The Red House Read Free Page B

stepfather they’d be keeping her in. The man was slumped in one of the plastic chairs looking bored mostly, tracksuit trousers and a dirty black T-shirt with the word BENCH on it. The man who’d abused her, or let others abuse her. He stank of cigarettes and aftershave. Richard wanted to knock him down and punch him and keep on punching him. We need to talk .
    Yeh?
    Richard’s anger draining away. Because he was hardly more than a teenager. Too stupid to know he’d end up in prison. Sugar and boilingwater thrown in his face on kitchen duty. If you could come with me, please .
    Melissa rolled up the sleeves of Dad’s lumberjack shirt. Still, after all this time, the faintest smell of him. Plaster dust and Hugo Boss. He was an arsehole, but, God, she looked at Richard sometimes, the racing bike, the way he did the crossword in pencil first. There were evenings when she wanted Dad to ride in off the plains, all dust and sweat and tumbleweed, kick open the saloon doors and stick some bullet holes in those fucking art books.
    Land of hope and glory , sang Mika. Mother of the free ride, I’m leaving Kansas, baby. God save the queen .
    Hereford, home of the SAS. Richard could imagine doing that, given a Just War. Not the killing so much as the derring-do, like building dams when he was a boy, though it might be thrilling to kill another man if one were absolved in advance. Because people thought you wanted to help others whereas most of his colleagues loved the risk. That glint in Steven’s eye when he moved to pediatrics. They die quicker .
    Louisa had squeezed his hand at the graveside. Drizzle and a police helicopter overhead. That ownerless dog standing between the trees like some presiding spirit, his father’s ghost, perhaps. He looked around the grave. These people. Louisa, Melissa, Angela and Dominic and their children, this was his family now. They had spent twenty years avoiding one another and he couldn’t remember why.
    Melissa pressed Pause and gazed out of the window. Bright sun was falling on the road but there was rain far off, like someone had tried to rub out the horizon. That underwater glow. There’d be Scrabble, wouldn’t there, a tatty box in some drawer, a pack of fifty-one playing cards, a pamphlet from a goat farm.
    Real countryside now, the land buckled and rucked. A sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused . Blustery wind, trees dancing, flurries of orange leaves, a black plastic sack flapping on a gate. The road a series of bends and switchbacks. Richard driving too fast. Low pearly cloud. Turnastone. Upper Maes-Coed. Llanveynoe. They broached the top of a hill and the view was suddenly enormous. Offa’s Dyke , said Richard. A dark ridge halfway up the sky. They made their way into the valley on a single-track road sunk between grassy banks like a bobsleigh run. Richard still driving too fast and Mum gripping the edge of the seat but not saying anything and …  Shit! yelled Louisa, and Fuck! yelled Melissa, and the Mercedes skidded to a crunchy halt, but it was just a flock of sheep and an old man in a dirty jumper waving a stick.
    Two gliders ride the freezing gray air that pours over the ridge, so low you could lean a ladder against the fuselage and climb up to talk to the pilot. Spits of horizontal rain, Hay Bluff, Lord Hereford’s Knob. Heather and purple moor grass and little craters of rippling peaty water. By the trig point a red kite weaves through the holes in the wind then glides into the valley, eyes scanning the ground for rats and rabbits.
    This was shallow coastal waters once, before the great plates crushed and raised it. Limestone and millstone grit. The valleys gouged out by glaciers with their cargo of rubble. Upper Blaen, Firs Farm, Olchon Court. Roads and footpaths following the same routes they did in the Middle Ages. Everyone walking in the steps of those who walked before them. The Red House, a Romano-British farmstead abandoned, ruined, plundered for