Poor Benjy. She examined the inside of her mug. He was talking about us dying. You know, who would get all the stuff in the house.
He seems to like it here, though. Because this was what they did. They acted like a real family. Perhaps it was what most people did. How are you and your brother bonding?
He remembers everything. She threw the dregs of her coffee into the grass. The birds flew away. It scares me. Makes me wonder if I’m losing my mind. Like Mum.
Who’s the prime minister?
I’m being serious … He could be making it up for all I know.
Don’t we always make them up, our childhood memories? His own mother had slept with another man, the dapper little dentist with the soft-top Mini. Or was it just a spiteful rumour?
They sat for several minutes looking at the view. They had this at least, the ability to sit beside one another in silence.
I have difficulty believing that Richard and I are actually related. The birds were reconvening around the crumbs.
Maybe you were adopted. That might solve a problem or two.
Another of his jokeless punchlines. But Richard was calling, Wagons roll.
Countryside like an advert on TV, for antiperspirant, for butter, for broadband, a place to make us feel good inside, where everything is slower and more noble, cows and hayricks and honest labour. Somewhere out there, hard by a stand of beech, commanding an enviable prospect of the valley, the house where the book will be written and the marriage mended and the children will build dens and the rain when it comes is good honest rain. How strange this yearning for being elsewhere doing nothing. The gift of princes once, its sweet poison spreading. Lady Furlough surveying the desert of the deer park, the monsters coiling in the ornamental lake, that terrible weight of hours, laudanum and cross-stitch. What every child knows and every adult forgets, the glacial movement of the watched clock, pluperfects turning slowly into cosines turning slowly into the feeding of the five thousand. School holidays of which we remember only mending bikes and Gary Holler killing the frog, the featureless hours between gone forever.
And now you must do nothing for a week and enjoy it. Days of rest long past the point when we’re rested, holidays without the holy, pilgrimage become mere travel, the destination handed to us on a plate, the idleness of the empire in its final days.
Melissa had been sitting at the dining-room table reading when Dominic walked through and said he was going for a walk. The door banged and she became aware of how quiet the house was. She stuck her iPod on. ‘Monkey Business’, Black Eyed Peas, but the inability to hear someone approaching from behind made her feel vulnerable so she took the earphones out again. She stepped into the garden, wanting the minimal reassurance of Dominic’s shrinking silhouette, but he was gone and the valley was empty. She went back into the living room and rifled through the stack of DVDs. Monsters Inc., Ice Age 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. There was a Simpsons case but it contained a PlayStation disc for Star Wars: Battlefront.
A whirr and clang behind her. She spun round. The grandfather clock chimed again. Fuck. She needed to talk to a normal human being. Megan, Cally, Henry, anyone. She grabbed her phone and headed for the hills.
He’d been looking forward to it for the last couple of weeks. A town of books. All this learning gathered in and offered up. Trawling, browsing, leafing. But now that he was standing in the bowels of The Cinema Bookshop … That smell. What was it, precisely? Glue? Paper? The spores of some bibliophile lichen? Catacombs of yellowing paper. Every book unwanted, sold for pennies or carted from the houses of the dead. Battersea Books Home. The authors earned nothing from the transaction. Salaries less than binmen, he’d read somewhere. He thought about their lives. No colleagues, no timetable, no security, the constant lure of daytime television. The formlessness of it all made him feel slightly ill, going to work in their dressing gowns. So much risk and so little adventure.
He laid his hand on the bumpy wall of frayed spines and brittle slip covers. His mother had arranged them according to their height, as a kind of subsidiary furniture. Airport novels and Hollywood biographies. He wished he were better at embracing the chaos, loosening up a little. But the journey was always a circle. You thought you were on the other side of the world then you turned a corner and found yourself in the kitchen with the green melamine bowls and the clown calendar. His neatness, his love of order, the need to keep himself constantly busy, these things weren’t a measure of the distance he’d put between them, these were the things they had in common.
The Golden Ocean. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. The House of Sixty Fathers. They Call Me Carpenter. Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive. The Velveteen Rabbit. The Chessmen of Mars. The Eagle of the Ninth. Tarzan and the Forbidden City. The Man Who Could Not Shudder. Typewriter in the Sky. The Naughtiest Girl in the School. Black Hunting Whip. The Secret of the Wooden Lady. Five Go to Mystery Moor. The Drowning Pool. The Courage of Sarah Noble. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Bonjour Tristesse. The Sky Is Falling. The Sound of Waves.
Holy shit. There was a naked woman tied up. Then another naked woman tied up. Then a naked woman tied up and hanging from the ceiling. Then a naked tattooed woman with her arse in the air and a dildo sitting on a record player in the background. Then a naked woman with an Egyptian hairstyle on an old-fashioned hospital bed tied up with rubber tubing that actually went into her cunt. And it was, like, actual art that you were allowed to look at. Or was it? Alex flipped the cover shut. Nobuyoshi Araki. Phaidon. £85. So it was art. Holy shit. You could have it on a coffee table. He imagined being the photographer. Actually being there in the room. There was a close-up of a big veiny penis in black and white which was gross, then two naked women on a bed.
Excuse me.
There were other human beings in the room. The man squeezed past and disappeared into Architecture. Alex stared at the photograph of the two women. He wanted to buy the book. He wanted to steal the book. He wanted to stay here forever. He had to put it down. He couldn’t put it down.
Dominic was thinking of the opening of the second Two-Part Invention, that little canon. When the work stopped he couldn’t bear to listen to music. Sentimental songs were the worst, ‘The Power of Love’, ‘Wonderful Tonight’ … He had to leave shops sometimes. Just like Coward said. Extraordinary how potent … etc. After a couple of months he started listening to Steve Reich and suddenly saw the point of those cool, evolving lines. Music for Eighteen Musicians, Electric Guitar Phase. Moving gingerly on to Bach. Another kind of coolness. He ran through the fingering of the Two-Part Invention in his head. Who was the guy on that classical music quiz show when he was a kid? He played a dummy keyboard and you had to guess the piece from the thumping. Joseph Cooper. That was it. Face the Music.
He looked across the valley and heard The Lark Ascending in his mind’s ear, that skirling violin, four semiquavers then up and up, pentatonic scale, no audible root, no bar lines even … Melissa. Jesus. Was that Melissa? He started to jog down through the bracken. What in God’s name was she doing? Vomiting? He tripped and fell and got up again. She was on all fours. He slowed, panting. Melissa? He touched her shoulder and she sprang up and screamed, waving her hands like a frightened woman in silent film. Whoa, sorry. I didn’t mean …
It’s … It’s … She stroked the air in front of her. Angela’s husband. She’d forgotten where she was. She felt naked. Was he going to attack her?
Are you all right?
She mustn’t cry. She held out her mobile. It refused to explain the situation. I couldn’t get any signal.
Have you hurt yourself?
No, I haven’t fucking hurt myself. Deep breath.
You were trying to ring someone.
I’ve got to … She turned and walked away and her knees buckled and she tried very hard to make it look like she was sitting down on purpose.
He came over and sat beside her. They said nothing. It was uncomfortable, then it was comfortable, then it was uncomfortable. So I guess
you’re not having a fun time.
She started crying. Shit. She wiped her eyes.
You want to talk about it?
No, I do not want to talk about it. Unsurprisingly.
He picked two daisies and started making a chain. I had a stepfather. I still have a stepfather.
What the hell was he talking about?
He was a really nice guy, which only made me hate him more, of course.
Yeh, well, thanks for the advice. She took a packet of Silk Cut from her jacket pocket.
One going spare?
She’d meant to piss him off but things were going a bit off-piste. His cupped hand touched her hand. The scratch and pop of the lighter. Was he going to try and feel her up? She imagined hanging on to the story like a fat cheque she could spend whenever she wanted.
Ooh. He blew a rubbish smoke ring. Haven’t had one of these in a while.
A sheep trotted past, bleating.
Actually, Richard’s all right. He kind of makes Mum happy, which is good. But it was a lie. She hated him for the same reasons Dominic had hated his stepfather.
They finished their cigarettes. Then Dominic turned and stared at her. She wondered if he was going to put a hand on her breast. Be nicer to Daisy, OK?
Which caught her totally on the hop.
You’ll look back and realise you’re not that different.
She laughed. We are so different. He held her eye and didn’t laugh. She’d lost her bearings now. The fear was coming back. She got to her feet and threw her cigarette stub into the long grass. I need to make a phone call.
Don’t walk over a precipice.
Was he being, like, metaphorical, or was there actually a precipice?
He watched her stumble up the hill. Town shoes. He imagined getting points for the way he’d handled the conversation. Six out of ten? He’d definitely got the better of her. Seven? The sheep bleated again. He felt a little nauseous. The cigarette, probably.
Benjy was doing a kind of boneless gymnastics on the leather armchair at the side of the shop.
Look at this encyclopedia. Daisy heaved him aside and sat down. It’s from 1938.
His eyes were fixed on the Nintendo.
Back before computers, when they thought there might be people on Mars.
He didn’t look up. I want to find the Encyclopedia of Torturing Barbie.
She turned the page. And what is this thing, she read, which the savage coaxes into being by rubbing one stick against another, and the civilised man conjures in a moment by striking a match? His breath wasn’t good. Had anyone made him brush his teeth this morning?
Louisa appeared suddenly. Benjy … Daisy … She had peeled herself away from Richard and set off in search of a sunny book-free location, but there was something cosy about the two of them in the chair. What have you got there?
Pictorial Knowledge, Volume 5. Daisy handed it to her.
Woven brick-red cover, the title indented and beneath it an oil lamp radiating beams of wisdom. She glanced at the contents page. How Steam and Petrol Work for Man. A Children’s Guide to Good Manners. Folding Model. She was suddenly back in her grandparents’ house, chicken-wire window in the larder, Walnut Whips and buttered white bread with fish and chips, the stilts Grandad made her from an old door frame.
Daisy shifted a little to get more comfortable. Louisa had sat herself on the arm of the chair, Daisy sandwiched between her and Benjy. Louisa’s leg was very close. Red cords tight around her thighs. The smell of cocoa butter.
Louisa turned a page. Arch, suspension, cantilever, girder. How strange that she should be reminded of them here, of all places, when they didn’t have a single book in the house. The fear of getting above yourself. She closed the book and ran her hand gently down the spine. You thought it was all gone, the house demolished, the furniture sold, photos eaten away by mildew and damp. Then you opened a tin of sardines with that little metal key.
He sat on the steps of the town clock, the bag from Richard Booth angled against his calf (Stalingrad by Antony Beevor, The Odyssey translated by John Hannah, Fighting Fit: The Complete SAS Fitness Training Handbook). There was a trailer containing two sheep, and three local teenagers standing round a scooter, smoking. The Sharne case was nagging at him again. Breathe in, two, three … Breathe out, two, three … One of the boys revved the scooter and his concentration broke. How restless the mind was. He should run, like Alex, clear it with activity instead of willpower. Breathe in … He noticed an attractive woman going into The Granary and heard that tiny sexual alarm sounding in his head. Oh, but it was Louisa. Then she was gone. How disorienting to see her as other men saw her. He remembered meeting her ex-husband that first time, when Craig came round to fit a new pump in the boiler. Absurdly hairy, as if he was wearing a black mohair vest under his t-shirt. Louisa tells me you’re a doctor. A muscular handshake that went on for just a little too long.
Consultant. Neuroradiology.
Eventually he came to understand that it was a kind of kryptonite, the degrees, the books, the music, though he remembered Louisa shaking her head and laughing and saying, He wanted it all the time, and he was never quite able to shake that picture.
There wasn’t a precipice, just a huge hill from which you could see Russia probably. An old couple walked past dressed like Boy Scouts. Then her phone made contact with civilisation and a string of texts pinged in, one from Dad in France followed by a stack of messages saying ring me and got 2 talk 2 u and need to talk urgent as if an actual war had broken out. She called Cally who didn’t even say hello, just, Michelle tried to kill herself.
How?
Sleeping pills. She told her mum we were bullying her.
Fucking cow.
Thing is, her mum went to see Avison, so now it’s official.
Well, it wasn’t me who sent that picture to everyone.
Don’t fucking dump me in it, said Cally. You took the photo.
Stop blaming me, all right. We’ve got to sort this out. Christ. Two weeks in a sleeping bag in a half-renovated French farmhouse with Dad didn’t seem such a bad idea now. She let it all sink in. Michelle being a slag as per usual. Michelle playing the victim as per usual. She should have seen this coming a long way back. Who else did you send it to?
Not that many people.
Just tell me, OK?
Jake, Donny, KC …
Fucking great. They’d save it, wouldn’t they, so they could stab her in the back. All those idiotic little vendettas. If she was only there, in person, to grab the phones out of their stupid hands.
I didn’t think I’d be so upset when she died. Angela took a final forkful of Tibetan roast. Benjy was sitting next to her reading a tattered second-hand encyclopedia. She brushed the crumbs from his hair.
Ghastly way to go, said Richard. He’d arranged his cutlery at half past six. Your mind dying, your body left behind for other people to look after.
Other people? Meaning her.
God forbid that I go like that. He poured the last of his tea through the metal strainer. Over his shoulder a gaggle of nut-brown cyclists gathered at the counter, little black shoes clacking on the stone floor. Give me a massive cardiac arrest.
Hang on, said Angela. Hang on. Why was she doing this? I visited her every week for five years.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. He could hear the resentment in her voice but was genuinely confused. Surely the gift of the holiday itself had removed any residual bad feelings.
I know you paid for her to be in Acorn House, said Angela. And maybe that was more important than anything else. I’m grateful, I am, but … She was walking on cracked ice. Every week for five years. What good had it done, though? Her mother didn’t recognise her at the end.
I know, said Richard tonelessly.
And the person she really wanted was you. She could see the disbelief in his face. He’d expected this to be easy, hadn’t he? Rebuilding the family now the troublesome parent had been removed. Bruises and broken bones
. She felt a childish desire to make it as difficult as she could. And you came, what? five times? six? She knew the exact number but she wasn’t going to admit to having kept score.
Richard was drawing little shapes on the tabletop with his index finger. She wondered if he was working out his reply on imaginary notepaper.
She’s dead, Angela. We can’t change anything now. Perhaps we should just leave it alone.
Benjy turned a page, oblivious to their conversation. Angela glanced over. The Romance of the Iron Road. A picture of the Flying Scotsman. I just wanted to hear you say thank you. There. It was out.
He laughed. Quiet and wry, but actual laughter.
Richard …? She felt as if she were talking to a child who had made some dreadful faux pas.
I was thirteen when she started drinking.
And I was fourteen.
But you left.
What? She really did have no idea what he was talking about.
When you moved in with Juliette.
The idea was so crazy that she wondered for the first time if he had some less pleasant motive for bringing them on holiday. I never left. I never moved in with Juliette.