The Red House by Mark Haddon Read Free Book Online Page B

bathroom, a sky-blue towel around his waist. Post-exercise fatigue. He made her think of a tiger, that slinky muscular shamble. There was a V of blond hairs on the small of his back. She wanted to touch him. The feeling scared her, the way it rose up with no warning, the body’s hunger. Because she loved the game, the tension in the air, but she found the act itself vaguely disgusting, André’s eyes rolling back like he was having a seizure, the greasy condom on the carpet like a piece of mouse intestine. Alex turned and looked at her. She smiled. Hello, sailor . Then turned away.
    Dominic sat beside Angela on the bench. There was a scattering of crumbs on the lawn, a couple of sparrows picking at them, and another bird he didn’t recognize. This’ll be good for us, I think. Being here .
    It’s a lovely place .
    That’s not what I meant .
    I know .
    He remembered a time when they had really talked, sitting by the river, lying in that tiny bedroom naked after making love, faded psychedelic wallpaper and the Billie Holiday poster. Both eager to know more about this other life of which they’d become a part. But now? They weren’t even friends anymore, just co-parents. He wanted to tell her about Amy, to relieve the pressure in his chest, because he was scared, because he had begun to notice the frayed curtains and the smell of cigarettes in Amy’s house and the need in her voice. He had assumed at first that the whole thing was no more than a distraction from lives lived elsewhere, but this wasn’t a distraction for her, was it. This was her life, this dimly lit bedroom in the middle of the afternoon, and the secret door was in truth the entrance to a darker dirtier world from which he wouldn’t be able to return without paying a considerable price. But was it really so bad to have looked for affection elsewhere?They had both been unfaithful in their way. To have and to hold, to love and to cherish. When had they last done these things? He wouldn’t tell Angela, would he. He would live with it until the discomfort faded and lying became normal.
    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 all 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 rumor?
    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 punch lines. 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 labor. 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