Free The Red House by Mark Haddon Page A

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    It’s Karen’s birthday on Thursday . She levered a pistachio shell open.
    Wasn’t that in February?
    Not the day she died. The day she was meant to be born .
    What do you mean, the day she was meant to be born?
    5th May. It was my due date .
    You’ve never talked about this before .
    She’d cracked a nail. I think I might be going a little crazy .
    Sayid follows the twisted metal cable into the jungle. Marimba and harp, the sky a scattered blue jigsaw in the canopy, spiderweb glimmer at ankle height. He crouches and sees the single trip wire. High dissonant violins. He steps carefully over. The whip-slither of a rope snapping tight as a sharpened stake is fired into his thigh. He screams, his legs are yanked from under him and he’s hoisted like a pig for slaughter.
    Alex fast-forwards through the beach section because he needs dramatic tension to stop himself thinking about Melissa. Over the last year he has become something of a film buff. Two, maybe three full-length features every shift at Moving Pictures, just a weather eye on the screen during the busy times. Best of all he likes TV box sets. Lost, 24, Battlestar Galactica . The consistency mostly. You enjoyed episode three? You’ll probably enjoy episode four. Less hassle all round.
    Nighttime. Sayid is lying on the ground. The blur of semiconsciousness. Someone approaches wearing military fatigues. Moonlight on a jagged knife. Sayid’s eye fills the screen, then flickers, then closes.

    I poured myself another glass of the Monbazillac. As I raised it to my lips something moved in the darkened hallway. Was it the white shoe? My heart hammered, the stimulus rushing through my sensory cortex and hypothalamus to the brain stem, flooding my body with adrenaline. I walked over and found that my coat had slipped off its hook. I breathed deeply trying to slow my racing pulse. Fight or flight, the loyal guard dog that has sat by our side for a million years, alerting us to every sign of danger. But how could one fight an imaginary threat? How could one flee the pictures in one’s head? As Hecht had written in his article for Nature, we had tamed the outside world but not the weapons we possessed for dealing with it …
    Melissa put the soggy paperback facedown on the edge of the bath, the pages turning slowly into a great damp ruff. Avison would ask Michelle how they’d been bullying her. What was she going to say? She couldn’t show him the picture, could she. But if the police were involved they’d look at everything. Shit. She’d always managed to tread the line. You could smoke as long as you did Midsummer Night’s Dream . You could skip the odd class as long as you got the grades. But if she got expelled Dad would go fucking ballistic. Goodbye allowance for starters. She didn’t even want to think what shitty school she’d end up going to.
    There was a print of a robin above the toilet and an air freshener in a crappy pink holster thing on the side of the cistern. Alex groping her. God, she hated this place.
    Benjy had a special dispensation to play his Nintendo at the table because he was bored of grown-up talk. Daisy tried to prize him away by asking him about school but he wanted to talk about his ongoing fantasy in which Mrs. Wallis killed and ate children in her class, which Daisy found tiresome and distasteful so she admitted defeat. She tried talking to Alex but he kept stealing glances at Melissa who was studiouslyignoring him. She felt oddly protective and wanted to apologize for her brother’s behavior though she was pretty sure it was Alex who’d come off worst. She stared at her willow-patterned plate. She must have seen the picture a thousand times but she’d never really looked at it, the ship, the temple garden, the figures on the bridge. What was happening?
    Mum and Dad were sitting at opposite corners of the table. Why didn’t they love each other? It was easier being here with Louisa and Richard and Melissa who acted as a kind of