‘What do you mean?’ asked Joseph.
(Benjy’s eyelids were getting heavy.)
Mellor pointed out across the water. ‘The house is out there.’
Joseph’s heart sank. ‘The map has to be wrong.’
‘Ssshh…’ Mellor put his finger to his lips.
In the distance Joseph could hear the faint barking of dogs. The Smoke Men were coming.
(Benjy closed his eyes and turned over.)
Mellor stuffed the map hurriedly into his rucksack. ‘Quick. Take off your boots.’
♦
Richard pulled his shirt over his head. She has to learn some manners.
She’s sixteen.
I don’t care how old she is.
You can’t force children to do anything.
So you let them do exactly what they want?
Richard, you are not her father. Sorry. I didn’t mean that…
No, I’m sorry. He shook his head like a dog coming out of water. It’s the Sharne case. It’s getting to me.
You did nothing wrong.
Being innocent is not always enough.
Come here.
But he wouldn’t come. I’m going outside to clear my head.
♦
Dominic stared at the black grid of the uncurtained window. If only he could fly away. How had he not seen the danger when Amy came into the shop that day? Blonde eyebrows, albino almost. They’d talked in the playground six years before. Two boys a couple of years above Daisy. She lingered at the till and he wondered if she was flirting but it had been so long that he found it hard to be certain. Then she mentioned her address in a way that was clearly an invitation which could be ignored without embarrassment and he dreamt that night of her long pale body with a vividness he had not felt since he was twenty. They slept together three weeks later in the middle of the afternoon, something he and Angela had never done, and this in itself was thrilling. She made a great deal of noise so that he wondered, briefly, if she were in actual pain. They lay afterwards looking up at the big Japanese paper lantern turning in the dusty curtained glow and Amy said, Thank you, kind sir. He turned onto his side and ran his fingers over her hip bones and her little breasts and into deep dints above her collarbones and realised there was a secret door in the house where he had been trapped for so long.
♦
Angela was two hundred miles and thirty-five years away, trying to conjure the hallway of the house where she’d grown up, the newel post they called The Pineapple, the china tramp that lay on the carpet smashed one morning as if a ghost had brushed past in the night, the Oscar Peterson Trio on the gramophone. Dominic climbed into bed and the bounce of the mattress woke her briefly. She listened to the silence and thought of Benjy and felt the old fear. Was he still breathing? A cracked wooden beam ran across the ceiling, splinted with a rusty iron spar. She was slipping away a little now. Sherbet Dabs and Slade singing ‘Cum on Feel the Noize’. Briefly she saw Karen sitting in the darkness somewhere further up the hill, looking down on the sleeping house, like a rabbit or an owl. Then she let go.
♦
Daisy opened the book and put the Monet postcard to one side.
I sat down beside her, and presently she moved uneasily. At the same moment there came a sort of dull flapping or buffeting at the window. I went over to it softly, and peeped out by the corner of the blind. There was a full moonlight, and I could see that the noise was made by a great bat, which wheeled around, doubtless attracted by the light, although so dim, and every now and again struck the window with its wings.
♦
Fingernail moon. The Bay of Rainbows. The Sea of Tranquillity. Richard had never really got the space thing. It worried him, the possibility that his imagination wasn’t strong enough to get past the earth’s atmosphere. Neil Armstrong’s heart rate staying under seventy during take-off. All brave men are slightly stupid. He and Mohan had sat opposite one another at the table by the window. He can see it as clear as day. Mohan was eating a container of M&S salad with a white plastic fork. It could be an abscess. Of course he should have put it in the report, that was precisely why he had tracked Mohan down, to make sure. Now the girl was in a wheelchair and Mohan was pretending the conversation never happened. Everyone knew the man was a shit, sleeping with two nurses and his poor bloody wife without a clue, which counted for nothing in a court of law, of course, just gossip and hearsay. The way the lawyer stared at him during that meeting. He half expected his eyelids to slide in from the side. Bloody hell, it was freezing out here.
♦
With a little grunt, Alex came messily into the cone of toilet tissue in his right hand then leant back against the door, breathing heavily. That sudden disinterest, pictures of Melissa naked blowing away like mist. He wiped the splash from the wooden floor with the toe of his sock. He was thinking about canoeing on Llyn Gwynant. Then he was thinking about how quiet the house was and whether anyone had heard him. Richard’s shaving brush glared from the window sill. He imagined it containing a little camera. Richard sitting at the dining table replaying the grainy footage, saying, Angela, I think you should see this. He dropped the tissue into the toilet bowl, pulled the flush and smelt his fingers. Seasidey. Nice.
♦
You run your hand along the bumpy, magnolia wall. Paint over paint over plaster over stone, smooth, like the flank of a horse. Something alive in the fabric of the house. Earlier today, in Café Ritazza at Southport, Richard had put his hands behind his head and stretched out as if he owned the place. Polo shirt, TAG Heuer watch. A young mum was staring from a nearby table, pink tracksuit, scraped back hair. He looked through her like she was furniture. But Melissa does have to learn some manners, and maybe you haven’t been strict enough. You remember yourself at fourteen. The Hanwell flat. You and Penny standing on the outside of the balcony rail, seven floors up, one Sunday afternoon, leaning over that woozy drop, hearts pounding and the scary tickle in the back of your knees. Dogs in the park, the traffic on the ring road, a scale model of the world. You whoop as loud as you can and your voice bounces off the block opposite. There’s a little crowd gathering now. Someone shouts, Jump. You look around and it occurs to you that this isn’t real, this is only a memory, that you could let go and topple into that great windy nothing and it wouldn’t matter. What frightens you is that for a couple of seconds you can’t remember where the present is and how to get back there.
♦
The click of the Mercedes cooling. A barn owl on top of a telegraph pole, eyeballs so big they rub against one another as they revolve. Bats slice the air above the garden. Limestone freakishly white under the moon. The sheep lie beside an old bath, still gathered against the wolves which haven’t hunted them for two hundred years. The deep quiet under the human hum. Bootes, Hercules, Draco. Eight thousand man-made objects orbiting the earth. Dead satellites and space junk. The asteroid belt. Puck, Miranda, Oberon. To every moon a fairy story. The Mars Rover squatting near the Husband Hills. The Huygens probe beside a methane lake on Titan. The Kuiper belt. Comets and Centaurs. The Scattered Disc. The Oort Cloud. The Local Bubble. Barnard’s Star. The utter cold warmed only by starlight.