A Game For All The Family
Read A Game For All The Family Online
Authors: Sophie Hannah
DEDICATION
For Karen Geary—thank you for looking after
my books so brilliantly for a decade!
CONTENTS
Chapter 1:
The Killing of Malachy Dodd
Chapter 1:
The Killing of Malachy Dodd (continued)
Chapter 2:
The Perrine Compromise, and Taking Turns
Chapter 3:
Standards of Evidence and the Almost Hanging of Perrine
Chapter 4:
Pas Devant les Enfants
Chapter 6:
Who Was It, Sitting on That Tree Branch?
Chapter 8:
Remove All Sharp Items, Chop Down All Trees
Chapter 9:
No Lock on the Little Green Door
“The Casting Ouch” or “The Ben Lourenco Affair”
Chapter 10:
You Know What? You Know What? You Know What? I Don’t Care
Chapter 11:
An Unlocked-House Mystery
Chapter 12:
The Legend of Evil Perrine
Chapter 13:
Who, How, When and Why
PROLOGUE
T
he people I’m about to meet in my new life, if they’re anything like the ones I’m leaving behind, will ask as soon as they can get away with it. In my fantasy, they don’t have faces or names, only voices—raised, but not excessively so; determinedly casual.
What do you do?
Does anyone still add “for a living” to the end of that question? It sounds stupidly old-fashioned.
I hope they miss out the “living” bit, because this has nothing to do with how I plan to fund my smoked-salmon-for-breakfast habit. I want my faceless new acquaintances to care only about how I spend my time and define myself—what I believe to be the point of me. That’s why I need the question to arrive in its purest form.
I have the perfect answer: one word long, with plenty of space around it.
Nothing.
Everything should be surrounded by as much space as possible: people, houses, words. That’s part of the reason for starting a new life. In my old one, there wasn’t enough space of any kind.
My name is Justine Merrison and I do Nothing. With a capital N. Not a single thing.
I’ll have to try not to throw back my head and laugh after saying it, or sprint a victory lap around whoever was unfortunate enough to ask me. Ideally, the question will come from people who do Something: surveyors, lawyers, supermarket managers—all haggard and harried from a six-month stretch of fourteen-hour working days.
I won’t mention what I used to do, or talk about day-to-day chores as if they count as Something. Yes, it’s true that I’ll have to do some boiling of pasta in my new life, and some throwing of socks into washing machines, but that will be as easy and automatic as breathing. I don’t intend to let trivial day-to-day stuff get in the way of my central project, which is to achieve a state of all-embracing inactivity.
“Nothing,” I will say boldly and proudly, in the way that another person might say “Neuroradiology.” Then I’ll smile, as glowing white silence slides in to hug the curved edges of the word.
Nothing.
“What are you grinning about?” Alex asks. Unlike me, he isn’t imagining a calm, soundless state. He is firmly embedded in our real-world surroundings: six lanes of futile horn-beep gripes and suffocating exhaust fumes. “The joys of the A406,” he muttered half an hour ago, as we added ourselves to the long line of backed-up traffic.
For me, the congestion is a joy. It reminds me that I don’t need to do anything in a hurry. At this rate of travel—approximately four meters per hour, which is unusual even for the North Circular—we won’t get to Devon before midnight.
Excellent.
Let it take twenty hours, or thirty. Our new house will still be there tomorrow, and the day after. It doesn’t matter when I arrive, as I have nothing pressing to attend to. I won’t need to down a quick cup of tea, then immediately start hectoring a telecommunications company about how soon they can hook me up with WiFi. I have no urgent emails to send.
“Hello? Justine?” Alex calls out, in case I didn’t hear his question over the noise of Georges Bizet’s
Carmen
that’s blaring from our car’s speakers. A few minutes ago, he and Ellen were singing along, having adapted the words somewhat: “Stuck, stuck in traffic, traffic, stuck, stuck in traffic, traffic, stuck, stuck in traffic, traffic
jam
. Stuck, stuck in traffic, traffic, stuck, stuck in traffic, traffic
jam
, traffic
jam
, traffic
jam
. . .”
“Mum!” Ellen yells behind me. “Dad’s talking to you!”
“I think your mother’s in a trance, El. Must be the heat.”
It would never occur to Alex to turn off music in order to speak. For him, silence is there to be packed as full as possible, like an empty bag. The Something that he does—has for as long as I’ve known him—is singing. Opera. He travels all over the world, is away for one week in every three, on average, and loves every second of his home-is-where-the-premiere-is existence. Which is lucky. If I didn’t know he was idyllically happy with his hectic, spotlit life, I might not be able to enjoy my Nothing to the full. I might feel guilty.
As it is, we’ll be able to share our contrasting triumphs without either of us resenting the other. Alex will tell me that he managed to squeeze four important calls into the time between the airline staff telling him to switch off his phone, and them noticing that he’d disobeyed them and telling him again like they really meant it this time. I’ll tell him about reading in the bath for hours, topping up with hot water again and again, almost too lazy to twist the tap.
I press the “off” button on the CD player, unwilling to compete with
Carmen
, and tell Alex about my little question-and-answer fantasy. He laughs. Ellen says, “You’re a nutter, Mum. You can’t say ‘Nothing.’ You’ll scare people.”
“Good. They can fear me first, then they can envy me, and wonder if they might take up doing Nothing themselves. Think how many lives I could save.”
“No, they’ll think you’re a depressed housewife who’s going to go home and swallow a bottle of pills.”
“Abandoned and neglected by her jet-setting husband,” Alex adds, wiping sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt.
“No they won’t,” I say. “Not if I beam blissfully while describing my completely empty schedule.”
“Ah, so you
will
say more than ‘Nothing’!”
“Say you’re a stay-at-home mum,” Ellen advises. “Or you’re taking a career break after a stressful few years. You’re weighing up various options . . .”
“But I’m not. I’ve already chosen Nothing. Hey.” I tap Alex on the arm. “I’m going to buy one of those year-planner wall charts—a really beautiful one—and stick it up in a prominent place, so that I can leave every day’s box totally empty. Three hundred and sixty-five empty boxes. It’ll be a thing of beauty.”
“You’re
so annoying
, Mum,” Ellen groans. “You keep banging on about this new life and how everything’s going to be so different, but it won’t be, because . . . you! You’re incapable of changing. You’re
exactly the same
: still a massive . . . zealot. You were a zealot about working, and now you’re going to be one about not working. It’ll be so boring for me. And embarrassing.”
“Pipe down, pipsqueak,” I say in a tone of mock outrage. “Aren’t you, like, supposed to be, like, only thirteen?”
“I haven’t said ‘like’ for ages, actually, apart from to express approval,” Ellen protests.
“That’s true, she hasn’t,” says Alex. “And she’s frighteningly spot-on about her drama-queen mother. Tell me this: if you crave tranquility as you claim to, why are you daydreaming about starting fights with strangers?”
“Good point!” Ellen crows.
“Fights? What fights?”
“Don’t feign innocence.”
“Not feigning!” I say indignantly.
Alex rolls his eyes. “Aggressively saying, ‘Nothing’ when people ask you what you do, making them feel uncomfortable by refusing to qualify it at all, or explain . . .”
“Not aggressively.
Happily
saying it. And there’s nothing about Nothing to explain.”
“Smugly,” Alex says. “Which is a form of aggression. Flaunting your pleasurable idleness in the faces of those with oversensitive work ethics and overstuffed diaries. It’s sadistic.”
“You might have a point,” I concede. “I’ve been particularly looking forward to telling the hardworking, stressed people I meet that I do Nothing. The more relaxed a person looks, the less fun it’ll be to boast to them. And it’s pointless bragging to the likes of you—you love your overstuffed diary. So I’m just going to have to hope I meet lots of people who hate their demanding jobs but can’t escape them. Oh God.” I close my eyes. “It’s sickeningly obvious, isn’t it? It’s me I want to taunt. My former self. That’s who I’m angry with.”
I could have escaped at any time. Could have walked away years earlier, instead of letting work swallow up my whole life.
“I literally cannot believe I have a mother who . . . homilies on in the way you do, Mum,” Ellen grumbles. “None of my friends’ mothers do it.
None.
They all say normal things, like ‘No TV until you’ve done your homework’ and ‘Would you like some more lasagna?’”
“Yes, well, your mother can’t go ten minutes without having a major, life-changing realization—can you, darling?”
“Fuck off! Oops.” I giggle. If I’ve ever been happier than I am now, I can’t remember the occasion.
“Aha! We’re on the move again.” Alex starts to sing, “End of the traffic, traffic, end of the traffic, traffic, end of the traffic, traffic
jam
, end of the traffic, traffic, end of the traffic, traffic
jam
, traffic
jam
, traffic
jam
. . .”
Poor, long-dead Georges Bizet. I’m sure this wasn’t the legacy he had in mind.
“Excuse me while I don’t celebrate,” says Ellen. “We’ve still got another, what, seven hours before we get there? I’m boiling. When are we going to get a car with air-conditioning that works?”
“I don’t believe any car air-conditioning works,” I tell her. “It’s like windshield wipers. The other cars want you to think they’ve got it figured out, but they’re all hot and stuffy on days like today, whatever Jeremy Clarkson might want us to think. They all have wipers that squeak like bats being garroted.”
