The Red House (16 page)

Mum always waits until we’re in the car to tell me things she knows I don’t want to hear. She likes me trapped. That’s what she did three days ago.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked. This wasn’t the usual way home from rehearsals at the concert hall. Mum was driving us deeper into Cambridge. ‘Almost there,’ she answered in a sing-song voice. I recognised Hills Road, making a bridge by the leisure park. We rode over it and Mum triggered her indicator for a right turn.

I sat up straighter. ‘Where are we going?’

There wasn’t a road to the right. It was an entrance. Mum just smiled.

While we waited for the light, I looked up out the window, at the stacks of luxury apartments. Mum is always careful to use that term with her clients, instead of calling them ‘flats’. She’s put people in this building before.

These apartments are new, well, newish. Very modern, very posh. There’s a swimming pool in there. A gym. And,
just a little further down the road, Hills Road Sixth Form College, where I was going to go with Dora in a year.

‘Mum, who lives here?’ I asked, my voice a squeak. Tears sprouted in my eyes.

‘We’re going to live here,’ Mum said firmly. She turned hard into the driveway.

I folded my arms across my chest.
No
.

‘We’re going to look at the show home.’ Mum parked and pulled up the hand brake, hard. She turned to face me. ‘It’s close to Hills Road,’ she said, as if the location practically next to the school weren’t obvious. ‘You can bring your friends over after classes.’

‘What about Grandma Ro?’

Mum sighed. ‘She can’t look after herself. You know that. She’s getting beyond our abilities to help her, not while we have work and school. That’s the reality.’

I shook my head.

Mum swallowed hard and forced a smile. ‘We’ll paint your new bedroom any colour you like …’

‘What colour will Ro’s room be? She won’t get to pick a colour, will she? Not in a care home. It’ll be dingy and …
generic
. They’ll just wait for her to die so someone else can be slotted in. She doesn’t want to go, you know. She’s told me what you’ve said. She hates the brochures. She doesn’t want to go!’ I was shaking.

‘She doesn’t know what bloody year it is or even who we are all the time!
She doesn’t get to make the decisions any more!’
The shouting bounced around inside the small car. I covered my ears.

‘I don’t want to go either! It’s two against one! You can’t make us sell!’

‘I can sell, Fiona. I have power of attorney.’

‘We’ll fight it. Ro’s not crazy. You can’t say that she is.’

Mum turned the key and backed out of the wide space. ‘We’ll come back another day, when you’ve adjusted to the idea.’

She swung the car into traffic and aimed towards home. I looked out the window, giving her the back of my head.

‘I’ll be able to meet you at the school gate,’ she said. She’s always loved the story about how I’d cried and clung to her on my first day of school. Mum had then stayed in sight of the classroom window every morning for weeks, so that I could look up and see her whenever I needed to. The teacher had eventually asked her to stop, and she did, but she told me that she was still there, just invisible. I used to see the leaves rustle outside and had known she was there.

‘The lift is big enough to fit your harp in. You don’t have to worry about that,’ Mum went on as she drove, as if I were a client who just needs to be persuaded.

My harp is why I have a downstairs bedroom. If I slept upstairs, I would have had to keep it in the living room, and play it in public. Well, in front of Mum.

When we finally got home, my fingers ached for it but it wasn’t there. It’s too large to carry back and forth to the concert hall, so I had to do without it at home for the week. My room felt unanchored without it, as if the rug might float up and away.

I got ready for bed.

Mum stuck her head in, inviting me to eat something. I wasn’t hungry.

‘The new apartment is for you, sweetheart,’ she said.
‘You don’t need to feel guilty over being happy. Rowena will be happy for you, too.’ She closed the door.

I hadn’t realised till then how much I’d been counting on escaping in a year’s time: a new school and a long commute, too long for Mum to drive me every day. I would have taken the bus, at least sometimes. I would have been almost free.

Mum wasn’t the only one cornering me. Grandma Ro had asked for my help.
If I can’t stop Mum putting her in a care home, Ro is going to make me
… I made myself stop thinking about it.

The sunset light made stripes across my rug, through the bars. That had been the compromise: for the privilege of a downstairs bedroom, I had to put up with security-gated windows. It’s too easy for someone to break in, Mum had said. I’d asked for a key. Mum had said no. That’s how I’d figured out that Mum wasn’t only worried about what people from outside might do.

The next day we were in the car again, going back to the concert hall. We were going fast and I couldn’t stop it, any of it.

‘Do you understand?’ Mum repeated, in that tight voice.

I answered quickly, ‘Yes, Mum. I’ll look after things. Have a good trip.’ I made sure to say the whole thing, not just ‘yes’. Mum is suspicious of agreement without specifics. She might have thought I wasn’t really listening.

‘It’s not a trip,’ Mum pouted. ‘It’s work.’

‘Have a good work,’ I said automatically, correcting myself. But Mum didn’t like that, either.

‘Are you being sarcastic?’ She’d turned her head to talk to me and almost didn’t see the red light.

‘Mum!’

She hit the brakes hard, stomping her foot down. We both lurched forward then back. Mum tossed a glance at the rear-view mirror. No one was behind us, so she acted like it hadn’t happened. ‘You know the rules,’ she said.

‘Yes, I know the rules,’ I agreed.

Dora has apologised a hundred times for getting me into trouble, but I’m not angry about it. The rules now aren’t that different from the rules before. Different, but not that different. Dora thinks it was normal before and crazy now, but it was never normal. It was never like it is for other families.

Mum has had to leave me alone to look after Grandma Ro before, but not since the school-skipping with Dora. Mum is a relocation specialist, which she mostly does while I’m in school. She helps foreign professionals get settled quickly into rented houses and flats, and gets them leased cars and mobile phones and cleaners, whatever they need. It’s usually local work and usually on her own timetable, except that she now had to go to a team-building event overnight – at least one night. Mum didn’t tell me how many it really was, so that I couldn’t plan to throw a party or have a sleepover. If I knew exactly which nights she would be away, Mum said, I might take advantage. One of my cousins is Bible-crazy and says that everyone has to be ready all the time because nobody knows when Jesus is coming back. Mum doesn’t like her but I think maybe that’s where she got the idea.

That’s also why Mum didn’t tell me until we were in the car. She didn’t want me to have a chance to set something up with friends, or pack something, or do anything
differently from normal. That’s the point: she needed me to do everything as normal, as if she were home.

The phone was the exception. I used to be allowed to make calls or answer them, so long as I was in the kitchen where Mum could listen. Since skipping school, I’ve not been allowed to use the phone at all. For this trip, though, Mum explained, she would call at random times when I was expected to be home. I was to listen to the answering machine and, if it was Mum, pick up. If I didn’t, I would be in trouble. If I picked up before the machine confirmed that it was Mum on the other end, I would be in trouble. If Mum called and the line was busy, I would be in trouble. This meant that I couldn’t stay too long in the barn with Grandma Ro. Mum didn’t like me in there. Mum said Ro wasn’t a healthy influence. She was still angry about Ro living in the Red House, instead of in the proper house with us. I think she kept Ro alive as a punishment. Ever since the developers came, Ro had been trying to die.

Mum was concentrating on the road. I turned my head towards the window. I liked the blurring as we drove fast.

Traffic was light because of summer, until we got to West Road. It was as if the concert hall were a whirlpool that had sucked all of the cars in Cambridge into the streets around it. Mum stopped along the kerb, where the bus stop is. She could only wait a minute.

‘I didn’t want to have to do this, but you brought it on yourself. I put a camera in the house. I won’t tell you where; it doesn’t matter. If you’re really being good, it won’t matter where the camera is, will it?’

‘No, Mum, it won’t matter. I’ll be good.’ My harp was already inside. I had nothing to hold onto but the straps of
my lunch bag. Mum chose it because it’s small enough that I can’t hide anything extra in it.

‘You’ll have to take the bus until I get back. I hope I can trust you with that.’

I felt a flutter in my stomach. The bus is freedom. But I’d forgotten; tomorrow wouldn’t be freedom at all.

It was happening too fast. I had been preparing for weeks, just in case, but it still felt like I’d been grabbed from behind and forced up against a wall.

It just seemed to have come up suddenly, is all. I blinked fast. If I didn’t take the chance Mum had just given me, it wouldn’t come up again in time. I’d promised Ro.

A bus beeped at us. We were in the way. I got out onto the pavement and Mum jerked the car into the road.

It had felt exciting to sneak out of the concert hall. I didn’t need Dora for that. I’d thought that I did, but I didn’t. Once outside, I considered trying to find the bus to Milton Keynes by myself, but I didn’t know where to catch it from Cambridge, and it had just been a crazy idea anyway. I’d thought I could run away from my responsibilities, and, maybe if Dora had come with me, I would have tried for a few hours. On my own, though, there wasn’t anyone to pretend for. I couldn’t pretend just for myself.

It had to be today. Mum would be away for at least overnight, probably two. That’s what the pills needed: eight to twenty-four hours without interference before the antidote wouldn’t work any more. After that, there wouldn’t be anything anyone could do.

I locked the door when I got home.

I wondered where Mum had put the camera. I scanned
the front rooms, but nothing jumped out at me as new.

She wouldn’t really put in a camera, would she?

If the camera was in the room, Mum wouldn’t have liked seeing me look for it, so I went into the kitchen for a glass of water. We have only glass glasses, not plastic, and I worried that my shaking hand would drop it.

The camera could be in here.

I didn’t think that there would be a real-time feed.
Mum wouldn’t have time to watch it, would she?
She was supposed to be working. If she were watching, she’d be angry that I was home at all, never mind what I was doing. I was supposed to be at the concert hall still. ‘I’m not feeling well, Mum,’ I said out loud, just in case. I walked back into the lounge and said it again.

But if Mum thought that I was still out, she wouldn’t bother checking any camera until later. It was having people over that she was worried about, or me not coming home. She wouldn’t start looking until this afternoon.

If there even really is a camera.

I rubbed my forehead.
Stop it.
It didn’t matter. A day and a bit, that’s all I had to act normal for. Ro needed me.

Ro had tried to kill herself once before, long before I was born, but just went into a coma instead. Then, when all Mum’s talk about selling and care homes freaked Ro out, Mum made sure that she couldn’t do it again. It was like in airports after 9/11: nothing sharp, nothing flammable allowed in the Red House any more. A personal alarm was installed. The ladder to the loft was taken away. I was usually the one to make Ro’s breakfast in the house and bring it to her ready to eat, instead of letting her toast her own bread or spread her own marmalade. No electrics. No
knives. Not even a kettle any more, no appliances because of electrical fire hazards. It would have solved Mum’s problems if Ro died but she wouldn’t let her.

I poured a mug of milk and put it on a tray. I put biscuits onto a small plate. Ro wouldn’t want them, but I had to give a visual reason why I was heading out there.

I carried the tray outside. That man was in the fields again. Sometimes there were lots of men; sometimes only him. That was an
only him
day. I put down the tray, and pulled the barn door to slide it sideways using both hands.

It wasn’t always like this, so densely packed. There used to be a big oval rug and chairs in the barn, and Dora and I had played there. Sometimes we’d modelled Rowena’s old jewellery and sixties clothes, which we’d discovered in the back of the loft, giggling at the surprising strangeness of the styles but never, at least I didn’t, mocking them. Rowena had woken early from a nap once and caught us at it. She’d gibbered and berated us; I’d never seen her like that before. She didn’t need daily care then, so I’d been able to avoid her for almost a week, too embarrassed to face her. When I’d at last come back, the rug had been rolled up, and the clothes and jewellery box packed away somewhere deeper, more hidden, that I’d only found again recently. Dora and I hadn’t played in the barn again after that, though we still visited Ro, as the stacks grew taller and the space tighter. That’s the week that, until today, I used to think of as my growing-up.

‘Ro?’ I said, leaving the tray at the door. ‘It’s me, Fiona.’ This time of day, Ro usually knew that I was her granddaughter. It was only in the evenings that she forgot things. It had all got worse since the developer came, the
forgetting and panic.
How can Mum force her to leave her home, her safe place?

I unstacked boxes to get at a middle one. I lifted out three folded skirts. That was where the now-empty jewellery box had a new purpose, lined with a soft handkerchief so that it didn’t rattle.
Twenty-nine pills.
Six more in my pocket from Alexandra today. I popped them all out of their blister packs and counted them out.
Thirty-five
. More than enough. I’d been careful of that. Ro hadn’t taken enough the last time, more than twenty-five years ago. She’d warned me. I’d learnt from that mistake.