The Red House (8 page)

I run for the buildings.

I hate sweating. The concert hall is designed for acoustics, not air flow. Walls are what make sound bounce around; windows would just let it escape. So the band room is four wide walls, windows only at the very top. You need a stick with a hook to open them. No one had bothered to do it.

It was a relief to put my flute away and get out. The corridor was choking on instrument cases and discarded sweatshirts. I picked my way through on my toes. Alexandra caught up; I shook her hand off my shoulder. Then we both stared.

The open space in the lobby of the concert hall stretched wide. In it, kids and teenagers between rehearsals crowded against the walls and pillars, hunched over books and DS games. They were the normal ones. The ones we stared at were the girls lying on their backs. There were at least six on the floor.
No, seven
. Three adults catered to them, propping backpacks as pillows and offering to phone parents. None of them were Fiona.

‘That’s nothing,’ Alexandra said. ‘Two years ago, a dozen girls fainted.’

No, seventeen. That summer session, seventeen girls had fainted. I had been one of them.

It had been hard to explain to Mum and Dad when it happened that it wasn’t the kind of faint you call a doctor for. I didn’t lose consciousness. It was just a light-headed floaty feeling, from the unusual heat, from standing too long, from breathing too deeply, from seeing other girls around me go down and … Here in the present, I shook myself. That was two summers ago.

We walked a loopy path around the bodies. The girls on the floor blinked, lolled, swore they’d try harder and that their parents didn’t need to be called.

‘I’m looking for Fiona,’ I told Alexandra. We needed her for the tight harmonies in our next group.

‘She probably has one of her
headaches
,’ Alexandra said, emphasising the word sarcastically. ‘Let’s get some water and go to the choir room.’

‘Why do you say it like that? How do you know how her head feels?’ Fiona got bad headaches with her period and was always begging paracetamol. I brought her a whole pack the day before. Fiona’s mother acted like Fiona made up her headaches. She didn’t believe in free time, either, so if it weren’t for music week I wouldn’t have seen Fiona until school starts. I checked the toilets; Alexandra followed. Girls at the mirrors, girls slamming stalls closed behind them. No Fiona in there.

‘What if she’s really ill?’ I worried.

Mr Gant motioned me and Alexandra into the practice room. Some of the other girls called him Maxwell, but I
didn’t feel right about that. He was a teacher, after all. He was our singing tutor for the week.

He lifted his head and smiled. He’s young. He looks more like someone’s older brother, an age it wouldn’t be weird to have a crush on, would it? I couldn’t remember what I was going to say. He was patient, holding up a hand to make Alexandra stop and wait. He wanted to hear me.

I remembered. ‘Mr Gant, Fiona isn’t here.’

‘I’m sure you can manage the harmonies without her,’ he assured me.

I wasn’t sure of that at all.
A cappella
is a lot harder than accompanied singing, and we were a small group. The seven of us sorted ourselves into two rows.

‘She’s probably not feeling well, Mr Gant. I had to give her some paracetamol this morning,’ Alexandra said, leaning over my shoulder from behind.

Today?
I wondered. The pills yesterday should have been plenty. How many were in there? Eight, maybe? The packs have got smaller since the laws to make it more difficult to commit suicide, but that was still a lot. Surely Fiona hadn’t gone through all of them.

‘How many did you give her?’ I whispered to Alexandra.

Fiona never takes them in front of me, I realised. She always takes them to the loo, she said to wash them down with tap water from the palm of her hand. I’d never seen her actually do it.

‘You don’t think …’ I started to say, but Mr Gant lifted his hands and we all breathed in.

Our dog isn’t home. There’s no yapping. That’s how I know that Dad isn’t here either.

I dump my music bag and flute case, and just need to get my bicycle.
If Fiona’s at her house, then I can stop worrying. Maybe she really did just have a headache and go home early.

I wanted to phone Fiona from the concert hall, but, if her mother picked up, I couldn’t ask if Fiona was there. What if her mother thought Fiona was still at the concert hall? What if Fiona had really gone off somewhere? Things would get worse than they are if her mum found out.

It’s late enough now that if her mum answers the door, I can just say that Fiona accidentally left her bracelet with me and that I’m bringing it back. It won’t be as if I’m checking where Fiona is. I don’t have to say anything about when Fiona left. She’ll be there, I’m sure. She has to be.
And if she’s not, I’ll call Dad
. I correct myself:
I’ll call Chloe.

The bracelet had been a surprise. I’d found it when I reached for my bus pass. My fingertips slid against something hard, sharp-cornered, and unexpected.

It was a little red cardboard box with an enamelled bracelet on cotton inside. It was made of ceramic with vines and flowers painted on, and even a few daubs of gold underlining the prettiest petals. I recognised it. It used to belong to Fiona’s grandmother, Rowena. Fiona’s not allowed to wear jewellery, but we’d found Rowena’s old things when we were little and used to play with them. Fiona sometimes hides a bracelet under a sleeve, or tucks earrings in a pocket to put on at school after her mother’s left.

Finding that little gift had made me more worried than I already was about the pill collecting, but the farther I got from West Road, the stranger my worry seemed. It must
have been seeing all the fainted girls that made me think that way. Fiona has a perfectly good reason for collecting pills. She’s been having these headaches for a long time.

Well, she
said
she has.

I pedal faster, ignoring the sweating under my helmet. And remind myself: Fiona isn’t the sort of person to do that. She’s a perfectionist. She’s more the type for an eating disorder, right? The worst that can happen is that I’ll catch her being sick after a meal, right?
Right?

It’ll be my fault
. Mrs Davies had been strict, but not crazy. Then I convinced Fiona to skip school for that day. Just one day! There hadn’t been anything important going to happen, nothing that we couldn’t make up, nothing that would affect our exams. We’d never risk our exams. My parents understood that. They told me off but let it go. Fiona’s mum went crazy over it. The rules changed. Maybe Fiona couldn’t take it.

I normally go round the long way to get to the cycle path, but Fiona is more important. I turn the direct way, into Codling Walk.

The dog barks at me. He’s tied up outside the house with the dried-flower wreath on the door, on the corner. I lean down over my handlebars and get past fast. I don’t want him to see me. Not the dog, Dad. Not that he’ll be looking out the window.
He’ll be looking at something else, right? That’s why he’s in there, right?
Then it’s out of the mazey village streets and onto the cycle path.

At first, I’d liked having Dad home. Mum had sat me down like I was little to explain that ‘
Dad needs to take some time off work and he’ll be able to spend more time with you.
’ Mum said it like there would be football on TV
and cooked dinners and maybe teaching me to drive. So I thought,
All right. Good, that’s fine
. Mum’s job has picked up after years of part-time. It’s supposed to be good to have Dad there instead, like he and Mum are having a trade.

Sure he does laundry and the other sorts of things whoever is home has to do. But after that he takes the dog and just goes.

Once a call came for him at home that seemed important. I’d thought,
How far away can he be with the dog?
He had to be in the village. So I got on my bike, like now. The dog barked at me, like now. The girl who used to live in that house, the one with the wreath on the door? She used to babysit me. She’s off at university now, in Edinburgh. Her mum lives alone. I’ve seen her jogging around the village. She wears a ponytail for that. Her hair bounces. Mum always sighs and says that she should do that. Mum doesn’t know. I haven’t told her where Dad goes with the dog.

The cycle path turns to parallel Broad Street, and then Cambourne Road. Two roundabouts, over the A428, and then it dumps me on St Neot’s Road to ride with traffic.

Lower Cambourne is relatively new. It has wide roads and lots of parking and cycleways designed in. Fiona lives in Highfields Caldecote. The main village, Caldecote, is old enough to be in the Domesday Book, but the area around it is being built up. That’s what happens when you have fields. The area’s going to become an ‘affordable planned community’.

Fiona’s family is holding out. They’ve been offered buckets of money, which Fiona’s mum wants to take, but Grandma Ro owns the property. I had to listen to them argue about it that last time I was over there. That was
months ago. Fiona’s mum doesn’t like me to come round any more, not since that day we skipped school.

I turn off the main road. The fields are different now. Instead of green and yellow, they’re churned up and only brown. A noisy construction vehicle prowls. The fluorescent vest on its driver flashes sunlight in my eyes.

The absence of the neighbouring houses is shocking. They’d each been painted a contrasting bright colour, every colour except green, because grass is green, and not blue either, because sky is blue. There had been a purple one and a pink one, a yellow one and a peach one, all gone now. Only Fiona’s family’s white one, with the red-painted barn, are left.

A billboard shows the houses to come: tall, terraced, matchy-matchy pastel coloured. The old houses had been distinct from one another. Not just separate, but different. Without the yellow house and the pink house, the sign pointing to Fiona’s ‘White House’ makes little sense.

The edge of Fiona’s family’s property is obvious. Their grass is fenced in, the prepared ground of new development coming right up to it. The main house, the white one, is down a long drive. The barn, which Fiona’s Grandma Ro calls the ‘Red House’, is closer to the property line. Blackberries are ripening along one of its long walls.

I prop my bike against the front of the White House and dump my helmet into the panniers. I push the doorbell. It buzzes inside but there are no answering footsteps. I push it again. Even if Fiona isn’t home her mother should be. Maybe something really is wrong. Maybe she and her mum are both at the hospital. Maybe there’s been an emergency and her mum picked her up from the concert hall. I realise what could cause that.

I clatter down the front steps and run to the Red House. Grandma Ro has lived there at least as long as I’ve known Fiona. Things have got pretty bad for her. She tried to climb the loft ladder and sprained her ankle falling off; Fiona’s mum took the ladder down. Ro was cleaning and mixed ammonia and bleach. Again, Fiona’s mum caught her and took all the cleaning things away. Maybe she tried to climb something else. Maybe something fell on her.

The barn had been converted years ago: floored, insulated, windowed. But I can’t see through the dirty glass, not past the piles of magazines up against the window on the inside. I knock on the barn’s original sliding door, the kind you use to let animals in and out. My fist doesn’t make a loud enough noise against the construction buzz nearby. I have to drag it open, pulling sideways.

I stand just inside the doorway. ‘Grandma Ro?’ I call cautiously. I don’t want to shock Rowena or make her afraid. ‘It’s me, Fiona’s friend.’ I don’t say my name. The last time I was allowed over, Ro didn’t recognise me. Fiona had said simply, ‘Ro, it’s Dora. You know Dora.’

But Ro had gibbered and panicked. ‘Dora?’ she’d repeated, in a slurred way that made it sound foreign. She’d pushed us out of the barn. ‘Get out!’ she’d said. ‘You have to get out of the house!’ Ro’s hands had grabbed at me. It wasn’t a way she had ever been before. I’d been scared and Fiona got embarrassed and cried. I told her that it was all right. My grandparents aren’t like that yet but I know it could happen.

‘Sometimes she thinks I’m Mum when she was my age,’ Fiona had confided. ‘When Ro’s like that she only remembers things from a long time ago. It’s better in the
mornings.’ The wailing inside the Red House had continued. Fiona’s mother had heard it too; the construction vehicles weren’t at work yet then, even though the houses around them were all sold already. Fiona’s mum had pushed past us and slid the door back and gone in to calm Rowena down. Ro was just repeating the name and sobbing. She’d pleaded, ‘She’s got to get away from the house!’

I shake the memory off.

‘Grandma Ro? I mean, Rowena?’ I try. If Ro’s in her forgetful phase, she probably doesn’t know that she’s a grandmother.

I can barely enter. If the door had been meant to push in instead of slide, it would have been impossible to open. ‘Fiona?’ I add, slipping into the dimness and accumulated heat inside. The blocked window didn’t let in much light and my eyes had to adjust. Fiona and I used to spend time in here when we were little. It had been different then.

Well, I had been different then.
Maybe I just imagine that the once seemingly vast space is now smaller. But entering confirms my first impression: the space has in fact tightened, choking on its own contents.

The Red House had been full of Ro’s things then too, but not as bad as this. Fiona and I had pawed through boxes and suitcases, and played on a braided rug while Ro made us hot milk on a camp stove, or napped. Even though it was all one ginormous room, areas had been delineated. Now the borders between spaces have grown into teetering walls made of boxes. The remnants of the jury-rigged systems of conversion from a mere barn remain, but now seem sad instead of clever: a hose extension leading to a squat bathtub, a dodgy electrical connection to the house.
We had always used the toilet in the White House, and I’m not sure what Ro did. I’d never asked.