The Radleys Read online

  Edited by Baileyd @ Demonoid.me

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Matt Haig

  Original y published in Great Britain in 2010 by Canongate Books Ltd Al rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Free Press hardcover edition December 2010

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  Designed by Carla Jayne Jones

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Haig, Matt,

  The Radleys / Matt Haig.

  p. cm.

  1. Dysfunctional families—England—Fiction. 2. Vampires—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PR6108.A39R33 2010

  823'.92—dc22 2010004459

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9401-0

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9464-5 (ebook)

  For Andrea, as always.

  And for Lucas and Pearl. Don’t spil a drop.

  Contents

  Friday

  17 Orchard Lane

  The Spare Bedroom

  Dreaming

  A Sudden Tweak of Pain

  Proper Milk

  Forty-six

  Realism

  Fantasy World

  Factor 60

  Red Setter

  Day Glimmers on the Dying and the Dead

  Photograph

  Faust

  Behind the Modesty Curtain

  Something Evil

  A Thai Green Leaf Salad with Marinated Chicken

  and a Chili and Lime Dressing

  Copeland

  Tarantula

  Signal

  The Blood, the Blood

  Quiet

  Béla Lugosi

  The Dark Fields

  My Name Is Wil Radley

  The Infinite Solitude of Trees

  Calamine Lotion

  Ten Past Midnight

  A Certain Type of Hunger

  Crucifixes and Rosaries and Holy Water

  A Bit like Christian Bale

  Saturday

  There Is a Rapture on the Lonely Shore

  Scrambled Eggs

  The Lost People

  Pretty

  Fences

  A Tantric Diagram of a Right Foot

  New Clothes

  A Bit of a Panic Attack

  Save the Children

  The Oarless Boat

  Paris

  Behind a Yew Tree

  Water

  Crimson Clouds

  Creature of the Night

  Black Narcissus

  Pinot Rouge

  Sunday

  Freaks

  Game Over

  Police

  Deli Ham

  The Sun Sinks Back Behind a Cloud

  His Wife’s Trembling Hand

  We’re Monsters

  The Night before Paris

  Bloodless Excuse for a Marriage

  Mil ennia

  Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

  Panic and Pondweed

  Saturn

  Monday

  Mister Police Encyclopedia

  Control

  The Three Vials

  Book Group

  An Unusual Thought for a Monday

  CSI: Transylvania

  Radley Makeover Day

  Class

  The Plow

  Pavement

  A Conversation about Leeches

  A Proposition

  Repression Is in Our Veins

  Then She Smiles a Devilish Smile

  Shoebox

  Lazy Garlic

  Curry Sauce

  Imitation of Life

  The Kiss

  The Fox and Crown

  Thirsk

  Atom

  Pity

  The Note

  A Lost World That Was Once Her Own

  Baby

  Up and Up and Up

  Out of the Wet, Dark Air

  His Father’s Face

  Change

  Into the Dark

  Womb

  A Few Nights Later

  Raphael

  A Song He Knows

  Self-help

  The Tiniest Drop

  Myths

  An Abstainer’s Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Friday

  Your instincts are wrong. Animals rely on instincts for their daily survival, but we are not beasts. We are not lions or sharks or vultures. We are civilized, and civilization only works if instincts are suppressed. So do your bit for society and ignore those dark desires inside you.

  The Abstainer’s Handbook (second edition), p. 54

  17 Orchard Lane

  It is a quiet place, especialy at night.

  Too quiet, you’d be entitled to think, for any kind of monster to live among its pretty, tree-shaded lanes.

  Indeed, at three o’clock in the morning in the vil age of Bishopthorpe, it is easy to believe the lie indulged in by its residents—that it is a place for good and quiet people to live good and quiet lives.

  At this hour, the only sounds to be heard are those made by nature itself. The hoot of an owl, the faraway bark of a dog, or, on a breezy night like this one, the wind’s obscure whisper through the sycamore trees. Even if you stood on the main street, right outside the pub or the Hungry Gannet delicatessen, you wouldn’t often hear any traffic or be able to see the abusive graffiti that decorates the former post office (though the word FREAK might just be legible if you strain your eyes).

  Away from the main street, on somewhere like Orchard Lane, if you took a nocturnal strol past the detached period homes lived in by solicitors and doctors and project managers, you would find al their lights off and curtains drawn, secluding them from the night. Or you would until you reached number seventeen, where you’d notice the glow from an upstairs window filtering through the curtains.

  And if you stopped, sucked in that cool and consoling fresh night air, you would at first see that number seventeen is a house otherwise in tune with those around it. Maybe not quite as grand as its closest neighbor, number nineteen, with its wide driveway and elegant Regency features, but stil one that holds its own.

  It is a house that looks and feels precisely how a vil age family home should look—not too big, but big enough, with nothing out of place or jarring on the eye. A dream house in many ways, as estate agents would tel you, and certainly perfect to raise children.

  But after a moment you’d notice there is something not right about it. No, maybe “notice” is too strong. Perhaps you wouldn’t actively realize that even nature seems to be quieter around this house, that you can’t hear any birds or anything else at al . Yet there might be an instinctive sense that would make you wonder about that glowing light and feel a
coldness that doesn’t come from the night air.

  If that feeling grew, it might become a fear that would make you want to leave the scene and run away, but you probably wouldn’t. You would observe the nice house and the moderately expensive car parked outside and think that this is the property of perfectly normal human beings who pose no threat to the outside world.

  If you let yourself think this, you would be wrong. For 17 Orchard Lane is the home of the Radleys, and despite their very best efforts, they are anything but normal.

  The Spare Bedroom

  “You need sleep,” he tels himself, but it is no good.

  The light on at three o’clock this Friday morning belongs to him, Rowan, the elder of the two Radley children. He is wide awake, despite having drunk six times the recommended dose of Night Nurse.

  He is always awake at this time. If he is lucky, on a good night, he wil drop off to sleep at around four to wake again at six or shortly after. Two hours of tormented, restless sleep, dreaming violent nightmares he can’t understand and arranging and rearranging his lanky frame into increasingly less sleepworthy positions. But tonight it’s not a good night, with his rash acting up and that breeze blowing against the window, and he knows he wil probably be going to school on no rest whatsoever.

  He puts down his book: Byron’s Collected Poems. He hears someone walking along the landing, not to the toilet but to the spare room.

  There is a slight rummaging around, and a few moments of quiet before she can be heard leaving the room. Again, this isn’t entirely unusual. Often he has heard his mother get up in the middle of the night to head to the spare bedroom with some secret purpose he hasn’t ever asked her about.

  Then he hears her go back to bed and the indistinct mumble of his parents’ voices through the wal .

  Dreaming

  Helen gets back into bed, her whole body tense with secrets. Her husband sighs a strange, yearning kind of sigh and nuzzles into her.

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to kiss you,” he says.

  “Please, Peter,” she says, a headache pressing behind her eyes. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “As opposed to al those other times, when you would want to be kissed by your husband.”

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I was. I was dreaming. It was quite an exciting one. Nostalgic, real y.”

  “Peter, we’l wake the children,” she says, although she knows Rowan stil has his light on.

  “Come on, I just want to kiss you. It was such a good dream.”

  “No. You don’t. You want more. You want—”

  “So, what are you worried about? The sheets?”

  “I just want to go to sleep.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I needed the toilet.” She is so used to this lie she doesn’t think about it.

  “That bladder. It’s getting weaker.”

  “Good night.”

  “Do you remember that librarian we took home?”

  She can hear the smile in his question. “Jesus, Peter. That was London. We don’t talk about London.”

  “But when you think about nights like that, doesn’t it make you—”

  “No. It was a lifetime ago. I don’t think about it at al .”

  A Sudden Tweak of Pain

  In the morning, shortly after waking, Helen sits up and sips her water. She unscrews the jar of ibuprofen tablets and places one on her tongue, as delicately as a communion wafer.

  She swal ows, and right at that moment as the pil washes down her throat, her husband—only a few steps away in the bathroom—feels a sudden tweak of pain.

  He has cut himself shaving.

  He watches the blood glistening on his damp, oiled skin.

  Beautiful. Deep red. He dabs it, studies the smear it has made on his finger and his heart quickens. The finger moves closer and closer to his mouth, but before it gets there he hears something. Rapid footsteps rushing toward the bathroom, then an attempt at opening the door.

  “Dad, please could you let me in . . . please,” says his daughter, Clara, as she bangs hard against the thick wood.

  He does as she asks, and Clara rushes in and leans over the toilet bowl.

  “Clara,” he says, as she throws up. “Clara, what’s wrong?”

  She leans back. Her pale face looks up at him, from above her school uniform, her eyes desperate through her glasses.

  “Oh God,” she says, and turns back toward the bowl. She is sick again. Peter smel s it and catches sight of it too. He flinches, not from the vomit but from what he knows it means.

  Within a few seconds, everyone is there. Helen is crouching down next to their daughter, stroking her back and tel ing her everything is al right. And their son Rowan is in the doorway, with his Factor 60 sunblock stil needing to be rubbed in and causing his dark bangs to stick to his skin.

  “What’s happening to her?” he asks.

  “It’s fine,” says Clara, not wanting an audience. “Honestly, I’m okay now. I feel fine.”

  And the word stays in the room, hovering around and changing the air with its own sick-scented falseness.

  Proper Milk

  Clara does her best to keep up the routine al morning, getting herself prepared for school just like normal, despite the rotten feeling in her stomach.

  You see, last Saturday Clara upped her game from vegetarian to ful -time, committed vegan in an attempt to get animals to like her a bit more.

  Like the ducks who wouldn’t take her bread, the cats who didn’t want to be stroked, the horses in the fields by Thirsk Road who went crazy every time she walked past. She couldn’t shake that school visit to Flamingo Land where every flamingo panicked and fled before she reached the lake. Or her short-lived goldfish, Rhett and Scarlett—the only pets she had ever been al owed. The total horror that first morning when she found them floating upside down on the water’s surface, with the color drained from their scales.

  Right now, she feels her mother’s eyes on her as she pul s the soya milk out of the fridge.

  “You know, if you switched to proper milk you’d feel a lot better. Even skimmed.”

  Clara wonders what part of “no more meat or dairy products” her mother doesn’t understand, but she does her best to smile. “I’m fine. Please, don’t worry.”

  They are al there now, in the kitchen—her father drinking his fresh coffee, and her brother devouring his morning smorgasbord of deli meats.

  “Peter, tel her. She’s making herself il .”

  Peter takes a moment. His wife’s words have to swim through the wide red river of his thoughts and heave themselves out, dripping and weary, onto the narrow bank of fatherly duty.

  “Your mother’s right,” he says. “You’re making yourself il .”

  Clara pours the offending milk onto her Nuts and Seeds muesli, feeling queasier by the second.

  She wants to ask for the radio to be turned down but knows if she does she wil only make herself appear more il .

  At least Rowan is on her side, in his weary way. “It’s soya, Mum,” he says, with his mouth ful .

  “Not heroin.”

  “But she needs to eat meat.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Look,” says Helen, “I real y think you should take the day off from school. I’l phone them for you if you want.”

  Clara shakes her head. She’d promised Eve she would be going to Jamie Southern’s party tonight and so she’l need to go to school to stand a chance of being al owed out. Besides, a whole day of listening to pro-meat propaganda isn’t going to help her. “Honestly, I’m feeling a lot better. I’m not going to be sick again.”

  Her mum and dad do their usual thing of swapping coded eye messages Clara can’t translate.

  Peter shrugs. (“The thing about Dad is,” Rowan once commented, “he couldn’t real y give two shits about pretty much anything.”)

  Helen is as defeated as when she placed t
he soya milk in the cart a few nights ago, under Clara’s threat of becoming anorexic.

  “Okay, you can go to school,” her mum says, eventual y. “Just please, be careful.”

  Forty-six

  You reach a certain age—sometimes it’s fifteen, sometimes it’s forty-six—and you realize the cliché you have adopted for yourself isn’t working. That is what is happening to Peter Radley right now, chewing away at a piece of buttered multigrain toast and staring at the crinkled transparent plastic that contains the remainder of the loaf.

  The rational, law-abiding adult with his wife and his car and his kids and his direct debits to the Red Cross.

  He had only wanted sex, last night. Just harmless, human sex. And what was sex? It was nothing. It was just a hug in motion. A bloodless piece of body friction. Okay, so he might have wanted it to lead somewhere else, but he could have contained himself. He has contained himself for seventeen years.

  Well, fuck it, he thinks.

  It feels good, swearing, even in his thoughts. He had read in the British Medical Journal that there was new evidence to suggest the act of swearing relieves pain.

  “Fuck it,” he mumbles, too quiet for Helen to hear. “Fuck. It.”

  Realism

  “I’m worried about Clara,” Helen says, handing Peter his lunch box. “She’s only been vegan a week and she’s clearly getting il . What if it triggers something?”

  He has hardly heard her. He is just staring downward, contemplating the dark chaos inside his briefcase. “There’s so much flaming crap in here.”

  “Peter, I’m worried about Clara.”

  Peter puts two pens in the trash. “I’m worried about her. I’m very worried about her. But it’s not like I’m al owed to offer a solution, is it?”

  Helen shakes her head. “Not this, Peter. Not now. This is serious. I just wish we could try and be adult about this. I want to know what you think we should do.”