The Radleys

Matt Haig

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781847678607
• eBook ISBN: 9781847679161
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

* New novel THE LIFE IMPOSSIBLE available in paperback now *

NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRING DAMIAN LEWIS AND KELLY MACDONALD

FAMILIES. SOMETIMES THEY'RE A BLOODY NIGHTMARE . . .

Life with the Radleys: Radio 4, dinner parties with the Bishopthorpe neighbours and self-denial. Loads of self-denial. But all hell is about to break loose. When teenage daughter Clara gets attacked on the way home from a party, she and her brother Rowan finally discover why they can't sleep, can't eat a Thai salad without fear of asphyxiation and can't go outside unless they're smothered in Factor 50.

With a visit from their lethally louche Uncle Will and an increasingly suspicious police force, life in Bishopthorpe is about to change. Drastically.

MONDAY

Mister Police Encyclopaedia

York. The North Yorkshire Police Headquarters. Detective Chief Superintendent Geoff Hodge sits in his office wishing he’d had more for breakfast. Of course, he knows he could do with losing a couple of stone or so, and he knows Denise worries about his cholesterol levels and all that, but you can’t start a working week on a bowl of Fruit ’n Fibre with skimmed milk and a poxy little tangerine or whatever it was. She’d even banned him from having peanut butter now.

Peanut butter!

‘Too salty and it’s got palm oil in it,’ she’d told him.

Denise knew all about palm oil from her Weight Watchers class. You’d think palm oil was worse than crack cocaine the way Denise goes on.

And now, staring at these two useless uniforms, he’s wishing he’d ignored Denise altogether. Although, of course, you can never ignore Denise.

‘So, you’re saying that you interviewed Clara Radley but you didn’t write anything down?’

‘We went round there and she … satisfied our enquiries,’ says PC Langford.

They all speak like this nowadays, thinks Geoff. They all come out of training at Wildfell Hall, speaking like little computers.

‘Satisfied our enquiries?’ Geoff snorts. ‘Chuffing hell, love, she was the most important person you had to talk to!’

The two PCs cower at his voice. Maybe, he thinks, if I’d had some bloody palm oil for my breakfast I might be able to keep a lid on my temper. Oh well, a trio of cheese-and-onion pasties for lunch should do the trick.

‘Well?’ he says, turning to the other one, PC Henshaw – a useless, debollocked spaniel of a man, Geoff thinks to himself. ‘Come on then, Tweedledee. Your turn.’

‘It’s just nothing came up. And I suppose we didn’t press too hard because it was just a routine thing. You know, two people go missing every—’

‘All right, Mister Police Encyclopaedia, I didn’t ask for statistics. And this is not looking quite so bloody routine now, I can tell you.’

‘Why?’ asks PC Langford. ‘What’s come up?’

‘The lad’s body. That’s what’s come up. Washed up, in fact, from the bloody North Sea. I’ve just had a call from East Yorkshire. He was found on some rocks at Skipsea. It’s this lad, Stuart Harper. He’s been proper done.’

‘Oh God,’ both uniforms say, together.

‘Yeah,’ says Geoff. ‘Oh chuffing God.’

Control

Rowan spent most of the night writing the poem about Eve he has been struggling to get under way for weeks. ‘Eve, An Ode to the Miracles of Life and Beauty’ turned into something of an epic verse, accommodating seventeen stanzas in total and using every last piece of paper in his A4 pad.

Still, despite having no sleep whatsoever, Rowan is less tired than usual over breakfast. He sits there, eating his ham and listening to the radio.

While his parents bicker away in the hall he whispers to Clara, ‘I tried it.’

‘What?’

‘The blood.’ Clara is wide-eyed. ‘And?’

‘It cured my writer’s block.’

‘Do you feel different?’

‘I did a hundred press-ups. I normally can’t do ten. And my rash has gone. And my headaches, too. My senses are so sharp it’s like being a superhero or something.’

‘I know, it’s amazing, isn’t it?’

Helen enters the room. ‘What’s amazing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing.’

Rowan takes the bottle with him to school and sits with Clara on the bus. They see Eve overtake them in a Beeline taxi. She shrugs and mouths the words ‘My dad’ from the back seat.

‘Do you reckon he’s told her?’ Rowan asks his sister.

‘Told her what?’

‘You know, that we’re—’

Clara worries people are listening. She turns around in her seat. ‘What’s Toby up to?’

Rowan sees Toby on the back seat, talking to a group of Year Elevens on the seats around him. The occasional face stares over at the Radley siblings.

‘Oh, who cares?’

Clara frowns at her brother. ‘That’s just the blood talking.’

‘Well, maybe you should have a top-up. You seem to be waning.’

He gestures towards his school bag.

She stares down at it, part-tempted, part-scared. The bus slows. The pretty, cream-painted Fox and Crown pub slides slowly by the window. They reach the bus stop in Farley. Harper’s stop. The few pupils who get on seem excited by the drama of someone going missing.

Rowan has noted this before, two years ago, when Leo Fawcett died of an asthma attack on the school field. The kind of thrill people get when something devastating happens, a thrill they never admit to, but which dances in their eyes as they talk about how bad they feel.

‘No,’ says Clara. ‘ ’Course I don’t want any. God, I can’t believe you’ve brought it. We’ve got to be careful.’

‘Wow, what happened to the Radleys?’ says Laura Cooper as she passes. ‘They look so different.’

Rowan shrugs at his sister and stares out of the window at the delicate morning mist across the field, like motionless rain, as though the landscape is behind a veil. He is happy, despite everything. Despite his sister’s doubts and despite Toby and the other pupils. He is happy because he knows that within less than an hour he will be seeing Eve.

Yet when he actually does see her, on the row in front of his in morning assembly, it is almost too much. With his senses so sharp, the scent of her blood is overwhelming in its complex and infinite textures. Right there, one bite away.

Maybe it’s because Eve has her hair up and her neck on show, but Rowan realises he doesn’t quite have the control he imagined.

‘And so it is our great hope,’ drones Mrs Stokes from the raised platform at the front of the hall, ‘and a hope I know is shared by every one of you sitting in this hall, that Stuart Harper will return home safely …’

He can smell Eve’s blood. It is all there is, really. Just her blood and the promise of a taste which he knows would surpass anything else in the world.

‘… but in the meantime we must all pray for his safety and also be very careful when we are out and about after school …’

He can vaguely sense himself leaning closer and closer, lost in a kind of waking dream. But then he hears a sharp cough from the raised side platform of the hall. He sees his sister glaring at him, snapping him out of the trance.

The Three Vials

One of the things Peter had enjoyed most about living in a city had been the almost total absence of neighbourhood gossip.

In London, it had been quite possible to sleep all day and drink fresh haemoglobin all night without ever seeing the twitch of a curtain, or hearing disapproving whispers in the post office. Nobody had really known him in his street in Clapham and nobody had really cared to enquire about how he chose to spend his leisure time.

In Bishopthorpe, however, things had always been somewhat different. He’d realised early on that gossip was something that was always around, even if, like the tweeting birds in the trees, it often went quiet if he was near.

When they had first moved to Orchard Lane, it was before Helen’s bump was showing and people wanted to know why this attractive, young, childless couple from London had wanted to move to a quiet village in the middle of nowhere.

Of course, they had answers at the ready, most of which were at least partially true. They wanted to be here to be closer to Helen’s parents, as her father was very ill with various heart problems. They found the cost of living in London becoming increasingly ridiculous. And, chief of all, they wanted to give their future children a quiet, relatively rural upbringing.

Harder than this, though, were the enquiries into their past. Peter’s especially.

Where were his family?

‘Oh, my parents died in a road accident when I was a child.’

Did he have any siblings?

‘No.’

So how did he get into medicine?

‘I don’t know, I just acquired a taste for it, I suppose.’

So he and Helen met when they were students in the 1980s. Did they live it up?

‘Not really. We were quite boring actually. We’d occasionally go out for a curry on a Friday evening or hire a video but that was pretty much it. There was a lovely Indian at the end of our street.’

Generally, he and Helen had managed to bat away such enquiries successfully. As soon as Rowan had been born and once Peter had proven himself a valued asset at Bishopthorpe Surgery, they were treated as welcome members of the village community.

But he was always aware that, so long as the inhabitants of Bishopthorpe were gossiping about other people (and they were, continually – at dinner parties, on the cricket field, at the bus stop), they could be gossiping about the Radleys too.

True, in many ways Peter and Helen had made themselves as anonymous and neutral as they possibly could. They had always dressed precisely how people expected them to dress. They had always bought cars which were going to sit quite inconspicuously alongside the other people carriers and family saloons of Orchard Lane. And they had made sure their political opinions always landed somewhere safely in the middle. When the children were younger they had gone along to Bishopthorpe church for the Christingle service every Christmas Eve, and had usually gone along to the Easter Sunday one as well.

A few days after moving in, Peter had even agreed to Helen’s idea of going through their record, CD, book and video collections to cull all works by vampires, whether they were hereditary or converted, alive or dead, practising or abstaining.

So Peter had reluctantly said goodbye to the VHS cassettes of his favourite Simpson–Bruckheimer movies (after watching the lush, blood-tainted sunsets of Beverly Hills Cop II one last time). He had to kiss farewell to Norma Bengell in Planet of the Vampires, Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour and Kelly LeBrock in The Woman in Red. Gone also were his guilty stash of Powell and Pressburger post-war classics (which every bloodsucker knew weren’t really about ballerinas or nuns at all), and the all-time great vampire westerns (Red River, Rio Bravo, Young Guns II: Blaze of Glory). Needless to say, he had to ditch his entire vamp porn collection, including his long-cherished but no longer watched Betamax versions of Smokey and the Vampire and Any Which Way You Fang.

Also going in the bin on that sad day in 1992 were hundreds of records and CDs which had provided the background noise ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• FRIDAY
• SATURDAY
• SUNDAY
• MONDAY
• A FEW NIGHTS LATER
• An Abstainer’s Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• The Life Impossible: An Extract