Page 3 of The New House

Like I said, usually we’re not out to get you.

Usually.

A small minority of psychopaths have a predisposition to calculated violence; violence that’s cold-blooded and planned, and scary as hell.

I’m as terrified of people like that as you are. It’s not like psychos give each other a hall pass.

I’m often asked how something as ordinary as moving house descended into such chaos and bloodshed, and the truth is, I honestly don’t know. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and, with retrospect, the signs were there. You’d think someone like me would have been able to spot them.

But at the time we had no reason to suspect anything.

We just wanted to sell our house.

chapter 02

millie

By the time I get back home, Tom is in the kitchen, organising breakfast, packed lunches, the day, our lives.

‘How was your run?’ he asks me.

‘Good. Just what I needed.’

Tom and I have been married for nineteen years. He knows it’s not the run that’s rejuvenated me, and put a spring in my step.

I left a bouquet of pink roses on the doorstep of the house I borrowed to say thank you to the owners, with a cryptic note:Pay it forward. They’ll be confused, but I hope the flowers will make them as happy as the house made me.

I hand Tom the dice I stole earlier as he puts two slices of wholewheat bread into the toaster. I don’t permit white bread in the house, or sugar, crisps, fizzy drinks. No screens at the table, or in bed.

Tom pockets the dice without comment. Later, he’ll add it to the other mementos of my extracurricular activities that he keeps in a drawer beneath his desk. I’m like a cat, bringing home a mouse as proof of my hunting skills.

Proof I still have my darker impulses in check.

The kids tumble down the stairs, already bickering and shoving at each other as they tussle for stools at the breakfast bar.

Medusa, our daughter, isthirteen, clear-eyed and knowing. She’s inherited Tom’s Black Irish hair and blue eyes, but in every other respect she takes after me. Sometimes this makes me sad; sometimes not. Naming her was my privilege, part of the deal Tom and I struck when we decided to have a child. I’d planned to call her Artemis, after the Greek goddess of the hunt, but that was before I endured a thirty-hour labour that ended in a forceps delivery and fourteen stitches.

Our son, Peter, named by Tom, is soft. Clay to her marble. He inherited my honeyed colouring, but people always say he takes after his dad. Amenable, sunny, accommodating. Ten years old, but he seems younger. He’s cerebral and dreamy; he gets bullied at school, and frequently comes home without the new computer game or collectible for which he’s saved for months.

I try not to play favourites, but if we were animals in the wild, Peter would be first to be picked off from the herd. He needs me in a way Meddie never has.

Peter sits down at the breakfast bar now and fills his bowl with plain yoghurt and granola. He reaches for the last banana in the fruit bowl to slice on top. His sister doesn’t like bananas, but now that Peter’s taken the last one, she wants it. She snatches his bowl away, and he sighs, but doesn’t object.

‘Give that back,’ Tom says.

Our daughter regards him, flat-eyed, and spoons a mouthful of granola and yoghurt between her lips.

‘Give the bowl back to your brother,’ I say.

Medusa shrugs and sends it skittering across the counter towards him. ‘I don’t want it, anyway. The granola’s got mouse droppings in it.’

Peter yelps and shoves the bowl back. ‘Ewww!’

‘Enough,’ I say, in a tone of voice that silences the pair of them. ‘I need to shower and change for work. You’d both better be ready to go when I come back downstairs. Your father doesn’t have time to take you to school today,so I’m dropping you off.’

This is a rare event. Part of our deal when we decided to have a child was that Tom would assume the lion’s share of hands-on parenting. We both knew that however good my intentions I’d quickly lose interest in the repetitive routines of childcare, perhaps with disastrous consequences.

I was quite clear when Tom asked me to marry him: I had no desire to replicate myself, no romantic longing to blend our genes. Frankly, given my childhood, I was a rotten proposition as a wife all round, but Tom was touchingly undeterred.

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