Summer Cannibals by Melanie Hobson

Author:Melanie Hobson [Hobson, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802146526
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2018-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Jax went back upstairs to get dressed, and David and Georgina walked along the lane as they’d been told to. Neither was talking because what was there to talk about. It was clear that the tour had been an absolute disaster and if either of them were able to think laterally, they’d see it correctly as the precipitous event that had put them in the shitstorm they were in now—dodging potholes and looking for a missing person they both knew they wouldn’t find. Not like this.

Bloody cheapskates, David growled as he skirted the craters, waving an arm at the house on his right. Look at them with their fancy cars … Audis, Mercedes, Land Rovers, a Rolls-Royce with right-hand drive … The potholes, he exploded into his daughter’s silence. The ruddy potholes.

The entire lane was his property, deeded with the house, and the lane’s other residents had right-of-way. Legally, repairs were his responsibility, but David didn’t think it was fair that he should have to pay for everything when all the residents were making use of and degrading it. It wasn’t cheap to maintain a road. So he’d worked out a formula, a sliding scale based on use so that he—at the lane’s end—paid the most, and the person in the first house paid the least. It was, he felt, an equitable share of the cost. He’d worked it out in great detail before calling a meeting to present it to the other residents, but he’d seen the way their eyes had cased his living room and all its treasures, and once the meeting was over, and they weren’t face to face anymore, the other two houses had refused to pay anything for maintenance or improvements. Every few years he tried again and still they refused, so every spring the snow melted to reveal deeper and deeper holes as he let the surface deteriorate to teach them a lesson. Never mind, as his wife liked to point out, that it is really we at the end who are suffering the most.

Georgina nodded, pressing her lips together in a manner she hoped looked like sympathy. She knew his anger was building again and she just wanted to delay it until she was clear because she, like her mother, was alarmed by the bombshell of Pippa’s disappearance and she needed to concentrate on working out how to get her back, not on answering her father’s tantrums which were tiresome and far too regular and, this time, grossly inopportune.

They fell into step with each other as if they were just out for a stroll and catching up on news: the little threads that bind families together. A father and his adult daughter, chatting … a rich man with his pretty young thing. So everyday, so innocuous, that anyone would think them bright and clean and free of trouble. Would be envious that they could afford the luxury of a mid-morning constitutional, an airing out, a prescription of moderate exercise … But as they walked, the roar of the traffic up the escarpment was becoming louder and more insistent.

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