The House We Grew Up In (23 page)

Even her.

As though she was a special case.

She felt a surge of anger. She thought again of fat Megan sitting on a sunlounger in a sensible swimsuit shouting at her children. Then she thought again of her own fingers at Jason’s fly last night and his howl of agony as she bit his earlobe too hard. Then she thought of her room at the house, the room she’d never left, and the sour atmosphere between Vicky and her mother, and it was Easter next weekend and she’d vowed, hadn’t she, vowed to herself that she would not be here for it and it looked as though she would be; she’d discussed it
with her mother, she vaguely remembered, the possibility of making a simnel cake.

She brought her lips to the warm stone of Rhys’s grave and kissed it long and hard. And then she ran on.

She’d bought three rolls of extra-strong refuse sacks and two pairs of plastic gloves, and cleared out the boot of her car. She’d got a quote for a skip which could be dropped off on Monday if she could persuade Lorrie into going through with it.

Vicky heard Colin tapping at the kitchen window and jumped to her feet.

‘Hello, lovely man,’ she said, greeting him with a kiss to his unshaven cheek. ‘Thank you so much. You have no idea how much I appreciate this. You’re an absolute star.’

Colin shrugged and said, ‘We’ve got a long way to go yet.’ Ever the realist, dear Colin. That’s why he hadn’t been able to hack living with Lorrie. You had to have a core of pink fluff and fairy dust to hack living with Lorrie. ‘Where’s Beth?’

‘She went for a run,’ she replied. ‘And some breakfast in the village. Said she’d be back later on. She went on a date last night.’

Colin raised an eyebrow above the frame of his spectacles. ‘Really,’ he said.

‘Yes. A man from work. Didn’t tell me much, you know what she’s like, but really, her first date since she split with Simon. I think she might be finally moving on.’

The ancient water pipes that ran throughout the house inside dusty wooden cladding squealed, juddered and
creaked, signifying the end of Lorrie’s morning shower. Vicky and Colin smiled nervously at each.

‘Have you said anything?’ he began. ‘Anything at all?’

‘No,’ said Vicky, ‘just been a bit frosty with her. I mean, honestly, Colin, I have managed to steer my way through twelve years of parenting without ever having to swear at one of my children. As much as I may have wanted to, on occasion. But it’s more than that, Colin. I could forgive that, just about. It’s the fact that my daughter is too embarrassed to bring friends home. I always thought maybe she was just not that interested in having friends home to play, but …’ She sighed, and held back encroaching tears. ‘Anyway –’ she brought herself back to common sense – ‘it has to stop. And she’ll have to accept that. Otherwise …’ She broke off as she heard Lorelei’s birdlike footsteps crossing the landing upstairs, from bathroom to bedroom. ‘Otherwise –’ she lowered her voice – ‘I’m not sure I can justify living here any more.’

Colin flicked on the kettle and nodded. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said. ‘It was fine when our lot were small. Just a bit of clutter then, a bit of eccentricity. But this –’ he spread his arms out – ‘this is not tenable. And as you say, not fair at all on your girls.’

They both fell silent at the sound of Lorelei overhead. Voices carried in this house. Colin made his coffee in silence and then joined Vicky at the table. When Lorelei walked in a few minutes later she baulked at the sight of them. ‘Good grief,’ she said, ‘you two look terrifying. What are you both doing sitting there staring at me like that?’

Vicky smiled at her love. ‘Sit,’ she said, ‘we need to talk.’

Lorelei narrowed her eyes. ‘Where’s Beth?’

‘She went for a run. Sit.’

She tutted and sat. Vicky smiled at her again and held her hands in hers. Lorelei’s hands were so thin now, the skin so silky and fragile like those little sheets of powdered blotting paper ladies used to carry in their handbags. Big blue veins bulged up under the thin skin and her nails were far too long. But still, they were her hands, Lorrie’s hands. Vicky swallowed down the sadness of knowing that she was still madly in love with this woman. This woman who had called her precious child a shit.

‘Now listen, sweet girl, you know I love you, so much.’

Lorelei moved her fingers to her sinewy throat and tutted again.

‘Heaven knows why,’ Vicky continued. ‘But I do. But we have a problem here. Maddy says you called her a nasty name.’

‘I did not!’

Vicky sighed away her frustration. She’d known Lorelei would deny it. Like a child. ‘Regardless,’ she said, ‘let us just say that relations between you and Maddy are not good, darling. Are they?’

Lorelei shrugged and tutted. ‘It’s not that,’ she said wearily, ‘it’s just, my things, Vick, all my things …’

‘Well, yes, precisely. I do think, Lorrie, that if we could just get to the bottom of the problem of all the
things
, then we might be able to sort out all our other little problems too.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Lorelei, sighing wanly as if
finally
someone was trying to help her. ‘Exactly.’

‘So, darling, what I thought we could do this weekend, while the girls are away, before the big Easter weekend, you
know, and while we’ve got an extra pair of hands –’ she patted Colin’s hands affectionately – ‘is to maybe make a start on dealing with your things. Start to, you know, get some kind of order to it. I think –’ she smiled encouragingly – ‘if we put our backs into it, not to mention our souls, we could make a real difference. I truly think we could relocate a substantial amount. Maybe even half of it.’

‘Relocate?’ Lorelei’s lips pursed.

‘Yes. I think we could probably do quite a lot of good work for the local charity shops, don’t you think, Colin, hmm?’ She turned and smiled at him, winked at him conspiratorially. My God, they both needed to handle this right. Use absolutely the right language. No talk of junk or rubbish or getting rid or throwing away. Only positive words. Otherwise Lorrie would lose the plot, throw her toys out of her pram and nothing would ever change.

‘Plus I’ve been talking to a nice man called Paul who said he can help us. Relocate some of your things. If we get them all ready for him, on Monday morning he’ll bring along a big pink skip – isn’t that marvellous! A pink skip! – and haul it all away for us.’ She flinched and bit her lip.
Haul it all away
. Uh-oh. That had blown it. ‘I mean, you know, rehome it.’

‘No, you don’t,’ snapped Lorrie. ‘You mean
get rid
of it.’ She sighed sadly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re right. Fine. Let’s do it.’ Vicky gulped as she saw a sheen of tears glaze over Lorrie’s sea-green eyes.

‘Darling—’ she began.

‘But,’ Lorrie interrupted, ‘not one thing goes without my approval. Do you understand? Particularly
you
, Colin.’ She
narrowed her eyes menacingly at him. ‘Don’t think I won’t know, because I will.’ She laughed then, a delicate shred of a laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. Lorrie had always had the most glorious laugh. Vicky still remembered that first night, with the Beaujolais, before that great fissure of tragedy had rent the whole dream in two. She still remembered Lorrie’s lovely laugh, in front of the fire, her long fingers around the stem of her glass.

Colin laughed too, under his breath, and cracked a smile. The atmosphere lightened momentarily.

‘Right,’ said Vicky, capitalising on the sudden, unexpected mood of positivity. ‘We need a plan. And I think the first priority should be the hallway and the staircase.’

Lorrie sighed. Vicky squeezed her hands again. ‘Good girl, darling,’ she said. ‘You’re such a good girl. Right, let’s get to it!’

When Beth returned from her morning run and her visit to Rhys’s grave, she could tell immediately that something was afoot. Vicky’s car was parked up on the kerb with its hatchback gawping open and the curtains on the street side of the house had been drawn open for the first time in years. She brought her face down to the low windows and peered inside, her hands cupped to the filthy glass. Inside she could see the shadowy figures of Mum, Dad and Vicky, in a three-headed huddle on the floor at the foot of the stairs. It looked as though they were fighting. She watched, mesmerised, for a moment. Vicky had hold of one end of an old bath towel and Mum had hold of the other and Dad was trying to stop
Mum hitting Vicky and Vicky was looking exasperated and Mum was crying and looking like a crazy old witch and all around them were bin bags and old clothes and, my God, was that …? Yes, it was Beth’s old pink polka-dot raincoat and there was Meg’s old school duffle coat, the grey one with the fur-lined hood, and there – she squinted hard to see – there was her old duvet cover, the one with the blue and pink squares on it, the one she’d thrown away when all the popping fasteners at the bottom had finally fallen off. What on earth was that doing here? She remembered, distinctly, taking it to be recycled at the charity shop in the village. How on earth had it found its way back into the house? She let herself quietly in through the back door and then tiptoed through the kitchen and towards the hallway.

‘You utter fucking
bastards
!’ she heard her mother wail. ‘Rhys used that towel, you know. It was his
favourite
! It still smells of him, for God’s sake – smell it, you bastard, smell it!’

Her father sighed and said, ‘No. I don’t want to smell it, because it smells of mildew. Like everything else in this bag. OK? It is mouldy and it smells of mildew and as long as there are bags full of old towels smelling of mildew cluttering up the house, Vicky and her girls are going to find it very hard to live here. Do you see?’

‘Stop threatening me!’

‘Colin’s not threatening you, darling,’ soothed Vicky. ‘He’s just being absolutely honest with you. And it is true. If we can’t sort out this mess, or at least go some substantial way towards sorting it out, then really, well …’ She trailed off. ‘Well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. So that’s why this is so
important. So incredibly important. And we have been doing this for –’ she consulted her wristwatch – ‘nearly two hours, darling, and all we have is one tiny little bag of things to leave the house. We have to do better, Lorrie. We have to do much, much better.’

Lorelei sank backwards against the wall and put the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. ‘Take the fucking towel,’ she said softly. ‘Just take it. And take my fucking heart out of my fucking chest cavity while you’re about it.’

Beth inhaled quietly and waited to see what would happen.

‘Good girl,’ said Vicky, making her way towards Lorrie on her knees. She encircled her inside her arms. ‘Good girl.’ She pulled away from Lorrie, gently folded the towel into a cube and placed it in an open bin bag. ‘Right then, what about this old kettle?’

Beth remembered it vaguely from the long-distant landscape of her childhood. It had started smoking one morning, she recalled, smoking and making ominous buzzing sounds. Dad had turned the electricity off at the mains, unplugged the thing, and as far as she could recall, had thrown it in the bin. Yet here it was again, like her duvet cover, risen from the ashes of her childhood, still living and breathing.

Lorrie looked up at Colin with sad eyes and then glanced wanly at the blackened kettle. ‘Oh, but darling,’ she said, in her soft voice, the one she’d used when they were all children, ‘don’t you remember that day? The day it exploded? Don’t you? It was the morning of the twins’ first nativity. It snowed. And they were so adorable, the two of them, with their little matching silver wings and their tinsel halos. Do you
remember? And everyone said
aaah
when they came on the stage together, because they were so blond then, the pair of them, remember? So precious. I mean, they actually looked like
real angels
. They really really did.’

Lorelei started to cry and Vicky wrapped her back up in her arms and Colin said, ‘They did, darling, it’s true. And I have photos of them. Lovely big colour photographs that we can look at every day, if we want. We can stick them up on the walls and the ceilings and look at them all the time. We don’t need old exploded kettles to remind us of that day.’

Lorelei sniffed and lifted her head from Vicky’s embrace. ‘Photographs are lies, darling. You know that. They’re one-dimensional. They only tell you about one precise moment in a whole infinite string of moments, they don’t tell you about the kettle exploding or the snow on the ground. I need
more
than photographs. Much much more. Don’t you see?’ She looked up at them through her red tear-streaked eyes. And then she saw Beth standing in the doorway and she spread out her arms and she said, ‘Look, darling, look what they’re doing to me. These people who say they love me. They’re killing me, Bethy, they’re just killing me. Can’t you make them stop?’

Beth stiffened at her words. It was happening. It was finally happening. The acknowledgement of the cancer at the core of this house. Here it was, the dressings being removed, the scars being revealed. She flinched. She didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want to be a part of it. It needed to happen, that much she knew. But she did not want to be a witness to it. She forced a smile and shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘I was just popping home, just to get a jacket, I’m er …’ And then
she turned, before she could say anything that might drag her into this open wound.

She ran through the house in her socks, seeing it suddenly through fresh eyes. Things loomed ominously over her and at her. How had she not noticed before how dirty everything had got? The layers of children’s drawings on the kitchen walls, splattered with cooking grease and dirt, held up with grubby yellow slivers of old Sellotape. The mountains of bin bags covered in dust, the piles of old rags, some stiff with whatever historical fluid they had last been used to absorb. She picked her way up the staircase, past piles of dirty trainers, who knows whose, past mugs and plates with unidentifiable colonies growing on them, heaps of paperwork and tatty magazines. And the books. Teetering towers of them; she stared at one, here by her feet, something from the seventies called
The Best of Clifford D. Simak
with a fantasy illustration of a spaceship on the cover. Who was Clifford D. Simack? And which member of this household had ever had an interest in science fiction? Not one. So why was it here? Where had it come from? And how had her old duvet cover found its way back into the house?