The House We Grew Up In (30 page)

‘Don’t make this all about you, Dad. This is nothing to do with you. It’s all of us. It’s everything. It’s, Christ, I was telling you she was sick decades ago. She’s always been sick. This …’ She paused. ‘This was always going to happen.’

Colin shook his head. ‘Do you really, really believe that?’

Meg nodded.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t agree with you. I think there was a moment. A moment when all this could have ended differently. When Mum might have found a less screwed-up way through life.’

‘And when was that, exactly?’

Colin shrugged. ‘Rhys,’ he said in a small voice. ‘I suppose it must have been Rhys.’

Meg nodded. ‘But how could we have stopped that happening? How could any of us have done anything differently? I mean, there was no build-up to it, no signs, no warning. And then afterwards – there was no note, no explanation. It was just like this utterly unconnected
thing
.’

‘I think we could have done more. To help Mum. Afterwards.’

‘But Mum didn’t want help!’ snapped Meg. ‘That was the whole crazy thing about it. She was
fine
!’ She imitated Lorelei’s bird-like trill. ‘Absolutely
fine
! My son’s dead! La-la-la! No.’ She shook her head. ‘I honestly don’t think there’s anything we could have done. How can you help someone who thinks, who
believes
, that they’re perfectly fine?’

Colin nodded and smiled sadly. ‘I still, more than any other regret, wish I could have understood. Why he did it. What he was thinking. Maybe that’s it. You know. Maybe if there’d been an explanation we could all have moved on. Found closure. But there wasn’t and we didn’t and we’ve all gone off at tangents—’

‘
I
haven’t,’ Meg interjected brusquely.

‘Well, no,
you
haven’t. Although that’s not to say you haven’t had your own demons. But the rest of us and, my God, your poor blessed mother more than anyone. It’s almost like …’ He paused. ‘As though we all blamed each other. Because we didn’t know who else to blame. And then we just carried on blaming each other for everything.’ He sighed and a silence fell between them.

‘Well,’ said Meg eventually. ‘You must be hungry. Shall we go up to the room? Maybe we could have tea?’

Colin’s face lit up. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That would be lovely. Thank you.’

‘You’re such an angel, Lorrie, I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

Vicky turned round in her wheelchair and squeezed Lorrie’s scrawny hand where it sat upon the handles.

‘Don’t be silly, love,’ Lorelei replied. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘No,’ said Vicky, ‘it’s not nothing. I know how much of an ordeal this is for you. I know you’d rather be at home and not ferrying me about all over the place.’

‘Well, darling, my car is an extension of my home, so it doesn’t feel like an ordeal. And anything to get you better, Vick, that’s all that matters now. Getting you better. For the girls. And for me.’

Lorelei squeezed her shoulder and carried on pushing her up the corridor. Out in the car park it was a bright and breezy day; lacy clouds danced across the sky and the trees shimmered and whispered. Such a stark contrast to what had come before. Three hours of chemo in a dark hospital ward, flicking mindlessly through the old copies of Sunday supplements that Lorelei had brought for her, delighted to finally have some use for her hoard beyond the inexplicable sense of calm they brought to her existence, drinking room-temperature
squash out of plastic cups, the time passing so slowly, even with Lorelei’s running commentary and soothing touch.

Two more days of this and then she was done. Well, for now at least. Until the next time. Which was more or less inevitable given the way the wretched cancer was rampaging around her body as if it was on a whistle-stop sightseeing tour. From a pea-sized lump in her right breast to telltale aches and pains in her chest as it passed into her lymph nodes (they’d whipped the lot out like a tangle of seaweed, and taken off the tit too). And then it had showed up like a bad smell in her other boob. They did keep managing to get it and nipping the bugger in the bud. But Christ, it was insistent. It had no respect for these men and women of medicine and their superlative ways with a chemo needle and a radiography machine. But still, as everyone kept telling her, she was as strong as an ox (she wasn’t sure she appreciated the analogy, but she could kind of see where they were coming from) and she was a fighter. And yes, that much was true. She always had been, all her life. Never a person just to fold up and roll over. But still, this really was pushing it now. Three lots of cancer, three bouts of treatment, the tits gone, the hair gone, the body gone (no, she did not, as she’d always assumed, have the figure of Pamela Anderson hiding beneath her excess weight, just a slightly deflated old bag of bones, as it turned out). She was tired now, and done with it all. Her fighting spirit, she feared, was ebbing away.

But still, on the up, her being ill really had done the world of good for Lorelei. She had risen to the challenge quite magnificently. She’d taken Vicky to all her appointments, passed
her tissues, held her hand, bought her chocolate bars when she wasn’t feeling sick and ginger tea when she was. She’d even taken on the role of receptacle of doctors’ words. Vicky always felt she was on show during these meetings with consultants, as though she was supposed to smile at just the right moment and nod at the appropriate juncture, like someone being judged by Simon Cowell on
The X Factor
. Or make that the C Factor. Anyway, she could never remember a bloody thing they said to her and thank God for Lorelei, taking it all in, even making notes in a little notepad with her jumbo multicoloured biro.

Vicky wasn’t daft. She knew why Lorrie was being so strong. She knew now that she was all Lorrie had left. Megan, pregnant again down in London, pretty much pegged to the ground she stood on by the sheer weight of all her bloody children. Beth busy being remote and unattainable in Australia. Rory pimping his soul away in Thailand and Colin, urgh, God,
Colin
. She could barely bring herself to think about that utterly revolting can of worms.

So really, Vicky was it. The tattered remnants of Lorelei’s once dazzling family. And she needed Vicky more than life itself. So of course she would pull herself out of her comfort zone to do the right thing. She was so often her own worst enemy. But not now.

Even sweet Lorelei wasn’t that bloody stupid.

Lorelei, sensing that this was not, for once,
her
Easter, spent the day with Vicky and her girls in their little flat around the corner.

She arrived at midday, buried under a deadweight of Easter eggs and daffodils. Vicky and Maddy had made a lamb tagine with couscous and roasted vegetables and thick yogurt sauce sprinkled with pumpkin seeds, and they gave each other knowing looks across the table as they watched Lorelei picking at it uncertainly, trying her hardest to accept the untraditional Easter fare, trying her hardest not to say something snippy like ‘
This is all very nice, but I really don’t see how you can improve upon a simple leg of lamb
.’

‘Yummy!’ she said, instead. ‘Really, you two should have your own cookery show or something. You’re both so incredibly clever in the kitchen.’

‘Not me,’ said Vicky. ‘It’s all down to Maddy. She’s the gastronomic genius in this house.’

She smiled warmly at Maddy who returned her smile with just a hint of long-suffering. Since Vicky had sided with Maddy one hundred per cent over what they all referred to in private as the ‘little shit incident’ and taken them out of the Bird House and into this cute little flat around the corner, her relationship with her eldest daughter had flourished. And it was such a tiresome cliché to say that your daughter was like your best friend, but really, with her and Maddy it was true. It was almost as if the aftermath of the ‘little shit incident’ had somehow taken them on a different route through these potentially tricky teenage years, a bypass around the hell that Vicky had been expecting ever since she’d first been presented with a baby daughter fourteen years previously. Never a cross word, never a dramatic sigh, never a slammed door. Just companionship. Vicky felt truly blessed. And in this
last year, since her initial diagnosis, that bond had grown even deeper. She mouthed the words, ‘
I love you
,’ across the table at her daughter who rolled her eyes and smiled.

‘How amazing,’ said Lorelei, oblivious, as ever, to undercurrents. ‘None of mine can cook. Well, not that I’m aware of, at least.’ She let out a brittle laugh and pushed some grains of couscous around her plate.

‘Meg makes a nice stir-fry,’ said Vicky, trying to leverage some positivity into the conversation before it got too bogged down in
poor old me
.

‘
Anyone
can make a nice stir-fry,’ Lorelei responded.

‘Well, no, that’s not strictly true. It does take a certain knack.’

‘I did think that at least one of them might end up with some flair in the kitchen.’

Vicky and Maddy exchanged another look, another pair of suctioned-in smiles. Just the way Lorrie’s children always used to. Those looks that had so angered Vicky when she was crazy in love with her. But she was no longer crazy in love with her. That illusion had been well and truly shattered.

‘Says the woman who subsists on rice cakes and Krispy Kremes,’ she said affectionately.

‘Well, really, there’s hardly any point cooking when it’s just you. I used to be a good cook. When I was younger. When the kiddos were about. I was always in the kitchen. I just don’t see the point any more.’ She had joined her knife and fork together in the centre of her plate, although she’d eaten barely half. Vicky, too, had eaten only a handful of food, just to be polite, just to keep it all ticking along. Her poor poisoned stomach
could not have taken any more. The girls were still eating, in that delicate, birdlike way of young girls, as though there were no pleasure to be had from it at all. And maybe there wasn’t, thought Vicky sadly. Maybe there wasn’t. This time last year she’d been well, Megan and the kids had been here, they’d been high with the euphoria of clearing out Lorrie’s kitchen, nobody knew about Colin and Kayleigh, nobody knew about Rory and his sleazy lifestyle. And surely, yes, the food must have tasted better that day. So much better.

‘Lovely lunch,’ said Lorrie, a film of tears over her eyes. ‘Really lovely lunch.’

‘Thank you, darling,’ said Vicky, squeezing her bony hand across the table. ‘You are sweet.’

Megan looked around the table. It was, as they kept telling each other, a bumper day of celebrations. Alfie’s eighth birthday. Easter Sunday. And the return of Molly from her first stay away from home after a week on a PGL camp with the rest of Year 5. And so, arranged around the table in no particular order, were all three of her children, Bill, Bill’s brother Frank, his girlfriend Sonia, their son Frank Jnr, Bill’s recently widowed dad Bobby and Meg’s recently divorced best friend Charlotte, who also happened to be the mother of Alfie’s best friend at school, James.