The House We Grew Up In (7 page)

‘Jesus,’ he said, surprised to see her, ‘when did you get home?’

She held the door half against herself, shielding her body from his strange, angry gaze.

‘About ten minutes ago,’ she said. ‘What are you doing, Rhys?’

He shrugged. ‘Sleeping.’

‘But why are you sleeping in Mum and Dad’s bed?’

‘Electric blanket.’

She nodded, once, but then grimaced at him. ‘It’s sixteen degrees out there. What do you need an electric blanket for?’

He shrugged. ‘I like it.’

She nodded again. ‘Why are you naked?’

‘I’m not,’ he said, flipping back the eiderdown to reveal his
pale body, in underpants that were too large for him.

She turned away and grimaced. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have a shower.’

‘How was London?’ he asked before she could go.

‘It was good.’

He nodded. She moved her gaze away from his body again and said, ‘Anyway.’

‘How was Meg?’

‘Fine,’ she said, ‘she’s fine.’ She wanted to go now. She did not want to have a conversation with her brother lying there in his parents’ bed in his underpants. She locked the bathroom door behind her and leaned against it for a moment, listening to his footsteps passing down the corridor towards the bathroom. They slowed down outside the door and she heard his breath. And then she heard him turn and leave, and the gentle click of his bedroom door closing behind him.

Meg did come home for Easter. She slept on a mattress on Beth’s floor because her own bedroom, since her last visit, had been rendered virtually uninhabitable by yet more towers of paperbacks and boxes of household goods bought in bulk from a cash and carry that Lorelei had recently signed up to.

‘It’s not that bad,’ said Lorelei, peering around the door over Meg’s shoulder. ‘Plenty of room for you.’

‘Not that bad?’ repeated Meg. ‘Jesus. Mother. Why are you stockpiling –’ she brought her gaze down to the box nearest her feet – ‘insect repellent?’

Her mother rolled her eyes. ‘We live in the countryside,’ she
said pointedly, as though Megan were no longer a member of this exclusive country-dwelling club. ‘We get a lot of insects.’

‘I mean, this is a fire hazard, isn’t it? Can you imagine that lot going up? It would blow the roof off the house. Jesus!’

‘It’s economics, darling,’ her mother replied, all sing-song disingenuousness. ‘Saving the family
money
.’

‘Well, yes, but the family won’t actually
need
any money if we all burn to death in a massive fireball.’

‘I get through a lot of it!’ her mother snapped. ‘And there won’t be any fire.’

‘Mum, this whole house is a fire hazard. It’s fifty per cent paper.’

Her mother tutted. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’s quite interesting to me that I am perfectly happy living in this house until
you
come home and start criticising everything.’

‘That’s because I’m objective, Mother. I see things that you lot don’t. I see what you’re doing here.’

‘And what exactly am I doing here, Megan, apart from looking after everybody and doing the best job I possibly can to look after our lovely house?’

Megan didn’t bother to reply. It would have been too cruel.

Bob and Jenny had moved out the previous summer, and the house next door was now inhabited by a young couple with a baby who’d swapped a flat in Clapham for the picture-postcard Cotswolds cottage. They were called Vicky and Tim and their baby was called Madeleine, and of course Lorelei had invited them over for Easter lunch. Megan could only imagine that the invitation had taken them unawares, leaving
them no time to form a polite excuse. She could see it with her mind’s eye, Vicky stuttering and clutching her throat and saying, ‘Er, oh, well, yes, that would be
lovely
,’ with a terrible fake smile and a gulp. The baby was only six months old but still Lorelei planted her foil-wrapped eggs and brought out the battered wicker baskets and they all followed Vicky and Tim and the baby round the garden, trilling and oohing every time somebody found one, the baby in her mother’s arms looking entirely nonplussed.

The lamb was cooked and carved, the eggs were eaten, the foils were smoothed out, commented upon and put aside, the sun shone, there were too many carrots, not enough potatoes, the yellow walls ached under the weight of children’s art, the conversation sagged under the strain of nobody really knowing what to say any more, and Megan wished she’d stayed in London. At four o’clock Vicky and Tim took their sleeping baby back home to bed and then, rather surprisingly, Vicky reappeared five minutes later with a bottle of Beaujolais and she and Lorelei secreted themselves away in the snug where they sat and drank and laughed and talked for a full three hours.

Meg and Beth raised their eyebrows at each other as the sound of raucous laughter drifted from the window into the garden where they sat together in the last rays of the evening sun.

‘Well, said Beth, ‘not
everybody
thinks Mum’s as awful as you do, you know.’

‘I don’t think she’s awful. I just think she’s ill.’

Beth tutted. ‘She’s eccentric, that’s all.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Well, she is,’ laughed Beth. ‘Honestly. She’s a sweetheart – so much energy, so much character. She means well.’

‘She does
not
mean well. You know she hasn’t asked me one single question about my job since I got back. Hasn’t even noticed my haircut.’

‘Maybe she’s cross with you for leaving home.’

‘Well, that’s not normal, is it? What sort of mother gets cross with a twenty-year-old for leaving home?’

‘OK, maybe not leaving home as such, but living in London.’

‘What’s London got to do with it? Half the teenagers in this village end up living in London. It’s what
normal
people do. And what about Rhys?’

‘What about Rhys?’

‘Well, she just seems to have given up on him. She didn’t even make him come down for lunch. It’s like she doesn’t care.’

‘She did try, I heard her. He just refused to come down.’

‘Well, if that was my child I would not be able to sit at that table with those virtual strangers going “
tralalala, egg hunt, egg hunt
,” like there was nothing wrong. I would have dragged him down. I mean, he hasn’t even eaten anything. And it’s –’ she glanced at her watch – ‘it’s nearly seven o’clock. It’s nearly seven o’clock and she’s sitting in there, getting pissed with some woman she barely knows, and her son has been on his own all day and she hasn’t even been to check on him.’ She got crossly to her feet and headed indoors. ‘I’m going to make him a sandwich,’ she said.

She piled offcuts of cold lamb and mint sauce between two fat slices of bloomer and smothered it with Hellmann’s, then found a bag of crisps and a can of Coke and grouped them all together on a tray. She felt furious to be mothering her little brother while his real mother sat drinking red wine, delighting in the attention of a new and unsuspecting admirer. As she made her way through the house she cringed at the cardboard boxes that lined each and every part of the staircase and hallway, the piles of unopened post, the paintings waiting to be hung and the unwashed laundry. Everything was halfway to being where it needed to be, everything was a work in progress, with no systems, no logic, no sense of organisation about any of it. Everyone who came here – including Tim and Vicky – gushed and cooed about the charm of the place – ‘
It’s so cosy! So welcoming!
’ – but they did not see the truth, that this house was the work of a disordered mind and all the enablers she lived with.

Megan paused for a moment on the landing and watched the birds in the trees outside: a cluster of tits and sparrows, all jostling about for space. She put the tray down on the window ledge and sat. From below she could hear her mother and her new friend squawking and shrieking and from above she could hear Alice in Chains blasting from her brother’s room in the eaves. But outside there were only the sounds of nature; the trilling of the tiny birds, the rumble of a distant tractor heading back after a day in the fields, a dog barking somewhere out of sight. She inhaled deeply, holding it in. She missed this when she was in London; not this mad, claustrophobic house and its
piles of stuff, not her crazy mother or her passive father, her troubled brothers and her too-nice sister, but this – the peace and the purity of life outside these windows. She breathed it in again and held it inside her for a beat. And then she picked up the tray and carried it up the eight steps that took her to the door of her baby brother’s bedroom. Eight small steps between
now
and
then
. Between what she knew and what she’d grow to wish she’d never known. Between the past and the future, between a small moment of peacefulness and the worst moment of her life. When her brother didn’t open the door on the fourth knock, Megan felt a tightness in her gut, an overwhelming wave of foreboding. She put the tray down on the floor and kicked the door in. It gave way relatively easily under her amateur karate kick, just a badly screwed-in bolt (fixed by Rhys himself because Lorelei didn’t believe in children having locks on their rooms) on the back of the door.

The music was so loud that Megan could feel it through her feet, through the ancient, buckled floorboards hammered in place three hundred years ago by craftsmen who would not know what to make of this cacophony, who would imagine it to be some business of the devil. And there he was. Her baby brother. The one she’d never felt fitted in. The one she resented and failed to bond with. The small one. The worrisome one. The one she couldn’t talk to. There he was, hanging by his thin, pale neck from the beams high above his single bed, long dead by the look of him, his protruded tongue swollen and obscene, the crotch of his jeans stained wet, his eyes wide open.

‘So did Grandma, like,
sleep
here, too?’ said Molly, stroking the lumpy arms of the chair.

Meg glanced around the room. Lorelei’s bed was entirely buried beneath a landfill of clothes and bags. There was a duvet on the floor at the foot of the chair, patterned with fuchsia and lavender stripes, and a matching pillow. ‘I suppose she must have,’ she replied.

‘God.’

Meg nodded. If there was one luxury that Meg never took for granted, it was the sensation of lying herself down at the end of every day upon a king-sized mattress, stretching out her limbs, stroking the soles of her feet against the silky bedsheets (laundered, pressed, sprayed with expensive scented water, changed every five days and not a moment longer), kissing her pillow, submitting to it all. When she saw homeless people it was that, more than the constant threat of violence that they lived with, the poverty and the loneliness, that made her heart bleed for them.
No bed
. And here had been her own mother, in a five-bedroom house, curling herself up every night, small and tight, her back a crooked arch, her neck a cricked right angle, in this shabby, lumpy chair, the same chair she’d sat in all day. Never lying flat. Never stretching out.
My God
, she thought,
did she really hate herself that much?

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s go and see what else has been going on up here.’ She put out a hand to help Molly out of the sagging pit of the armchair.

‘Can we see your room?’

Meg grunted. There hadn’t been a ‘your room’ since roughly a week after she’d left home at the age of twenty. Her mother had turned it over to junk storage even before Meg’s first visit home.

‘For what it’s worth,’ she replied.

Meg turned left out of Lorelei’s room and forced her way through another junk-filled corridor to the door of her former bedroom. She pushed at it and then turned to Molly and grimaced. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said. ‘I think this one might actually be totally blocked up.’