The Family Upstairs

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘Will you tell your sister?’

  ‘I’m not fucking telling anybody,’ he snapped. ‘Christ. And you mustn’t either. Seriously. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t do anything unless I tell you to. OK?’

  I nodded again. I was out of my depth and glad to follow Phin’s lead.

  The moment was falling away from me; I could feel it. I could tell Phin was about to stand up and go indoors and that he wasn’t going to invite me to go in with him and that I would be left here on the bench staring at the back of the house with it all still blowing about inside me, all the wanting and the needing and the red raw desiring. And I knew that despite what had just happened, we’d go back to normal, back to the place of mutual polite reserve.

  ‘Let’s go out today,’ I said breathlessly. ‘Let’s do something.’

  He turned to look at me. He said, ‘Have you got any money?’

  ‘No. But I can get some.’

  ‘I’ll get some too,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet you in the hall at ten.’

  He stood then and he left. I watched him go, watched the shape of his spine under his T-shirt, the breadth of his shoulders, his big feet hitting the ground, the tragic hang of his beautiful head.

  I found a handful of coins in the pockets of my father’s Barbour. I took two pounds from my mother’s purse. I combed my fringe and put on a jersey zip-up jacket that my mother had bought for me a few weeks before from a cheap shop on Oxford Street, which was about a hundred times nicer than anything I ever got bought from Harrods or Peter Jones.

  Phin sat in his throne at the foot of the staircase with a paperback book in his hand. To this day, this is how I always picture Phin – except in my fantasies he lowers the book and he looks up at me and his eyes light up at the sight of me and he smiles. In reality he barely acknowledged my arrival.

  He stood, slowly, then glanced around the house furtively. ‘Coast clear.’ He gestured for me to follow him through the front door.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, chasing after him breathlessly.

  I watched him raise his arm into a salute and move towards the kerb. A taxi pulled over and we got in.

  I said, ‘I can’t afford to pay for taxis. I’ve only got two pounds fifty.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said coolly. He pulled a roll of ten-pound notes from his jacket pocket and cocked an eyebrow at me.

  ‘Jesus! Where did you get that from?’

  ‘My dad’s secret stash.’

  ‘Your dad has a secret stash?’

  ‘Yup. He thinks no one knows about it. But I know everything.’

  ‘Won’t he notice?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe not. Either way there’s no way of proving who took it.’

  The taxi dropped us on Kensington High Street. I looked up at the building in front of us: a long façade, a dozen arched windows above, the words ‘KENSINGTON MARKET’ in chrome letters. I could hear music coming from the main entrance, something metallic, pounding, disturbing. I followed Phin inside and found myself in a terrifying rabbit warren of winding corridors, each home to multiple tiny shops, fronted by blank-faced men and women with rainbow hair, black rimmed eyes, ripped leather, white lips, shredded chiffon, fishnets, studs, platforms, nose piercings, face piercings, dog collars, quiffs, drapes, net petticoats, peroxide, pink gingham, PVC thigh-high boots, pixie boots, baseball jackets, sideburns, beehives, ballgowns, black lips, red lips, chewing gum, eating a bacon roll, drinking tea from a floral teacup with a black-painted pinkie fingernail held aloft, holding a ferret wearing a studded leather lead.

  Each shop played its own music; thus the experience was of switching through channels on the radio as we walked. Phin touched things as we passed: a vintage baseball jacket, a silky bowling shirt with the word ‘Billy’ embroidered on the back, a rack of LPs, a studded leather belt.

  I didn’t touch anything. I was terrified. Incense billowed from the next little shop we passed. A woman sitting outside on a stool with white hair and white skin looked up at me briefly with icy blue eyes and I clutched my heart.

  On the next stall a woman sat with a baby on her lap. I could not imagine that this was a good place for a baby to be.

  We wandered the corridors of this strange place for an hour. We bought bacon rolls and very strong tea from a weird café on the top floor and watched people. Phin bought himself a black and white printed scarf of the type worn by men in the Sahara, and some seven-inch singles of music I’d never heard of. He tried to persuade me to let him buy me a black T-shirt with illustrations of snakes and swords on it. I declined, although part of me rather liked it. He tried on a pair of blue suede shoes with crêpey soles which he referred to as brothel creepers. He looked at himself in a full-length mirror, pulled his curtained hair away from his face and turned it into a quiff, rendering him suddenly into a beautiful 1950s heartthrob, Montgomery Clift crossed with James Dean.

  I bought myself a bootlace tie with a silver ram’s head. It was two pounds. It was slid into a paper bag by a man who looked like a punk cowboy.

  We emerged an hour later into the normality of a Saturday morning, of families shopping, people getting on and off buses.

  We walked for a mile into Hyde Park where we sat on a bench.

  ‘Look,’ said Phin, unfurling the fingers of his right hand.

  I looked down at a small crumpled clear bag. Inside the small bag were two tiny squares of paper.

  ‘What is that?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s acid,’ he replied.

  I didn’t understand.

  ‘LSD,’ he said.

  I had heard of LSD. It was a drug, something to do with hippies and hallucinating.

  My eyes widened. ‘What. But how …? Why?’

  ‘The guy in the record shop. He just sort of told me he had it. I didn’t ask. I think he thought I was older than I am.’

  I stared at the tiny squares of paper in the tiny bag. My mind swam with the implications. ‘You’re not going to …?’

  ‘No. At least, not today. But some other time, maybe? When we’re at home? You up for it?’

  I nodded. I was up for anything that meant I could spend time with him.

  Phin bought us sandwiches in a posh hotel overlooking the park. They came on plates with silver rims, and a knife and fork. We sat by a tall window and I wondered how we appeared: the tall, handsome man-boy, his tiny baby-faced friend in a scruffy jersey jacket.

  ‘What do you think the grown-ups are doing now?’ I asked.

  ‘I couldn’t give a shit,’ said Phin.

  ‘They might have called the police.’

  ‘I left a note.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, surprised by this act of conformity. ‘What did it say?’

  ‘It said me and Henry are going out, we’ll be back later.’

  Me and Henry. My heart leapt.

  ‘Tell me what happened in Brittany?’ I asked. ‘Why did you all leave?’

  He shook his head. ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘No, I do want to know. What happened?’

  He sighed. ‘It was my dad. He took something that wasn’t his. Then he said, oh, you know, I thought we were all supposed to be sharing everything, but this was like a family heirloom. It was worth about a thousand pounds. He just took it into town, sold it, then pretended he’d seen “someone” break into the house and steal it. Kept the money hidden away. The father found out through the grapevine. All hell let loose. We were turfed out the next day.’ He shrugged. ‘And other stuff too. But that was the main thing.’

  I suddenly understood his lack of guilt about taking his father’s money.

  David claimed to be making a lot of money running his exercise classes, but really, how much money could you make out of a handful of hippies in a church hall twice a week? Could he have sold something of ours from under our noses? He’d already brainwashed my mother into letting him handle our family finances. Maybe he was taking money directly out of our bank account. Or maybe this was the mon
ey that my mother thought was going to charity to help poor people.

  All my vague misgivings about David Thomsen began to coalesce into something hard and real.

  ‘Do you like your dad?’ I asked, fiddling with the cress on the side of my plate.

  ‘No,’ he said simply. ‘I despise him.’

  I nodded, reassured.

  ‘How about you?’ he said. ‘Do you like your dad?’

  ‘My dad is weak,’ I replied, knowing with a burning clarity that this was true.

  ‘All men are weak,’ said Phin. ‘That’s the whole bloody trouble with the world. Too weak to love properly. Too weak to be wrong.’

  My breath caught at the power of this statement. I immediately knew it to be the truest thing I’d ever heard. The weakness of men lay at the root of every bad thing that had ever happened.

  I watched Phin peel two ten-pound notes from his wad to pay for the expensive sandwiches. ‘I’m really sorry I can’t pay you back,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘My father’s going to take everything you own and then break your life. It’s the least I can bloody do.’

  27

  Libby, Dido and Miller lock the house up behind them and go to the pub. It’s the pub Libby saw from the roof of the house. It’s heaving but they find a high table in the beer garden and drag stools across from other tables.

  ‘Who do you think it is?’ says Dido, stirring her gin and tonic with her straw.

  Miller replies, ‘It’s not someone homeless. There’s not enough stuff. You know. If he was actually living there, there would be lots more things.’

  ‘So you think it’s someone who just comes occasionally?’ says Libby.

  ‘That would be my guess.’

  ‘And so there was someone up there when I was here on Saturday?’

  ‘That would also be my guess.’

  Libby shudders.

  ‘Look,’ says Miller, ‘here’s what I think. You were born around June 1993?’

  ‘June the nineteenth.’ A chill goes through her as she says the date. How does anyone know? Maybe it was just made up. By the social services? By her adoptive mother? She feels her grasp on the certainty of herself start to slip and slide.

  ‘Right. So your brother and sister would have known your date of birth given that they were teenagers when you were born. And if they somehow knew that the house was being held in trust for you until your twenty-fifth birthday, it would make sense that they might want to come back to the house. To see you …’

  Libby gasps. ‘You mean, you think it might be my brother?’

  ‘I think it might be Henry, yes.’

  ‘But if he knew it was me, and he was there, in the house, why didn’t he come down and see me?’

  ‘Well, that I do not know.’

  Libby picks up her wine glass, puts it briefly to her lips and then puts it down again. ‘No,’ she says, forcefully. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t want to scare you?’ suggests Dido.

  ‘He could have left me a note?’ she says. ‘He could have got in touch with the solicitor and let them know he wanted to meet me? But instead, he’s hiding out in the attic like a weirdo.’

  ‘Well, maybe he is a weirdo?’ says Dido.

  ‘What did you find out about him?’ Libby asks Miller. ‘Apart from him being my brother?’

  ‘Nothing, really,’ says Miller. ‘I know he went to Portman House School from the ages of three to eleven. His teachers said he was a clever boy, but a bit full of himself. He didn’t really have any friends. And then he left in 1988, had a place offered to him at St Xavier’s College in Kensington but didn’t take it up. And that was the last anyone heard of him.’

  ‘I just don’t get it,’ says Libby. ‘Lurking around, slinking through tunnels and bushes, hiding upstairs when he knew I was downstairs. Are you sure it’s Henry?’

  ‘Well, no, of course not. But who else would know you were going to be there? Who else would know how to get into the house?’

  ‘One of the others,’ she answers. ‘Maybe it’s one of the others.’

  28

  Lucy checks the time on her phone when Michael is briefly distracted by a wasp that is bothering his plate. He flaps at it with his napkin, but it keeps coming back.

  It’s nearly three o’clock. She wants to be home by four. She needs the passports, but she also knows that in asking for the passports, she will be quickening the inevitable journey towards Michael’s bed.

  She starts to clear their plates. ‘Here,’ she says, ‘let’s get this stuff inside, that’ll get rid of your annoying friend.’

  His eyes are glassy and he smiles at her gratefully. ‘Yup,’ he says. ‘Good plan, and let’s get some coffee on too.’

  She leads the way into the kitchen and starts to load the dishwasher. He watches her while the coffee machine grinds beans. ‘You really kept your figure, Luce,’ he says. ‘Not bad for a forty-year-old mom of two.’

  ‘Thirty-nine.’ She smiles tightly and drops two forks into the cutlery basket. ‘But thank you.’

  The atmosphere is clumsy, slightly sour. They’ve left it too long for what comes next. They’ve drunk too much, eaten too much, sat for too long in the languorous air of the garden. Lucy says, ‘I need to get back to the kids soon.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Michael lightly. ‘Marco’s a big boy. He can look after his little sister a while longer.’

  ‘Yes, sure, but Stella gets a little anxious when she’s not with me.’

  She sees his jaw twitch a little. Michael does not like to hear about weakness in others. He abhors it. ‘So,’ he says with a sigh, ‘I suppose you’ll want the passports?’

  ‘Yes. Please.’

  Her heart thumps so hard under her rib cage that she can feel it in her ear canals.

  He cocks his head and smiles at her. ‘But don’t rush off just yet? OK?’

  He goes to his study and she can hear him opening and closing drawers. He returns a moment later, the passports in a felt drawstring bag in his hand. He waves it at her.

  ‘I am nothing if not a man of my word,’ he says, walking slowly towards her, his eyes on her, dangling the felt bag in front of him.

  She can’t work out what he’s doing. Is he expecting her to snatch them from him? Chase him? What?

  She smiles nervously. ‘Thank you,’ she says.

  And then he is standing up against her, the small of her back hard against the kitchen counter, the felt bag clutched in his hand, his mouth heading towards the crook of her neck. She feels his lips against her throat. She hears him groaning.

  ‘Oh, Lucy Lucy Lucy,’ he says. ‘God, you smell so good. You feel so …’ He grinds himself against her. ‘So good. You are …’ He groans again and his mouth finds hers and she kisses him back. That is why she is here. She came here to fuck Michael and now she is going to fuck Michael and she has fucked him before and she can fuck him again, she really can, especially if she pretends he is Ahmed, pretends he is a stranger even, then yes, she can do this, she can do this.

  She lets his tongue into her mouth and closes her eyes, tight, tight, tight. And his hands are pushing her up from behind, pushing her up on the counter and he takes her legs and he wraps them around his body, his hands gripping her ankles hard enough to make her wince, but she doesn’t stop, she carries on because this is what she came here to do. Behind them the coffee machine bubbles and hisses. She knocks an empty glass and it rolls across the counter, smashes against the side of the kettle. She tries to move her hand away from the broken glass but Michael is pushing her closer towards it, his hands pushing up the fabric of her skirt, searching for the waistband of her knickers. She tries to move across the counter away from the glass, but she doesn’t want to stop the momentum of what’s happening, she needs it to happen so that it is done, so that she can pull on her underwear and take the passports and go home to her babies. She tries to focus on helping him take off her underwear, but she can feel a shard of glass under
her small of her back, pressing into her flesh. She tries one last time to shift herself across the counter and then Michael suddenly pulls away and says, ‘Fucking hell, will you stop fucking wriggling away from me. Fuck’s sake,’ and then he pushes down hard against her and she feels the glass pierce her skin and she jolts forward and shouts out in pain.

  ‘What the fuck is it now? For fuck’s sake!’

  Almost in slow motion she sees his hand coming down towards her face and then she feels her teeth jolt inside her head, her brain slapping off the insides of her skull as he hits her.

  And there is blood now, warm blood running from the small of her back. ‘I’m hurt,’ she says. ‘Look. There was glass and …’

  But he’s not listening to her. Instead he forces her back on to the counter again, the glass piercing a new section of her back, and then he’s inside her and his hand is over her mouth and this was not how it was going to be. It was going to be consensual. She was going to let him. But now she hurts and there is blood and she can smell the charred meat on his hand, see the blank fury on his face and she just wants the passports, she wants the fucking passports, she does not want this and her hand finds a knife; it’s the knife she used to slice the tomatoes, the knife that cut through their skins like butter, and here it is in her hand and she plunges it into the side of Michael’s body, into the space below the hem of his T-shirt, the soft, tender white part where the skin is like a child’s skin and it goes in so easily she almost doesn’t register that she’s done it.

  She sees his eyes cloud over briefly with confusion, then uncloud with realisation. He pulls out of her and staggers backwards. He gazes down at the blood pumping out of the hole in his side and covers it with his hands but the blood keeps pumping out. ‘Fucking Christ, Luce. What the fuck have you done?’ He gazes at her with wide, disbelieving eyes. ‘Help me. Fuck.’

  She finds tea towels and puts them into his hands. ‘Hold them tight,’ she says, breathlessly, ‘hold them against it.’

  He takes the cloths and presses them to his side and then she sees his legs buckle and he’s falling to the floor. She tries to help him up again but he bats her away. It suddenly occurs to Lucy that Michael is dying. She envisages herself making a phone call to the emergency services. She imagines them arriving here, asking her what happened. She would tell them that he raped her. There would be evidence. The broken glass still embedded in her back would be proof. The fact that he still has his trousers around his ankles. Yes, they would believe her. They would.