The Family Upstairs

by Lisa Jewell

  I climbed out of my clothes as fast as I could and folded them roughly into a pile.

  ‘Am I allowed to keep my underwear?’ I called through the door.

  ‘Yes, of course you can,’ she replied impatiently.

  I stepped into the stupid black robe and leggings and observed myself in the mirror. I looked like a very small, very thin monk. I stifled the desire to laugh out loud. Then very quickly I ran my hand around the backs of my drawers, searching for something. My fingers found it and I stared at it for a moment. The bootlace tie I’d bought in Kensington Market two years ago. I’d never worn it. But I could not bear the thought that I never would. I slipped it under my mattress with Justin’s witchcraft books and his rabbit’s foot and then I opened the door. I passed my folded clothes to Birdie.

  ‘Good boy,’ she said. She looked, for a moment, as though she might touch my hair. But then she smiled instead and repeated, ‘Good boy.’

  I paused for a moment, wondering, as she seemed momentarily soft, if I could possibly ask the question I desperately wanted to ask. I drew in my breath and then blurted it out. ‘Aren’t you jealous?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t you jealous about the baby?’

  She looked broken then, for just a split second. I felt as if I suddenly saw right inside her, right into the runny yellow yolk of her. She flinched and then she rallied. She said, ‘Of course I’m not. David wants a baby. I’m grateful to your mother for letting him have one.’

  ‘But didn’t he have to have … sex with her?’

  I wasn’t entirely sure I’d ever said the word sex out loud before and I felt my face begin to flush red.

  ‘Yes,’ she said primly. ‘Of course.’

  ‘But he’s your boyfriend?’

  ‘Partner,’ she said, ‘he’s my partner. I don’t own him. He doesn’t own me. All that matters is his happiness.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘But what about yours?’

  She didn’t reply.

  My sister had turned thirteen a few days after my mother’s pregnancy announcement. I would say, although it is not particularly my area of expertise, that she was blossoming into a very pretty girl. She was tall, like my mother, and now, a year since the ‘no haircut’ rule had been implemented, her dark hair hung to her waist and unlike Clemency’s hair and Birdie’s hair, which grew thin and scraggy at the ends, hers was thick and shiny. She was thin, as we all were, but she had a certain shape to her. I could imagine (not that I spent very long at all doing such a thing, I can assure you) that with another stone on her, she would have had a knock-out figure. And there was an interesting face with a certain impish charm to it starting to emerge from beneath the baby face I’d been used to seeing all her life. Almost beautiful.

  I mention all of this, not because I think you need to know what I thought about my sister’s looks, but because you may still be envisaging a little girl. But she was no longer a little girl.

  She was, when the next thing happened, much closer to being a woman.

  44

  Libby arrives at work, breathless, two minutes late for her meeting with Cerian Tahany. Cerian is a local DJ and minor celebrity who is spending fifty thousand pounds on a new kitchen and every time she walks into the showroom a kind of low-level electric buzz starts up. Usually Libby would have been ultra-prepared for seeing her, would have had the paperwork ready, coffee cup set up, she would have checked her reflection and eaten a mint and tidied her skirt. Today Cerian is already seated and staring tensely at her phone when Libby arrives.

  ‘I am so, so sorry,’ she says. ‘So sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ says Cerian, turning off her phone and sliding it into her handbag. ‘Let’s crack on, shall we?’

  For an hour, Libby has no time to think about the events of the past day. All she can think about is Carrara marble worktops and cutlery drawers and extractor hoods and copper pendant lights versus enamel pendant lights. It’s comforting to her. She loves talking about kitchens. She’s good at kitchens. Then suddenly it’s over and Cerian’s putting her reading glasses back in her handbag and hugging Libby goodbye and as she leaves the atmosphere in the showroom deflates and diffuses and everyone kind of flops.

  Dido beckons her into the back office.

  ‘So,’ she says, clicking the tab on a can of Diet Coke. ‘What the hell happened?’

  Libby blinks. ‘I’m not entirely sure. It was all completely bizarre.’

  Libby talks her through coming upon Phin on the top landing and walking across Albert Bridge to his stunning riverfront apartment in Battersea with its view directly across to the house. She tells Dido what she can remember of the story that Phin recounted to them on the terrace. And then she tells her about awaking this morning to find herself top to toe with Miller in a big double bed and Dido says, ‘Well, I could have told you that was going to happen.’

  Libby looks at her askance. ‘What?’

  ‘You and Miller. You have a connection.’

  ‘We do not have a connection.’

  ‘You do have a connection. Trust me. I’m brilliant at this stuff. I’ve predicted three marriages from virtually before the couples had even met each other. Seriously.’

  Libby waves this nonsense away. ‘We were drunk and rolled into bed with all our clothes on. Woke up this morning still with all our clothes on. Oh, and he has a tattoo and I do not like tattoos.’

  ‘I thought everyone liked tattoos these days.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure they do, but I don’t.’

  Her phone vibrates then and she picks it up. ‘Talk of the devil,’ she says, seeing Miller’s name flash up.

  ‘Hi!’

  ‘Listen,’ he begins urgently. ‘Something weird. I just opened up my file from last night, the recording of Phin’s story. It’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Yes. It’s been deleted.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in a café in Victoria. I was just about to start transcribing it and it’s not there.’

  ‘But – are you sure it was there? Maybe you hadn’t pressed record properly?’

  ‘I totally pressed record properly. I remember, last night, I checked it. I listened to it. It was there. I’d even given the file a name.’

  ‘So, you think …?’

  ‘It must have been Phin. Remember you said you thought you had your phone with you when you came to bed? Well, so did I. And my phone has a thumbprint recognition. I mean, he must have come into our room, when we were sleeping, and opened up my phone using my actual thumb, while I was sleeping. And taken your phone too. Then locked us in. And there’s more. I’ve googled him. Phin Thomsen. No trace of him anywhere on the internet. I googled the flat he’s living in. It’s an Airbnb. According to their booking system it’s been booked since the middle of June. Basically since …’

  ‘Since my birthday.’

  ‘Since your birthday.’ He sighs and runs his hand down his beard. ‘I have no clue who that guy is. But he is dodgy as fuck.’

  ‘The story,’ she says. ‘Can you remember the story? Enough to work out the truth.’

  He pauses, briefly. ‘It’s hazy,’ he says. ‘I can remember most of it. But the bits towards the end are really …’

  ‘Me too,’ she says. ‘Really hazy. And I slept …’

  ‘Like a dead person,’ he finishes.

  ‘And all day I’ve felt …’

  ‘Really, really strange.’

  ‘Really strange,’ she agrees.

  ‘And I’m starting to think—’

  ‘Yes,’ she interjects, ‘me too. I think he drugged us. But why?’

  ‘That,’ says Miller, ‘I do not know. But you should check your phone. Do you have a passcode?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replies.

  ‘What is it?’

  She sighs. Her shoulders slump. ‘It’s my birth date.’

  ‘Right,’ says Miller. ‘Well, check your phone for anything weird. He might have left something on it. Spyware or something
.’

  ‘Spyware?’

  ‘God, hell knows. He’s odd. Everything about last night was odd. He broke into your house. He drugged us—’

  ‘Might have drugged us.’

  ‘Might have drugged us. At the very least he snuck into our room while we slept, used my fingerprint to access my phone, took your phone from your bag and then locked us in. I wouldn’t put anything past this guy.’

  ‘No,’ she says softly. ‘No, you’re right. I will. I’ll check it. I mean, he might even be listening to us now.’

  ‘Yes. He might. And, buddy, if you’re listening, we’re on to you, you creepy fuck.’ She hears him draw in his breath. ‘We should meet up again. Soon. I’ve been researching Birdie Dunlop-Evers. She’s got an interesting back story. And I think I might have found out more about the other guy who lived here: Justin, Birdie’s boyfriend. When are you free?’

  Libby’s pulse quickens at the prospect of developments in the story. ‘Tonight,’ she says breathlessly. ‘I mean, even …’ She looks up at Dido who is staring intently at her. ‘Now?’ She aims the question at Dido who nods at her furiously and mouths go, go.

  ‘I can meet you now. Anywhere.’

  ‘Our café?’ he says.

  She knows exactly where he means. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Our café. I can be there in an hour.’

  Dido looks at her after she hangs up and says, ‘You know, I think this might be a good juncture for you to take some annual leave.’

  Libby grimaces. ‘But—’

  ‘But nothing. I’ll take on the Morgans and Cerian Tahany. We’ll say you’re ill. Whatever the hell is going on here is more important than kitchens.’

  Libby half opens her mouth to say something in support of the importance of kitchens. Kitchens are important. Kitchens make people happy. People need kitchens. Kitchens, and the people who buy them, have been her life for the last five years. But she knows that Dido’s right.

  She nods instead and says, ‘Thank you, Dido.’

  Then she tidies her desk, replies to two new emails in her inbox, sets her account to Out-of-Office autoreply and heads away from St Albans High Street to the train station.

  45

  CHELSEA, 1992

  By May 1992 our household had curdled and transmogrified into something monstrous. The outside world, filled as it was with meat-eaters and fumes and germs that could not be fought off by sweaty exercise and pretty flowers alone, was sure to bring about the death of David’s precious spawn. So nobody was allowed to go outside. We had vegetables delivered to our door weekly and our larder was filled with enough pulses, grains and beans to feed us for at least five years.

  Then one day, shortly before my fifteenth birthday, David ordered us to surrender our shoes.

  Our shoes.

  Shoes, apparently, even shoes that were not made of dead animals, were bad, bad, bad. They were suggestive of dirty pavements and joyless trudges to evil offices where people made yet more money to lavish upon the already rich whilst leaving the poor in the shackles of government-manufactured deprivation. Poor people in India did not, apparently, wear shoes; therefore, neither should we. All of our shoes were collected together into a cardboard box and left outside the nearest charity shop.

  From the day that David took our shoes until the night of our escape two years later, nobody set foot outside our house.

  46

  Miller is eating when Libby walks into the café on West End Lane.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asks, hanging her handbag on the back of the chair and sitting down.

  ‘Chicken and chorizo wrap,’ he replies, wiping some sauce from the corner of his mouth. ‘So good. So, so good.’

  ‘It’s four o’clock,’ she says. ‘What meal does this constitute?’

  He ponders the question. ‘Late lunch? Or early supper? Dunch? Linner? Have you eaten?’

  She shakes her head. She’s not eaten since breakfast on Phin’s terrace this morning and neither has she wanted to. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she says.

  He shrugs and bites into his wrap again.

  Libby orders a pot of tea and waits for Miller to finish eating.

  There is something strangely attractive about Miller’s appetite. He eats as though there is nothing else he would rather be doing. He eats, she observes, mindfully.

  ‘So,’ says Miller, opening up his laptop, typing something into it and then turning it to face Libby. ‘Meet Birdie Dunlop-Evers. Or Bridget Elspeth Veronica Dunlop-Evers, to give her her full name. Born in Gloucestershire in April 1964. Moved to London in 1982 and studied violin at the Royal College of Music. Used to busk at the weekends and then joined a band called Green Sunday with her then boyfriend, Roger Milton. Roger Milton, incidentally, went on to be the lead singer in the Crows.’

  He looks at her expectantly.

  She stares back blankly. ‘Are they famous?’

  He rolls his eyes. ‘Never mind,’ he continues. ‘Anyway, she jobs about with her fiddle for a few years before auditioning for a band called the Original Version. She starts a relationship with a man called Justin Redding and brings him into the band as a percussionist. According to interviews from the time, she was quite controlling. Nobody liked her. They had their big number one in the summer of 1988 and then released one more single with her and Justin, but when that tanked, she blamed everybody else, had a hissy fit and left, taking Justin with her. And that is the end of Birdie Dunlop-Evers’s internet life story. Nothing since. Just …’ He uses his hand to describe something falling off a cliff.

  ‘But what about her parents?’

  ‘Nothing. She was one of eight children, from a big posh Catholic family. Her parents are still alive, as far as I can tell – at least, I’ve found nothing to suggest that they’re not – and there are dozens of posh little Dunlop-Everses out there playing musical instruments and running vegan home-delivery services. But for whatever reason, her family didn’t notice or maybe just didn’t care that their fourth daughter disappeared off the face of the earth in 1994.’

  ‘And what about her boyfriend? Justin?’

  ‘Nothing. A couple of mentions of him during his brief phase as a percussionist on the two Original Version hit singles. But nothing else.’

  Libby pauses to absorb this. How can it be possible for people to slip off the edge of existence like that? How can it be possible for no one to notice?

  He turns the screen back to himself and types something in. ‘So,’ he says, ‘then I started looking into Phin. I got in touch with the Airbnb owner and said I was investigating a murder case and needed the name of the last person to rent his apartment. He was very forthcoming, clearly wanted in on the excitement. Justin Redding.’

  Libby looks at him, startled. ‘What?’

  ‘Phin, or whoever that guy was, used the name of Birdie’s ex-boyfriend to check into an Airbnb.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yeah, right?’ He types something else into his laptop. ‘And last, but by no means least, I give you Sally Radlett.’

  He turns the screen towards her again. There is an older woman, silver hair cut into a helmet, horn-rimmed glasses, watery blue eyes, a suggestion of a smile, a light blue blouse unbuttoned to the third button, a pale collarbone, echoes of beauty in the angles of her face. Underneath her photograph are the words ‘Life Therapist and Coach. Penreath, Cornwall’.

  ‘Right town. Right age. Looks like the right career area generally – you know, life therapist. Kind of bullshit thing you’d end up doing, isn’t it? If you were in fact Sally Thomsen?’

  He looks at her triumphantly. ‘What do you think?’ he says. ‘It’s her, isn’t it?’

  She shrugs. ‘Well, yeah, I guess it could be.’

  ‘And there’s her address.’ He points at the screen and she can see the question in his eyes.

  ‘You think we should go?’

  ‘I think we should, yes.’

  ‘When?’

  He raises an eyebrow, smiles an
d presses a number into his phone. He clears his throat and says, ‘Hello, is that Sally Radlett?’

  She can hear a voice down the line saying yes.

  Then, as suddenly as he’d made the call, Miller ends it. He looks at Libby and says, ‘Now?’

  ‘But—’ She’s about to start foraging for a reason why she cannot possibly go now, but remembers that she has no reason. ‘I need a shower,’ she manages.

  He smiles, turns the laptop back to face him again and starts to type. ‘B and B?’ he says. ‘Or Premier Inn?’

  ‘Premier Inn.’

  ‘Excellent.’ With a few more clicks he’s booked them two rooms at a Premier Inn in Truro. ‘You can shower when we get there.’ He closes his screen and unplugs his laptop, slides it into a nylon case. ‘Ready?’

  She gets to her feet feeling strangely excited at the prospect of spending the rest of the day with him.

  ‘Ready.’

  47

  I decided that the oncoming baby was the cause of all our ills. I saw my mother getting fatter, the rest of us getting thinner. And I saw David fluffing out his tail feathers, preening and strutting. Every pound my mother gained, every time the baby kicked or wriggled, David developed another layer of sickening self-belief. I tried to keep hold of what Phin had told me the day we went to Kensington Market, about David being thrown out of the last home he tried to infiltrate and take control of. I tried to imagine the humiliation for him of being caught red-handed stealing from his hosts. I tried to remind myself that the man who’d turned up homeless and penniless on our doorstep four years earlier, was the same man swaggering now about my house like a puffed-up turkey.

  I could not bear the thought of that baby coming into existence. I knew that David would use it to cement his role as the god of our warped little universe. If the baby didn’t come, my mother could stop eating all the time, and we’d be able to bring germs into the house again. And, more importantly, there’d be absolutely no reason whatsoever for us to have anything more to do with David Thomsen. There’d be nothing to connect us, nothing to link us.