The House We Grew Up In

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘Oh, now, Megan, come on,’ said Jenny nervously. ‘Stop bullying lovely Mummy.’

  Meg sighed and groaned. She looked around and realised that everyone had stopped talking and that they were all staring at her with varying degrees of discomfort. Beth looked at her in an accusatory way from the other table and her father stared at his shoes. Then Meg looked at her mother again who was smiling nervously and rubbing at the pointy nibs of her elbows.

  ‘It’s only tea towels,’ said Rhys.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lorelei brightly. ‘That’s exactly right, Rhys, it’s only tea towels. Now, who’s for more carrots? Absolutely heaps left!’

  Megan went up to her room and listened to the Top 40 on Radio One, letting the clean, sweet melody of Simple Minds rub away her frayed nerves.

  April 2011

  It was not a kitchen. Not in any traditional or easily recognisable way. It was a structure, a form, an entity, like the guts of a living creature. It was dark, eerily dark, no sense of the bright spring day outside, just a white stripe of light strafing through a gap in the piles in front of the windows. Meg felt around the wall to her left for the light switch. The lights did not come on. She was unsurprised. She switched her mobile phone to its torch function and swept the beam around the room.

  ‘Sweet Jesus Christ.’

  Molly stood behind her mother, a hand clamped over her mouth, her darkly kohled eyes wide with horror. She grabbed Meg’s arm with her other hand and gripped it.

  Megan sighed. ‘Oh, Mum.’

  Molly relaxed her grip on her mother’s arm and let her hand drop from her mouth. ‘I remember eating breakfast in here,’ she said. ‘There was a big table. There. With benches. And the cereal was in jars, over there, with cork lids. And there was a view, through the window. Of a tree …’

  They both turned to look at the place where the windows had been. But it was hard to place them, behind the wall of things. It was disorientating. The house no longer made any sense.

  Molly turned back to her mother. ‘How are we going to get through to the rest of the house?’

  Meg sighed and swung the torch beam to the area at the back of the room that should, in theory, contain a door leading to the hallway and the rest of the house. All that the beam picked out was more walls. Walls within walls. There was no sign of the back of the room and no immediate sense of how to locate it. But then the light picked up a gap, a foot wide. She shone the light down on to the floor and saw flagstones. The flagstones of her childhood. The only familiar feature so far.

  ‘I think,’ she said, shining the light back on to the tiny gap, ‘we’ll have to go this way.’

  ‘You’re kidding me?’ said Molly.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘I’ll have a panic attack if I have to go through there.’

  ‘Yes. Me too. Although, Christ, I’m not even sure I could squeeze through. I mean, look, it’s so narrow.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going there on my own. No way.’

  Meg set her shoulders. She’d lost three stone six years ago – she was no longer a size sixteen – but still, she was a solid woman, not a waif like her mother and her teenage daughter. ‘Fine,’ she said, sucking in her stomach, ‘fine. I’ll lead the way.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ whimpered Molly, holding on to the back of Meg’s T-shirt. ‘Mum, I’m scared.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Meg, holding back her own primeval monsters. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s just Grandma’s house. That’s all.’

  ‘But we’re the first people to set foot in here for years. I mean, shit, Mum, there could be anything in here. Rats! Mum, what about rats?!’

  ‘It’s going to be fine, love. There won’t be any rats. Grandma didn’t really eat at home, so there was nothing for them to dine on. Come on. Just hold on to me and breathe in.’

  The walls compressed Meg firmly from both sides. They felt solid and uniform against her body but the light from her phone picked out details: a shirt cuff, a shred of netting, the corner of a book, the knot in the top of a black bag. All smoothed to a formless corridor by the passage of Lorelei’s body over the countless days she’d lived here alone, refusing to accept visitors or help.

  ‘You OK, love?’ she whispered into the muffled darkness.

  ‘Yes. I think so. Are we nearly there yet?’

  Meg could feel her heart contracting and throbbing with a deep-seated sense of unease. ‘Pretty much,’ she replied cheerfully.

  ‘What’s at the other end?’

  ‘Not sure yet. Hoping for a door.’

  The corridor turned through a forty-five-degree angle a moment later. She aimed the light ahead and saw an opening. ‘We’re there,’ she said. ‘We’ve made it.’

  She expected a cool rush of light and freedom as she pulled her body from the claustrophobic crush of her mother’s corridor; she expected to be able to shake out her bones and feel released. But she saw immediately that this corridor led directly into another one. The doorway from the back of the kitchen into the front hall was merely a pit stop. She suddenly saw the rest of this journey unfurl in her mind’s eye. She saw herself squeezing through smaller and smaller apertures, into deeper and deeper corners of the house until she was squashed into a ball and unable to turn around. She swallowed back an urge to scream and said, ‘Right, well, at least it’s not quite so dark in here.’ The window on the landing was only partially blocked, allowing a wash of dusty-blue light across the tops of the towers. At least here Meg could ascertain height and perspective. Ahead of her was the door into the snug, to the left the door into the living room and to the right the foot of the staircase. She only knew this from memory, because no such things were visible from where she stood. She’d been told that Lorelei had lived mainly in her bedroom so she decided that they should aim to get there, that it was probably less cluttered (Ha! Cluttered! What an entirely insufficient word that was) than the rest of the house and that they were both less likely to die getting into it.

  ‘Right,’ she said, encouraging her daughter. ‘Next one! Are you ready?’

  Molly nodded uncertainly and grabbed the back of Meg’s T-shirt again.

  They slithered sideways through the tunnel which, almost like a well-planned road system, had a junction halfway down where they turned right. Meg felt for the first runner with her toes and then gingerly walked up, subconsciously counting them as she’d done countless times as a child. Eleven to the landing. Then a dog-leg and another twelve to the first floor.

  As she emerged at the top of the stairs she turned to Molly and smiled. ‘It’s quite bright up here,’ she said. ‘Look, the top of the landing window. You can see out into the garden.’ Molly stood at her side and they drank in the view from the window as if it were water in a desert. Dust motes sparkled in the midday sun like clouds of glitter. Furry cobwebs hung from the wooden beams in the ceiling and from the old paper light shades. It smelled mustier up here, meatier. Downstairs had carried a smell of dead paper and dust; here it smelled of old flesh and unwashed things.

  Molly put her hand to her mouth again and shuddered. ‘Gross,’ she said. ‘It’s just as well you can’t actually smell these places on TV. No one would watch those shows otherwise. Seriously.’

  ‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. Given how long she lived like this.’

  ‘It’s disgusting.’

  Meg shrugged. She couldn’t argue. ‘This is like hell.’

  ‘It’s worse than hell.’

  ‘It’s hell on actual earth.’

  There were no words. No language sufficient to convey this experience. For years Meg had lain in bed awake at night, imagining this, picturing it, hearing about it second-hand from social workers and the council: ‘This could be the most extreme case of hoarding we have ever encountered. Her life is at risk, every moment of every day’, listening to her mother on the phone playing it down: ‘Oh, it’s all such a fuss. Such a fuss about a few things. I’m all alone now. I can live how I choos
e.’

  Meg would try to argue: ‘You’ll kill yourself. It’ll bury you. They’ll have to pull the house down to get your body out.’

  And Lorelei would laugh lightly and say, ‘That’s fine with me.’

  But none of her imaginings had brought her to this place, to the meaty stench and the Gothic horror of it.

  A low corridor of objects brought them into Lorelei’s bedroom. Meg remembered vividly the last time she’d been in her mother’s bedroom. Six years ago. The last time she’d come for Easter. She’d arrived with Molly and the boys and found the house already halfway to the state it was in today. Her mother had been sitting in the middle of this room, hillocks of junk piled up around her, like a spider in the middle of its web, painting her toenails periwinkle and smiling at Meg as though all in the world was as it should be.

  The memory brought a sudden lump to her throat.

  She remembered how cross she’d felt to see her mother like that, buried up to her elegant neck in her own shit, letting her beautiful home fall into decay, cooking up yet more fodder for the neighbours to get into a sweaty lather about. She’d been so cross that she’d almost hated her.

  But now, as she edged her way into the room, she saw the armchair where her mother had been, a fat, flowery thing padded out with cheap cushions, tables at either side, holding bottles of nail polish, paperbacks, rice cakes, the oversized headphones she’d wear to listen to the radio, and instead of filth and junk, all she was aware of was the empty space at the centre of it all.

  Molly crunched uncertainly across a rocky pathway of scattered ephemera – empty packaging, discarded clothing, old newspapers – and joined her mother at the centre of the room. ‘I remember her sitting there, when we came that time,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Right there. I was scared of her.’

  Meg turned to her daughter and said, ‘Scared? Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Molly. ‘She just looked so bizarre, sitting there, so thin and scrawny, her eyes were kind of like, wild. She wasn’t like anyone I’d ever seen before.’

  ‘Poor Mum,’ Meg sighed again. ‘Don’t you remember the hot chocolate, though?’

  Molly glanced at her blankly.

  ‘She made you all hot chocolate. At bedtime. You were all so excited. Don’t you remember?’

  Molly shrugged. ‘No recollection at all,’ she said. ‘I just remember that,’ she pointed at the chair. ‘Her. There.’

  Meg felt overwhelmed with sadness.

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ said Molly. ‘I mean, you’re like, just so normal. You’re like the most normal person I’ve ever met. And you’re such a clean freak and everything. How did you come from this?’

  Meg shook her head. ‘Well, obviously it wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, Moll, this place was actually relatively normal.’

  ‘But your mum? Grandma? Was she ever normal?’

  Meg smiled sadly. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s a good question. And I think, with Mum, it really was all just a matter of degrees.’

  She took two more steps towards the armchair and touched it, with the very furthest tips of her fingers. And then, before her inner clean freak could tell her that she’d catch fleas, that she’d never get the smell out, that it was filthy dirty and full of germs, she lowered herself right into it, right into her mother’s armchair. She let her head fall back against the greying upholstery and she looked up at Molly and she smiled. ‘Tiny, tiny little degrees.’

  2

  Friday 5th November 2010

  Hello again, Jim!

  I am delighted to see that I didn’t scare you off, and thank you for your reply. It was fascinating to find out more about you, and of course, I can see now that you would have started out as a James. You look more like a James than a Jim, but I agree that Jim is a much ‘friendlier’ name – particularly up there in Gateshead. You wouldn’t want to stand out too much, I suppose! Do you have a lovely accent? I don’t have much of an accent. I suppose you would say that I am ‘posh’! I was brought up just outside Oxford, went to the local girls’ grammar, Mum and Dad were both writers, my father wrote about medicine, my mother wrote about gardening. It was all very ramshackle and left-wing middle-class, nobody ever looked in a mirror, nobody ever hoovered. But at the heart of it was a deep, deep sadness. Probably about the baby, Athena. And other things that happened. Things I can’t really talk about. So even though it should have been a happy childhood, it really wasn’t. And then they both died young, my parents, pretty much one after the other. I was twenty when my father passed, twenty-three when my mother did, and there was all this stuff, stuff we’d never talked about. Stuff I really do rather wish we had talked about. But you know what it’s like when you’re that age, you think you have all the time in the world, don’t you? I would say I was rather a strange child, a bit like you say you were. I was very introverted and lived quite a colourful imaginary life. I collected things, obsessively, and wet the bed well into my early teens. I was almost feral in some ways. Quite wild yet also excruciatingly shy. I was forever being carted off to therapists but none of them had a clue. And then I left home at eighteen, went off to university, and I completely changed, blossomed into something quite different. It was as if my childhood had never happened, like I’d shed a skin. So there you go, that’s me. Well, the early stages of me. And I suppose, in a way, it was having such an odd and uncomfortable childhood myself that made me so utterly, utterly determined to give my own children the best childhood possible.

  It remains to be seen whether or not they would say that I succeeded.

  So, tell me more about your son. Do you live with him? How old is he? What’s his name? I’m glad you have a child. It will give us more to talk about.

  Oh, BANGBANGBANG! The fireworks are starting already here in the village. I hope you’re watching a lovely display somewhere, wrapped up warm and cosy. I’ll be making do with listening to it, from here in my chair. I can’t really find the motivation to get out there and stand about in the cold with a bunch of strangers!

  All the very best to you, Jim, take care,

  Lorelei

  April 1987

  Bethan had grown breasts. Huge ones. Quite suddenly and as if from nowhere. One minute she’d been a bony little thing in a training bra from Woollies, the next she was off to the shops with Mum, looking for something in a 32C. Megan was both alarmed (her baby sister!) and jealous (her baby sister!) but mainly fascinated as Bethan now possessed the only substantial pair of breasts in the family.

  ‘Let me see then,’ she badgered as Lorelei and Beth bustled into the house on a dry April afternoon halfway through the Easter holidays.

  Beth looked embarrassed as Meg snatched the bag from her. ‘Ooh,’ she said, fingering the cream lace thing with its solid underwiring and its unlikely capacious cups. ‘Nice,’ she said, trying not to sound jealous. ‘Did you get anything else?’

  ‘No,’ said Beth, snatching back the bra and shoving it into the carrier bag before one of her little brothers saw it.

  ‘I did, though!’ said Lorelei, her high cheekbones flushed pink, her green eyes flashing with something chemical and profound. ‘Look! There’s a new shop opened in town. What was it called, Beth?’

  Beth rolled her eyes and said, ‘Poundstretcher.’

  ‘Yes! Poundstretcher! Everything’s a pound. Can you imagine? Look!’

  She emptied a bulging carrier bag on to the tabletop and let her eyes roam over her booty with a hunger and a joy that were almost tangible.

  ‘Look!’ she said. ‘Hangers. Ten for a pound. Aren’t they lovely? I just loved the colours, especially this blue one. And pan scourers, a pound for twenty …’

  Meg too stared at the items on the tabletop and said, ‘Why have you bought three packs?’

  Her mother’s smile froze for a split second. Then she laughed and said, ‘Always good to have stockpiles.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Meg, ‘just think how smug we’ll be when we’re living in a post-apocal
yptic wilderness and we’re the only family in the village with pan scourers.’

  Meg saw Beth’s face cloud over then and noticed a tiny, barely perceptible shake of her head. She tutted loudly and said, ‘Sixty pan scourers, Beth. We have sixty pan scourers.’

  Beth smiled apologetically and Lorelei stood there, her shoulders slightly slumped, the light gone from her eyes. ‘Why do you always have to spoil everything, Meggy? Why?’ Her eyes filled with tears and she hurriedly returned her treasures to the carrier, before leaving the room.

  ‘What?’ snapped Meg, looking at Beth’s accusing face.

  ‘Oh, come on, why d’you have to be so hard on her?’

  ‘Don’t you see,’ Meg hissed, ‘it’s because of you lot, everyone in this fucking family, that she is the way she is. You encourage her!’

  ‘But what does it matter?’ said Beth. ‘Who cares if we’ve got too many pan scourers? Who cares if funny things make her happy? Why does it bother you so much?’

  ‘Because,’ she began, the rage starting to separate in her mind into manageable chunks of theory, ‘because I think she’s ill.’

  Beth laughed. And then stopped dramatically. ‘Ill?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Meg. ‘Mentally. Ill in the head.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous.’

  ‘I’m not being ridiculous. I mean it. All this – all these collections and obsessions with colours and tea towels and … and rainbows.’

  Beth shrugged.

  ‘And think of what she was like when she was a child. You know, collecting hair. Everyone acts like that’s normal. It’s not normal. It’s crazy.’

  ‘What are you two whispering about?’ asked Rory, passing them in the hallway, his long blond hair hanging into his eyes, long skinny legs like his dad’s in baggy jeans, the best-looking boy in his class, apparently. Not that he was interested in what the girls in his class thought of him yet. He was only twelve.

  ‘Nothing,’ snapped Meg.

  ‘You’re talking about the pan scourers, aren’t you?’