The House We Grew Up In

by Lisa Jewell

  Poor Jim.

  Her phone rang again. Still Unknown. This time she pressed Answer.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Meg?’

  Meg’s flesh wriggled slightly at the familiar tone of the caller’s voice. ‘Yes, speaking.’

  ‘It’s me. Beth.’

  Meg breathed once down the line, and then twice.

  ‘Hello?’

  Meg hung up.

  March 1991

  Megan and Beth sat side by side in a subterranean concrete room off Shaftesbury Avenue. The room was a bar called Freuds; someone had told Megan that it was the place to be and it was certainly unlike anywhere she’d been before. Industrial was the word. Unfinished walls, beaten copper bar, cubist seating, chalked lists on blackboards, everything very dark and very uncomfortable.

  It was hard to concentrate on her sister sitting hunched up beside her, sipping a lemonade through a black straw, because there was a constant overwhelming sense that something terribly exciting was about to happen over her shoulder. It wasn’t, of course. Everyone else here was just like her: twenty-something, office worker, new in town, earning peanuts, looking for love, expecting everything to be a lot more exciting than it actually was.

  Megan felt proud to sit here with Beth. Her little sister was a full two inches taller than her and, she imagined, a full double-take more beautiful. Not that Megan was plain. Megan was far from plain. But Bethan was the one with the long mane of sleek black hair and the kissable mouth and the blushing cheeks and the legs that spoke their own language. And the boobs. Bethan was the one with the boobs. Someone once said to Megan that sisters always feel more beautiful when they’re together and, ever since, Megan had found it to be true. Without Beth, Meg felt reasonable; with her she felt exceptional.

  Beth was dressed in black. Black jeans. Black angora cardigan with the sleeves pushed up her arms. Black lace vest. Black ribbon in her black hair.

  ‘Remember your polka-dot raincoat?’ said Megan, returning to the place they always came back to eventually, their shared childhood.

  ‘The pink one? How could I forget! It was literally the most important thing in the world to me. She’s still got it, you know?’

  Meg groaned and said, ‘Of course she has. I think that could probably apply to any random item of clothing you care to mention.’

  ‘So,’ said her sister, her expression growing serious, ‘are you coming?’

  Meg groaned. Easter weekend. She’d told her mother she’d let her know, that she wasn’t sure what her plans were yet, and her mother had tried to sound as though she didn’t mind either way – even though it would be the first Easter Megan hadn’t spent at home and therefore something that Lorelei would find traumatic even to contemplate. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s such a long way.’

  ‘I know,’ said Beth, ‘but please come. It’ll be shit if you’re not there.’

  ‘No, it won’t,’ scoffed Meg. ‘It’ll just be exactly the same as it is every single year except with one less person around the table.’

  ‘Yes, exactly. And you’re the only normal person in the family.’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Well, yeah, just about, although I think that twenty-five years living with Mum are finally starting to grind him down. He doesn’t seem quite himself lately.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. He just seems distracted. And thin. He looks very thin.’

  Megan considered her father, all six foot one of him, his floppy hair, his pixie face, his almost absurd patience with his highly strung, immature wife. He could not afford to be distracted or thin. He needed to be solid and sensible and fully engaged or the whole structure of things would just come apart.

  ‘How are the twins?’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Oh, they’re fine. But Rory’s got some rather dodgy new friends.’

  ‘Hasn’t he always had dodgy friends?’

  ‘Well, yes, but these are slightly dodgier than the last lot.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  Beth shrugged. ‘Probably.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Megan dragged her hands through her brown curls. ‘And what about Rhys?’

  ‘Rhys is Rhys. No dodgy friends. No friends at all from what I can see. He just sits in his room listening to grunge music, very loud, until really late.’

  ‘That boy does not get enough sleep.’

  ‘No, I know, and it’s affecting his schoolwork. You know, Rory can just flip through his revision in half an hour and he’s done, but Rhys needs to really concentrate and because he doesn’t really sleep, well, Dad thinks he’s going to fail all his GCSEs. And he’s just a bit, you know, weird.’

  ‘What, weirder than usual, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah, a little bit. He got hauled in front of the headteacher at school the other day for hanging around the girls’ changing room.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes. It was horrible. We only found out about it because Dad knows the geography teacher and it was all round the school. And they couldn’t prove he’d done it so he wasn’t punished, but now apparently all the girls hate him and call him a creep and a pervert.’ She shuddered lightly. ‘It’s horrible,’ she said, almost silently.

  ‘Christ,’ said Meg. ‘What does Mum say?’

  ‘Oh, well, you know, she’s taken his side obviously, closed ranks completely, her precious baby, etc., etc. And as she says, there is no proof, just one girl’s word against his. But to be absolutely honest,’ she paused and lowered her voice, ‘it really wouldn’t surprise me if it was true. He’s the oddest boy I know.’

  ‘Come down and live with me,’ said Megan, suddenly fearful for her soft-hearted younger sister who had barely spent a night away from home since the day she was born, and who tiptoed around the characters in her house as if they were the leading men and woman and she was just a lowly extra. ‘Come and live in London. Seriously. There’s space for another bed in my room, we could split the bills and everything. I could ask around for you for a job at my place – they’ve always got vacancies.’

  Beth smiled. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘right.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can you imagine me telling Mum that?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because –’ Her sister looked flustered for a second. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She smiled. ‘Maybe I could.’

  ‘Of course you could! You finish college in June. You’ll be a qualified secretary. London will be your oyster.’

  Beth’s face went from uncertain to quietly excited. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I mean, it would be fun, wouldn’t it?’

  Megan nodded. ‘Ten different types of fun.’

  ‘And Mum would still have the twins …’

  ‘Stop worrying about Mum!’

  ‘I know, I know. You’re right. I just can’t help it sometimes.’

  ‘You need this,’ said Meg. ‘You need to get away from her. From all of it. It’ll swallow you whole otherwise. I mean it. It really will. And you won’t even realise it’s happening until it’s too late.’

  Two days later Beth returned home from London. The Bird House sat quiet and dusty, filled with sunlight and distant sounds. She rested her weekend case at the foot of the stairs and called out once or twice. No one replied and she presumed herself alone. She felt coated with the grime of the big city. Although she’d had a shower in Megan’s immaculate little en-suite shower room just that morning, she couldn’t shake the feeling of it all over her skin. She made herself a mug of tea and took it up to her room. She stood for a while in the middle, imagining herself not in it any more, imagining herself instead in her sister’s room in Wood Green with its high ceilings and its views over a parade of shops, its shared kitchen and flatmates from foreign countries.

  It didn’t seem possible, although in every practical way of course, it was. She went to her window and took in the view across the rambling gardens, down to the old green hammock at the far end and t
he fields beyond. Memories fluttered about her mind, of days that had passed and died and were never to return. But when she turned her thoughts to the future there was nothing there, just space. She sighed and sat on the window ledge, pondering her lack of ambition, of forward propulsion. She’d only signed up for the secretarial course because the college was ten minutes away and she knew she wouldn’t muck it up. She assumed that at some point soon she would probably end up being a secretary. But through fatalism rather than design.

  She began to take off her clothes, feeling the sweet release of her breasts from the ill-fitting bra she’d been wearing since Friday morning. She looked at her body in the foxed mirror inside her wardrobe. She saw the loveliness of it and blanched slightly, thinking of the things she hadn’t told Meg in the bar that night. The looks from her brother. The sense of someone outside the bathroom door.

  She’d watched Rory become interested in women, but with him it had been like the unfurling of a bud: something natural, inevitable, almost adorable, something separate, entirely unconnected to her. But with Rhys it was like a dark shadow spilling over everything he touched. Including her.

  She wrapped her body in a towel, tucked her hair inside a shower cap and made towards the bathroom. A strange sound made her stop outside the door of her parents’ bedroom.

  ‘Mum?’

  She clutched her towel closer to her chest and gently pushed at the door. Rhys was lying in his parents’ bed, the satin eiderdown pulled up to his armpits, naked as far as Beth could tell, staring straight at her.

  ‘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.