The House We Grew Up In

by Lisa Jewell

  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.

  3

  Wednesday 24th November 2010

  Hi, Jim!

  Can you believe this weather! They’ve put out flood alerts in some parts of the county! What’s it like in Gateshead? I always check the forecast now for you when I listen to the weather, it looks like you’re ankle-deep too. Yuck! Luckily we’re not in a vulnerable area, and there’s never (FINGERS CROSSED!) been flooding here. My God, just the thought of this house going under, with all my things in it, argh! I have an awful lot of newspapers (oh dear, does that make me sound like a mad old hag?!) and they would swell up, wouldn’t they, like a cork, plug me in here? Oh, anyway, not worth thinking about, I suppose.

  I was so sorry to hear about your son. Bloody bloody hell, Jim. So awful, even if he had been a drug addict for all those years. Thirty-one is absolutely FAR TOO YOUNG, and the old cliché about parents outliving their children is one of the truest. It subverts the order of everything and nothing ever makes sense again, does it? And you see, I should know. Because, since we’re becoming so intimate, so quickly, I feel able to tell you this now, but I have lost a son, too. My baby one. Little Rhys. He died just after his sixteenth birthday. He hanged himself, in his own bedroom. On Easter Sunday.

  Sorry. I had to take a break there. You know, I’ve never really spoken about it to anyone. But then I never met anyone who’d lost a son too (apart from my husband of course but that’s different, isn’t it?). I did such a good job of dealing with it at the time that I was always too utterly terrified to pick at the scab, as it were. Do you understand what I mean? I don’t really expect you to. I suspect you were more ‘normal’ about it all, thrashed about and screamed and wailed etc.? Anyway, so, yes, there you are, we have even more in common than we first thought. And in case you’re wondering, no, Rhys left no note, no explanation. It’s an infinite mystery. A terrible mystery. Although … well, I’ve never told anyone this before, Jim, but I think I know why he killed himself. And I’ve never told anyone, because he would have hated anyone to know. And so would I. But anyway! Can’t go spouting all my deepest secrets too soon, you’ll run screaming for the hills!!!

  So, on to less grisly things. Are you interested at all in horoscopes? In case you are, I’m a Cancerian. I would say I’m very typical – home-loving, nurturing, sensitive, creative, etc., etc. How about you, Jim? What star sign are you? I’m guessing at … VIRGO!! Am I right?!

  All the very best,

  Lorelei

  xx

  April 2011

  ‘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.’

  ‘Let me try.’ Molly pressed her slight body to the door. She pushed against it with her back, with each side, and then with her arms. She turned to Meg. ‘It’s blocked,’ she said. ‘How is that even possible? I mean, how did she get that stuff in when you can’t even open the door?’

  Meg shrugged. ‘None of this really stands up to any kind of right-thinking analysis. None of it. Your grandma was a very strange woman.’

  ‘Which one was Beth’s room?’

  ‘Round here,’ said Meg, ‘round this corner.’ She felt her way with her hands, trailing her fingertips against the damp wallpaper. Laura Ashley’s finest, pale-green leaves against a magnolia background, still bearing the marks of the childhoods lived here – felt-tip trails, half-ripped stickers – and there, Beth’s door, still with its plastic plaque bought from a gift shop in Weston-super-Mare. BETH’S ROOM. They’d each had one. Both the girls. Meg still remembered the excitement as they spun the carousel around and found that yes! There was a Megan! (Although no Rory and no Rhys, but the twins had been too small to feel hard done by.) They’d stuck them to their doors with sticky felt pads. Meg had eventually taken hers off, at some point during her teenage years, and it had broken apart in her hands. She’d tipped it into a bin, never thought of it again. Until now. A sudden, searing reminder that they’d once been happy. All of them. Even Rhys.

  Impossible, she thought. Impossible.

  Beth had never taken her plaque down, stuck in the past as she’d been for so long, half-formed and amorphous, like an embryo in a jar. The door was half open and peering through the gap Meg saw, without much surprise, more generic, formless piles. The curtains across the window were drawn and dirty, drooping from the runner at one side, letting in a half-moon of daylight. Beth’s wardrobe sat to the left of the door. Its doors were wide open, revealing Beth’s clothes: her old clothes, the clothes she’d worn when she was still a person who made sense to Meg. When she was still her sister.

  Meg’s phone rang again. She looked at the display. BILL. Thank God.

  ‘Hello, darling.’

  ‘We’re here!’

  ‘Oh, good!’ said Meg, crossing one thing off her list of dread fears. The other half of her family had failed to die in a plane crash on an Air France flight from Gatwick to Bern. ‘How was the flight?’

  ‘It was good, great.’

  ‘How are the boys?’

  ‘Boys!’ she heard her husband call out. ‘Mummy wants to know how you are!’

  Meg smiled as she heard the oddly high-pitched sound of her three boys loudly exclaiming that they were well.

  ‘Bit of a scene at outsize items,’ Bill was saying. ‘Only three pairs of skis came through. Had to hang around for half an hour. Had to, you know, shout at people.’

  ‘Oh, God, not at Swiss people. You shouldn’t do that, you know? They don’t like it.’

  Bill laughed. Meg’s heart calmed at the sound of it. How far away it all
seemed now: soft, warm, shouty Bill, her three wild, red-haired boys with their freckles and their hugs, the whiteness and glare of a Swiss airport, four immaculately packed suitcases full of clothes that smelled like home. Her home.

  ‘Do you want to talk to Daddy?’ Meg mouthed to Molly.

  Molly shrugged and then said, ‘Yeah, all right.’

  ‘Molly wants to say hello. Hold on, hold on. No, I’ll tell you later, yes, we’re here. I’ll tell you everything later. Love you. Love you all. I’ll call you when Molly and I get to the hotel. Yes. Yes. Love you. Bye.’

  She passed her phone to Molly and felt shocked by the transition from one world to another, from cleanliness and love and chaos, to dirt and loneliness and death. Her ears rang and the silence ate her up. Not just the silence of the countryside, but the unsettling muffled silence of this house, where every wall was buffered and every surface was covered. The muted silence of a pillow over your head.

  April 1995

  An alarm wailed from somewhere. It was not an alarm that Megan recognised. Hers made a high-pitched buzz. This was more of a drone. She opened her eyes and forced them to focus. Boxes. Dozens of boxes. A bed sheet pinned over the window because they didn’t yet have curtains. A large bevelled mirror that was not hers, balanced against the far wall, in which was visible a tableau of two people on a brand new divan bed, one sitting up, looking back at her, the other still asleep. The person looking back at her was dishevelled and confused. Megan flattened down her hair and yawned.

  The droning alarm seemed to grow louder as it went on. It was not her alarm. It was his. Bill’s. She nudged the man sleeping by her side and said, ‘Bill. Wake up. Your alarm’s going off. You need to unpack it and turn it off.’

  Bill opened one eye and then closed it again. He smiled and snuggled himself into Megan’s rounded tummy.

  ‘Bill!’ she said again. ‘It’s driving me nuts! Please do something!’

  He groaned and unpeeled himself from her body. ‘Are you sure it’s mine?’ he asked raspily.

  ‘Yes. Of course it’s yours. I’d know if it was mine. I’m amazed you don’t recognise it.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure mine’s set to radio,’ he said. ‘I’ve definitely never heard it buzz before.’

  He swung his legs out of the bed and Meg watched him stumble, naked, through the city of unopened boxes that surrounded the bed. She smiled at him in amusement as he put his ear to each box in turn.

  ‘You look completely mad,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure I do,’ he replied. ‘You could help, if you wanted.’

  Meg threw back the duvet and pointed at her swollen belly. ‘I am exempt from everything for the next two and a half months.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Absolutely everything.’

  The baby was not planned. Definitely not. She was only twenty-four. She and Bill had only been together for six months. It was ridiculous.

  But Megan had always wanted a big family. At least four. Getting an early start was a good thing.

  And from the moment she’d seen the test results held in her shaking hand in a toilet cubicle at work, it had felt right. Meg wasn’t a young twenty-four. She’d partied hard throughout her teenage years, had two long-term relationships and ten previous lovers. She’d experimented with drugs and decided she preferred alcohol. She’d drunk herself sick and decided she preferred moderation. She could cook a roast dinner, write to her bank manager, run her own car and drive on motorways. She had no overdraft and most of her friends were older than her. And then there was Bill.

  Bill was thirty-two. Bill ran an art gallery. He had an ex-wife. And a mortgage. He was losing his hair.

  In some contexts, twenty-four sounded young to have a child. But in the context of Meg and Bill, it was just perfect. So Bill had sold his little post-divorce love shack with blood-red walls and zebra-print furniture above a barber’s on Chalk Farm Road and bought them a two-bedroom flat in Tufnell Park with a garden. He’d done this unquestioningly and happily. And this morning, a bright Easter Sunday morning, they were waking up here together for the very first time.

  Bill stood up triumphantly. ‘Aha,’ he said, in a stupid Russian accent. ‘I have located the device. I have thirty seconds to dismantle it before it detonates.’ He peeled the tape from the box and plucked the clock from it. ‘There,’ he said, hitting a button and bringing instant peace and quiet to the room that rang out like a high-pitched chime. ‘Sorry about that.’

  Meg smiled. ‘Not your fault,’ she said.

  ‘Ha, there you go. You see, my ex-wife would have told me that it was my fault. You are so wonderfully sane and reasonable. Please don’t ever change.’

  Megan loved it when Bill mentioned his ex-wife because he never had a good word about her. Megan had never met her, but in her head she looked like Cruella de Vil. Her name was Michelle. She’d married her boss and lived in Spain and was of little consequence in Megan’s world.

  The phone rang and Bill and Meg looked at each other. ‘Our first phone call!’ she said, leaning across him to reach it. ‘And I bet I know who it’ll be.’

  ‘Happy Easter!’

  ‘Happy Easter,’ replied Meg, leaning back into the pillows and cupping the phone into the crook of her neck. ‘It’s Beth,’ she mouthed at Bill who nodded knowingly and headed to the bathroom. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine!’ said Beth in her sing-song voice, a vaguely irritating facsimile of their mother’s. ‘How are you?’

  ‘We are absolutely fine,’ said Meg, stroking her big bump and stretching out her toes.

  ‘How did the move go?’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Meg. ‘I just sat on my big fat bum and let everyone do everything. Now we’ve just got to unpack. Hang some curtains. Mow the lawn. Take up the carpets. Sand the floorboards. Redecorate. And have a baby.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t wait to see you all,’ said Beth longingly.

  ‘Well, you know, any time,’ Meg replied drily. Beth was becoming as difficult to prise out of the Bird House as her mother.

  ‘Yes! Yes. Maybe next month.’

  ‘Yes,’ repeated Megan, ‘maybe next month. How’s Mum?’

  ‘She’s good. You know. Do you want to talk to her?’

  Meg sighed. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘OK. Put her on.’

  The phone line sounded muffled for a moment and she could hear her mother through the flesh of Beth’s hand, complaining gently about something, but then a moment later she came on the line.

  ‘Hello, darling!’

  ‘Hello, Mum.’

  ‘Happy Easter! We’re just about to head into the garden for the egg hunt. Maddy’s here. And little Sophie. And Vicky, of course. Say hello, Vicky!’

  Meg rolled her eyes and heard Vicky in the background calling out, ‘Hello Meggy!’ In the aftermath of the terrible Easter of 1991, Lorelei and Vicky had become inseparable. It turned out that Vicky’s first boyfriend had hanged himself at the age of eighteen, so they had more in common than a taste for Cotswolds houses. According to Beth, Vicky ‘popped over’ every day at about ten-thirty with her two little ones and would then spend the rest of the day at Lorelei’s, giggling with her over Chardonnay when the sun went over the yardarm and not leaving until she heard her husband’s car pulling up on the pavement outside, at which point she would hastily down the last dregs of her wine and head next door to greet him.

  ‘It’s nice,’ Beth would say. ‘I’m glad she’s got a friend.’

  And Meg would say, ‘It’s just fucking weird, if you ask me.’ Which Beth hadn’t.

  ‘When are you going to see Rhys?’ she asked impatiently.

  ‘Oh,’ said her mother, ‘well, now, I’m not sure we’ll have time today, will we?’ She asked this supposedly of the other people in the room with her, not of Megan lying prone in her new bed in Tufnell Park.

  ‘Can you put Beth back on for me?’

  ‘OK, darling.’ Her mother sounded relieved and happy to end the con
versation with her eldest child.

  ‘Beth!’ Meg snapped as her sister came back on the line. ‘What’s going on? Why isn’t Mum going to see Rhys?’

  Beth sighed. ‘I don’t know. She says she’s moving on.’

  ‘Moving on! It’s only been four years. You don’t “move on” from visiting your son’s grave on the anniversary of his death.’

  ‘Well,’ ventured her sister nervously, ‘you’re not going to see him either, are you?’

  ‘No,’ snapped Meg, ‘of course I’m not! I’m nearly seven months’ pregnant, a hundred miles away and I’ve just moved into a new flat. I would love to be going to see Rhys. I’ve been to see Rhys every chance I’ve had these past four years. Please tell me Dad and Rory are going?’

  There was a brief silence on the end of the line, long enough to alert Megan that all was far from well at the Bird House. ‘Tell me, Beth, tell me the rest of you are going?’

  ‘Well, the thing is, Dad’s not here.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And Rory?’

  ‘I don’t think he came home last night. As far as I know.’