by Lisa Jewell
Lorelei looked up from the mixing bowl she was helping one of the children to stir cake mix into and said, ‘Hmm?’
‘I was just saying to Kayleigh, I think you like the company, you know, when I bring the little ones over.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Lorelei, stroking the child’s hair. ‘Yes, I certainly do. Don’t know where I’d be without them. I’d be lost. Completely lost.’
‘Oh, well then,’ said Kayleigh, ‘that’s nice.’ Her face spoke volumes, but no one was looking apart from Rory. ‘Oh,’ she said, busily, as if she’d just remembered something, ‘by the way, me and Rory, we went to visit Rhys at Easter. You know, at the cemetery.’
Lorelei’s shoulder twitched slightly but she didn’t turn round.
‘That’s nice,’ said Vicky brightly.
‘Yeah,’ Kayleigh continued. ‘We had a bit of a tidy-up, you know, said a little prayer, left some flowers. It was a bit sad-looking, you know, looked like no one had been there for a while …’
‘Well,’ said Vicky, her voice pitched at a new place, no longer bright and shiny, but deep and forbidding. ‘It’s hard for Lorrie. It’s hard for all of us.’ She forced a sour smile.
‘Yes,’ said Kayleigh in a voice full of fake empathy, ‘I’m sure that’s true. I’m sure it is. So,’ she said brightly, changing the subject, ‘you have a beautiful house. It reminds me of my own home, except –’ she laughed in anticipation of her next comment – ‘my own mother is an anal retentive, you know, the house is like an actual operating theatre, not a speck of dust anywhere. And everything put away, mugs snatched away before you’ve had the last sip out of them.’ She tutted good-humouredly and then stared round the room again. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is quite the opposite. You have a lot of stuff, Lorrie.’
‘Yes,’ said Vicky, interjecting again. ‘Lorrie likes shopping.’
‘Wow,’ said Kayleigh. ‘You know, I don’t think I can recall ever seeing so many plates in one home before.’
Rory looked at the shelves hanging heaving and bowed from the kitchen walls. His eyes roamed over the dinner plates: he estimated around a hundred. Then he looked at the bowls: teetering arrangements in every colour of the rainbow, melamine, china, clay, beautiful in some ways, but obviously, it was now clear to him, completely excessive. There were three shelves of colourful tumblers and glasses that caught the afternoon light like votives, and more shelves loaded down with pitchers, jugs, vases, pots, tins, jars, platters, gravy boats and condiment sets. It occurred to Rory suddenly that there were ten different salt-and-pepper mills. And, he suspected, more buried away in the cupboards.
‘Can I see the rest?’
Vicky looked at Lorelei who appeared either to be ignoring Kayleigh or oblivious to her and said, ‘I’m sure that’ll be fine, won’t it, Lorrie?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Kayleigh wants to see the rest of the house.’
Lorelei beamed, showing all her unkempt teeth and said, ‘Of course! Excuse the mess, though!’ She had cake mix smeared across her cheek and looked slightly unhinged.
‘Christ,’ said Kayleigh, following Rory through the house, ‘this place is pure chaos. How can you all live like this?’
Rory looked around and sighed. The delicate, tissue-thin layers of his own lack of objectivity were being ripped apart, just as he’d known they would be.
‘You get used to it,’ he said, stepping over a pile of bin bags marked ‘For Oxfam’ which had been sitting at the bottom of the stairs for roughly two years.
‘I mean, that’s not to say it’s without its charms,’ she continued, taking his hand and stepping over the bin bags herself. ‘It’s a lovely house. But you know, it’s kind of nuts. Wouldn’t you say?’
‘My mum –’ he began, not quite knowing where he was about to head – ‘she’s kind of excessively nostalgic, you know, sentimental. Always has been. It’s like she’s scared that if she lets go of things, she’ll never think of them again. And that if she never thinks of them again then they were just kind of worthless.’
‘Hmm,’ said Kayleigh, joining him at the top of the first flight of stairs, ‘and yet …’ She stopped and looked pensive.
‘And yet what?’
‘Well, and yet she doesn’t come to visit the grave of her beautiful dead son on the anniversary of his death.’
The words hung there in the space between them, like a bullet suspended on its trajectory. They both turned to look through the window on the half-landing at the gardens beyond.
‘Pretty,’ said Kayleigh, cupping the glass with the side of her hand and peering through it. ‘Very pretty.’
Rory showed her his bedroom, his parents’ room, Beth’s room, Megan’s room now turned into a storage space for piles and piles of books and paperwork. And then she said, ‘Will you show me his room? Rhys’s room?’
Rory shuddered. He never went into Rhys’s room. He shrugged. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘if you want.’
He stood just on the threshold and watched Kayleigh walk in.
‘Are you coming?’ she said.
He shook his head and she threw him a tender look.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘it’s just a room.’
He shook his head again and smiled.
She stopped in the middle of the room and looked up. ‘So this is where it happened, yeah?’
He nodded and smiled, embarrassed. He’d never had this conversation before.
‘Jesus,’ she said, staring at the beams overhead, ‘how fucking tragic. Did he leave a note?’
‘No, no note. No clues. Nothing. Selfish bastard.’
‘God, that really is, you know. Ultimately selfish.’
Rory smiled with relief. It was the first time he’d ever said that out loud, and the first person he’d said it to had agreed with him.
‘But you know, it’s a sickness, right?’ she continued. ‘You can’t try and pin logic and rationality on to the thing. It’s gone way beyond that by the time someone sticks their neck in a rope.’
‘Yeah,’ said Rory, ‘I know that. I do know that.’ He sighed. Four years he’d spent wondering what had really happened in this room when they were both sixteen and he still had not even half an answer.
‘So, who was it that found him? Was it you?’
‘No. It was Meg.’
‘Aah, the infamous Meg. How old was she when that happened, then?’
‘She was twenty.’
‘Christ above, what a holy mess.’ She left the room and joined him on the landing outside Rhys’s room.
‘It was best it was her. She’s the sanest one in the family. It might have tipped anyone else over the edge. But Meg’s handled it really well.’
Kayleigh raised an over-plucked eyebrow at him and said, ‘Well, she doesn’t seem the only one who’s handled it well.’
He threw her a questioning look and then said, ‘Aah,’ as realisation of her meaning dawned. His mother. He opened his mouth to defend her and then closed it. There was no point. You couldn’t explain his mother in mere words. You had to live his mother, breathe his mother. And even then she didn’t always make sense. ‘Come on then,’ he said, putting his arm around Kayleigh’s shoulders, ‘let’s go and look at the gardens, shall we?’
They had sex up against the wall at the very bottom end of the garden. It was easy, logistically, given the length of her skirt. A sheep approached from the neighbouring field to see what they were doing. Kayleigh laughed and called out, ‘Fancy a threesome, sheepy?’ And then she laughed again and said, ‘You’d have to give yer arse a clean first, though, it’s terrible shitty.’ They both laughed, and Rory thought he’d never known it was all right to laugh during sex; he’d always thought it was supposed to be serious. They hung together in the hammock after, sharing a spliff, their legs entangled. They could hear Vicky’s children laughing and shrieking nearer the house and Rory felt the roughness of the smoke inside his lungs and the stickiness inside his jeans and the love of the woman in his arms, and
he smiled. His childhood was behind him. Kayleigh had walked into his childhood home an hour and a half ago and untied all the ribbons that had held him to this place for so long.
‘We should go away,’ he said suddenly.
She laughed. ‘Like where?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said breathlessly. ‘I’ve never been anywhere. I haven’t even got a passport.’
She looked at him agog and laughed again. ‘You’re kidding me.’
He shook his head. ‘None of us have.’
‘But that’s …’ She paused to find the right word. ‘That’s diabolical.’
He shrugged and then he laughed. ‘Nearly went to Greece once.’
‘You nearly went to Greece.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Good God!’
‘I wanna get a passport,’ he said, sitting upright and grasping her hands in his. ‘I want to go somewhere, with you.’
She smiled. ‘That’s a superb plan, it really is, but neither of us has two pennies to rub together.’
‘I can get hold of money.’
She eyed him suspiciously. ‘How?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ll sell something. I’ll ask my dad if I can borrow some. I’ll get a job. I’ll do all three. Seriously. I want to go somewhere. I really, really want to go somewhere!’ And then, unexpectedly and overwhelmingly, Rory began to cry. He cried for his lost brother, his mad mother, his distant father, his sweet sisters. But mainly he cried for himself, for all the time he’d spent in stasis waiting to want to go.
Kayleigh held him in her skinny arms and kissed the top of his head and told him that everything was going to be OK. And he believed her.
A week later Lorelei stood with her hands against her hips in the middle of Megan’s old room, looking from one side to the other. ‘Gosh,’ she said, ‘now. Well … this is tricky.’
Rory groaned. Here was a woman with ten salt-and-pepper sets, a woman who had kept every last mark on paper made by four different children over the course of fifteen years or more, a woman who never threw away anything colourful, eye-catching or shiny, a woman who bulk-bought cleaning products and household gadgetry, a woman who accumulated stuff on a grand, almost baroque scale, yet she could not locate a simple birth certificate.
‘But Mum, I don’t understand, how can you lose a birth certificate?’
‘I haven’t lost it, darling, I just haven’t found it yet! Just give me a minute. Please.’
Lorelei now referred to Meg’s old room as her office. It was not an office. It was a room of piles. Mainly paperback books that Lorelei picked up at charity shops and jumble sales and never got around to reading (she didn’t sit still for long enough to read a book), and filing boxes and lever-arch folders and wallet folders and piles and piles of loose, unfettered paperwork that made Rory feel dizzy just looking at it, trying to imagine what lay within. Meg’s bed itself was now invisible, swamped by piles of old coats and bin bags full of clothes headed vaguely, unconvincingly, towards charity shops. Meg’s old dressing table, a piece of furniture that had once been her pride and joy, white with a triptych mirror and gilt edging (Rory seemed to recall it had been a special birthday present or a reward for doing something brilliant at school) was now in use as Lorelei’s desk, and again, virtually invisible under more piles of paperwork, random selections of stuffed animals, snow globes, mugs, paperweights and for some unknown reason, a pile of deflated pink balloons still tied with curled nylon ribbon.
A couple of years back Lorelei had bought two filing cabinets from Ryman’s, with which to apply some order to her paper, yet these were now so over-stuffed that the drawers hung open, spewing out their contents.
‘I mean, how the hell do you ever find anything in here? It’s a nightmare.’
‘Oh, I know.’ Lorelei dragged a bony hand through her still-long hair and sighed. ‘I’m going to sort it out. Vicky says she’ll help me.’
‘When?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. There never seems to be enough time.’
‘That’s ridiculous, Mum, of course there’s time. You don’t work, all your children are grown up …’
‘Yes, well, there’s the little ones. They’re so time-consuming.’
‘They’re not your little ones. They’re not your responsibility. They’re Vicky’s. Just ask them not to come over for a few days. You’d easily get this room sorted. I can help you … I mean, for example, this pile of old magazines, we could get rid of this right now, eh?’
‘Well, yes, of course we could. Except we’d have to search through it first, to make sure there’s nothing important buried away between them.’
‘Like your children’s birth certificates, you mean?’
‘Precisely, darling.’ She sounded almost relieved. ‘Do you see? Do you see my problem?’
Rory nodded. He saw many problems. ‘Right –’ He clapped his hands together. ‘Let’s start looking, shall we?’
His mother smiled apologetically. ‘Maybe we should wait for Daddy to get home.’
Rory groaned. ‘No, Mum,’ he said, ‘I need it now. I need to get my application off, like, yesterday. We’ve booked our flights. We’re going in two months.’
‘Going?’ she said absent-mindedly.
‘Spain. I told you. Me and Kayleigh. Going to Spain, for a month.’
‘Oh, yes, of course.’ She tutted loudly.
‘Why are you tutting?’
‘Oh –’ she wrapped her hand around the back of her neck – ‘I just don’t get it. I don’t understand what the attraction is. Going away.’ She tutted again and laughed under her breath, as if going away was some kind of oddball pastime.
‘Everyone does it, you know? It’s perfectly normal.’
‘Oh, I know that, silly. Of course it’s normal. It’s just, when you’ve got this –’ she gestured around her – ‘and that –’ she gestured at the window – ‘and all the people you love, why would you want to go anywhere else? All that faffing, and packing and unpacking and sleeping in a strange bed and not seeing the people you know when you go to the shops …’ She shuddered delicately. Then she looked around the room again and said, ‘Well, darling, you’re welcome to see what you can unearth in here, but frankly, I’d rather wait for Daddy. He’s much more organised than me. And you know, it might not even be in here. It could be anywhere. Anywhere at all. And I really need to get back to the little ones now. We’re making pasta necklaces.’
Her body language was all directed away from Rory and away from this hellhole of a room. He was about to move out of the way to let her past when he felt something rise up through him, a question he’d never realised he wanted to ask before, but one that suddenly felt like the most important question in the world.
‘Why do you never want to talk about the past?’
‘What?’
‘You. You never talk about the past. Or the future.’
‘I live in the moment, darling, didn’t you know that? It’s the secret of true happiness.’
‘Yes, but …’ He paused. ‘But you’re not happy.’
‘Not happy?’ She blinked at him with her big owlish eyes.
‘No. Not happy.’
‘What on earth are you talking about, darling? I’m deliriously happy.’
‘How can you be?’ he asked, a hint of anger in his voice. ‘How can you be happy?’
‘Because of everything I have. All my blessings.’
‘But … Rhys.’
Her smile froze.
‘He was your baby. Your special one. You didn’t cry at his funeral. You don’t visit his grave. You don’t even have any photos of him on display. It’s like … it’s like he never existed.’
She narrowed her eyes at him and growled. ‘This is her, isn’t it? This is that girl.’
‘Kayleigh?’
‘Yes, her. She’s changed you.’
‘Yes, she has. For the better.’
‘No, I mean, she’s made you hard, like her.’
‘She’s not hard.’
‘Oh, darling, sweetie-boy, of course she is.’
‘What, because of the way she looks, you mean?’
‘Well, partly, yes, but it’s her aura, too. She has no soft edges. None at all. Vicky noticed that, too …’
‘Urgh,’ said Rory. ‘Vicky, Vicky, bloody fucking Vicky.’
‘Darling, horrible language. I thought we were having a civilised chat. Don’t be base. I assume that’s more of her influence.’
‘No. I’ve always used bad language. Just not in front of you. Because I had too much respect for you.’
‘And now?’
He shrugged. ‘I can’t respect someone who doesn’t respect the memory of her dead child.’
She looked at him then, a terrible haunted look, a look that Rory would never forget as long as he lived and said, ‘Don’t you ever talk to me like that again.’
For a moment he thought she was going to slap him. But she didn’t. Instead she shoved him roughly out of her way and left the room.
Rory’s dad found the birth certificate two days later. It was in a carrier bag full of disposable bendy straws in fluorescent colours that Lorelei had bought in bulk from Poundstretcher. The receipt in the bag was from 1989. ‘Oh!’ she’d exclaimed with pleasure, taking the straws from her husband. ‘I was wondering what had happened to those. The little ones will love them.’
All four birth certificates were together, in a pale-blue folder marked ‘Kiddies’. There were other things in the folder: medical papers about the first few days of Rhys’s life, GP certificates, notes on vaccinations and four little plastic wrist bracelets with the words ‘Baby Bird’ on them, which struck Rory as rather charming.
His father suggested they meet in the pub. Said he could do with a change of scenery. Rory had never been to a pub with his dad before. He’d never even considered the possibility.
‘Well,’ said Colin, handing him the certificate, ‘I’m really, really happy you’re doing this. It’s been a long time coming. I feel like we’ve all been set in aspic these past years, pickling ourselves in grief. And Mum would never let us go away when you were all young, so, good on you.’