The House We Grew Up In

by Lisa Jewell

  From the strip beyond the bar came the sounds of traffic: horns blaring, mopeds humming, people shouting. ‘Well,’ said Rory, ‘I’m not working until tonight, so we can just hang for a while. What do you fancy doing?’

  ‘How about some lunch? Some street food. Somewhere that does a good Pad Thai?’

  Rory smiled. If there was one thing he knew about his neighbourhood, it was where to get the best noodles. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘get that jacket off, put some shorts on, I’ll take you out for lunch.’

  It was strange seeing his neighbourhood through somebody else’s eyes. So much of what Rory saw was under cover of night, standing on the street, in the phosphorescent glow of street lights and neon, sunburned tourists who’d been drinking since noon, stag parties and sad fucks, perverts and freaks. He slept most of the day, while the families and the normal folk were gallivanting on the strip and on the beach. By the time he woke up they were moving on, packing up their bags, heading to hotels and guest houses for showers and early suppers. Even when he was awake during the day, he only really absorbed the elements of the world he knew; he saw the girls from the bars looking wan and out of sorts; he saw the punters, the dealers, the ravers, all rendered strangely distorted by being out of their night-time context.

  But now, here, in this clean midday, with his sweet father by his side, he saw that he lived in a bustling seaside town, a town where you could buy souvenirs and suncream, Now magazine and the Daily Mail. If you hadn’t witnessed the underbelly, you might not even notice it was there.

  They sat on pavement-mounted stools by a small noodle stall. The guy who ran the stall was the son of the woman who ran the girls at the club. He was married to one of them. Even lunch was interwoven with sex.

  ‘Hello, hello!’ said the noodle guy.

  ‘Hi, Rak. This is Colin, my dad.’ He didn’t bother introducing him to his father.

  ‘Ah, good,’ said the man, ‘very good. You want Pad Thai?’

  Colin rubbed his hands together. ‘Yes, please!’

  ‘Chicken, pork?’

  ‘Chicken, thank you.’

  Rory walked away from the stall, leaving his father there watching intently as Rak threw things around in a wok. He would have to tell him eventually. He was going to be here for four days. He would have to tell him that he worked for Owen as a door manager at Owen’s girlie bar and as a runner for Owen’s small but ever-growing cocaine dealership. He would have to tell him that he was a criminal.

  He’d tried to put him off coming – he’d told him his room was too small, he worked too many hours – but his dad had just said, ‘I don’t mind.’ He’d batted away every attempt to make him change his mind and eventually Rory had capitulated. Because, in fact, the benefits of seeing his father after all this time had far outweighed his discomfort at having to come clean about the life he was living out here. He just had to hope that his father would not judge him too harshly.

  ‘Oh, good God,’ he heard Colin saying behind him, ‘oh, my God.’ He was halfway through a mouthful of noodles and his eyes were rolling back in his head with pleasure. ‘This is the most incredible Pad Thai I have ever tasted in my life. Oh …’ He lifted another forkful to his mouth. ‘How do you say “thank you” in Thai, Rory?’

  Rak passed Rory his noodles and then Rory and Colin sat up at the bar and ate them together, facing a wall.

  ‘So,’ said Rory, ‘how is everyone? Dare I ask?’

  Colin groaned and wiped some grease from his chin. ‘You mean Mum?’

  ‘Well, yeah, mainly, I suppose.’

  ‘She’s OK,’ said Colin. ‘She’s still not got over Beth moving away. I mean, she was thirty-one years old, for God’s sake, I don’t know what your mother was expecting, that she would stay at home for ever?’

  ‘I think she thought we’d all stay at home for ever. I think she thought that none of us would ever want to be anywhere else.’

  Colin sighed. ‘I know, I know. Poor Mum.’

  ‘And how’s she doing without Vicky?’

  ‘Not good. I mean, Vicky still comes to stay every other weekend, when the girls are with Tim, and Meg comes up with the little ones as often as she can. And obviously I’m just next door. But basically she’s on her own, for the first time in her life.’

  ‘And the house?’

  ‘Appalling. Health-and-safety hazard. She completely filled Vicky’s girls’ room – your old one – the minute they moved out, and then about thirty seconds after Beth went to Australia she started dumping stuff in there. And there’s been a worrying development – she’s started hoarding newspapers …’

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘Yes. I know. I’ve written to that TV show.’

  ‘Which TV show?’

  ‘Life Laundry. You know, on the BBC. They clear out people’s houses for them.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Rory. ‘Have you told her?’

  Colin rolled his eyes at him. ‘What do you think? Anyway, I doubt it will come to anything – I don’t even know if they’re going to make another series. But it seemed worth a try. I mean, I just really don’t know where to turn. We all keep trying, me, Vicky, Meg. We’re always trying to persuade her, thinking up new and ingenious ways of convincing her to part with things. But if anything it makes her worse. So …’ He shrugged and blew out his cheeks. ‘Well, you know, you just kind of give up eventually, don’t you? When someone doesn’t want to help themselves. There’s only so much you can do and …’ He smiled sadly. ‘I’m not sure I can help her any more.’

  Rory scraped the last noodles from the sides of the container and licked them from his plastic fork. He wiped his mouth with a paper towel and considered the issue of his mother. He was so distant from it over here, he barely thought about it. The concept of a troubled, lonely, middle-class, gay fifty-eight-year-old living alone in dusty squalor in a chocolate-box cottage in the heart of the Cotswolds was a hard one to grasp in the context of his sweaty, noisy, hectic, foreign, red-light existence.

  ‘I can’t say I blame you,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it.’

  Colin smiled and dropped a screwed-up paper napkin into his empty noodle container. ‘I’ll try not to,’ he said. And then his face became serious. ‘And what about you, my boy? What’s the story with you and Kayleigh and the little one?’

  Rory groaned. He dropped his head into his hands and growled. Just the merest thought of Kayleigh and Tia always felt like a knife in his chest. ‘There’s nothing to say. No story. I haven’t heard from her. But then, she doesn’t know where I am, so I wasn’t expecting to, really.’ He braced his body for his father’s response to his next question. ‘Have you … has she been in touch with you lately?’

  ‘Yes,’ Colin replied simply. ‘Yes. We email each other a lot. At least once a week. And as you know, she comes over every Christmas, just for a night, on her way back to Ireland. She and Tia. She’s a lovely little thing, you know … really quite spectacular.’

  Rory shrugged. He’d already had a full report on these Christmas visits; his father sent him long emails about them, attaching photographs which Rory did not open. He’d made that mistake once before, when his father had gone to Spain to visit Kayleigh and the baby a few months after Rory had left. He’d clicked on the attachment unthinkingly and then nearly fallen against the wall with the shock of it. His baby. Who had still been a colic-ridden screaming blob of nothing much when he’d said goodbye to her at eight months old. And there she was suddenly, magically, at fourteen months, with a ribbon in her hair, smiling and long-lashed, standing upright in jeans and sandals. A proper little girl. He’d looked at the photo for long enough to gauge that Tia looked just like him and then he’d pressed Delete. He’d made his decision, he had to live with it.

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  ‘She’s got a new partner, you know, Kayleigh?’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘Yes. He’s an artist, I think, a fair bit older than her, has a daughter of his own. I
think she’s very happy.’

  Rory nodded, just once. He wanted to scream at his dad to shut up. To stop talking. He wanted to yell at him that he had moved on. That he had drawn a line. That that was then and this was now and he had made a deliberate decision not to lug his baggage around with him. But Kayleigh had other ideas. She had completely inveigled her way into Colin’s affections, her and the girl. And Rory could not, in all reasonableness, expect his dad not to bring it up when it was such an important part of his life. But it was not an important part of his life. Kayleigh was supposed to have left him breathless in her wake. Instead she’d tied him up with string and wire, to live out the rest of his life putting food on the table and having to beg for sex. She had broken the terms of their unwritten agreement. She had taken him to the wrong place. He had learned not to feel guilty about what he’d done on that shocking June afternoon nearly four years ago. He had dealt with it.

  But here was his lovely dad who did not understand what Rory had done and thought that he still had the power to change things. He did not.

  ‘Good,’ he said again. ‘I’m really glad for her.’

  His father paused, looked at him thoughtfully and then said, ‘She calls him Dad.’

  The statement did not register at first.

  ‘Tia,’ Colin continued. ‘She calls the new boyfriend Dad.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. He nodded. ‘Right.’

  ‘Yes, I wondered if you, er … how you might feel about that? I mean, I felt you should know.’

  Rory nodded again and said, ‘Yeah, thank you. That’s good then, I suppose.’

  He looked at his dad and saw raw disappointment in his pale eyes. Colin sighed and said, ‘I suppose. It depends, really, on what you want. On what your plans are?’

  ‘Well, yeah, I mean, my plans are pretty much just staying here, working hard, seeing what happens. I still feel too young to be a dad. I still feel like I’m sixteen.’ He looked into his father’s eyes, beseechingly, feeling suddenly that he wanted to go home, that he wanted Colin to tuck him in his rucksack and take him home, that he wanted it be Easter Sunday and for them all to be there, him and his sisters and his brother, saving the foils, holding back on the roast potatoes, being a tribe. Because it was true, he did still feel sixteen but it wasn’t true that he had a plan; he had no idea what he was doing here or where he was heading. He was lost. Totally lost. Without Owen here to tell him what to do next, he’d be clueless.

  He smiled at his dad and he said, ‘I’m really glad you’re here, though, really, really glad.’

  His father’s eyes filled with tears suddenly and he grasped Rory’s hands in his and squeezed them, way too hard. ‘Me too, son,’ he said, ‘me too.’

  There was only one way to handle that first night with his dad, only one way to tell his father the truth about himself. And that was to take him to work with him.

  He showered himself and dressed himself in his work gear: crisp white shirt, black trousers, sunglasses, sensible shoes in case he had to chase anyone. His dad said, ‘Wow, look at you. Don’t you scrub up well,’ and put on a scruffy T-shirt and shorts with his heinous Velcro-strapped sandals.

  ‘So, what is it you do here, exactly?’ his dad said as they turned the corner towards the front of the club.

  ‘I’m a doorman.’

  Colin laughed. ‘Ha!’ he said. ‘A bouncer! Of all the things …’ They walked into the club, past the curious gaze of the cashier at the front desk, past the spangled walls and into the dark womb of the club. It was early, the doors not yet open to the public. Without the girls there, it could be any old bar, any old nightclub. A guy called Ben washed glasses behind the bar and nodded a hello to Rory and his dad. A girl still in her own clothes but already fully made up passed them on her way to the bar. She hugged Rory to her and called him ‘sweetie’. Colin looked at him curiously and Rory shrugged. His father would put the pieces of the jigsaw together eventually. He knocked on the door of Owen’s office. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Come in.’

  Owen sat behind his desk, all muscles and money and too much aftershave. But still, he found a sweet smile for Rory’s dad, and a big warm handshake, and Rory could tell that his dad was impressed. Everyone who met Owen was impressed. ‘An honour to meet you, sir,’ he said. Rory saw Colin’s look of surprise at being referred to as ‘sir’ by an Englishman.

  ‘Likewise,’ he said.

  ‘How long are you staying for?’

  ‘Four nights.’

  Owen sat back down in his big leather chair and said, ‘Not long then, a flying visit?’

  ‘Yes, sadly so. I was hoping Rory might be able to take some time off, that we might be able to travel around a bit together. But he says he’s too busy.’

  Owen laughed and smiled apologetically. ‘Yeah, that’ll be my fault. Sorry, Mr Bird.’

  ‘Call me Colin.’

  ‘Colin. Yeah. I run a very tight ship and I don’t really trust anyone. So if Rory’s not here there’s no one else to put on the door, and if there’s no one on the door, the club can’t open.’ He shrugged and smiled again.

  Colin nodded and said, ‘Yes. Sure. Sure.’

  ‘But still,’ Owen continued. ‘You’ve got the days free. Plenty to see. Plenty to do.’ He suggested the ocean beyond the doors of the club with his big tanned arms and then leaned back into his chair.

  It was odd to Rory, observing his friend, his boss, this man he’d seen every day of his life for the past four years, seeing him suddenly through someone else’s eyes. It was discomfiting and strangely sad.

  Outside the office door, the music had been turned up louder. Rory could hear the girls starting to filter through into the club. Owen smiled at him. ‘Looks like you’re up,’ he said. Then he got to his feet, all six foot odd of him, shook Colin again by the hand, smiled that dimpled smile, wished him well, told him drinks were on the house. Rory led his dad out of the office and towards the front door. The girls were everywhere now, in their work clothes: rhinestone bikinis, hot pants, sequinned bras. They oozed and they wriggled and they clucked and they touched Rory’s blond hair with overextended fingernails. He turned to his father as they came out on to the pavement and his father looked at him and said, ‘You left Kayleigh, and the baby, for him?’

  Rory did not reply.

  ‘Jesus, Rory. The man’s a buffoon! I mean, look at him. “I don’t trust anyone –”’ He rolled his shoulders, mimicked Owen’s Essex growl. ‘Who does he think he is, Tony bloody Soprano?’ Colin laughed.

  ‘He’s my friend,’ Rory replied quietly, unclipping the velvet rope from the club entrance, waving through two young men in rugby shirts.

  ‘You think?’ said Colin. ‘He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who has friends.’

  Rory shrugged. ‘He doesn’t have friends. But he has me. We’re like brothers …’

  Colin threw him a look.

  ‘We are. We’re soulmates. It’s weird. I can’t explain it.’

  Colin continued to stare at him inscrutably. ‘And this place, it’s a titty bar, right?’

  ‘Well, yeah. Pretty much.’

  Colin laughed again and rocked back on his heels, his gaze reaching into the darkening sky as though there might be something more edifying up there. ‘Pretty much,’ he repeated. ‘Right.’ He sighed, dropped his gaze to the ground. ‘Oh, son.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This!’ Colin exclaimed. ‘And what you left behind. Tia. Kayleigh. It’s … it’s … Christ. Rory. What the hell is it you’re looking for, exactly?’

  Rory waved a relatively sober stag party through and scuffed his shoes against the pavement. ‘I’m not looking for anything.’

  Colin nodded. He looked for a moment as though he were about to say something. But then he stopped, exhaled. ‘Just as well,’ he said, ‘because I can tell you this. You won’t find anything here.’ He gestured at the bar, at the line of young men waiting to gain entry. ‘You won’t find anything at all.’

 
; ‘Oh, my God.’ Meg dropped her weekend case on the doormat and stared at the scene before her. Behind her the three children tried to see what she was looking at.

  ‘What?’ said Molly. ‘Is it really bad?’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she repeated.

  Molly squeezed past her. ‘Let me see,’ she urged. She came to a standstill in front of Meg and said, ‘Oh, my God.’ Then she turned to Meg and she said, ‘I don’t want to go in, Mummy. I really don’t. Can you let me into Grandpa’s house? Please.’

  ‘No,’ said Meg. ‘Not until we’ve said hello to Grandma. Come on. Boys!’ she called out behind her to the two youngest who were now grabbing handfuls of the gravel on the footpath. They all trooped in and for a brief moment they were silent.

  It was Meg’s first visit home since Christmas, six months since Vicky and the girls had finally jumped ship and four months since Beth had moved away, and in those four months Lorelei appeared to have put her kitchen completely out of commission. Dad had warned her. But still, nothing could have prepared her for the devastation that her mother had wrought upon the heart of her home.

  The detail that struck her first was that the Aga was no longer visible. The precious orange Aga that had cooked their meat for them, warmed their winter gloves, dried out wet socks and heated pans of bedtime milk was gone, cloaked entirely under piles of laundry and cardboard boxes. The surface of the kitchen table was also invisible, loaded up with piles of newspapers and plastic carrier bags tied up by their handles into knots, empty pizza boxes, empty drinks cans and a colony of empty wine bottles. The old butler’s sink was packed up with jam jars and old cellophane in various colours and the kitchen blind had come off its fittings and was slung diagonally across the window. Meg lifted her foot experimentally from the flagstones and was unsurprised when it came away with a gluey slurp.

  ‘Come on, you lot,’ she called to her children, ‘let’s go and find Grandma. Mum!’ she called out, walking blindly through the wreckage of her childhood kitchen. ‘Mum! We’re here!’

  She had not wanted to come. She and Bill had been busy searching the Internet for a last-minute deal to somewhere sunny when Dad had called to say he was going away, to see Rory and Beth, that Vicky and the girls were going to be at her parents’ in Surrey and that Lorelei was going to be on her own at Easter for the first time in her life. She’d ummed and aahed and mentally measured out the constituent ingredients of guilt, duty, resentment and selfishness until she’d finally come up with a recipe for Doing the Right Thing. Bill had stayed at home and she did not blame him in the least.