The House We Grew Up In

by Lisa Jewell

  She traipsed through the kitchen into the front hall, the three children following behind her, silent in awe and wonder. The square space was filled to almost the height of Stanley’s head with cardboard boxes from the cash and carry. She idly lifted flaps as she passed through the narrow space between the boxes, her breath held against the prospect of what she might find within.

  Two hundred citronella tea lights.

  A hundred multicoloured disposable tablecloths.

  Twenty packets of mixed gold and silver Christmas decorations.

  Twenty-four packets of Betty Crocker Halloween cupcake mix.

  Forty pink polka-dot washing-up brushes.

  Fifty one-litre cartons of Aptamil follow-on milk.

  She let the flap of this last box drop in horror. Aptamil follow-on milk? When there were no babies in the family? She checked the side of the box and saw that its contents had a consume-by date of August 2001. She sighed.

  ‘Mum. We’re here!’

  They picked their way through the two opposing walls of things that snaked their way up the staircase leaving a two-foot gap in the middle.

  ‘Mummy,’ hissed Alfie urgently, as though something important had just this minute occurred to him. ‘Why has Grandma got all these things on the stairs?’

  ‘Shh,’ cautioned Meg.

  They followed her through the continuing wall of objects and into Lorelei’s bedroom.

  Meg couldn’t see her at first and was about to turn and leave when she spied her, curled up inside her floral armchair, with a huge pair of headphones on, listening to – she presumed – the radio and painting her toenails. She was buried, virtually, within more piles of unidentifiable things, an amorphous mass of bags and boxes and paper and clothes with occasional unexpected outshoots of lamps and broken furniture, hairdryers and ironing boards.

  And her mother, like a frog on a lily pad, in the very centre of it all.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, pulling away her gigantic headphones and peering up at Meg suspiciously. ‘Hello, darling. I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Meg, ‘you wouldn’t really, would you, with those big things over your ears? I did tell you we’d be here at three. And it’s now exactly five past.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course it is. I was just listening to the three o’clock news. D’oh! Silly me. I completely forgot! Hello, you three!’ she cried out to the children clustered nervously behind Megan’s back. ‘I’d say come in, but as you can see …’ She spread her arms apologetically and laughed.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Mum. I mean … just … Jesus.’ Meg was having trouble breathing properly. There was a tightness around her stomach and her chest and a kind of putrid green mist clouding her thought processes. She could think of no vocabulary to properly express herself. She could think of nothing beyond her overwhelming need to turn and leave. This instant. Pack everything and everyone back into her fragrant, newly valeted (you had to have it done at least once a month when you had three small children, otherwise things started to take root on the upholstery) people carrier and set off back to London at a significant rate of knots.

  She thought of her house in a neat terrace off Kentish Town Road. She thought of her two-thousand-odd square feet of shiny wood-laminate floors and immaculate cream carpets, the rows of storage boxes stacked neatly inside cupboards and the sparking granite surfaces in her kitchen. She thought of her gleaming windows, washed once a season on a contract, and her louvred shutters which she cleaned with a toothbrush to remove the film of dust from between the slats. She thought of her monthly clear-outs, the ones that made the children gripe and groan and Bill look at her as if she had a screw loose, as if she should get a life.

  And then she looked at her will-o’-the-wisp of a mother buried under a mountain of her own seething shit and she felt herself breathe easier. She was not the mad one in this family. Whatever her family might say. This here, this was madness. Right here. She pulled back her shoulders and she said, ‘What the hell have you done to your house?’

  Lorelei shrugged, as if she could care less. Then she sighed and said, ‘I know. I know. It’s, well, let’s call it a work in progress.’

  ‘Mum! This is not a work in progress! Do not dignify it with such a ridiculous description. This is a disaster. Plain and simple. I’m calling the council!’

  Her dad had warned her to go easy, but “going easy” was not in Meg’s repertoire. And she saw exactly how too far she had gone as the colour slowly left Lorelei’s face and her features pinched together and her hands turned into fists. ‘Don’t you bloody dare!’ she growled. ‘Don’t you bloody bloody bloody dare!’

  Meg felt a pair of small arms grip her tightly around the legs and she hustled the children back on to the landing and said, ‘Wait there. One minute. I’ll be one minute and then we’ll all go out in the garden. OK?’

  She stepped back into the entrance to her mother’s room and said, ‘Please don’t swear in front of the children, Mum.’

  Lorelei tutted and folded her arms.

  ‘I’m going to take them out in the garden, to play. Will you join us?’

  She tutted again.

  ‘Well, let’s put it this way – I can’t spend another second up here. I’m feeling half mad already with all this –’ she whispered it – ‘shit. We’ve driven halfway across the country to come and see you, so please, come outside. OK?’

  Lorelei nodded and sighed. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I’ll have to wait for my nails to dry first.’ Her mood brightened at the mention of her toenails; she pulled up one long leg so that her toes appeared over the mountain of things and she curled them down so that they faced Megan, and then she smiled her yellowing snaggle-toothed smile and said, ‘Look! Periwinkle! Isn’t that the most divine colour you’ve ever seen?’

  Meg flinched when she saw her mother appear in the garden ten minutes later. She shuffled nervously through the garden door, as though there might be wolves or bears. She was wrapped up in a huge rainbow-striped angora cardigan, one she’d owned for most of her life, under which she wore pink floral leggings that hung loose from her spindly legs. On her feet were leopard-print slippers with fur trim and her long grey hair was piled on top of her head bar a long shank that fell down her back like a piece of dirty rope.

  She forced a smile and took another tentative step out on to the flagstones. ‘Chilly out here, isn’t it, darling?’ she muttered.

  ‘Yes,’ Meg replied. ‘But at least the children aren’t in danger of being buried alive under an avalanche of your total and utter shit.’

  ‘Oh, Meggy.’

  ‘No, Mum. Sorry. This is not about me, OK. This is not me being horrible Meg, you know, always the villain of the piece. This is about you. About what you’re doing to yourself, to your home. I mean, look at it.’ She flapped her arms angrily towards the back of the house. ‘Look at this beautiful place. There are people in this world who would kill to live in this house, in this village, to have what you’ve got. And you’re trashing it, Mum. I mean, what are you thinking? What on earth are you thinking?’

  Lorelei put a hand against the flint wall of the house. She caressed the stone gently and sighed. ‘I love this house,’ she said. ‘You know I do. It’s the only thing that’s never let me down.’

  ‘Then why are you treating it so badly?’

  She looked up at Meg, her green eyes full of hurt and devoid of understanding. ‘This house looks after me,’ she said. ‘That’s more than anyone else in this family does.’

  Meg breathed in hard. Go easy, she thought to herself, go easy.

  ‘What have you been eating?’ she asked.

  Lorelei shrugged. ‘I eat,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, but what?’

  ‘Cottage cheese.’

  ‘Cottage cheese?’

  ‘Yes. I buy it in those big family-sized tubs from the supermarket, in all the different flavours – you know, they do one with paprika now. Cottage cheese with smoky paprika. A kind of terracotta co
lour, that one. It’s absolutely delicious. And the pink one with the prawns, that’s my favourite. And I have lots of rice cakes, they all come in delicious flavours too. So I kind of mix and match them together, infinite combinations.’ Her face had lit up with all this talk of cottage cheese and rice cakes and she was kneading the hem of her cardigan maniacally with her fists.

  ‘What else?’ said Megan. ‘Apart from cottage cheese.’

  ‘Biscuits,’ she said, ‘bread. Sweeties. Ooh, and those doughnut things –’ she let her cardigan fall and clicked her fingers while she searched for the word – ‘what are they called? They’re so pretty, they come in a big box and they’ve all different toppings in different colours, from America, you know …’

  ‘Krispy Kremes?’

  ‘Yes! Those! I treat myself every week. In fact, I think there’s a couple left. Shall I get them out, for the children?’

  Megan shook her head vehemently. ‘No!’ she snapped. ‘God. No, thank you.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ sighed Lorelei, ‘I forgot. You’re all super-healthy, aren’t you? Those poor children.’

  Megan breathed in again. This was not about her, she reminded herself, not about her. ‘So you’re not actually eating anything hot, then? Nothing cooked?’

  ‘Well, the doughnuts are cooked, I assume, at some point.’

  ‘No, Mum, you know what I mean. You’ve no kitchen appliances to cook with, they’re all buried. So you’re not eating anything hot?’

  ‘No, darling, that is not actually true. I go to Vicky’s at least twice a week and she cooks for me.’

  Megan rolled her eyes. Bloody Vicky, absolving her mother yet again of her basic responsibilities to herself.

  ‘And Daddy often pops something over, when he’s at home. Which isn’t very often these days.’

  ‘So what exactly do you do all day?’

  ‘I listen to the radio. I go to the shops. I see Vicky and the girls. I surf the Internet. I’m a silver surfer, apparently, I heard that on the radio the other day,’ she giggled. ‘And I still volunteer at the library once a week. So, you know, it’s not as if I’m just hanging around. Doing nothing.’

  ‘Well, no, clearly you have been doing something. Nobody accumulates that magnitude of crap without doing something proactive. I see you’re hoarding newspapers now, as well as bulk-buying baby milk and J-cloths. You know that means you’ve reached the final stages of your affliction.’

  ‘Affliction,’ muttered Lorelei, and then she tutted.

  ‘What are they for, Mother, the newspapers?’

  ‘I haven’t read them yet.’

  ‘Right, and you’re going to start reading them when, exactly?’

  She tutted again. ‘When I need to remember something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Oh, God, Meggy. You just don’t understand, do you? You never have understood. Everything that I possess is part of the context.’

  ‘The context?’

  ‘Yes! The big picture!’ She made a frame with her hands and then finally joined Meg at the garden table. ‘For example, today, the tenth of April 2004. Easter Saturday. The day that Meg and the children came to stay. The day that I wore my favourite rainbow cardigan and painted my toenails periwinkle. The day that was cloudy and cool with the threat of localised showers later. The day that I got an email from Daddy in Thailand telling me that he’d landed safely and was on his way out for dinner with Rory. The day that I had yet another argument with you, darling.’ She smiled sadly and looked tearful. Then she brought her shoulders up and said, ‘So the newspaper fills in some of the gaps. Of the context. Of the big picture. So does the bottle of nail polish. Once it’s empty I can’t throw it away. Because it’s like throwing away something that happened. It’s like throwing away the email from Daddy and the visit from you. It’s like throwing away the clouds in the sky and the chill in the air and the very moment we’re living in. Do you see, darling, do you see?’

  Meg shrugged and smiled tightly.

  ‘No,’ she said softly, ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Lorelei. ‘I didn’t really expect you to. We’ve never seen eye to eye, you and I. You’ve never understood me.’ She sighed. ‘It’s fine. Other people get me. You don’t have to.’ She reached across the damp wood of the table and squeezed Megan’s hand. It wasn’t a gesture of affection, it was a gesture of reassurance. It was saying, ‘Never mind darling, we can’t all be perfect children.’

  Megan could hear the children playing in the lower garden. She was heartened to see that her mother hadn’t destroyed the garden too. Between her father and Vicky, it was still a picture-postcard idyll of roses and meandering pathways, bowers and lovingly striped lawns. She stared overhead at the threatening sky, hoping that it would not deliver the forecast showers, that she would be able to spend the rest of the day out here and not have to venture back into that hellhole. Then she pulled her hand away from her mother’s and said, ‘But what about the rest of it? All the cash-and-carry stuff? Why, for example, is there a box of follow-on milk in the hallway, that expired three years ago?’

  ‘Oh –’ her mother took back her hands and rubbed at her pointy elbows – ‘well, obviously I bought that when there were babies around. You know. Thought it would be nice for you not to have to cart a load of formula down every time you came to visit.’

  ‘And then?’

  She shrugged. ‘I forgot I’d bought it. And suddenly the babies weren’t babies any more.’

  ‘And you have kept it because …?’

  ‘Because buying it brought me pleasure. Because I stood in a shop and saw it and thought of my babies and your babies and your visits and imagined myself with a little Stan or a little Alf on my lap, drinking the milk that I bought them, and I imagined you smiling and saying, “Thank you, Mummy, what a brilliant idea.” And all the things I thought when I looked at the milk and bought the milk were good things. And if I throw the milk away then I’m throwing away all those good things I thought and felt when I bought it.’

  Megan sighed. Her mother’s view of the world was an impenetrable wall. ‘Empty food packaging?’

  ‘Ah, yes –’ her mother smiled mischievously – ‘there you have a point, darling. I really do need to get on top of that. It’s just, I’m trying to be good about my recycling, and so often a whole day goes by without me leaving the house and the recycling box fills up so quickly and sometimes I just sort of leave things and I intend to do something about them but then once they’ve been sitting there for a few days I kind of stop noticing them. And then before I know it …’

  ‘… you’re living in utter squalor.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t call it squalor.’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘I know you would, Meg. You’ve always been very critical of the way I live my life. You’ve always very been critical of me.’

  Megan sighed and reminded herself yet again that she was not here to fiddle around with the knobs and switches of her unsatisfactory relationship with her mother. ‘So,’ she said, steering things back to the relevant. ‘You wouldn’t mind, in that case, if I threw away the empty food packaging. Just the empty food packaging?’

  Lorelei smiled. ‘Of course not! I’d love it! Vicky always has a little go when she comes to visit. And your father, of course. But it all builds up so quickly, doesn’t it?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Lorelei laughed nervously. And then she sighed. ‘I’m quite lonely, you know.’

  ‘I know you are.’

  ‘I never expected to be on my own. I know it sounds silly, because everyone ends up on their own eventually, don’t they? But I never really thought it would happen to me.’

  ‘Well, you’re not strictly on your own, are you? You’ve got Dad right next door and Vicky up the road, and you know, don’t you, that if you could get on top of things, if you could, you know, acknowledge your affliction …’

  ‘That word again.’

  ‘… then Vicky a
nd the girls might be able to think about moving back in and you wouldn’t have to be on your own. You do know that, right?’

  ‘Of course I do. Of course. I still don’t really understand what that was all about. One minute we were all here together having a lovely time, the next …’ She blew out her cheeks.

  ‘… the next, Mum, you were calling her precious girl a little shit and filling their home up with so much stuff that they were embarrassed to bring friends home to play.’

  Lorelei tutted, into the sky. ‘I don’t even remember it,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, you do. Of course you do.’

  Lorelei tutted again.

  ‘Right, so –’ Meg got to her feet. ‘I’ll get some things from the car, and make a start on your kitchen.’

  Lorelei jumped up from her chair and said, ‘I shall want to watch, you know?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Megan, ‘of course you will. Come on then, Mother dearest, let’s go and have a big old screaming row about egg cartons.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Lorelei, ‘I never throw away egg cartons, darling, they’re useful.’

  ‘No,’ said Megan, ‘they are not useful. And I will be throwing them away. Are you coming?’

  Lorelei let her shoulders slump just a degree and then she looked at Megan and she smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m coming.’

  It was, strangely enough, after all Megan’s misgivings and resentment about missing out on her last-minute sunshine getaway, a very nice Easter weekend. Vicky came over in the late afternoon and kept the children entertained next door with Sophie (but no Maddy) while Lorelei graciously allowed Megan to empty her kitchen. She did not, of course, allow her to throw away anything apart from food packaging (even that had its fraught moments, a small tussle over a sheet of blue bubble wrap, for example – ‘But darling, it’s blue, I’ve never seen blue bubble wrap before!’ – which ended in Lorelei’s favour) and was very controlling about exactly where Meg could relocate the objects elsewhere in the house, but all in all, she was quite good-natured about the process and actually burst into tears as they stood a few hours later and admired the newly unentombed kitchen surfaces.