The House We Grew Up In

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘And that makes it all right, does it? That makes it OK to shack up with her. I mean, Dad, she’s half your age!’

  ‘I know. I know. But she doesn’t feel it. It doesn’t seem like that, when we’re together. She’s lived a lot of life for a young woman. She’s more mature than me in some ways.’

  ‘Oh, God! I just knew you’d say that! That’s what dirty old men always say. Of course she’s not more mature than you. She’s younger than me, for fuck’s sake, Dad.’

  ‘Yes, but Beth, without wishing to cause you any offence, you are a very young thirty-one.’

  ‘So?’ she demanded. ‘What did he say? Rory?’

  ‘I didn’t tell him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Colin shook his head. ‘I couldn’t quite find the words. Or the moment. And anyway, as I say, nothing’s actually happened yet. Nothing concrete.’

  Beth shook her head slowly in disbelief. ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ she said. ‘You were the only one, Dad, the only one who I could feel normal about.’ Dark shadows skittered around her head, shadows of moments from the past that she couldn’t quite form into memories. Feelings of wrongness and discomfort. She thought of Rhys half-naked in their parents’ bed, of the footsteps outside the bathroom door, of Vicky kissing Lorelei in the kitchen one morning when they didn’t think anyone was looking, the slick of saliva still shining on her mother’s chin when she turned to smile at her a moment later. From nowhere another memory hit her: her mother coming out of Rhys’s bedroom the evening before he hanged himself, a look of sheer black horror on her face, her eyes bright with shock. She shook the memory away, not even sure what it was, not even convinced it was real. And then, as a final gift from her subconscious, she saw herself in a cheap hotel room, being roughly and insensitively serviced by her sister’s partner.

  The dark waters pounding through Beth’s head quietened and parted then for just long enough for another thought to occur to her.

  ‘Does Meg know?’

  Colin looked up at her, aghast. ‘Oh, God, no.’

  She gulped. For all these years, Kayleigh and her little secret, overheard in the garden of the Bird House that balmy spring night on the last Easter weekend of the old millennium – when Beth’s affair with Bill was still new and sweet and not the rancid old hash of bad habits and careless romance that it had eventually decayed into – had been safely at arm’s length in an incommunicado hippy commune in the middle of nowhere. Now Kayleigh had slept with her dad and would be bringing her secrets to their shared pillow.

  ‘Are you going to tell her?’ she asked in a quiet voice.

  ‘Hmm. I think, perhaps, I was hoping that if it does happen, which it may well not, that she would find out via some form of osmosis. I’m not sure I could find the words.’

  ‘No,’ she snapped, ‘and I’m not surprised. You know you can’t do this, don’t you, Dad?’

  He shrugged. It made him look about ten. ‘Well, actually, I sort of can. The question really is whether or not I will.’

  ‘It’ll cause mayhem, you know that, don’t you?’

  Colin nodded. But then he said, ‘It might not. Your mother dumped me for the woman next door, split up two families, made us all the gossip of the decade. We survived that.’

  She grimaced at him. ‘We’re not indestructible, Dad.’

  He nodded again. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no family is indestructible. But we’re pretty resilient. And this might all turn out to be a storm in a teacup anyway. And I’m not asking for your blessing. I’m just telling you. Because you and I, we’ve always been the quiet ones, haven’t we? We’ve always been the doormats, and now, look at you, finally spread your wings and escaped the evil clutches. Now it’s my turn. That’s all.’

  He folded his arms and leaned back into his chair. And then he smiled at her and Beth honestly felt as though she didn’t know the man sitting across from her. There was something burning in his eyes she’d never seen there before and it was awful.

  She sighed and she tutted and she said, ‘You’re making a mistake.’

  And he continued to smile and said, ‘Good.’

  9

  Monday 10th January 2011

  Darling Jim!

  Thank you for the virtual flowers! How did you know that delphiniums were my favourites?! It does so often feel like we’ve known each other for much longer than a few weeks, don’t you agree? I am searching the Internet for something to send you in return, so watch this space. And thank you for the new photo! You are a handsome beast! I must say that even at my age I do still have an eye for the men, I’m always subconsciously ‘eyeing up the talent’ wherever I go and I must tell you that were I to pass you on the street I would give you a very prolonged double take! I didn’t see how much hair you had in your original photo, all those lovely silver locks, gorgeous!

  So, now I think I have a crush on you. Argh! Is that OK? Do you mind?!

  So, you asked about my partner. Well, ‘he’ was actually a ‘she’. Vicky was her name. And no, before you ask, I would not describe myself as a lesbian. I would not, I think, like to describe myself as anything, other than a Lorelei.

  But certainly, for the years I was with Vicky, I did not really think about men in that way. It was all-consuming and lovely. She was my next-door neighbour and she happened to be here when we found Rhys, the night he killed himself. We got very close very quickly and then one day she kissed me and that was that really. I adored her. Unconditionally. Like everyone else who loves me, she couldn’t hack living with me. She moved out after a few years, we stopped sleeping together but we remained best of friends. Passionately good friends. She really was absolutely the best sort of person. I wish she was still here.

  So, there you go, another email, another revelation! I haven’t looked at another woman since Vicky. Which is why I can’t call myself a lesbian. It was, I suspect, a wonderful, beautiful one-off.

  All of which means that yes, the father of my children is still alive! Dear Colin! A wonderful man! NOT. Oh, dear. Well, he used to be, and gosh, probably still is in many respects. He was a wonderful father to our children but he fell out of love with me and I never really forgave him. I’m afraid I’m quite high-maintenance in that way. If I’m with someone then it really does have to be all or nothing. I’m a terrible romantic. So he kind of left the door ajar for what happened between me and Vicky. And now … oh, dear, how much more can you take?! … he lives with my son’s ex-girlfriend and her child. Who is – are you ready for this??? – his granddaughter. He is sixty-six years old! She is thirty-eight! Oh, dear, it’s quite disgusting. Really. I haven’t spoken to him in years. Not since I found out. I mean, I should know better than most that love can often be found in the most unexpected places. But not there. No. Absolutely not there. And worse than that is HER! Kayleigh! At least Vicky was a wonderful person. Kayleigh is just an utter bitch. Honestly. A spiteful, terrible person. It was her, in the end, who really rent my family apart. It was her who ruined everything.

  Argh!

  Another tale of woe for another day, I think.

  Until then, lovely man, I send you a passionate kiss, virtual, but heartfelt,

  Yours, with love,

  L

  xxxxxxxxxxx

  April 2011

  ‘Hello, Dad.’ Meg had sat down in the chair next to him before he’d spotted her walking across the plush reception hall of the boutique hotel in Mickleton.

  ‘Oh. Darling.’ He got to his feet, still bouncy and nimble at sixty-six. ‘Meg.’ He leaned in towards her and tried to embrace her but Meg’s body would not allow it and the gesture turned into a kind of teenage fumble.

  ‘You look wonderful, Meg, really amazing. You’ve lost a lot of weight.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ she muttered. ‘Funnily enough it all fell off me after the last time I saw you.’

  ‘Vicky’s funeral,’ he murmured, as though Meg had not just spoken. ‘Has it really been that long?

  ‘It most c
ertainly has.’

  Colin sat back down in the plush armchair and looked around. ‘This place is nice,’ he said. ‘Used to be a shoe shop, I think, once upon a time. Wide fittings if I recall.’ He winked and laughed and Meg stared at him blankly. ‘Where’s Molly?’

  ‘She’s in our room,’ said Meg, ‘watching endless reruns of Come Dine With Me and texting her friends.’ Her voice was dry as dust.

  Colin nodded and smiled. ‘So,’ he said, ‘how are you feeling?’

  ‘About what?’

  Colin let his jolly demeanour deflate a little. ‘Your mother, of course,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling about your mother?’

  ‘Well,’ said Meg, ‘you know. Pretty much exactly how any daughter would feel upon losing her mother. Who has starved herself to death inside a house so full of filthy shit that it is going to take her daughter two weeks to clear it out and even then there will probably be another two weeks’ worth of crap still left in there. That’s how I’m feeling. Thank you.’

  Meg flopped crossly into the back of the armchair and folded her arms across her chest.

  Colin stared at her and then leaned towards her and touched her arm. Meg pulled her arm away from him and said, ‘No, thank you. I don’t want sympathy. Or affection, OK. I just want help.’

  ‘Good,’ said Colin, removing his hand from her arm. ‘Yes. Good. Absolutely. That’s what I’m here for. To help. How bad is it?’

  Meg sighed and let her shoulders soften. ‘It’s even worse than the worst nightmares I’d been having about it. I mean, seriously, it’s … it’s …’ She noticed with some surprise that she had begun to cry. Colin touched her arm again and once more she shook it off. She was not sure she would ever accept her father’s touch again. She pulled in her tears and continued. ‘It’s absolutely shocking. Particularly downstairs. I mean, there’s literally no daylight down there. It’s all piled to the ceiling. There’s like, like, this corridor. You know. Through the piles. Like walls. And it smells –’ she put her hand over mouth – ‘it smells disgusting. And then there’s her place, her armchair, in the middle of all of this and it’s all stained and shabby and that was where she lived.’ She widened her eyes at her father, finally feeling able to make eye contact with him. ‘She lived on that chair. Slept on that chair. Ate on that chair.’ She shuddered and lowered her gaze to the floor. ‘It’s all so fucking tragic.’

  Colin sighed and put his fingers against his mouth. ‘I feel awful,’ he said. ‘I feel—’

  ‘Don’t make this all about you, Dad. This is nothing to do with you. It’s all of us. It’s everything. It’s, Christ, I was telling you she was sick decades ago. She’s always been sick. This …’ She paused. ‘This was always going to happen.’

  Colin shook his head. ‘Do you really, really believe that?’

  Meg nodded.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t agree with you. I think there was a moment. A moment when all this could have ended differently. When Mum might have found a less screwed-up way through life.’

  ‘And when was that, exactly?’

  Colin shrugged. ‘Rhys,’ he said in a small voice. ‘I suppose it must have been Rhys.’

  Meg nodded. ‘But how could we have stopped that happening? How could any of us have done anything differently? I mean, there was no build-up to it, no signs, no warning. And then afterwards – there was no note, no explanation. It was just like this utterly unconnected thing.’

  ‘I think we could have done more. To help Mum. Afterwards.’

  ‘But Mum didn’t want help!’ snapped Meg. ‘That was the whole crazy thing about it. She was fine!’ She imitated Lorelei’s bird-like trill. ‘Absolutely fine! My son’s dead! La-la-la! No.’ She shook her head. ‘I honestly don’t think there’s anything we could have done. How can you help someone who thinks, who believes, that they’re perfectly fine?’

  Colin nodded and smiled sadly. ‘I still, more than any other regret, wish I could have understood. Why he did it. What he was thinking. Maybe that’s it. You know. Maybe if there’d been an explanation we could all have moved on. Found closure. But there wasn’t and we didn’t and we’ve all gone off at tangents—’

  ‘I haven’t,’ Meg interjected brusquely.

  ‘Well, no, you haven’t. Although that’s not to say you haven’t had your own demons. But the rest of us and, my God, your poor blessed mother more than anyone. It’s almost like …’ He paused. ‘As though we all blamed each other. Because we didn’t know who else to blame. And then we just carried on blaming each other for everything.’ He sighed and a silence fell between them.

  ‘Well,’ said Meg eventually. ‘You must be hungry. Shall we go up to the room? Maybe we could have tea?’

  Colin’s face lit up. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That would be lovely. Thank you.’

  March 2005

  ‘You’re such an angel, Lorrie, I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  Vicky turned round in her wheelchair and squeezed Lorrie’s scrawny hand where it sat upon the handles.

  ‘Don’t be silly, love,’ Lorelei replied. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘No,’ said Vicky, ‘it’s not nothing. I know how much of an ordeal this is for you. I know you’d rather be at home and not ferrying me about all over the place.’

  ‘Well, darling, my car is an extension of my home, so it doesn’t feel like an ordeal. And anything to get you better, Vick, that’s all that matters now. Getting you better. For the girls. And for me.’

  Lorelei squeezed her shoulder and carried on pushing her up the corridor. Out in the car park it was a bright and breezy day; lacy clouds danced across the sky and the trees shimmered and whispered. Such a stark contrast to what had come before. Three hours of chemo in a dark hospital ward, flicking mindlessly through the old copies of Sunday supplements that Lorelei had brought for her, delighted to finally have some use for her hoard beyond the inexplicable sense of calm they brought to her existence, drinking room-temperature squash out of plastic cups, the time passing so slowly, even with Lorelei’s running commentary and soothing touch.

  Two more days of this and then she was done. Well, for now at least. Until the next time. Which was more or less inevitable given the way the wretched cancer was rampaging around her body as if it was on a whistle-stop sightseeing tour. From a pea-sized lump in her right breast to telltale aches and pains in her chest as it passed into her lymph nodes (they’d whipped the lot out like a tangle of seaweed, and taken off the tit too). And then it had showed up like a bad smell in her other boob. They did keep managing to get it and nipping the bugger in the bud. But Christ, it was insistent. It had no respect for these men and women of medicine and their superlative ways with a chemo needle and a radiography machine. But still, as everyone kept telling her, she was as strong as an ox (she wasn’t sure she appreciated the analogy, but she could kind of see where they were coming from) and she was a fighter. And yes, that much was true. She always had been, all her life. Never a person just to fold up and roll over. But still, this really was pushing it now. Three lots of cancer, three bouts of treatment, the tits gone, the hair gone, the body gone (no, she did not, as she’d always assumed, have the figure of Pamela Anderson hiding beneath her excess weight, just a slightly deflated old bag of bones, as it turned out). She was tired now, and done with it all. Her fighting spirit, she feared, was ebbing away.

  But still, on the up, her being ill really had done the world of good for Lorelei. She had risen to the challenge quite magnificently. She’d taken Vicky to all her appointments, passed her tissues, held her hand, bought her chocolate bars when she wasn’t feeling sick and ginger tea when she was. She’d even taken on the role of receptacle of doctors’ words. Vicky always felt she was on show during these meetings with consultants, as though she was supposed to smile at just the right moment and nod at the appropriate juncture, like someone being judged by Simon Cowell on The X Factor. Or make that the C Factor. Anyway, she could never remember a bloody thing they said to h
er and thank God for Lorelei, taking it all in, even making notes in a little notepad with her jumbo multicoloured biro.

  Vicky wasn’t daft. She knew why Lorrie was being so strong. She knew now that she was all Lorrie had left. Megan, pregnant again down in London, pretty much pegged to the ground she stood on by the sheer weight of all her bloody children. Beth busy being remote and unattainable in Australia. Rory pimping his soul away in Thailand and Colin, urgh, God, Colin. She could barely bring herself to think about that utterly revolting can of worms.

  So really, Vicky was it. The tattered remnants of Lorelei’s once dazzling family. And she needed Vicky more than life itself. So of course she would pull herself out of her comfort zone to do the right thing. She was so often her own worst enemy. But not now.

  Even sweet Lorelei wasn’t that bloody stupid.

  Lorelei, sensing that this was not, for once, her Easter, spent the day with Vicky and her girls in their little flat around the corner.

  She arrived at midday, buried under a deadweight of Easter eggs and daffodils. Vicky and Maddy had made a lamb tagine with couscous and roasted vegetables and thick yogurt sauce sprinkled with pumpkin seeds, and they gave each other knowing looks across the table as they watched Lorelei picking at it uncertainly, trying her hardest to accept the untraditional Easter fare, trying her hardest not to say something snippy like ‘This is all very nice, but I really don’t see how you can improve upon a simple leg of lamb.’

  ‘Yummy!’ she said, instead. ‘Really, you two should have your own cookery show or something. You’re both so incredibly clever in the kitchen.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Vicky. ‘It’s all down to Maddy. She’s the gastronomic genius in this house.’