The House We Grew Up In

by Lisa Jewell

  She smiled warmly at Maddy who returned her smile with just a hint of long-suffering. Since Vicky had sided with Maddy one hundred per cent over what they all referred to in private as the ‘little shit incident’ and taken them out of the Bird House and into this cute little flat around the corner, her relationship with her eldest daughter had flourished. And it was such a tiresome cliché to say that your daughter was like your best friend, but really, with her and Maddy it was true. It was almost as if the aftermath of the ‘little shit incident’ had somehow taken them on a different route through these potentially tricky teenage years, a bypass around the hell that Vicky had been expecting ever since she’d first been presented with a baby daughter fourteen years previously. Never a cross word, never a dramatic sigh, never a slammed door. Just companionship. Vicky felt truly blessed. And in this last year, since her initial diagnosis, that bond had grown even deeper. She mouthed the words, ‘I love you,’ across the table at her daughter who rolled her eyes and smiled.

  ‘How amazing,’ said Lorelei, oblivious, as ever, to undercurrents. ‘None of mine can cook. Well, not that I’m aware of, at least.’ She let out a brittle laugh and pushed some grains of couscous around her plate.

  ‘Meg makes a nice stir-fry,’ said Vicky, trying to leverage some positivity into the conversation before it got too bogged down in poor old me.

  ‘Anyone can make a nice stir-fry,’ Lorelei responded.

  ‘Well, no, that’s not strictly true. It does take a certain knack.’

  ‘I did think that at least one of them might end up with some flair in the kitchen.’

  Vicky and Maddy exchanged another look, another pair of suctioned-in smiles. Just the way Lorrie’s children always used to. Those looks that had so angered Vicky when she was crazy in love with her. But she was no longer crazy in love with her. That illusion had been well and truly shattered.

  ‘Says the woman who subsists on rice cakes and Krispy Kremes,’ she said affectionately.

  ‘Well, really, there’s hardly any point cooking when it’s just you. I used to be a good cook. When I was younger. When the kiddos were about. I was always in the kitchen. I just don’t see the point any more.’ She had joined her knife and fork together in the centre of her plate, although she’d eaten barely half. Vicky, too, had eaten only a handful of food, just to be polite, just to keep it all ticking along. Her poor poisoned stomach could not have taken any more. The girls were still eating, in that delicate, birdlike way of young girls, as though there were no pleasure to be had from it at all. And maybe there wasn’t, thought Vicky sadly. Maybe there wasn’t. This time last year she’d been well, Megan and the kids had been here, they’d been high with the euphoria of clearing out Lorrie’s kitchen, nobody knew about Colin and Kayleigh, nobody knew about Rory and his sleazy lifestyle. And surely, yes, the food must have tasted better that day. So much better.

  ‘Lovely lunch,’ said Lorrie, a film of tears over her eyes. ‘Really lovely lunch.’

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ said Vicky, squeezing her bony hand across the table. ‘You are sweet.’

  From: Colin.bird@hotmail.com

  To: MeganRoseLiddingtonBird@yahoo.co.uk; RoryBird2@hotmail.com; Bethanbabybird@arthouseframing.co.au

  27th March 2005

  Hello, my dearest darling children,

  I’m writing this from a café in Madrid. I’ve decided to spend a few weeks away from the community, I think all of us needed some space. It’s been getting a bit messy. Well, messier than usual, let’s put it that way. Adie, that’s the guy who Kayleigh lives with, he’s having some kind of breakdown, or God, I don’t know, a manic thing. I’m not really sure, but there’s medication involved and he’s refusing to take it and yada, yada, yada, he doesn’t seem to be quite so relaxed about our ‘arrangement’ any more and doesn’t really want me around. And to be perfectly frank, it’s come at a good time. I had hoped that given time the three of you might have accepted the choice I made a year ago but that clearly isn’t the case and I’m half mad with despair and longing for you all. I feel like we’re at opposite sides of some warped mirror, like I can see you all, but when I go to touch you you’re not there. I realise I’m going through something, something mad and ridiculous, but then I think all of us, in different ways, have made some not-so-great choices over the years. I think all of us have baggage that we didn’t ask for. I wanted you all to understand and to give me the time and the freedom to make my own mistakes, but I cannot blame you for not doing that. You are my children. I am your father. I should be better than that. I understand. If my own lovely dad, God rest his precious soul, had done something along the lines of what I have done, I would have had terrible trouble accepting it.

  So now, I have two choices: a) go back to the community, see it through, whatever it is (and I know none of you want to hear this, but God, I love her, I really, really do) and hope that you will all come round to the idea but accept that maybe you never will or b) give her up, go home, pretend none of it ever happened and wait for you all to forgive me.

  Talk about Sophie’s Choice …

  In the meantime, here is a recent photo of Tia. She’s five and a half now, bright as a button, so clever. She calls me Papa, in case you’re wondering, and she is desperate to meet you all one day, her aunties and her cousins. We took her back to Ireland for Christmas, it was a perfect joy to see her with all her cousins over there, but joy tinged with sadness because she’s not yet met the ones who really matter to me.

  So, I’ll be here for a while, until Adie is either better or gone, and hopefully while I’m here I can reach some kind of resolution with everything. And quite apart from me and my own issues and ruminations, remember to speak to your mother over the Easter weekend. She’s spending it with Vicky and as you probably all know, it may well be the last for the pair of them. Make sure they feel loved.

  I love you all so much. You can’t ever imagine the physical pain I feel not being with you all, knowing what my actions have caused. Happy Easter, my beautiful glorious children.

  Love, hugs, kisses, from your

  Dad

  xxx

  Megan looked around the table. It was, as they kept telling each other, a bumper day of celebrations. Alfie’s eighth birthday. Easter Sunday. And the return of Molly from her first stay away from home after a week on a PGL camp with the rest of Year 5. And so, arranged around the table in no particular order, were all three of her children, Bill, Bill’s brother Frank, his girlfriend Sonia, their son Frank Jnr, Bill’s recently widowed dad Bobby and Meg’s recently divorced best friend Charlotte, who also happened to be the mother of Alfie’s best friend at school, James.

  Extra chairs had been commandeered from other parts of the house and Charlotte had brought four extra place settings. There’d been oysters and shell-on prawns with garlic mayonnaise for starters and now they were clearing their plates of roasted lamb and vegetables with a red-wine gravy. She’d had to do it all from cookery books; she wasn’t a natural-born chef and had been up at seven, apron on, everything arranged on the counter, a pre-printed timings sheet Sellotaped to the tiled wall, hair tied back, ready to go. She didn’t cut any corners the way she normally did; no expensive, shop-bought gravy or ready-to-cook roast potatoes. All from scratch. This was their first Easter at home in four years and Megan was pregnant with what was categorically going to be her last child and she wanted this day to be perfect. In every single way.

  Bill smiled at her across the table. ‘Good work,’ he said. And Megan smiled and felt the compliment warm her up from the inside out. They’d had some awful times the last few years; she’d even kicked him out two years ago, told him she couldn’t live with a man who had two mobile phones and slept in his office every night, a man who shouted at his children and answered all her questions with a grunt. She knew he’d been sleeping with someone else. Possibly even a whole procession of someone elses. She honestly hadn’t cared. She’d lain alone in bed at night, picturing him in boutique hotel
rooms, slamming himself into some tiny blonde from behind, with wild eyes and his tongue hanging out, and had not been able to rustle up even an iota of upset. She’d imagined him lying on a blanket on a starry London night with someone small and feminine, caressing her face with his fingertips and staring lovingly into her eyes and she’d simply shrugged to herself and thought, Well, you know, at least someone’s making him happy.

  But that was the problem: they weren’t making him happy. Whoever he was sleeping with or romancing or fucking or falling in love with or whatever, was making him miserable. And that was why she’d kicked him out. He’d come back three days later with a tiny gold bird on a chain in a Liberty’s box and said, ‘Please, can you let me try again.’

  And crazy as it sounds, everything had changed. No more shouting, no more nights away, no more monosyllables. And after a year, once she truly believed that this was it, that they’d broken the cycle and found a better way of being together, she’d suggested a last baby. And he’d smiled and said, ‘Well, I was going to suggest a wedding, but if you’d prefer a baby …’ And she’d smiled and said, ‘Baby first, maybe a wedding later?’ Six months later she was pregnant.

  She waited for a lull in the chatter and then she said, ‘By the way. We had the gender scan on Thursday.’

  Charlotte and Sonia let out little gasps of excitement. After two virtually identical boys (Alf and Stan were almost impossible to tell apart when they were sitting down) and a six-year gap, there was a tangible and rather irritating bias towards a girl from most quarters. And really, honestly, Megan did not mind. Her mother had managed the neat little two boys/two girls combination and look how that had ended. Just a happy child, that was what she wanted. A happy bonny child with a winning smile and a sunny disposition.

  ‘It’s going to be …’ She dragged out the suspense, almost spitefully, knowing that she would not be giving her guests what they were looking for. ‘Another boy!’

  She heard the disappointment buried in the noises of glee and delight that emanated from her guests. And she smiled. Her fourth child. Her last baby. She could not wait to meet him. She would make sure he was at the centre of everything, the axis around which they all spun. She would keep him there, fully integrated, if she had to pull muscles doing it. This boy would never miss an Easter lunch, unnoticed, unremarked upon. She held her hand soft against her stomach and thought, My special boy, my lovely special boy.

  She called her mother after lunch, taking her mobile into the quietest corner of the house and shutting the door. She sighed as she waited for Lorelei to pick up the call. It had been nearly two months since her last visit to the Bird House and she was racked with guilt. Here she was, in the bosom of her family, warm and loved, her future unrolling in front of her like a feel-good movie, another baby on the way, surrounded, completely surrounded, while her mother sat a hundred miles away and ate food with her dying lover. She should have been there. She knew that. It was probably Vicky’s last Easter. It would have taken everyone’s minds off everything, the chaos and clatter of her unruly family. But she’d looked at the day from every angle and seen objectively that she had to be selfish. Alfie wanted his friend here on his birthday and Molly had only just got back from a trip away; she did not want to have to pack up and sit on motorways again, sleep in someone else’s bed. Bill’s dad couldn’t be alone today, his first Easter without his wife. She’d invited Lorelei, but purely to ease her guilt. Which it hadn’t. In the least.

  ‘Hello!’ she said when Lorelei finally picked up after ten rings.

  ‘Oh, hello, darling. How lovely to hear from you. How’s things?’

  ‘Good,’ she said circumspectly. ‘It’s been a nice day. How about you?’

  ‘Ah, well, you know. It’s been perfectly nice.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at Vick’s. We’re just about to have tea and a cake.’

  ‘One of yours?’

  Her mother laughed wryly. ‘Oh, no, darling. Not today. Apparently we’ve got a lovely shop-bought one from Waitrose.’

  ‘You mean you’ve covered over the Aga again?’ She tried to keep her voice soft and kind, but even she could hear the strand of annoyance running through it.

  Lorelei sighed and Megan felt awful.

  ‘How’s Vicky?’ She changed the subject.

  ‘Oh, trooping on. You know. She looks absolutely dreadful. But the girls are being amazing. So supportive. They never leave her side.’

  Megan said nothing. The comment sounded innocent in Lorelei’s sing-song tones but was as loaded as a double-barrelled gun.

  ‘If it was you, Mummy …’ she began patiently.

  ‘Yes, yes. I do know that. Of course I know that. But still.’

  ‘Still what?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s all such a terrible shame. All of it. What happened to us. We used to be such a tight-knit little bunch. And now we’re like a bunch of raggle-taggle gypsies.’

  Megan thought briefly of the heinous email from her father this morning, that she had both read and deleted in roughly thirty-five seconds. ‘Well, you know, that’s life, isn’t it? Families aren’t all the same.’

  ‘I wonder …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, gosh, I don’t know. I do sometimes wonder how different things would have been for us all, if Rhys hadn’t … well.’

  ‘Hanged himself?’ Meg winced. So harsh, but really, her mother was nearly sixty. Rhys had killed himself fourteen years ago. She had to find some words for it. She had to have processed it by now. Surely.

  ‘No!’ said Lorelei. ‘Well, yes. I suppose. But do you think, Meggy, do you think we might all have been a bit closer now? If Rhys was still here?’

  Meg absent-mindedly rubbed her stomach with her spare hand. She sighed. ‘That’s something we’ll never know.’

  ‘I do sometimes think it’s quite amazing, how I’ve dealt with it. You know. I do sometimes think … well, I honestly … I barely grieved. Isn’t that remarkable?’

  Megan took in a sharp breath, felt it bruise against her ribs.

  ‘I mean, I was terribly sad, obviously. But I never felt …’

  Megan let the silence play out towards her mother’s next words with a terrible sense of dread.

  ‘I never felt devastated. Isn’t that strange? And he was my baby. My littlest one. And I didn’t feel devastated.’

  The next silence was weighed down with the sense of Lorelei’s own surprise. It was clear to Megan that she’d only just acknowledged this fact, that it had just this very minute presented itself to her and that she did not know quite what to make of it.

  ‘It is strange, Mum. Really strange and it’s …’ She rubbed her bump again, her baby, her littlest one, and she chose her next words carefully, realising that this was the first time she had ever had a window into her mother’s mind and an opportunity to climb in and change something. ‘I think it’s got a lot to do with your habits. Your … collecting of things. I think it’s a coping strategy. I think that’s why you can’t let go of things, because they stop you thinking too much, protect you from your own emotions. I think—’

  ‘Oh, Meggy!’ Her mother cut in suddenly, her voice lilting and full of delight. ‘The girls have just brought in the cake! It’s simply beautiful – all covered over in yellow royal icing and baby chicks and pastel-coloured eggs. I wish you could see it! It’s the most beautiful Easter cake I’ve ever seen! And look, even a little chocolate nest in the middle. How completely adorable.’

  Megan sighed and brushed her hair away from her face. Less of a window, then, and more of a pinhole. She wrapped up the phone call and made her way back to her party.

  Beth sat on the terrace of her Sydney apartment, a book open and unread upon her lap, staring thoughtlessly into space. She had been sitting this way for nearly three minutes. It was something she did more and more these days, almost like blacking out, like fainting with her eyes open. After another moment she came round and shook the blank
ness from her head. She looked from side to side, trying to remember what she’d been doing, who she was with. She remembered that it was Sunday afternoon, that she was alone, that she was due at her boyfriend Richard’s place in an hour, that she needed to have a shower and get changed. She pulled her hair from her face, closed her book and got to her feet.

  She should probably see someone about these blackouts. Supposing it happened while she was driving? It had happened at work the other day, while she was in a meeting. Her boss had said, ‘Beth? Beth? Earth calling Beth?’ and everyone had laughed and she’d smiled nervously and said, ‘Sorry, sorry, miles away.’ But miles away was not accurate. Nowhere at all was more like it.

  She showered and changed, fixed a clip to her fringe, buckled up her black-and-white cork-soled Mary-Janes, glanced at herself in the mirror, smiled wanly and drove to Richard’s. He met her at his front door in his customary uniform of short-sleeved shirt and jeans. Not a man of style. He wasn’t fussed about clothes. She sometimes thought they looked like an odd couple, her all bedecked in girlie clutter, him all straight-up and mannish. He pulled her to him and smelled her, as he always did, like a mother to a baby.

  ‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘Yum.’

  She wore a scent she’d bought in a local boutique, a brand she’d never heard of before, something new to cover over the aroma of her old persona. She was all about signatures, these days: signature scent, signature side parting with a single diamante clip, signature Mary-Janes in zingy colours, signature pinky-red lipstick. She was instantly recognisable these days. To everyone but herself. To herself, she was still a stranger.

  ‘Look what I’ve got for us,’ said Richard, leading her to his kitchen counter and opening up a drawer. He pulled out a pair of Creme Eggs and handed one to her. ‘Four dollars a pop. Happy Easter!’

  She held the Creme Egg in the palm of her hand and stared at it. They always threw her off kilter, these little chunks of home. Richard loved them, knew all the best places to get hold of Anglo stuff. But Beth found them unsettling. She spoke with an Antipodean twang, she used Australian slang, she was assimilated. One hundred per cent. She didn’t need “little chunks of home”. They were like slightly sinister postcards from old enemies.