The House We Grew Up In

by Lisa Jewell

  As they ran out of light, a rainstorm threatened overhead so they packed themselves into the people carrier and headed for the pub. It was one of the few locals that hadn’t been turned into a gastropub, that still had patterned carpets and laminated menus.

  ‘I used to come here all the time,’ said Rory, taking it all in, his hands stuffed into the pockets of one of his dad’s fleecy jackets. ‘This was where me and my mates used to do all our underage drinking. The landlord turned a blind eye.’ He shrugged.

  Colin went to buy them drinks at the bar and they shuffled themselves into a booth by the open back door. Rory was talking about the mates he’d left behind, wondering what happened to so-and-so and what’s-his-name, remembering terrible tales of multicoloured vomit and setting fire to bins. Molly was staring at him adoringly. The rain was coming down now outside the door in weighty sheets, rumbles of thunder on the far horizon. Colin returned with a metal tray and offloaded the round: red wine for Megan and himself, J20 for Molly, fizzy water for Rory and Beth. And there they sat; Colin, Megan, Bethan, Rory and Molly. In the pub, having a drink together.

  Megan sucked it in. She felt an odd nostalgia; odd, because this had never happened before. She had never sat in a pub with her family before. But she liked it. Very much.

  ‘What are your plans?’ she asked Rory.

  He grimaced. ‘I want to make amends,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ She’d been expecting a more prosaic response.

  ‘I want to make amends. I want to make up for it all, for all the mess I made. I want to clear out Mum’s house and make it beautiful again. I want to grow up.’

  Everyone nodded, but it was clear that nobody really understood what he was saying.

  ‘How’s Tia?’ he said to Colin and the shock of the words sent invisible ripples across the table.

  ‘Oh!’ said Colin, flushing slightly. ‘She’s great. Really, really great.’

  ‘Would she like to meet me, do you think?’

  Megan gulped. My God. Rory had never been one to say what was on his mind. He’d never, as far as she was aware, actually had anything on his mind. And now here he was, upfront and saying it plain.

  ‘My goodness, well, yes,’ said Colin. ‘Yes, she would. I know she would. I’ve only ever said good things about you. Both of us have …’

  Rory nodded staunchly. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Maybe she’ll come for the funeral?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Colin, ‘I expect she will. Especially if she knows you’ll be here.’

  Rory nodded again. Then he put down his water, looked around and said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. For everything. If it hadn’t been for me, everything might have been so different.’

  Beth and Megan both said, ‘What?’ at the same time.

  ‘I was so self-centred,’ he said. ‘When we started big school I just abandoned Rhys. Left him to get on with it. He used to sit outside my bedroom door sometimes, just listening to me. I knew he was there and I never asked him in. I never asked him out with my mates. I never let him into my life. It was like I dumped him, you know? Like he was a girlfriend I’d had enough of.’ He let his shoulders slump and he sighed. ‘He killed himself because of me. And it’s time to stop running away from that fact and to start dealing with it.’ He shrugged. ‘So here I am. Cheers.’

  He raised his glass of water and everyone else raised their drinks and it was the strangest toast that Megan had ever heard in her life.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said, more to normalise the situation than because she knew it to be true.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said simply, ‘it was.’

  Megan and Bethan looked at each other.

  ‘I’ve had plenty of time to think about this,’ he continued. ‘And I know I’m right.’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ said Colin, in a tone of voice that suggested the unburdening of a great weight.

  ‘No,’ said Bethan, her voice catching. ‘It’s mine.’

  A crack of lightning lit the bruised sky. Another roll of thunder followed suit.

  ‘It was none of us,’ said Megan, looking at her family. ‘It was all of us.’

  15

  Saturday 12th March 2011

  Oh, Jim, I cannot shake this blasted cough. Honestly. I feel like an old woman, like I’ve aged a decade in a few weeks. It doesn’t help that I’m losing all this weight. It’s a vicious cycle – I’m too weak to eat, then I get weaker because I haven’t eaten. I have, you’ll be thrilled to hear, made an appointment at the GP’s, I can just about bear the thought of that woman’s hands on my oesophagus. JUST ABOUT. In the meantime, Project Go and See Jim has ground to a halt. And to be frank, right now, Jim, sex is about the furthest thing from my mind. And it’s not often I can say that!

  So, I’ve been thinking about Rhys again. I’ve thought more about Rhys in the past few months than I have in the past two decades. It’s like he’s back, in this house sometimes. You know how you have a memory of something, and it’s flat, you know, like a piece of paper. It’s just a fact that you can recall. A moment. And then other times that memory extrapolates itself into something three-dimensional with smells and textures and colour? And you think to yourself; where was that hiding all this time? Do you ever get that, Jim? Well, as you know, that’s why I keep so many things, because of that innate energy that things carry, that shadow of a memory that each thing casts. And the other day I went into Rhys’s room (did I tell you that I keep it as he left it? Completely uncluttered? Isn’t that odd? Maybe you could find a theory for that. You’re so good at theorising, Jim) and I walked in and it was as though he was THERE! In the room. And I’ve never felt that before, not once in all these years, and I’m a pretty spiritual person as you know, Jim. So it’s odd that I’ve never felt it. But I realised it wasn’t a ghost, it was his SPIRIT and then I realised that a spirit is just another word for a memory, isn’t it? The stronger the memory the stronger the spirit. Because as much as I’d love to believe that the spirit lives on as a thing separate to humanity, I know that’s not true. It’s in our minds, in our hearts, that a person’s spirit lives on. And I felt SO SAD, Jim, that all these years I’ve denied his spirit because I couldn’t bear to think of him. Like I’d stifled his spirit. Let it fester.

  And for some reason this day, I was open to it. I let it in. All the memories. All the power. And there he was. My little boy. With all his confusion and oddness and frailty. I could smell his scalpy hair smell, see the way he used to sit with his knees together and his toes pointed in. I could feel the tension around him. It was always there, like a force field. I heard his voice, that flat monotone he used to speak in. And I remembered, VIVIDLY, the day before he died. I was in his room and he was sitting on his bed with his back against the wall, his knees up, picking at some dry skin on the heel of his hand. He had a watch, a big chunky plastic thing that had buttons on it. He had a sweatband on the other wrist, a bit grubby. I was hoovering (ha! Imagine that! Having floor to hoover!) and he just watched me. Through his fringe. With those dull blue eyes. I remember wondering if he would ever find anyone to love him the way I did. If there was anything there for another person to see and to want. Isn’t that awful? Never came close to feeling anything like that for the others. I just knew they had qualities that other people would want. But not him. Not Rhys.

  Oh, God. It was wonderful (like he was alive!) and dreadful (I hadn’t loved him properly!). And then it was gone. Like a popped bubble. And I started to think, serious, for the first time, about what happened later, what happened that evening. Oh, Jim, I almost threw up, you know? Literally, my food came up my throat. So I stopped the thoughts. But I’m going to go back into his room later, or maybe tomorrow. I’m going to go in and see if I can bring it back, what happened. Properly. Not just the aborted moment I’ve been playing over and over in my head all these years, like a disembodied bar of music. I need to remember the whole thing, every moment. And if I can do that, Jim, I’m going to tell you all about it. Because
I want you to know. And this is it, I suppose. This is the kernel of the thing. The piece of grit that got stuck inside me and turned everything else into what it is. And as you know, Jim, it ain’t no pearl.

  Thank you, Jim, thank you for being here. For listening. For wanting to know. I don’t know what I’d do without you, my love. I truly don’t.

  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  April 2011

  Molly and Megan were still in the expensive boutique hotel. Megan was no longer thinking about the tariff. She could not imagine settling it without passing out or laughing maniacally until she fell over. But there was absolutely no imminent possibility of moving into Mum’s house. They were on day four. The kitchen was empty. They had celebrated by cooking a meal and sitting together at the table. The kitchen had not exactly sparkled and gleamed; there were dust balls in the drawers, shelves hanging off the walls, stains on the pine table, and the flagstones were almost black with entrenched dirt. But still, there it was. A kitchen. An Aga. A roast chicken and steamed broccoli. Microwaved chocolate pudding. Wine, beer, candlelight.

  The uncovering of the yellow walls had been momentous, revealing the children’s gallery that had been obscured for so long. Molly had examined it in great detail, endearingly searching out pictures by her mother. ‘Look, Mum! Look, you drew this when you were five! It’s so adorable!’ Colin and Megan had photographed the gallery in situ before painstakingly unpeeling each drawing, choosing ones to keep and recycling the rest. The wall of art had preserved the brightness of the paint beneath and it was an atypical and welcome jolt of colour in a house that had grown grey with neglect.

  And now here they were, Molly and Megan, back in their hotel room, bathed and pink, in fresh pyjamas, Molly cross-legged with her hair in a turban, oscillating between texting a friend and watching I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. Megan had just got off the phone to Bill, and was about to open a book when her phone rang. It was Colin.

  ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘Rory just found something. In Mum’s room. It looks like it might be her computer password. Can you try and collect her laptop tomorrow morning? On your way here?’

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Just a scribbled thing. In a notepad. It says –’ she envisaged him lowering his reading glasses – ‘abc123mbrr’.

  Megan. Bethan. Rory. Rhys.

  ‘Sounds likely,’ she replied, scribbling it down on the hotel’s paper pad. ‘I’ll drive over there first thing.’

  She hung up a moment later and turned to Molly. ‘I think we’ve got the password for Grandma’s laptop. We’ll try it out tomorrow.’

  Molly made a circle of her mouth. ‘Ooh,’ she said, ‘wicked!’ And then she turned back to the telly and frowned. ‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘what kind of idiot has a baby’s head hanging out of their vagina and still thinks they’re just having a bad period?’

  Rory lay back against the scorched grass. The moon hung above him, almost full. Stars glittered in constellations. It was the same moon he’d stared into in Thailand. The same stars that had bedecked the same velvety sky. Extraordinary, but starting to feel more likely by the day. He got to his feet and wandered barefoot across the warm grass. He remembered it now. He remembered home. He remembered having sex with Kayleigh down there, by the hammock. He remembered chasing Rhys around the flagstone paths, a loaded water pistol in his hand. He remembered his mother turning cartwheels, without preamble or announcement. He remembered people, members of the cast of his childhood who’d wandered off the set, never to be seen again: aunts and uncles and cousins, dogs, neighbours, friends. He turned back to appraise the house from this distance. It had always been so full of people and so full of life.

  Tonight had been good. They’d cleared away enough of the junk in the kitchen to cook a meal. They’d sat there, the five of them, faces over flickering candlelight, eating, drinking, remembering how to be a family. And then, after the girls had left – Megan and Molly back to their posh hotel, Bethan to Vicky’s old flat – Rory had gone up to his mother’s room. He’d had a sense of needing to find something. He wasn’t sure what. He had no particular question in mind, just a series of black holes needing to be filled. He’d sat in her chair, inhaled the scent of her hair on the back of it, dusty and dry, with that hint of stale spice-cupboard that he always associated with her. He’d put on her enormous headphones, her cans. He’d laughed to himself. DJ Lorelei in da house. He’d pulled her duvet up to his chin, smelled the unwashed skin on it, the dampness and the death. She’d let herself die. Was that the same as killing yourself? He didn’t know.

  Then he’d started rifling through her things, the papers that sat on either side of her. Old newspapers, unopened bills, her horoscopes neatly torn out of magazines and papers. Hairpins, velvet hair scrunchies, bottles of dried-up nail polish, old teabags and half-eaten packets of biscuits and rice cakes. A notepad full of lists. Names of social workers. Phone numbers for the Department of Health. All the people who’d phoned her, trying to help, their numbers duly noted and then forgotten about. Because she didn’t want to be helped. He’d found two little parcels, wrapped in pink paper, one with his name on it, the other with Beth’s. He’d put them in his pocket. Saved them for tomorrow. And then he’d found a small piece of lilac paper, taken from one of those paper cube towers, housed in red Perspex. On it was written the code: ‘abc123mbrr’.

  There, he’d thought, there. A key. A way in. Maybe.

  He walked around the garden now, from corner to corner, trying to fill his head with more and more memories. It was as if he was rebuilding his childhood, step by step. The garden had been more important to him, growing up, than the house. This was where it all happened. Balls and dogs and water and mud, slides and swings and wrestling and horseplay. And egg hunts, of course. He remembered each nook and cranny now. The cracks in the stone walls. The flowerpots and crooks of trees. He heard the echo of the noise his wings might have made as he’d flown from home, so suddenly, so starkly, without a moment of nostalgia or regret. And then he ran his finger through the gaps in the wall, praying to the gods of all above, Just one egg. Just one little egg. Just to know that it had all been true, that he hadn’t imagined it. And there it was, a moment later, held between his thumb and his forefinger, a small pink egg. He held it triumphantly to the moon.

  Then he put it in his pocket with the two little parcels he’d found in his mum’s drawer and the slip of paper with the password on, and headed back inside.

  Bethan lay on her back in Vicky’s old bed, in Vicky’s old room, staring at the paper shade over Vicky’s old light. She’d gone straight to bed after Megan had driven her back. Sophie had some friends over, young friends, squawking and shouting and talking over each other the way teenagers do. Sophie, eyes glazed and heavy with cider, had said, ‘Come in! Come in!’ There’d been pizza boxes everywhere and all eyes had come to rest on Beth’s bump as though it was the last thing anyone had expected to see, as though she’d brought a baby hippo into the room with her. She’d said, ‘No, thank you, I’m exhausted. But have fun.’

  ‘We’ll try and be quiet,’ Sophie had said.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ she’d replied.

  She turned heavily on to her side at the sound of her phone receiving a text message, and squashed a cushion under her bump. It was from Megan:

  Dad found a password, might be for Mum’s laptop. I’ll pick you up 9 a.m. and we’ll go via the repair shop. Sleep tight, Bethy. Sleep tight, baby bump. Love you both. x

  Bethan’s eyes widened. Her heart filled with pleasure. Megan’s love. She had missed it so much. She kissed the screen of her phone. She typed back:

  Love you too. xxx

  Then she slept, deep and peaceful, for the rest of the night.

  The repair shop had sent Lorelei’s laptop to a nephew in Tetbury. The nephew in Tetbury was not answering his phone so Megan, Beth and Molly had to drive all the way there. The nephew opened the door of a tiny cottage in a back lane in just a tow
el, with a cigarette burning in his hand. He hurriedly stubbed it out when he saw Bethan’s bump and went up a tiny staircase in the middle of the house to get changed. A moment later he returned, dressed and combed, with Lorelei’s laptop in his hands.

  Megan stared greedily at it. On there was the story of Jim. On there, potentially, was the story of why her mother had died in the front seat of her car, half a mile away from her own home.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ said the nephew, whose name was Josh, ‘but I don’t think I’m going to be able to crack this for you.’ He then launched into a very technical, jargon-heavy explanation for his failure which Megan interrupted by waving a piece of paper with the hotel’s logo on the top at him and saying, ‘Yes, yes, thank you, but we think we’ve found it. The password.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Josh. He plugged the laptop into the wall and opened it up. Then, with large, bitten-down fingers, he typed the password into the login page. The laptop made a pretty noise, and then, there it was. Windows.