The House We Grew Up In Read online

  Megan unthinkingly squeezed her fist around the gold foil that she’d just unpeeled from the big egg she’d found in the cherry tree, and jumped slightly as her mother’s hand slapped down against hers.

  ‘Foil!’ Lorelei cried. ‘Foil!’

  She immediately let her fist fall open and her mother took the crumpled foil with a smile. ‘Thank you, darling,’ she said sweetly. She let her gaze fall on the foil and said, ‘Look at it, so pretty, so shiny, so … happy.’

  The Easter holidays stretched out for another week. The heatwave continued and the Bird children came indoors only for beakers of squash, slices of bread and butter and desperately needed visits to the toilet.

  Friends came and went, there was a day trip to the beach at Weston-super-Mare, and on the last weekend of the holidays they had a visit from Lorelei’s sister Pandora and her two teenage sons. Dad filled the paddling pool and the adults drank glasses of Pimm’s with fruit-shaped plastic ice cubes bobbing about in them. Megan’s cousin Tom played David Bowie songs on his heavily stickered guitar. Rory burst the paddling pool with a stick and the water seeped heavily on to the lawn, leaving it waterlogged and boggy, and Dad said, ‘Well, that’s that then.’ Lorelei scooped the floppy remains of the punctured pool into her arms like an injured child and carried it into the garage murmuring, ‘Dad’ll fix it up.’ Dad said, ‘You and I both know that Dad won’t fix it up. I have no idea how to fix paddling pools and I still haven’t fixed the one that got burst last year.’ And Lorelei smiled and blew him a kiss across the garden.

  Dad sighed and said, ‘Well. We now have three punctured paddling pools sitting in our garage – this house is just a dumping ground,’ and raised his eyebrows heavenwards.

  Pandora smiled and said, ‘Just like our dad. He never could throw anything away.’

  Megan’s other cousin Ben smiled and said, ‘Tell us again about what Lorelei used to collect when she was a child.’

  Pandora frowned and then smiled. ‘Autumn leaves. Ring pulls. Tags from new clothes. Cinema stubs. The silver foil from Mum’s cigarette packets.’

  ‘And hair!’ said Ben gleefully. ‘Don’t forget the hair.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pandora, ‘any time anyone in our family had a haircut, Lorelei begged to keep it. She had a shopping bag full of it under her bed. It was quite gruesome.’

  The adults and teenagers laughed and Megan looked at them curiously. They’d had this conversation before – every time they were together, it sometimes seemed – and whenever she heard them talking about her mum like this it sounded different. The older she got the less she found it funny and the more she found it peculiar. Because she was now the age that her mother had been at the time of these strange childhood collections and she could no more imagine herself collecting old hair than she could asking to go to school on a Saturday.

  ‘Are you laughing at me?’ her mother asked good-naturedly as she returned from the garage.

  ‘No, no, no!’ said Ben. ‘Absolutely not. We’re just talking about you affectionately.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Lorelei, wiping her damp hands down the length of her long denim skirt. ‘I strongly suspect not.’

  And then she spread her arms upwards, revealing unshaved armpits of lush brown curls and declared, ‘Look at that sky, just look at it. The blueness of it. Makes me want to snatch out handfuls of it and put it in my pockets.’

  Megan saw a look pass over her father’s face at that moment. Love and worry. As though he was aching to say something unspeakable.

  The look softened as Megan watched and then he smiled and said, ‘If my wife had her way, her pockets would be full of pieces of every single thing in the world.’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ beamed Lorelei. ‘They would be. Totally and absolutely bulging.’

  Pandora had brought home-made butterfly cakes with fluffed-up cream and more tiny yellow chicks atop.

  Lorelei served them in the garden with tea from a pot and scones and cream. There was more Pimm’s and a plastic bowl of strawberries. The twins ran barefoot back and forth from the hosepipe to fill their water pistols, which, after countless tellings-off, they were using to squirt only each other. Tom and Ben had retired to the bottom of the garden to smoke cigarettes in the hammock and share secret jokes together. Megan and Bethan sat side by side, listening to the grown-ups talk.

  When Megan herself was a grown-up and people came to ask about her childhood, it was afternoons such as these that would impel her to say, ‘My childhood was perfect.’

  And it was. Perfect.

  They lived in a honey-coloured house that sat hard up against the pavement of a picture-postcard Cotswolds village and stretched out beyond into three-quarters of an acre of rambling half-kempt gardens. Their mother was a beautiful hippy called Lorelei with long tangled hair and sparkling green eyes who treated her children like precious gems. Their father was a sweet gangly man called Colin, who still looked like a teenager with floppy hair and owlish round-framed glasses. They all attended the village school, they ate home-cooked meals together every night, their extended family was warm and clever; there was money for parties and new paddling pools, but not quite enough for foreign travel, but it didn’t matter, because they lived in paradise. And even as a child, Megan knew this to be paradise. Because, she could see with hindsight, her mother told her so. Her mother existed entirely in the moment. And she made every moment sparkle. No one in Megan’s family was ever allowed to forget how lucky they were. Not even for a second.

  A cloud passed over the sun just then and Lorelei laughed and pointed and said, ‘Look! Look at that cloud! Isn’t it wonderful? It looks exactly like an elephant!’

  April 2011

  The keys were where Lorelei had always left them, under a cracked plant pot behind a water pipe beneath the kitchen window. Meg pulled them out and dusted the sticky cobwebs from her fingertips. ‘Yuck.’

  The house had been impenetrable by either of its front doors for many years now. The family had always come in and out through the kitchen door at the back and for the last few years Lorelei had been using both hallways at the front as bonus ‘storage areas’.

  ‘Right,’ Meg said, rejoining Molly by the back door, ‘let’s go. Deep breath.’ She threw her daughter a brave smile and was gratified to see her smile reflected back at her.

  ‘You OK, Mum?’

  Meg nodded. Of course she was OK. Meg was always OK. Someone had to be and she’d been the one to draw that straw. ‘I’m fine, love, thank you.’

  Molly peered at her curiously and then took one of her hands in her own and squeezed it gently. Meg almost flinched at the tender power of it. Her daughter’s touch. Until recently her last memory of her daughter’s touch had been the sting of a palm across her cheek, the jab of toes against her shins, the drag of fingernails down her arm. It had been that bad. Truly. Everything she’d been warned about teenage girls, squared and squared again. But lately, things had started to change. Lately, it seemed as though her daughter had started to like her again.

  ‘Thank you, love,’ she said again.

  ‘You know you can talk about it, don’t you? You know I want to listen. I want to help. You’ve lost your mummy. If I lost my mummy, I’d …’ Molly’s eyes filled with tears and she smiled through them. ‘Oh, God, well, you know.’

  Meg laughed. ‘I know, baby, I know. But honestly. I’m good. Really.’

  Molly squeezed her hand one more time before letting it go. She pulled in her breath theatrically and then nodded at the key in Meg’s hand. Meg nodded back and fitted it into the lock. She turned the key. She opened the door.

  March 1986

  The sky was dark with rain clouds and in the very far distance, thunder was starting to rumble. The York stone paving slabs were still stained charcoal grey from the last downpour and fat droplets of rain clung tremulously to the edges of leaves and spring blossoms. Behind the cloud was a strip of blue and there on the horizon, the faint beginnings of a rainbow. Lorelei stood barefoot just o
utside the kitchen door, wrapped in a long multicoloured angora cardigan. Her waist-length hair was twisted and held on her crown with three large tortoiseshell combs.

  ‘Look, Meggy,’ she said, her head appearing around the door. ‘Look. A rainbow! Quick!’

  Meg glanced up from her revision, spread before her on the kitchen table, and smiled encouragingly. ‘In a minute,’ she said.

  ‘No!’ cried her mother. ‘It’ll be gone in a minute. Come and look now!’

  Meg sighed and rested her pen on her notepad. ‘OK,’ she said.

  She joined her mother outside, feeling the wetness of the flagstones seeping through her sheepskin slippers.

  ‘Beth!’ her mother called back into the kitchen. ‘Boys! Come quickly!’

  ‘They’re watching telly,’ said Meg. ‘They won’t be able to hear you.’

  ‘Go and get them, will you, darling?’

  ‘They won’t come.’

  ‘Of course they will. Quick, darling, run in and tell them.’

  Meg knew it was pointless to argue. She sighed again and headed towards the sitting room. Her three siblings sat in a row on the grubby sofa with the dog lying listlessly between them. They were watching Saturday Superstore and eating carrot sticks.

  ‘Mum says there’s a rainbow,’ she said defeatedly. ‘She wants you to go and look at it.’

  No one acknowledged her so she returned to her mother with the bad news.

  Lorelei sighed melodramatically. ‘That’s a terrible pity,’ she said. ‘And look,’ she gestured at the sky, ‘now it’s gone. Gone for good. For ever …’ A small tear rolled down the side of her nose and she wiped it away with a bunched-up fist, the way a small child might do. ‘Such a pity,’ she murmured, ‘to miss a rainbow …’ Then she forced her face into a smile and said, ‘Ah well, at least one of you saw it. You can always describe it to the others.’

  Meg smiled tightly. As if, she thought to herself, as if I will sit with my siblings and regale them with descriptions of the red and the yellow and the pink and the green, the awe and the splendour of the purple and the orange and the blue, the miracle of distant prismatic stripes. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Maybe, later.’

  It was still raining the next day. Lorelei insisted on the egg hunt taking place regardless.

  ‘Let’s do it indoors, darling,’ Colin had suggested gently.

  ‘No way, Jose!’ Lorelei had countered. ‘Easter Sunday is egg hunt in the garden. Rain or no rain. Isn’t that right, kiddies?’

  Meg looked out towards the garden, through the rain-splattered panes of glass, and thought of her hair, lovingly backcombed that morning into a fat quiff and sprayed hard with Elnett. She thought of the muddy lawn and the cold, wet grass and her canvas pumps, and she thought of her drainpipe jeans that she’d had trouble squeezing into this morning, and the date she was going on next week for which she planned on being able to wear said jeans, not to mention the troublesome spot forming on her chin.

  The twins jumped into their wellington boots and cagoules, while Lorelei ran around in the rain, planting her eggs in the garden. Meg watched her through the window. She looked like a wraith, long and lean, in a cream muslin smock, faded jeans, green wellingtons and a floppy-brimmed straw hat, her long hair sticking wet to her back, her small breasts growing visible through the fabric of her top as it dampened. Her face was shining with joy as she hopped from spot to spot, plucking eggs from a straw basket held in the crook of her arm.

  The boys stood in the doorway, bristling with anticipation. At just turned eleven years old they could still be held rapt by Lorelei with her enthusiasm and childlike charm. Her babies, still, just about.

  ‘Ready, steady, go!’ she called out a moment later, and the boys hared out on to the lawn, followed more sedately by Bethan in a pink polka-dot raincoat and rubber boots.

  ‘Meggy?’ Her mother stared at her curiously. ‘No eggs?’

  ‘I’ll leave them for the others,’ said Meg, hoping a suggestion of sibling-oriented kindness might prevent further urging.

  ‘There’s lots to go round. Tons and tons.’

  Meg shrugged. ‘I don’t want my hair to get wet.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. That’s no excuse. Put on a rain cap, here …’ She pulled a clear plastic hood from a drawer and forced it into Meg’s hands.

  Meg stared at it aghast. ‘I’m not wearing that!’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘Because it’s an old lady’s hat.’

  ‘It is not! It’s my hat!’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Lorelei threw her head back and laughed hard. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, ‘one day, God willing, you’ll be forty too, and I promise you, you will not feel a day over eighteen. Not a day. Now put the hat on and come and have some fun with the little ones. Imagine,’ she said, her face turning serious for a moment, ‘imagine if something happened to one of us and there was no Easter egg hunt next year, imagine if everything stopped being perfect – you would wish so hard that you’d taken part today …’

  Megan stared into the depths of her mother’s eyes, the greeny-blue reservoirs of a million fervent emotions. They were set firm. She forced a smile and said, ‘OK,’ dragging out the second syllable to demonstrate her sacrifice. She found eleven eggs that morning and gave them all to her siblings.

  Pandora and her husband Laurence arrived at midday, without either of their now grown-up sons but with a new puppy in tow. Shortly afterwards, Colin’s sister Lorna turned up, with a carrier bag full of Easter eggs. Some neighbours were next to arrive, Bob and Jenny and their three young children. Lorelei roasted a leg of lamb in the Aga and served it with far too many honey-glazed carrots (‘Aren’t they the most glorious shade of orange?’) and not nearly enough roast potatoes. The children sat at a plastic picnic table at one end of the kitchen while the adults sat together around the antique pine table in the middle. Megan felt lost amongst the two parties, too old for the children, too young for the adults, not one person in the room to appreciate her perfectly applied eyeliner or her new Aran cardigan with leather buttons or the fact that she’d finally got down to eight and a half stone. She didn’t like carrots and was toying with the idea of vegetarianism so she picked daintily at the one roast potato she’d been allocated by her mother (‘FHB, darling!’) and stared through the window at the incessant rain, fantasising about her escape.

  Megan imagined it to be a glorious explosion of glass shards, as she slammed her fists through the invisible walls around her. She imagined fresh air and bright light and dizzying amounts of space. She saw a room with four flat bare walls, a square bed dressed in plain white sheets, a tall window hung with a simple pair of white curtains like the ones in Demi Moore’s apartment in St Elmo’s Fire. She saw a shiny kitchen, gleaming pans, a white bathroom and a quiet man with clean fingernails and a silver guitar.

  Then she looked around her own kitchen, at the fifteen years’ worth of children’s art lovingly hung and tacked and stuck to the walls, and the thought of escape soured in her heart. She left the children’s table and went and sat herself on her father’s knee at the grown-ups’ table, hoping for a return of the sense of the sugary days of her childhood. He wrapped a gangly arm around her waist and Megan smiled across the table at her mother.

  ‘You know, Lorrie,’ their neighbour Jenny was saying, ‘your kitchen really is the loveliest place to be on a grotty day like today.’

  Lorelei smiled and put an arm around her friend.

  ‘No, it really is. So warm. So welcoming. If I ever found myself stranded on the side of a snowy mountain, freezing to death, I would probably hallucinate about this place. About Lorrie’s lovely kitchen.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Lorelei, kissing her on her cheek. ‘Meggy thinks the house is a mess, don’t you, my darling?’

  ‘It is a mess,’ she replied.

  Lorelei laughed. ‘Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks, darling, isn’t that right?’

  Meg raised her eyebrow
s and rolled her eyes. ‘I just don’t know why you have to keep so much stuff. I mean, I understand all this –’ she gestured at the artwork. ‘But why, for example, do we have nineteen tea towels?’

  Lorelei snorted. ‘We do not have nineteen tea towels.’

  ‘We absolutely do have nineteen tea towels, Mother. I counted them the other day. Just as an experiment. Look!’ She leapt to her feet and yanked open a kitchen drawer. She pulled out examples and held them up as evidence. ‘We have tea towels with holes in them, tea towels with burn marks, stained tea towels, threadbare tea towels. But look! We also have brand new tea towels – look, nice ones.’

  Pandora laughed. ‘I must confess, Lorrie, I bought you that one because I was a bit alarmed by the elderly appearance of the existing tea towels last time I came.’

  ‘Yet, still,’ Meg continued theatrically, warming to her theme, ‘do we throw the old ones away? No! We do not! We wash them and we dry them and then we fold them and we return them to this drawer which now has nineteen tea towels in it!’

  ‘Well, darling,’ her mother replied drily, ‘I must say, given that you’ll be sitting your O levels in less than three months, I’d have thought you might have better things to do with your time than count tea towels.’

  ‘Please let me throw one away, Mother. Please. I beg of you. How about this one?’ She held up a limp grey cloth with a rent running down the full length of it.

  ‘No!’ exclaimed Lorelei. ‘Absolutely not! It’ll do for rags.’

  ‘Mother,’ said Megan in exasperation, ‘we have a black bag on the landing bulging at the seams with “rags”. Which we never use. We do not need any more rags.’

  ‘Put it back,’ said her mother, her joyful eyes clouding over for a moment. ‘Please. Just put it back. I’ll do a clear-out another day. When you’re all back at school.’

  ‘But you won’t, will you? You know that and I know that. If I came back here in ten years’ time there’d be thirty tea towels in that drawer. Including this one.’ She hurled the tea towel down on her mother’s lap.