The House We Grew Up In Page 9

  ‘Remember Greece?’ said Rory, picking up his pint.

  His dad laughed drily and rolled his eyes. ‘How could I forget? It took me years to get up the nerve to suggest it in the first place. Then those bloody burglars …’

  ‘Mum hates her,’ he replied.

  ‘Who? Kayleigh?’

  Rory nodded.

  ‘Oh, I doubt it,’ Colin said dismissively. ‘I doubt it very much. She just resents you spreading your wings, finding charms outside her tightly controlled little world. And she finds it easier to blame that on an outsider.’

  Rory nodded again. He was probably right. ‘Do you like her?’ he said.

  ‘I barely know her.’

  ‘No. I know. But from what you’ve seen?’

  His father narrowed his eyes at him, and took off his glasses. ‘I think,’ he began, rubbing the lenses of his glasses against the hem of his shirt, ‘that she is just what you need. Right now. But …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘But maybe not what you need for the rest of your life?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because she’s a drama queen. And drama queens are difficult to live with. They don’t want a quiet life. You’ll be left gasping in her wake …’

  Rory absorbed this pronouncement. There was something thrilling about the concept of gasping in someone’s wake – it sounded better than being ‘set in aspic’ or ‘pickled in grief’ at least.

  ‘What was Mum like, when you met her?’

  Colin replaced his glasses, picked up his glass of wine and smiled. ‘Incredible,’ he said. ‘Joyful. Glamorous. She looked like a model, hair down to her waist. Always smiling. Hundreds of friends. Always dancing, turning somersaults, doing cartwheels, hair everywhere, laughing, vibrant. It was like going out with … with summer.’

  Rory had stopped breathing. His father’s face was candescent. He’d never seen him look like that before.

  ‘And then,’ Colin continued, ‘well, you know, babies, more babies – it takes the edge off a bit.’

  ‘She thinks she’s still happy, you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Even though Rhys is dead.’

  His father sighed. ‘I know.’

  ‘What are we going to do about it?’

  Colin looked at him curiously. ‘I have no idea. How the hell do you help someone who insists on believing that she’s happy?’ He blew out his cheeks and sighed again. ‘To be honest, to be totally and entirely honest –’ he paused, then looked Rory directly in the eye – ‘I’ve kind of given up.’

  He glanced away then, quickly, but not too fast for Rory to see the look of guilt and regret that passed across his face.

  Colin drove them both to the airport two months later. Lorelei had said she was far too busy to come. Rory hadn’t even wanted to know why. She’d hugged him hard the last time he’d seen her and told him to have an incredible time, that she loved him, that she’d miss him, that she couldn’t wait to hear all about his adventures. It had been a perfectly reasonable enactment of a mother-and-son farewell scenario. Any casual onlooker would have sighed and found it charming. But Rory had felt the distance in her body language, the need to be getting on with something else, to be elsewhere, otherwise occupied. Hurry up, said her body language, hurry up and go.

  Kayleigh and Colin were sitting in the front of the car chatting about Andalusia, Kayleigh flicking through her Rough Guide, pointing things out to him. Her hair was short now, and white-blonde. She looked like a beautiful little boy. From behind, it occurred to him in an uncomfortable wave of realisation, she looked like Rhys.

  He turned his gaze to the window and watched the countryside pass him by. It was high summer. The world was vivid green, with wide stripes of yellow where the rape fields grew. Everything was so familiar to him: the soft butterscotch of the Gloucestershire bricks, the evocative names of the villages, the peaty smell of the air, the solid feel of British tarmac beneath the tyres of his father’s car. It was all he’d ever known.

  ‘Oh, by the way –’ his father turned to address him – ‘don’t forget to call on your mother’s birthday, will you? And Beth’s, too, if you can remember.’

  ‘Oh, God, yeah, when is that?’

  ‘July the nineteenth. She’ll be twenty-three.’

  ‘Poor Beth,’ Rory sighed, under his breath.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Kayleigh, picking up on the tiny, rising bubble of family discord.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ he said. ‘Just feel sorry for her. Stuck at home on her own for her birthday. Seems a bit of a pitiful way to turn twenty-three, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m going to be twenty-three next year,’ said Kayleigh, ‘and I’ve been living away from home since I was sixteen. She needs to cut the apron strings. You know what I mean?’

  ‘And remember to give us a phone number. So we can let you know when Meg’s baby comes.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure there won’t be a phone there,’ said Kayleigh. ‘I kind of think that’s supposed to be the idea. You know, a retreat.’

  They were going to stay with a guy called Ken to whom Kayleigh had lost her virginity when she was seventeen and he was forty-nine. She’d met him at a festival in Limerick and stayed in touch with him. She referred to him, rather charmingly, as her ‘pen pal’. He now lived in a kind of informal commune in Andalusia with three girlfriends, some goats, some donkeys and half a dozen children. He sounded both hideous and mesmerising in equal measure. But he was giving them free board and lodgings in return for some light farming, building, decorating and childcare, and given that Rory had exactly £200 to last him the month, it was an offer he couldn’t reasonably refuse.

  ‘Are you still in love with him?’ he’d asked.

  Kayleigh had thrown him a withering look and said, ‘Are you mad, Rory Bird? You think I would take you across the world with me to stay with a man I’m in love with? What kind of a person do you think I am? I may be a lot of things, but a polygamist is not one of them.’ Which was kind of reassuring to hear.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Colin, ‘be sure to get to a phone if you can around about the due date. Meg will be livid if you don’t get in touch somehow.’

  ‘Leave it with me, Colin,’ said Kayleigh, gently touching his arm. ‘I’ll make sure your son does all the right things. I promise you that.’

  Colin turned and smiled at her and said, ‘Good girl.’

  Rory still saw ghostly little Rhyses everywhere. He could barely remember Rhys as a teenager, but he vividly remembered him at nine, freewheeling down this hill on his BMX. He remembered Rhys at six trying to keep up with him as they chased through those woods together looking for the wild pigs that someone at school had said they’d seen there. He saw Rhys sitting on the steps with him outside the chemist on the High Street with his chin on his hands, waiting for Mum and the girls to come out with bags of things that were of no interest to either of them. And he remembered Rhys sitting there, in the boot of the hatchback where he always wanted to sit, facing backwards, his legs stretched out and the dog in his lap.

  And now Rory was going somewhere that Rhys had never been. He wondered if the ghosts would follow him there. And if they didn’t, he wondered if he would miss them.

  4

  April 2011

  Rhys’s room was just as it always had been.

  The sheer volume of empty space before her almost took Meg’s breath away.

  ‘My God,’ she muttered, ‘she kept it. She kept it as it was.’

  ‘That’s freaky,’ said Molly. ‘Totally.’

  ‘It really is. I mean, how could she have controlled her impulses? It’s like, I don’t know, if she could stop herself hoarding in this room, why couldn’t she stop herself doing it in the others? If she could control part of herself, then why not the rest?’

  The ancient floorboards creaked and complained beneath their feet. Rhys’s bed sat stripped bare in the far corner, his wardrobe was empty, his desk piled with just a few objects: an encycl
opaedia, a pot of pens, some folders, deodorant in a rusting nineties-designed aerosol can. There was his stereo, a huge thing, designed for CDs and records, that had never heard of MP3s or iTunes. And posters on the walls. Dozens of them. Pearl Jam. Nirvana. NWA. Alice in Chains. Courtney Love.

  ‘It’s, like, a museum of the nineties,’ said Molly.

  Meg nodded and smiled. It was. Untouched, just clothes and bedding taken out. Everything else as it had been that day, when she’d put down that tray of food and kicked down the door. She ran her hand around the inside of the door and felt it there, the lock still hanging off the door by uprooted nails.

  ‘And is that where he, you know, did it?’ Molly nodded towards the buttress beams in the high ceiling.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Meg.

  ‘With rope?’

  ‘Yes. A very long piece of rope.’

  ‘Where’d he get it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The rope. Where did he get a very long piece of rope?’

  ‘Christ. I don’t know.’

  ‘What, like, the village rope shop or something?’

  Meg threw her daughter a look of only half-formed outrage.

  ‘And how did he get it up there?’ She nodded again at the beams.

  ‘It was there,’ said Meg, the image coming to her, clear as the present moment. She pointed to a lower section of the beam. ‘He stood on a chair. That chair.’

  Molly paced across the room, her arms outstretched. She put a hand on the chair and said, ‘Same age as me. Nearly.’ She let her hand fall from the chair and turned to her mother. ‘Isn’t that crazy? He was the same age as me. I mean, what was he like? Would I have liked him?’

  Meg smiled sadly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t have liked him. You would have called him sad and a loser, and you’d have stood and stared at him pityingly every time he walked past you at school. Assuming you’d even noticed his existence in the first place, that is.’

  Molly looked affronted for a moment and then her face softened. ‘That’s really tragic.’

  ‘I know. He was really tragic. It was. I remember when Alfie started secondary school, God, I was terrified for him.’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘You? Well, I knew you’d be fine. Alpha female that you are. That you have always been. But Alfie, reminds me sometimes of Rhys. So quiet, you know, so few friends. And that was when it all went wrong for Rhys, the day he started at the big school. That was the beginning of the end …’

  ‘But Alfie was fine.’

  ‘Yes, Alfie was fine,’ Meg smiled. ‘Is fine.’

  ‘Best boy out there.’ Molly blushed.

  Meg gazed at her in surprise. ‘Really? You think that?’

  ‘Well. Yeah. Alfie rocks. He’s brilliant.’

  Meg’s stomach rolled pleasantly. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I like that very much.’

  She absorbed the wonder of Molly’s pronouncement, took it as a compliment on her parenting, on her mothering, as a certificate of excellence. But then she felt her pride fade away at the thought that if Rhys had had a big sister like Molly, maybe he would have thought he was worth more than sixteen years of life.

  Her phone rang again and she sighed. It was Unknown again. It might be her. But then again, it might be any number of people who needed to talk to her in the wake of the death of the county’s worst hoarder. She inhaled, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Meg, please, it’s me. Please don’t hang up.’

  Meg waited just one beat, listened to the sound of her sister’s urgent, panicked breath down the line, and then she ended the call.

  March 1997

  Beth collapsed into the sofa and caught her breath.

  ‘You’re a natural,’ said Meg, scooping wooden blocks back into a drawstring bag.

  ‘I’m absolutely not,’ she replied. ‘I have no idea how you do it. And in your condition.’ She pointed at the enormous bump straining the fabric of Meg’s T-shirt.

  ‘Well,’ said Meg, pulling herself with some effort to a standing position and throwing the bag of bricks into a plastic crate, ‘it’s not as if I have a lot of choice.’

  ‘Sit down, for God’s sake,’ urged Beth, patting the cushion next to her.

  ‘Not quite yet, I’m afraid. I’ve got a wash to hang out. And a shirt to iron. And then I can sit down. Here –’ She threw Beth the remote control. ‘Enjoy.’

  Beth watched Meg leave the room. From behind you could not see her bump. She was all out the front. But it was obvious from the duck-like roll of her gait that she was heavily, urgently pregnant. Her second baby had been due four days ago. Beth had come down to help out with Molly while Meg was having the baby. But the baby was still not here and now Beth was rather concerned that she was not going to make it home for Easter. Rory and Kayleigh were still living in Spain. Their one-month holiday had extended itself into several months and they’d been living on a hippy commune with this guy called Ken for nearly two years now. Having made it home for Easter last year with baby Molly in tow, Meg and Bill were once more out of commission due to reasons of imminent confinement, and Dad was going to be away on business. Again. So it all came down to Beth. She’d promised her mum that she’d be there. And she had no intention of letting her down. Good old Beth.

  She heard the key turn in the lock and stiffened slightly. She touched her hair and cleared her throat. Then she rearranged her legs, crossed them, then uncrossed them again.

  ‘Hi,’ she said as Bill walked into the room, all thick, shaggy hair, trendy trainers and soft, smiling, careworn face.

  ‘Hi, there, Beth,’ he said, dropping a flight bag on to the dining table and flicking through a pile of letters. ‘Where’s Meg?’

  ‘She’s hanging up washing. And ironing a shirt.’

  Bill grimaced. ‘She’s a lunatic,’ he said. ‘What the fuck is she doing ironing shirts in her condition?’

  ‘You know Meg. Never could sit still.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said absent-mindedly, sliding his finger under the flap of an envelope, ‘but sometimes you really do just have to.’ He looked up and glanced around. ‘Molly gone to bed?’

  Beth nodded.

  ‘Oh.’ He sounded disappointed. ‘Must be later than I thought. Might just go in and have a look at her.’

  ‘No, you won’t!’ they heard Meg call through from the kitchen. ‘You’ll wake her up!’

  He smiled indulgently. ‘No,’ he called back, ‘I won’t wake her up, darling. I promise you.’

  ‘Well,’ Meg called back, ‘if you wake her up, then you have to get her back to sleep.’

  ‘Deal,’ said Bill, throwing Beth a conspiratorial smile that turned her stomach to milk. Then he put down the letters and headed back into the hallway.

  Beth let herself relax. It was terrible. Truly, truly terrible. This crush on Meg’s partner. It had come from nowhere. From out of the blue. For two years he had been just ‘Bill’. Just this nice bloke who lived with her sister. Just this amiable, fluffy-haired guy with an easy smile and twinkling eyes. She was sure the change had come from him. She was sure he’d started it. She hadn’t even packed any pretty clothes to come down to stay. If she’d already suspected she had feelings, however subliminal, for him, she’d have packed something nice to wear. Pretty pyjamas. That kind of thing. But she hadn’t. So clearly this, whatever this was, had not been started by her. No. It was him. It was the way he looked at her, this complicity that had developed between the two of them. He and Beth against Meg. Sort of. Vaguely. I mean, it was clear to Beth, blindingly clear, that Bill adored Meg. He adored Meg and he adored Molly and he adored his flat and his family and his life. But still, there was something there when he looked at her. Something that had definitely not been there before. And, Beth was pretty certain, that thing was sex.

  Meg went into labour very early the following morning. Meg and Bill left Beth at home with a still-sleeping Molly and instructions for how to get her to her childminder at 9 a.m. It was the first time Beth ha
d been alone in their flat. She sat at the breakfast bar in her ugly pyjamas and sipped at a cup of tea and stared at the clock on the kitchen wall as it ticked over from 6.32 to 6.33. It was so quiet. She thought about phoning home, to let her mother know what was going on, but then she envisaged her mother’s slightly panicky journey from deepest sleep to the phone that sat on the landing and she knew, anyway, that her mother would have only the most passing interest in something that might not, in theory, happen for another two or more days and would probably be a bit cross about being woken up. So she decided to wait until nine o’clock or until there was some news, whichever came first.

  In the meantime, she stared around the silent kitchen, taking in the details she hadn’t picked up on before, when the place was full of Meg and Bill and Molly and all their loud distractions. It was built into the corner of a large living room from shiny white units with brushed steel handles. There was not a fingerprint or a splash of dirt on anything. A small collage of neatly arranged family photographs hung on the wall in a white frame, a glass vase of yellow gerbera daisies sat on the immaculate windowsill; knives, forks and spoons all sat in soldier-like rows in the cutlery drawer, and there were exactly eight white plates, eight white bowls, eight white side plates, eight white egg cups and one salt-and-pepper cellar. Even in a state of labour, Megan had left the house pristine: fluffed cushions, tidied toys, remote controls neatly arranged in a row on the clutter-free coffee table, clean shoes set in straight pairs in the hallway, a wash hung to dry on a plastic dryer, coats hung in size order from pegs on the wall, not a speck of dust anywhere, not even on picture rails, not even on light bulbs.

  Like a show home.

  Lorelei would hate it.

  Beth sighed and carefully, almost reverently, placed her teacup in the showroom-shiny dishwasher. Then she tiptoed to the door of Molly’s little room and peered in. It was as immaculate as the rest of Meg’s flat. The only thing in the room that lacked order was Molly herself, buried within her little duvet which she had gathered around herself in twisted clumps. Her reddish-brown hair was tangled over her face and across her mouth and one of her plump arms was dangled through the bars of her cot, her fat fingers trailing against the unstained cream carpet. Beth felt overwhelmed for a moment with love for her niece and her insistence on subverting the lines of Meg’s strictly ordered world. Good girl, she thought, good girl.