The House We Grew Up In (12 page)

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.

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 had 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
.

Not that Beth blamed Meg in the slightest for being the way she was. How could she be otherwise, given how much she’d always railed against her mother’s ways? But a little bit of give, a little bit of flexibility, wouldn’t have gone amiss. She saw it in Bill’s glances sometimes, little twitches of his
eyebrows, little half-formed smiles or grimaces. Bill hadn’t signed up for this. He hadn’t signed up for not being able to kick off his trainers and drop the remote control absent-mindedly down the side of the sofa. He hadn’t signed up for there being a right way and a wrong way to hang up a tea towel or open a carton of orange juice. He hadn’t signed up for tiny aggressive hand-held vacuum cleaners that sucked away crumbs before he’d even noticed them, and newspapers being folded away and disposed of before he’d even read them, and half-eaten packets of biscuits being thrown away because a new packet had been purchased. He really, really hadn’t. But he was a good sport. He didn’t like it, but he put up with it. Because Meg was Meg and he loved her.

She tiptoed away from Molly’s room and then peered into the tiny little box room that had once been an office and now housed a shelving unit full of carefully arranged baby accoutrements: a pile of tiny nappies, already out of their packets and stacked just so, a pile of ice-white muslin squares and nipple pads and Babygros and soft animals and jars of cream and fluffy towels. They didn’t know what they were having, a strangely laissez-faire attitude, mainly down to Bill who would clearly appreciate a few more surprises in his life. Everyone thought it would be a boy. Just because everyone always thought it would be a boy. But Beth thought it would be another girl. She could see it in the extra bloom on Meg’s skin.

The clock ticked round to 6.37. Beth decided to take a very quick shower. The only shower in the flat was in the en suite to Meg and Bill’s room so she hadn’t used it before.
She took the soft blue towel that had been left folded just so for her at the foot of the little put-you-up bed in the box room, and she checked once more on Molly, and then she walked through Meg and Bill’s bedroom – bed made, slippers in pairs, coordinated cushions – and into their shower room. She showered fast, mainly because she didn’t want Molly to wake up and find herself alone, but also because she felt she shouldn’t be in here, in their little sanctuary, in the place where Bill and Megan took their clothes off, in the place where they brushed their teeth together every night and had private conversations and made plans for their future. She didn’t use any of their products for fear of messing anything up, and after her shower she sprayed the inside of the cubicle with the spray that had been left for that purpose, and she cleared all the glass walls with the window scraper, and then she wrapped her blue towel about herself and dashed back to the little box room, where she dressed and put on a tiny bit of make-up.

It was now almost 7 a.m. She wondered if they were at the hospital yet. She wondered what they were doing. She wondered how this day was going to pan out. She wondered how the next few days would pan out. The baby would be in a Moses basket in their room at first and Meg had said she could stay in the box room as long as she liked. In fact she’d said, ‘
Please stay, please, I need you!
’

But there was Easter to think about, and Mum. There was also the lack of space in this tiny flat and the stress of living with a newborn, and more than any of that there was this
thing
between herself and Bill. If the baby came home tomorrow,
she could stay another twenty-four hours and then still be home in time for Easter lunch. Beth knew on a fundamental level that her sister needed her more than her mother did. She knew that Easter lunch was not as important, in the scheme of things, as spending time with her new niece or nephew, but the sheer, ground-in pull of it, of her mother’s emotional neediness, was virtually impossible for her to ignore.

‘Mama?’ said a small voice in the hall outside her room. ‘Mama?’

‘Hello, sweetie.’ She quickly got to her feet and went to Molly.

‘Where Mama?’

She looked dishevelled, almost Neanderthal. Her hair was a puffball of knotted curls and her cheeks were blotchy with sleep.

‘How did you get out of your cot, sweetie?’

‘Mama?’

‘Mama’s gone to have the baby. To the hospital. With Daddy.’

‘Mama have a baby?’ she asked thoughtfully.

‘Yes. At the hospital.’

‘Beth make a toast?’

‘Yes!’ Beth breathed a sigh of relief that the news had not been met with tears or anxiety. ‘Beth make a toast. Come on, sweetie.’ She took her niece’s small hand in hers and led her to the kitchen where she sat her in her highchair. Molly looked just like Meg, just like her, just like Dad and Auntie Lorna. She had the Bird face. It still took Beth by surprise that this child existed. It felt like only a few minutes ago that
they had all been children themselves. And in fact, in most respects, Beth still was. She still lived at home, she still slept in a single bed, she still used the same face flannel and stared at the same face in the same mirror in the same bathroom. She still had breakfast with her mum and dad every morning and drove her dad’s car and ate food bought and prepared by her parents. She was, to all intents and purposes, seventeen years old. Except she wasn’t. She was twenty-four. A twenty-four-year-old woman. In July she would be twenty-five.