The House We Grew Up In (16 page)

Molly’s demeanour softened – so easily bought – and Vicky led her by her small, eager hand towards the kitchen.

Molly’s mouth loosened with every nibble of chocolate-covered toast. Vicky had made herself a slice too and they sat side by side outside the kitchen door watching Alfie forage for snails, quite companionably, almost as though sharing a bottle of rosé.

‘So,’ said Vicky, ‘are you looking forward to your new brother or sister?’

Molly wrinkled up her pretty little face, considered the question for a while and said, ‘No, not really.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Vicky. ‘Why’s that?’

Molly shrugged, tiny shoulders going up and down in their sockets. ‘Don’t know. I just am not looking forward to it. I’ve already got a brother.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Vicky empathetically, ‘one brother probably is more than enough.’

Molly nodded and ate some more toast. She had a chocolate-spread crescent bisecting her mouth which looked
incongruous against her serious expression. ‘Why is Nana’s house so messy?’ she asked after a moment.

Vicky smiled. ‘Ah, well, you see, your nana is a very special lady – she is really quite magical, you know – and when she looks at the world she sees it in a very special way, like it’s a party bag, or a toy shop, and she likes to keep bits of it. And she feels sad when she throws things away.’

Molly nodded again. ‘My mummy throws away
everything
.’ She said this with a roll of the eyes.

‘Yes, so I hear.’

‘Really,’ she emphasised, ‘
everything
. It’s really annoying.’

‘Oh,’ said Vicky, ‘I can imagine.’

‘But,’ said Molly thoughtfully, ‘I
think
I prefer it living in a house that is tidy than in a house which is untidy. Like Nana’s house.’

‘Oh,’ said Vicky, with a hint of sadness, ‘well, everyone is different. Some people like a lot of things around them, and some people like it all put away.’

‘I think,’ said Molly, ‘that I would like it all put away. But not
thrown
away. When I am a grown-up I will be tidy, but I will not throw things away. Especially not my
toys
.’

‘That,’ said Vicky, ‘sounds like a very good compromise. Very sensible indeed.’

Vicky had not been to Meg’s house. Lorrie still refused to spend a night away from home even twelve years after the burglary. But she had heard much about it from Beth. She had heard about the sparkling antibacterial surfaces and the cupboard full of sprays, the storage boxes labelled with
stickers and the multitude of coasters. It was obvious to Vicky that Meg’s fastidiousness was not a genetically inherited trait, but a direct reaction to the way she felt about her mother. Meg was disgusted by her mother, despised her childlike ways, her dreamy outlook, her love of stuff and things and bits and bobs. All the things that Vicky loved about her. Living with Lorrie was like living with a person formed from your favourite grandmother and the kooky girl in the sixth form and the teacher who let you off homework because it was her birthday. It was like living with all the best and most colourful people you’d ever known all rolled up into one. But then, Vicky had always liked weird people. She’d always happily made conversation with drunks on the tube, chatted to the strange man at the party who everyone else was avoiding, befriended confused old ladies at bus stops and got to know the homeless guy with the voices in his head who sat outside her office. Nothing fazed her. She was utterly fearless. The only person who scared her was Meg.

Meg terrified her.

Vicky was forty-five.

Meg was twenty-eight.

They were both tall women, five foot eight, and big-boned. They both had loud voices and strong opinions. They were both matriarchal and bossy.

But still. When Vicky was with Meg she felt like a shrimp.

Absolutely ridiculous.

That fear was currently manifesting itself into a frantic dash for a wet cloth at the sound of Meg at the front door, and a rather rough-handed removal of the chocolate smile
from Molly’s face. Meg had taken precisely the hour she’d said she wanted, not a minute more, not a minute less. Vicky could hardly see the point of asking for time for a nap if you were just going to lie there watching the clock.

‘Come in, come in!’

Vicky stationed the little ones in front of a
Teletubbies
video in the sitting room. Megan seemed momentarily vexed about this, then looked very tired and resigned, left them to it and followed Vicky back into the kitchen.

Everyone else was still asleep: Lorrie, the girls and Bethan. So, until one of them surfaced, it was just the two of them. Vicky and Meg. She made a fresh pot of tea and opened a packet of croissants.

Megan peered suspiciously at them.

‘When were they bought?’

Vicky smiled patiently. Meg always thought that everything in this house was past its sell-by date, festering with unseen mould, wriggling with invisible mealworms, noxious with lethal bacteria. ‘Yesterday,’ she replied genially.

Meg nodded and picked one up.

‘This house …’ she began, looking about herself awkwardly. ‘Christ. It gets worse every time I come.’

‘Well,’ said Vicky, in the smoothest voice she could arrange for herself. ‘It’s since the house was split. You know. We’ve less space now and you know your mother, she just won’t countenance …’ She trailed off, feeling her customary surge of loyalty bubble to the top. ‘Although, I must say, in her defence, she has let a few bags of stuff go. Recently. A load of clothes. To the charity shop.’ She rubbed nervously at her elbows. Of
course, she wasn’t being quite honest. She’d done it herself, while Lorrie was at a doctor’s appointment for her alopecia (a bald spot the size of a ten-pence piece that had appeared virtually overnight on her crown). And she’d felt so terribly nervous doing it, as though she were committing some dreadful crime, as though there were a dozen surveillance cameras focused in on her, beaming her activities directly into Lorrie’s head. Possibly through the bald patch.

What had it been in the end? A jumper, a scarf, some old work shirts of Colin’s and a pile of really, really unreadable-looking paperbacks. Not a lot. But as much as she thought she might be able to get away with.

‘Well,’ said Meg, ‘that’s better than nothing, I suppose. And how is she? Generally?’ Meg pulled down the cuffs of her maternity top and smoothed her brown curls behind her ears, which were decorated with small and annoyingly discreet diamond studs.

Vicky, still unshowered, still in her banana-print jim-jams and matching yellow hair, nodded enthusiastically and said, ‘Marvellous. Really.’

‘She looked very thin, last night,’ said Meg, pulling shreds off her croissant and depositing them delicately into her mouth. ‘And what’s with this bald patch?’

‘Oh, gosh,’ said Vicky, ‘I don’t know. It’s just one of those things, isn’t it? You know, it’s been a hell of a couple of years for her, all in all.’

‘She’s been through worse.’

This was a pointed comment. Meg had never forgiven Lorrie for not being more upset about Rhys. And Vicky really
couldn’t blame her. It was the one thing, really, of all the odd things about Lorrie, that she absolutely couldn’t get to grips with. She’d been there. That evening. Oh, even now, eight years later, she couldn’t think about it without being there, you know, actually properly
being there
. She could taste her red-wine breath and feel the dizzy splendour of intimacy, her and Lorrie in the snug, by the fire, putting the world to rights. She felt a kind of retrospective guilt that she had not said to her new friend, ‘Where’s your youngest? I’d love to meet him,’ that she had not been interested in the person missing from the lunch table. But that was only now, now that she knew them all, now that this was her family and this house her home. At the time, why should she have cared?

And even now, she could feel the pit of her stomach contract and expand, contract and expand at the memory of the wee thing, hanging like a forgotten Christmas decoration from his bedroom ceiling, the panicky feeling that she must get the others away, back down the stairs, back to their perfect childhoods. And the sudden, gruesome exhumation of the buried memory, her first love – not a boyfriend as she’d told them at the time, because she didn’t yet know them and she wanted them to think of her as conventional, but a girl called Hazel with blue eyes and black hair who couldn’t quite come to terms with everyone hating her for being gay.

It was a baptism of fire, the quickest journey into the inner world of another family it was possible to imagine. One moment she was just the woman next door, the next she was a central component of their personal history. Awful, the whole thing, just absolutely awful. And she had waited for Lorrie
to do what she herself imagined she would do if one of her lovely children had taken their own life; she waited for her to lose the plot, to scream and grieve and kick and scratch and cry and die a little. But she never did. She just kind of
got on with it
. Eerie. Unsettling. But also, maybe, depending on your outlook, utterly utterly marvellous.

Vicky still hadn’t quite decided.

She nodded thoughtfully at Meg’s last comment. As much as she would like to argue the toss with her on most matters, on this point she really could not.

‘I still think she needs some help,’ Meg continued. ‘Honestly. It’s been going on too long now. She needs some therapy. She needs to talk to somebody. She’s fifty-three. She’s still relatively young. She’s got another thirty, forty years to go, God willing, and I can only see all this –’ she gestured aggressively at the space around her (even the kitchen was now beginning to show the signs of Lorrie’s rampant over-shopping and refusal to throw anything away) – ‘getting worse. And as for the Rhys thing. I mean, that’s the sort of thing that can give you cancer, you know, sitting on a wound like that, not
dealing
with it …’

‘Morning, girls!’ She was standing right behind them. She didn’t question the tail end of the conversation she absolutely must have picked up on. She just smiled and rubbed Vicky’s hair. Maddy and Sophie appeared behind her, bleary-eyed and tangle-haired. Lorrie picked up a mug, began to fill it with tea from the pot, pouted childishly when it ran out halfway through, waited for Vicky to get up, refill the kettle and put it on to boil, and then she turned to the girls and
said, as she had every single Easter morning since Vicky had known her and, she was sure, for the many years before, ‘So, who’s looking forward to an egg hunt?’

Rory and Kayleigh arrived shortly after ten. They were staying in Cirencester, with Kayleigh’s cousin, the cousin who’d originally introduced them to each other all those years ago. The only room that was free at the Bird House was Rhys’s old room and no one slept in there. Not ever. It was for the best, anyway, Vicky felt. The first and only time that Lorelei had met Kayleigh had been nothing but awkward; Lorrie didn’t like her and frankly, Vicky didn’t like her either. And who knows what state Rory would be in now, after four years in that weird commune.

He sat now, in the kitchen, with his arm around his mother. He looked, of course, very brown. Brown as a berry, as her mother always used to say, although Vicky had never actually seen a berry that was brown. He had turned lean and sinewy and had three tattoos at various junctures up his right arm. His teeth needed attention. He had taken to chewing tobacco, like a hoary old cowboy. And drinking fifty-peseta red wine from unlabelled bottles, like a hoary old Spaniard. But his hair, it was a dream. The constant sun had turned his hair back to its childhood flaxen.

‘He’s a regular Timotei boy,’ Kayleigh said, playfully rubbing his brilliant mop. ‘You should only see the fuss they make of him out there. I think they think he’s a film star, you know, the reincarnation of Robert Redford.’ She arched her eyebrows sardonically.

Kayleigh herself looked well. She’d grown her hair long again; it was halfway down her back and dyed scarlet. She had a suggestion of a tan, though it was clear that her skin didn’t quite have the gumption to go properly brown, and she seemed well fed, or, at least, better fed than she had been four years ago. She wore a faded Lycra dress and heavy boots and had a tattoo on her right arm that directly matched one of Rory’s. (Vicky had not the slightest idea what it was supposed to be; nobody had roses any more, or anchors, it was all Sanskrit this and Celtic the other.)

It had been just as Vicky had hoped it would be, like something from a TV show, when Lorrie had seen her boy standing there in the hallway half an hour ago, with a bunch of daffs and a Black Magic egg the size of a head.

Meg and Bill and the little ones were next door, variously having naps and late showers. Colin was in the garden clearing cobwebs in advance of the egg hunt (Maddy had a phobia of cobwebs) and Beth was sitting next to Vicky, with Sophie on her lap, smiling dreamily at her prodigal brother. The oven was heating up, the lamb was on the counter draped over with stems of rosemary from the garden, the pastel-coloured eggs were in a bowl ready to be distributed, the sun was fighting its way through some dense black cloud. The scene was almost set for the first proper Bird family Easter lunch, since, well, since Rhys had died.

‘So,’ said Lorrie, smiling up at her boy with sparkling eyes, ‘what are your plans, you two? Are you back for good?’

Rory and Kayleigh exchanged a look. Clearly there was some contention here.

‘For now,’ said Rory.

‘Well,’ Kayleigh interjected, ‘for a little while. Maybe a week or two.’

‘Maybe longer …’

‘Maybe. And then …’ She shrugged. ‘
Who knows
.’

‘Well, we do
kind
of know …’

The sound of Meg and her family arriving saved them the effort of trying to find an account they could both agree upon of their short-term plans. But Vicky already had half an idea. It was in the way Kayleigh was tearing at the skin around her fingernails, the new bloom upon her skin.

‘Hello, hello!’ She got to her feet to greet Bill, who she had not yet seen this morning. She loved Bill. He was the type of man she’d like for one of her daughters. Solid and fun and just sexy enough. He flirted with Vicky, in that way that men felt they could now they knew she wasn’t going to take it seriously. They were cut from the same cloth, Vicky and Bill; no-nonsense, loud, warm, family-minded and up for a laugh. They always got along.