The House We Grew Up In (20 page)

‘Bad night?’ asked Owen, eyeing Rory as he licked two Rizlas together.

‘Mare,’ replied Rory. ‘Baby was awake every two hours.’

Owen slanted his eyes and whistled.

The baby’s name was Tia. Rory had had no say in naming
it. Very much in the same way as he’d had no say in whether or not they were going to have a baby. This time last year they’d been in the UK, ostensibly to see his family, but in reality to have an abortion. Until Kayleigh had decided at the very last minute, literally, twenty-four hours before their return flight, that she did not want an abortion. And they had to fly all the way back again. With the baby growing ever more viable within her body.

Rory was twenty-four when the baby was born. He’d felt as if he was going mad. How the hell had he ended up with a baby at twenty-four?

The baby had some problems. Reflux. Colic. And glue ear. Small problems in the scheme of things but problems that made her cry. A lot. Problems that took them to the doctor in town more than was desirable. Problems that required the administering of antibiotics and medicines. Problems that made it even harder than it might have been for Rory to feel as though this baby was something he wanted in his life.

He could tell that the others resented it to. They resented the piercing screams emanating from the lodge, seven, eight times a night; they resented the constant background noise of griping and wailing. And the stress that went with it. Ken’s farm was a place people came to live quietly, gently, selfishly. Rory and Kayleigh no longer really fulfilled the brief. They snapped and they snarled, they threw barbed comments at each other and created atmospheres. And their baby screamed and screamed, her desperate cries blocking out the preferred soundtrack of humming cicadas, the amateur guitar strumming, the earnest chats about life and its many
meanings. They were the ultimate party poopers, pissing on the whole beautiful, blissed-out, hedonistic parade.

‘Here,’ said Owen, pulling open a small fridge and passing Rory a freezing can of San Miguel.

‘Cheers.’

Rory stared at the small can in his hand. He rolled it back and forth a couple of times between his fingers, enjoying the surprise and then the numbness of it.

‘It’s Easter day,’ he said.

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Owen. ‘Are you into that kind of thing, then?’

Rory shook his head. ‘No. Not really. Wasn’t brought up into any kind of religion. But we always celebrated Easter. It was my mum’s favourite day.’

‘Was?’ said Owen. ‘Is she dead, then?’

Rory laughed. ‘No. She’s definitely not dead. Just …’ He pulled the tab off the beer and sucked up the froth that burst out of the opening. ‘I had a twin brother. He killed himself. On Easter Day.’

Owen winced. ‘Shit. How old was he?’

‘Sixteen. Just turned. He hung himself. Yeah.’ Rory wasn’t angry any more. He’d stopped being angry at some indefinable point during the last few years, since he’d been in Spain. He was just sad now, sad that he’d never know what Rhys was doing or where Rhys was living or who Rhys was going out with or why Rhys had killed himself. Sad that Rhys would never meet his baby or his girlfriend. Sad that he didn’t have a brother. Sad that he’d been angry instead of being sad. Sad that he couldn’t say he was sorry for being such a crap brother.

‘Shit,’ said Owen again, ‘what did he do that for?’

Rory shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Didn’t leave a note. Never said anything to anyone.’ He let his shoulders drop. ‘So that’s just, you know, Easter fucked, really.’

‘Yeah,’ said Owen, ‘I can see that. That’s tough, really tough. How’s your mum about it?’

Rory smiled. ‘My mum …’ he began, unsure where he was going to take this. ‘Aah,’ he said, ‘my mum is unusual. She has her own way of dealing with things, you know. She’s not like other people. So, basically, she dealt with it by dumping my dad for the next-door neighbour.’

Owen raised an eyebrow at him and poked the roach into the end of the spliff.

‘Who is a woman.’

‘No way!’

‘Yeah. “Late-flowering lesbians” – that’s what she says they are. “
We’re late-flowering lesbians
.” Like they’re trees or something.’

‘What, and they live together?’

‘Yes. In my family home. With the woman’s children. And my sister. My dad lives next door.’

‘What, where the woman used to live?’

Rory laughed. ‘No, they sold that. Our house used to be two separate cottages so they just put a wall back in and opened up the front door and moved all his stuff across. And now
he’s
the next-door neighbour.’

Owen chuckled. ‘I love other people’s families,’ he said. ‘They always make me feel better about my own.’ He lit the spliff and inhaled. ‘So what about your sister, how old is she?’

Rory squinted. ‘What, Beth? She’s nearly three years older than me. And I’ve got another sister too. Meg. She’s nearly five years older than me. She lives in London and has about a hundred kids.’

‘And you used to have a brother?’

‘Yeah,’ he smiled sadly. ‘I used to have a brother.’

‘Tragic.’

‘Yeah.’

Owen passed him the spliff. ‘Cheers.’

They sat in genial silence for a moment or two. Rory took in the details of Owen’s van: the FHM calendar, the pristine polo shirts hanging neatly, the bottle of Kouros aftershave, the designer trainers in a row, the gold bracelet left pooled on the table, and he said, ‘What about you? What are you doing here?’

‘Just woke up one morning and had had enough of the whole lot of it. Got talking to a bloke in the pub who was going to a festival in a field somewhere, thought I liked the sound of it, got talking to this other bloke, a singer in a band, said his dad lived out in a commune in Spain. That was that.’

Rory shook his head. He already knew all of that. ‘But really. Why are you really here? What do you want?’

Owen laughed. ‘Haven’t got a fucking clue,’ he said.

Rory laughed too. And then he stopped when he heard the familiar sound of Tia screaming across the courtyard.

‘Poor mite,’ said Owen.

Rory nodded. It was hard to feel sympathy sometimes.

‘What about you?’ said Owen. ‘What do you want?’

Rory smiled. And then he dropped his chin into his chest. He looked up at Owen and he sighed. ‘I think,’ he said, voicing a deeply buried thought for the first time, ‘I think I want the next thing. I think –’ he paused – ‘I want to move on.’

Owen nodded sagely, and took the spliff back from Rory.

Outside the caravan, his baby screamed.

Molly dashed out of the hotel’s en-suite bathroom clutching a bottle of scent. ‘Look,’ she squealed. ‘Actual perfume. Jo Malone! Can I have it? Please, Mum?’ She clutched it to her chest and smiled winningly at Meg.

Meg glanced at the room menu and said, ‘It’s thirty-nine pounds. No way. You don’t even wear perfume.’

‘Yes, well, I would if it was Jo Malone.’

‘It’s thirty-nine pounds and you’re fifteen. Put it back.’

Molly let her shoulders slump melodramatically, and shuffled back into the bathroom. ‘You’re mean,’ she said over her shoulder. But it was meant affectionately. A year ago the Jo Malone exchange would have escalated into a bloody battle with swear words and pronouncements of maternal hatred, and, more than likely, the scent bottle being hurled against a wall and a door being slammed hard enough to dismember a hand. This time it ended with the soft chink of the bottle being gently replaced on the marble-topped counter in the bathroom and Molly padding barefoot back into the bedroom.

‘Look,’ said Meg, waving a small card at Molly. ‘A pillow menu.’

Molly took it from her hand and smiled at it.

‘Like the towel menus you invented when you were small.’

‘Yeah,’ said Molly dreamily, stretching out backwards on to her bed and holding the card above her face. ‘
Way
ahead of my time, clearly.’

‘But no live palm trees.’

‘I’ll make a note of that on the comments form before we leave.’

Meg smiled and lay back on her own bed. Quality time with her daughter. She’d never thought it would happen. She’d given up hope of ever having a nice time with her daughter again. And it had taken the death of her own mother to bring it about.

Her phone rang and she sighed. ‘Hello?’

‘Good afternoon, is this Meg Liddington?’

Not Beth. Meg breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Speaking.’

‘Hello, this is Stella Richards, from the Coroner’s Office.’

‘Oh, hello, yes, hi.’

‘We’ve had the final results through, the cause of death for your mother, Lorelei Bird. Would you be able to come to our office? Possibly this afternoon, so that we can talk you through them?’

Meg glanced at the time on the TV display in front of her. Two thirty-five. ‘We’re in Mickleton. How far is that from you?’

‘Oh, not far, about forty minutes on the fast roads.’

‘Fine then, yes, fine. But I’ll, er, have my teenage daughter with me. I mean, will it be OK, is it … you know … suitable, I mean?’

The woman on the other end of the line paused for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she said eventually. ‘Yes, I’m sure it’ll be fine. So we’ll see you in …?’

‘In an hour,’ said Meg, smiling reassuringly at Molly. ‘We’ll see you in an hour.’

‘Vick! Oh, Jesus, Vick!’

Vicky dropped the pile of post she’d just picked up from the front doormat and turned towards the stairs.

‘What, love?’

‘Come quick! Come!’

Vicky took the stairs a pair at a time, quite an effort given her frankly dire levels of fitness. ‘What is it, love? What?’

She followed the sound of Lorrie’s plaintive moaning into Meg’s old room, the so-called ‘office’.

Lorrie stood on the small patch of carpet still uncluttered by shopping bags and piles of newspapers. She was crying. ‘Someone’s been in here!’ she said. ‘Someone’s been moving my things around.’

Vicky breathed in hard against a swell of irritation. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, ‘have they?’

‘Yes! I had a new book, I only got it last week, it was almost as good as new, I don’t think it had even been read. And I came in here to find it and the whole pile’s gone, Vick. All of it!’ Her hands were threaded through her hair, pulling at it by the roots.

‘What book, love?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what it was called. It had a lovely cover, all purple and blue, with a rose. But there were more. Books I haven’t read. And they’ve all gone!’

‘Oh, darling, I’m sure they haven’t, they’re probably just not where you thought they were.’

‘No,’ Lorelei snapped. ‘I know where everything is.
Everything. And I know I put it here –’ she pointed at an area of grubby, unvacuumed carpet. ‘Right here. And someone has
moved
it.’

Vicky put her hand upon Lorelei’s shoulder and squeezed it. ‘Darling, take a deep breath, calm down.’

‘I
cannot
calm down, Vick. How can I? That book was precious. You know. Precious.’

Vicky repressed the urge to shake Lorelei very hard and scream, ‘
No, it was not precious – it was some shitty old paperback that you can’t even remember the name of!
’

‘We’ll need to talk to the girls about this,’ said Lorelei, pulling her hands from her hair and punching them together rather aggressively. Vicky did not appreciate the flavour of the gesture; it looked unseemly in the context of a twelve-year-old and a nine-year-old.

‘Why do we need to talk to the girls?’

‘Because it must be them. Mucking about in here. They’re always mucking about. With my things.’