The House We Grew Up In (26 page)

But here was his lovely dad who did not understand what Rory had done and thought that he still had the power to change things. He did not.

‘Good,’ he said again. ‘I’m really glad for her.’

His father paused, looked at him thoughtfully and then said, ‘She calls him Dad.’

The statement did not register at first.

‘Tia,’ Colin continued. ‘She calls the new boyfriend Dad.’

‘Oh,’ he said. He nodded. ‘Right.’

‘Yes, I wondered if you, er … how you might feel about that? I mean, I felt you should
know
.’

Rory nodded again and said, ‘Yeah, thank you. That’s good then, I suppose.’

He looked at his dad and saw raw disappointment in his pale eyes. Colin sighed and said, ‘I suppose. It depends, really, on what you want. On what your plans are?’

‘Well, yeah, I mean, my plans are pretty much just staying here, working hard, seeing what happens. I still feel too young to be a dad. I still feel like I’m sixteen.’ He looked into his father’s eyes, beseechingly, feeling suddenly that he wanted to go home, that he wanted Colin to tuck him in his rucksack and take him home, that he wanted it be Easter Sunday and for them all to be there, him and his sisters and his brother,
saving the foils
, holding back on the roast potatoes, being a tribe. Because it was true, he did still feel sixteen but it wasn’t true that he had a plan; he had no idea what he was doing here or where he was heading. He was lost. Totally lost. Without Owen here to tell him what to do next, he’d be clueless.

He smiled at his dad and he said, ‘I’m really glad you’re here, though, really, really glad.’

His father’s eyes filled with tears suddenly and he grasped Rory’s hands in his and squeezed them, way too hard. ‘Me too, son,’ he said, ‘me too.’

There was only one way to handle that first night with his dad, only one way to tell his father the truth about himself. And that was to take him to work with him.

He showered himself and dressed himself in his work gear: crisp white shirt, black trousers, sunglasses, sensible shoes in case he had to chase anyone. His dad said, ‘Wow, look at you. Don’t you scrub up well,’ and put on a scruffy T-shirt and shorts with his heinous Velcro-strapped sandals.

‘So, what is it you do here, exactly?’ his dad said as they turned the corner towards the front of the club.

‘I’m a doorman.’

Colin laughed. ‘Ha!’ he said. ‘A bouncer! Of all the things …’ They walked into the club, past the curious gaze of the cashier at the front desk, past the spangled walls and into the dark womb of the club. It was early, the doors not yet open to the public. Without the girls there, it could be any old bar, any old nightclub. A guy called Ben washed glasses behind the bar and nodded a hello to Rory and his dad. A girl still in her own clothes but already fully made up passed them on her way to the bar. She hugged Rory to her and called him ‘sweetie’. Colin looked at him curiously and Rory shrugged. His father would put the pieces of the jigsaw together eventually. He knocked on the door of Owen’s office. ‘It’s me.’

‘Come in.’

Owen sat behind his desk, all muscles and money and too much aftershave. But still, he found a sweet smile for Rory’s dad, and a big warm handshake, and Rory could tell that his dad was impressed. Everyone who met Owen was impressed. ‘An honour to meet you, sir,’ he said. Rory saw Colin’s look of surprise at being referred to as ‘sir’ by an Englishman.

‘Likewise,’ he said.

‘How long are you staying for?’

‘Four nights.’

Owen sat back down in his big leather chair and said, ‘Not long then, a flying visit?’

‘Yes, sadly so. I was hoping Rory might be able to take some time off, that we might be able to travel around a bit together. But he says he’s too busy.’

Owen laughed and smiled apologetically. ‘Yeah, that’ll be my fault. Sorry, Mr Bird.’

‘Call me Colin.’

‘Colin. Yeah. I run a very tight ship and I don’t really trust anyone. So if Rory’s not here there’s no one else to put on the door, and if there’s no one on the door, the club can’t open.’ He shrugged and smiled again.

Colin nodded and said, ‘Yes. Sure. Sure.’

‘But still,’ Owen continued. ‘You’ve got the days free. Plenty to see. Plenty to do.’ He suggested the ocean beyond the doors of the club with his big tanned arms and then leaned back into his chair.

It was odd to Rory, observing his friend, his boss, this man he’d seen every day of his life for the past four years, seeing him suddenly through someone else’s eyes. It was discomfiting and strangely sad.

Outside the office door, the music had been turned up louder. Rory could hear the girls starting to filter through into the club. Owen smiled at him. ‘Looks like you’re up,’ he said. Then he got to his feet, all six foot odd of him, shook Colin again by the hand, smiled that dimpled smile, wished him well, told him drinks were on the house. Rory led his dad out of the office and towards the front door. The girls were
everywhere now, in their work clothes: rhinestone bikinis, hot pants, sequinned bras. They oozed and they wriggled and they clucked and they touched Rory’s blond hair with overextended fingernails. He turned to his father as they came out on to the pavement and his father looked at him and said, ‘You left Kayleigh, and the baby, for him?’

Rory did not reply.

‘Jesus, Rory. The man’s a buffoon! I mean, look at him. “
I don’t trust anyone
–”’ He rolled his shoulders, mimicked Owen’s Essex growl. ‘Who does he think he is, Tony bloody Soprano?’ Colin laughed.

‘He’s my friend,’ Rory replied quietly, unclipping the velvet rope from the club entrance, waving through two young men in rugby shirts.

‘You think?’ said Colin. ‘He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who has friends.’

Rory shrugged. ‘He doesn’t have friends. But he has me. We’re like brothers …’

Colin threw him a look.

‘We are. We’re soulmates. It’s weird. I can’t explain it.’

Colin continued to stare at him inscrutably. ‘And this place, it’s a titty bar, right?’

‘Well, yeah. Pretty much.’

Colin laughed again and rocked back on his heels, his gaze reaching into the darkening sky as though there might be something more edifying up there. ‘Pretty much,’ he repeated. ‘Right.’ He sighed, dropped his gaze to the ground. ‘Oh, son.’

‘What?’

‘This!’ Colin exclaimed. ‘And what you left behind. Tia.
Kayleigh. It’s … it’s … Christ. Rory. What the hell is it you’re looking for, exactly?’

Rory waved a relatively sober stag party through and scuffed his shoes against the pavement. ‘I’m not looking for anything.’

Colin nodded. He looked for a moment as though he were about to say something. But then he stopped, exhaled. ‘Just as well,’ he said, ‘because I can tell you this. You won’t find anything here.’ He gestured at the bar, at the line of young men waiting to gain entry. ‘You won’t find anything at all.’

‘Oh, my
God
.’ Meg dropped her weekend case on the doormat and stared at the scene before her. Behind her the three children tried to see what she was looking at.

‘What?’ said Molly. ‘Is it really bad?’

‘Oh, my
God
,’ she repeated.

Molly squeezed past her. ‘Let me see,’ she urged. She came to a standstill in front of Meg and said, ‘Oh, my
God
.’ Then she turned to Meg and she said, ‘I don’t want to go in, Mummy. I really don’t. Can you let me into Grandpa’s house?
Please
.’

‘No,’ said Meg. ‘Not until we’ve said hello to Grandma. Come on.
Boys!
’ she called out behind her to the two youngest who were now grabbing handfuls of the gravel on the footpath. They all trooped in and for a brief moment they were silent.

It was Meg’s first visit home since Christmas, six months since Vicky and the girls had finally jumped ship and four months since Beth had moved away, and in those four months Lorelei appeared to have put her kitchen completely out of commission. Dad had warned her. But still, nothing could
have prepared her for the devastation that her mother had wrought upon the heart of her home.

The detail that struck her first was that the Aga was no longer visible. The precious orange Aga that had cooked their meat for them, warmed their winter gloves, dried out wet socks and heated pans of bedtime milk was gone, cloaked entirely under piles of laundry and cardboard boxes. The surface of the kitchen table was also invisible, loaded up with piles of newspapers and plastic carrier bags tied up by their handles into knots, empty pizza boxes, empty drinks cans and a colony of empty wine bottles. The old butler’s sink was packed up with jam jars and old cellophane in various colours and the kitchen blind had come off its fittings and was slung diagonally across the window. Meg lifted her foot experimentally from the flagstones and was unsurprised when it came away with a gluey slurp.

‘Come on, you lot,’ she called to her children, ‘let’s go and find Grandma.
Mum!
’ she called out, walking blindly through the wreckage of her childhood kitchen. ‘
Mum! We’re here!
’

She had not wanted to come. She and Bill had been busy searching the Internet for a last-minute deal to somewhere sunny when Dad had called to say he was going away, to see Rory and Beth, that Vicky and the girls were going to be at her parents’ in Surrey and that Lorelei was going to be on her own at Easter for the first time in her life. She’d ummed and aahed and mentally measured out the constituent ingredients of guilt, duty, resentment and selfishness until she’d finally come up with a recipe for Doing the Right Thing. Bill had stayed at home and she did not blame him in the least.

She traipsed through the kitchen into the front hall, the three children following behind her, silent in awe and wonder. The square space was filled to almost the height of Stanley’s head with cardboard boxes from the cash and carry. She idly lifted flaps as she passed through the narrow space between the boxes, her breath held against the prospect of what she might find within.

Two hundred citronella tea lights.

A hundred multicoloured disposable tablecloths.

Twenty packets of mixed gold and silver Christmas decorations.

Twenty-four packets of Betty Crocker Halloween cupcake mix.

Forty pink polka-dot washing-up brushes.

Fifty one-litre cartons of Aptamil follow-on milk.

She let the flap of this last box drop in horror. Aptamil follow-on milk? When there were no babies in the family? She checked the side of the box and saw that its contents had a consume-by date of August 2001. She sighed.

‘
Mum
. We’re here!’

They picked their way through the two opposing walls of things that snaked their way up the staircase leaving a two-foot gap in the middle.

‘Mummy,’ hissed Alfie urgently, as though something important had just this minute occurred to him. ‘Why has Grandma got all these things on the stairs?’

‘Shh,’ cautioned Meg.

They followed her through the continuing wall of objects and into Lorelei’s bedroom.

Meg couldn’t see her at first and was about to turn and leave when she spied her, curled up inside her floral armchair, with a huge pair of headphones on, listening to – she presumed – the radio and painting her toenails. She was buried, virtually, within more piles of unidentifiable things, an amorphous mass of bags and boxes and paper and clothes with occasional unexpected outshoots of lamps and broken furniture, hairdryers and ironing boards.

And her mother, like a frog on a lily pad, in the very centre of it all.

‘Oh,’ she said, pulling away her gigantic headphones and peering up at Meg suspiciously. ‘Hello, darling. I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘Well, no,’ said Meg, ‘you wouldn’t really, would you, with those big things over your ears? I did tell you we’d be here at three. And it’s now exactly five past.’

‘Oh, yes, of course it is. I was just listening to the three o’clock news. D’oh! Silly me. I completely forgot! Hello, you three!’ she cried out to the children clustered nervously behind Megan’s back. ‘I’d say come in, but as you can see …’ She spread her arms apologetically and laughed.

‘Jesus Christ, Mum. I mean … just …
Jesus
.’ Meg was having trouble breathing properly. There was a tightness around her stomach and her chest and a kind of putrid green mist clouding her thought processes. She could think of no vocabulary to properly express herself. She could think of nothing beyond her overwhelming need to turn and leave. This instant. Pack everything and everyone back into her fragrant, newly valeted (you had to have it done at least once a
month when you had three small children, otherwise things started to take root on the upholstery) people carrier and set off back to London at a significant rate of knots.

She thought of her house in a neat terrace off Kentish Town Road. She thought of her two-thousand-odd square feet of shiny wood-laminate floors and immaculate cream carpets, the rows of storage boxes stacked neatly inside cupboards and the sparking granite surfaces in her kitchen. She thought of her gleaming windows, washed once a season on a contract, and her louvred shutters which she cleaned with a toothbrush to remove the film of dust from between the slats. She thought of her monthly clear-outs, the ones that made the children gripe and groan and Bill look at her as if she had a screw loose, as if she should
get a life
.

And then she looked at her will-o’-the-wisp of a mother buried under a mountain of her own seething shit and she felt herself breathe easier. She was not the mad one in this family. Whatever her family might say. This here, this was madness. Right here. She pulled back her shoulders and she said, ‘What the hell have you done to your house?’

Lorelei shrugged, as if she could care less. Then she sighed and said, ‘I know. I know. It’s, well, let’s call it a work in progress.’

‘Mum! This is not a work in progress! Do not dignify it with such a ridiculous description. This is a disaster. Plain and simple. I’m calling the council!’

Her dad had warned her to go easy, but “going easy” was not in Meg’s repertoire. And she saw exactly how too far she had gone as the colour slowly left Lorelei’s face and
her features pinched together and her hands turned into fists. ‘Don’t you bloody
dare
!’ she growled. ‘Don’t you bloody bloody bloody
dare
!’