The House We Grew Up In (27 page)

Meg felt a pair of small arms grip her tightly around the legs and she hustled the children back on to the landing and said, ‘Wait there. One minute. I’ll be one minute and then we’ll all go out in the garden. OK?’

She stepped back into the entrance to her mother’s room and said, ‘Please don’t swear in front of the children, Mum.’

Lorelei tutted and folded her arms.

‘I’m going to take them out in the garden, to play. Will you join us?’

She tutted again.

‘Well, let’s put it this way – I can’t spend another second up here. I’m feeling half mad already with all this –’ she whispered it – ‘
shit
. We’ve driven halfway across the country to come and see you, so please, come outside. OK?’

Lorelei nodded and sighed. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I’ll have to wait for my nails to dry first.’ Her mood brightened at the mention of her toenails; she pulled up one long leg so that her toes appeared over the mountain of things and she curled them down so that they faced Megan, and then she smiled her yellowing snaggle-toothed smile and said, ‘Look! Periwinkle! Isn’t that the most divine colour you’ve ever seen?’

Meg flinched when she saw her mother appear in the garden ten minutes later. She shuffled nervously through the garden door, as though there might be wolves or bears. She was wrapped up in a huge rainbow-striped angora cardigan, one
she’d owned for most of her life, under which she wore pink floral leggings that hung loose from her spindly legs. On her feet were leopard-print slippers with fur trim and her long grey hair was piled on top of her head bar a long shank that fell down her back like a piece of dirty rope.

She forced a smile and took another tentative step out on to the flagstones. ‘Chilly out here, isn’t it, darling?’ she muttered.

‘Yes,’ Meg replied. ‘But at least the children aren’t in danger of being buried alive under an avalanche of your total and utter shit.’

‘Oh, Meggy.’

‘No, Mum. Sorry. This is not about me, OK. This is not me being horrible Meg, you know, always the villain of the piece. This is about you. About what you’re doing to yourself, to your home. I mean, look at it.’ She flapped her arms angrily towards the back of the house. ‘Look at this beautiful place. There are people in this world who would kill to live in this house, in this village, to have what you’ve got. And you’re trashing it, Mum. I mean, what are you thinking? What on earth are you thinking?’

Lorelei put a hand against the flint wall of the house. She caressed the stone gently and sighed. ‘I love this house,’ she said. ‘You know I do. It’s the only thing that’s never let me down.’

‘Then why are you treating it so badly?’

She looked up at Meg, her green eyes full of hurt and devoid of understanding. ‘This house looks after me,’ she said. ‘That’s more than anyone else in this family does.’

Meg breathed in hard.
Go easy
, she thought to herself,
go easy
.

‘What have you been eating?’ she asked.

Lorelei shrugged. ‘I eat,’ she said.

‘Yes, but what?’

‘Cottage cheese.’

‘Cottage cheese?’

‘Yes. I buy it in those big family-sized tubs from the supermarket, in all the different flavours – you know, they do one with paprika now. Cottage cheese with smoky paprika. A kind of terracotta colour, that one. It’s absolutely delicious. And the pink one with the prawns, that’s my favourite. And I have lots of rice cakes, they all come in delicious flavours too. So I kind of mix and match them together, infinite combinations.’ Her face had lit up with all this talk of cottage cheese and rice cakes and she was kneading the hem of her cardigan maniacally with her fists.

‘What else?’ said Megan. ‘Apart from cottage cheese.’

‘Biscuits,’ she said, ‘bread. Sweeties. Ooh, and those doughnut things –’ she let her cardigan fall and clicked her fingers while she searched for the word – ‘what are they called? They’re so pretty, they come in a big box and they’ve all different toppings in different colours, from America, you know …’

‘Krispy Kremes?’

‘Yes! Those! I treat myself every week. In fact, I think there’s a couple left. Shall I get them out, for the children?’

Megan shook her head vehemently. ‘No!’ she snapped. ‘God. No, thank you.’

‘Oh, yes,’ sighed Lorelei, ‘I forgot. You’re all super-healthy, aren’t you? Those poor children.’

Megan breathed in again. This was not about her, she reminded herself, not about her. ‘So you’re not actually eating anything hot, then? Nothing cooked?’

‘Well, the doughnuts are cooked, I assume, at some point.’

‘No, Mum, you
know
what I mean. You’ve no kitchen appliances to cook with, they’re all buried. So you’re not eating anything hot?’

‘No, darling, that is not actually true. I go to Vicky’s at least twice a week and she cooks for me.’

Megan rolled her eyes. Bloody Vicky, absolving her mother yet again of her basic responsibilities to herself.

‘And Daddy often pops something over, when he’s at home. Which isn’t very often these days.’

‘So what exactly do you
do
all day?’

‘I listen to the radio. I go to the shops. I see Vicky and the girls. I surf the Internet. I’m a silver surfer, apparently, I heard that on the radio the other day,’ she giggled. ‘And I still volunteer at the library once a week. So, you know, it’s not as if I’m just
hanging around
. Doing nothing.’

‘Well, no,
clearly
you have been doing something. Nobody accumulates that magnitude of
crap
without doing something proactive. I see you’re hoarding newspapers now, as well as bulk-buying baby milk and J-cloths. You know that means you’ve reached the final stages of your affliction.’

‘
Affliction
,’ muttered Lorelei, and then she tutted.

‘What are they for, Mother, the newspapers?’

‘I haven’t read them yet.’

‘Right, and you’re going to start reading them when, exactly?’

She tutted again. ‘When I need to remember something.’

‘Like what?’

‘Oh, God, Meggy. You just don’t understand, do you? You never have understood. Everything that I possess is part of the context.’

‘The context?’

‘Yes! The big picture!’ She made a frame with her hands and then finally joined Meg at the garden table. ‘For example, today, the tenth of April 2004. Easter Saturday. The day that Meg and the children came to stay. The day that I wore my favourite rainbow cardigan and painted my toenails periwinkle. The day that was cloudy and cool with the threat of localised showers later. The day that I got an email from Daddy in Thailand telling me that he’d landed safely and was on his way out for dinner with Rory. The day that I had yet another argument with you, darling.’ She smiled sadly and looked tearful. Then she brought her shoulders up and said, ‘So the newspaper fills in some of the gaps. Of the context. Of the big picture. So does the bottle of nail polish. Once it’s empty I can’t throw it away. Because it’s like throwing away something that happened. It’s like throwing away the email from Daddy and the visit from you. It’s like throwing away the clouds in the sky and the chill in the air and the very moment we’re living in. Do you see, darling,
do you see
?’

Meg shrugged and smiled tightly.

‘No,’ she said softly, ‘I really don’t.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Lorelei. ‘I didn’t really expect you to. We’ve
never seen eye to eye, you and I. You’ve never understood me.’ She sighed. ‘It’s fine. Other people get me. You don’t have to.’ She reached across the damp wood of the table and squeezed Megan’s hand. It wasn’t a gesture of affection, it was a gesture of reassurance. It was saying, ‘
Never mind darling, we can’t all be perfect children
.’

Megan could hear the children playing in the lower garden. She was heartened to see that her mother hadn’t destroyed the garden too. Between her father and Vicky, it was still a picture-postcard idyll of roses and meandering pathways, bowers and lovingly striped lawns. She stared overhead at the threatening sky, hoping that it would not deliver the forecast showers, that she would be able to spend the rest of the day out here and not have to venture back into that hellhole. Then she pulled her hand away from her mother’s and said, ‘But what about the rest of it? All the cash-and-carry stuff? Why, for example, is there a box of follow-on milk in the hallway, that expired three years ago?’

‘Oh –’ her mother took back her hands and rubbed at her pointy elbows – ‘well, obviously I bought that when there were babies around. You know. Thought it would be nice for you not to have to cart a load of formula down every time you came to visit.’

‘And then?’

She shrugged. ‘I forgot I’d bought it. And suddenly the babies weren’t babies any more.’

‘And you have kept it because …?’

‘Because buying it brought me pleasure. Because I stood in a shop and saw it and thought of my babies and your babies
and your visits and imagined myself with a little Stan or a little Alf on my lap, drinking the milk that I bought them, and I imagined you smiling and saying, “
Thank you, Mummy, what a brilliant idea
.” And all the things I thought when I looked at the milk and bought the milk were good things. And if I throw the milk away then I’m throwing away all those good things I thought and felt when I bought it.’

Megan sighed. Her mother’s view of the world was an impenetrable wall. ‘Empty food packaging?’

‘Ah, yes –’ her mother smiled mischievously – ‘there you have a point, darling. I really do need to get on top of that. It’s just, I’m trying to be good about my recycling, and so often a whole day goes by without me leaving the house and the recycling box fills up so quickly and sometimes I just sort of
leave things
and I intend to do something about them but then once they’ve been sitting there for a few days I kind of stop noticing them. And then before I know it …’

‘… you’re living in utter squalor.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t call it squalor.’

‘
I
would.’

‘I know you would, Meg. You’ve always been very critical of the way I live my life. You’ve always very been critical of
me
.’

Megan sighed and reminded herself yet again that she was not here to fiddle around with the knobs and switches of her unsatisfactory relationship with her mother. ‘So,’ she said, steering things back to the relevant. ‘You wouldn’t mind, in that case, if I threw away the empty food packaging.
Just
the empty food packaging?’

Lorelei smiled. ‘Of course not! I’d love it! Vicky always has a little go when she comes to visit. And your father, of course. But it all builds up so quickly, doesn’t it?’

‘If you say so.’

Lorelei laughed nervously. And then she sighed. ‘I’m quite lonely, you know.’

‘I know you are.’

‘I never expected to be on my own. I know it sounds silly, because everyone ends up on their own eventually, don’t they? But I never really thought it would happen to me.’

‘Well, you’re not strictly on your own, are you? You’ve got Dad right next door and Vicky up the road, and you know, don’t you, that if you could get on top of things, if you could, you know,
acknowledge
your affliction …’

‘That word again.’

‘… then Vicky and the girls might be able to think about moving back in and you wouldn’t have to be on your own. You do know that, right?’

‘Of course I do. Of course. I still don’t really understand what that was all about. One minute we were all here together having a lovely time, the next …’ She blew out her cheeks.

‘… the next, Mum, you were calling her precious girl a little shit and filling their home up with so much stuff that they were embarrassed to bring friends home to play.’

Lorelei tutted, into the sky. ‘I don’t even remember it,’ she said.

‘Yes, you do. Of course you do.’

Lorelei tutted again.

‘Right, so –’ Meg got to her feet. ‘I’ll get some things from the car, and make a start on your kitchen.’

Lorelei jumped up from her chair and said, ‘I shall want to watch, you know?’

‘Yes,’ said Megan, ‘of course you will. Come on then, Mother dearest, let’s go and have a big old screaming row about egg cartons.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Lorelei, ‘I never throw away egg cartons, darling, they’re useful.’

‘No,’ said Megan, ‘they are not useful. And I will be throwing them away. Are you coming?’

Lorelei let her shoulders slump just a degree and then she looked at Megan and she smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m coming.’

It was, strangely enough, after all Megan’s misgivings and resentment about missing out on her last-minute sunshine getaway, a very nice Easter weekend. Vicky came over in the late afternoon and kept the children entertained next door with Sophie (but no Maddy) while Lorelei graciously allowed Megan to empty her kitchen. She did not, of course, allow her to throw away anything apart from food packaging (even that had its fraught moments, a small tussle over a sheet of blue bubble wrap, for example – ‘
But darling, it’s
blue,
I’ve never seen blue bubble wrap before!
’ – which ended in Lorelei’s favour) and was very controlling about exactly where Meg could relocate the objects elsewhere in the house, but all in all, she was quite good-natured about the process and actually burst into tears as they stood a few hours later and admired the newly unentombed kitchen surfaces.

‘Oh, look, look. It’s my kitchen again! Look at my lovely kitchen! My Aga! My sink!’

Vicky had come in with the little ones and they all stood and smiled at each other and Vicky said, ‘You’ve clearly got more sway over her than me. Never in a million years would she have let me do this. And believe me, I’ve tried.’

Meg had smiled sardonically and said, ‘It’s because she’s scared of me.’

And Vicky had sighed and said, ‘Ah, yes, indeed. That’s where I always went wrong with her. I just always wanted her to like me, more than anything.’

Vicky and the girls left and then they all drove up to the supermarket by the roundabout and had what could only be described as a fun time shopping for Easter lunch. Finally uncoupled from her long-standing embarrassment of her mother’s ‘little ways’ and distracted anyway by her marauding tribe of children, she saw, for possibly the first time since her very early childhood, some of Lorelei’s charm.