The House We Grew Up In (3 page)

Meg laughed. ‘I know, baby, I know. But honestly. I’m good. Really.’

Molly squeezed her hand one more time before letting it go. She pulled in her breath theatrically and then nodded at the key in Meg’s hand. Meg nodded back and fitted it into the lock. She turned the key. She opened the door.

The sky was dark with rain clouds and in the very far distance, thunder was starting to rumble. The York stone paving slabs were still stained charcoal grey from the last downpour and fat droplets of rain clung tremulously to the edges of leaves and spring blossoms. Behind the cloud was a strip of blue and there on the horizon, the faint beginnings of a rainbow. Lorelei stood barefoot just outside the kitchen door, wrapped in a long multicoloured angora cardigan. Her waist-length hair was twisted and held on her crown with three large tortoiseshell combs.

‘Look, Meggy,’ she said, her head appearing around the door. ‘Look. A rainbow! Quick!’

Meg glanced up from her revision, spread before her on the kitchen table, and smiled encouragingly. ‘In a minute,’ she said.

‘No!’ cried her mother. ‘It’ll be gone in a minute. Come and look now!’

Meg sighed and rested her pen on her notepad. ‘OK,’ she said.

She joined her mother outside, feeling the wetness of the flagstones seeping through her sheepskin slippers.

‘Beth!’ her mother called back into the kitchen. ‘Boys! Come quickly!’

‘They’re watching telly,’ said Meg. ‘They won’t be able to hear you.’

‘Go and get them, will you, darling?’

‘They won’t come.’

‘Of course they will. Quick, darling, run in and tell them.’

Meg knew it was pointless to argue. She sighed again and headed towards the sitting room. Her three siblings sat in a row on the grubby sofa with the dog lying listlessly between them. They were watching
Saturday Superstore
and eating carrot sticks.

‘Mum says there’s a rainbow,’ she said defeatedly. ‘She wants you to go and look at it.’

No one acknowledged her so she returned to her mother with the bad news.

Lorelei sighed melodramatically. ‘That’s a terrible pity,’ she said. ‘And look,’ she gestured at the sky, ‘now it’s gone. Gone for good. For ever …’ A small tear rolled down the side of her nose and she wiped it away with a bunched-up fist, the way a small child might do. ‘Such a pity,’ she murmured, ‘to miss a rainbow …’ Then she forced her face into a smile and said, ‘Ah well, at least one of you saw it. You can always describe it to the others.’

Meg smiled tightly.
As if
, she thought to herself,
as if I will
sit with my siblings and regale them with descriptions of the red and the yellow and the pink and the green, the awe and the splendour of the purple and the orange and the blue, the miracle of distant prismatic stripes
. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Maybe, later.’

It was still raining the next day. Lorelei insisted on the egg hunt taking place regardless.

‘Let’s do it indoors, darling,’ Colin had suggested gently.

‘No way, Jose!’ Lorelei had countered. ‘Easter Sunday is egg hunt in the garden. Rain or no rain. Isn’t that right, kiddies?’

Meg looked out towards the garden, through the rain-splattered panes of glass, and thought of her hair, lovingly backcombed that morning into a fat quiff and sprayed hard with Elnett. She thought of the muddy lawn and the cold, wet grass and her canvas pumps, and she thought of her drainpipe jeans that she’d had trouble squeezing into this morning, and the date she was going on next week for which she planned on being able to wear said jeans, not to mention the troublesome spot forming on her chin.

The twins jumped into their wellington boots and cagoules, while Lorelei ran around in the rain, planting her eggs in the garden. Meg watched her through the window. She looked like a wraith, long and lean, in a cream muslin smock, faded jeans, green wellingtons and a floppy-brimmed straw hat, her long hair sticking wet to her back, her small breasts growing visible through the fabric of her top as it dampened. Her face was shining with joy as she hopped from spot to spot, plucking eggs from a straw basket held in the crook of her arm.

The boys stood in the doorway, bristling with anticipation.
At just turned eleven years old they could still be held rapt by Lorelei with her enthusiasm and childlike charm. Her babies, still, just about.

‘Ready, steady,
go
!’ she called out a moment later, and the boys hared out on to the lawn, followed more sedately by Bethan in a pink polka-dot raincoat and rubber boots.

‘Meggy?’ Her mother stared at her curiously. ‘No eggs?’

‘I’ll leave them for the others,’ said Meg, hoping a suggestion of sibling-oriented kindness might prevent further urging.

‘There’s lots to go round. Tons and tons.’

Meg shrugged. ‘I don’t want my hair to get wet.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. That’s no excuse. Put on a rain cap, here …’ She pulled a clear plastic hood from a drawer and forced it into Meg’s hands.

Meg stared at it aghast. ‘I’m not wearing that!’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Because it’s an old lady’s hat.’

‘It is not! It’s
my
hat!’

‘Exactly.’

Lorelei threw her head back and laughed hard. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, ‘one day, God willing, you’ll be forty too, and I promise you, you will not feel a day over eighteen. Not a day. Now put the hat on and come and have some fun with the little ones. Imagine,’ she said, her face turning serious for a moment, ‘imagine if something happened to one of us and there was no Easter egg hunt next year, imagine if everything stopped being perfect – you would wish so hard that you’d taken part today …’

Megan stared into the depths of her mother’s eyes, the
greeny-blue reservoirs of a million fervent emotions. They were set firm. She forced a smile and said, ‘OK,’ dragging out the second syllable to demonstrate her sacrifice. She found eleven eggs that morning and gave them all to her siblings.

Pandora and her husband Laurence arrived at midday, without either of their now grown-up sons but with a new puppy in tow. Shortly afterwards, Colin’s sister Lorna turned up, with a carrier bag full of Easter eggs. Some neighbours were next to arrive, Bob and Jenny and their three young children. Lorelei roasted a leg of lamb in the Aga and served it with far too many honey-glazed carrots (‘
Aren’t they the most glorious shade of orange?
’) and not nearly enough roast potatoes. The children sat at a plastic picnic table at one end of the kitchen while the adults sat together around the antique pine table in the middle. Megan felt lost amongst the two parties, too old for the children, too young for the adults, not one person in the room to appreciate her perfectly applied eyeliner or her new Aran cardigan with leather buttons or the fact that she’d finally got down to eight and a half stone. She didn’t like carrots and was toying with the idea of vegetarianism so she picked daintily at the one roast potato she’d been allocated by her mother (‘
FHB, darling!
’) and stared through the window at the incessant rain, fantasising about her escape.

Megan imagined it to be a glorious explosion of glass shards, as she slammed her fists through the invisible walls around her. She imagined fresh air and bright light and dizzying amounts of space. She saw a room with four flat bare walls, a square bed dressed in plain white sheets, a tall
window hung with a simple pair of white curtains like the ones in Demi Moore’s apartment in
St Elmo’s Fire
. She saw a shiny kitchen, gleaming pans, a white bathroom and a quiet man with clean fingernails and a silver guitar.

Then she looked around her own kitchen, at the fifteen years’ worth of children’s art lovingly hung and tacked and stuck to the walls, and the thought of escape soured in her heart. She left the children’s table and went and sat herself on her father’s knee at the grown-ups’ table, hoping for a return of the sense of the sugary days of her childhood. He wrapped a gangly arm around her waist and Megan smiled across the table at her mother.

‘You know, Lorrie,’ their neighbour Jenny was saying, ‘your kitchen really is the loveliest place to be on a grotty day like today.’

Lorelei smiled and put an arm around her friend.

‘No, it really is. So warm. So welcoming. If I ever found myself stranded on the side of a snowy mountain, freezing to death, I would probably hallucinate about this place. About Lorrie’s lovely kitchen.’

‘Thank you,’ said Lorelei, kissing her on her cheek. ‘Meggy thinks the house is a mess, don’t you, my darling?’

‘It
is
a mess,’ she replied.

Lorelei laughed. ‘Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks, darling, isn’t that right?’

Meg raised her eyebrows and rolled her eyes. ‘I just don’t know why you have to keep so much stuff. I mean, I understand all this –’ she gestured at the artwork. ‘But why, for example, do we have nineteen tea towels?’

Lorelei snorted. ‘We do not have nineteen tea towels.’

‘We absolutely
do
have nineteen tea towels, Mother. I counted them the other day. Just as an experiment. Look!’ She leapt to her feet and yanked open a kitchen drawer. She pulled out examples and held them up as evidence. ‘We have tea towels with holes in them, tea towels with burn marks, stained tea towels, threadbare tea towels. But look! We also have brand new tea towels – look,
nice
ones.’

Pandora laughed. ‘I must confess, Lorrie, I bought you that one because I was a bit alarmed by the elderly appearance of the existing tea towels last time I came.’

‘Yet, still,’ Meg continued theatrically, warming to her theme, ‘do we throw the old ones away? No! We do not! We wash them and we dry them and then we
fold
them and we return them to this drawer which now has
nineteen tea towels
in it!’

‘Well, darling,’ her mother replied drily, ‘I must say, given that you’ll be sitting your O levels in less than three months, I’d have thought you might have better things to do with your time than count tea towels.’

‘Please let me throw one away, Mother. Please. I beg of you. How about this one?’ She held up a limp grey cloth with a rent running down the full length of it.

‘No!’ exclaimed Lorelei. ‘Absolutely not! It’ll do for rags.’

‘Mother,’ said Megan in exasperation, ‘we have a black bag on the landing bulging at the seams with “rags”. Which we never use. We do not need any more
rags
.’

‘Put it back,’ said her mother, her joyful eyes clouding over for a moment. ‘Please. Just put it back. I’ll do a clear-out another day. When you’re all back at school.’

‘But you won’t, will you? You know that and I know that. If I came back here in ten years’ time there’d be thirty tea towels in that drawer.
Including
this one.’ She hurled the tea towel down on her mother’s lap.

‘Oh, now, Megan, come on,’ said Jenny nervously. ‘Stop bullying lovely Mummy.’

Meg sighed and groaned. She looked around and realised that everyone had stopped talking and that they were all staring at her with varying degrees of discomfort. Beth looked at her in an accusatory way from the other table and her father stared at his shoes. Then Meg looked at her mother again who was smiling nervously and rubbing at the pointy nibs of her elbows.

‘It’s only tea towels,’ said Rhys.

‘Yes,’ said Lorelei brightly. ‘That’s exactly right, Rhys, it’s only tea towels. Now, who’s for more carrots? Absolutely heaps left!’

Megan went up to her room and listened to the Top 40 on Radio One, letting the clean, sweet melody of Simple Minds rub away her frayed nerves.

It was not a kitchen. Not in any traditional or easily recognisable way. It was a structure, a form, an entity, like the guts of a living creature. It was dark, eerily dark, no sense of the bright spring day outside, just a white stripe of light strafing through a gap in the piles in front of the windows.
Meg felt around the wall to her left for the light switch. The lights did not come on. She was unsurprised. She switched her mobile phone to its torch function and swept the beam around the room.

‘Sweet Jesus Christ.’

Molly stood behind her mother, a hand clamped over her mouth, her darkly kohled eyes wide with horror. She grabbed Meg’s arm with her other hand and gripped it.

Megan sighed. ‘
Oh, Mum
.’

Molly relaxed her grip on her mother’s arm and let her hand drop from her mouth. ‘I remember eating breakfast in here,’ she said. ‘There was a big table. There. With benches. And the cereal was in jars, over there, with cork lids. And there was a view, through the window. Of a tree …’

They both turned to look at the place where the windows had been. But it was hard to place them, behind the wall of things. It was disorientating. The house no longer made any sense.

Molly turned back to her mother. ‘How are we going to get through to the rest of the house?’

Meg sighed and swung the torch beam to the area at the back of the room that should, in theory, contain a door leading to the hallway and the rest of the house. All that the beam picked out was more walls. Walls within walls. There was no sign of the back of the room and no immediate sense of how to locate it. But then the light picked up a gap, a foot wide. She shone the light down on to the floor and saw flagstones. The flagstones of her childhood. The only familiar feature so far.

‘I think,’ she said, shining the light back on to the tiny gap, ‘we’ll have to go this way.’

‘You’re kidding me?’ said Molly.

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘I’ll have a panic attack if I have to go through there.’

‘Yes. Me too. Although, Christ, I’m not even sure I could squeeze through. I mean, look, it’s so narrow.’

‘Well, I’m not going there on my own. No way.’

Meg set her shoulders. She’d lost three stone six years ago – she was no longer a size sixteen – but still, she was a solid woman, not a waif like her mother and her teenage daughter. ‘Fine,’ she said, sucking in her stomach, ‘fine. I’ll lead the way.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ whimpered Molly, holding on to the back of Meg’s T-shirt. ‘Mum, I’m scared.’