The House We Grew Up In (41 page)

The following morning all four of them strapped themselves into Megan’s people carrier and headed to the funeral parlour where Lorelei’s body had been sent from the Coroner’s Office. Megan had had a call the previous evening, while they ate in the pub in the next village along (too many curious gazes and
awkward reunions in the local). ‘Your mother is ready,’ said an earnest young man called Samuel Moss. ‘We’ve made her look very nice. I think you’ll be pleased.’

Megan could not begin to imagine. She had never seen a body laid out for a funeral before. ‘Thank you very much,’ she’d said. ‘We’ll see you in the morning.’

They’d laid her out on a bed in a tiny room in the back corner of the parlour. She was surrounded by silk flowers and attended by the boy called Samuel Moss who was dressed in a suit, his thin hair greased down like a pensioner’s, and so theatrically respectful he was bordering on a character from
The Fast Show
. ‘I’ll leave you all to treasure your time with Lorelei. If I may call her that?’

Megan and Beth looked at each other and exchanged pained looks, their cheeks sucked in with repressed laughter. ‘Yes,’ Megan managed, ‘you may. Thank you.’

The laughter dissipated as Samuel left the room and they moved in closer to their mother’s body.

‘She’s so
thin
!’ Bethan cried out in a loud whisper.

‘Six stone eight,’ said Megan.

‘God.’

‘But she looks sweet, doesn’t she?’

Bethan put her hand against Lorelei’s hand and nodded. ‘So little.’

‘Like a child,’ said Colin, laying his hand against her cheek.

‘What the hell is she wearing?’ said Bethan.

‘Christ knows.’ Megan turned to check that Samuel wasn’t listening at the door. ‘It’s revolting – it looks like something an old lady would wear.’

It was a pale-blue dress, devoid of any of Lorelei’s precious colours. It sat loose around her handspan waist and ended just an inch too low below her knees. It had a row of three buttons on a placket down the front and long sleeves.

‘We should have brought her something,’ said Bethan.

Megan sighed. ‘They asked me to. I tried to find something, but honestly, as ridiculous as it might sound, I couldn’t find any of her nice clothes. I have no idea where she kept them. We’ll have to buy her something,’ she said decisively. ‘From that boutique. We’ll buy her something colourful. Bring it over later.’

‘Oh,’ said Colin, ‘surely that’s a waste of money. She’s only—’

‘No,’ Beth interjected. ‘Meg’s right. We’ll buy her something lovely.’

Colin nodded and smiled, happy to be outnumbered.

‘She looks pretty,’ said Molly.

Megan smiled and put her arm around her daughter’s waist. ‘She does, doesn’t she?’ She didn’t want to say that she thought her mother looked like an awful shrunken-down witch, her unkempt hair tamed into a long grey plait, her skin the colour of cement. She had to remind herself of what her mother must have looked like before they’d worked their magic on her, this woman who’d starved herself to death and been found dead in her car on the side of the road with her insides eaten away by disease.

She should be grateful for small mercies.

They spent another half an hour in the room with Lorelei. Nobody cried. Not even Bethan with her body pumped full
of hormones. But it was sweet and tender, nonetheless. The three women left Colin to talk about arrangements for the funeral with the director and drove into the village. They parked outside the funny boutique that had been there for always. Their mother had brought them here when they were young, left them to roam about the trailing jungle of clothes rails while she tried on brightly coloured dresses and an ingratiating woman called Grace said things like, ‘
Oh Lorrie, that’s the one, it really sets off your amazing figure. Not many people round here could get away with something like that. You’re a natural clothes horse
.’

The boutique had changed with the times and Grace, with her plume of silver hair and chunky paste jewellery, was nowhere to be seen, just a bored, beautiful young girl who looked as though she was home from boarding school for the holidays, perched on a stool behind the till.

The dress they chose, at £219, was ludicrously expensive. But it had been reduced from £395, owing, Megan assumed, to the fact that it was in such an unfeasibly small size, a tiny size 6 scrap of silk chiffon printed all over with peacock feathers in gemstone colours. On the way back to the funeral parlour they dropped Lorelei’s laptop into a repair shop.

‘This laptop belonged to our mother,’ she said to the jolly-looking middle-aged couple behind the counter. ‘She just passed away.’

They expressed their condolences in lush Cotswold burrs.

‘We need to access her laptop. We don’t have a password. Is there …? Do you …?’

The couple looked doubtful but keen to help. They mentioned a nephew, who lived in the next village. He might
know someone. They said to leave it with them and tore off a deposit slip from a small pad underneath their desk. At no point did they suggest or imply that there was anything untoward about this request and Megan smiled as she tried to imagine the equivalent reaction in the laptop repair shop at the top of her road in Tufnell Park. The police would have been involved in moments, she suspected.

They took the dress to the funeral parlour and collected Colin, and then Megan drove them all back to the Bird House. It was around 11 a.m. as they pulled up on the kerb outside the house. The skip men had been and gone; two empty containers sat on the road. The sun shone on, the day stretched ahead. They turned the corner on to the garden path, talking loudly about plans for Lorelei’s funeral, laughing about Samuel Moss’s precocious obsequiousness, joking about how he probably met his friends in the pub after work in a hoody, talking like a South London gangster. And then Megan stopped and stared. Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped and she looked at the wiry, blond-haired, leather-skinned man on the doorstep and whispered, ‘Rory.’

Rory had no words at first. He’d forgotten how to talk to his family. He’d more or less forgotten how to talk, full stop. He’d spent six weeks at a Buddhist retreat; twenty-three hours a day of silent prayer and contemplation amongst whitewashed walls and shaved heads. No music. No television. No traffic. Just cicadas and chanting.

He did not want to be in this country. He did not want to be looking at these staring, gawping faces, at the tear-sodden cheeks of his father, at the confusion and curiosity of his sisters. But he’d had a moment of deep understanding halfway through the retreat. He’d come to understand that everything was his fault. Rhys had killed himself because of him, because he was such a bad brother to him. Kayleigh had been forced into the arms of her father by him, by his abandonment of her and their child. That union had brought about the events at Vicky’s funeral that Megan had told him about in a badly punctuated email shortly afterwards. And now his mother was dead because he had not come home to look after her once he’d been released from jail. He should have been here. And he wasn’t. And now she was gone. All his fault. All of it.

They all looked so old. His father looked ancient. His sisters
were no longer girls. They looked meaty and matured. His younger sister was pregnant. He could not remember how old she was. He could barely remember how old he was. They looked fat. They weren’t fat, but they looked fat. Compared to himself. Compared to the people he’d eaten rice and broth with three times a day for six weeks, compared to the peasants and farmers who worked the land around them in a hundred degrees.

And this house, his mother’s house, the house where he grew up, where he lost his brother and then lost himself. It was everything that the retreat had not been. He had walked the perimeter of the house, again and again, waiting for someone to find him here. He had peered in through the windows, through the glass in the doors, seen the piles and the boxes. All the things. All the stuff. He thought how as a child he’d laughed affectionately at his mother’s ways. He remembered the trips to Poundstretcher and the cash and carry, the endless amounts of stuff coming into the house, the endless sums of money being spent, the endless, filthy accumulation. How could he have thought it was funny? How could he have thought it was cute? It was obscene. What his mother had done here, as poor people scavenged for food in landfill, as parents watched their children die, as disease wiped out villages and waterholes dried up, it subverted everything. It was grotesque. His sisters with their mascaraed lashes and daft shoes. His niece (he assumed she was a niece), with her big nest of blonde hair, her neon fingernails and spoiled demeanour. They looked alien to him, as alien as if they had green skin and tentacles.

But he needed to get over that. He needed to shut his mind to its complaints and outrage. Here he was, what remained of him, and he had a job to do.

He smiled, and he got to his feet and said, ‘All right?’

Colin brought Rory a box, like the one he’d brought for the two girls. But Rory shook his head and said, ‘No, thanks. I don’t want any stuff.’

‘You might be sorry,’ said Colin, ‘if you don’t. One day you might wish you’d kept something and it’ll be too late.’

Rory shook his head again and said, ‘No. I won’t. I don’t know much about me, but I know that much. And besides, I’d have nowhere to put it.’

‘I can keep it for you,’ said Megan. ‘Until you’re settled.’

Rory smiled and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘honest. I don’t want it.’

‘Where are you going to stay?’ asked Megan.

‘Here?’ he said, looking from Megan to his father and back again. ‘If there’s room?’

His father took him upstairs to show him Rhys’s room, with talk of finding a mattress. ‘I can sleep on the floor,’ he said. ‘I’ve been on the floor for the past six years. I’ve got kind of used to it.’

The three girls turned to each other after Rory and Colin had gone.

‘He looks really sad,’ said Beth.

‘He looks terrible,’ said Megan.

‘I think he’s kind of cool,’ said Molly.

Rory’s presence galvanised them. By the end of that day
they’d come almost to the back of the kitchen. They cleared the hoard all the way to the kitchen windows so that the sunlight finally had a way through and the sudden burst of daylight really spurred them on. Molly and Rory worked together as a team, being the youngest and the thinnest. Megan appraised them from a distance. They looked like father and daughter with their golden hair, their lean bodies and fine features. They talked a lot, and there was a lot of mutual laughter. In the presence of a grown man who she for some reason saw as being her peer, Molly reverted to some of her old teenagery habits, talking to Meg as if she was slightly subnormal. Megan couldn’t catch half of what they were saying but it was clear that Rory felt more comfortable with his niece than he did with his sisters and his father. Molly didn’t know him. She wasn’t a threat. There was also a sense that he aligned himself more closely with a teenager than with people of his own age, as if he was Peter Pan. And of course, Megan pondered, he hadn’t come close to growing up, had he? From home to commune, from commune to drug dealer’s lackey, from lackey to prison and from prison to a retreat. All his many experiences had been so one-dimensional, so cosseted. He’d never had to take responsibility for himself.

As they ran out of light, a rainstorm threatened overhead so they packed themselves into the people carrier and headed for the pub. It was one of the few locals that hadn’t been turned into a gastropub, that still had patterned carpets and laminated menus.