The Family Upstairs

by Lisa Jewell

  She ends the call and looks at Miller.

  He looks at her from the corner of his eye and smiles gently. ‘I won’t let anything bad happen to you,’ he says. ‘I’ll make sure you get to work for your next meeting. Alive. OK?’

  A wash of affection floods through her. She smiles and nods.

  Phin appears with a tray and places it in front of them. Scrambled eggs, smashed avocado sprinkled with seeds, a pile of dark rye toast, a pat of white butter and a jug of iced orange juice. ‘How good does this look,’ he says, handing out plates.

  ‘It looks amazing,’ says Miller, rubbing his hands together before starting to pile toast on to his plate.

  ‘Coffee?’ offers Phin. ‘Tea?’

  Libby asks for coffee and tops it up with milk from a jug. She picks up a slice of toast but finds she has no appetite.

  She looks at Phin. She wants to ask him something about the story he’d told them last night but she can’t quite get a grip on it; it keeps moving out of touching distance. Something to do with a woman called Birdie who played the fiddle. Something to do with a cat. Something to do with a list of rules and a pagan sacrifice and something really very bad to do with Henry. But it’s all so vague that it’s almost, she ponders, as though he’d never told them anything at all. Instead she says, ‘Do you have any pictures of you all when you were children?’

  ‘No,’ he replies apologetically. ‘Not a one. Remember, there was nothing in the house when we left. My father sold everything, every last shred. And whatever he didn’t sell, he dumped on charity shops. But …’ He pauses. ‘Do you remember a song? From the eighties called … No, of course you won’t, you’re far too young. But there was a song by a band called the Original Version? It was number one for weeks the summer before we came to live in the house. Birdie, the woman I was telling you about last night. She was in the band for a while. Birdie and Justin both were. And the video was filmed in Cheyne Walk. Do you want to see it?’

  Libby gasps. Apart from the photo of her parents in their evening clothes in Miller’s Guardian article, this will be the closest she’ll have been to getting a sense of the place she came from.

  They move into the living room and Phin connects his phone to the huge plasma TV screen. He runs a YouTube search and then presses play.

  Libby recognises the song immediately. She never knew what it was called or who it was by, but she knows it very well.

  The video opens with the band performing in front of the river. They are all dressed similarly in tweed and braces and caps and DM boots. There are many of them, probably about ten members in all. Two of them are women, one of whom plays the fiddle, the other some kind of leathery drum.

  ‘There,’ says Phin, pausing the video and pointing at the screen. ‘That’s Birdie. Her with the long hair.’

  Libby stares at the woman on the screen. A scrawny thing, weak-chinned and serious. She holds her fiddle hard against her chin and stares at the camera imperiously. ‘That’s Birdie?’ she says. She cannot equate this frail, unimpressive-looking woman with the woman in the story Phin told them last night, the sadistic woman who presided over a household of cruelty and abuse.

  Phin nods. ‘Yup. Fucking evil bitch.’

  He presses play again and the band are now inside a house, a glorious, riotous house filled with oil paintings and overblown furniture, red velvet thrones, gleaming swords and polished panelling, swagged curtains, moose heads, stuffed foxes and glittering chandeliers. The camera follows the band as they skip through the house with their instruments, posing on an ornate carved staircase, charging down wood-panelled corridors, play-fighting with the swords, modelling a knight’s helmet, astride the cannon in the front garden and in front of a huge stone fireplace full of burning logs.

  ‘Oh my God,’ says Libby. ‘It was so beautiful.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Phin drily, ‘wasn’t it? And that bitch and my father systematically destroyed it.’

  Libby’s gaze returns to the image on the television screen. Ten young people, a house full of life and money and energy and warmth. ‘I don’t understand,’ she says quietly, ‘how it all turned out the way it did.’

  42

  The early afternoon sun is still hot against their skin as Lucy, the children and the dog walk around the corner to the block of flats behind number sixteen Cheyne Walk. They tiptoe quickly through the communal garden to the rickety door at the back and she gestures to the children to be silent as they pass through the woody area and out on to the lawn which is parched brown by the long hot summer.

  She notices with surprise that the back door to the house is unlocked. A pane of glass is broken. The breaks in the glass look fresh. A shiver runs down her spine.

  She puts her hand through the broken pane and turns the handle on the inside. The door opens and she breathes a sigh of relief that she won’t have to scale the side of the house to get in through the roof.

  ‘It’s scary,’ says Stella, following Lucy into the house.

  ‘Yes,’ agrees Lucy, ‘it is, a bit.’

  ‘I think it’s awesome,’ says Marco, running his hand across the top of a huge pillared radiator and gazing around the room.

  As she shows the children around the house it feels to Lucy as if not one mote of dust or string of cobweb has moved since she was last here. It feels as though it has been in stasis waiting for her to come back. The smell, whilst musty, is also darkly familiar. The way the light slices through the dark rooms, the sound of her feet against the floorboards, the shadows across the walls. It is all exactly the same. She trails her fingertips across surfaces as they step through the house. In the space of a week she has revisited the two most significant houses of her life, Antibes and Chelsea, the two places where she was hurt, where she was broken, from where she was forced to escape. The weight of it all lies heavy in her heart.

  After the tour of the house they sit out in the garden. The shadows cast by the overgrown foliage are long and cool.

  Lucy watches Marco picking around the garden with a stick. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and for a fleeting moment she sees him as Henry, tending his herb garden. She almost jumps to her feet to check his face. But then she remembers: Henry is a man now. Not a boy.

  She tries to picture Henry, but she can’t. She can only see him as she saw him that last night they were all together, the set of his jaw against the shock of what had happened, the candlelight flickering across his cheeks, the dreadful silence of him.

  ‘What’s this?’ Marco calls to her.

  Lucy puts her hand to forehead and peers across the garden.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, standing and moving towards him. ‘It’s an old herb garden. One of the people who used to live here grew medicine out here.’

  He stops then and holds the stick like a staff between his feet and looks up at the back of the house. ‘What happened in there?’ he asks.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, I can just tell. The way you’ve been since we got here. Your hands are shaking. And you always just said your aunt brought you to France because you were an orphan. But I’m starting to think that something really, really bad must have happened to make her bring you. And I think it happened in this house.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it later,’ she says. ‘It’s a very long story.’

  ‘Where are your mum and dad?’ he says and she can see now that bringing Marco here has opened up the dams to all the things he never thought to ask her before. ‘Where are they buried?’

  She pulls in her breath, smiles tightly. ‘I have no idea. No idea at all.’

  Lucy used to write it all down, constantly, when she was younger. She’d buy a lined notepad and a pen and she’d sit somewhere, anywhere, and she’d write it and she’d write it and she’d write it. Streams of consciousness. Phin tied to a pipe in his bedroom, the adults dead, the van waiting in the shadows with its engine rumbling and the long dark drive through the night, the shell-shocked silence, and then the waiting and the wait
ing for the thing to come and it never did come and now, twenty-four years later, she’s still waiting for it to come and it’s so close she can taste it on the back of her tongue.

  This was the story she wrote over and over again. She’d write it and then she’d tear the pages from the notepad, screw them into a ball and toss them in a bin, into the sea, into a dank lightwell. She’d burn them or soak them or tear them into shreds. But she needed to write it down to make it into a story instead of the truth about her life.

  And all the time the truth jangled at her nerves, squeezed at her stomach muscles, played drums on her heart, taunted her in her dreams, sickened her when she awoke and stopped her from sleeping when she closed her eyes at night.

  She’d always known that the only thing that would bring her back to London, to this place where so many terrible things had happened, was the baby.

  But where is she? She’s been here, that much is clear. There is evidence around the house of recent activity. There are drinks in the fridge, used glasses in the sink, the hole in the back door.

  Now she just has to wait for the baby to come back.

  43

  CHELSEA, 1992

  The next thing that happened was that my mother fell pregnant.

  Well, clearly it wasn’t my father’s baby. My father could barely get out of his chair. And the announcement, when it came, was curiously unsurprising. Because by this stage it had already become hideously clear to me that my mother was obsessed with David.

  I’d seen her the night he first arrived, pulling back from him, and I’d known then that it was because she was attracted to him. And I’d seen that initial attraction turn to infatuation as my father grew weaker and David’s influence grew stronger. I could see that my mother was under David’s spell entirely, that she was willing to sacrifice everything for David and his approval, including her family.

  But lately I’d noticed other things too.

  I heard doors opening and closing late at night. I saw a flush upon my mother’s neck, felt loaded moments, heard things whispered urgently, smelled his smell on her hair. I saw Birdie regard my mother watchfully, saw David’s eyes upon parts of mother’s body that should be no concern of his. Whatever was happening between my mother and David was feral and alive and was spreading into every corner of the house.

  The announcement was made as all announcements were made, over the dinner table. David made the announcement of course, and as he made it he sat between Birdie and my mother holding one of their hands each. You could almost see the proud swell of the blood under his epidermis. He was so pleased with himself. What a guy. Two birds on the go and now a bun in the oven. What. A. Guy.

  My sister immediately burst into tears and Clemency ran from the table and could be heard throwing up in the toilet by the back door.

  I stared at my mother in utter horror. While I wasn’t entirely surprised by the development, I was surprised that she had allowed it to be announced so publicly, so happily. I could not believe that she hadn’t felt that maybe a quiet tête-à-tête in a dark corner might not have been a better way to break such news to her children. Was she not embarrassed? Was she not ashamed?

  It appeared not. She grabbed my sister’s hand and said, ‘Darling, you always wanted a little brother or sister.’

  ‘Yes. But not like this! Not like this!’

  So dramatic, my little sister. But on this occasion I couldn’t say I blamed her.

  ‘What about Dad?’ I piped up hopelessly.

  ‘Dad knows,’ she said, now clutching my hand and squeezing that too. ‘Dad understands. Dad wants me to be happy.’

  David sat between Birdie and my mother watching us carefully. I could tell he was simply humouring our mother by allowing her to comfort us. I could tell he did not care one iota what we thought about him and his repulsive act of penetrating and impregnating our mother. He cared nothing about anything other than himself.

  I looked at Birdie. She looked oddly triumphant, as if this was the result of some great masterplan of hers.

  ‘I’m not able to bear children,’ she said, as though reading my mind.

  ‘So my mother is – what?’ I found myself asking quite sharply. ‘A human incubator?’

  David sighed. He touched his lips with the side of his finger, a pose he affected frequently and which to this day still unnerves me when I see other people doing it. ‘This family needs a focus,’ he said. ‘A heart. A reason. This house needs a baby. Your amazing mother is doing this for all of us. She is a goddess.’

  Birdie nodded sagely in agreement.

  Clemency returned at this point looking ashen and unwell. She flopped heavily into her chair and shuddered.

  ‘Darling,’ David said to her. ‘Try to look at it this way. This will bring our two families together. You four will all have a little brother or sister in common. Two families’ – he reached for their hands across the table – ‘united.’

  My sister burst into fresh tears and Clemency kept her hand pulled into a fist.

  Birdie sighed. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, you two,’ she hissed, ‘grow up.’

  I saw David throw her a warning look. She returned the look with a petulant toss of her head.

  ‘It will take a few days to get used to the idea. I understand,’ said David. ‘But you have to trust me. This will be the making of us all. It really will be. This baby will be the future of our community. This baby will be everything.’

  My mother grew in a way I could not have imagined was possible. She, who had always been so slender with her jutting hip bones and long narrow waist, was suddenly the biggest person in the house. She was fed constantly and told to do nothing.

  The ‘baby’ apparently needed a thousand extra calories a day and while we all sat picking over mushroom biryanis and carrot soups, my mother gorged on spaghetti and chocolate mousse. Have I mentioned how thin we all were by this point? Not that any of us had been particularly overweight to begin with, apart from my father. But we were virtually emaciated by the time my mother was being fattened up like a ceremonial goat. I was still wearing clothes that had fitted me when I was eleven, and I was nearly fifteen. Clemency and my sister looked as though they had eating disorders and Birdie was basically a twig. I’ll tell you for nothing that vegan food goes straight through you; nothing sticks to the sides. But when that food is offered in mean portions and you are constantly told not to be greedy by asking for seconds, when one cook hates butter, so there is never enough fat (and children must eat fat), another hates salt, so there is never enough flavour, and another refuses to eat wheat because it causes their stomach to swell like a whoopee cushion, so there is never enough starch or stodge, well, that makes for very thin, malnourished people.

  One of our neighbours, shortly after the bodies were found and the press were buzzing around our house with microphones and handheld cameras, appeared on the news one night talking about how thin we had all looked. ‘I did wonder’, said the neighbour (whom I had never before seen in my life), ‘if they were being looked after properly. I did worry a bit. They were all so terribly thin. But you don’t like to interfere, do you?’

  No, mysterious neighbour lady, no, you clearly do not.

  But while we wasted away my mother grew and grew. Birdie made her maternity tunics out of black cotton, bales of which she’d bought cheap from a fabric sale months earlier, in order to make shoulder bags to sell at Camden Market. She had sold a grand total of two before being chased away by other stallholders who all had licences to sell, and had instantly given up on the project. But now she was sewing with a fervour, desperate to be a part of what was happening to my mother. David and Birdie soon took to wearing Birdie’s black tunics too. They gave all their other clothes to charity. They looked utterly ridiculous.

  I should have guessed that it wouldn’t be long before we children were expected to dress like this too.

  Birdie came into my room one day with bin bags. ‘We’re to give all our clothes to charity,’ s
he said. ‘We don’t need them as much as other people. I’ve come to help you pack them away.’

  In retrospect I can’t believe how easily I capitulated. I never gave myself over to David’s ethos, but I was scared of him. I’d seen him fell Phin on the pavement outside our house that awful night the year before. I’d seen him hit him. I knew he was capable of more and of worse. And I was equally scared of Birdie. She was the one who had unleashed the monster inside him. So while I often moaned or grumbled, I never refused. And thus I found myself at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon in late April emptying my drawers and cupboards into bin bags; there went my favourite jeans, there went the really nice hoodie from H&M that Phin had passed down to me when I’d admired it. There went my T-shirts, my jumpers and shorts.

  ‘But what will I wear when I go out?’ I asked. ‘I can’t go out in the nude.’

  ‘Here,’ she said, passing me a black tunic and a pair of black leggings. ‘We’re all to wear these from now on. It makes sense.’

  ‘I can’t go out in this,’ I said, appalled.

  ‘We’re keeping our overcoats,’ she replied. ‘Not that you ever go out anyway.’

  It was true. I was something of a recluse. What with all the ‘household rules’, the ‘not going to school’ and the fact that I had nowhere to go, I barely left the house. I took the black robe and the leggings from her and held them to my chest. She stared at me meaningfully. ‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘The rest.’

  I looked down. She was referring to the clothes I was already wearing.

  I sighed. ‘Could I have a moment of privacy please?’

  She looked at me suspiciously but then left the room. ‘Be quick,’ she called through the door. ‘I’m busy.’