The House We Grew Up In

by Lisa Jewell

  Meg groaned. ‘You’re all fucking useless,’ she yelled. ‘The whole fucking lot of you.’

  And then she hung up.

  He bought her an egg. Just a cheap one. Purple foil and full of chocolate buttons. And then he pulled some daffodils from a well-stocked bed outside someone’s house. The sun was high and bright and it felt like the beginning of everything. For the first time in his life, Rory Bird was in love.

  Her name was Kayleigh and she was waiting for him now, in her bedsit. He’d met her three nights ago at his local pub. She was the cousin of one of his mates, just moved across to England; two years older than him, bleached-blonde hair cut into a bob, Irish accent, her own guitar, a tattoo on her left breast, and a livid scar on her wrist that she said she’d tell him about one day, when she ‘trusted him’.

  He hadn’t left her side since that night, until now. She’d sent him out for milk and cigarettes and now he walked fast through the morning streets of Cirencester, desperate and aching to get back to her. It was the strangest feeling. In fact, just feeling anything at all was strange. He’d been numb for the past four years.

  ‘I’m back!’ he called out, taking the steps two at a time to the front door.

  She was still in bed, lying stretched out and naked. Her flesh was deathly white, her eyes fixed on a tiny portable TV on the chest of drawers at the foot of the bed. She smiled at him and arranged herself on to her elbow. ‘I missed you,’ she said.

  He grinned at her and pulled the egg and the daffodils from his carrier bag.

  ‘Happy Easter,’ he said, joining her on the bed and presenting them to her.

  ‘Oh, you sweet fool,’ she said, taking the egg and sniffing the daffodils. ‘I didn’t have you down as the religious type.’

  ‘What’s religion got to do with Easter eggs?’

  ‘Everything, from where I come from.’ She smiled and started to take apart the packaging. ‘I’d love a cup of tea,’ she said, ‘to go with my, you know, non-religious chocolate egg.’

  He cupped her face with his hand and kissed her on her soft lips. ‘Coming right up.’

  She pulled the egg out of the box and unwrapped it. Rory watched her and resisted the temptation to say, ‘Save the foil.’ He smiled at the thought and Kayleigh glanced at him affectionately and said, ‘What are you smiling at?’

  He said, ‘Nothing. Just …’ They’d talked about his mother, about his family, about Rhys. Of course they had. You don’t go falling in love with people unless you’ve talked about the things that matter. ‘My mum’s always had this thing about foils. Every Easter, it was always, you know, “Save the foils! Save the foils!”’

  ‘Your mum sounds like a fruit.’

  He grimaced and filled the kettle from the tap. ‘Yeah,’ he said, absent-mindedly, ‘she is a bit. A lovely fruit, though.’

  ‘I’d love to meet her. One day.’

  ‘You can meet her today,’ he said rashly. ‘If you want.’

  She laughed. ‘Nah. Thanks all the same, though.’

  He nodded, relieved. This was just for him. He wanted to keep it to himself for as long as he possibly could. But even so, it felt wrong not being at home today. Megan wasn’t coming back for Easter – she was moving house or something – and Dad was on one of his mysterious ‘writing courses’, so it would just be Mum and Beth and the stalker woman from next door. Mum had insisted that Easter would be what Easter always had been, a day for fun and chocolate and lamb and family. She’d said, ‘Rhys wouldn’t want to have spoiled Easter for everyone. Rhys would want it to carry on.’

  Rory had no idea what Rhys was thinking that day, but he didn’t suppose for a second that it had anything to do with what might happen on Easter day after he’d gone. The little fucker hadn’t even left a note. He supposed there might have been a clue in the lyrics of the Alice in Chains song he’d left playing on repeat, but Rory was buggered if he knew what it was. He’d given up having a clue what made his twin brother tick a long time before he killed himself.

  ‘Mmm.’ Kayleigh sank her teeth into a splinter of chocolate and let her eyes roll back into their sockets. ‘Yum yum.’ You could tell by looking at Kayleigh that she didn’t really eat much chocolate. She was the type of person who forgot to eat, who had toast for dinner, who would lose weight absent-mindedly. ‘Want some?’ She waved the egg at him.

  ‘No, thanks,’ he replied. He suspected that he might never eat an Easter egg again. The particular flavour of chocolate moulded into a thin curve – and it did absolutely have its own unique taste – would always throw him into some Proustian hellhole of bad associations.

  ‘Will you do something for me?’ he asked nervously. ‘Today?’

  She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘That totally depends,’ she began, ‘on what it involves.’

  ‘Will you come to his grave with me?’

  ‘Your brother?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You want me to come to your brother’s grave with you, on the anniversary of his death?’

  He nodded again. ‘I mean, sorry, I know it’s macabre, I know you never met him, I know it’s a big deal, it’s—’

  ‘I would love to come with you,’ she said simply. ‘It would be an honour.’

  The graveyard was canopied with pink and white cherry blossom. The sky was cobalt blue. The sun was warm. Kayleigh wore a black vest, ripped jeans, Ray-Bans and a sombre expression. She held Rory’s arm in its crook with one hand, and with her other she held a small posy of wild flowers she’d pulled from the nooks and crannies of the cemetery. She appeared to be in her element.

  ‘This takes me back,’ she sighed, looking around herself as they walked towards the dark corner where the incinerated remains of Rory’s brother had been interred almost four years ago. She sighed and Rory felt impelled to say, ‘Back to what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. You know, just death. My granny. My granddaddy. The lady who lived next door who got hit by a chimney stack.’ She sighed dramatically and Rory tried not to think too deeply on her rather tenuous allusions to a shared experience. For all her wan melodrama and mysterious scars, it struck Rory momentarily that maybe she was putting it all on a bit. Which oddly enough made him love her all the more. He squeezed her hand in his and said, ‘This is it.’

  A small slab of granite marked the spot. It was carved with the words:

  RHYS ARTHUR BIRD

  1st MARCH 1975 – 31st MARCH 1991

  SWEET SIXTEEN FOR EVER

  Lorelei had chosen the wording without consulting anyone in the family. Rory had always thought it was stupid. There had been nothing ‘sweet’ about Rhys. Rhys had been all vinegar and angst. All ‘It’s not fair’ and ‘It wasn’t me’ and ‘Fuck off and leave me alone’.

  They’d begun to grow apart when they moved on to the big school. Before that they’d always been in the same class and a kind of intimacy had been forced upon them. But then they were put in separate classes and, to put it bluntly, Rory was in the cool class and Rhys was in the nerdy class and Rory didn’t really want to cross over. He had it good where he was. All the prettiest girls were in his class, guys he was still friends with even now. His kind of people, basically. For the first time in his life he’d had some distance from Rhys and suddenly he’d been able to see his brother objectively. And objectively, he was a loser.

  None of which meant to say that he hadn’t loved him desperately, passionately. And none of which meant to say that Rory didn’t miss his little brother with an agonising ache every minute of every day. His twin. They’d shared a womb, then a bed, then a room. He would never be closer to another person, not as long as he lived. But still. He was weird. Had been. Weird. And Rory wasn’t weird. And that, frankly, was life.

  ‘So, that’s your birthday, is it? March the first?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You’re a Pisces?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘Me too,’ she said, falling to her haunches in front of Rhys’s grave. ‘Were you similar then,
the two of you?’

  He shrugged and sank down to her level. ‘Not really. We used to be, when we were little, but then we kind of grew apart.’

  ‘I heard about that kind of thing before,’ said Kayleigh. ‘Girl twins, though, it was. Inseparable when they were wee, worst of enemies now they’re grown. So sad, you know?’

  ‘Sad is an understatement.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They sat side by side on the grass bank. It was still so warm. It reminded Rory of an Easter day years ago, when they were about five or six and it had been hot enough for a paddling pool and water pistols. It felt, in retrospect, and possibly not entirely accurately, like the last really happy Easter at home. The last Easter before Megan had got all grown up and stroppy, when it hadn’t rained, when Ben and Tom had still been young enough to come too, when his mum and dad had seemed as if they liked each other, before that woman from next door had come and taken over everything. And before, of course, Rhys had spoiled Easter for ever.

  Rory felt a roll of anger thunder through him and he breathed it in hard.

  ‘So,’ said Kayleigh, putting together a spliff on the shelf of her bony kneecaps. ‘What about the rest of the family? Don’t you usually all come together?’

  He sighed. ‘There’s no such thing as “usual” in my family,’ he said. ‘Not any more. Rhys kind of stopped “usual” in its tracks.’

  Kayleigh nodded knowingly. Rory could tell she wasn’t used to being upstaged in matters of tragedy and life experience. He could also tell that she was gripped by it all. But far too cool to show it.

  ‘You know, when my granddad died my granny wore black for the rest of her life. Proper mourning she went into, you know. The Widow Doherty, that’s what everyone called her. Went to his grave every day, polished it all up, fresh flowers. The works. It was almost like it was her job, you know, her professional occupation …’

  She tailed off and they both stared for a moment at the unkempt grave. ‘So his actual anniversary,’ she said, ‘it was two weeks ago?’

  ‘Yeah, but we always come on Easter Sunday, feels like an anniversary, not just an arbitrary date. You know.’

  ‘Well,’ she said pointedly, ‘doesn’t look like anyone came to see him on the thirty-first either.’ She finished making the spliff and then she lit it, held in the corner of her mouth, her eyes slanted against the first rush of smoke. She passed the spliff to Rory, got to her feet, pulled the dead flowers from the grave and arranged the meadow flowers in their place. She brushed some dirt away with the palms of her hands and then wiped them clean against her black vest.

  ‘Have you got a tissue?’ she asked, turning back to Rory.

  ‘Er –’ he patted himself through his clothes – ‘er, yeah, actually, I do.’ It was a paper napkin from Spudulike. He had no idea how it had got into the pocket of his jeans, which spoke many volumes about the nature of his existence in recent years. She used the napkin to polish up the dull granite of the headstone, until it shone. Then she sat down next to Rory on the grass bank and took the spliff back from him.

  ‘There you go,’ she said. ‘That’s a whole lot better.’

  Rory turned and glanced at her from the corner of his eye. He was struck, as he’d been roughly every thirty seconds since the first time he laid eyes on her in the pub three days ago, by her extreme and almost vulgar beauty, but now he was struck by something else. She loved him. He could see it. It was blinding and incredible.

  He stared at her in wonder and awe.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing.’ He smiled.

  ‘Not nothing,’ she said. ‘Why are you staring at me like that?’

  He touched the ends of her home-cut hair with his fingertips and then stroked the dip of her cheekbone. ‘Because I love you,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, you daft bastard.’

  ‘And you love me.’

  She put her hand to her throat and looked at him in fake horror. ‘Outrageous!’ she squeaked.

  ‘But true.’

  She dropped her hand from her throat and let her shoulders go soft and then she held his hand against her cheek and said, ‘You got me.’

  He smiled and brought her to him, pressed his lips up against hers. ‘For ever and ever,’ he said.

  ‘For ever and ever.’

  He took her home the following week.

  It was a moment he’d been both looking forward to and dreading. Looking forward to bringing these two enormously important elements of his life together, dreading the shock of objectivity that this would bring about. He did not want to know what Kayleigh looked like to a person who was not insanely in love with her. And he did not want to know how his family and their peculiar home would appear to someone who had not grown up there and seen how things had come to be that way. He could feel excuses forming in his subconscious already. I know she looks a bit rough, but she’s a sweetheart, I promise you. I know my mum seems a bit distracted and disengaged but she really loves us underneath it all. I know our house looks like a tip but it’s actually quite clean.

  It was the last day of the school holidays and Vicky was there with her little ones. Of course. She came upon them in the hallway, all bouncy dyed-blonde hair and scrubbed cheeks, wide hips in stretchy jeans and huge piles of breast under a too-tight T-shirt.

  ‘Rory! Hello, stranger. We’ve missed you.’

  She kissed him extravagantly on both cheeks, swathing him in a blanket of milky perfume. She peered at Kayleigh standing behind him, her hands stuffed into the pockets of a tight denim jacket, thin blue-white legs dangling from a matching mini skirt, chewing a piece of gum and looking for all the world like a call girl he’d just plucked off a street corner.

  ‘You must be Kayleigh!’ she tweeted. ‘I’m Vicky. Hello! Come through. We’re all in the kitchen. Making banana cake. Bit of a mess, I’m afraid.’

  Rory and Kayleigh exchanged a look and followed her into the kitchen. He’d already warned her about the ever-present Vicky.

  ‘Hi, Mum.’ He kissed his mother on the cheek and she smiled delightedly.

  ‘Hello, darling boy,’ she said, gripping his arm and looking into his eyes, searching for some kind of change in him. ‘And this,’ she said, ‘this must be …’ She’d forgotten her name. Either by pure scattiness or deep-seated lack of interest.

  ‘Kayleigh,’ he said, taking his girlfriend’s hand and leading her forwards. ‘This is Kayleigh. Kayleigh, this is my mum, Lorelei.’

  ‘Call me Lorrie! Everyone just calls me Lorrie.’

  This wasn’t quite true. Vicky called her Lorrie. Everyone else called her Mum. Or Lorelei.

  ‘Lovely to meet you,’ said Kayleigh, her hands still tucked firmly inside her jacket pockets. Rory watched his mother’s face as she took in the detail of his rough-and-ready love. She looked at first surprised and then mildly amused. ‘Likewise,’ she said, and turned away to assist one of Vicky’s small daughters with slicing an overripe banana with a blunt knife. Rory blanched. It had been a slight. Barely perceptible, but without a doubt, a slight. He hoped to God that Kayleigh hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Wow,’ said Kayleigh, ‘look at all of this! It’s totally crazy.’ She was standing in the centre of the room, staring wide-eyed and gorgeous at the walls of artwork. ‘Is this all your stuff?’ she asked Rory.

  He laughed. ‘No, not just mine. All of us. All four of us.’

  ‘Oh, look.’ She stepped forward to examine a picture of a dalek, collaged over with pieces of tin foil and old buttons, the word ‘ekstminat’ written below and the words ‘rory bird’ above. ‘Look what you made, you little cutie-pie!’ She pulled him towards her by the crook of his arm and leaned in to his body. ‘I had no idea you were an artist.’ He smiled at her and Lorelei turned and said, ‘They all are. All my children. Natural artists.’ Rory saw her clock Kayleigh standing up against him and witnessed a cloud of something fearful pass across her eyes.

  ‘Can I get you a drink, Kayleigh?’ said Vicky, plugging th
e gap in Lorelei’s hostessing duties.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘that’d be nice. Do you have any squash?’

  ‘Just Ribena, I’m afraid,’ Vicky replied apologetically.

  ‘I love Ribena.’ Kayleigh beamed, snapping her gum between her teeth.

  Vicky beamed back at her and poured her out a glass. ‘So,’ she said, passing it to her. ‘You’re Irish?’

  ‘How’d you guess?’

  Vicky’s smile faltered for a second while her brain played catch-up with Kayleigh’s humour. Then she said, ‘Ha, ha!’ and blushed. ‘Whereabouts are you from?’ she continued.

  ‘I’m from County Clare.’ Kayleigh pulled the gum from her mouth and dropped it into the waste-paper bin. ‘Been here for less than a month. It’s all taking a bit of getting used to, to be honest.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Vicky with widening eyes, ‘yes. I’m sure it is. And what brought you here then?’

  Kayleigh noisily gulped down half her Ribena and then wiped her mouth. ‘Too many enemies,’ she said, ‘back home. Everyone hated me. Fancied a fresh start.’

  Vicky stared at her uncertainly, clearly having no idea what to make of her. She laughed again and then looked blank.

  ‘And what about you, what’s your story then?’

  Vicky’s face softened as some kind of normal order was applied to the conversation. ‘Well, the usual story, brought up in the countryside, ran away to the city, fell in love in the city, had a baby in the city, decided to bring the baby up in the countryside.’

  Kayleigh looked at her blankly. Clearly not a story she’d heard before. ‘And Rory tells me you’ve all but moved in.’

  Rory stiffened and threw Kayleigh a look.

  Vicky laughed. ‘Well, not strictly true, y’know. More, I think, found a new friend.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your own house, then?’

  Rory clutched his forehead and dropped his head. He’d half known this would happen, but hadn’t been expecting it to happen quite so soon.

  ‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with my house. It’s just, when you’ve got small children it’s nice to get out of the house with them, you know. Can make you go a bit screwy being stuck in your own house all day. And I know, well, at least I think, Lorrie enjoys the company. Wouldn’t you say, Lorrie?’