The House We Grew Up In Read Free

immediately let her fist fall open and her mother took the crumpled foil with a smile. ‘Thank you, darling,’ she said sweetly. She let her gaze fall on the foil and said, ‘Look at it, so pretty, so shiny, so … happy.’
    The Easter holidays stretched out for another week. The heatwave continued and the Bird children came indoors only for beakers of squash, slices of bread and butter and desperately needed visits to the toilet.
    Friends came and went, there was a day trip to the beach at Weston-super-Mare, and on the last weekend of the holidays they had a visit from Lorelei’s sister Pandora and her two teenage sons. Dad filled the paddling pool and the adults drank glasses of Pimm’s with fruit-shaped plastic ice cubes bobbing about in them. Megan’s cousin Tom played David Bowie songs on his heavily stickered guitar. Rory burst the paddling pool with a stick and the water seeped heavily on to the lawn, leaving it waterlogged and boggy, and Dad said, ‘Well, that’s that then.’ Lorelei scooped the floppy remains of the punctured pool into her arms like an injured child andcarried it into the garage murmuring, ‘Dad’ll fix it up.’ Dad said, ‘You and I both know that Dad won’t fix it up. I have no idea how to fix paddling pools and I still haven’t fixed the one that got burst last year.’ And Lorelei smiled and blew him a kiss across the garden.
    Dad sighed and said, ‘Well. We now have
three
punctured paddling pools sitting in our garage – this house is just a dumping ground,’ and raised his eyebrows heavenwards.
    Pandora smiled and said, ‘Just like our dad. He never could throw anything away.’
    Megan’s other cousin Ben smiled and said, ‘Tell us again about what Lorelei used to collect when she was a child.’
    Pandora frowned and then smiled. ‘Autumn leaves. Ring pulls. Tags from new clothes. Cinema stubs. The silver foil from Mum’s cigarette packets.’
    ‘And hair!’ said Ben gleefully. ‘Don’t forget the hair.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Pandora, ‘any time anyone in our family had a haircut, Lorelei begged to keep it. She had a shopping bag full of it under her bed. It was quite gruesome.’
    The adults and teenagers laughed and Megan looked at them curiously. They’d had this conversation before – every time they were together, it sometimes seemed – and whenever she heard them talking about her mum like this it sounded different. The older she got the less she found it funny and the more she found it peculiar. Because she was now the age that her mother had been at the time of these strange childhood collections and she could no more imagine herself collecting old hair than she could asking to go to school on a Saturday.
    ‘Are you laughing at me?’ her mother asked good-naturedly as she returned from the garage.
    ‘No, no, no!’ said Ben. ‘Absolutely not. We’re just talking about you affectionately.’
    ‘Hmm,’ said Lorelei, wiping her damp hands down the length of her long denim skirt. ‘I strongly suspect not.’
    And then she spread her arms upwards, revealing unshaved armpits of lush brown curls and declared, ‘Look at that sky, just look at it. The blueness of it. Makes me want to snatch out handfuls of it and put it in my pockets.’
    Megan saw a look pass over her father’s face at that moment. Love and worry. As though he was aching to say something unspeakable.
    The look softened as Megan watched and then he smiled and said, ‘If my wife had her way, her pockets would be full of pieces of every single thing in the world.’
    ‘Oh, yes!’ beamed Lorelei. ‘They would be. Totally and absolutely
bulging
.’
    Pandora had brought home-made butterfly cakes with fluffed-up cream and more tiny yellow chicks atop.
    Lorelei served them in the garden with tea from a pot and scones and cream. There was more Pimm’s and a plastic bowl of strawberries. The twins ran barefoot back and forth from the hosepipe to fill their water pistols, which, after countless