The House We Grew Up In Read Free Page A

tellings-off, they were using to squirt only each other. Tom and Ben had retired to the bottom of the garden to smoke cigarettes in the hammock and share secret jokes together. Megan and Bethan sat side by side, listening to the grown-ups talk.
    When Megan herself was a grown-up and people came to ask about her childhood, it was afternoons such as these that would impel her to say, ‘
My childhood was perfect
.’
    And it was. Perfect.
    They lived in a honey-coloured house that sat hard up against the pavement of a picture-postcard Cotswolds village and stretched out beyond into three-quarters of an acre of rambling half-kempt gardens. Their mother was a beautiful hippy called Lorelei with long tangled hair and sparkling green eyes who treated her children like precious gems. Their father was a sweet gangly man called Colin, who still looked like a teenager with floppy hair and owlish round-framed glasses. They all attended the village school, they ate home-cooked meals together every night, their extended family was warm and clever; there was money for parties and new paddling pools, but not quite enough for foreign travel, but it didn’t matter, because they lived in paradise. And even as a child, Megan knew this to be paradise. Because, she could see with hindsight, her mother told her so. Her mother existed entirely in the moment. And she made every moment sparkle. No one in Megan’s family was ever allowed to forget how lucky they were. Not even for a second.
    A cloud passed over the sun just then and Lorelei laughed and pointed and said, ‘Look! Look at that cloud! Isn’t it wonderful? It looks
exactly
like an elephant!’
April 2011
    The keys were where Lorelei had always left them, under a cracked plant pot behind a water pipe beneath the kitchen window. Meg pulled them out and dusted the sticky cobwebs from her fingertips. ‘Yuck.’
    The house had been impenetrable by either of its front doors for many years now. The family had always come in and out through the kitchen door at the back and for the last few years Lorelei had been using both hallways at the front as bonus ‘storage areas’.
    ‘Right,’ Meg said, rejoining Molly by the back door, ‘let’s go. Deep breath.’ She threw her daughter a brave smile and was gratified to see her smile reflected back at her.
    ‘You OK, Mum?’
    Meg nodded. Of course she was OK. Meg was always OK. Someone had to be and she’d been the one to draw that straw. ‘I’m fine, love, thank you.’
    Molly peered at her curiously and then took one of her hands in her own and squeezed it gently. Meg almost flinched at the tender power of it. Her daughter’s touch. Until recently her last memory of her daughter’s touch had been the sting of a palm across her cheek, the jab of toes against her shins, the drag of fingernails down her arm. It had been that bad. Truly. Everything she’d been warned about teenage girls, squared and squared again. But lately, things had started to change. Lately, it seemed as though her daughter had started to like her again.
    ‘Thank you, love,’ she said again.
    ‘You know you can talk about it, don’t you? You know Iwant to listen. I want to help. You’ve lost your mummy. If I lost my mummy, I’d …’ Molly’s eyes filled with tears and she smiled through them. ‘Oh, God, well, you know.’
    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.
March 1986
    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,