reading

When she was nine years old, Melody Browne’s house burned down. Not only did the fire destroy all her posses – sions, it took with it all her memories – she can remember nothing before her ninth birthday. Now in her early thirties, Melody lives in a council flat in the middle of London with her seventeen-year-old son. She’s made a good life for herself and her son and she likes it that way.

Until one night something extraordinary happens. Whilst attending a hypnotist show with her first date in years she faints – and when she comes round she starts to remember. At first her memories mean nothing to her but then slowly, day by day, she begins to piece together the real story of her childhood. But with every mystery she solves another one materialises, with every question she answers another appears. And Melody begins to wonder if she’ll ever know the truth about her past . . .

ALSO BY LISA JEWELL

After The
Party

Eleven years ago, Jem Catterick and Ralph McLeary fell in love. They thought it would be for ever, that they’d found their happy ending.

Then two became four, a flat became a house. Romantic nights out became sleepless nights in. And they soon found that life wasn’t quite so simple any more.

Now the unimaginable has happened. Two people who were so right together are starting to drift apart – Ralph is standing on the sidelines, and Jem is losing herself. Something has to change. As they try to find a way back to each other, back to what they once had, they both become dangerously distracted – but maybe it’s not too late to recapture happily ever after . . .

ALSO BY LISA JEWELL

The Making
of Us

They live very different lives but each of them, independently, has always felt that something is missing.

What they don’t know is that a letter is about to arrive that will turn their lives upside down.

It is a letter containing a secret – one that will bind them together, and show them what love and family and friendship really mean . . .

ALSO BY LISA JEWELL

Before I Met
You

London, 1920. Arlette works in Liberty by day, and by night is caught up in a glamorous whirl of parties, clubs, cocktails and jazz. But when tragedy strikes she flees the city, never to return.

Over half a century later, in the grungy mid-’90s, her granddaughter Betty arrives in London.

She can’t wait to begin her new life. But before she can do so, she must find the mysterious woman named in her grandmother’s will.

What she doesn’t know is that her search will uncover the heartbreaking secret that changed her grandmother’s life, and might also change hers . . .

About the Book

All four children have an idyllic childhood: a picture book cottage in a country village, a warm, cosy kitchen filled with love and laughter, sun-drenched afternoons in a rambling garden.

But one Easter weekend a tragedy strikes the Bird family that is so devastating that, almost imperceptibly, it begins to tear them apart.

The years pass and the children become adults and begin to develop their own quite separate lives. Soon it’s almost as though they’ve never been a family at all.

Because something has happened that will call them home, back to the house they grew up in – and to what really happened that Easter weekend all those years ago.

About the Author

Lisa Jewell had always planned to write her first book when she was fifty. In fact, she wrote it when she was twenty-seven and had just been made redundant from her job as a secretary. Inspired by Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, a book about young people just like her who lived in London, she wrote the first three chapters of what was to become her first novel, Ralph’s Party. It went on to become the bestselling debut novel of 1998.

Ten bestselling novels later, she lives in London with her husband and their two daughters. Lisa writes every day in a local cafe where she can drink coffee, people-watch, and, without access to the internet, actually get some work done.

Get to know Lisa by joining the official facebook page at www.facebook.com/LisaJewellOfficial or by following her on Twitter @lisajewelluk. And visit her website at www.lisa-jewell.co.uk

LISA JEWELL

the house we grew up in

Lisa Jewell has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work

This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Century
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA

Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

Pip stands behind her mother in the tiny bathroom. She’s not sure what to do. She’s never seen her mother being sick before.

‘That’s OK, Mum.’ Pip tentatively touches her mother’s head, and strokes her fine blond hair just once.

Her mother doubles over and is sick again. She judders afterwards and rocks back on to her heels, staring up into the halogens buried in the ceiling.

Clare shudders and says, ‘Yes. I think that’s it.’ She rests the beaker of water on the floor by the toilet with shaking hands and unfolds her legs, leaning back against the side of the bath. ‘Pip,’ she says, taking her hand, ‘I am so so sorry.’

‘It does matter!’ Her mother’s words are slightly slurred. Her pale skin is waxy, her mascara smudged under her eyes. ‘It matters because I’m your mother and it is my job to look after you and how can I look after you in this state.’ She points at herself. ‘You shouldn’t have to be looking after me. You shouldn’t have to deal with anything you’ve had to deal with these past few months. You’ve been the best, most amazing girl. I don’t know what I’d do without you. I don’t.’

‘I need to go to bed now. I have to …’ Clare gets uncertainly to her feet, holding on to the sink for balance. ‘… I have to sleep.’

The back door is still unlocked. All the lights are on. And Grace is still outdoors somewhere, roaming the communal garden with her friends. Pip resists the urge to say, ‘But what about Grace? What about me?’ She’s twelve years old. She can handle this.

Her mother stumbles from the bathroom and falls face down on to her bed. Pip pulls the duvet from under her small body and covers her properly. ‘Thank you, baby. Thank you. I love you so much. So, so much.’

Pip sits on the edge of her mother’s bed for a while, until she hears her breathing change to a sonorous bass. It is just past nine. She moves to the living room and sits there, perched uncertainly on the edge of the sofa. Beyond the back door, across the gardens, the party is still going on. She can hear it in snatches of laughter and high-pitched screams of over-excited children out long past their bedtimes. She doesn’t know what to do. She is all alone. And soon it will be dark. She phones Grace, but, unsurprisingly, her call goes straight through to voicemail. Grace has been outdoors since two o’clock and her phone will be out of charge.

Then she hears something at the back door: footsteps. She looks up, her heart racing. She sees a tall shadow move past the window. The footsteps are closer now, and suddenly there is a man standing by the door. Pip clutches her heart and hides herself behind the sofa.

She breathes a sigh of relief. It’s Leo. She goes to the door, where he stands with his golden dog, Scout. ‘Just checking on your mum,’ he says, looking behind her. ‘Is she OK?’

Pip crouches to stroke the dog, mainly because she is embarrassed to be here, alone, talking to a grown-up.

‘Are you coming back out?’ he asks. ‘The party’s still going on. Loads of kids still out there.’

‘I don’t think I should,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to leave Mum. In case she’s sick again.’

He nods approvingly. ‘Fair enough,’ he says. ‘If you need anything, come to ours: we’ll all be up for a good while longer.’

Then he goes, the golden dog following behind, and disappears into the shadows of the encroaching dusk.

By ten to ten it is dark and Pip wants to go to bed. She looks in on her mother who is asleep on her back, her mouth hanging open, her arms above her head, snoring.

Pip looks out into the darkness beyond her garden gate. The party has finished but the garden is still alive. Clusters of people sit on the grass or on arrangements of folding chairs, their faces lit by storm lanterns, by candles flickering in jars, by the red embers of disposable barbecues. She needs to find Grace, so that she can lock the door and go to bed. But she doesn’t want to wander these gardens in the dark on her own, however lively they are.

The security light at the back of a neighbour’s house goes on and she sees a stream of twenty-somethings pass through the garden and back door, each holding something: rolled-up blankets, empty wine bottles, bin bags full of the detritus of a day in the sun. The sudden brightness and the wholesome chatter of her neighbours and their friends makes Pip feel brave for a second and she grabs the key to the back door and locks it behind her.

The table on their terrace is still bedecked with balloons from Grace’s birthday party earlier in the day, bobbing mournfully in the warm night breeze.

She sees children in the playground: big children. She heads towards them, hopefully. She sees faces she recognises: Leo’s older daughters, Catkin and Fern, mucking about on the swings. And Tyler and Dylan, side by side on a bench. But no Grace.

They all look at each other and shrug. Dylan sits up straight. ‘Isn’t she at home?’

Pip feels a cold chill of dread pass down her spine. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I haven’t seen her for hours.’

‘She said she was going in,’ says Catkin. ‘About an hour ago. She must have changed her mind. Have you checked our flat? Maybe she’s hanging out with our parents?’

Pip wanders across the lawn, through the remains of the party, bunting fluttering darkly from trees, bin bags in piles ready to be removed the next morning, piles of folded chairs and dismantled gazebos stacked under trees. She can see the light from the Howeses’ garden apartment glowing from here, empty now after a day-long party, the party that she and her mother had been at earlier, where her mother had drunk too much wine and had had to excuse herself, barely able to walk in a straight line.

Then she cries out and clutches her chest when a figure appears at her side. It is Max, the football-mad loner of the garden. He’s only nine, three years younger than her. She can’t believe he’s still out here, wandering alone at this time of night. As ever he is holding his beloved football, squeezing it tight against his stomach. He looks at Pip, his eyes wide and appalled. He looks as though he’s about to say something, but no words come. He turns then and runs, down the hill, towards the lights.

There is something on the brow of the hill, a strange shape emerging from the hedge that encircles the Rose Garden. She heads towards it.

As she nears the shape she can see it is a foot. She holds her breath deep inside her body and rounds the corner timorously.

The foot is attached to a person. Pip passes the beam from her mobile phone across the figure: a girl, half-undressed. Shorts yanked down to her knees, floral camisole top lifted above small naked breasts. Her hair is spread about her. Her face is a bloodied mass.

Pip drops to her knees. ‘No,’ she mutters, ‘no. No. No. No.’ She pulls Grace’s camisole down. Then she runs down the hill, runs and runs, towards the warm safe lights of the Howeses’ apartment, towards grownups, her heart thumping piston-hard in her chest.

BEFORE

One

We moved into the new flat this weekend. It’s nice. It’s on a quiet street with little houses. You walk into a narrow hallway and if you turn right there are two bedrooms. I have to share with Grace but I really don’t mind. You know I never liked sleeping on my own in the old house anyway. Not really. Do you remember? I don’t really know how much you remember about things from before. I don’t know if you’ve lost all your memories or if you’re just the same except with all the other problems.

Anyway, our room is really cute. We put our beds in an L shape so that our feet point together and our heads are furthest apart and I can see Grace when I’m in bed. It’s like this:

It’s weird how I’m eleven and I should be wanting my own room and I just really don’t. Remember how I used to say I wish we lived in a caravan? So we could be all snug together? Well, this is a bit like that, I suppose. Then Mum’s room is next door to ours. It’s quite small but she’s got a little shower room attached, which is nice for her. Then on the other side of the hallway there’s a kitchen which is square with white units with silver handles and white tiles and Mum says it looks like an operating theatre. It kind of does. Well, it’s totally different to our old kitchen, that’s for sure. Do you remember our old kitchen? Do you remember those crazy tiles around the sink with the bits of fruit on them? Grapes and stuff? I sort of miss those now.

So the kitchen has a breakfast bar, which is good, I like breakfast bars, and a window that looks over the garden. And next door is a tiny living room. It’s all painted white with that kind of shiny wood flooring that’s not really wood and whoever lived here before must have worn very sharp heels because it’s full of little dents, like a Ryvita. There’s a door in the living room that takes you into the back garden. It’s tiny weeny. Just big enough for a little table and some chairs. And maybe it’s just because it’s winter but it does smell a bit damp out there and there’s lots of moss all over the walls.

And it has a little wooden gate and when you go through the gate there’s a totally massive garden. We were not expecting it. Mum didn’t even tell us about it before. I was just thinking what a cute little flat it was and then suddenly it’s like Narnia, there’s all these tall trees and pathways and a lawn that takes you up to all these big white houses with windows that are as tall as two men and you can see the chandeliers and the big splashy paintings on the walls. At night when you look up the hill and the houses have all their lights on it’s so pretty. And in the garden itself there are all these pathways and little tucked-away places. A secret garden which is hidden inside an old wall covered with ivy, like the one in the book. A rose garden which has bowers all the way round and benches in the middle. And then there’s a playground too. It’s not particularly amazing, just some swings and a clonky old roundabout and one of those sad animals on a spring. But still, it’s cool.

Mum says I can’t tell you the name of the garden, or where it is. I totally don’t know why. But it is still in London. Just a different part to where we lived.

So, all in all I quite like it here. Which canNOT be said for Grace. She hates it. She hates sharing a room with me, she hates the tiny rooms and the narrow hallway and the fact there’s nowhere to put anything. And she hates our new school (I can tell you it’s a girls’ school and there are two baby goats and a Vietnamese potbellied pig in the playground. But I can’t tell you what it’s called. I’m really sorry). Anyway, she hates it. I don’t really know why. I really like it. And also she hates the communal garden. She says it’s weird and scary, probably full of murderers. I don’t think so. I think it looks interesting. Kind of mysterious.

I have to go now. Mum says she doesn’t know if they’ll give you any letters or even if you’d be able to read them anyway. But I always told you everything, Dad, and I don’t want to stop now.

‘Look,’ said Adele, standing in the tall window of her living room, her arms folded across her stomach. ‘More new people.’

She was watching a young woman with a soft helmet of pale blond hair wearing an oversized parka with a huge fur-trimmed collar that looked as though it had eaten her. She was walking along the perimeter of the Secret Garden, followed by two biggish girls, Adele couldn’t really gauge their age, but she thought roughly eleven, twelve, thirteen, that kind of area. The girls had matching heads of thick dark curls and were wearing similar-looking parkas to – she assumed – their mother. They were tall and solid, almost, Adele couldn’t help herself from thinking, verging on the overweight. But hard to tell in the winter coats.

Leo joined her at the window. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘them. I saw them moving in a few days ago.’

The garden was formed in the space between a long row of small, flat-fronted Georgian cottages on Virginia Terrace and a majestic half-moon of stucco-fronted mansions on Virginia Crescent, with a large mansion block at either end.

Adele had lived on Virginia Crescent for almost twenty years. She’d moved into Leo’s flat when she was twenty-one, straight from a cramped flat-share on Stroud Green Road. She had been immediately overwhelmed by the high ceilings and the faded grandeur: the foxed mirrors and threadbare sofas, old velvet shredded by the claws of a dozen long-dead cats; the heavy floor-length curtains patterned with sun-bleached palm fronds and birds of paradise; the walls of books and the grand piano covered with a fringed chenille throw. They’d long since taken out the opulent seventies-style bathroom suite with its golden bird-shaped taps and green porcelain sanitary-ware. They’d ripped out the expensive, claret-red carpets and taken down the curtains so heavy they’d needed two people to take the weight. Leo’s mother had died twelve years ago and two years later his father had moved to some land-locked African state to marry a woman half his age. She and Leo bought out his two brothers and room by room they’d made the flat their own.

Adele felt as much a part of the garden as her husband, who had grown up on these lawns. She had seen babies become adults. She had seen a hundred families come and go. She had had dozens of other people’s children in and out of her home. The garden became a mystery during these winter months: neighbours becoming shadows glimpsed through windows, their children growing taller and taller behind closed doors, people moving out, people moving in and people occasionally dying. And it wasn’t until the onset of spring, until the days grew longer and the sun shone warmer, that the secrets of the winter were revealed.

She looked again at the new arrivals. Gorgeous girls, tall and big-boned, both of them, with square-jawed faces like warrior queens. And then she turned her gaze to their elfin, worried-looking mother. ‘Was there a man?’ she asked Leo. ‘When they moved in?’

She wanted to wander out there now, accidentally cross paths, introduce herself, make sure they realised that there was more to the garden than it might appear on a dank January afternoon such as this. She wanted to impart some sense of the way the garden opened like a blossom during the summer months: back doors left open; children running barefoot in the warm dark of night; the red glow of tin-can barbecues for two in hidden corners; the playground full of young mothers and toddlers; the pop and thwack of ping-pong balls on the table wheeled out by the French family along the way; cats stretched out in puddles of sunshine; striped shadows patterning the lawn through fronds of weeping willows.

But right now that was all a long way off. Right now it was January and in an hour or so it would be getting dark, lights switched on, curtains pulled shut, everyone sealed up and internalised. The garden itself dark and shabby; lines of bare-branched trees, dead-faced backs of houses, pale gravelled paths covered in the last of autumn’s leaves; an air of desolation, melancholic whistle of wind through leafless tendrils of weeping willows, cats sitting listlessly on garden walls.

‘I wonder where those girls go to school,’ she muttered mainly to herself. The girls’ school up by the Heath, maybe? Or maybe even the hothouse place on the other side of the main road? She tried to work out whether they had money or not. You couldn’t assume anything in this community. Half these houses were owned by a charitable trust and the mansion blocks at either end were affordable housing for service workers. There was even a halfway house on the terrace, home to an endless succession of recently released female offenders and their children, its back garden cemented over and sprouting weeds, with a never-used solitary plastic rocking dog.

There was no single type of person who lived here. No neat social demographic catchment. Everyone lived here. TV presenters, taxi drivers, artists, teachers, drug addicts. That was the joy of it.

‘Those girls will be going: Mum, have you seen that weird woman over there who keeps staring at us?’

Adele turned and smiled at Leo. ‘They can’t see me,’ she said, ‘not in this light.’

‘Well, that makes it even worse! Mum, there’s a ghostly shape in that window over there, I don’t like it!’

Tuesday 2nd November 2010

Hi, Jim!

Well, I must say, I didn’t think for a minute you’d be called something earthy like Jim! The Barbour and natty waistcoat in your profile photo make you look more like a Rupert or a Henry, something serious with two syllables, you know! And talking of syllables, and since you asked, no, I’m not really called Rainbowbelle. OF COURSE NOT! I’m called Lorelei and my name has three or four syllables, depending on how you say it. (My parents named us after mythical maidens. My sister is called Pandora. There was an Athena, but she was stillborn, so you know.) Anyway. Lor-a-lay-ee. Or Lor-a-lay. I’m not fussy really.

I’m sixty-five years old and I live in one of the prettiest villages in the Cotswolds in a big, crazy old house full of what I call TREASURES and what my children call CRAP. We are probably ALL right.

I have four children. Megan is forty, Bethan is thirty-eight and the twins, Rory and Rhys, are thirty-five. Oh, and thanks mainly to the frantic reproduction of my eldest daughter I am a multiple grandmother too! Do you have any children? You didn’t mention them so I assume not? People usually tell you about their children before anything else, right? I don’t see them very much, unfortunately, they’re all so busy, and I’m, well, I suppose you could say insular, these days. I lost my partner about four years ago and things kind of unravelled from there, you might say.

Anyway, what can I tell you about me? I love nature, I love the countryside, I love children, I love to swim. I’m fit, for my age. I’ve kept my figure over the years, and am grateful for that. I see some women I’ve known for many years just turn to woolly mammoths once they passed menopause! And, as you can see from my picture, I’ve kept my hair long. Nothing ages a woman faster than a haircut!!

Anyway, that’s enough about me. Tell me more about you! You say you’re a widower. I’m very sorry to hear that. And whereabouts in the North do you live? I can see from your photo that you have a dog. That is a very beautiful retriever. What is it called? We had a dog when the children were growing up, but once they’d all gone, I could never quite see the point of animals.

I will see what I can do about photographs. I’m not really very techy beyond my laptop. But there must be something else I can send you. I’ll check it out.

Well, thank you, Jim, for getting in touch. The Internet really is a marvellous thing, especially for old codgers like us, wouldn’t you say? I’d be lost without it really. I’d love to hear back from you again, but please don’t feel you have to, if you think I sound dreadful!!

Yours with best wishes,

Lorelei Bird

April 2011

The damp heat came as a shock after the chill of the air conditioning that had cooled the car for the last two hours. Meg slammed the door behind her, pushed up the sleeves of her cotton top, pulled down her sunglasses and stared at the house.

Molly joined her on the pavement, and gawped from behind lime-green Ray-Bans. ‘Oh, my God.’

They stood together for a moment, side by side, the same height as each other now. Molly had caught up last summer, much to her delight. They now both stood at five foot eight. Molly long and lean as a fashion drawing, tanned legs in denim hot pants, honey-dusted hair bundled on top of her head in an artful pile, white Havaianas, a chambray shirt over a pink vest, tiny ankles and wrists layered in friendship circlets and rubber bands. Meg, on the other hand, solid as a quarterback, sensible in three-quarter-length navy chinos and a Breton-striped long-sleeved top, a pair of silver-sequinned FitFlops and a last-minute pedicure her only concession to the unseasonal heatwave. Mother and only daughter, in the late stages of a nightmarish, clichéd teenage disaster that had lasted more than three years. Almost friends now. Almost. Someone had once told Meg that you get your daughter back when she’s nineteen. Only four more years to wait.

‘This is worse than I thought. I mean, so much worse.’ Meg shook her head and took a tentative step towards the house. There it stood, brick for brick, exactly as it had been the day she was born, forty years earlier. Three low windows facing out on to the street, four windows above, two front doors, one at either end, on the right by the side entrance a plaque, made by a long-dead local craftsman, an oval with the words The Bird House painted on it and a pair of lovebirds with their beaks entwined. The green-painted gate to the left of the house that opened up on to a gravelled path to the back door, the stickers in the windows declaring membership of Neighbourhood Watch (whatever happened to Neighbourhood Watch? Meg wondered idly), allegiance to the RSPB and an intolerance towards people selling door to door.

‘This is the worst house I’ve ever seen,’ said Molly. ‘It’s worse than the ones on the TV shows.’

The windows, which to her recollection had never been cleaned, were now so thick with grime that they were fully opaque. In fact, they were black. The pastel-yellow Gloucester brick was discoloured and damaged. The green gate was hanging off its post by one solitary nail and the gravelled pathway was piled high with random objects: two old pushchairs, a rusty bike, a dead Christmas tree in a broken pot, a box of magazines swollen and waterlogged to twice their original size.

The flat-fronted style of the house meant that it held most of its personality within and behind, but even on such scant display, it was clear that this house had a disease. The village had grown more and more gentrified over the decades, all the old houses scrubbed to a gleaming yellow, doors and window frames Farrow-&-Balled to the nth degree, and there, lodged between them, like a rotten tooth, sat the Bird House.

‘God, it’s so embarrassing,’ said Molly, pushing her Ray-Bans into her hair and wrinkling her tiny nose. ‘What must everyone think?’

Meg raised her eyebrows. ‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘I’d say that judging by our local reputation this is probably no more than anyone in the village would expect. Come on then,’ she smiled at her daughter, nervously, ‘let’s go in, shall we? Get it over with?’

April 1981

Megan pulled back the ivy and pushed her fingertips inside a small crevice in the wall.

‘Oh, well done, Meggy!’ her mother called from the back step where she stood in her strawberry-print apron watching proceedings with a contented smile. ‘Bravo!’

Megan pulled out the small foil-wrapped egg and dropped it into her basket. ‘It’s pink!’ she said pointedly to her younger sister.

Megan looked up at the sky; it was cloudless, densely blue, hot as July. Mum had said they needed to find their eggs quickly otherwise they might melt. Her eyes scanned the gardens. She’d found all the eggs in the woodpile, gingerly plucking them from next to rubbery woodlice. There’d been more in the beds of daffodils and hyacinths that lined the pathways around the greenhouse and she’d come across a big gold one sitting in the branches of the cherry tree outside the kitchen door. She counted up her eggs and found she had twelve. Bethan and the twins were still searching close to the house, but Megan suspected that the top garden had been all but stripped of its eggy assets, so she skipped down the slate-covered steps to the lower garden. Suddenly the sounds of her siblings and her mother faded to a murmur. It was warmer down here, soft and hazy. The grass had stripes in it, from where Dad had mown it yesterday, this way and that, and little piles of shaggy grass trimmings already turning pale in the burning sun. A camellia bush, confused by the early summer, had already bloomed and spilled its fat blossoms on to the lawn where they lay browning and sated, halfway to ugly. Megan headed to the lichen-spotted sundial in the middle of the lawn. Three more foil-wrapped eggs sat on top of it and she brushed them into her basket with the side of her hand.

She heard Bethan tripping down the steps behind her in her flamenco shoes. Megan turned and smiled. Sometimes when she looked at her little sister she felt overcome with love. Her worst enemy and her best friend.

Meg and Beth looked identical. They both had what her mother called the ‘Bird face’. It was the same as her dad’s and the same as her auntie Lorna’s and the same as Granny Bird’s. Apple cheeks, high foreheads, wide smiles. The only difference was that Megan’s hair was brown and curly like Mum’s, and Bethan’s was straight and black like Dad’s. Rory and Rhys, the twins, looked like their mum. They had ‘Douglas faces’. Low foreheads, long noses, neat bee-stung lips, and narrow blue eyes peering curiously from behind curtains of long blonde hair.

People always said, ‘Oh, such lovely looking children.’ They said, ‘You must be so proud, Mrs Bird.’ They said, ‘What perfect angels.’

And Mum would say, ‘You should see them when they’re at home,’ and roll her eyes, with one hand running through Rory’s hair, the other wrapped around Rhys’s hand and her voice full of love.

Their mother appeared at the bottom of the steps with the twins in tow. ‘The boys have got nine each, I think we’re almost there,’ she said. ‘Think yellow,’ she added with an exaggerated wink. The boys let go of her hands and ran towards the slide at the bottom of the garden that had yellow handles. Bethan ran towards an upturned bucket that was actually orange. But Megan knew exactly where her mother meant. The St John’s wort bush right in front of them. She walked towards it and let her eyes roam over the clouds of yellow flowers abuzz with fat bumble bees before they came to rest on a row of terracotta pots underneath, overflowing with eggs and small yellow puffball chicks with glued-on eyes. She was about to scoop up the eggs and chicks when her mother touched her on her shoulder, her soft dry hands firm against Meg’s sun-freckled skin. ‘Share them,’ she whispered softly, ‘with the little ones. Make it fair.’

Meg was about to complain but then she took a deep breath and nodded. ‘Here!’ she called out to her siblings. ‘Look! There’s millions.’

All three hurtled to the St John’s wort bush and their mother divided up the remaining eggs into four piles and handed them to each child in turn. ‘Already starting to melt,’ she said, licking some chocolate from the edge of her thumb, ‘better get them indoors.’

The cool of the house was shocking after the heat outside. It draped itself over Meg’s bare skin like a cold flannel. Dad was pouring squash into beakers at the kitchen table. The dog was dozing on the window seat. The yellow walls of the kitchen were entirely covered over with the children’s art. Megan ran her finger along the edges of a drawing that she’d done when she was four. It always amazed her to think it had been stuck to the wall there, in the very same place, with the very same piece of Sellotape, for six whole years. She could barely remember being four. She certainly could not remember sitting and drawing this portrait entitled ‘megn and mumy’, composed of two string-legged people with crazy hair, split-in-half smiles and hands twice the size of their bodies, suspended in a gravity-free world of spiky blue trees and floating animals. The wall of art was a conversation piece for anyone coming into the house; it spanned all three walls, spread itself over cupboard doors, over door frames, around corners and even into the pantry. Dad would try and take some down occasionally, to ‘update the wall’ as he’d put it. But Mum would just smile her naughty-little-girl smile and say, ‘Over my dead body.’ If Dad ever saw one of his children producing a piece of art he’d snatch it away the moment it was shown to him and say, ‘That is so very beautiful that I shall have to put it in my special folder,’ and spirit it away somewhere (occasionally tucked inside his clothes) before Mum saw it and stuck it to the wall.

‘Now,’ she said, pulling her tangly hair back into a ponytail and removing her apron, ‘you can eat all the eggs you like as long as you promise you’ll still have room for lunch. And remember, keep the foils for the craft box!’

The ‘craft box’ was another bugbear of Dad’s. It had once been a small plastic toolbox neatly filled with sequins and pipe cleaners and sheets of gold leaf. Over the years it had expanded into an ever-growing family of giant plastic crates that lived in a big cupboard in the hall, filled with an impossible tangle of old string lengths, knots of wool, empty sweet wrappers, toilet-roll middles, old underwear cut into rags, packing chips and used wrapping paper. Megan didn’t really do crafts any more – she was nearly eleven now – and Bethan had never been as creative as her sister; while the boys of course would rather be roaming the gardens or charging about the house than sitting with a tube of Pritt and a handful of old ice-lolly sticks. No one really used the craft box any more, but that didn’t stop Lorelei constantly topping it up with all sorts of old junk.

She pulled the egg foils eagerly from the children now as they discarded them, smoothing them flat with her fingertips into delicate slivers, her face shining with satisfaction. ‘So pretty,’ she said, piling them together, ‘like little slices of rainbow. And of course, they will always make me think of today. This perfect day with my lovely children when the sun shone and shone and all was right with the world.’

She looked at each child in turn and smiled her smile. She ran a hand over Rhys’s hair and stroked it from his eyes. ‘My lovely children,’ she said again, her words encompassing all four of them, but her loving gaze fixed firmly upon her lastborn child.

Rhys had been the smallest of all of Lorelei’s babies. Megan and Bethan had both weighed over nine pounds. Rory had been the first twin out, weighing in at a healthy six pounds and fifteen ounces. And then, as her mother often recounted, out popped poor Rhys like a plucked quail, a little under four pounds, blue and wrinkled and just about able to breathe on his own. They’d put him under lights – or ‘lightly toasted him’ as Lorelei also often recounted – and declared him fit to go home only after three long days.

Lorelei still worried about him more than the other three. At just six years old he was smaller than Rory, smaller than most of the children in his class, with a pale complexion and a tendency to catch colds and tummy bugs. He clung to his mother whenever they were out in public, wailed like a baby when he got hurt and, unlike his brother, didn’t like playing with other children. He seemed happy only when he was here, at home, brother on one side, mother on the other. Megan didn’t know what to make of him. Sometimes she wished he’d never been born. Sometimes she really thought they’d be better off without him. He didn’t ‘match’. All the Birds were fun and gregarious, silly and bright. Rhys just dragged them down.

Megan unthinkingly squeezed her fist around the gold foil that she’d just unpeeled from the big egg she’d found in the cherry tree, and jumped slightly as her mother’s hand slapped down against hers.

She 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 and carried 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.’

‘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 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.’

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.

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.

‘You know you can talk about it, don’t you? You know I want 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.’

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, the faint beginnings of a rainbow. Lorelei stood barefoot just outside the kitchen door, wrapped in a long multicoloured angora cardigan. Her waist-length hair was twisted and held on her crown with three large tortoiseshell combs.

‘Look, Meggy,’ she said, her head appearing around the door. ‘Look. A rainbow! Quick!’

Meg glanced up from her revision, spread before her on the kitchen table, and smiled encouragingly. ‘In a minute,’ she said.

‘No!’ cried her mother. ‘It’ll be gone in a minute. Come and look now!’

She joined her mother outside, feeling the wetness of the flagstones seeping through her sheepskin slippers.

‘They’re watching telly,’ said Meg. ‘They won’t be able to hear you.’

Meg knew it was pointless to argue. She sighed again and headed towards the sitting room. Her three siblings sat in a row on the grubby sofa with the dog lying listlessly between them. They were watching Saturday Superstore and eating carrot sticks.

‘Mum says there’s a rainbow,’ she said defeatedly. ‘She wants you to go and look at it.’

Lorelei sighed melodramatically. ‘That’s a terrible pity,’ she said. ‘And look,’ she gestured at the sky, ‘now it’s gone. Gone for good. For ever …’ A small tear rolled down the side of her nose and she wiped it away with a bunched-up fist, the way a small child might do. ‘Such a pity,’ she murmured, ‘to miss a rainbow …’ Then she forced her face into a smile and said, ‘Ah well, at least one of you saw it. You can always describe it to the others.’

Also by Lisa Jewell

ALSO BY LISA JEWELL

The Truth About
Melody Browne

ALSO BY LISA JEWELL

After The
Party

ALSO BY LISA JEWELL

The Making
of Us

ALSO BY LISA JEWELL

Before I Met
You

About the Book

About the Author

LISA JEWELL

the house we grew up in

BEFORE

One

1

April 2011

April 1981

April 2011

March 1986

Also by Lisa Jewell

ALSO BY LISA JEWELL

The Truth About Melody Browne

ALSO BY LISA JEWELL

After The Party

ALSO BY LISA JEWELL

The Making of Us

ALSO BY LISA JEWELL

Before I Met You

About the Book

About the Author

LISA JEWELL

the house we grew up in

BEFORE

One

1

April 2011

April 1981

April 2011

March 1986

The Truth About
Melody Browne

After The
Party

The Making
of Us

Before I Met
You