The House We Grew Up In by Lisa Jewell Read Free Book Online Page A

as, in her own melodramatic words, ‘
a violation akin to rape
’. She kept stalking desolately round the house, peering into corners and touching things. And at the merest sound of footsteps on the pavement outside the window, or the whine of a car driving too fast, or the rumble of a car driving too slow, or the crack of a twig under the paws of a squirrel, or the rustle of leaves in a soft breeze, Lorelei would gasp and run to the nearest window, her arms wrapped defensively around herself.
    ‘They were only kids,’ Megan would say, ‘just a pair of spotty dweebs.’
    But Lorelei would not be assuaged.
    ‘Well,
you
can all go to Greece next year,’ she said self-righteously, ‘but I’m going to stay here to protect our home.’
    So of course, nobody went to Greece.
April 2011
    Meg’s phone rang. She picked it up from the arm of Lorelei’s chair, expecting it to be Bill telling her that he and the boys had checked in, that everything was going to plan. But it was an unknown number. She stared at it for a moment.
    ‘Who is it?’ asked Molly, anxiously nibbling a fingernail.
    ‘Don’t put your fingers in your mouth,’ hissed Meg. ‘Seriously, you have no idea what you’ve been touching.’
    Molly let her finger drop from her mouth and wiped it absent-mindedly against the denim of her hot pants.
    ‘Who is it?’ she asked again.
    Meg pressed Decline. ‘Unknown,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I can face talking to a normal human being right now. Maybe they’ll leave a voicemail.’
    ‘You look weird sitting there,’ said Molly.
    ‘I
feel
weird sitting here.’
    ‘Can I have a go?’
    ‘Sure.’ Meg stood up and eased herself into a corner to let Molly sit down.
    Molly leaned her head gingerly against the back of the armchair and rested her delicate hands upon the arms. She looked up at her mum. ‘So this was, like, where she spent all her time? Just here. In this chair?’
    ‘Pretty much. According to the social worker, she went into the village a couple of times a week, had something to eat, chatted to the neighbours, went to the charity shop, bought a paper or two. Sometimes she went for a swim at the pool in town, mainly so she could have a shower, I suppose. Andevery weekend she’d get in the car and go to the cash and carry, to
pick up some bits
.’ She groaned under her breath.
Pick up some bits
. Infuriating, ridiculous woman. ‘And then she’d get home, push her way through metres of pitch-black corridors and emerge up here, like a rat out of a drain-cover.’
    ‘Oh, don’t talk about rats.’
    ‘And God knows what she did then.’ Meg looked about her for any evidence of activities. She saw her mother’s laptop; it was tiny, state of the art, must have cost a fortune. She had no idea where it had come from. She knew that her mother, despite her twin loves of the Internet and shopping, had never developed an Internet shopping habit, mainly because it would have taken her too long to get to the front door to collect any packages. So she must have bought this in a shop. She could not picture her mother in a shop, buying a laptop. But still, there it sat, covered in a thin layer of dust, untouched for the four days since Lorelei’s death. There’d been talk of an online lover. A man in Gateshead called Jim whom she’d never actually met, but with whom, she’d declared dramatically, she was
crazy in love
. It sounded, from what Meg had managed to glean from between her mother’s very skewed conversational lines, as though Jim might have issues of his own. She wondered if Jim knew about Lorelei’s death. And then she realised that of course he didn’t. He probably thought he’d been dumped. Dumped by Lorelei from the Cotswolds. Without so much as a by-your-leave.
    Poor Jim.
    Her phone rang again. Still Unknown. This time she pressed Answer.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Meg?’
    Meg’s flesh wriggled slightly at the familiar tone of the caller’s voice. ‘Yes, speaking.’
    ‘It’s me.