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Authors: Lisa Jewell
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old hag?!) and they would swell up, wouldn’t they, like a cork, plug me in here? Oh, anyway, not worth thinking about, I suppose.
I was so sorry to hear about your son. Bloody bloody hell, Jim. So awful, even if he had been a drug addict for all those years. Thirty-one is absolutely FAR TOO YOUNG, and the old cliché about parents outliving their children is one of the truest. It subverts the order ofeverything and nothing ever makes sense again, does it? And you see, I should know. Because, since we’re becoming so intimate, so quickly, I feel able to tell you this now, but I have lost a son, too. My baby one. Little Rhys. He died just after his sixteenth birthday. He hanged himself, in his own bedroom. On Easter Sunday.
Sorry. I had to take a break there. You know, I’ve never really spoken about it to anyone. But then I never met anyone who’d lost a son too (apart from my husband of course but that’s different, isn’t it?). I did such a good job of dealing with it at the time that I was always too utterly terrified to pick at the scab, as it were. Do you understand what I mean? I don’t really expect you to. I suspect you were more ‘normal’ about it all, thrashed about and screamed and wailed etc.? Anyway, so, yes, there you are, we have even more in common than we first thought. And in case you’re wondering, no, Rhys left no note, no explanation. It’s an infinite mystery. A terrible mystery. Although … well, I’ve never told anyone this before, Jim, but I think I know why he killed himself. And I’ve never told anyone, because he would have hated anyone to know. And so would I. But anyway! Can’t go spouting all my deepest secrets too soon, you’ll run screaming for the hills!!!
So, on to less grisly things. Are you interested at all in horoscopes? In case you are, I’m a Cancerian. I would say I’m very typical – home-loving, nurturing, sensitive, creative, etc., etc. How about you, Jim? What star sign are you? I’m guessing at … VIRGO!! Am I right?!
All the very best,
Lorelei
xx
April 2011
‘So did Grandma, like,
sleep
here, too?’ said Molly, stroking the lumpy arms of the chair.
Meg glanced around the room. Lorelei’s bed was entirely buried beneath a landfill of clothes and bags. There was a duvet on the floor at the foot of the chair, patterned with fuchsia and lavender stripes, and a matching pillow. ‘I suppose she must have,’ she replied.
‘God.’
Meg nodded. If there was one luxury that Meg never took for granted, it was the sensation of lying herself down at the end of every day upon a king-sized mattress, stretching out her limbs, stroking the soles of her feet against the silky bedsheets (laundered, pressed, sprayed with expensive scented water, changed every five days and not a moment longer), kissing her pillow, submitting to it all. When she saw homeless people it was that, more than the constant threat of violence that they lived with, the poverty and the loneliness, that made her heart bleed for them.
No bed
. And here had been her own mother, in a five-bedroom house, curling herself up every night, small and tight, her back a crooked arch, her neck a cricked right angle, in this shabby, lumpy chair, the same chair she’d sat in all day. Never lying flat. Never stretching out.
My God
, she thought,
did she really hate herself that much?
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s go and see what else has been going on up here.’ She put out a hand to help Molly out of the sagging pit of the armchair.
‘Can we see your room?’
Meg grunted. There hadn’t been a ‘your room’ since roughly a week after she’d left home at the age of twenty. Her mother had turned it over to junk storage even before Meg’s first visit home.
‘For what it’s worth,’ she replied.
Meg turned left out of Lorelei’s room and forced her way through another junk-filled corridor to the door of her former bedroom. She pushed at it and then turned to Molly and grimaced.
I was so sorry to hear about your son. Bloody bloody hell, Jim. So awful, even if he had been a drug addict for all those years. Thirty-one is absolutely FAR TOO YOUNG, and the old cliché about parents outliving their children is one of the truest. It subverts the order ofeverything and nothing ever makes sense again, does it? And you see, I should know. Because, since we’re becoming so intimate, so quickly, I feel able to tell you this now, but I have lost a son, too. My baby one. Little Rhys. He died just after his sixteenth birthday. He hanged himself, in his own bedroom. On Easter Sunday.
Sorry. I had to take a break there. You know, I’ve never really spoken about it to anyone. But then I never met anyone who’d lost a son too (apart from my husband of course but that’s different, isn’t it?). I did such a good job of dealing with it at the time that I was always too utterly terrified to pick at the scab, as it were. Do you understand what I mean? I don’t really expect you to. I suspect you were more ‘normal’ about it all, thrashed about and screamed and wailed etc.? Anyway, so, yes, there you are, we have even more in common than we first thought. And in case you’re wondering, no, Rhys left no note, no explanation. It’s an infinite mystery. A terrible mystery. Although … well, I’ve never told anyone this before, Jim, but I think I know why he killed himself. And I’ve never told anyone, because he would have hated anyone to know. And so would I. But anyway! Can’t go spouting all my deepest secrets too soon, you’ll run screaming for the hills!!!
So, on to less grisly things. Are you interested at all in horoscopes? In case you are, I’m a Cancerian. I would say I’m very typical – home-loving, nurturing, sensitive, creative, etc., etc. How about you, Jim? What star sign are you? I’m guessing at … VIRGO!! Am I right?!
All the very best,
Lorelei
xx
April 2011
‘So did Grandma, like,
sleep
here, too?’ said Molly, stroking the lumpy arms of the chair.
Meg glanced around the room. Lorelei’s bed was entirely buried beneath a landfill of clothes and bags. There was a duvet on the floor at the foot of the chair, patterned with fuchsia and lavender stripes, and a matching pillow. ‘I suppose she must have,’ she replied.
‘God.’
Meg nodded. If there was one luxury that Meg never took for granted, it was the sensation of lying herself down at the end of every day upon a king-sized mattress, stretching out her limbs, stroking the soles of her feet against the silky bedsheets (laundered, pressed, sprayed with expensive scented water, changed every five days and not a moment longer), kissing her pillow, submitting to it all. When she saw homeless people it was that, more than the constant threat of violence that they lived with, the poverty and the loneliness, that made her heart bleed for them.
No bed
. And here had been her own mother, in a five-bedroom house, curling herself up every night, small and tight, her back a crooked arch, her neck a cricked right angle, in this shabby, lumpy chair, the same chair she’d sat in all day. Never lying flat. Never stretching out.
My God
, she thought,
did she really hate herself that much?
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s go and see what else has been going on up here.’ She put out a hand to help Molly out of the sagging pit of the armchair.
‘Can we see your room?’
Meg grunted. There hadn’t been a ‘your room’ since roughly a week after she’d left home at the age of twenty. Her mother had turned it over to junk storage even before Meg’s first visit home.
‘For what it’s worth,’ she replied.
Meg turned left out of Lorelei’s room and forced her way through another junk-filled corridor to the door of her former bedroom. She pushed at it and then turned to Molly and grimaced.
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