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

‘Jesus Christ,’ she said. ‘I think this one might actually be totally blocked up.’
    ‘Let me try.’ Molly pressed her slight body to the door. She pushed against it with her back, with each side, and then with her arms. She turned to Meg. ‘It’s blocked,’ she said. ‘How is that even possible? I mean, how did she get that stuff in when you can’t even open the door?’
    Meg shrugged. ‘None of this really stands up to any kind of right-thinking analysis. None of it. Your grandma was a very strange woman.’
    ‘Which one was Beth’s room?’
    ‘Round here,’ said Meg, ‘round this corner.’ She felt her way with her hands, trailing her fingertips against the damp wallpaper. Laura Ashley’s finest, pale-green leaves against a magnolia background, still bearing the marks of the childhoods lived here – felt-tip trails, half-ripped stickers – and there, Beth’s door, still with its plastic plaque bought from a gift shop in Weston-super-Mare.
BETH’S ROOM
. They’d each had one. Both the girls. Meg still remembered the excitement as they spun the carousel around and found that
yes
! There was a
Megan
! (Although no Rory and no Rhys, butthe twins had been too small to feel hard done by.) They’d stuck them to their doors with sticky felt pads. Meg had eventually taken hers off, at some point during her teenage years, and it had broken apart in her hands. She’d tipped it into a bin, never thought of it again. Until now. A sudden, searing reminder that they’d
once been happy
. All of them. Even Rhys.
    Impossible
, she thought.
Impossible
.
    Beth had never taken her plaque down, stuck in the past as she’d been for so long, half-formed and amorphous, like an embryo in a jar. The door was half open and peering through the gap Meg saw, without much surprise, more generic, formless piles. The curtains across the window were drawn and dirty, drooping from the runner at one side, letting in a half-moon of daylight. Beth’s wardrobe sat to the left of the door. Its doors were wide open, revealing Beth’s clothes: her old clothes, the clothes she’d worn when she was still a person who made sense to Meg. When she was still her sister.
    Meg’s phone rang again. She looked at the display. BILL. Thank God.
    ‘Hello, darling.’
    ‘We’re here!’
    ‘Oh, good!’ said Meg, crossing one thing off her list of dread fears. The other half of her family had failed to die in a plane crash on an Air France flight from Gatwick to Bern. ‘How was the flight?’
    ‘It was good, great.’
    ‘How are the boys?’
    ‘Boys!’ she heard her husband call out. ‘Mummy wants to know how you are!’
    Meg smiled as she heard the oddly high-pitched sound of her three boys loudly exclaiming that they were well.
    ‘Bit of a scene at outsize items,’ Bill was saying. ‘Only three pairs of skis came through. Had to hang around for half an hour. Had to, you know,
shout
at people.’
    ‘Oh, God, not at Swiss people. You shouldn’t do that, you know? They don’t like it.’
    Bill laughed. Meg’s heart calmed at the sound of it. How far away it all seemed now: soft, warm, shouty Bill, her three wild, red-haired boys with their freckles and their hugs, the whiteness and glare of a Swiss airport, four immaculately packed suitcases full of clothes that smelled like home.
Her
home.
    ‘
Do you want to talk to Daddy?
’ Meg mouthed to Molly.
    Molly shrugged and then said, ‘Yeah, all right.’
    ‘Molly wants to say hello. Hold on, hold on. No, I’ll tell you later, yes, we’re here. I’ll tell you everything later. Love you. Love you all. I’ll call you when Molly and I get to the hotel. Yes. Yes. Love you. Bye.’
    She passed her phone to Molly and felt shocked by the transition from one world to another, from cleanliness and love and chaos, to dirt and loneliness and death. Her ears rang and the silence ate her up. Not just the silence of the countryside, but the unsettling muffled silence of this house, where