On 25 July that same year, while Lorelei was out at the shops, and Megan was violently kissing Andrew Smart on a blanket in a field in the middle of nowhere, and the twins and Bethan were alone in the house, two sixteen-year-old boys wearing hooded jackets broke in and took, after a leisurely exploration, the video player, two television sets, a watch, some jewellery, and a leg of lamb and a joint of beef from the chest freezer in the utility room. They did all
of this without disturbing any of the three children in the house, and it was only when they let the kitchen door bang shut behind them that Rhys peered over his window ledge just in time to see them running down the garden path and on to the street. He rushed then to a window overlooking the street and saw them pile into a matt black Ford Escort and screech away through the village, whooping and hollering through the opened windows as though they thought they were in Harlem.
Rhys found the whole episode thrilling beyond words. He called 999 before he even told the others, for fear that someone else would want to do it. And for a few days afterwards he dined out on the whole episode, to the point of being boring. But Lorelei couldn’t see the harmless drama of the thing. She could only see it 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.
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. And
every 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. Beth.’
Meg breathed once down the line, and then twice.
‘Hello?’
Meg hung up.
Megan and Beth sat side by side in a subterranean concrete room off Shaftesbury Avenue. The room was a bar called Freuds; someone had told Megan that it was
the
place to be and it was certainly unlike anywhere she’d been before.
Industrial
was the word. Unfinished walls, beaten copper bar, cubist seating, chalked lists on blackboards, everything very dark and very uncomfortable.
It was hard to concentrate on her sister sitting hunched up beside her, sipping a lemonade through a black straw, because there was a constant overwhelming sense that something terribly exciting was about to happen over her shoulder. It wasn’t, of course. Everyone else here was just like her: twenty-something, office worker, new in town, earning peanuts, looking for love, expecting everything to be a lot more exciting than it actually was.
Megan felt proud to sit here with Beth. Her little sister was a full two inches taller than her and, she imagined, a full
double-take more beautiful. Not that Megan was plain. Megan was far from plain. But Bethan was the one with the long mane of sleek black hair and the kissable mouth and the blushing cheeks and the legs that spoke their own language. And the boobs. Bethan was the one with the boobs. Someone once said to Megan that sisters always feel more beautiful when they’re together and, ever since, Megan had found it to be true. Without Beth, Meg felt reasonable; with her she felt exceptional.
Beth was dressed in black. Black jeans. Black angora cardigan with the sleeves pushed up her arms. Black lace vest. Black ribbon in her black hair.
‘Remember your polka-dot raincoat?’ said Megan, returning to the place they always came back to eventually, their shared childhood.
‘The pink one? How could I forget! It was literally the most important thing in the world to me. She’s still got it, you know?’
Meg groaned and said, ‘Of course she has. I think that could probably apply to any random item of clothing you care to mention.’
‘So,’ said her sister, her expression growing serious, ‘are you coming?’
Meg groaned. Easter weekend. She’d told her mother she’d let her know, that she wasn’t sure what her plans were yet, and her mother had tried to sound as though she didn’t mind either way – even though it would be the first Easter Megan hadn’t spent at home and therefore something that Lorelei would find traumatic even to contemplate. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s such a long way.’
‘I know,’ said Beth, ‘but please come. It’ll be shit if you’re not there.’
‘No, it won’t,’ scoffed Meg. ‘It’ll just be exactly the same as it is every single year except with one less person around the table.’
‘Yes, exactly. And you’re the only normal person in the family.’
‘Dad?’
‘Well, yeah, just about, although I think that twenty-five years living with Mum are finally starting to grind him down. He doesn’t seem quite himself lately.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know. He just seems distracted. And thin. He looks very thin.’
Megan considered her father, all six foot one of him, his floppy hair, his pixie face, his almost absurd patience with his highly strung, immature wife. He could not afford to be distracted or thin. He needed to be solid and sensible and fully engaged or the whole structure of things would just come apart.
‘How are the twins?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Oh, they’re fine. But Rory’s got some rather dodgy new friends.’
‘Hasn’t he
always
had dodgy friends?’
‘Well, yes, but these are slightly dodgier than the last lot.’
‘Drugs?’
Beth shrugged. ‘Probably.’
‘Oh, God.’ Megan dragged her hands through her brown curls. ‘And what about Rhys?’
‘Rhys is Rhys. No dodgy friends. No friends at all from what I can see. He just sits in his room listening to grunge music, very loud, until really late.’
‘That boy does not get enough sleep.’
‘No, I know, and it’s affecting his schoolwork. You know, Rory can just flip through his revision in half an hour and he’s done, but Rhys needs to really concentrate and because he doesn’t really sleep, well, Dad thinks he’s going to fail all his GCSEs. And he’s just a bit, you know, weird.’
‘What, weirder than usual, you mean?’
‘Yeah, a little bit. He got hauled in front of the headteacher at school the other day for hanging around the girls’ changing room.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. It was horrible. We only found out about it because Dad knows the geography teacher and it was all round the school. And they couldn’t prove he’d done it so he wasn’t punished, but now apparently all the girls hate him and call him a creep and a pervert.’ She shuddered lightly. ‘It’s horrible,’ she said, almost silently.
‘Christ,’ said Meg. ‘What does Mum say?’
‘Oh, well, you know, she’s taken his side obviously, closed ranks completely, her precious baby, etc., etc. And as she says, there is no proof, just one girl’s word against his. But to be absolutely honest,’ she paused and lowered her voice, ‘it really wouldn’t surprise me if it was true. He’s the oddest boy I know.’
‘Come down and live with me,’ said Megan, suddenly
fearful for her soft-hearted younger sister who had barely spent a night away from home since the day she was born, and who tiptoed around the characters in her house as if they were the leading men and woman and she was just a lowly extra. ‘Come and live in London. Seriously. There’s space for another bed in my room, we could split the bills and everything. I could ask around for you for a job at my place – they’ve always got vacancies.’
Beth smiled. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘right.’
‘What?’
‘Can you imagine me telling Mum that?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because –’ Her sister looked flustered for a second. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She smiled. ‘Maybe I could.’
‘Of course you could! You finish college in June. You’ll be a qualified secretary. London will be your oyster.’
Beth’s face went from uncertain to quietly excited. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I mean, it would be fun, wouldn’t it?’
Megan nodded. ‘Ten different types of fun.’
‘And Mum would still have the twins …’
‘Stop worrying about Mum!’
‘I know, I know. You’re right. I just can’t help it sometimes.’
‘You need this,’ said Meg. ‘You need to get away from her. From all of it. It’ll swallow you whole otherwise. I mean it. It really will. And you won’t even realise it’s happening until it’s too late.’
Two days later Beth returned home from London. The Bird House sat quiet and dusty, filled with sunlight and distant
sounds. She rested her weekend case at the foot of the stairs and called out once or twice. No one replied and she presumed herself alone. She felt coated with the grime of the big city. Although she’d had a shower in Megan’s immaculate little en-suite shower room just that morning, she couldn’t shake the feeling of it all over her skin. She made herself a mug of tea and took it up to her room. She stood for a while in the middle, imagining herself not in it any more, imagining herself instead in her sister’s room in Wood Green with its high ceilings and its views over a parade of shops, its shared kitchen and flatmates from foreign countries.
It didn’t seem possible, although in every practical way of course, it was. She went to her window and took in the view across the rambling gardens, down to the old green hammock at the far end and the fields beyond. Memories fluttered about her mind, of days that had passed and died and were never to return. But when she turned her thoughts to the future there was nothing there, just space. She sighed and sat on the window ledge, pondering her lack of ambition, of forward propulsion. She’d only signed up for the secretarial course because the college was ten minutes away and she knew she wouldn’t muck it up. She assumed that at some point soon she would probably end up being a secretary. But through fatalism rather than design.
She began to take off her clothes, feeling the sweet release of her breasts from the ill-fitting bra she’d been wearing since Friday morning. She looked at her body in the foxed mirror inside her wardrobe. She saw the loveliness of it and blanched slightly, thinking of the things she hadn’t told Meg in the bar
that night. The looks from her brother. The sense of someone outside the bathroom door.
She’d watched Rory become interested in women, but with him it had been like the unfurling of a bud: something natural, inevitable, almost adorable, something separate, entirely unconnected to her. But with Rhys it was like a dark shadow spilling over everything he touched. Including her.
She wrapped her body in a towel, tucked her hair inside a shower cap and made towards the bathroom. A strange sound made her stop outside the door of her parents’ bedroom.
‘Mum?’
She clutched her towel closer to her chest and gently pushed at the door. Rhys was lying in his parents’ bed, the satin eiderdown pulled up to his armpits, naked as far as Beth could tell, staring straight at her.