The House We Grew Up In Read Online Free PDF Page A

towers. At least here Meg could ascertain height and perspective. Ahead of her was the door into the snug, to the left the door into the living room and to the right the foot of the staircase. She only knew this from memory, because nosuch things were visible from where she stood. She’d been told that Lorelei had lived mainly in her bedroom so she decided that they should aim to get there, that it was probably less cluttered (
Ha! Cluttered! What an entirely insufficient word that was
) than the rest of the house and that they were both less likely to die getting into it.
    ‘Right,’ she said, encouraging her daughter. ‘Next one! Are you ready?’
    Molly nodded uncertainly and grabbed the back of Meg’s T-shirt again.
    They slithered sideways through the tunnel which, almost like a well-planned road system, had a junction halfway down where they turned right. Meg felt for the first runner with her toes and then gingerly walked up, subconsciously counting them as she’d done countless times as a child. Eleven to the landing. Then a dog-leg and another twelve to the first floor.
    As she emerged at the top of the stairs she turned to Molly and smiled. ‘It’s quite bright up here,’ she said. ‘Look, the top of the landing window. You can see out into the garden.’ Molly stood at her side and they drank in the view from the window as if it were water in a desert. Dust motes sparkled in the midday sun like clouds of glitter. Furry cobwebs hung from the wooden beams in the ceiling and from the old paper light shades. It smelled mustier up here, meatier. Downstairs had carried a smell of dead paper and dust; here it smelled of old flesh and unwashed things.
    Molly put her hand to her mouth again and shuddered. ‘Gross,’ she said. ‘It’s just as well you can’t actually smell theseplaces on TV. No one would watch those shows otherwise. Seriously.’
    ‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. Given how long she lived like this.’
    ‘It’s disgusting.’
    Meg shrugged. She couldn’t argue. ‘This is like hell.’
    ‘It’s worse than hell.’
    ‘It’s hell on actual earth.’
    There were no words. No language sufficient to convey this experience. For years Meg had lain in bed awake at night, imagining this, picturing it, hearing about it second-hand from social workers and the council: ‘
This could be the most extreme case of hoarding we have ever encountered. Her life is at risk, every moment of every day
’, listening to her mother on the phone playing it down: ‘
Oh, it’s all such a fuss. Such a fuss about a few things. I’m all alone now. I can live how I choose
.’
    Meg would try to argue: ‘
You’ll kill yourself. It’ll bury you. They’ll have to pull the house down to get your body out
.’
    And Lorelei would laugh lightly and say, ‘
That’s fine with me
.’
    But none of her imaginings had brought her to this place, to the meaty stench and the Gothic horror of it.
    A low corridor of objects brought them into Lorelei’s bedroom. Meg remembered vividly the last time she’d been in her mother’s bedroom. Six years ago. The last time she’d come for Easter. She’d arrived with Molly and the boys and found the house already halfway to the state it was in today. Her mother had been sitting in the middle of this room, hillocks of junk piled up around her, like a spider in the middle of its web, painting her toenails periwinkle andsmiling at Meg as though all in the world was as it should be.
    The memory brought a sudden lump to her throat.
    She remembered how cross she’d felt to see her mother like that, buried up to her elegant neck in her own shit, letting her beautiful home fall into decay, cooking up yet more fodder for the neighbours to get into a sweaty lather about. She’d been so cross that she’d almost hated her.
    But now, as she edged her way into the room, she saw the armchair where her mother had been, a fat, flowery thing padded out with cheap cushions, tables at