The House We Grew Up In Read Online Free PDF

either side, holding bottles of nail polish, paperbacks, rice cakes, the oversized headphones she’d wear to listen to the radio, and instead of filth and junk, all she was aware of was the empty space at the centre of it all.
    Molly crunched uncertainly across a rocky pathway of scattered ephemera – empty packaging, discarded clothing, old newspapers – and joined her mother at the centre of the room. ‘I remember her sitting there, when we came that time,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Right there. I was scared of her.’
    Meg turned to her daughter and said, ‘Scared? Really?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Molly. ‘She just looked so bizarre, sitting there, so thin and scrawny, her eyes were kind of like,
wild
. She wasn’t like anyone I’d ever seen before.’
    ‘Poor Mum,’ Meg sighed again. ‘Don’t you remember the hot chocolate, though?’
    Molly glanced at her blankly.
    ‘She made you all hot chocolate. At bedtime. You were all so excited. Don’t you remember?’
    Molly shrugged. ‘No recollection at all,’ she said. ‘I just remember that,’ she pointed at the chair. ‘Her. There.’
    Meg felt overwhelmed with sadness.
    ‘I still don’t understand,’ said Molly. ‘I mean, you’re like, just so normal. You’re like the most normal person I’ve ever met. And you’re such a clean freak and everything. How did
you
come from
this
?’
    Meg shook her head. ‘Well, obviously it wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, Moll, this place was actually relatively normal.’
    ‘But your mum? Grandma? Was she ever normal?’
    Meg smiled sadly. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s a good question. And I think, with Mum, it really was all just a matter of degrees.’
    She took two more steps towards the armchair and touched it, with the very furthest tips of her fingers. And then, before her inner clean freak could tell her that she’d
catch fleas
, that she’d
never get the smell out
, that it was
filthy dirty
and
full of germs
, she lowered herself right into it, right into her mother’s armchair. She let her head fall back against the greying upholstery and she looked up at Molly and she smiled. ‘Tiny, tiny little degrees.’

2
    Friday 5th November 2010
    Hello again, Jim!
    I am delighted to see that I didn’t scare you off, and thank you for your reply. It was fascinating to find out more about you, and of course, I can see now that you would have started out as a James. You look more like a James than a Jim, but I agree that Jim is a much ‘friendlier’ name – particularly up there in Gateshead. You wouldn’t want to stand out too much, I suppose! Do you have a lovely accent? I don’t have much of an accent. I suppose you would say that I am ‘posh’! I was brought up just outside Oxford, went to the local girls’ grammar, Mum and Dad were both writers, my father wrote about medicine, my mother wrote about gardening. It was all very ramshackle and left-wing middle-class, nobody ever looked in a mirror, nobody ever hoovered. But at the heart of it was a deep, deep sadness. Probably about the baby, Athena. And other things that happened. Things I can’t really talk about. So even though it should have been a happychildhood, it really wasn’t. And then they both died young, my parents, pretty much one after the other. I was twenty when my father passed, twenty-three when my mother did, and there was all this stuff, stuff we’d never talked about. Stuff I really do rather wish we had talked about. But you know what it’s like when you’re that age, you think you have all the time in the world, don’t you? I would say I was rather a strange child, a bit like you say you were. I was very introverted and lived quite a colourful imaginary life. I collected things, obsessively, and wet the bed well into my early teens. I was almost feral in some ways. Quite wild yet also excruciatingly shy. I was forever being carted off to therapists but none of them had a clue. And then I left home at eighteen,