The House We Grew Up In Read Online Free

Her mother stared at her curiously. ‘No eggs?’
    ‘I’ll leave them for the others,’ said Meg, hoping a suggestion of sibling-oriented kindness might prevent further urging.
    ‘There’s lots to go round. Tons and tons.’
    Meg shrugged. ‘I don’t want my hair to get wet.’
    ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. That’s no excuse. Put on a rain cap, here …’ She pulled a clear plastic hood from a drawer and forced it into Meg’s hands.
    Meg stared at it aghast. ‘I’m not wearing that!’
    ‘Why on earth not?’
    ‘Because it’s an old lady’s hat.’
    ‘It is not! It’s
my
hat!’
    ‘Exactly.’
    Lorelei threw her head back and laughed hard. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, ‘one day, God willing, you’ll be forty too, and I promise you, you will not feel a day over eighteen. Not a day. Now put the hat on and come and have some fun with the little ones. Imagine,’ she said, her face turning serious for a moment, ‘imagine if something happened to one of us and there was no Easter egg hunt next year, imagine if everything stopped being perfect – you would wish so hard that you’d taken part today …’
    Megan stared into the depths of her mother’s eyes, thegreeny-blue reservoirs of a million fervent emotions. They were set firm. She forced a smile and said, ‘OK,’ dragging out the second syllable to demonstrate her sacrifice. She found eleven eggs that morning and gave them all to her siblings.
    Pandora and her husband Laurence arrived at midday, without either of their now grown-up sons but with a new puppy in tow. Shortly afterwards, Colin’s sister Lorna turned up, with a carrier bag full of Easter eggs. Some neighbours were next to arrive, Bob and Jenny and their three young children. Lorelei roasted a leg of lamb in the Aga and served it with far too many honey-glazed carrots (‘
Aren’t they the most glorious shade of orange?
’) and not nearly enough roast potatoes. The children sat at a plastic picnic table at one end of the kitchen while the adults sat together around the antique pine table in the middle. Megan felt lost amongst the two parties, too old for the children, too young for the adults, not one person in the room to appreciate her perfectly applied eyeliner or her new Aran cardigan with leather buttons or the fact that she’d finally got down to eight and a half stone. She didn’t like carrots and was toying with the idea of vegetarianism so she picked daintily at the one roast potato she’d been allocated by her mother (‘
FHB, darling!
’) and stared through the window at the incessant rain, fantasising about her escape.
    Megan imagined it to be a glorious explosion of glass shards, as she slammed her fists through the invisible walls around her. She imagined fresh air and bright light and dizzying amounts of space. She saw a room with four flat bare walls, a square bed dressed in plain white sheets, a tallwindow hung with a simple pair of white curtains like the ones in Demi Moore’s apartment in
St Elmo’s Fire
. She saw a shiny kitchen, gleaming pans, a white bathroom and a quiet man with clean fingernails and a silver guitar.
    Then she looked around her own kitchen, at the fifteen years’ worth of children’s art lovingly hung and tacked and stuck to the walls, and the thought of escape soured in her heart. She left the children’s table and went and sat herself on her father’s knee at the grown-ups’ table, hoping for a return of the sense of the sugary days of her childhood. He wrapped a gangly arm around her waist and Megan smiled across the table at her mother.
    ‘You know, Lorrie,’ their neighbour Jenny was saying, ‘your kitchen really is the loveliest place to be on a grotty day like today.’
    Lorelei smiled and put an arm around her friend.
    ‘No, it really is. So warm. So welcoming. If I ever found myself stranded on the side of a snowy mountain, freezing to death, I would probably hallucinate about this place. About Lorrie’s lovely