The Family. Louise Jensen
Planet Rock. Def Leppard vibrated through the terrible speaker in the car door. It wasn’t really my sort of music, but I left it on knowing that Mum would hate it, not really understanding why I was compelled to irritate her. But she ignored the music and she ignored me. She clearly thought it wasn’t worth the fight, that I wasn’t worth the fight.
It was when Mum knocked on the front door as if we were strangers that we heard all the shouting coming from inside the house. Aunt Anwyn threw open the door. I was too anxious to speak as we went inside. I couldn’t remember ever entering this way, through the cramped hallway with its dark red walls and bookcases, and I had to turn sideward to squeeze past them. Usually we spilled through the light, bright conservatory with the old sofa with a hole in its arm, and the games console Rhianon and I used to play on until we discovered makeup and boys. When we reached the kitchen, Mum ordered me to go and find Rhianon, and virtually slammed the door in my face before I could even say hi to Uncle Iwan. Charming.
Although I’d wanted to see Rhianon, once I was there I had felt too awkward to go upstairs. Instead I sat on the sofa in the lounge. The first thing I noticed was that all the photos of me, Mum and Dad had been removed. There were darker patches on the peacock walls, where the frames used to be. It was quiet at first. But then, from the kitchen, the whisper-shouting started. They didn’t think I could hear them, but of course I could. Needing to block out their arguing I pulled the twisted mess of my earbuds from my pocket, and worked the knots free before stuffing them into my ears. My Spotify daily mix played Nina Nesbitt’s ‘18 Candles’. I would be eighteen next year. An adult. The thought of leaving school calmed me. I started scrolling through Instagram and spotted a new post from Rhianon. A photo of her, Katie and Ashleigh sitting cross-legged on sleeping bags, wearing pyjamas. I think it was taken at Katie’s house. ‘Great sleepover last night #BFF’
Again that lump in my throat. I’d tell Mum I’d walk home. But when I removed my earbuds I heard Anwyn scream, ‘You’re not family and neither is that daughter of yours.’
If I wasn’t family.
If I wasn’t a friend.
Who was I?
I stepped into the hallway and Mum came barging out of the kitchen, just as Rhianon sauntered through the front door with her overnight bag. Her silent yawn shouting she’d had a brilliant sleepover.
I pushed my way past Mum and her, running out towards the car. I never got to tell Aunt Anwyn that even without Dad around to tie her to Mum, I was still her niece. Somehow, even then, I knew I would never be back.
I would never see her again.
LAURA
Tilly thundered upstairs as soon as we got back from Anwyn’s. I didn’t follow her, knowing I had to make the call straight away before my courage drained away. I sat in the kitchen still wearing my coat. My knee jigging up and down as I conjured up the keypad on my mobile. This wasn’t a number that was stored in my contacts, instead it was stored in the dark corners of my mind where cobwebs hung, and memories that were too painful to revisit gathered dust.
Acid rose in my throat as my shaking finger pressed the digits slowly. Through the stretch of time I could see the phone vibrating on the mahogany table with the vase of fake flowers with their too-shiny leaves. I could hear my mother’s voice reciting the number every time she answered, in the unlikely event the caller was unaware of who they were trying to reach.
A soft click.
‘Hello.’ The voice was bright and breezy. Too young to belong to my dad. Too cheerful.
‘Hello. I… I’m trying to reach Donald or Linda?’
‘You’ve got the wrong number.’
‘Sorry. I… I don’t suppose that line is still connected to fourteen Acacia Avenue is it?’
‘Yes. But we’ve been here eight years—’
Numb, I ended the call. Stupid that I’d expected everything in my childhood to have remained the same. Stupid that I’d ever thought my parents would help me, even if they still lived there.
‘Laura, you’ve made your own bed. You’re not family to us anymore,’ my father had spat after he’d ordered me out of his life. I had hefted a black bag crammed with my possessions over my shoulder, my duvet rolled under my arm, as my scared and confused seventeen-year-old self had stumbled out into the cutting night air. The door slammed behind me but I didn’t move. Couldn’t co-ordinate my legs and brain to work together. Minutes later I had been flooded with relief as there was the sound of unlocking, my mum framed in the doorway, honeycomb light spilling out into the porch. ‘Mum!’ Slowly, uncertainly, I had stepped towards her but she had shaken her head, creating an invisible barrier between us, before stretching out her palm.
‘Give me your key,’ were her last words to me before I handed over my keyring and my identity as a daughter. The door closed once more, leaving me standing alone on the step, my breath coming too fast, white clouds billowing from my mouth like mist, instantaneously disappearing like it had never existed. The kitchen light brightened the garden. I had crouched in the flower bed and peeped through the window as Mum stuck a couple of pork chops under the grill while Dad laid the table for two, and as I turned away I knew – for my parents – it was as if I had never existed.
Still, I couldn’t believe how much it hurt to learn they had moved, and I had no idea where they were. If they were alive even. My eyes cast around the tiny kitchen as though somehow I might find them there, coming to rest by the back door. The pencil marks made by Gavan as he balanced a ruler on Tilly’s head while she asked, ‘How tall am I now, Daddy?’ We’d outgrown this house years ago, but I always had an excuse not to move. It was too convenient for Tilly’s nursery; for her school. Later, we’d spent the deposit we’d saved to buy our own house on setting up Gavan’s business. We’d saved again, but that time our hard-earned cash went on the florist shop. Gavan never complained. Now and then he’d grumble about renting being a waste of money, and that it was ridiculous we didn’t own a home when he built them for a living, but he knew that deep down the reason I didn’t want to leave was because there, my parents knew where I was. We’d sent them a photo of Tilly asleep in her pram after she was born, with our address scrawled on the back. How could they resist her sweet face? Somehow they did. The void of loss had never fully left me, but gradually over the years I had filled it with a new family: Gavan, Tilly, Iwan, Anwyn, Rhianon; but I always retained the tiniest sliver of hope that one day they might come for me and if that day came I wanted them, I needed them, to be able to find us.
And now they’d moved.
When Tilly thumped downstairs hours later, proclaiming that she was starving, I was still sitting at the kitchen table.
Still wearing my coat.
The following day, I was rifling through the fridge, seeing which withering vegetables from the Oak Leaf Organics bag I could salvage for Sunday lunch, when the doorbell chimed.
‘Iwan!’ My eyes darted left and then right. He was alone. ‘Come in.’ I stepped back and gestured for him to go into the lounge as I returned to the kitchen to make tea, putting some space between us. I gathered my thoughts as I gathered the milk and the sugar. I needed to repair my shrinking family. Iwan was my last link to Gavan. Their dad had passed from cancer two years ago, and their mum followed six months later. A cardiac arrest, the young doctor had said, but privately we thought that grief had broken her heart in two. There were no other relatives.
My breath caught in my throat as I carried the mugs through. Iwan was filling Gavan’s chair, his elbows resting on the arms, fingers steepled together in front of his mouth the way Gavan used to sit when I’d laugh and tell him it looked like he was praying.
‘Praying for a kiss,’ he’d say and I’d roll my eyes but kiss him anyway.
I’d never noticed before how similar