The House We Grew Up In by Lisa Jewell

‘How?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ll sell something. I’ll ask my dad if I can borrow some. I’ll get a job. I’ll do all three. Seriously. I want to go somewhere. I really, really want to go somewhere!’ And then, unexpectedly and overwhelmingly, Rory began to cry. He cried for his lost brother, his mad mother, his distant father, his sweet sisters. But mainly he cried for himself, for all the time he’d spent in stasis waiting to want to go.
    Kayleigh held him in her skinny arms and kissed the top of his head and told him that everything was going to be OK. And he believed her.
    A week later Lorelei stood with her hands against her hips in the middle of Megan’s old room, looking from one side to the other. ‘Gosh,’ she said, ‘now. Well … this is tricky.’
    Rory groaned. Here was a woman with ten salt-and-pepper sets, a woman who had kept every last mark on paper made by four different children over the course of fifteen years or more, a woman who never threw away anything colourful, eye-catching or shiny, a woman who bulk-bought cleaning products and household gadgetry, a woman who accumulated stuff on a grand, almost baroque scale, yet she could not locate a simple birth certificate.
    ‘But Mum, I don’t understand, how can you lose a birth certificate?’
    ‘I haven’t
lost
it, darling, I just haven’t found it yet! Just give me a minute.
Please
.’
    Lorelei now referred to Meg’s old room as her office. It was not an office. It was a room of piles. Mainly paperback books that Lorelei picked up at charity shops and jumble sales and never got around to reading (she didn’t sit still for long enough to read a book), and filing boxes and lever-arch folders and wallet folders and piles and piles of loose, unfettered paperwork that made Rory feel dizzy just looking at it, trying to imagine what lay within. Meg’s bed itself was now invisible, swamped by piles of old coats and bin bags full of clothes headed vaguely, unconvincingly, towards charityshops. Meg’s old dressing table, a piece of furniture that had once been her pride and joy, white with a triptych mirror and gilt edging (Rory seemed to recall it had been a special birthday present or a reward for doing something brilliant at school) was now in use as Lorelei’s desk, and again, virtually invisible under more piles of paperwork, random selections of stuffed animals, snow globes, mugs, paperweights and for some unknown reason, a pile of deflated pink balloons still tied with curled nylon ribbon.
    A couple of years back Lorelei had bought two filing cabinets from Ryman’s, with which to apply some order to her paper, yet these were now so over-stuffed that the drawers hung open, spewing out their contents.
    ‘I mean, how the hell do you ever find anything in here? It’s a nightmare.’
    ‘Oh, I know.’ Lorelei dragged a bony hand through her still-long hair and sighed. ‘I’m going to sort it out. Vicky says she’ll help me.’
    ‘When?’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know. There never seems to be enough time.’
    ‘That’s ridiculous, Mum, of course there’s time. You don’t work, all your children are grown up …’
    ‘Yes, well, there’s the little ones. They’re so time-consuming.’
    ‘They’re not your little ones. They’re not your responsibility. They’re Vicky’s. Just ask them not to come over for a few days. You’d easily get this room sorted. I can help you … I mean, for example, this pile of old magazines, we could get rid of this right now, eh?’
    ‘Well, yes, of course we could. Except we’d have to searchthrough it first, to make sure there’s nothing important buried away between them.’
    ‘Like your children’s birth certificates, you mean?’
    ‘Precisely, darling.’ She sounded almost relieved. ‘Do you see? Do you see my problem?’
    Rory nodded. He saw many problems. ‘Right –’ He clapped his hands together. ‘Let’s start looking, shall we?’
    His mother smiled