The only difference between a fresh start and ‘oh my god, my life is a complete failure’ is a good attitude and the right Instagram caption.
Which was why I had my ‘so happy to be moving home’ social media declaration drafted and ready to post, even before the wheels of the plane had touched British soil. It wasn’t a lie but it wasn’t exactly the truth either, which I figured was OK, since that described roughly ninety-seven percent of the internet anyway.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed my wayward curls into some sort of recognizable shape, rapped three times on my parents’ back door and let myself into the house.
‘Knock, knock,’ I called, heaving my bags inside. ‘It’s only me.’
‘Look lively, Gwen, sounds like burglars.’ I could hear my dad slapping his thighs all the way from the other side of the house.
‘Yes, put your hands in the air and step away from the baked goods,’ I ordered as I bounced into the living room all jazz hands and forced smiles. I dropped my backpack on the floor and searched the room for snacks. ‘Seriously, I’m not joking, where are the Fondant Fancies? I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.’
‘Plenty of cultures eat horses,’ Mum said, gathering me up in a trademark Gwen-Reynolds-hug, swinging me from side to side and making sweet, unintelligible noises. ‘Probably better for you than a Fondant Fancy.’
Dad, the more stoic of my parents, opted for a pat on the shoulder and a curt nod before he disappeared into the kitchen to emote. He wasn’t the touchy-feely type. At my graduation, while everyone else was sobbing and crying, my dad shook my hand and slapped me on the back so hard, my mortar-board went flying.
‘How was the flight? Did you have any trouble at the airport? Did you get all your bags?’ Mum asked as she settled on the settee and I took up residence in my favourite armchair. It was as though I’d never been away.
‘Hers and half the plane’s by the looks of things,’ Dad called from the other room. ‘Have you brought all of Washington back with you, Rosalind?’
‘Not all of them,’ I shouted back. ‘Only the good ones.’
‘Not many then,’ he replied, muttering something about ‘the bloody state of politics’ to himself as I heard him turn on the tap.
I smiled and let myself relax for the first time in I couldn’t quite remember how long. The living room looked almost exactly the same as it had when I left, same magnolia walls, same bookcase groaning with books, same painting of a peacock my parents bought on their honeymoon and refused to admit was hideous. It was all so reassuring, however questionable the aesthetic. I hadn’t been back for a visit in more than eighteen months and it was a little over three years since I’d left London for my fabulous new job, producer at a radio station in Washington, DC. Somehow it felt like I’d been away much, much longer than that, and like I’d never been away at all, both at the same time. I wondered if everyone’s family living room had the same time-warp effect on them.
‘So,’ Mum said quietly, tucking her smooth, straight hair behind her ears. I got my hair and my height from my dad but the rest of me, the freckles, the brown eyes, strong nose, wide mouth, were pure Gwen Reynolds. ‘You’re home. Is everything all right?’
I pressed my lips into a thin, straight line. So much for relaxing.
‘Everything is fine,’ I replied as confidently as I could. ‘I told you on the phone.’
‘You did and I’m not going to go on about it,’ she said with an agreeable smile. ‘But if there’s anything you want to talk about, you know I’m here …’
‘Here we are, here we are,’ Dad walked back in with a heavily laden tray, matching china teacups for them, the novelty Care Bear mug I’d been drinking from since I was six for me. ‘I got one of those fast-boil kettles, worth its weight in gold. Less than a minute, even if you get the water out the fridge.’
Mum reached across the tray for her cup and gave me a knowing look. She wouldn’t say anything else in front of Dad, deep and meaningfuls weren’t his cup of tea.
They both looked a little bit older, I realized, noticing a few more lines around Mum’s eyes, a bit more grey in Dad’s close-cut curls. It was the kind of thing you didn’t notice when you saw someone every day but when it had been a while, you couldn’t help but see it.
‘Present time!’ I said, setting down my mug and clapping my hands. I wrestled a very full duty-free bag out of my backpack. ‘Perfume for Mum, bottle of whisky for Dad …’
I handed out the tax-free bounty and beamed. ‘The man said that was his favourite whisky, I hope you like it.’
‘And who are all those Toblerones for?’ Dad asked, eyes on my backpack. I quietly pushed it around the side of my chair before he realized the Toblerones had already been eaten. It had been a long flight.
‘Can’t believe Jo’s left home,’ I said, changing the subject as I took in all the other details that spelled out home: the velvet drapes, the net curtains, Mum’s late-nineties collection of Swarovski crystal bears. ‘She says she’s enjoying it?’
‘Having the time of her life.’ Dad lifted his eyebrows over the rim of his teacup as Mum spritzed herself with her new perfume and immediately sneezed. ‘According to the one text message she has deigned to send me.’
No one would ever actually call my sister an accident (except me) but even if she wasn’t planned, my parents couldn’t have cooked up a better child if they’d tried. And they had tried (again, me). Jo was beautiful. A perfect baby with silky, straight hair, a button nose and the biggest blue eyes you’d ever seen, which was why, when I passed all my exams at sixteen and jokingly told everyone I was the brains of the family and baby Jo was the beauty, I didn’t mind so much that they agreed with me. It stung a bit more when she grew up and turned out to be an actual genius as well as shockingly beautiful. Where was the fairness in that?
‘One in, one out,’ Dad said as he passed me the biscuit tin. ‘Just when I thought we’d finally got the house to ourselves.’
‘Obviously, we discussed the timing,’ I joked. ‘Didn’t want to leave the two of you here on your own to go mental.’
He fixed me with a look that suggested he got the joke, he just didn’t think it was funny.
‘I didn’t think we’d see you back so soon, everything seemed to be going so well. Thought you’d stay over there a bit longer,’ he added, his voice lilting up and down as he avoided asking his real question.
Why had I come home?
‘It was the right time to leave,’ I said airily, breaking a ginger nut in half and dipping it in my tea.
Dad passed me a napkin. ‘And move back in with us?’
I chewed my biscuit thoughtfully. Anyone would think he didn’t want his unemployed thirty-two-year-old daughter moving back in unexpectedly, fourteen years after she’d left home.
‘I won’t be here long,’ I told them, wiggling my left big toe into the cuff of my right sock and prising it off. Ahh, sweet relief. ‘As soon as I get a job, I’ll be out of the way.’
‘Any bites on the work front?’ Dad asked.
‘Lots of possibilities.’ I busied myself by balling up my socks so he wouldn’t see my face. My dad could always tell when I was lying. ‘I’ll be out of your way in a couple of weeks.’
‘There’s absolutely no rush,’ Mum insisted before sliding her hand around the back of Dad’s neck and giving it a rub. ‘We’re just happy you’re home, aren’t we, Alan? I never liked you being that far away anyway.’
I silently registered their PDA. This was new.
‘You know, I might go and put my head down for an hour,’ I said, stifling a fake yawn. Perhaps I was hallucinating from exhaustion. ‘Before it gets too late for a nap. Got to beat the jetlag, you know?’
Mum and Dad caught each other’s eye, furtive glance meeting furtive glance. I put down my mug and straightened in my seat. Something was up.
‘Is everything all right?’ I asked.
‘It’s more than all right,’ Dad said. A big, bright smile spread across his face and I watched in horror as he placed his hand on my mother’s thigh. Her actual, upper thigh. And then he squeezed.
‘I could definitely use some shut-eye.’ I stood swiftly, scooping up my socks and getting an unfortunate whiff of myself as I stood. Some shut-eye and a shower. ‘Didn’t really get a lot of sleep on the plane.’
And if my dad’s hand didn’t stop creeping up my mum’s leg, I might never sleep again.
‘Before you go anywhere,’ Dad took Mum’s teacup and placed it back on the tray. ‘We’ve got a surprise for you.’
‘I think you’re going to like it,’ she added, a happy pink flush in her cheeks.
It was exactly what they’d said when they told me Mum was pregnant with Jo. If she hadn’t been very vocal about going through the menopause several years ago, I would have been quite concerned.
‘Come on, this way.’ Dad stood up and beckoned me through to the conservatory. I followed as he opened the French doors and made his way down to the bottom of the garden.
‘Shoes on,’ Mum ordered as I made to follow in my bare feet. ‘It rained earlier and the grass is wet. I don’t want you catching your death on your first day home.’
‘It’s a thousand degrees out there now,’ I muttered but I did as I was told, going back to the kitchen for my trainers before following them outside. Ducking low under the washing line, I met them both at the bottom of the garden.
‘What do you think?’ Dad asked, gesturing to a new shed with an out-of-character flourish.
I looked at the shed. Mum looked at the shed. Dad looked at the shed.
‘It’s a shed,’ I stated.
‘It’s not a shed,’ Dad said with a stern look. He produced a shiny silver key from his pocket and waved it in front of my face. ‘Go on, open her up.’
Tired as I was, I took the key and offered them a wan smile in an attempt to show willing before I blocked up their Jacuzzi jets with half a bottle of Mum’s Badedas. There was an upside to your dad running a company that installs bathrooms and that upside was the massive soaking tub in their en suite that I’d been dreaming about for the duration of my overbooked, overnight flight, stuck in the middle seat of the middle row for eight very long hours.
I pushed open the flimsy door.
It was not a shed.
It was every item from my childhood bedroom, taken out of the house and painstakingly reconstructed in a damp, prefabricated structure at the bottom of my parents’ garden. Double bed, wardrobe, chest of drawers, Postman Pat beanbag and all.
‘I – I don’t get it,’ I stammered, looking back into the garden where my parents beamed back at me. How had they got my enormous knotted pine bedframe into this tiny space? ‘Why is all my stuff in here?’
‘You know your dad loves a project,’ Mum said, gazing up at my father with an expression I’d only ever seen in our house that time we all watched Memoirs of a Geisha. It was an uncomfortable evening and I didn’t care to be reminded of it. ‘He built this all by himself!’
‘Peter Mapplethorpe helped a bit,’ Dad corrected reluctantly.
‘Are they repeating Grand Designs again or something?’ I asked. I lingered in the doorway, key still in hand, so confused.
‘Yes but that’s not the point,’ Dad replied, gently but decisively shoving me inside. ‘What do you think?’
What did I think?
All my books were there on my bookcase, from Enid Blytons to my Sweet Valley Highs, via a few well-worn Virginia Andrews and a copy of Judy Blume’s Forever that had a spine so cracked only I could tell which book it was without looking at the cover. All my CDs were stacked up next to my boombox and a legion of cuddly toys stared at me from the top of the wardrobe. Even my beloved terracotta oil diffuser from the Body Shop was in there. I wrinkled my nose at the tiny bottle of Fuzzy Peach oil that stood sentry beside it. It was practically rancid at the time, God only knew what it would smell like now.
The whole thing was altogether too much for my jetlagged brain to handle, like I’d walked out of the garden and into 1997. Wait, was that what had happened? I wondered. What if this wasn’t some sort of bizarre art installation, ‘Child’s Bedroom in a Shed’, but actually a time machine Dad had built at the bottom of the garden? He did spend an awful lot of time by himself and he was very handy.
‘If you go through that door, there’s a bathroom,’ he explained, sliding past me and the pine wardrobe that matched my bed in both design and gargantuan proportions. ‘It’s small but perfectly formed, just like your mother.’
My mother tittered appreciatively. I did not.
‘It’s a compostable toilet,’ he went on from behind the concertina door. ‘Good for the environment. And the water from the shower goes into the garden! Waters the tomatoes. It’s genius. Come and have a look.’
‘It’s really impressive, Dad,’ I said, fighting back a yawn as I clambered over my bed to peer into the bathroom out of politeness, immediately finding myself wedged in between the bed and the chest of drawers. Shuffling free, I whacked my hip on the oversized round knobs I’d fought for in the middle of DFS so many moons ago. ‘So, what’s the plan, you’re renting it out? Doing Airbnb?’
‘Oh.’ Dad emerged from the bathroom with a slightly crestfallen look on his face. ‘No.’
‘You know we’re very excited to have you home,’ Mum said as Dad and I shuffled awkwardly back and forth until he clambered on my bed and shuffled over on his hands and knees. ‘And we know it might take a little while for you to get back up on your feet—’
‘I’m not off my feet,’ I replied quickly. ‘This is just a fork in my road that will lead me on an unforeseen pathway to fulfilment.’
My flight had been delayed for so long, I’d caved and bought one of those inspirational books everyone raves about on Instagram from the airport bookshop. Starting Over: A Woman’s Guide to Getting It Right the Second Time Around. It turned out to have more to do with getting over a divorce than anything else but, still, there were some very catchy sound bites in there. It really was dangerous to leave unattended humans in an airport for more than five hours at a time – another half an hour and I’d have been chatting with the nice-looking lady giving away biscuits and trying to talk to people about Scientology.
‘I know my coming home was a bit of a surprise and I know not having another job waiting for me isn’t exactly ideal but I’m so absolutely, one hundred percent fine.’
‘Well, that sounds very nice but, regardless, we thought while you were here, it would be nice for you to have your privacy.’ Dad coughed to clear his throat before looking to my mother for help. Mum looked at Dad and Dad looked at me and I looked back at both of them.
‘If all my furniture is in here, then what’s in my room?’ I wondered out loud, too tired to get it.
‘The thing is, Rosalind, you’re not a child any more,’ Dad said firmly as the pieces of a puzzle I hadn’t been prepared for began to fall into place. ‘And while we’re happy to have you home for as long as you need to be here, I think we would all appreciate a bit more space and a bit more distance and, well …’
Oh.
Oh no.
They hadn’t put my bedroom in a shed.
The shed was my bedroom.
‘You want me to live in here?’ I asked, hoping they would laugh and bring me back inside with a clap on the back. Good joke, everybody laughs.
But no.
Dad slapped his hands together, breaking the tension with a thunderclap.
‘I’ll get your bags, will I?’ he said brightly. ‘I think they’ll fit under the bed, otherwise you’ll have to bring them in once you’ve emptied them and I’ll put in the loft until you leave. Not that there’s a rush for you to leave.’
‘Everything works except the WiFi,’ Mum said proudly as I adjusted to the reality of my situation. The reality of living in a shed. ‘And the reception on the telly comes in and out but that’ll all be fine once we’ve worked out the WiFi. There’s a man coming next week.’
‘Great,’ I replied, steadying myself on my bedframe. ‘No rush.’
After all, who needed television or the internet, especially when they were unemployed and looking for a new job?
‘Thing is, we turned your room into an office so your dad can work from home a couple of days a week,’ Mum said, fussing with the curtains, straightening the nets. She might have her daughter living in a shed but she was not a savage. ‘And you said you wouldn’t be back for long and it’s so nice having him around more.’
‘And Jo’s room?’
‘Jo only left a month ago!’ She turned to stare at me, positively aghast. ‘We couldn’t very well upend her room when her bed was still warm, could we?’
‘I suppose not,’ I replied, definitely not thinking about how they moved Jo into my room the same day I left for uni because she needed a bigger room. When she was four.
‘Exactly.’ Mum cleared her throat. ‘But I have put all her furniture in one corner and I’m using it as a yoga studio. I’m really getting there with my downward dog.’
What I wouldn’t have given to see my sister’s face at that moment.
‘If you cook anything, be careful,’ she went on, picking things up then putting them down. My Pikachu piggy bank, an unopened bottle of bath pearls from Christmas 2004, a framed photo of Justin Timberlake that Sumi had given me for my birthday in the first year of uni that Mum had given pride of place, clearly mistaking JT for an actual friend. ‘We took the batteries out of the smoke alarm because it kept going off every ten minutes and we could hear it up in the house. Very distracting.’
No WiFi, no TV and no smoke alarm. I could see it now: exhausted from being forced to read an actual book, I would fall asleep with a Pop-Tart in the toaster, the toaster would set on fire, I’d die of smoke inhalation and no one on Instagram would ever even know.
‘Right, I need to get back into the kitchen and put the chicken in the oven for dinner. Unless you’d like to have us over to your place?’ Mum asked with a theatrical wink.
‘Perhaps I should try not to set it on fire the first night,’ I joked weakly as Dad returned with my bags.
Or maybe I should, I thought, eyeing the toaster across the room.
Closing the door behind the horny pod people who had replaced my parents, I cast an eye over my domain – all three hundred square feet of it – before dropping down on my bed. The uncertain, ancient frame complained at my weight but the protest wasn’t loud enough to get me back up on my feet.
‘You have so much to be grateful for,’ I told myself, staring up at the ceiling. ‘You have your health, your parents, your friends and a highly flammable roof over your head. It’s more than a lot of people have. It’s not as nice as what you had before but it’ll be OK. You’ll get a job, you’ll get a flat, you’ll burn that poster of Tom Cruise and you’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.’
The more times I said it, the closer it felt to being true.
A smile found its way onto my face. I’d have loved this place when I was a teenager, I thought. A bolthole at the bottom of the garden, all to myself? Maybe it was actually amazing and I was just too tired to realize. The smile disappeared as a single drop of water fell from the roof and landed right in the middle of my forehead. I rolled over onto my side and watched as it began to rain, a summer storm tap, tap, tapping on the corrugated roof of my new home.
‘It’s all going to be fine,’ I said again, more determined this time.
I only hoped I was right. I hadn’t always been that reliable in the past.