They didn’t just take over the house. They stuffed themselves up my ears, into my brain. I heard everything. Conversations about the shocking cost of the car park, how their children were driving them up the wall and they still had four more weeks of holiday to go. I heard about family feuds and nasty divorces, got stuck in the middle of endless sibling squabbles. Children my age saying, ‘Remind me why we’re here again’, and ‘What is that horrible damp smell?’ and ‘I don’t want to learn local history. I want to eat my crisps instead’.
When I closed my eyes, I saw them, and no one else. When they left the house, I still heard their voices inside my head.
Had Mum and Dad also counted down the days till we returned to school, just like these parents did? Had they rolled their eyes at each other over our heads too?
I started to see things through the eyes of the tourists, not mine. Our rooms were crooked. Mum did have a bit of a potbelly. Dad hadn’t been a brilliant artist. Perhaps he’d been a … failure? Perhaps we’d been a joke?
I remembered what Jill had said. ‘You won’t rot. But your memories might.’
I wanted to take back control.
So I think what happened next was totally and completely understandable.
WHEN IT CAME to crowds inside the house, rainy days made them ten times worse. At the slightest drizzle, people would cram into the cottage, filling the rooms with the smell of wet clothes and disappointment. They made the house feel even smaller, even darker. On days like that, Sea View felt like an unexploded water balloon, quivering with unspilt energy.
I’d spent most of the morning in what used to be my bedroom, curled up on top of a flowery duvet cover I’d never have chosen for myself, while children said pitying things like ‘Did they really not have multiplayer console VR micro-box pixel lagoon skins in their rooms?’ before asking ‘Where next?’
I could have gone anywhere else in the house. Could have sat on top of Birdie’s bed. Taken refuge under the kitchen table for a few hours. I could have sat, undisturbed, in a flower bed outside. If I had, maybe things would have been different.
But I went to Mum’s study instead, and it had happened there.
It was crowded. Medow, the shyest and most timid of the Room Sentries, was there, nervously fiddling with one of her experimental necklaces.
Inside the room were also two giggling teenagers, an older man holding a steaming cup of CuppaGrubba and a woman whose twin boys were climbing on to Mum’s desk.
To top it all off, Mum’s hologram was also crammed inside, saying repeatedly, ‘Have you got any questions about working mothers in the twenty-first century and how I balanced work and parenting?’
Whenever she said this, however, the man would just roll his eyes and take another gulp of his foul-smelling bug drink and the teenagers would giggle and say things like: ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’
And suddenly, out of nowhere, an old pulse began to beat inside me. Not a heartbeat, obviously, but a familiar buzzing feeling, something I’d not felt for a while. I glared at my unwelcome companions and that pulse got stronger. They were literally using Mum’s study as a waiting room until the rain eased off. Her life – her career – was nothing more than a jokey stopgap where they could pass the time and drink nasty grub coffee until lunch. Not one of them was doing what Olivine called ‘engaging and learning from the stories of our past’.
Well, maybe the two young boys were. If running through Mum’s hologram and shrieking with laughter as if she was a garden sprinkler was ‘learning from the stories of the past’. But, with that feeling of immense generosity that often accompanies blinding flashes of wisdom, I suddenly knew there was no point in blaming these idiots. It wasn’t their fault they couldn’t see how special that study was. Because it was wrong.
For starters, it was way too orderly. Back when Mum had been alive, this room had been an absolute mess, only a couple of months away from a guest appearance on one of those How Clean Is Your House? programmes. There would always be at least fifteen cups of half-drunk coffee on the go, teetering mounds of paperwork, plates with half-eaten snacks on, loads of half-used coral lipsticks lying around – she wasn’t a ‘tidy-as-you-go’ kind of person at all.
Now though there was none of that. No wonder the tourists didn’t feel anything in there. It was nothing like her. It wasn’t true to life. It was devoid of life. All it had now was a laminated sign on her desk which said: Like typical working mothers in the early twenty-first century, Rachel Ripley attempted to hold down a job as she worked from home. In this cramped spot, Rachel had a desk, laptop, filing cabinet and phone, which would have met all her working needs at the time, primitive though these basic tools may seem to us now.
I didn’t understand what all of that meant, but I knew one thing. I did not like Mum being called primitive. Or typical. She wasn’t typical. She was brilliant. And she’d been mine.
‘Mummy? Time to swipe. There’s nothing good to see here,’ said one of the boys, who had now tired of running through Mum’s hologram.
‘I’ll give you something to see.’ My voice sounded rusty and tangled, like a bunch of broken Christmas lights stuck in an attic for too long.
No one paid me any attention.
I tried again.
‘I said,
This time, the words came out more easily. It felt good, to speak aloud in my
