The Way Back Home

by Freya North

  The shack is called the Ice House? Someone lives in the shack?

  ‘We’re sisters,’ said the elder. ‘I’m Emma and I’m eight.’

  ‘Our mum is called Paula and our dad is called Rob,’ said Kate in a tone of voice which suggested she’d had to repeat this often. But Oriana was only half listening, moving slowly away from the children, ignoring their chatter, gravitating towards the house whether she wanted to or not.

  ‘Well, bye,’ Emma was saying.

  ‘See you later, alligator,’ Kate called after her.

  Suddenly, the girls were in the very periphery of Oriana’s consciousness and she did not respond.

  She’s not very friendly, the girls concurred. We’ll not be inviting her to our place. We’ll not introduce her to our mum.

  Eighteen years. A little over half her life. Instantly, her adulthood was condensed and reduced to a flick of light-speed separating the time when she was last here from now. The new cars – they were incongruous; as unbedded and jarring as a new and overly ornamental shrubbery might be in an overgrown garden. But the house – it was wonderfully, frighteningly, unchanged. Everything was recognizable and known. The mineralized rust around the leaking rain hopper which she always thought would be soft and slimy to the touch until she’d shinned up the drainpipe at twelve years old and found it to be hard and cold. The cracked pane in the fanlight above the front door. The chunk of stone missing from the base of the pillar of the portico, like a wedge of cake stolen. The strangulating cords of wisteria claiming the walls as their own, the defensive march of rose bushes skirting the house.

  She started circumnavigating the building. Everything, denied for so long, felt forbidden. She moved lightly, quickly, holding her breath.

  The familiar feel of the gravel underfoot.

  The sound of it.

  Tiptoe.

  As in a dream, strange new details distorted the old reality. Curtains where there hadn’t been, now framing the windows of what had been the illustrator Gordon Bryce’s flat on the second floor. The customary tangle of flung bikes by the stone steps leading down to the cellars – but Oriana’s wasn’t amongst them. And no brambles by the yard. Instead, a residence now converted from the stables with an Audi parked outside on uniform cobbles.

  Where do you play hide-and-seek these days then?

  Oriana walked straight past her own front door at the side of the building, without once turning her head to acknowledge it. She was vaguely aware of the velvety-leaved pelargoniums in their soil-encrusted terracotta pots currently on the inside windowsills, where they’d be for another month or so before enjoying their summer sojourn out of doors. But she turned deaf ears to any sound that might seep through the gaps in the window frames. Those hateful old frames through which the icy breath of winter would slice into her sleep and the wasps in the summer would sneak in and target her.

  Suddenly she heard it. The groan and creak of the great old cedar of Lebanon. She hurried ahead, towards the grounds at the back of the house and finally it came into view.

  No one climbs me the way you used to, Oriana. The children are different these days. They play in different ways.

  She walked quickly to the tree, crept under its boughs and up to the trunk. There, behind its protective barrier of branches welcoming her back into its fold once again, she wept.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Tick tock. Eleven o’clock. Fuck me, thought Jed, why do I always oversleep when I’m here? He looked around the room, once his bedroom, and wondered why. It wasn’t even his bed any more; Malachy had sensibly replaced it with a sofa bed when he’d converted the room. Nothing of Jed’s past was visible. A couple of Robin’s small oils and four old framed prints of Derbyshire landscapes replaced the Cure and the Clash who’d once papered the walls alongside Echo and the Bunnymen. There was no sound from any of them anymore, Jed’s towers of vinyl LPs replaced long ago by CD versions which themselves had since been condensed further into virtual MP3 files. The walls were now uniformly white – whereas he’d painted all five of them in different hues. Red, black, purple, navy, orange. If he lifted the new carpet, the floorboards would still bear the spatters as evidence.

  He stared at the ceiling; the long, snaking crack which his eyes had traversed for so many years while music played and his mind whirred with teenage emotion, was now Polyfillaed into a slightly raised scar. The huge paper lantern shade had gone, replaced with a neat, dimmable, three-light unit. When his parents had moved to Denmark a decade ago, they had signed the apartment over to him and Malachy. Jed had persuaded his brother to take on a mortgage and buy him out so that he could purchase his own place. Malachy was thus within his rights to make any changes he wished and the room had been sensibly, sensitively converted. Jed didn’t mind at all because, whatever the title deeds might say, this room was unmistakably his space and he always slept like a log here.

  He showered and dressed, begrudgingly made a mug of instant coffee and took a pot of Greek yoghurt from the fridge, dolloping in honey from a sticky jar retrieved from the back of the cupboard. He thought, my brother’s fridge is empty save for beer and Greek bloody yoghurt. It wasn’t just a bit pathetic. Apart from the order and spryness of the spare room, the rest of the place was forlorn and dusty and the kitchen was a disgrace. And yet, of the two of them, Malachy was the together one, with the common sense and the poise and maturity, who avoided drama even if it made life dull.

  ‘Thieving cleaner-shag aside, of course,’ Jed murmured, taking a yoghurt through to the sitting room. Once the ballroom, its full-height windows flooded the room with spring sunlight, revealing just how in need of a clean they were while dust danced across the air with a we-don’t-care. Automatically, Jed glanced at the piano and yes, Malachy had indeed left him a message. He hadn’t bothered to check his phone: it wasn’t his brother’s style to text. Or to push a note under the bedroom door or stick it to the bathroom mirror or fridge. The piano had always been the place where messages were left.

  J. We need food. M.

  Two twenty-pound notes were stapled to the paper.

  Jed grimaced at the bitter scorch of instant coffee masquerading as the real thing. He phoned the gallery.

  ‘Where the fuck is your coffee machine?’

  ‘It broke.’

  ‘OK. But where is it? I’ll fix it.’

  ‘I binned it. It smashed beyond repair when Csilla dropped it when she was stealing it.’

  ‘Oh. Shit. Sorry – I.’

  ‘I’m kidding, Jed. But I did bin it because it broke.’

  ‘Don’t you have a cafetière? For emergencies?’

  ‘No.’ Malachy paused. ‘I do have an old, stove-top coffee maker somewhere – but you’ll have to hunt for it.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that,’ said Jed, hanging up.

  Malachy anticipated the phone call which came twenty minutes later.

  ‘You shit!’ Jed said. ‘You could have told me you don’t have any bloody ground coffee before I searched high and low for the sodding pot.’

  Malachy just laughed.

  Jed was about to launch into something larkily insulting about all that Greek yoghurt, when he looked out to the garden and there was Oriana.

  There was Oriana.

  And Jed dropped the phone and just stared and stared while in the far-off recesses of his consciousness, Malachy’s voice was filtering up tinnily from the floor, calling Jed? Jed? You there, Jed? before everything went quiet and time was tossed in a centrifuge; the past battered, the present making no sense, the future wide open.

  I am not the sort of bloke whose heart beats fast.

  I will not be the sort of bloke with a lump in his throat.

  I am not one to imagine things.

  I am not a soft bastard.

  I don’t do sentimentality.

  But Oriana is out there.

  Jed was at an utter loss. He’d stepped back, almost tripping. Now he was rooted to the spot, looking out as Oriana came away from the
cedar and into full view. He watched as she glanced up to the ballroom window and away again, up to the window and down at her feet, shyness and perhaps dread, a multitude of emotions. And Jed loved Csilla Shag Cleaner just then for thieving and leaving, and leaving the cleaning of the windows which meant that Oriana couldn’t see him in there, gazing out at her.

  And then he thought, but what if she goes? After all this time, and all that happened – what if she goes before I’ve talked to her? If she goes – was she ever really here? And then he thought, what if she’s not real? What if I let her go again – for another eighteen years?

  Eighteen years? Is that all? Such a long time.

  And then he thought, stop thinking and get out there. And he scrambled his bare feet into his brother’s docksiders that were a size too big, opened the double ballroom windows and stepped out on to the balcony.

  The commotion caught Oriana’s attention.

  She stood stock-still while the sunlight spun gold from her hair and cut a squint across her eyes.

  Jed. It’s Jed.

  ‘Oriana?’ He was still on the balcony and she was still motionless. They stared and wondered, both of them, what are you doing here? How come you’re here?

  I never thought I’d ever see you again.

  Jed knew the move, though he hadn’t performed it for many, many years. He vaulted the balustrade of the balcony, and winched himself down, swinging against the wall of the house, grappling the descent like a crazy, out-of-practice, ropeless abseiler. The stone scuffed and grazed at his skin. He banged his knee. One of Malachy’s shoes fell off. The ground seemed far away. Suspended, he wondered if Oriana might be gone by the time he’d made the descent. He remembered how she’d sing the Spider-Man theme at him when he’d done this manoeuvre when they were young. With the tune once more in his head, bolstering him, and a mix of clumsiness and confidence, he made it down.

  Terra firma. Rooted to the spot.

  ‘Oriana?’ His voice, barely audible to him, was painfully loud to her. And now she was turning away, moving off. No! He sprinted after her.

  ‘Wait!’

  She stopped but didn’t turn. Tentatively, Jed stretched out his hand and laid it lightly on her shoulder. The wind, then, lifted her hair and wafted it over his skin, just quickly, in greeting. With great effort, she turned, not all the way, but enough. They glanced at each other, too nervous to move a step closer.

  ‘Are you back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Back – here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I –’ Jed shrugged.

  Oriana raised her face, sucking her lips on words she could neither release nor swallow. ‘How are you?’ she asked. Formal.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he told her. And then he laughed. This was mad. Crazy. ‘I’m fine.’ He felt compelled to shake his head as if to dislodge any risk this might not be real. ‘And you?’

  She scratched her head. ‘Just me.’ She shrugged.

  Jed looked over his shoulder and nodded at the house. ‘Have you been in? Have you seen your dad?’

  ‘No.’ She followed his gaze though her childhood home was out of sight from here.

  ‘Are you going to?’

  He watched as she stared at the house for a long time.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She fidgeted. ‘Not today, though. I haven’t – it’s been years. It’s all been years.’ She looked at him, marvelling shyly. ‘But you – you’re still here?’

  Jed suddenly felt an extreme urgency – like meeting someone on a train, for whom this was the wrong train, someone who might just jump off as soon as they could and who he’d never see again. Oriana was here, at Windward, but he sensed it was momentary and he sensed this wasn’t her true destination. If it was a chance encounter then serendipity had to be shackled quickly – as if he’d have to grab her forcibly before he dared loosen his grip. He sensed he had limited time and, as such, he didn’t want to waste it on formal pleasantries but feared anything intimate might cause her to bolt. He just couldn’t think what to say. It was crazy. It was Oriana. It’s only Oriana. It’s only ever been Oriana.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘Here – Windward? Or UK here?’ She paused and shrugged. ‘Time for a change,’ she said, looking again at the house. ‘I was ready to come back. I didn’t think anyone would be here. I assumed everyone would have sold up and moved.’

  Jed thought about telling her about his parents and Denmark and the mortgage and the nice new carpet in his old room. But it struck him that, as she hadn’t thought he’d be here, then she hadn’t returned to find him. His hope rapidly deflated.

  Don’t ask about Malachy.

  I’m not going to ask about Malachy.

  They fidgeted with their thoughts.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked, genuinely sincere.

  It was as if he’d said smile for the camera. He saw how she fixed a beatific expression to her face.

  ‘Oh, I’m fine! Fine. Just time to come back, really.’ She grinned and nodded and looked around and grinned and nodded and gave a satisfied sigh. It was pretty convincing – to someone who didn’t know her as well as he did, perhaps. He didn’t believe a word of it.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘Wait – can I? I mean – if you’re around, now – perhaps we can meet, just for a drink and a catch-up?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll be sure to call you!’

  An unconvincing transatlantic twang to her accent. Oh he could have taken her into his arms and said shut up you silly thing. And swung her around and kissed her and said I knew you’d come back, I knew I hadn’t lost you. Quick! he thought, give her your number before she changes her mind! He chanted his work number as well as his mobile to her though they came out in a tangle.

  ‘So – you’re not going in?’ He nodded at the house.

  She glanced there and shrugged as though it was no big deal. ‘Not today,’ she said. It was as though she hadn’t intended to come, as though she’d just been passing and had suddenly remembered Windward was here. ‘I have to go.’ Though her voice wavered, she didn’t take her eyes off him as she stepped close and gave him a small, soft kiss on his cheek. ‘Bye, Jed. It’s so good to see you.’

  He watched her walk away, taking the longer route around the opposite side of the house to her old home. And then she was gone and all that was there was the house. He spied Malachy’s rogue shoe on the grass, as though it had been flung off in glee. Jed looked down, surprised by his one bare foot. He hadn’t noticed. Had Oriana? He cringed. But it didn’t matter because he could feel the kiss on his cheek. He heard a car start, then listened as the sound of the engine faded. And then he thought shit, you stupid idiot. You didn’t take her number. What if she never calls? What if you never see her again? Having been this close.

  * * *

  It did cross Oriana’s mind that she was probably less safe to drive than if she had been ten times over the limit. But she needed to put distance between herself and Windward, so on she drove. She felt peculiar; light headed and slightly sick, hyper yet exhausted. Her throat was tight and her mouth was dry and her eyes itched with tears that she was furious about. She needed a drink of water. Perhaps she needed a drink. She drove on, thinking please be there, please be there. But the old petrol station was gone, a barren concrete slab the only remnant. She continued, heading helplessly into Blenthrop. She’d dive in, she decided quickly, buy water, perhaps walk around in a haze and then phone Cat. That was a good idea. Perhaps she’d be around this afternoon and Oriana could call on her to workshop through the headfuckness of what just happened.

  The first thing she noticed was traffic wardens as though they were a newly introduced species. There was a one-way system too, which flummoxed her, but it led her to the car park by the library. It was much changed. She looked around – the little booth she remembered with the wizened old toothless man had gone. Invariably, he’d left the barrier up, but they’d never
not paid. Now there were dictatorial signs everywhere. Pay & Display. She went to the machine and bought a ticket. At that price, an hour would be plenty.

  Walking tentatively down Church Street, it felt initially as though all eyes were on her. But she knew it was doubtful that anyone knew her, and if they had known her years ago, they wouldn’t recognize her today because she’d be the last person on their minds. And wouldn’t most people have grown up and moved away or just grown old and died? There were a lot of pushchairs, it seemed. Pushed by parents perhaps a decade younger than she was. Changing times and with it, a new community. New housing. Self-service petrol from supermarket forecourts. She felt a stranger. She felt anonymous. She didn’t know a soul and it calmed her down.

  The shops were all different and yet they seemed so established that she found it hard to remember what had been there when this had been her town. Marketplace was awash with stalls selling fruit and vegetables, sickly-smelling sweets and cheap dogs’ beds. A smart lorry with one side down had fresh fish on beds of tumbling ice scalpings. A van vending coffee. A stall selling crepes. A butcher yelling sausages! at passers-by like someone with Tourette’s. Where can one buy just a simple bottle of bloody water these days?

  Remembering that there used to be a newsagent’s on Ashbourne Road, she headed there, pleased that, despite the disconcerting unfamiliarity, some things remained instinctive. Turn right. Go straight. Turn right. Oxfam! Oxfam’s still here! She peered through the window but it was all changed. It looked like a proper shop, brightly lit with veneered shelving carrying fancy goods, and she wondered where in town today’s teenagers went to rummage for clothes to customize. That’s new – that hairdresser’s. But that isn’t – the kitchen shop. It has a new name but it’s still a kitchen shop.

  ‘The White Peak Art Space,’ Oriana said quietly. A gallery in Blenthrop – there should always be a gallery in Blenthrop. She doubted that the old one, fusty with dingy oil paintings and insipid watercolours, had survived. To her relief, this new place appeared to be a proper gallery – not a shop selling dreadful generic pictures of sand dunes, or bluebell woods, or squirrels, or small children, all given the Adobe once-over. Nor was it full of annoying sayings on strips of distressed tin or weathered wood. It appeared to be a genuine showcase for artists, for talent; it seemed to be somewhere that Art mattered.