The Way Back Home

by Freya North

  ‘She’ll call,’ he told his wife. ‘She’s probably just worried about bothering you.’

  * * *

  In Hathersage, no one asked any searching questions. It was enough that ‘Did you have a nice day?’ was met with ‘Yes, thanks, did you?’ In fact, most of the questions came from Oriana who tactfully chose topics she knew Rachel and Bernard could answer at length. The route to Wakefield. The Bennets’ house. What they’d had for their dinner. And their tea. The weather forecast tomorrow. The amount of detail that anodyne subjects warranted was surprising and insubstantial minutiae floated through the evening like musak until it was a respectable time to turn in. As Oriana climbed the stairs, she thought to herself, that’s probably the longest conversation I have ever had with my mother.

  It was only after cleaning her teeth, when she caught sight of herself in the mirror unawares, that the magnitude of the day that was closing swept over her again. But it wasn’t what had happened or where she had been. At that moment it wasn’t even whom she had seen. It was who had seen her, looking like this.

  Frequently, since her return from the US, her mother had remarked how thin Oriana looked. But ‘thin’ implied something gently fragile, like a bird, like a Hans Christian Andersen character, something young and pretty and ethereal, waif-like. Butterfly wings and gentle breeze and dandelion heads and spun sugar. ‘Thin’ brought out the protective in others. But, now she looked, Oriana didn’t see thin. She saw haggard. She saw gaunt grey. She saw someone to baulk at, to shy away from; to think Christ, she’s aged, she looks terrible. What the fuck happened to Oriana? they’d say. Have you seen her these days? Old beyond her years.

  ‘Mum!’ She called out before she’d even opened the bathroom door, let alone unlocked it. ‘Mum!’

  Rachel’s bedroom door opened. Oriana must have been in conversation with her reflection for quite some time if her mother’s bleariness was anything to go by.

  ‘What is it? Honey – you OK?’

  Bernard could be heard from the gloom of the room saying everything OK? everything OK? like a daft old parrot trying to keep up with the action.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Rachel called back at him. ‘We’re good.’

  ‘My hair,’ Oriana wailed. ‘Look at it! I look hideous. Do you have a good hairdresser? Are they open Sundays?’

  ‘You look fine,’ said Rachel, agitated. ‘You’re a bit thin – but you’re tired. Go to sleep and yes, I have a hairdresser,’ and she touched her own hair as if to double-check. ‘And no, they’re not open Sundays.’

  ‘They are in the lead-up to Christmas, love,’ came Bernard’s voice.

  ‘It’s fucking April!’ Rachel seethed over her shoulder, before clapping her hand over her mouth, wondering how long it had been – truly, how many years – since she’d sworn like that. ‘Look what you made me do!’ she hissed at Oriana. ‘Just go to sleep, for God’s sake.’ Reproach and dislike creased her face.

  Rachel had never spoken to Bernard like that, never. She held his hand tightly as she lay awake, frowning into the dark. Her daughter should not have come back and, just then, she really resented her. Oriana was rested, fed, had a roof over her head, their home and car at her disposal and yet she looked worse now than when she arrived. Where was the gratitude in that? Into the conspiratorial darkness, Rachel let her thoughts find support. She liked her daughter less when she was troubled. In fact, she liked her less when she was in direct contact. If their relationship was to survive – or even go back to how it had been – she really did need her out of the house. Emails and occasional phone calls – that’s when they’d rubbed along best. She actually didn’t much like her at all – an unpleasant sensation that made her feel unwell. Distance and time could alleviate it. It had done so in the past, after all.

  * * *

  At Windward, Oriana wasn’t mentioned at all that evening. Instead, the Bedwell brothers drank beer and watched sport and shouted at the teams on the television. It was innocuous and boorish, akin to watching in the pub, commentating on the game with people they hardly knew. And Malachy and Jed should have steered clear of Scotch. But the match was over and the beer was gone, so out came the Laphroaig which took the pub philosophizing to the next level as they spouted argumentatively on politics and policies, each brother taking a turn at pulling on the garb of the devil’s advocate and wrestling each other for it.

  Jed should have said no to whisky. He didn’t have the stomach for it, especially not after European lager and the disappointment of a two–nil defeat. Consequently, he became very drunk, very quickly and, after decimating bankers, Russian oligarchs and the Tories, he staggered off to bed mid-sentence, only to throw up later in the early hours.

  Malachy heard his brother chucking his guts up. Malachy should have said no to whisky too. It didn’t make him paralytic, it made him insomniac and introspective. He hadn’t yet slept when Jed went stumbling to the bathroom. He’d been sitting up in bed, initially comforted by the pitch darkness making him equally blind in his good eye. Velvet black and even. He just sat in bed, appreciating the sensation of both eyes being open and both eyes seeing nothing; feeling that peculiar warmth that came with night-time silence and obscurity, nothing material to see, to imagine, to tax the eye – either eye. But then, the undeniable sense that darkness is not a constant but a flux; forms beginning to emerge as his good eye told his lost eye what they were. Mahogany chest. Flung shirt. Door frame. Right shoe. Something else – wallet. What’s my wallet doing on the floor? Left shoe. Handles on the wardrobe doors that look like cartoon eyes.

  Back in the present. What’s Jed doing? Jed’s throwing up. Dickhead.

  Then –

  What’s Oriana doing? Right this minute? Right now, at five minutes past stupid o’clock?

  She’ll be asleep. Fast asleep.

  Oriana Taylor back from the Land of Opportunity, to the Country Where It All Went Tits Up. Where was the sense in that? Why had she come back? Was she running away again? It seemed preposterous that she could prefer this place to anywhere else. Perhaps she was returning simply to tie up eighteen years of loose ends into one intricate knot. Certainly she was back now as suddenly as she’d disappeared back then.

  After she’d left the gallery, when the shock had subsided, Malachy had felt different all afternoon, as if he’d been imperceptibly levitated. The complexity of it all had been baffling and crazy and just a bit wonderful too. But not now. Now, in the choke of the night, alcohol tainting his blood and hastening his heartbeat, it was entirely unnerving.

  He could hear Jed leaving the bathroom, shuffling back to bed with a self-pitying groan. Malachy needed to sleep, it was gone four in the morning. He thought, I don’t want her in my dreams. He thought‚ I don’t want to see her again. He thought‚ sleep! He thought, damn her for coming back. She had no right – however chance the encounter had been. Oh God, I really, really need to sleep. He told himself not to look at the clock. Ten to five in the bloody morning. Memories mingled with shadows, sounds with silence. It was all too bloody busy to permit sleep. He thought masturbating might help. He thought, think of some generic sex bomb. Pneumatic and faceless who you don’t know, you’ll never meet, you have no history with, no emotion for. Tits and ass and lips.

  But ultimately it was Oriana who filled his mind. He could taste her, hear her, feel her skin, her breath on his neck, her fingers around his cock, her body melding with his. The stretch and dip of her figure. He came. Exhausted, sleep finally crept over him. And his last thought was, how could something be so vividly real – when actually it had never happened? Not beyond those desperately grasped kisses that they’d harvested over a period of just a few months when he was eighteen and she was fifteen.

  And Malachy knew he wouldn’t dream of Oriana that night; he was doomed to have the rabbit dream again. Resigned, he became sleep’s quarry.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  As Oriana made her way downstairs on Sunday morning after a fitful night’s sleep, she could hea
r her mother’s hissing whisper.

  ‘It’s just not right! She has no business here – she literally has no business here. We’re not doing right by her – we’re facilitating her languor.’

  Oriana thought, when has my mother ever used the word languor? Suddenly a memory of her mother at Windward assaulted her and she thought, my mother put the definition of languor into the dictionary. And then Oriana heard Bernard, dear Bernard, try gently to butt his way in with conjunctions that stood entirely on their own and therefore were bluntly denied all meaning. But. However. Well. If.

  ‘She oughtn’t to be here, it’s not right.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Not at her age – not at my age.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘She’s got to get a job! move on! move out!’

  ‘However—’

  ‘She’s an adult. It’s making me unwell, it really is. I can’t have her squawking about hairdressers at whatever o’clock.’

  ‘Mind you—’

  ‘Mind you what, Bernard? Mind you what?’

  ‘She’s your daughter, love – and where else can she go?’

  ‘She can find her own hairdresser!’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about hairdressers, Rachel.’

  Hovering just out of sight of the kitchen door, Oriana wondered which way to go. Just then, the conundrum of whether to go back upstairs or continue to the kitchen was taxing enough, never mind where she’d go now her mother was kicking her out. She didn’t want to stay – but she certainly didn’t want to be told to leave. She pressed her back against the wall and thought again of Windward. Not the Windward of yesterday, but the Windward of yesteryear, where she’d grown up. A house, a place, a crazy world in its own orbit. No matter how bonkers, how unruly, how frightening, there had always, always, been somewhere to go. To the Bedwell boys and their beautiful serene Danish mother Jette who’d take her to school with rye-bread sandwiches and hair braided to perfection. Or to Louis for a sanctuary of stories and toast and shiny coins appearing from behind her ear. Or Lilac’s where she’d be seated in the wing-back chair like royalty, presented with a plate which had a biscuit on top of a doily, and told tales of the music halls of Montmartre. And the summer when Rod Stewart kindly feigned not to notice that she spent day after day curled in the corner deep down in the beanbag while his music filled the room over and over and over. She’d received a package months later – with a seven-inch single and a message written on the cover.

  You’re more than the girl in the corner.

  Rod xx

  He’d sent it care of Louis so that she’d be sure to get it. Because Rod knew. He knew.

  And Oriana thought back to the bleakest of times when nowhere at Windward would do, when the only option was to pedal herself away from the place. Vividly, she retraced in her mind the crazy cycle route, half road, half land. How she’d jostled her heavy old bike over drystone walls, negotiated boulders, forged streams and had to hoick it over five-bar gates all the way to the McCabes. No mobile phones back then, no texting to say they’re pissing me off, I’m going to bike it to yours. The duration of the journey, over an hour, during which no one in the world knew where she was, what time she’d left or where she was headed. The colliding extremes of loneliness and liberation spinning her head as her feet spun the pedals. The welcome at the McCabes’ – Django warm and accommodating as if it was a long-arranged invitation to tea. Cat and her sisters Fen and Pip – in a circle in a bedroom, or in the garden or around the kitchen table, listening and loving her and telling her don’t worry, they’re just stupid and annoying and you can stay here tonight.

  She wondered if nowadays children dared to do a ride like that – that fast, that far. Was there even any need for it today – could they even be bothered? They probably just Instagrammed photos of themselves looking morose with some derogatory comment about their parents being, like, so unfair. And, just then, Oriana knew that no matter how imprisoned or squashed or unhappy or fed up or lonely or confused she’d felt when she was young, actually she’d had freedom few others would have experienced. Standing there, that Sunday morning, against the blandness of magnolia walls and gloss white skirting and the sound of her mother detesting her, she loved very much the child she’d been. She felt a familiar surge of protectiveness but also a new pride for her younger self. Rod Stewart had been right all those years ago.

  * * *

  In Windward, Robin Taylor hurled his palette with such force it turned into a razor-sharp Frisbee, whacked into the window frame and left its mark bloodied in smears of magenta and streaks of cerise, bruises of burnt umber. He looked back at the canvas and his objection rose in a vicious crescendo.

  ‘No No No.’

  It was as though the painting had wronged him. ‘No No No.’

  He pointed at it, wagging his finger with seething sarcasm. ‘No, you don’t. No, you don’t.’

  He walked over to the window and stamped on the palette lying on the floor.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he glowered over his shoulder back at the painting. He roared with the furious effort of hauling up the warped sash window before walking calmly back to the painting as though it was a scoundrel to be ousted from the studio by the ear. He held the canvas at one corner; it wasn’t large but it was unwieldy enough, and he dragged it across the room without looking at it, like something too repellent even to be glanced at.

  ‘Fuck you!’ And he launched it out of the window.

  Emma and Kate, the de la Mare girls, heard the rude word and saw the painting fall. They didn’t know the man who lived in that part of the house. Just that he wasn’t particularly friendly and didn’t much like children or animals or women or anything or anyone other than Malachy and then only sometimes. Their mother had told them to walk around the other side if they wanted to go to the back gardens where the cedar and the willow with the rope swing were. She told them, if they saw him, to be polite and smiley but not really to stop. She told them he might say rude words and not to worry about it, to understand that he wasn’t very well and rude words were part of it.

  When they were quite sure that all was quiet, the sisters finally looked at each other. They felt, somehow, complicit in what had happened because after all they’d decided to go around the Other Side of the house. Currently, they were hidden in the old pigsty – which, unlike their Ice House and Mr Martin’s Stables and the Corrigans’ Coach House remained gloriously ramshackle and unconverted. There were rusty nails and mice, all manner of junk dumped there over the decades and something so dead and flattened it appeared to be made out of old shoe leather. Their father had persuaded their mother that it was precisely the type of place children should be allowed to commandeer and have as a semi-secret den. Well, a dead mouse isn’t going to kill them, she’d said. Nor is a living one, he’d said.

  And now, the sash window over at the house was juddered down and the shadowy figure disappeared from view, back into the mystery of the apartment. The girls waited. Then they looked at each other again before scuttling out of the sty and over to the painting. It had fallen face down just beyond the French drain. Emma flipped it over and both girls gasped.

  Bosoms.

  How utterly thrilling.

  Quickly, they carried the painting back to the sty and propped it against a wall. Their hearts pounded at the bases of their throats, their stomachs knotted and their eyes danced – they were just old enough to grasp the illicitness of it all – bosoms in a painting that they had kidnapped, bosoms that were enough to make a grown man swear. Fervently, they explored every inch of the painting with their eyes, with their fingers. Parts of the canvas had oils so thick they had been whipped up into peaks and ridges like a storm-lashed sea. The paint was still pliable and the children fiddled, pressing with thumbs and digging with their nails. There was an area of the picture – the lady’s neck – that they decided must be the fuck-you part because the paint was still fresh and tacky and the sweary man had done a bad job trying to keep within
the outline.

  It was like skating by fingertip – the girls swirled and tracked around the wetter paint, leaving their marks and thinking it looked better. Not perfect. It still didn’t look like a nice, smooth, elegant neck – but at least it no longer looked as though the flesh had been grabbed away from the lady’s throat.

  * * *

  ‘Christ.’

  Jed had been in a slump on the sofa for two hours, saying nothing other than Christ. Malachy laughed at him, but privately was grateful for the ground coffee his brother had bought the day before, and he made a pot so strong that he really could stand a teaspoon in it.

  ‘Are you staying for lunch?’

  ‘I can’t talk about food.’

  ‘At least you’ve stopped talking to Jesus.’

  ‘Fat lot of help He gave me.’ Jed paused. ‘Christ.’

  He pressed gingerly around his eye sockets as if fully expecting to find fissures and shards. Unbelievably, his nose appeared to be straight and he still had all his teeth. The coffee helped and, after an hour, he said yes to the scrambled eggs and bacon Malachy offered to cook for them.

  ‘I am a prize idiot,’ Jed said, ‘and I have only myself to blame. If I ever even mention the word Scotch again, you are within your rights to have me sectioned.’

  Malachy laughed. His brother could always make him laugh – Jed could always bring a genuine smile to anyone: teachers ready to dish out detention, parents about to ground him, even girlfriends on the verge of dumping him. It was something Malachy had quietly begrudged him their whole lives. Not so much because it got Jed out of all manner of scrapes, but more because it seemed to amplify Malachy’s diametric default. Jed the lively one, Malachy the quiet one. Jed the life and soul. Malachy the boy in the background. Jed who could get away with blue murder. Malachy who should know better. Jed the brother the girls flocked to. Malachy the brother they didn’t.