The Way Back Home

by Freya North

  But today he looked at Jed and thought, mate, I do not envy you your hangover.

  ‘Stay tonight,’ he said. ‘You’re probably still over the limit, anyway.’

  Jed thought about it. Stretched. Slumped. Straightened. Shrugged. ‘I’d better go,’ he said, ‘but thanks.’

  ‘Don’t leave it so long next time,’ said Malachy.

  His brother grinned. ‘It’s nothing personal.’ Then he thought about it, about the fact that he wasn’t entirely sure what Malachy did in between the times he saw him. Apart from fending off thieving cleaner girlfriends and caring for deranged aged artists. What did Malachy do when he wasn’t at the gallery, or in Robin’s studio? Where was he on a standard Tuesday evening, or on a random Sunday? Who was he with on any given Friday night? For Jed, Malachy and Windward were indivisible, one and the same, always there; solid, little changed, patiently pleased to accommodate him. Just then, he felt badly about this.

  ‘Come to mine,’ he said to Malachy. ‘We’ll go out next time.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘Good. I’ll phone – we’ll arrange it.’

  ‘Let’s.’

  With Jed gone, Malachy went to check on Robin who refused to move from his chair let alone acknowledge that Malachy was even there. Malachy always thought how disconcerting it was that a human being could emanate such coldness whilst simultaneously radiating such fierce heat. He left Robin the Sunday Times, on top of which he placed a glass of water and the tablets. Robin’s apartment seemed particularly fetid today and Malachy stepped outside and walked into the gardens, head back, breathing deeply. That afternoon, spring had finally become a tantalizing glimpse through a crack in winter, a tangible quality in the light, a benign edge to the breeze, a shy scent. He walked around the back of the house, automatically checking the pointing and paintwork around his windows which always begged for attention. These days, though, there had to be a residents’ meeting to sanction anything, another to agree contractors and argue costs and a couple more just for the sake of it. Long gone were the days of an assortment of ladders and paint pots and everyone mucking in with each other’s Sunday DIY tasks. The sinking fund into which he had to put money up front was a bottomless pit that seemed to produce little visible return. It pissed him off. It irked him that the original residents appeared to have less say than the new. If anything, they were kept just on the periphery of the loop and decisions were cleverly presented to them as fait accompli.

  ‘Hi, Malachy!’

  ‘Hi, Malachy!’

  The de la Mare girls bounded over the grass to him like excited ponies.

  ‘Guess what?’

  ‘Guess what!’

  Kate, the younger, was like a lively echo to her sister.

  ‘What?’ said Malachy, patting them as if they really were ponies.

  ‘We heard him say fuck and there are bosoms.’

  Priceless. Malachy looked around hoping that Paula or Rob were in earshot but their parents were nowhere in sight. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Oh – we’re not swearing on purpose,’ said Emma, ‘we’re just repeating.’

  ‘Repeating,’ Malachy said thoughtfully.

  ‘Bosoms and fuck!’ said a delighted Kate.

  ‘Care to elaborate?’ said Malachy.

  ‘Come and see,’ said Emma.

  ‘Come. And. See,’ said Kate, tugging at his sleeve all the way to the pigsty.

  The three of them contemplated the painting in silence for some time, like art critics at a private view.

  ‘I did this bit,’ said Emma eventually, proudly wafting her hand at the canvas.

  ‘No, you didn’t – I did,’ said Kate.

  ‘Did not. You did that bit – see, that same colour is still on your hands,’ and she splayed her own fingers for emphasis.

  ‘Ladies,’ said Malachy diplomatically. He always referred to them as ladies, never girls, and they loved it. He scratched his chin and breathed against the crook of his finger, deep in thought. It was the first time he’d seen this work and yet it had obviously been in production for some time. He recognized the subject as Rachel. Here was the Rachel he remembered. The painting was an ode to a ruinous passion so profoundly deep it imploded. The painting was a pictorial love letter because words were impotent to describe the breadth of feeling. The execution was mostly sublime – the throat, however, was simply an execution. The throat was mid-murder. Malachy thought, this painting will give me nightmares. He glanced at the girls and thought thank God for bosoms – that’s the part of the painting that they’ll remember.

  ‘Can we keep it?’

  ‘No,’ said Malachy.

  ‘But he said fuck you and threw it out of the window!’ said Kate.

  ‘He chucked it out because he messed it up,’ Emma explained ‘but we mended her neck. See? So why can’t we keep it if he doesn’t want it? It can live here.’

  ‘Because, sometimes artists suffer for their art – they do almighty battle with their paintings and that’s what makes their work so brilliant. The discord between artist and painting is what gives it the depth, so many layers, such luminosity.’ The girls stared at Malachy blankly. ‘It’s the equivalent of your mum putting you on the naughty step. And then coming back for you.’

  ‘I’ve never been on the naughty step,’ said Kate.

  ‘Oh yes, you have,’ said her elder sister.

  ‘Well – not like the naughty step, then,’ said Malachy. ‘It’s like having a big row with someone you love and going off in a huff.’

  Emma thought Malachy was using too many unnecessary words. The artist had messed up his picture. That was the sum of it, surely. He could paint another quite easily. This one had been thrown away – until she and her sister had kindly rescued and resuscitated it.

  ‘Do you think he’ll at least like how we’ve fixed it?’ she said.

  He’ll go absolutely berserk, thought Malachy, who hoped that an ambiguous hum and a hand on Emma’s head would suffice.

  Into the time warp of the pigsty, Paula’s voice filtered through, calling her girls to come in now, come in for tea. He escorted them back out into the daylight, around the house, along the side of the driveway, across the front lawn and through the cherry walk towards the Ice House.

  ‘We think the painting is of that lady who came here yesterday,’ Emma said.

  ‘Sorry?’ Malachy was only half listening. How on earth am I going to get that canvas back to Robin?

  ‘The painting – the lady looks a bit like the one who came here yesterday.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Ought I to take it to Robin – or let him retrieve it in his own time?

  ‘Yes, the one who came in the blue car. Who had her head on the steering wheel and we thought she was asleep.’

  ‘Of course.’ I could leave it where it might have landed when he threw it.

  ‘Anyway, she looked quite a bit like the lady in the painting. But with clothes on, of course.’

  But Robin will still see what’s happened to it. ‘Indeed,’ said Malachy. It might be prudent for me to tell him first, then bring the painting to him.

  ‘Binky,’ Kate butted in.

  It was as if a guillotine had sliced off Malachy’s meandering thoughts. He stared at Kate. ‘What?’

  ‘Binky,’ she repeated.

  ‘The lady,’ Emma said, weary of yet another grown-up doing that annoying half-listening thing which meant she’d have to repeat it all again. ‘The lady who came yesterday – who we think looks like the one in the painting.’

  ‘A lady who came yesterday? Here? A lady who looks like the one in the painting?’ Malachy stared from one girl to the other. ‘What did she look like?’

  The sisters glanced at each other and regarded him as if he was completely stupid.

  ‘Like the lady in the painting?’ said Emma slowly, as if Malachy was utterly dense.

  ‘And she said her name was Binky?’

  ‘The lady was called Binky,’ said Kate conversational
ly. ‘She told us. She went for a walk with your brother.’

  ‘Hey, Malachy! Coming in for a cuppa?’ Paula de la Mare was coming across the lawn to meet them. But Malachy shook his head and walked away without even saying goodbye to the girls. He strode back to the house fast, chanting you bastard, Jed – you total bastard.

  Binky.

  Binky had been Malachy’s dog when he was a boy. A tufty mongrel to whom Oriana had taught all manner of tricks which a slightly peeved Malachy had told her were demeaning. There’d been dogs before and after Binky – but none so special to him.

  The woman in the painting was Rachel, Robin’s muse, his wife. Beautiful and brittle and little more than a child when she’d come over from America for Robin. In the painting she was a little older, but still young – though her physical vulnerability was now underscored with a canny awareness of the destructive power of her beauty. But Emma and Kate had never met Rachel. And Rachel was forty years older now than in the painting. And Rachel had never given a flying fuck about Binky. So, if some woman had been here yesterday, who looked like the subject of the painting and said her name was Binky, that woman could only have been Oriana.

  Oriana had come back to Windward.

  She’d been here.

  She’d been here with Jed.

  He didn’t say.

  Was that before she came into the gallery? Or after?

  Jed had said nothing.

  Why had Jed not said?

  Bastard.

  Fuck him.

  That is it, thought Malachy. Fuck him, the bastard. Fuck him.

  When I was …

  When I was three I needed a haircut. If people talk about their earliest memories, invariably it’s specific events which they recall. My earliest memory was not an event – it was something said about me.

  When I was three I needed a haircut. I remember my father hissing at my mother, ‘The child needs a haircut – it can’t see where it’s going.’ And my mother said, ‘Yes, it can.’ And my mother suddenly saw me and started shouting at my father: ‘She! She! She’s not an It, she’s a She, you heartless bastard!’ But I knew that she knew that I knew that she’d also called me ‘it’.

  That was my earliest memory, when I was three. It remains far more cutting than what followed.

  My mother hoicked me onto her hip and plonked me on the edge of the table. I distinctly remember the table that day because there were all these wine bottles on it in a perfect, accidental grouping. They were mostly but not quite empty and one was on its side. The light slicked the glass like varnish and the glass was the colour of glossy black cherries. They looked so beautiful, like a detail in a seventeenth-century Dutch or Flemish still life – like something you might spy in a corner of a Frans Hals painting – just a perfect little vignette away from the main focus of the canvas. I remember being mesmerized by these bottles; the grace and stillness a haven away from the seethe between my parents.

  There’s something else I recall hearing that day. Perhaps not so much a sound as a sensation – the slow ratcheting crunch of scissors against my hair and the sharp snag of any disparate strands caught around my mother’s fingers. It hurt. You could, quite literally, say that ‘it’ hurt because when I was three, that’s who I was. Everything hurt that day.

  I remember Malachy and Jed laughing at me when they saw me next, ruffling my hair. Even Jette smiled. But they didn’t laugh in pity, nor with derision, just with love. And then I thought that actually it wasn’t too bad. I remember feeling very proud, in fact, because finally I could see where I was going.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Oriana was walking the streets of Hathersage like a bobby on the beat – her pace casual but purposeful. She didn’t know where to go and she didn’t know what to think but as walking always helped her think, she walked for hours, with no corner and no dead end forsaken. Nothing her mother said had particularly hurt her. Over the years and through a lot of therapy in the States, Oriana had done a good job accepting that it was nothing personal, that actually it had nothing to do with her at all, per se – that it was just her mother, it was just the way she was. What affronted her more now was what the hell she was going to do and where on earth, realistically, she could go.

  As she passed by, she looked in the windows of letting agencies. It was rather futile – she had no intention of living in Hathersage, nor could she justify a car, so studying the particulars of property to rent in more rural areas was pointless. She did it anyway. All the agencies were closed and none was promoting little affordable cottages conveniently placed on bus routes. It was a demoralizing and stupid thing to do – like window shopping for clothes she could neither afford nor fit into. She scoured the notices in the windows of a couple of newsagents’. Room available. Flat-share wanted. Studio to let. She jotted down the numbers. Clean, bright flat, all mod cons. Female n/s wanted. She’d phone that one first.

  A man answered. He said yes at the end of every sentence, preceded by a phlegmy clearing of his throat. You’re a non-smoker, yes? Do you know the area, yes? Rent doesn’t include bills, yes?

  ‘Can I ask about the other people in the flat?’ asked Oriana.

  ‘There’s just me, yes?’

  No.

  Oriana thought, I really, really don’t want to flat-share with strangers. She thought how it had been different when she’d been a student – then they were all strangers in common and afterwards they chose to live together because they were friends. It wasn’t the same now. It was something you just did not do in your mid-thirties.

  She ordered tea and a toastie at Cintra’s and, despite the owner’s imploring her to sit inside, telling her spring was still some way off, Oriana chose a picnic table in the garden at the back. It was mid-afternoon and the sun was being valiant. She’d have to go back to her mother’s at some point – but not until she had something constructive sorted. She dabbed at crumbs as she stared at the list she’d scribbled in the bedroom before leaving that morning:

  Cat

  Django

  Jed

  White Peak

  Whom should she phone? Which one would be able to provide what she needed? She looked at the names. It was Sunday – the gallery, she remembered from the details on the website, would not be open.

  Jed

  Cat

  Django

  Jed – could she really face being back at Windward? Could she really face seeing Jed again so soon?

  Cat – but her old friend was cosily married and busy feathering her nest.

  Django – he was old, though, and not in good health. Actually, perhaps that was a good option – she could keep an eye on him, help. But she cursed herself for her fake altruism. She thought, perhaps I could just ask them, any one of them, if they know someone or somewhere I could go.

  Who on her list was most likely to be in at this time on a Sunday – and who was most likely to have a solution for her? The two didn’t necessarily tally. The names floated around the page as her eyes gauzed with tears. It’s only frustration, she told herself. It’s just loneliness. Really, where she most wanted to be was with Ashlyn. She’d had some of her very best Sundays with Ashlyn. Lazy lunches in Tiburon. Flea markets and hiking and an afternoon movie – Sundays were varied, a movable feast, the one constant being talking and talking; putting the world to rights with laughter, thus ending the weekend and starting the week on a good note. She looked at her watch – Ashlyn would only just be waking up. And then Oriana thought, I have enough money to fly back to California.

  But she couldn’t. It was impossible. The self-inflicted taunt of something unobtainable – a perfect dream that made no sense whatsoever. She focused on the names on the scrap of paper and scrolled through the contacts on her phone and took a deep breath and thought oh, just get on with it, and dialled.

  ‘Hullo. It’s Oriana.’

  ‘Hey! How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine – I’m good. I’m sorry to trouble you, Ben – but is Cat about? For a chat
?’

  ‘Of course!’ said Ben. ‘She’ll be delighted.’ He took the landline through to the front room and found Cat asleep.

  He backed out of the room. ‘You still there? She’s dozing – can she ring you later?’

  ‘OK,’ said Oriana but she obviously didn’t sound it.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ben asked. ‘I mean – I can wake her?’

  ‘No no,’ said Oriana, ‘don’t do that. I don’t want to trouble her. I just fancied a chat, you know, with my old pal.’

  ‘Thank you for visiting Django yesterday,’ Ben said. ‘And I know Cat would love to see you soon, too. Herself.’ There. He felt quite proud of the way he’d handled that one.

  ‘Definitely,’ said Oriana.

  ‘She’ll phone you,’ said Ben. ‘It’s what I call a gestational snooze. It’s the legitimate equivalent of Sunday Afternoonitis.’

  Oriana laughed. How she’d love to be in their home right now, all nesty and nuptial and safe and together and grown up. ‘Bye, Ben.’

  ‘Look after yourself.’

  I’m trying, Oriana thought, I’m trying. And then she thought, how long does Cat sleep for? It was darkening. Nobody was out. Impending drizzle hung in the air like a low-level hum. It was dawning on her that it was unlikely she’d be sleeping anywhere other than back at her mother’s that night. She looked at the list; realistically she didn’t have a Plan B. She folded the paper as many times as she could and wedged it between the slats of the bench.

  * * *

  ‘I’ll just be off round the block then, love,’ said Bernard. ‘Two shakes.’

  Rachel glanced up. She’d spent the afternoon leafing distractedly through magazines and doing the crosswords in biro, rather than pencil, which meant ugly black scratchings and illegible answers, mostly wrong. ‘Hmmm.’