The Way Back Home

by Freya North

  Slowly, and with silent sensitivity, Cat covered her right eye with her hand. Oriana reached over and gently moved it to her left eye.

  ‘Still handsome,’ she said again, softly.

  They didn’t talk for a while.

  ‘And Jed?’ Cat said eventually.

  ‘He hasn’t changed a bit.’ Oriana had to laugh. ‘Honestly. I mean – he has a better hairdo these days. Do you remember when he thought he looked like Bono?’

  ‘It was a mullet,’ said Cat. ‘He looked more like a dodgy footballer.’

  ‘Anyway – like I said, he’s still at Windward. Can you believe that? Still leaping over the balcony and shinning down the drainpipes. Still gorgeous and mad.’

  Cat stirred her tea though she didn’t take sugar. ‘It seems so long ago,’ she said.

  Oriana nodded. ‘All those years in between. I have often wondered about them. About Malachy. About where he went. And he’s right here. And Jed – Jed hasn’t left Windward.’

  ‘It was a terrible, terrible thing, Oriana,’ Cat said. ‘It was a terrible thing that happened – to all of you. All of you.’

  ‘It’s like it happened to different people. Someone I know – but not me.’

  ‘I think, when something happens – like that, at that age – the only way forward is to parcel it up.’ Cat thought about it. ‘Compartmentalize it to the furthest recesses of your conscious – and conscience.’

  ‘When something happens – like that,’ said Oriana, ‘I suppose the only way forward is to leave.’ They kept stirring at their cups of tea. ‘One’s meant to just drift away from one’s childhood and adolescence – it should be gentle and blurred. But with us, the door on the past was slammed shut. Now I’m back and suddenly I find it’s ajar.’

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Oriana shrugged. ‘Freaked?’

  ‘No wonder you were too full to even consider seeing Robin,’ she said. ‘Two Bedwell boys in one day.’

  Oriana looked at her levelly. ‘Had I not seen them, it really wouldn’t have altered the fact that I’ve no desire to see Robin.’

  OK, thought Cat. OK. We’ll leave that one for the time being.

  They headed for home, Oriana driving. She indicated when they neared the lane for Windward and Cat didn’t comment when they headed along it. She couldn’t, she was holding her breath. Oriana parked up by the gateposts, switched the engine off, and they gazed up the driveway. It was unimportant that the house was not in view.

  ‘See,’ Oriana said finally. ‘It’s all still there.’

  She turned the car and drove away from Windward. Back at the junction, she headed away from Blenthrop. A pang plunged through her body like sudden turbulence on a flight. She’d been so close. Back then, years ago. And today. She’d been so close.

  That evening, Oriana went to bed early. She wasn’t unduly tired, surprisingly, and there was actually good television on. But she just felt she oughtn’t to be in the room intruding on Cat and Ben curled into each other on the sofa. I’m knackered, she told them. I’ve seen this film a million times. I’m going to have an early night.

  Upstairs, she Facetimed Ashlyn, automatically speaking in little more than a whisper. It was as if the baby was already here. This was the baby’s room and new things were appearing all the time. Tiny, beautiful items which made Oriana feel the world was shrinking around her and she was a galumphing giant. At some point today Ben, or Cat, had carefully moved Oriana’s laptop off the changing table, to stack folded squares of muslin and soft terry towels there. A jar in the shape of a vanilla-coloured hippo smiled out puffs of cotton wool and nestled up to a pile of minute babygros in a colour softer than cloud.

  I’m fine, Ashlyn. Do you love my hair? Actually, I’m pleased you told me about Casey. I dodged a bullet there. I can’t really talk now. We’re about to watch a movie. Cat and Ben say hi. I’d better go. Speak soon, though?

  Three days later, on the day that Ben asked Oriana if she minded staying in for a couple of deliveries, Ashlyn phoned to tell Oriana that she was engaged. This news left her more poleaxed than Casey’s had.

  Ashlyn’s getting married. Cat’s having a baby. I’m unemployed and sleeping on the floor.

  Staring at the box that had arrived, at the drawing of the cot on the side, how Oriana wished her thoughts and emotions could be so neatly packaged up. And that’s why she welcomed the distraction and concentration necessary for constructing the flat-pack cot.

  It looked fairly straightforward, came with its own Allen key and a packet of nuts and bolts and required no other tools or fixings. To make space, she plonked her bedding on the new rocking chair which had arrived an hour earlier, and pushed it to the corner. Methodically, Oriana laid out all the components and read carefully through the instructions. They were mainly drawings, step by step. She felt strangely exhilarated. Selecting the playlist she’d named All Time Faves, she set to work constructing the cot for Cat and Ben’s baby. It was going well, really well. God! Is that the time? Cat would be home soon. But the cot was almost finished. Almost. So nearly there. But not quite.

  ‘Don’t come in!’ Oriana called through the door. ‘I’ll be down in a mo – but don’t come in.’

  You bastard bloody thing, why won’t you fit?

  I shouldn’t have jammed that other plank in – I knew it ought to have fitted more easily.

  ‘Has my rocking chair arrived?’

  ‘Yes!’ Oriana shouted back.

  Cat really wanted to see it. She’d been waiting weeks for it.

  ‘But don’t come up!’ Oriana yelled. ‘Not yet.’

  Why doesn’t that bit slot in? Bloody stupid thing. Maybe it does need a shove. It’s wood – wood changes, doesn’t it.

  Suddenly the music was getting on her nerves so she slammed it off, sat back on her knees and ripped her jumper over her head. She was hot. And very bothered. Really, she’d like to punch and scrunch the instructions and kick the cot. It just didn’t make sense. She’d followed everything to the letter, and most of the pieces thus far had clicked or slid or aligned nicely into place. But this last part? It had to be faulty – it just had to be. Poor Cat.

  Fit, you bastard thing, fit.

  The slatted base of the whole thing was pretty crucial, Oriana knew that. It was currently wedged diagonally within the four sides.

  She heard Ben arrive home. She heard Cat and him talking. Oh – Oriana’s upstairs. Yes, they’ve arrived. I don’t know. I haven’t seen them yet. She won’t let me up there. She says she needs a minute. She said that ages ago.

  Oriana thought, shall I just give it an almighty shove?

  But what if it breaks?

  She pushed the cot gently, very gently.

  Feels a bit wobbly. That can’t be right.

  She pressed down on the base with even pressure. There was absolutely no give.

  She stared and stared at the instructions. Picture after picture of bolts, looking like bullets, flying towards holes. Planks called A. Struts called B. Uprights called C. As easy as ABC. Helpful little arrows pointing this way and that. They might as well have been instructions for the Tower of Babel. She stared at the page. Hieroglyphics.

  There was a knock at the door. It was Ben.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘A minute! Just a minute or two – please.’

  Oriana was irritable and cross and in Ben’s bloody nursery and he didn’t like it. He knocked again and this time turned the handle and came in. Cat behind him. Oriana was sitting there, flushed and harassed. The cot for their baby was almost built, almost right but unnervingly skewed like the optically distorted drawings of Escher.

  ‘I wanted it all ready for when you got back.’

  Ben was frowning at it. Cat looked as if she was about to cry.

  ‘Where’s the rocker?’ said Cat. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘There.’ She picked her way over the scatter of instructions, over the tangl
e of Oriana and removed the laptop, duvet, sweatshirt and two paperbacks from the new chair. ‘Look, Ben,’ she said, sitting herself down and setting it in gentle motion. It bashed the wall. It was too close. But there was too much else going on in the room to move it. No space.

  Oriana wanted to be miles away. Away from the stupid faulty cot, from their lovingly designed nursery, from Cat and Ben who should be admiring their new rocking chair, just the two of them.

  I don’t belong here. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t want to be here.

  ‘I’m sorry – I just wanted to surprise you.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Ben, who didn’t sound as if it was. ‘It’s just – Cat and I had planned to put it together ourselves. This weekend. Easier with two.’

  ‘Bit of a daft rite of passage – but a key one, nevertheless,’ Cat butted in. ‘Feathering the nest – bed for the baby – fruits of our labour. You know?’

  ‘One of the final finishing touches. I quite like doing things like that,’ Ben said diplomatically. ‘But it was a kind thought.’

  He could see where Oriana had gone wrong. It was an easy mistake to make. He looked over to Cat sitting still on her new chair that was unrockable for the time being. And Oriana, sitting at his feet looking miserable. Still here, in his nursery. Still here when they had little over six weeks to go.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you and Oriana go and relax downstairs – I’ll have a fiddle with this.’

  Downstairs, neither Oriana nor Cat could really relax.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Oriana kept saying.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Cat, who looked really tired and a bit pale.

  ‘The best-laid plans – and all that.’

  ‘Please don’t worry,’ Cat said. The baby wedged a limb under her ribs. She winced and shifted.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Oriana asked.

  ‘Just a bit uncomfortable.’

  It took Ben another hour, and his electric drill and a little wood-filler, to make the cot right. Finally, he came downstairs.

  ‘Mrs York?’ he said. ‘It’s done. Come and see.’ He held his hand out to Cat, to help her up. Calm and unflustered. Giving her a tender kiss. His arm around her shoulder; protective, loving. Leading her back up to the nursery. Leaving Oriana where she was. Oriana shrank into the sofa. Then she tiptoed into the kitchen. She looked in the fridge and, though it was full, it was like the elements of an impossible equation. What plus what goes with what to make a nice meal? She really wanted to cook them something. She wanted to do something nice, something conciliatory. She wanted to do something well. But she felt hopeless and she hated it.

  Cat and Ben readily accepted her excuse that she had a cracking headache and wasn’t hungry and Oriana took herself upstairs. She glanced at the cot shyly. It looked perfect. She put her hand on it. It was steady. But as much as she was relieved, she was dispirited. The rocking chair was in the same place and she felt reluctant to put her mark anywhere else in their nursery by moving it. It meant that, when she put out her bedding, she was cramped between it and the cot.

  She sat cross-legged, her back against the wall. She checked her phone. Ashlyn had responded to Oriana’s earlier text of heartfelt congratulations.

  I know! I’m all grown up! Axxx

  Ashlyn now engaged to lovely Eric with whom she’d been steady for some time. Oriana thought about it. All grown up. It was true. A proper grown-up. Just like Cat and Ben who were expecting a lovingly planned child within a stable relationship. And, in the distant background of her life, even Casey too. Weddings and babies and mortgages and jobs. Paving a path ahead. Being able to build for the future. Embracing responsibility and acting your age.

  And look at me! Just look at me!

  Just then, her life seemed personified by the scrunch of borrowed bedding laid out on the floor of someone else’s room. She felt ashamed. She knew she had no business being in that room, in that house. They were saints, Cat and Ben, saints. They’d never once made her feel unwelcome or a burden in the way her mother had. Not even today, when she’d practically broken their baby’s cot, ruined their plans and used their new chair as a dumping station.

  Mi casa su casa.

  But for Christ’s sake I’m in the way in their nursery.

  She had to do what was right – and the right thing to do was to do right by them. She must leave and give them their space, privacy and time to prepare for their new little family.

  Oriana curled embryonically on the floor. Gradually, it struck her that her decision had little to do with altruism. Her decision to leave was not driven by her wish to afford them space and privacy. All the little gestures Cat and Ben made instinctively to one another. The sweet looks, the tenderness, the thoughtfulness, the helping hand and sentence-finishing. The cosiness. The nub of it was that Cat and Ben’s life – and Ashlyn’s – inadvertently amplified what she didn’t have.

  My life is as much a mess as theirs is sorted.

  It made her feel embarrassed, humiliated. She felt a bit pathetic.

  Then she thought, but that’s not it. Not entirely.

  She stayed stock-still, as if the knotting emotions were whispers in a strange tongue. She listened hard to how she truly felt. And she knew that the overriding emotion was pain. Pure pain. Their togetherness caused her this pain.

  I have to do something about this pain.

  She thought, everyone’s growing up around me. I’m just this girl in a whirl of what to do.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  There was a slim chance, thought Malachy, that Robin might have forgotten he’d even painted it. He was sitting on the sofa, with the portrait of Rachel in front of him, balanced on his knee like a child. He’d looked at it almost daily since the little de la Mare sisters had found it and, though it was now dry and familiar, Malachy found it no less disquieting. It wasn’t just the unfinished, compromised area of the neck; the painting was twisted and contorted deep beneath the surface details. The mashing of the paint around the neck simply added a heavy and dark symbolism to it. Badly executed. This woman had been badly executed. A disturbing, fucked-up, messy execution.

  Malachy shuddered. Out of nowhere, he vividly recalled Rachel bursting into his home, running straight in through the never-locked door. The family had been eating their evening meal; it was later than normal for a school day because he’d had an away rugby match. He remembered that. It was dessert time when Rachel flew in. His mother’s beautiful æbleskiver – apple fritters – a Danish delicacy, round and little and light, dusted with icing sugar. Usually chatty, his family always fell silent when eating this dish because it was just so ambrosial. But then in charged Rachel, fear and excitement, panic and delight graffitied across her face.

  ‘He’s going to kill me!’

  The pervasive emotion that surged from her was exhilaration, not terror. That’s how she and Robin lived their life, always scrabbling to cling to the height of drama. It was as if they dared each other to hold a precarious pose on a cliff edge. Jump. Don’t jump. I’m going to jump – just you watch, you bastard.

  ‘He loves me enough to kill me!’

  How she’d hurled herself against the peace of their evening meal that night; like a bird trapped indoors, flying at full pelt straight into a windowpane.

  Malachy rested the painting against the back cushion of the sofa, as if wanting Rachel to calm down, to catch her breath and think about what she’d just said in front of two young boys, one thirteen, one ten.

  He went to the kitchen, not because he had wanted anything, just to be away from the painting. He sat at the table and sighed heavily through his nose as he shook his head. Loving someone enough to kill them? What tosh! That’s not love! Rachel had always seemed so proud of the extremes of emotion that she and Robin could elicit from each other.

  ‘Totally fucked up,’ Malachy said out loud. ‘As twisted as your neck in that painting.’ He went back into the living room, hands on hips, staring at Rachel. ‘Your poor daughter,’ he said to th
e canvas. And then his voice was edged with a hiss. ‘You should be ashamed,’ he said, ‘both of you.’ He turned away from the painting, pulled instead back into the memory of that mealtime all those years ago.

  Rachel had circumnavigated their table like a dervish. He’ll kill me he’ll kill me he’ll kill me! She was triumphant. And there, silent in the doorway (how long had she been there?) ten-year-old Oriana looking from her mother to the æbleskiver. Rachel – boasting about the level of impassioned hatred her husband had for her. Oriana – gazing at the Bedwells and the plate of fritters as if wondering what it took to instil such order in a family, to achieve such a balanced mealtime, to be nourished by such home-made sweetness. Harmony – how do you build such harmony? Had Jette and Orlando designed the blueprint?

  ‘Mum?’

  Even now, Malachy remembered how Oriana’s soft little voice shattered through the commotion as if it was the sound barrier.

  No one else had seen her until that moment. Only me.

  He thought about the extreme effort and presence of mind it must have taken for his parents to beam over their everyday smiles as if to say oh look! Oriana’s popped in for a fritter!

  ‘I love my parents,’ he told the portrait of Rachel pointedly. ‘They are good people.’

  ‘Mum?’

  Oriana’s voice from the past floated back through the years to him once again.

  It sounded so odd to hear Rachel being referred to directly as Mum. It was as if Oriana had her name wrong. Side by side with Jette, in his mind’s eye, Malachy looks now from his mother to Rachel, from his mother to Rachel. Rachel – a mother?

  ‘Go back!’ Rachel had screamed. ‘Go!’

  So, without a fritter, Oriana had no option but to return to the man who loved her mother enough to kill her.

  Malachy shuddered. He remembered how Jette had hugged him for a little longer that night, how his father’s customary pat on the head had softened into a stroke of his hair.

  ‘I don’t want you here,’ he said under his breath to the painting. ‘This is my home now and you’re no longer welcome.’ He took it and left the apartment, walking through the Corridor, swinging the canvas as if it was a piece of board he was going to chuck onto the rubbish. ‘You can sod off back to Robin – let him kill you, for all I care.’