The Way Back Home

by Freya North

  In separate rooms they were both listening to the song again. The relevance of the lyrics now striking both of them. The years and years between them and what had happened. And so it was a lonely futility that marked the end of their day.

  He knows that she’s so sad

  She knows the goods turned bad

  He knows that she’s so sad

  She knows the clocks don’t turn back

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  ‘Oriana?’

  It was her mother and it came as a total shock. She had barely thought of her since she last saw her almost two months ago. They’d spoken just the once in that time, which was back to the regularity of their contact when Oriana had been living abroad. Now her mother’s voice brittled right through her, threatening the spring in her step created by the job interview she’d just floated out of.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  Oriana was in the centre of the city, off Tudor Square. ‘I’ve just had a job interview. I think they really liked me. It’s an amazing company.’

  ‘Yes, but where are you?’

  ‘Sheffield.’

  ‘You’re in Sheffield.’ It was a statement underscored with immense irritation.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What are you doing there?’

  ‘I just told you? About the amazing job interview?’ Oriana saw the Winter Gardens ahead of her and walked there quickly. Peace amongst the plants, just what she needed. And oxygen. Her mother’s voice had a toxicity similar to carbon dioxide.

  ‘Sheffield.’ Her mother sounded appalled. Did she hate the city – or the fact that it hadn’t crossed her daughter’s mind to update her on her whereabouts?

  ‘Yes,’ said Oriana. It was sad, really, that she hadn’t thought to inform her own mother about this change in her life.

  ‘Well, could you get yourself out of Sheffield. All your stuff is here.’

  Oriana racked her brains for what on earth she had left at her mother’s. A pair of jeans perhaps? Was her presence so negatively intrusive that her mother wanted them out of the house? Oriana wished it was Bernard who’d phoned her. Why couldn’t her mother have had a histrionic flounce and said to Bernard you phone her! You tell her to come and get her jeans!

  ‘I’m pretty sure I took everything, Mum.’

  ‘Oh yes – oh yes! You took everything, didn’t you!’ The sarcastic hysteria in her mother’s voice rose like the spikes of an ECG. It was the same tone she used to use with Robin and it hurt Oriana’s ears. ‘There is a truck blocking our road,’ she continued. ‘And it’s brought everything from the United States.’

  Oriana sat down heavily, aware of the irony that she was surrounded by thorny, twisted plants. All her stuff. Shit. The same welling emotion struck her now as it had then, when the truck had trundled off out of sight with the essential pieces of her life. Fragments of Oriana in a plain crate, sailing the ocean to find her again. She’d given away and sold so much – but there were a few key items that she’d never part with. She was defined by every weft of the vintage patchwork quilt, each turned corner of a book’s page, every dovetail joint in the investment pieces of furniture she’d saved hard for. How often had she given herself a good talking-to in that oversized mirror with the gesso frame? And escaped into the benign landscape of the oil painting she’d picked up at the Flea? And her Specialized bike that she’d ridden miles on? And the desk at which she’d studied and drawn and shaped her career?

  ‘What am I to do?’ Her mother’s wail brought her back to the present. ‘We can’t have it here! We have no storage! This isn’t bloody Windward, you know!’

  And then a thought surged through Oriana like the perfect wave, lifting her up and over her mother’s squallish angst, delivering her to a place where everything was calm, magical and as strange as a fairy tale.

  ‘It’s OK, Mum,’ Oriana said. ‘Can you tell the driver to wait just five minutes? I need to make a phone call.’

  Malachy had rewritten Chapter Seventeen many, many times. Chapters Sixteen and Eighteen were fine – he was very happy with them. But Chapter Seventeen just wasn’t right. The prose was clunky, the dialogue unconvincing, the leaps in plot pretty ridiculous. He sat back in his chair and thanked the Lord that it was quiet in the gallery and no visitors could see him tearing his hair out, hissing for fuck’s sake at the laptop screen while stabbing at the keys as if that would teach the words a lesson.

  ‘Yes?’ he answered the gallery phone, irritated.

  Oriana was a little taken aback. She’d left the spiky plants for a more genial area of soft and feathery ferns. Malachy’s fractious voice made her coil into herself, like a frond of bracken by which she sat.

  ‘White Peak Art Space – yes?’ He spoke as if to a hoax caller. Or an imbecile.

  ‘It’s me,’ Oriana apologized.

  There was a momentary pause.

  ‘It’s Oriana.’

  ‘I know it’s you.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Just pissed off with my stupid novel.’

  Oriana had to smile. Had there ever been a time when Malachy’s novel had caused him anything other than extremes of emotion? She thought back to what he’d told her when they’d talked late into the night. That, for him, it wasn’t about getting published, it was about telling the story. Rejection slips from publishers had bluntly extinguished his teenage dreams of being Derbyshire’s John Irving. Selling art had been something he’d been good at during his university vacations, when galleries were happy to employ him because customers wanted to buy from him. What he’d assumed to be a secondary career choice had soon become the sensible thing to do. But if his business brain was in the gallery and art was in his heart, writing his novel still nourished his soul. And sometimes tortured him too.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Oriana told Malachy. ‘Just read one of the chapters you do like.’

  Malachy nodded at the phone, temporarily soothed by familiar advice she’d dispensed verbatim so regularly a long time ago. Now, as then, she wasn’t wrong.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, as if it had been him phoning her for advice.

  ‘I need a favour,’ she said quickly, worrying he was going to end the call. ‘A hulking great huge one.’

  Malachy wasn’t sure whether he was flattered or unnerved. It wasn’t about Jed, was it?

  ‘A crate of my belongings has just turned up in Hathersage, outside my mother’s house. She’s popping hernias as we speak.’

  ‘You want to store it in the cellar?’ It was said so matter-of-factly that it dispensed with the concept of it being much of a favour at all, let alone a liberty.

  ‘I’m in Sheffield. I just had a job interview.’

  Malachy nodded at the phone again. ‘You want me to close up the gallery? And nip back to Windward? And unpack your worldlies for you?’ He paused. ‘You want me to leave my novel mid-chapter? Forgo all potential sales today?’

  ‘No!’ Oriana was appalled. ‘I just wanted to know if it was OK, in theory. I need to phone them and rearrange the delivery. I won’t trouble you – you needn’t be there. There’s not a huge amount. I just thought –’

  He smiled. She was still just as easy to wind up. ‘It’s fine, silly. It’s fine.’

  Oriana unfurled a coiled finger of bracken. Malachy calling her silly had always been a comfort in times of duress. ‘I’d better go,’ she said. In her mind’s eye, her mother was stamping and stropping and cursing her daughter this very moment. ‘Thank you, Malachy. And reread your good chapters. Bye.’

  ‘Bye then.’

  The shipping company took Oriana’s crate away, with an arrangement to deliver two days later, on the Friday morning. Her mother didn’t want to speak to her.

  Jed wasn’t keen on lending Oriana his car. Yes, she could drive him in to work and collect him. But what he really wanted was to prevent her going to Windward at all. If she went there, all t
he public-relations work he’d done promoting the merits of a new life in Sheffield might unravel. If she went there, she might clamber about her memories the way she used to clamber up and around the cedar. And she used to spend hours and hours doing that. Who might she want to be when she surfaced? And if she went to Windward, would Malachy be there?

  It was over three weeks since she’d moved into his spare room, but he hadn’t once told her how he felt – still felt – about her. He hadn’t made a move on her. He’d come so close then retreated, spending wakeful hours in bed, turned on by her proximity, frustrated by his fantasies, silently and urgently powering his semen out of him so that he might at least sleep.

  And he’d steered clear of even mentioning Malachy. It wasn’t so much an elephant in the room as a can of worms in the corner. If he could just keep the lid on it, he could establish and cement all that the present held for the future and make the past seem redundant.

  ‘I’ll pay for a tank of petrol,’ Oriana said, hugging her hands around her cup of morning tea.

  ‘No no.’ Jed brushed away her suggestion as he swept the spilled flakes of breakfast cereal off the table and into the palm of his hand. ‘It’s fine. Just drive carefully.’

  Then he looked at her directly and she saw all the steel in Sheffield shoot through his eyes.

  ‘Maybe you’ll see your father when you’re there.’ It was below the belt but, he felt, a legal move. You hate Windward, remember? You hate it.

  ‘Malachy?’

  He didn’t appear to be at home though the scent of toast was still fresh in the kitchen and the kettle was hot.

  ‘Hullo?’

  Oriana walked through the apartment, calling out softly every few steps or so. Her drawings of the house had gone from the table in the ballroom. His bedroom door was closed. The navy pullover was still over the arm of the sofa. On various surfaces there were used mugs yet to be taken into the kitchen. Next to the Eames, the newspapers from last weekend were in a scatter on the floor. She went back into the hallway and opened the door that connected with the cavernous interior corridor.

  As she headed for the cellar, she thought about the stories she’d shared with Paula as they’d walked back from not quite going into Louis’. It was as if drifts and details still lingered, whispering at her as she walked. Some to step over, others to turn towards. The bounce and thwack of green tennis ball against willow bat. The skid of roller skates and the tumble of limbs in the ensuing crash. The puff on a spliff, the echo of giggle and snorts. Hiding a folded five-pound note in crumbled masonry and seeing who’d find it first. Forgetting where it was. Remembering weeks later and feeling rich. And it was here – right here – where he kissed me.

  Does Malachy remember this when he passes this point?

  How long ago did he decide that he’d rather forget?

  There was no door to the cellar, just oversized old hinges where once there had been one. There was light down there, the weak but warm glow from old bare bulbs which illuminated little but created a whole cast of strange ominous shadows. The unmistakable smell of chalky dampness seeped up the deep stone steps. Carefully and slowly, Oriana descended. At the bottom, she stood stock-still and just looked around. Monsters under dust sheets and piles of ghostly crockery. A table with a velvety layer of dust, two candelabra laced by cobwebs and a chair at one end pulled out a little as if Miss Havisham had just left. Boxes and crates marked with names long forgotten and others not known.

  ‘Boo!’

  Oriana leapt. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ She hit Malachy and clung to him and laughed at herself and cursed him.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t resist.’ In the half-light of this shaded world of what had been forgotten and what was there to be kept, Malachy’s face was like a charcoal portrait. He could feel her penetrating gaze and he turned away from it, quickly touching the ribbon around his head. He had thought about not bothering with his eyepatch; it was dark enough down here that shadows would provide protection – for her as much as for himself.

  It was so dusty. He cleared his throat.

  ‘There’s plenty of space – as you can see. Do you want to clear yourself a specific area?’

  She looked around, peering into the gloom. She was relieved to see that there was no new order; no individual plots. However closed off and privatized the apartments above might now be, however formally delineated the car parking, down here in the cellar it was as gloriously disorganized and communal as it ever had been.

  ‘I’ll just fit in and around everyone else,’ she told him.

  ‘What time are they arriving?’

  ‘About ten-thirty.’

  ‘Are you sure you can manage on your own?’

  ‘Yes – absolutely.’

  ‘Because I’d better head off to the gallery now.’

  ‘I know. Go. You go. I’ll be fine. It’s not like I have to lock up when I leave.’

  ‘Why are we whispering?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Might you kiss me, Malachy?

  No. I’m going to turn away now. I’m going.

  ‘How’s Jed?’ Malachy’s normal voice, and the blunt timbre of his brother’s name, sounded abrupt now they were out and in the Corridor.

  ‘He’s fine,’ said Oriana. ‘He said he’d call you about coming to Sheffield for a drink.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Malachy and, as they walked, he hated himself for wondering have they? Are they? Perversely, he threw an image into his mind of them together, Oriana and Jed; together as they were today, and as they had been when they were fifteen.

  Oriana stopped at the place where Malachy had kissed her, willing him to stop too, for the significance to hit him, for him to retrace his steps and join her. To recreate the stuff of dreams and what memories had been made from. But he just kept walking.

  ‘Malachy?’ she called after him. Finally he turned. They were a few yards apart but she didn’t want to leave that spot. She swept her hands out in front of her, all around her, as if to display where she was. She didn’t have to say, remember? Do you remember? Do you know where this is? Malachy’s heart heaved and surged and hurt. She was looking at him beseechingly, as if shyly pleading with him not to forget. He looked at her and let his breath go.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, though he only mouthed it. He held out his hand. ‘Come on.’ She walked slowly over to him, a little downcast, slipped her hand into his and let him lead her back out into the daylight.

  * * *

  The central sash window rattled as the lorry rumbled across the driveway and round to the side of the house. It could have been a tank for all the noise it created and the commotion it left in its wake. There were people whistling and shouting, there was the clang and slam of metal chains and vehicle doors, the blunt honking signifying the lorry’s reversing, the vulgar hiss of air brakes.

  ‘Some of us are trying to bloody paint!’ Robin yelled out of the window.

  Was someone moving in? Moving out?

  ‘Oh dear God,’ he cursed. ‘What in the name of Christ is going on?’

  He went through to the kitchen and looked out of the window to see a small forklift truck trundling down a ramp off the lorry. Above the din of the engine, three men were shouting as if they were fresh from Babel. With a groan and a wail, the lorry seemed to lower, like an elephant sinking to its knees.

  ‘How can I paint? How can I paint?’

  Robin hammered his frustration at the window, banging until finally the men looked up. There they saw an old man with furious hair thumping at the glass, raising a clenched fist at them. They could see how his mouth was twisting around all manner of inaudible abuse. They put their hands to their ears as if to say, speak up, mate! We can’t hear you! So he struck at the window and swore and brandished his fist while the men grinned at him in good-humoured joshing.

  ‘What is going on?’ Oriana came around the side of the lorry.

  ‘Some old boy’s getting his knickers in a twist,’ the for
eman laughed. But that particular old boy was now stock-still at his kitchen window, his arm still raised but immobilized. Similarly, Oriana faced the men in a frozen gawp before slowly turning and lifting her gaze until her eyes locked with Robin’s. She wasn’t sure if she was holding her breath or whether she just couldn’t breathe. She was unable to move. While the men, oblivious, unloaded the crate, Oriana and her father stared at each other.

  Robin’s fist slowly unclenched. His wrist rotated and, like petals unfolding, his fingers fanned out and his hand moved from side to side. A small gesture of greeting, like a splice of turquoise sky through storm clouds.

  As Oriana directed the men where to put what, as she drove back to Sheffield, as Jed chatted away in the pub that night, she thought of the missed moment with Malachy in the Corridor. But as she lay in her bed and felt her body soften into slumber, she could think of only one thing.

  My father waved at me.

  And I waved back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  It struck Oriana that, when she’d been living at Cat’s, she’d experienced an agoraphobia of sorts; not wanting to go out, preferring to stay in, to hunker down and hole up. Perhaps it had something to do with Cat’s place being very much a home. Initially this had been a great comfort to Oriana, having left hers in the United States and then finding the antithesis to exist at her mother’s. Eventually though, Cat’s set-up rubbed a newly exposed nerve in Oriana so raw that it became untenable, too painful, for her to stay. Every framed photograph dotted here and there at the Yorks’ could have been – perhaps should have been – of Oriana. Oriana and husband. Oriana and husband at jolly family get-togethers. Mr and Mrs on holiday. And with friends. The long, healthy history of Mr and Mrs. And the pride of place to the scans of their unborn child – from kidney bean to Baby Suckathumb in extraordinary ultrasonic images. Cat’s home was testimony to someone who was just like Oriana but who, unlike Oriana, had made clear decisions and wise choices, got her life together and was enjoying its bounty. It didn’t make her love Cat any the less, but it did amplify the disappointment she felt in – and for – herself.