The Way Back Home. Freya North

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       CHAPTER EIGHT

      ‘You were sniffing Natalie Fox.’

      ‘There isn’t a sign saying “No Sniffing”.’

      ‘Oils should be sniffed, sculptures touched.’

      ‘Is this your gallery?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘You own it? It’s your career?’

      ‘Yes. You look – disappointed?’

      ‘It’s – it’s impressive. Congrats. But – what about being an author?’

      ‘A teenage daydream. But I still write. Still writing that novel.’

      Silence. You don’t have to stare – but it’s a bit obvious you’re looking everywhere but at Malachy.

      ‘Is it?’ Oriana touched her own eye, as gently as if she was touching Malachy.

      He shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago,’ he said softly.

      ‘But –’ Oriana wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear. She didn’t know whether Malachy would rather not talk about it. She was unsure whether it was impertinent for her, of all people, to ask. She hadn’t seen him for such a long time. And here he was, here was Malachy, changed and yet unchanged.

      ‘I lost it,’ he said in the same gentle tone. ‘My eye, my sight.’ He watched how she nodded but couldn’t look at him.

      ‘Sixty per cent of injured eyes become phthisical and require either evisceration or enucleation,’ he continued quickly, as if medical facts made it less personal, as if being in the majority made it somehow less severe.

      ‘I – I don’t know what those words mean,’ she struggled, staring hard at the floor.

      ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

      And Oriana thought how ridiculous it was that the word should come from Malachy. The constriction in her throat made it impossible for her to say so.

      ‘The terms, the minutiae,’ Malachy qualified, ‘they’re just part of my lexicon – I forget.’

      Oriana glanced at him, then away, then to the door. Suddenly, Malachy really didn’t want her to go, not yet, not now she was back after such a very long time.

      ‘Beyond twenty feet, everyone sees the world as if they have only one eye,’ he said. He lifted her wrist and placed her hand over her eye. Pointing for her to look at the back of the gallery, he lifted her hand off, then on. He needed to change the subject, draw her back from the past to right here, in his gallery. An extraordinary thing that they should be marvelling about. ‘You’re back – from the States.’ It was a fact, not a question.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘How long for?’

      ‘I’m back for good.’

      Just then, to Oriana, the word seemed preposterous. Life on both sides of the Atlantic suddenly seemed ridiculously complicated. Where could she run to next? Australia?

      ‘Or for the time being,’ she added.

      ‘And are you in the area – for the time being?’

      She nodded. ‘Hathersage.’

      ‘At your mother’s?’ He couldn’t contain his surprise and it made her giggle. He had her gaze once again.

      She rolled her eyes at herself and shrugged. Pathetic really. Thirty-four years old and living with her mother.

      ‘And are you OK, Oriana? Are you all right?’

      He always knew. He always knew when she wasn’t.

      Malachy watched as she hauled herself to her tallest and pulled the widest smile possible across her face.

      ‘Oh, I’m good,’ she said, with drama and drawl to her inflection.

      And then the gallery phone rang. And an elderly couple came in. Followed by a father and a teenage boy. And Malachy thought this is very, very bad timing. All of it. He knew that as soon as he turned away from her, returned to the demands of his day, Oriana would disappear. In the blink of an eye, she’d be gone. That’s what had happened all those years ago. Now you see her, now you don’t.