The Way Back Home. Freya North

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      ‘How did she know you work here?’

      ‘She didn’t.’ Malachy paused. Jed was visibly flummoxed. ‘She literally showed up out of the blue,’ he told him. ‘She said she’s back from the States and living with her mother.’ Jed was speechless, staring at her father’s paintings as if they held a clue, if not an actual answer. ‘She was surprised I’m not a best-selling author. I completely forgot to ask her what she does.’

      ‘Did she leave a number?’

      ‘No.’ Malachy thought about it. ‘I wonder if Robin knows.’ He looked at Robin’s paintings too. He turned to Jed. ‘Did you pop in on him today?’

      Jed hit his forehead. ‘Sorry – sorry. I didn’t. No.’

      ‘I’ll call in when we get back,’ said Malachy.

      ‘Will you tell him? About Oriana?’

      Malachy thought about it. ‘No,’ he said.

      ‘Does he talk about her?’

      ‘Not really – sometimes he says her name, but in a disembodied way, as if it isn’t connected to a person, let alone his daughter. As if he just likes the taste of the word on his tongue.’

      ‘Did she –’ Jed wondered about this conversation, how to cut it off yet know everything before he did so. ‘Did she seem happy? Pleased to see you?’

      Malachy thought about it. ‘I’d say she seemed flabbergasted.’ Then he thought about it. Terrified would have been a better word. ‘But she hadn’t changed, not really.’

      ‘You have,’ said Jed. ‘She hasn’t seen you since—’

      ‘I know,’ said Malachy. ‘I’m aware of that.’

      Jed and Malachy drove back to Windward in their separate cars, privately picking over all the tiny details. From the silt of the past, undisturbed for so long, the seed bank of memories and dormant feelings was awakened. They were both acutely aware that if they talked about her, about what had happened, they’d spend the rest of the weekend doing so but getting nowhere. They also knew there was even less point pondering her return and mulling the what-ifs of her being here. Her absence had brought them closer. Her reappearance, however, could drive them apart.

      Malachy parked precisely, Jed at a hasty slant across his brother’s car. His boot was crammed with shopping and they took the bags into the house. As they put the items away, they read out what each was, just as their mother used to. It gave a rhythm, a ritualization to it; a pointless family tradition that, when it was needed, carried meaning and comfort.

      ‘Was forty quid enough?’

      ‘Was it hell.’

      ‘I have cash.’

      ‘Forget about it.’

      ‘I’ll go and see Robin now.’

      ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

      ‘No – you’re fine, Jed.’

      ‘OK. Maybe I’ll swing by tomorrow. I’ll get the dinner ready – how about that?’

      ‘Sounds good. I won’t be long.’

      Alone in the apartment, Jed sat down heavily. Why hadn’t he said, I saw her too? He could have been breezy, nonchalant even. She swung by the house! We had a quick chat! Why keep it from his brother when so much time had passed and after so much had happened? But Jed knew why. All he’d ever wanted to do was to keep Oriana all to himself.

      Malachy left the apartment by the inner door connecting with the interior service corridor. He never used Robin’s front door. It would alarm him; Robin didn’t accept visitors any more. The Corridor was like a conduit between the private worlds within the apartments and the lives in the house over the decades. From staff in the eighteenth century going strictly and quickly about their business, to the scamper and larking of the children of the artists meandering and playing for hours on end nearly two hundred years later. Nowadays, though, it was the echoes of its past that rang out the most; the newer residents rarely used it.

      As Malachy walked, it was impossible not to hear Oriana squealing her way along it on a tricycle, then a bike firstly with and then without stabilizers, soon enough her roller skates, and ultimately her skateboard. Malachy smiled, conjuring her up at the far end bowling for him while he waited right at the other end in full cricket whites with his bat at the ready. Out of the gloom the tennis balls came hurtling, him fending them off as if they were missiles while Oriana called, four! six! a hole in one! rounder! And, if she caught one, bull’s eye!

      Teach me not to throw like a girl.

      The recall so vivid it rooted him to the spot. He remembered how he’d come behind her, slipped his hand down to her wrist, tried to show her how to twist, flick. She’d tried and failed, growled at herself and stamped her feet, impatient at her ineptitude. Hurling balls here and there. It doesn’t work, Malachy – I can’t do it! I throw like a girl! And that was the first time he’d kissed her.

      Malachy called through as he entered Robin’s place, though the sombre groan of the door and echoing thunk as he closed it would have announced his arrival anyway. There was nothing wrong with Robin’s hearing but it depended on which world he was in whether he actually registered it or not.

      ‘Hi, Robin!’

      Silence.

      Malachy whistled casually as he made his way from room to room. Not in the kitchen. Bathroom door open; towels on the rail, spirit-level straight. Study door closed. Malachy knocked, poked his head around. The day bed, with a tartan blanket flung back as if someone had suddenly become overheated; the swivel chair facing Malachy as if someone had only just now left it. The walls a latticework of shelves, bent and bowed with the weight of all the books and, in the spaces between the books and the next shelf, piles of papers, brochures, catalogues and magazines. The room could do with some air. And then Oriana’s room. Today, he felt he did want to see in there – but what if Robin had renovated it the way Malachy had Jed’s old room? What if nothing had changed and even the quickest glimpse hurled him back through time to a period during which he was happiest and at his most miserable? He took his hand off the knob, walked on to the sitting room and through to Robin’s studio. He was in there, at the easel behind a canvas, and Malachy could only see his legs and the legs of the stool on which he sat.

      ‘Hullo, Robin.’

      Robin peered around the side of the canvas and stared for a moment.

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘It’s Malachy – I just thought I’d pop in.’

      ‘Well, fuck off.’ Robin disappeared behind the canvas, muttering.

      ‘I’ll go and make you some soup, shall I?’ Malachy continued. He glanced around the room. There was no sign of any meals having been taken. All the mugs that were on various surfaces were crammed with paintbrushes and palette knives, pheasant feathers, knitting needles, flat wide pencils and small branches with curled and crusted leaves still clinging on. Tea bags in dried-out little dumps on surfaces here and there; on the windowsills cigarette butts balanced upright.

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