The Way Back Home (13 page)

‘I’ll help,’ said Cat, noticing. It had immediately evoked a barrage of incidents from their youth.

‘I just can’t do goodbyes!’ Rachel said suddenly, actually swiping the back of her hand across her brow. ‘I just can’t.’

I know, thought Oriana. Oh, I know. You don’t do goodbyes. You just go.

Her mother hugged her hard, spikily, too tight, no softness, no give.

‘Bernard – you do it!’ she said. So Bernard enfolded Oriana into the gentlest of bear hugs and kissed the top of her head.

‘I meant her bags, Bernard!
Her bags
. You take them to the car.’

‘We’re fine,’ Oriana, still within Bernard’s embrace, told Rachel. ‘We’re good. We understand.’

Bernard again liked her ambiguity and, when Oriana looked back up the path as Cat closed the boot on her bags, he was still standing at the doorway. As they set off, she was pleased to see Bernard there still. And he waved and winked.

* * *

Ten weeks. Oriana lay on the futon on the floor of the new nursery ashamed that, in her prime childbearing years, she actually had no idea what Ten Weeks till Due Date actually involved. How long would Cat be happy for her to stay? Oriana felt slightly mortified that Cat would be the one going off to work while she’d be the one staying at home, with her feet up. That seemed a little skewed. Yet Cat and Ben had implored her to take all the time she needed.

Ben’s a doctor, remember. He said you could stay. And he knows what’s best for his wife and unborn child.

Under bedding that smelled fragrantly soft, Oriana looked at the paper border dancing a merry jig of pastel jungle animals all around the room. Say all the time she needed was more than ten weeks? In a fidget of tiredness that precluded sleep, Oriana tried to synchronize timetables for all of them. At Six Weeks to Go, Cat would be finishing work. Should Oriana ship out then or would her old friend be most grateful of her company at that time, of someone to help hoick her out of her chair and rub her ankles or the small of her back or iron tiny clothes and fold lots and lots of bouncy white towels? At Four and a Half Weeks to Go – that might well be when Cat would suddenly crave daytime silence and solitude. But that was probably when Ben would be most busy tying up loose ends in advance of paternity leave. So maybe that would be a crucial time to stay put? Would Cat perhaps want Oriana to stay all the way to ten weeks, just in case she went into labour and Ben wasn’t there to drive her to the hospital? And what if the baby had no intention of sticking to the countdown? Say the baby came early? Really early. And then she thought, if the baby could give the parents little notice of its arrival, could the parents also give me scant notice of my departure?

She wanted to think, all in good time. But even now on her first night, so comfortable after a joyful evening during which shared reminiscing – of their pasts both in the UK and the USA – gave her a sense of solidity, the countdown had already begun.

Benign lions. Cuddly tigers. Plump bouncing elephants and jovial giraffes. Oriana gazed at the wallpaper frieze. Two by two they ringed the room, ready to comfort and guard Baby. Smiling crocodiles, with fluttery eyelashes and Hook’s watch invisible but ticking, unmistakably ticking, deep inside.

This made Malachy’s job hard. Harder than a week of slow sales. He gave each item in the portfolio a considered look, though he could have leafed through it in moments, had the young artist not been at his side, expectant. They came into the gallery unannounced, uninvited, perhaps two or three times a month, throughout the year. Some were fresh out of art college, some had been painting for decades. Sometimes, it was the relatives of artists long dead, lugging in work they didn’t care for in the hope it would net them a fluke fortune. Once, a mother brought in her four-year-old’s daubings. It was very much this gallery they targeted – the reputation of the White Peak Art Space having grown over recent years. Ever since all that press about David Merifield being shortlisted for the Turner Prize – a local artist with no formal training who had brought his work in on spec and who Malachy had tirelessly championed. Today, though, there’d be no prizes, no wall space – and, realistically, not much of a future – for this artist.

‘I like to chew things,’ he told Malachy.

Until that moment, Malachy had assumed it was papier mâché stuck in globs to the boards. He peered closer. What
was
that? Well-masticated supermarket receipts apparently. And on that one? Enormous clumps of used chewing gum: pulled and twisted, then rolled in pencil filings and cigarette ash. Jesus, a chicken’s wishbone.

‘I thought you could write something like: Archie Dunfold likes to choose what he chews. Or maybe the other way around. Chews what he chooses.’

‘What’s this one called? Chew
bacca
?’ asked Malachy sarcastically, staring at pulverized cigarettes stuck to the board with stickers saying ‘Special Offer’.

‘Yes, it is!’ the artist said. ‘You see? You
get
me. I knew it. You get me.’

Christ alive, thought Malachy. He needs to be sectioned. ‘Leave it with me – I’ll have a think.’

The artist started walking away backwards saying cool! cool!

‘Your portfolio?’ Malachy said.

‘Oh – thought you just said to leave it with you?’

‘No – when I said that, I meant –’ Malachy thought, I do not want this person’s germs in my gallery a moment longer. ‘It’s best if you take it with you. I’ve seen it – it’s unforgettable.’

Oriana would be in stitches.

The thought came out of nowhere and stayed.

It’s just the sort of thing that would tickle her.

It was mid-week and, while the effects of the previous weekend were still acute, they were no longer constant and his thoughts for Oriana had softened. He’d never see her again anyway – so what point was there to feel anything other than a nostalgic tenderness towards her? His feelings for Jed, though, remained serrated; so sharp he had banished his brother from his thoughts for both their sakes.

He looked over at Robin’s work. People came from afar to see them. He’d had offers, some sizeable. One day, he’d accept one. He enjoyed the paintings, here on the walls of the gallery. He wasn’t entirely happy that the new one – of Rachel – lingered in the spare room facing the wall. Something happened to the paint when Robin transferred it from tube to canvas, when it mutated from medium to expression, from colour to meaning, from material to ephemeral. It was an alchemy of sorts. But it generated the opposite of gold, whatever that was. Even with Kate and Emma’s editing, there remained a darkness enmeshed within that work which not even the fingertips of a child could palliate.

Having tapped it against his chin whilst deep in thought, finally Malachy put his flashdrive into the computer. If there were no further interruptions from tobacco-chewing non-artists, and no more distractions of paintings in spare rooms, he intended to work on his novel. He’d had a productive evening the night before, reshaping the first quarter and introducing a new character. However, though the scene was set with a notepad and pencil to one side and a fresh cup of tea to the other, a cushion behind his back and his mobile phone on mute, the words on the screen blurred into a background pattern as a whorl of sweet recall swept over him.

He laughed out loud.

‘You mad thing,’ he said quietly, vividly seeing her again, as she’d been then.

Oriana had been struggling with
Hamlet
for her English GCSE.

‘Hamlet is
rubbish
,’ she’d been saying for months. ‘He’s a berk. And the play is crap!’

‘Oriana – that’s blasphemy.’

‘He gets his knickers in a twist the
whole
time.’

‘He’s Hamlet – he’s allowed to.’

‘He just bangs on and on. And he’s so morose.
To be or not to be
– well, my advice is
don’t
. Don’t bloody bother to bloody
be
, mate! Stop asking such pseudo philosophical questions and just piss off back to Wittenberg. Get over yourself! Get a life and for God’s sake don’t bloody live at home with your slag mum and evil stepdad.’

Malachy laughed now as he’d laughed then. He remembered exactly what he’d said to her.

‘You know – if you had the guts – you could write that in the exam. Perhaps hold off the expletives, though. A mate of mine – did you meet Jonno? – that’s how he won his place at Cambridge. He had to write an essay on courage. He put his name and candidate number at the top of four blank pages but didn’t write a thing. Then, on the very last line of the last page, he wrote
This is courage
.’

‘Do you dare me?’ Oriana asked, looking at him askance, sparkling at the thought.

‘I don’t need to,’ he said, slipping his hand into hers, ‘you’re the daring one.’

They’d walked through to the brook which demarcated the Windward boundary, taking the path the deer trod through the bluebells.
Always follow the path of least destruction
was a favourite saying of Malachy’s. He said it to Oriana again that day and she laughed and biffed him and said
oh shut up, Malachy. You and your deep-and-meaningfuls.

‘I’ll go easy on the swearing,’ she said, ‘in the essay – but I’ll write it in my own way. I’ll be true to how I feel.’

‘Always be true to how you feel,’ Malachy said.

‘You sound like Polonius –
to thine own self be true
,’ she groaned. ‘Polonius is a rubbish character anyway – Shakespeare must’ve run out of ideas and resorted to churning out a bunch of clichés.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be
…
Brevity is the soul of wit
– well, old Wills didn’t take note of that, did he!’

Malachy looked at her. Her face open, guileless, so very pretty.

‘You do know those so-called clichés came about because of the play? They didn’t exist before? Shakespeare coined them? There was, indeed,
method
in the
madness
?’

It was difficult to tell if she knew or not. They locked eyes. He came in close to her face, backed off a bit and scrutinized her expression. Did she know? Was she joshing? And then he saw it: just the most fleeting twitch of her top lip, a barely perceptible flare of her nostril. And then she laughed and punched his arm again and took his hand, weaving her fingers around his, and they walked on.

‘Just write with the passion you
feel
,’ Malachy told her. ‘Most students will regurgitate the teacher’s slant, play it safe. They don’t think for themselves. You’re different. By the way, you
are
going to do English A level, aren’t you?’

‘Well, if I must. But I’d rather run off with the circus.’ She sighed histrionically. She used to do that a lot, back then. ‘Yes, Malachy, I’ll be following in your footsteps,’ she said. To emphasize her point, she made much of dropping his hand, dropping behind him, linking her fingers lightly over the waistband of his jeans and stepping balletically into his footfalls as they walked on.

‘When do you get your results?’ she’d wanted to know.

‘A week before yours,’ he’d said over his shoulder.

‘Jed’s going to get ten A-starreds.’

‘I know.’

‘I hate him. I’ll probably get four A’s. Then a B for French. C’s for biology and geograwful. And my maths’ll be Unclassified.’

‘If you pass maths, I’ll buy you a present.’

‘If I fail, do I have to pay you?’

‘Yes.’

‘How much?’

‘Ten.’

‘Ten quid? Ten pee?’

‘Ten of these.’

And Malachy had turned suddenly and pulled Oriana close, his body pressed achingly against hers as he stroked her hair away from her face, his cool violet-grey eyes darkening with desire, holding her in an intense caught moment. The still point of the turning world – moments like these, that’s what he called them, because he’d done T. S. Eliot for A level. Dipping his face, finding her lips, brushing them gently with his until the kisses came true; instinctive, loaded, meaningful, crazy, urgent. Eighteen and fifteen.

When Malachy kissed Oriana and Oriana kissed Malachy, their age and inexperience stood for nothing. And when he touched her, wherever he touched her, the pleasure she felt sent a charge through his fingers, right through his body: skin, fibre, bones, organs. There was nothing more thrilling, more maddening, than her hands swooping over his back, holding on tight to his arms, slipping lightly down to dally over the mound swelling in excruciating desire behind his jeans.

‘I love you, Malachy,’ she whispered, her lips touching his ear lobe. But he pulled her hand away because the temptation, the insane feeling of pleasure locking with pain, was a bullet heading straight for regret and danger.

‘No, Oriana. Not yet,’ he said, enfolding her in his arms, her head tucked under his chin as he stared at the patterns on the black pine to avoid the subject that every neurone was screaming out for. ‘We just can’t.’

‘We so
can
,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s so stupid – sixteen! Who says! Who decides! The stupid government? Some frigid medical busybody? I’m in my sixteenth year, for God’s sake. I love you. It’s right. Hamlet – think of Hamlet, he was
thirty
.’

‘We’ll wait,’ he whispered.

They clung to each other.

‘Think of Ophelia!’ Oriana protested. ‘She was only fifteen.’

‘Actually, we don’t know her precise age,’ Malachy corrected.

And suddenly Oriana softened. ‘Well, Juliet was fourteen. And Polonius refers to Ophelia as a
green girl
. So
I’m
saying she’s fifteen – and
you’ve
just told me that my opinion counts.’

Back at the gallery, Malachy can see it again now, so vividly – how Oriana stuck out her tongue and stropped off ahead, lightly hitting the tree trunks with a stick as she passed.

Acting her age. Fifteen. With so much ahead of her.

Sitting at his computer, staring at the screen without seeing a word of his novel, Malachy felt the disconcerting welling of the ghost tear. He rarely cried, even as a child. Jed was the one far more at ease with emotion. But since losing an eye – it was the weirdest thing. His good eye remained dry and yet the sensation of tears in his left eye – the prickling buzz of them forming, the hot oiliness of their passage from the duct down his face, the release, the relief, the physical manifestation of feeling so much – was overwhelming. He slipped his finger up under his patch. Dry. Nothing. Nothing there at all. He’d never once cried for himself, for the half-light that had been his world for almost half his life. But today, at this vividly beautiful yet terrible taunt of a past that had promised so much, the secret tears came.