The Way Back Home - Freya North

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knew she’d never go back.

      Driving to her mother’s house was easier because she’d never lived there. There was little to recognize, nothing to flinch at; she was unknown and that was preferable to intrusive welcomes and waves, however warm and well meaning Blenthrop folk might be. The further she drove from her childhood home, the longer the space she could finally create between her ears and her shoulders. As she relaxed a little, the car seat felt more comfortable and her headache lifted. Really, jet lag had nothing to do with the tension and now that the anxiety had dissipated, Oriana let the genuine tiredness billow over her the way her mother used to waft her duvet when she was a little girl, giggling in bed waiting for it to land. They call it a comforter in the United States, she thought. My mum’s gone all sheets and blankets because she says it makes the bed look ‘properly made’. My mom – the all-American girl who’s now as small-town English as they come.

      The tiredness, the tiredness. Should she pull over? Half an hour left to Hathersage. Open the window. Turn the radio up another notch. Drink Coke. Pinch yourself awake. Pinch yourself that you really are here again, eighteen years on. Kick yourself, wondering if it’s a stupid idea, really.

      * * *

      Oriana’s mother didn’t know what to do. Her daughter was sleeping and though she’d told her mother not to let her, under any circumstances, what was Rachel to do? Her daughter, wan and sunken-eyed, too thin. Rachel looked in at the front room. Oriana was curled embryonically into a corner of the sofa, her hands tucked tightly between her thighs, the tips of her socks hanging limply a little way off her toes; the heel of her right sock was twisted to her ankle, as if her shoe had wanted to cling onto her feet. Her hair looked lank and flat and her lips were chapped. She wasn’t wearing earrings. She’d spilled something on her top. This wasn’t jet lag, Rachel sensed. This was exhaustion.

      Rachel had done that trip back to America often enough since she herself emigrated from there aged nineteen. She knew well that, though jet lag made you feel discombobulated, it didn’t make you look like that – how Oriana had looked on arriving an hour ago. When Rachel had opened the door to her daughter, she read in half a glance all the unrevealed secrets and sadness that had slipped unnoticed between the lines of her sporadic emails. On her doorstep, Rachel saw how the crux of it all was suddenly writ large over Oriana’s face, her general scrawniness. The details, however, remained concealed. She was shocked. How could she have known nothing? She was ashamed that, once again, a mother’s instinct had failed her.

      ‘I’ll give her another ten minutes,’ Rachel said, unsure.

      ‘That’ll make it forty winks,’ Bernard said. ‘I’ll be popping out now. Just round the block.’ And he kissed his wife who, just then, really did love his habit of explaining life with sayings and clichés. Bernard Safely. Had ever a person had a more appropriate surname?

      ‘Two shakes,’ Bernard told her though they both knew that his walk around the block would take far longer than two shakes of a lamb’s tail. She watched him through the bubbled-glass panel of the front door as he walked away. The distortion made him appear to have no bones, amorphous as jelly. Her ex-husband, Oriana’s father, referred to Bernard as spineless. Through the warped glass, he did indeed look so. Rachel felt disloyal. She rarely thought about Robin these days. She supposed she’d have to, now Oriana was back, even if she didn’t want to. She’d see him in her daughter’s crooked smile, her high cheekbones, the way her gaze darted away while she talked but focused fixedly on whoever spoke to her. Father and daughter both had the ability, without realizing it, to make one feel simultaneously inconsequential and significant.

      ‘Oriana Taylor,’ Rachel said quietly and then, in a whisper, ‘Oriana Safely.’

      It didn’t flow. It didn’t work. It would never have worked. She’d always be Oriana Taylor, daughter of Robin. The Robin Taylor. Would they mention him? She and her daughter had managed for eighteen years to skirt issues as if they were dog mess on the pavement.

      * * *

      Malachy

      An ex-girlfriend had described it as Saturn Returns. Malachy hadn’t a clue what she meant. That dream you have, she’d said, you might not have it often but it’ll always recur – like Saturn Returns, with similar cataclysmic fallout. It makes you introverted and horrid to be around.

      He’d ended the relationship soon after. She was a bit too cosmic for Malachy and she talked too much anyway. If he had the dream, the last thing he needed was a load of astrobabble bullshit. A warm body cuddling next to him, soothing him, taking his mind off it – that’s what he required. Saturn Returns. She never knew that a prog-rock band of that very name had formed in his childhood home, exploded onto the music scene for a couple of years in the late 1970s and then finally imploded back at the house in 1981. He never told her, even though the band had jammed in the very place where Malachy currently lived.

      Last night, the dream had once again hijacked his sleep, apropos of nothing. In the woods, with his brother Jed, their teenage bodies of twenty years ago encasing their current souls. They were out at summer dusk, shooting rabbits. A large buck running away, stopping, turning and facing him. Delicate eyes and soft silver pelt conflicting with the anomalous fuck-you gesture of lope-long ears rigid like two-fingered abuse. Malachy pulled the trigger and smelt the saltpetre and heard the harsh crack and felt the kick and experienced the extreme pain as half his world went dark.

      He’d often wondered whether the rabbit was some kind of metaphor. He’d tried to analyse why in the dream he didn’t shout for help; why his brother was there only at the start. And he never knew whether he killed the rabbit, the little fucker. The pain cut the dream short, always. And he always woke up thinking, but it didn’t happen like that, it didn’t happen like that. And he’d be cranky and introverted for a good while after because he knew that he’d much rather it had happened like in the dream.

      Stupid dream. Malachy left his bed and showered. Dressed, he snatched breakfast, yesterday’s post in one hand, toast in the other. What he really wanted to do today was write his novel, not go to work. Business was slack this time of year – early March, thick frost, too cold for tourists, too close to Easter for more hardy holidaymakers; too close to Christmas and Valentine’s and Mother’s Day for locals to fritter any more of their money. The irony was Malachy could very well not open the gallery because, after all, he owned it – but the fact that he owned it compelled him to keep it open, never take time off, never get sick. Tuesday to Friday, 10 till 6. Saturday 10 till 5. Summer Sundays 11 till 2. Closed Mondays. If the gallery was as quiet as he anticipated, he’d work on his novel from there today. He left the apartment, glancing guiltily at the house. He ought to do the rounds, really. He hadn’t done so for a couple of days.

      Paula de la Mare waved at him, before she hopped into her car, belting down the drive. Malachy followed, absent-mindedly creating acronyms from the letters on her car’s registration plate. At the bottom of the drive, she turned right, taking her girls to school. Malachy followed her a little way before joining the main road into Blenthrop.

      Some idiot had dumped litter in the doorway of the White Peak Art Space; yesterday’s chips lay like flaccid fingers in the scrunch of sodden paper. He rummaged in his satchel for something suitable like a plastic bag. Phone. An apple. Slim leather diary (he refused to use his phone for anything other than calls). A tin of pencils, a spiral-bound notebook and a flashdrive. He had no plastic bag. The toe of his shoe would have to do. He shoved the takeaway detritus into the gutter and opened up the gallery.

      It was always the weirdest feeling. It never diminished and it engulfed Malachy the moment he entered. The immediate stillness and quiet of the space contradicted by the undeniable sensation that, up until that very moment, they’d been alive; the paintings, the sculptures. If he’d turned up a minute earlier, or sneaked in through the back, he was certain he’d have caught them at it. Now, as every day, they were just figures frozen into their canvases, others quite literally turned to stone, bronze or, in the case of Dan Markson’s work, multicoloured polymer. It was like the characters in his novel – Malachy sensed they existed

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