The Way Back Home (17 page)

And look at me! Just look at me!

Just then, her life seemed personified by the scrunch of borrowed bedding laid out on the floor of someone else’s room. She felt ashamed. She knew she had no business being in that room, in that house. They were saints, Cat and Ben,
saints
. They’d never once made her feel unwelcome or a burden in the way her mother had. Not even today, when she’d practically broken their baby’s cot, ruined their plans and used their new chair as a dumping station.

Mi casa su casa
.

But for Christ’s sake I’m in the way
in their nursery
.

She had to do what was right – and the right thing to do was to do right by them. She must leave and give them their space, privacy and time to prepare for their new little family.

Oriana curled embryonically on the floor. Gradually, it struck her that her decision had little to do with altruism. Her decision to leave was not driven by her wish to afford them space and privacy. All the little gestures Cat and Ben made instinctively to one another. The sweet looks, the tenderness, the thoughtfulness, the helping hand and sentence-finishing. The cosiness. The nub of it was that Cat and Ben’s life – and Ashlyn’s – inadvertently amplified what she didn’t have.

My life is as much a mess as theirs is sorted.

It made her feel embarrassed, humiliated. She felt a bit pathetic.

Then she thought, but that’s not it. Not entirely.

She stayed stock-still, as if the knotting emotions were whispers in a strange tongue. She listened hard to how she truly felt. And she knew that the overriding emotion was pain. Pure pain. Their togetherness caused her this pain.

I have to do something about this pain.

She thought, everyone’s growing up around me. I’m just this girl in a whirl of what to do.

There was a slim chance, thought Malachy, that Robin might have forgotten he’d even painted it. He was sitting on the sofa, with the portrait of Rachel in front of him, balanced on his knee like a child. He’d looked at it almost daily since the little de la Mare sisters had found it and, though it was now dry and familiar, Malachy found it no less disquieting. It wasn’t just the unfinished, compromised area of the neck; the painting was twisted and contorted deep beneath the surface details. The mashing of the paint around the neck simply added a heavy and dark symbolism to it. Badly executed. This woman had been badly executed. A disturbing, fucked-up, messy execution.

Malachy shuddered. Out of nowhere, he vividly recalled Rachel bursting into his home, running straight in through the never-locked door. The family had been eating their evening meal; it was later than normal for a school day because he’d had an away rugby match. He remembered that. It was dessert time when Rachel flew in. His mother’s beautiful
æbleskiver
– apple fritters – a Danish delicacy, round and little and light, dusted with icing sugar. Usually chatty, his family always fell silent when eating this dish because it was just so ambrosial. But then in charged Rachel, fear and excitement, panic and delight graffitied across her face.

‘He’s going to kill me!’

The pervasive emotion that surged from her was exhilaration, not terror. That’s how she and Robin lived their life, always scrabbling to cling to the height of drama. It was as if they dared each other to hold a precarious pose on a cliff edge. Jump. Don’t jump. I’m going to jump – just you watch, you bastard.

‘He loves me enough to kill me!’

How she’d hurled herself against the peace of their evening meal that night; like a bird trapped indoors, flying at full pelt straight into a windowpane.

Malachy rested the painting against the back cushion of the sofa, as if wanting Rachel to calm down, to catch her breath and think about what she’d just said in front of two young boys, one thirteen, one ten.

He went to the kitchen, not because he had wanted anything, just to be away from the painting. He sat at the table and sighed heavily through his nose as he shook his head. Loving someone enough to kill them? What tosh! That’s not love! Rachel had always seemed so proud of the extremes of emotion that she and Robin could elicit from each other.

‘Totally fucked up,’ Malachy said out loud. ‘As twisted as your neck in that painting.’ He went back into the living room, hands on hips, staring at Rachel. ‘Your poor daughter,’ he said to the canvas. And then his voice was edged with a hiss. ‘You should be ashamed,’ he said, ‘both of you.’ He turned away from the painting, pulled instead back into the memory of that mealtime all those years ago.

Rachel had circumnavigated their table like a dervish.
He’ll kill me he’ll kill me he’ll kill me!
She was triumphant. And there, silent in the doorway (how long had she been there?) ten-year-old Oriana looking from her mother to the
æbleskiver
. Rachel – boasting about the level of impassioned hatred her husband had for her. Oriana – gazing at the Bedwells and the plate of fritters as if wondering what it took to instil such order in a family, to achieve such a balanced mealtime, to be nourished by such home-made sweetness. Harmony – how do you build such harmony? Had Jette and Orlando designed the blueprint?

‘Mum?’

Even now, Malachy remembered how Oriana’s soft little voice shattered through the commotion as if it was the sound barrier.

No one else had seen her until that moment. Only me.

He thought about the extreme effort and presence of mind it must have taken for his parents to beam over their everyday smiles as if to say oh look! Oriana’s popped in for a fritter!

‘I
love
my parents,’ he told the portrait of Rachel pointedly. ‘They are good people.’

‘Mum?’

Oriana’s voice from the past floated back through the years to him once again.

It sounded so odd to hear Rachel being referred to directly as Mum. It was as if Oriana had her name wrong. Side by side with Jette, in his mind’s eye, Malachy looks now from his mother to Rachel, from his mother to Rachel. Rachel – a
mother
?

‘Go back!’ Rachel had screamed. ‘Go!’

So, without a fritter, Oriana had no option but to return to the man who loved her mother enough to kill her.

Malachy shuddered. He remembered how Jette had hugged him for a little longer that night, how his father’s customary pat on the head had softened into a stroke of his hair.

‘I don’t want you here,’ he said under his breath to the painting. ‘This is my home now and you’re no longer welcome.’ He took it and left the apartment, walking through the Corridor, swinging the canvas as if it was a piece of board he was going to chuck onto the rubbish. ‘You can sod off back to Robin – let him kill you, for all I care.’

Malachy respected Robin greatly as an artist. As the elderly, infirm man Robin was today, it was no bother for Malachy to look in on him, to take him the paper, heat up a can of oxtail soup, ensure he’d taken his pills. But as the man who’d caused him significant distress when he was a child, whether directly or indirectly? And as the man who’d so heinously mistreated the gift of love, of fatherhood? The man who’d ripped Oriana away from him, from them all? The truth of it was that Malachy despised him.

‘Robin?’

‘In here.’

In the studio.

God, it was airless. It had been balmy all day, constant sunshine even if diluted by typical April temperatures. The windows had trapped the sunlight, drawn it into the room and expanded it. It was unpleasantly stuffy.

‘You need to open the windows, Robin,’ said Malachy. ‘Let the fresh air in. It’s been beautiful out there.’

‘Why aren’t you at work? Are you unwell?’ Robin rose, still impressive though stooped, today in a three-piece suit of sludge-coloured wool shot through with a bright purple stripe. Today he sounded present, almost chipper. Malachy was adept at taking no notice of Robin’s moods.

‘I was at work all day,’ said Malachy. ‘It’s almost seven. I shut at five at the moment.’

‘What day is it?’

‘Wednesday.’

‘What have you there?’ Robin gestured to the canvas.

‘I didn’t know whether you’d like it back,’ Malachy said, turning it around and then casually back again, his eyes never leaving Robin’s face, tuned for the slightest darkening.

‘I wondered where that had got to,’ Robin mused as though it was a missing shoe. He took the canvas from Malachy. ‘Let’s pop you up here, shall we? See what we can do for you.’

Malachy thought, he sounds like a GP about to treat a patient for laryngitis. He thought, she needs more than a GP for that throat; she needs a plastic bloody surgeon.

‘Thank you, Malachy.’

‘Can I heat something up for you?’

‘I’ve had,’ said Robin.

‘And your tablets?’

‘And I’ve had my tablets.’

‘May I?’ Malachy gestured to a chair.

‘By all means,’ said Robin, who pottered around the studio as if it was his surgery. Where’s my filbert brush? Stethoscope. Let’s have a little look at you, shall we? Blood pressure. Palette. Let me look down your throat. Rag soaked in meths. His total focus was Rachel.

Is it not exhausting being Robin? Malachy wondered. Now as much as then? A lifetime of duress and extremes? One day, so full of venom, the next – like now – almost genial, tender even, chatty as you like?

‘Keep taking the tablets,’ he said under his breath. But Robin didn’t hear him, Robin was communicating on another level entirely. With love in his eyes, tenderness in every flick and touch of his brush, warmth in the chosen colours, his lips moving in silent conversation – his world polarized by and devoted to Rachel.

Malachy slipped away unnoticed. Robin would work until he had to sleep. That could well be after twenty-four straight hours of painting. He’d once asked Robin if he could install a video camera because it would be so fascinating to play it back, speeded up. The artist at work. The artist possessed. Robin had flatly refused.

Out in the gardens, Malachy walked, gulping in lungfuls of fresh air as if he’d just surfaced from underwater. He smiled at his pre-teen self – he’d taken Oriana the
æbleskiver
that night, going outside and throwing stones up at her window in their secret code to alert her. One, two. Wait. One, two. But the fritters were so light that the bag just floated back down to him well short of her arms.
Don’t worry
, she’d said,
not hungry
.

You OK?

Me OK.

Idiots
, Malachy said.
You can stay at ours?

They’re just idiots,
Oriana had said.

Now he walked across the grass, around the house and over the drive towards the Ice House. He fancied a cup of tea with Paula. Or a beer with Rob. Or maybe, he just wanted company. As he walked, Malachy thought back some more – Rachel had left Robin not long after that. It was scandalous at the time. People were as shocked that it was Bernard she’d left Robin for, as they were horrified that she’d left her child. He was about to knock on the de la Mares’ door when suddenly he paused.

He stepped away, almost staggered a step or two backwards. With sudden and startling clarity he now understood how love had nothing to do with it. It wasn’t about love or lack of. Leaving Robin and choosing Bernard was Rachel making the conscientious decision to self-lobotomize. Ultimately she’d done so to save her own life.

When I was twelve my birthday was unforgettable but I would do anything not to remember it. I can’t recall my eleventh at all – that was the first one after my mother left. But when I was turning twelve, my mother insisted that I had a birthday party though I didn’t really want one. People my age were having trips to the cinema or out for a pizza for their birthdays. But she was adamant – and she told my father it was to be at Windward because ‘that’s where the girl lives’. I suppose, looking back, it wasn’t about me, it was all about my mother. At the time, with my mother reappearing at Windward trailing bunting and balloons, it felt peculiar to be the centre of attention. I remember how she and Bernard made trip after trip back out to their car, bringing in platters and trays piled with party food. My father stood by, watching as his ex-wife commandeered the kitchen while her new husband made awkward adjustments to this platter of crustless sandwiches and that tray of fondant fancies, or this jug of celery sticks and that bowl of Twiglets. In the end, my father just went back to his studio to paint, at which point my mother made much of an enormous sigh of relief.

And then the guests came. Nearly everyone in my class. And Malachy and Jed. And a Windward girl called Plum who was a little younger than me and her sister Willow who was a little older. Louis came down, Lilac and George too. There was no need for party games and there was no official entertainment – the tea banquet was the focus. It was straight from the pages of Lewis Carroll. We almost didn’t dare eat the food, suspecting that it couldn’t possibly be real, not that quantity and variety. Everything seemed so plump – the mini sausage rolls were in puffed-up pillows of pastry, the muffins were spilling corpulently over the paper cases, all manner of bright fillings oozed from sandwiches, icing had been applied to cupcakes like cement from a trowel.

But eat we did. We gorged ourselves and every time an obese vol-au-vent went, my mother seemed to pluck another from thin air and replenish the plate. It was all delicious – hyper-sweet or fabulously salty, just what we craved at that age. And the birthday cake itself – so monstrous in its extravagant confection that, when it appeared, everyone fell silent. It looked like a pile of hatboxes of diminishing sizes stacked in a precarious tower; chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate, globs of cream and huge mutant strawberries. It took both my mother and Bernard to bring it in. This year, my mother hadn’t stinted on candles; they circumnavigated the haphazard tiers like flares marking the way of a magical, terrifying spiralling pathway.

They called for my father.

No singing until Robin is here. I said NO singing until Oriana’s father comes. Don’t touch! Be quiet, everyone – silence!