What on earth am I doing here? This place makes me feel ill.
A sweep of memories kept at bay for so long: the day she was made to leave, the occasions she’d tried to return. The address bold in her bubbled teenage handwriting on letters she’d never posted. That day, that terrible day when she’d been fifteen.
Oriana wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there but suddenly she was aware of an audience, and she raised her head just enough to see two small girls peering in through the car window. They smiled and waved and she raised her hand half-heartedly. The younger girl pressed her palm against the glass and looked at Oriana earnestly, as if she felt she’d found someone trapped, waiting to be rescued. Reluctantly, she put the window down.
‘Hi,’ said the elder girl. ‘I’m Emma. You can call me Ems.’
‘And I’m Kate,’ said the smaller one. ‘I’m five.’ She splayed out one hand for emphasis.
‘I’m –’ Oriana thought about it. ‘Incognito’ might be prudent but they might not know the word. ‘I’m Binky.’ It was the first name that came into her head. Thank God it was two young girls she was lying to. The name sat perfectly well with them.
‘Are you visiting someone?’
‘Sort of,’ said Oriana, getting out of the car and closing the door thoughtfully. Do people lock their cars now, she wondered. She glanced at the other vehicles. Mercedes. BMW. Range Rover. They probably lock
them
.
‘We live in the Ice House,’ the little one, Kate, said.
‘The Ice House?’ said Oriana and Kate pointed across the cherry-walk lawn.
The shack is called the Ice House? Someone
lives
in the shack?
‘We’re sisters,’ said the elder. ‘I’m Emma and I’m eight.’
‘Our mum is called Paula and our dad is called Rob,’ said Kate in a tone of voice which suggested she’d had to repeat this often. But Oriana was only half listening, moving slowly away from the children, ignoring their chatter, gravitating towards the house whether she wanted to or not.
‘Well, bye,’ Emma was saying.
‘See you later, alligator,’ Kate called after her.
Suddenly, the girls were in the very periphery of Oriana’s consciousness and she did not respond.
She
’s not very friendly, the girls concurred. We’ll not be inviting her to
our
place. We’ll not introduce her to
our
mum.
Eighteen years. A little over half her life. Instantly, her adulthood was condensed and reduced to a flick of light-speed separating the time when she was last here from now. The new cars – they were incongruous; as unbedded and jarring as a new and overly ornamental shrubbery might be in an overgrown garden. But the house – it was wonderfully, frighteningly, unchanged. Everything was recognizable and known. The mineralized rust around the leaking rain hopper which she always thought would be soft and slimy to the touch until she’d shinned up the drainpipe at twelve years old and found it to be hard and cold. The cracked pane in the fanlight above the front door. The chunk of stone missing from the base of the pillar of the portico, like a wedge of cake stolen. The strangulating cords of wisteria claiming the walls as their own, the defensive march of rose bushes skirting the house.
She started circumnavigating the building. Everything, denied for so long, felt forbidden. She moved lightly, quickly, holding her breath.
The familiar feel of the gravel underfoot.
The sound of it.
Tiptoe.
As in a dream, strange new details distorted the old reality. Curtains where there hadn’t been, now framing the windows of what had been the illustrator Gordon Bryce’s flat on the second floor. The customary tangle of flung bikes by the stone steps leading down to the cellars – but Oriana’s wasn’t amongst them. And no brambles by the yard. Instead, a residence now converted from the stables with an Audi parked outside on uniform cobbles.
Where do you play hide-and-seek these days then?
Oriana walked straight past her own front door at the side of the building, without once turning her head to acknowledge it. She was vaguely aware of the velvety-leaved pelargoniums in their soil-encrusted terracotta pots currently on the inside windowsills, where they’d be for another month or so before enjoying their summer sojourn out of doors. But she turned deaf ears to any sound that might seep through the gaps in the window frames. Those hateful old frames through which the icy breath of winter would slice into her sleep and the wasps in the summer would sneak in and target her.
Suddenly she heard it. The groan and creak of the great old cedar of Lebanon. She hurried ahead, towards the grounds at the back of the house and finally it came into view.
No one climbs me the way you used to, Oriana. The children are different these days. They play in different ways.
She walked quickly to the tree, crept under its boughs and up to the trunk. There, behind its protective barrier of branches welcoming her back into its fold once again, she wept.
Tick tock. Eleven o’clock. Fuck me, thought Jed, why do I
always
oversleep when I’m here? He looked around the room, once his bedroom, and wondered why. It wasn’t even his bed any more; Malachy had sensibly replaced it with a sofa bed when he’d converted the room. Nothing of Jed’s past was visible. A couple of Robin’s small oils and four old framed prints of Derbyshire landscapes replaced the Cure and the Clash who’d once papered the walls alongside Echo and the Bunnymen. There was no sound from any of them anymore, Jed’s towers of vinyl LPs replaced long ago by CD versions which themselves had since been condensed further into virtual MP3 files. The walls were now uniformly white – whereas he’d painted all five of them in different hues. Red, black, purple, navy, orange. If he lifted the new carpet, the floorboards would still bear the spatters as evidence.
He stared at the ceiling; the long, snaking crack which his eyes had traversed for so many years while music played and his mind whirred with teenage emotion, was now Polyfillaed into a slightly raised scar. The huge paper lantern shade had gone, replaced with a neat, dimmable, three-light unit. When his parents had moved to Denmark a decade ago, they had signed the apartment over to him and Malachy. Jed had persuaded his brother to take on a mortgage and buy him out so that he could purchase his own place. Malachy was thus within his rights to make any changes he wished and the room had been sensibly, sensitively converted. Jed didn’t mind at all because, whatever the title deeds might say, this room was unmistakably his space and he always slept like a log here.
He showered and dressed, begrudgingly made a mug of instant coffee and took a pot of Greek yoghurt from the fridge, dolloping in honey from a sticky jar retrieved from the back of the cupboard. He thought, my brother’s fridge is empty save for beer and Greek bloody yoghurt. It wasn’t just a bit pathetic. Apart from the order and spryness of the spare room, the rest of the place was forlorn and dusty and the kitchen was a disgrace. And yet, of the two of them, Malachy was the together one, with the common sense and the poise and maturity, who avoided drama even if it made life dull.
‘Thieving cleaner-shag aside, of course,’ Jed murmured, taking a yoghurt through to the sitting room. Once the ballroom, its full-height windows flooded the room with spring sunlight, revealing just how in need of a clean they were while dust danced across the air with a we-don’t-care. Automatically, Jed glanced at the piano and yes, Malachy had indeed left him a message. He hadn’t bothered to check his phone: it wasn’t his brother’s style to text. Or to push a note under the bedroom door or stick it to the bathroom mirror or fridge. The piano had always been the place where messages were left.
J. We need food. M.
Two twenty-pound notes were stapled to the paper.
Jed grimaced at the bitter scorch of instant coffee masquerading as the real thing. He phoned the gallery.
‘Where the fuck is your coffee machine?’
‘It broke.’
‘OK. But where is it? I’ll fix it.’
‘I binned it. It smashed beyond repair when Csilla dropped it when she was stealing it.’
‘Oh. Shit. Sorry – I.’
‘I’m kidding, Jed. But I
did
bin it because it broke.’
‘Don’t you have a cafetière? For emergencies?’
‘No.’ Malachy paused. ‘I do have an old, stove-top coffee maker somewhere – but you’ll have to hunt for it.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ said Jed, hanging up.
Malachy anticipated the phone call which came twenty minutes later.
‘You
shit
!’ Jed said. ‘You could have told me you don’t have any bloody ground coffee
before
I searched high and low for the sodding pot.’
Malachy just laughed.
Jed was about to launch into something larkily insulting about all that Greek yoghurt, when he looked out to the garden and there was Oriana.
There was Oriana.
And Jed dropped the phone and just stared and stared while in the far-off recesses of his consciousness, Malachy’s voice was filtering up tinnily from the floor, calling Jed? Jed? You there, Jed? before everything went quiet and time was tossed in a centrifuge; the past battered, the present making no sense, the future wide open.
I am not the sort of bloke whose heart beats fast.
I will not be the sort of bloke with a lump in his throat.
I am not one to imagine things.
I am not a soft bastard.
I don’t do sentimentality.
But Oriana is out there.
Jed was at an utter loss. He’d stepped back, almost tripping. Now he was rooted to the spot, looking out as Oriana came away from the cedar and into full view. He watched as she glanced up to the ballroom window and away again, up to the window and down at her feet, shyness and perhaps dread, a multitude of emotions. And Jed loved Csilla Shag Cleaner just then for thieving and leaving, and leaving the cleaning of the windows which meant that Oriana couldn’t see him in there, gazing out at her.
And then he thought, but what if she goes? After all this time, and all that happened – what if she goes before I’ve talked to her? If she goes – was she ever really here? And then he thought, what if she’s not real? What if I let her go again – for another eighteen years?
Eighteen years? Is that all? Such a long time.
And then he thought, stop thinking and get out there. And he scrambled his bare feet into his brother’s docksiders that were a size too big, opened the double ballroom windows and stepped out on to the balcony.
The commotion caught Oriana’s attention.
She stood stock-still while the sunlight spun gold from her hair and cut a squint across her eyes.
Jed. It’s Jed.
‘Oriana?’ He was still on the balcony and she was still motionless. They stared and wondered, both of them, what are you doing here? How come you’re
here
?
I never thought I’d ever see you again.
Jed knew the move, though he hadn’t performed it for many, many years. He vaulted the balustrade of the balcony, and winched himself down, swinging against the wall of the house, grappling the descent like a crazy, out-of-practice, ropeless abseiler. The stone scuffed and grazed at his skin. He banged his knee. One of Malachy’s shoes fell off. The ground seemed far away. Suspended, he wondered if Oriana might be gone by the time he’d made the descent. He remembered how she’d sing the
Spider-Man
theme at him when he’d done this manoeuvre when they were young. With the tune once more in his head, bolstering him, and a mix of clumsiness and confidence, he made it down.
Terra firma. Rooted to the spot.
‘Oriana?’ His voice, barely audible to him, was painfully loud to her. And now she was turning away, moving off. No! He sprinted after her.
‘Wait!’
She stopped but didn’t turn. Tentatively, Jed stretched out his hand and laid it lightly on her shoulder. The wind, then, lifted her hair and wafted it over his skin, just quickly, in greeting. With great effort, she turned, not all the way, but enough. They glanced at each other, too nervous to move a step closer.
‘Are you back?’
‘Yes.’
‘Back –
here
?’
‘No.’
‘I –’ Jed shrugged.
Oriana raised her face, sucking her lips on words she could neither release nor swallow. ‘How are you?’ she asked. Formal.
‘I’m fine,’ he told her. And then he laughed. This was mad. Crazy. ‘I’m
fine
.’ He felt compelled to shake his head as if to dislodge any risk this might not be real. ‘And you?’
She scratched her head. ‘Just me.’ She shrugged.
Jed looked over his shoulder and nodded at the house. ‘Have you been in? Have you seen your dad?’
‘No.’ She followed his gaze though her childhood home was out of sight from here.
‘Are you going to?’
He watched as she stared at the house for a long time.
‘I don’t know.’ She fidgeted. ‘Not today, though. I haven’t – it’s been years. It’s all been years.’ She looked at him, marvelling shyly. ‘But you – you’re still here?’
Jed suddenly felt an extreme urgency – like meeting someone on a train, for whom this was the wrong train, someone who might just jump off as soon as they could and who he’d never see again. Oriana was here, at Windward, but he sensed it was momentary and he sensed this wasn’t her true destination. If it was a chance encounter then serendipity had to be shackled quickly – as if he’d have to grab her forcibly before he dared loosen his grip. He sensed he had limited time and, as such, he didn’t want to waste it on formal pleasantries but feared anything intimate might cause her to bolt. He just couldn’t think what to say. It was crazy. It was Oriana. It’s only Oriana. It’s only ever been Oriana.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘Here – Windward? Or UK here?’ She paused and shrugged. ‘Time for a change,’ she said, looking again at the house. ‘I was ready to come back. I didn’t think anyone would be here. I assumed everyone would have sold up and moved.’
Jed thought about telling her about his parents and Denmark and the mortgage and the nice new carpet in his old room. But it struck him that, as she hadn’t thought he’d be here, then she hadn’t returned to find him. His hope rapidly deflated.