Freya North - The Way Back Home

Cat – her childhood friend who knew so much, but not everything.

Ashlyn – her closest friend who knew so much, but not everything.

Casey. Jed. Malachy. The men she’d loved, lost, left.

She traced her finger over the shiny lion emblem in the centre of her mother’s steering wheel.

‘It doesn’t matter how many questions there are if there can never be any answers.’

She thought, what a stupid thing to say out loud. She thought, I am not a teenage existentialist and I’m not a cod-philosophizing hippy even though I grew up with enough of them.

‘I’m thirty-bloody-four and there’s not a single certainty in my life.’

Oriana forced herself from looking inwards to watching how the dusk was now creeping across the moor like spilled treacle, edging its way in a slow but determined advance. Her fingertips were cold and she needed to blow her nose. If this had been her car, not her mother’s, she’d have had to use her sleeve. But she looked in the glove compartment and found, as she predicted, a packet of tissues. She gave the strawberry-faced air freshener an apologetic smile. She started the engine. She wanted to be indoors, by a fire, in an armchair, on her own with a cup of tea. She wanted to be home, wherever that was. The room which opened up in her mind’s eye wasn’t in San Francisco nor was it in Windward but it was as well known to her as either. She started the car, made a U-turn and drove.

Django McCabe watched the headlights send stuttering beams into his quiet Saturday evening as the car made its way along the lurch and swerve of his unmade driveway. Sometimes, he experienced sights as sound and, though from inside the house he couldn’t hear the car’s engine, its lights were like an uninvited visitor with a grating voice asking for a favour he wasn’t actually prepared to give.

‘You can bugger off for a start,’ he muttered, taking his mug of Bovril and heading for the utility room where he sat down and said bugger, bugger off. He thought to himself how the more social a person was in their heyday – as he had been to a legendary extent – then the more justified was a cantankerous dotage. So bugger off, whoever you are, this is my Saturday evening. I’m closed.

But the voice, when it called out, baffled him. He was expecting the brittle but strident tone of the village busybody. Perhaps the gruff hail of someone off to the Rag and Thistle. More likely, the gently melodious greeting from the vicar who had called in with alarming regularity over recent months despite Django having visited the church only twice – and once was accidental. But he wasn’t expecting the voice of someone young. And female.

‘Knock knock. Django? It’s Oriana.’

Cat put the phone down and looked at it thoughtfully.

Ben watched. ‘Everything OK?’

She nodded slowly. ‘I think so.’

‘Do you want any more pizza?’

She looked at the box, in which the two remaining slices looked now to be made of the same cardboard. ‘No, thanks.’ She knew her husband would wrap them in tinfoil and have them for breakfast, cold.

‘That was Django.’

‘I gathered.’

‘ Oriana dropped in.’ Cat thought about it. ‘She stayed for two hours.’

‘That was nice of her?’ Ben was unsure why Cat appeared disconcerted.

‘He said she asked to go upstairs and then she wandered around, looking in rooms and standing deep in thought.’

‘And?’ Ben didn’t want to comment too much – the umbilical cord appeared to be syphoning off much of his wife’s patience and sense of humour. If that was the case, their baby would be imperturbable and have great comic timing.

‘It’s just –’ Cat thought about it. ‘She’s my oldest friend – I know everything about her.’ Absent-mindedly, she pressed at her jutting navel as if trying to keep thoughts in. ‘But when I saw her, it struck me that she was just ever so slightly guarded – as if there was something essential she was concealing.’

‘Maybe she didn’t want to say in front of Django?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous – Django’s world famous for being unshockable.’

‘I wouldn’t take it personally.’

‘Why wouldn’t I? She’s my oldest friend. God! You just don’t understand!’

Ben counted to ten in his head. ‘Well – perhaps she was just passing?’

Cat looked at him as if he was dense. Django lived so off the beaten track that impromptu visits always necessitated an involved detour and a certain level of planning.

‘Did Django say where she was on her way to – or back from – to make a trip to his plausible?’

There was a long pause. ‘She’d been to Windward,’ Cat said. ‘That’s why it’s weird. She went back to Windward . Just like that.’ She rubbed her belly thoughtfully, as if hoping to elicit the genie from the lamp.

‘And you wanted to go with her?’ Ben was trying to second-guess. Cat looked at him blankly. ‘Or – you wanted her to let you know she was going? Or had been?’

‘You would’ve thought she’d’ve phoned me.’ She felt hot, uncomfortable. ‘Whatever. Doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s watch telly. Can I have a cuppa?’

Ben took the pizza boxes into the kitchen, Cat muted the sound on the television, randomly channel hopping while managing her thoughts. Why is Oriana back? Why would she go to Windward anyway? Why hadn’t she told her – beforehand or straight after? And she thought, have we grown apart? Can friendships not last such lapses? If all you have in common is a shared past, is that reason enough to believe you’ll always be as close as you were? To Cat just then, the past was neither halcyon nor troubling, it was simply a long, long time ago.

Ben made tea and thought to himself how often he had heard his patients who were pregnant complain that people treated them differently – as if growing a baby equated to diminished brain cells and the incapacity for any conversation other than about babies. They felt excluded because of some misplaced need of others to protect them from any topic anything other than bland ones. And, for the most part, they didn’t like it. My baby’s stolen my identity! one had declared. He thought about Oriana. He’d only met her a few times, when they were all living in the United States but, through Cat, he felt he knew her well enough. He remembered how, if ever he answered her call, the first words she’d always say were sorry to bother you .

‘She’ll call,’ he told his wife. ‘She’s probably just worried about bothering you.’

* * *

In Hathersage, no one asked any searching questions. It was enough that ‘Did you have a nice day?’ was met with ‘Yes, thanks, did you?’ In fact, most of the questions came from Oriana who tactfully chose topics she knew Rachel and Bernard could answer at length. The route to Wakefield. The Bennets’ house. What they’d had for their dinner. And their tea. The weather forecast tomorrow. The amount of detail that anodyne subjects warranted was surprising and insubstantial minutiae floated through the evening like musak until it was a respectable time to turn in. As Oriana climbed the stairs, she thought to herself, that’s probably the longest conversation I have ever had with my mother.

It was only after cleaning her teeth, when she caught sight of herself in the mirror unawares, that the magnitude of the day that was closing swept over her again. But it wasn’t what had happened or where she had been. At that moment it wasn’t even whom she had seen. It was who had seen her , looking like this .

Frequently, since her return from the US, her mother had remarked how thin Oriana looked. But ‘thin’ implied something gently fragile, like a bird, like a Hans Christian Andersen character, something young and pretty and ethereal, waif-like. Butterfly wings and gentle breeze and dandelion heads and spun sugar. ‘Thin’ brought out the protective in others. But, now she looked, Oriana didn’t see thin. She saw haggard. She saw gaunt grey. She saw someone to baulk at, to shy away from; to think Christ, she’s aged, she looks terrible . What the fuck happened to Oriana? they’d say. Have you seen her these days? Old beyond her years.