The Way Back Home (36 page)

When the A level results came through, the Bedwell boys threw a party at the behest of all their friends. It was logical – Jette and Orlando were still away, they had the apartment to themselves and Windward was the perfect setting. Our GCSE results were still a week away but that was the summer when any old excuse for a party would do.

‘I did it, Oriana,’ Malachy repeated while I was filling his bath with ice for the beer. ‘I got the grades. I’m in.’ He was sitting on the closed toilet seat, holding the piece of paper as if it was a screen showing him the rest of his life. I went over to him and sat on his lap and he held me tightly and we kissed deeply and desperately and I thought to myself this is the beginning of the end.

At the party there was beer and cider, a ridiculous rum punch and boxes of warm white wine. There were cigarettes and joints and hash cakes. There was Acid house and grunge and Neil Young and Springsteen – always Springsteen. We had our arms in the air and the world in our hands.

The ballroom was heaving with people I didn’t know. I finally found Malachy out on the balcony. He tried to hide a joint from me but I raised my eyebrow and said I’m not a child you know, and I took the joint and sucked hard. I hated the head rush. We stood, side by side, our bare arms touching, goosepimpled by the connection and the middle-of-the-night air. We looked down on our circle of grass, we looked across to the cedar, we looked at each other and our fingers wove together. He didn’t need to kiss me. And he didn’t.

What are you doing? said Jed who was suddenly with us, staring at our hands long after they’d disengaged.

Nothing, we said. Just chilling.

He stood with us, me in the middle, the love of two brothers encircling me like vapours.

Are you coming back in? Malachy asked me but I didn’t want to say the joint had made me feel nauseous, that I needed to stay outside, focusing on the steady silhouette of the cedar. So I just said I was going to hang out with Jed. I let Jed hold my hand. It wasn’t unusual, he often did.

‘You know he’s shagging Charlotte?’ Jed said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Charlotte – who left school last year.’

‘The scary one?’

‘Yeah. You know he’s shagging her?’

‘Malachy?’

‘Yes
,
Oriana – Malachy.’

No, I did not know that. And I didn’t believe Jed. Malachy would have told me. He told me everything. But Jed turned my shoulders and I saw inside; I saw Malachy sitting on the piano stool being straddled by scary Charlotte, her tongue inserted into his mouth like a slug, his hand moving around inside her shirt.

What was I going to do? What was I going to do? I went home in a huff, that’s what I did. I curled up in bed with a bucket on the floor and when Jed tiptoed in and climbed in beside me and spooned next to me and cupped his hand over my breast and pressed against me and kissed my neck I didn’t object, I didn’t move. I couldn’t.

When I woke in the morning, Jed was propped up on one arm, smiling at me.

‘Oregano,’ he said, ‘you snore.’

He helped me avoid Malachy for the next few days by keeping me busy and keeping me with him. He took me fishing all day and we crouched around at dusk aiming at rabbits with my father’s old Winchester which I’d purloined for all those years without him ever commenting. We caught lots of fish but we always missed the rabbits, accidentally-on-purpose. And all the while Malachy lazed on our circle in the sun, listening to our music, reading and sleeping as if he’d never noticed we’d been there in the first place and didn’t miss us now we weren’t. I was too humiliated, really, to tell Jed how crushed I felt. Jed’s chatty warmth and his tactile attentiveness were a distraction and a positive antidote to Malachy’s reticence and rejection. I did notice that Charlotte was never around and that Malachy was always at Windward but I said to myself who cares?

Our GCSE results came the next weekend. I was chuffed, I’d excelled at what I loved, and failing maths was almost cool. I wanted to tell my father but he was in the studio, door shut. There was a knock on my bedroom door and in came Malachy. I turned away from him but he wasn’t going to let that stop him. He took the slip of paper from me and absorbed the facts and figures.

‘You flunked your maths pretty spectacularly,’ he smiled. ‘But you’ll retake it and I bet you’ll get a B.’

I shrugged.

‘Well done.’ He was beaming, he was proud. He came and sat beside me. ‘Clever girl.’

‘Where’s Jed?’

‘Gone to get fags.’

I wanted Malachy to go. To stay. To go.

‘Did he get his straight A-starreds?’ I asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Is he ecstatic?’

Malachy thought about it. ‘I’m not sure really – he could have done them with his eyes closed last year. Where’s the sense of achievement if you haven’t had to strive for something?’

‘Your parents are going to be cock-a-hoop,’ I said.

‘Does your dad know?’

‘No – he’s working. I’ll tell him later.’

‘You’ve been avoiding me all week.’

I couldn’t answer that. He nudged me. He nudged me again. And then he put his arm around me and kissed the side of my face so gently again, again and again, slowly, slowly, while he stroked my neck, my arms. My Malachy was back and I didn’t care what the consequences were, I just wanted to stay in that moment. We crumpled onto my bed and kissed each other’s faces and wrapped our arms and legs around each other and pulled each other in as close as we could. We took off our tops and basked in skin against skin. I could feel him harden and strain in his trousers and, just fleetingly, he swept his hand up between my legs and pressed his fingers against me. We lay together and rolled and rocked and he was on top of me and we moved and kissed and writhed and something extraordinary started building in my body. And suddenly Malachy was fumbling with his flies and breathing hard. I was so ready. This was how it should be. It was going to be perfect.

And then he pulled away. ‘We can’t.’

I reached out for him. ‘We can. I want this. I love you.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s crazy. You’re fifteen! I’m going to university. It’s just – impossible. Ridiculous.’

‘Please don’t say that.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You have nothing to apologize for.’

‘You’ll thank me, Oriana. One day – I promise.’

‘Don’t say that. That’s rubbish. Malachy – please.’

‘Don’t you see? If we – made love –’ He couldn’t finish the sentence. ‘I want to,’ he said, hoarse. ‘It’s just not the right time, Oriana. It would be wholly wrong.’

‘Are you shagging scary Charlotte? Is that why?’ I think he laughed as much at my accusatory tone as at the concept.

We lay beside each other again while our bodies tried to make sense of the come-down. We lay together and just loved one another, tiptoeing fingers up and over the landscapes of each other’s bodies as if committing the routes to memory should we ever find ourselves lost. I knew Malachy was right but what he said conflicted so strongly with the physical and the emotional, that denial seemed an insult to the veracity of those feelings.

‘I love you,’ he whispered to me with a glazed gaze. ‘I love you.’

And that’s how Jed found us. Semi-naked, wrapped up in each other with the word ‘Love’ hanging in the air like a neon banner.

He had a cigarette behind his ear and it tumbled off as he turned and stormed out.

‘Shit,’ said Malachy and he dressed quickly and left.

And I lay there thinking that everything sucked and everyone was going to get hurt but I never imagined that in ten minutes’ time the hurt would be so cataclysmic.

The noise coming from their apartment. The crashing and banging and yelling. It was more unbearable than any of the furious rows my parents had ever had.

‘What’s going on?’ My father had stormed out of his studio and appeared to be ricocheting off the walls in our hallway. ‘I’m trying to paint!’

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘It’s the boys – they’re just scrapping. I’ll go. Here.’ I gave him the paper with my results. ‘I flunked maths. Sorry.’

Even the deadening flagstones of the Corridor and the monumentally thick walls couldn’t absorb the sound of the fight. I rushed to be there and found myself in the midst of such uncontained hatred that I didn’t know what to do. I watched, I felt. Jed punched Malachy square on the jaw and sent him flying but he hurled himself back with an empty bottle in his hand and thwacked Jed hard on the side of his skull. As Jed staggered and swayed, Malachy spat blood on the floor.

‘Fuck you,’ Malachy said. ‘Just fuck you, Jed.’

Malachy rarely swore. I always felt a bit childish if I did so in his presence. Those words from Malachy enunciated his hostility more than any strike. But the moment of separation re-energized them and they ran at each other again with a combined roar, hurling one another against the walls.

I was terrified and desperate. I needed the Bedwells to be the family full of love and support and solidity. I depended on them to be so. They needed to exemplify the opposite to my family. This wildness I was in the midst of, the primal hatred and violence and baseness, was more than I could handle. It had to stop. The noise, the blood, the damage and the despising had to stop. If it was me who’d started it, I had to stop it. But they couldn’t hear me shout. They weren’t listening to me at all.

People say that when terrible things happen, it’s as if the protagonists have been flung backwards momentarily, held in abeyance; then the action proceeds in slow motion towards the impending disaster which is at once known yet unavoidable. This is not so. It does not happen like that. Time went into overdrive that day and moved too fast for any of us to sense what lay ahead. My father’s rifle was on their mantelpiece, left there from one of our futile rabbiting attempts. I ran for it. I wasn’t aiming. There was no time to put it to my shoulder, though that rifle alone was heavy enough on a teenage girl’s wrist and that was before the kick. I just grabbed it and raised it, and the sun struck through the middle pane of the upper section of the second sash window to the left of the balcony and blinded me the moment I shot into the air. I couldn’t see a thing. I never saw that Malachy had stood up while Jed remained down. I was shooting into the light to make them stop and in a split second, that stupid rifle that couldn’t kill a bunny maimed Malachy for life.

That’s what happened. That’s how it happened.

That’s what happened when I was fifteen.

Eighteen years later, I have finally accepted that it was an accident. Because Malachy told me so and Jed corroborated it and it was only the three of us there, back then. And the three of us are here again now.

It was hard not to be transfixed by the space that Oriana had left when she’d gone. If they imagined that she was still here, sitting between them, then they could keep their focus on her and not have to adjust it to take in the wider picture bespeckled with overlapping details of what had happened that morning. Eventually, the rumble of his stomach caused Malachy to stand, to look at the time and say Jesus, it’s almost midday, to glance at his brother and ask if he’d like tea.

‘Please,’ said Jed and he stood and stretched and yawned and slumped back down on the sofa.

Malachy looked at the cold breakfasts, forlornly curling on the plates. Had they only been made this morning? It seemed longer than that. Time was playing tricks.

‘Jed,’ he called, ‘do you want to eat?’

In the ballroom, Jed was looking over to Oriana’s wet clothes. He wondered, what kind of crazy adventure did she have yesterday?

‘I’m starving,’ he called. ‘Thanks.’ And he stood up and crossed to the windows and smoothed the yellow film back flat where it had peeled away from one of the windows. The middle pane of the upper section of the second sash window to the left of the balcony. He checked the film on the panes to the right and the left of the neighbouring sashes, up a little, down a little. He remembered his father studying the passage of sunlight for hours each day while Malachy convalesced, hovering with the pieces of sticky-backed coloured coverings as if poised to refract the rays before any further harm was done. He remembered how his mother would run her eyes over the six coloured panes for months afterwards, as if they were notes forming a dissonant tune she could never quite memorize.

Malachy returned with sandwiches filled with cold bacon and eggs. They didn’t taste too bad and they were much needed. The brothers ate in silence and gulped down the tea.

‘Refill?’ Malachy asked.

‘Looking back, she and I were hurled together by what happened that day.’ Jed regarded Malachy. ‘During that time when you were down at Moorfields and Mum and Dad were with you most days.’ Jed wanted to continue but he wasn’t sure how; he gave up stumbling over his words and put his head in his hands. ‘The drifts of news we scavenged were getting worse and worse.’

‘I remember so little,’ Malachy said. ‘I remember nothing of it happening.’

‘She cradled your head,’ Jed told him, looking up at him again. ‘She was so brave because it was terrifying and you looked terrible but she didn’t stop talking to you.’ He paused. ‘Your hand over your eye. The blood. Your head in her lap,’ said Jed. He pointed. ‘The copper shell casing just there. The rifle flung – over there.’

Malachy considered it. In some ways, he felt lucky to remember so little. ‘You must have been beside yourselves.’

‘I called the ambulance. I didn’t know what to say. Suddenly, Robin was here and he couldn’t speak. And Lilac. Others – I can’t tell you who. It was oddly quiet. Just waiting. I think people probably prayed. But all the while, Oriana talked to you. You know it took her two days to realize how badly sprained her wrist was from the kick.’