didn’t bother to answer.
‘I’ll go and make you some soup,’ Malachy said again and he went into the kitchen, opened a cupboard and, under his breath, said oxtail, oxtail or oxtail? The interior of the cupboard was like a pastiche of an Andy Warhol screenprint.
‘Nice drop of oxtail,’ he called out. The pelargoniums on the sills needed water. He lifted the kettle, full but stone-cold, and gave the plants a drink. He hadn’t been in yesterday and the crockery on the rack was just as he’d left it the day before. Quite possibly, Robin hadn’t eaten since then. He looked in the breadbin and buttered the last two slices of bread, cutting a little mould off the crusts. He grated the last of the cheese because it was too hard to be palatable any other way. Robin had only an old-fashioned, free-standing gas cooker. With the soup heating up, Malachy lit the grill, ready to leap back as the flames licked along at ferocious speed and clawed out at him. Suddenly he remembered Oriana aged around twelve running into their apartment in floods of tears because she’d singed her fringe when grilling toast. The smell of burnt hair acrid in his nostrils even today. She’d been inconsolable. He and Jed had tried to tell her she looked fine while she sobbed and twanged off the brittle, sizzled ends. And he remembered how they had sat her down on a stool and, with solemnity and the kitchen scissors, had tried their best. Shorter they went, shorter still, until she looked like Louise Brooks.
The soup making audible phuts jolted Malachy back to the present. He popped the bread under the grill and watched like a hawk for it to brown before turning it carefully, adding the cheese and waiting until it seethed golden bubbles. He found a tray, placed on it the soup, cheese on toast, a tomato and a pint glass of cold water. He buffed the cutlery against his sleeve and folded a piece of kitchen roll into a triangle. He toyed with the idea of putting a pot of pelargoniums on the tray, but they were all encrusted with soil and Robin might well hurl it.
Malachy set the tray on the coffee table by the old sofa in the sitting room and went back into the studio.
‘Bon appétit.’
Robin glanced over. ‘Is it dinner time?’
‘It is,’ said Malachy. ‘Nice bit of soup – oxtail.’
Robin left his easel and pulled himself up to his formidable height, winding turps-soaked rags around his brushes. Then he straightened his tie, smoothed the waistcoat of his three-piece suit and lightly brushed down the sleeves of its jacket. Today, Malachy noticed tiny flecks of blue, like the lightest rain, on the Harris tweed. Robin glanced at Malachy as he passed by and sat down, his teeth snatching at the toast as he crammed it into his mouth. He made fast work of it. With his spoon hovering about the soup, he stared hard at Malachy.
‘Why are you staring? Why are you standing there?’ His voice was sharp and belligerent.
Malachy was wondering where Robin’s medication was – because it certainly wasn’t in its usual place on the coffee table. ‘Where are your tablets?’
‘I don’t know,’ Robin said, as if there was no reason why he should. ‘Now sod off and leave me to eat in peace.’
After a search, Malachy found the tablets in the bathroom. With one in the palm of his hand, he extended it to Robin who stared at it as if it was the first pill he’d ever seen, regarded Malachy as if he was poisoning him. But he placed it on his tongue, swallowing it down with a great glug of soup.
‘I’ll be off now,’ said Malachy. ‘I’ll pop in tomorrow.’ He thought of all the shopping Jed had bought. Despite the fetid air in the room and the smell of concentrated tinned soup, his own appetite hadn’t diminished. He’d bring Robin some fresh food tomorrow.
‘À demain.’
Malachy always said this as his parting remark. Some days, Robin repeated it. ‘Adam Man.’ Very occasionally, he laughed. Mostly, he didn’t respond at all.
Malachy left the apartment, appeased. Robin Taylor was still producing great art. One could forgive him his vile temper and foul mouth. Still, some days this was easier to do than at other times. And for some people, this was far simpler to achieve than it was for others. Today was not a day to mention Oriana. And perhaps Robin should not be told of her return.
It isn’t up to you.
That’s what Malachy had been told eighteen years ago.
It’s nothing to do with you.
That’s what they’d said when he found that she’d gone.
Oriana couldn’t help but think of Casey. Even though she’d managed to stick doggedly to her ban of permitting him anywhere near her memory for the last two or three months, she had little control over his voice ricocheting around her head today.
‘Headfuck,’ he’d say if he were here. ‘If that wasn’t one total headfuck, baby.’
And Oriana had to admit – he’d be right on that one.
She’d stilled the car. Daylight was fading. From a distance, resembling sheets of organza fluttering in a gentle breeze, the rain came sweeping over the dales in fast, cold, needle-sharp gusts. Concentrating on the sound of the weather on the roof of her mother’s car while watching thousands of droplets busying their way across the windscreen provided welcome respite from the barrage of thoughts. Soon enough, though, it all became a background blur as the crux of the matter came to the fore.
What on earth was she to make of what had happened that day? The immensity of it all. Windward, Jed and Malachy too. Facts and feelings were weaving around each other like snakes in a pit, moving too fast and mercurially for her to sort through and make sense of. Ashlyn, Cat – they would both willingly wade in to help, she had only to ask. But just then, she realized that to ask meant to involve; that she’d have to confide to the one or the other as much about her present as her past. There were things she didn’t want either of her friends to know, things she wanted under lock and key in a secret space. Bringing them into the open would only slice open fragile scars protecting deep wounds. A problem shared is a problem magnified. She wondered, why did I even go back there? What deluded part of me thought it could in any way be a good idea?
‘Idiot is my middle name,’ she said, resting her forehead against the steering wheel. ‘Idiot is my middle name.’ The mantra was comforting in its familiarity. Today, though, it suddenly brought Jed to the fore. How he used to love tinkering and warping the most mundane things, distorting words and situations in order to change something grave, awful even, into something ludicrous and light.
Oregano Idiot he called her when she was fretful, when she called herself an idiot, when he needed to make her feel all right.
‘So your mother gave up Robbing to live with Burning Safety.’
And he had flopped back in the long grass at the edge of the mowed lawn at Windward and pulled Oriana against his chest. She’d tuned in to his heartbeat while he hummed ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ on a blazingly sunny day.
* * *
Gladly she welcomed Pink Floyd into the car and played through the whole song in her head, even adding where the vinyl was scratchy and the one place the needle always jumped. But there came
