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