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 a point when she just had to let it fade out and she found herself still in her mother’s car with the weight of the day rendering her unable to know what to do for the best. She stared at Jed’s number now in her contacts lists. She opened the browser on her phone and searched for the White Peak Art Space website. She scoured it, reading Malachy’s profile on the About Us tab.
Malachy Bedwell was born in Derbyshire. He is the son of world-renowned architect Orlando Bedwell and Jette Stromsfeld, a furniture designer of international standing. He was the first child to be born at Windward, the artists’ collective that his parents founded in the late 1960s, with other seminal figures including Robin and Rachel Taylor, Gordon Bryce, Laurence Glaub, George and Lilac Camfield and Louis Bayford.
He credits the absolute assimilation of all arts into everyday life at Windward with his enduring passion for them.
‘As a baby, my mother fed me in a highchair designed by Gerrit Rietveld. I hung my school blazer on a Louise Bourgeois sculpture and read Agatha Christie novels whose covers were original Windward artworks. The soundtrack of my teenage years was either played at home or even written there. The phone would go and Celia Birtwell would simply say, “Hullo, Malachy – is your mother home? It’s Celia.” There’d be a knock at the door and someone would be standing there, asking, “Is Keith here?” and we’d go upstairs and tell Keith Richards that he had a visitor. Our cutlery was David Mellor prototypes. Our furniture was Bauhaus and beyond. We kept apples in a Bernard Leach bowl.’
Oriana looked up. I remember that bowl.
She remembered Keith too. And Marlon, his son. She’d had a huge crush on him. Jed and Malachy had taken the piss terribly though both their noses had been visibly out of joint too.
She read on, under her breath.
The White Peak Art Space seeks to unify the diverse talent of international artists inspired by Derbyshire. Whether they live here or abroad, whether they work figuratively or wholly abstract, whatever media they favour, our artists are united by the Peak District genius loci, the spirit of the place.
She felt proud of Malachy and yet strangely sad too. But you wanted to be a writer, Malachy. You and that great novel of yours. The White Peak Art Space arguably had philanthropic as well as financial value. But was it what Malachy truly wanted to do? She remembered him saying how he wanted to be the John Irving of his generation, having read The Hotel New Hampshire cover to cover twice in one week. How they’d all fallen about laughing! Now she felt sad, concerned. She wondered whether losing his eye had anything to do with it. She hoped not. She shuddered.
The rain had stopped and suddenly the sun was charging through and the wet landscape let off a glare; flares of light piercing through the windscreen. Headache weather.
Oriana thought, where do I go now?
Hathersage? Hathersage was no more home than San Francisco was. An image of the cedar at Windward loomed large – it was the place she’d always gone to for solace – something about shade and solitude under the embrace of the branches, the scent of the space around the trunk, the way the air was always a degree cooler than beyond the boughs, how the light from the day outside the tree was filtered into something else as it spun through the branches, the needles. It was a world within a world and for so many years it had been hers alone. In her youth, the other children had been put off it by a strange psychic who’d stayed at Windward and denounced the tree as the Place That Has Seen Death. But she couldn’t go back to the tree or Windward – not with Jed there ready to leap from the balcony and her father inside the house and two small unknown girls badgering to befriend her.
The paradox struck her – she was welcome the world over; welcome at Windward, in Hathersage, she could pitch up in California tomorrow and a dozen people would fling open their doors and arms for her. Yet just then it felt that there was nowhere that was hers, not one place she could truly call home. Other people’s places could never be anything other than halfway houses. She looked around her; this wasn’t even her car. Those were Bernard’s Werther’s Originals in the cup holder of her mother’s Peugeot. There was a synthetic-smelling cardboard air freshener in the shape of a smiley-faced strawberry dangling from the rear-view mirror and an oversized Road Map of the British Isles in the footwell, as if her mother and Bernard took to navigating a sweetly scented kingdom on a whim any day of the week. She thought, I’d never choose this type of car for my own. And then she thought, you ungrateful cow. She felt alone mostly because she knew she was defiantly turning her back on the few who were there for her.
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