Free The Way Back Home by Freya North Page B

the door and echoing thunk as he closed it would have announced his arrival anyway. There was nothing wrong with Robin’s hearing but it depended on which world he was in whether he actually registered it or not.
    ‘Hi, Robin!’
    Silence.
    Malachy whistled casually as he made his way from room to room. Not in the kitchen. Bathroom door open; towels on the rail, spirit-level straight. Study door closed. Malachy knocked, poked his head around. The day bed, with a tartan blanket flung back as if someone had suddenly become overheated; the swivel chair facing Malachy as if someone had only just now left it. The walls a latticework of shelves, bent and bowed with the weight of all the books and, in the spaces between the books and the next shelf, piles of papers, brochures, catalogues and magazines. The room could do with some air. And then Oriana’s room. Today, he felt he did want to see in there – but what if Robin had renovated it the way Malachy had Jed’s old room? What if nothing had changed and even the quickest glimpse hurled him back through time to a period during which he was happiest and at his most miserable? He took his hand off the knob, walked on to the sitting room and through to Robin’s studio. He was in there, at the easel behind a canvas, and Malachy could only see his legs and the legs of the stool on which he sat.
    ‘Hullo, Robin.’
    Robin peered around the side of the canvas and stared for a moment.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘It’s Malachy – I just thought I’d pop in.’
    ‘Well, fuck off.’ Robin disappeared behind the canvas, muttering.
    ‘I’ll go and make you some soup, shall I?’ Malachy continued. He glanced around the room. There was no sign of any meals having been taken. All the mugs that were on various surfaces were crammed with paintbrushes and palette knives, pheasant feathers, knitting needles, flat wide pencils and small branches with curled and crusted leaves still clinging on. Tea bags in dried-out little dumps on surfaces here and there; on the windowsills cigarette butts balanced upright.
    ‘Have you eaten today?’
    Robin 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