The Way Back Home by Freya North Page B

Coach House remained gloriously ramshackle and unconverted. There were rusty nails and mice, all manner of junk dumped there over the decades and something so dead and flattened it appeared to be made out of old shoe leather. Their father had persuaded their mother that it was precisely the type of place children
should
be allowed to commandeer and have as a semi-secret den. Well, a dead mouse isn’t going to kill them, she’d said. Nor is a living one, he’d said.
    And now, the sash window over at the house was juddered down and the shadowy figure disappeared from view, back into the mystery of the apartment. The girls waited. Then they looked at each other again before scuttling out of the sty and over to the painting. It had fallen face down just beyond the French drain. Emma flipped it over and both girls gasped.
    Bosoms.
    How utterly thrilling.
    Quickly, they carried the painting back to the sty and propped it against a wall. Their hearts pounded at the bases of their throats, their stomachs knotted and their eyes danced – they were just old enough to grasp the illicitness of it all – bosoms in a painting that they had kidnapped, bosoms that were enough to make a grown man swear. Fervently, they explored every inch of the painting with their eyes, with their fingers. Parts of the canvas had oils so thick they had been whipped up into peaks and ridges like a storm-lashed sea. The paint was still pliable and the children fiddled, pressing with thumbs and digging with their nails. There was an area of the picture – the lady’s neck – that they decided must be the fuck-you part because the paint was still fresh and tacky and the sweary man had done a bad job trying to keep within the outline.
    It was like skating by fingertip – the girls swirled and tracked around the wetter paint, leaving their marks and thinking it looked better. Not perfect. It still didn’t look like a nice, smooth, elegant neck – but at least it no longer looked as though the flesh had been grabbed away from the lady’s throat.
    * * *
    ‘Christ.’
    Jed had been in a slump on the sofa for two hours, saying nothing other than Christ. Malachy laughed at him, but privately was grateful for the ground coffee his brother had bought the day before, and he made a pot so strong that he really could stand a teaspoon in it.
    ‘Are you staying for lunch?’
    ‘I can’t talk about food.’
    ‘At least you’ve stopped talking to Jesus.’
    ‘Fat lot of help He gave me.’ Jed paused. ‘Christ.’
    He pressed gingerly around his eye sockets as if fully expecting to find fissures and shards. Unbelievably, his nose appeared to be straight and he still had all his teeth. The coffee helped and, after an hour, he said yes to the scrambled eggs and bacon Malachy offered to cook for them.
    ‘I am a prize idiot,’ Jed said, ‘and I have only myself to blame. If I ever even mention the word
Scotch
again, you are within your rights to have me sectioned.’
    Malachy laughed. His brother could always make him laugh – Jed could always bring a genuine smile to anyone: teachers ready to dish out detention, parents about to ground him, even girlfriends on the verge of dumping him. It was something Malachy had quietly begrudged him their whole lives. Not so much because it got Jed out of all manner of scrapes, but more because it seemed to amplify Malachy’s diametric default. Jed the lively one, Malachy the quiet one. Jed the life and soul. Malachy the boy in the background. Jed who could get away with blue murder. Malachy who should know better. Jed the brother the girls flocked to. Malachy the brother they didn’t.
    But today he looked at Jed and thought, mate, I do
not
envy you your hangover.
    ‘Stay tonight,’ he said. ‘You’re probably still over the limit, anyway.’
    Jed thought about it. Stretched. Slumped. Straightened. Shrugged. ‘I’d better go,’ he said, ‘but thanks.’
    ‘Don’t leave it so long next time,’ said