No Place Like Home

ankles released him and he fell, he heard her, up on the bridge, he heard her shout his name:
‘Owen!’

1
‘Noooooo! Dad, tell her she can’t!’ Max staggered back against the worktop, as if the shock of seeing the ingredients Phoebe had assembled on the table had sent him reeling. ‘Please, you have to assert some sort of control here.’
‘I’m out of control!’ Phoebe shouted happily, dancing across the kitchen waving a wooden spoon in each hand, the oversized Bake Off apron impeding the execution of the moves she was attempting.
Bram saw it happen as if in slow motion: Phoebe’s ill-conceived decision to go for a high kick; the long apron catching at her legs; the inevitable fall to the unforgiving Caithness slate floor, on which her nine-year-old skull would crack like an egg.
He shot across the kitchen, his dad-bod physique transformed into that of a superhero, leg muscles powering him into position, arms flying out with supernatural speed to catch her as she fell.
‘Oof! Thanks, Dad!’ She clutched at his shirt as he righted her, smiling up at him as if he really were her superhero.
He held on to her a moment before letting her go. ‘Careful, Phoebs. It’s a kitchen, not a dance floor. You shouldn’t really be messing about in here.’
Maybe slate flooring hadn’t been such a great choice for the kitchen after all.
‘They mess about on Bake Off all the time,’ Phoebe objected, the wooden spoons now drooping in her hands, her big blue eyes fixed on Bram reproachfully. Unless he was careful, they’d be streaming with tears in a second. Phoebe’s moods were mercurial things, will-o’-the-wisps, giddy flames that flared and were gone.
Bram swept her up in his arms, making her squeal like a much younger child as he set her down on the table next to her chosen ingredients. Max had picked up the jar of jam.
Phoebe snatched it back. ‘Peanut butter and jam is a classic combination.’
‘Not in a quiche!’
‘You’re not the boss of me, Max.’ Her brother may have been nine years older than Phoebe, but she had never let the age difference carry much weight. ‘Each competitor gets to choose her or his own ingredients. Don’t they, Dad?’
Bram grimaced a concession. ‘Them’s the rules, I guess.’
‘But we can’t make Grannie and Grandad and Uncle Fraser and Mum eat a peanut butter and raspberry jam quiche,’ Max wailed, the wail turning into a chortle as the two of them gave themselves up to mirth.
Bram smiled as he opened the oven door. ‘Okay, Phoebs, you have the time it takes to blind-bake the cases to ponder the wisdom of your choices.’
The three pastry cases were lined up ready to go into the oven. Phoebe’s effort was already looking extremely unappetising, sweaty-looking and grey. Max’s pastry, in contrast, was so perfect it looked like the bought stuff, neatly pressed into the wavy edge of the quiche tin and overlapping the edges just the right amount to allow for shrinkage.
When had this happened? When had Max become someone who made perfect pastry? Almost while Bram wasn’t looking, their little boy had grown up. Up, up and away. After this last year of school he’d be off out into the world on his gap year – which absolutely terrified Bram, no matter how much Kirsty tried to reassure him that Max was a sensible boy and would be perfectly fine constructing a school with no proper training under the supervision of a load of randoms a hundred miles from the nearest hospital in the Rwandan bush, surrounded on all sides by Gaboon vipers, spitting cobras and black mambas, an encounter with any one of which could prove fatal. Kirsty had banned Bram from Googling snakes, but that only meant he’d moved on to spiders – and they were worse, if anything, being so much less visible.
He shoved the three pastry cases into the oven and threw an arm around Max’s shoulders, trying and failing not to choke up. He’d really missed Max these last two months. After selling the flat in Islington, Bram, Kirsty and Phoebe had moved straight up to Scotland to live temporarily with Kirsty’s parents until the new house was finished, but Max had stayed on with Bram’s parents in London to finish the school year, with just the odd weekend trip up to Scotland.
‘I’m relying on you to contain the force of nature that is your sister until I get back, okay? I’m going to the veg patch to harvest some onions.’
Bram had planted onions, leeks, carrots, lettuce and chard in late spring and tended them religiously on every visit to the new house. Today, hopefully, they could all enjoy the fruits of his labours.
‘We’ll try not to burn the place down in your absence,’ said Max, pushing his floppy dark fringe to the side, the better to scrutinise the oven temperature. He was taller than Bram now, and fortunately blessed with Kirsty’s looks rather than Bram’s: her straight brows and soulful green eyes.
‘That would be good.’
Phoebe laughed. ‘Grandad wouldn’t be happy if we burned the house down on our first day in the new kitchen!’
‘I don’t imagine he’d be best pleased, no.’ Bram looked beyond the big antique pine table to the open-plan sitting area situated between the kitchen and the front door. Kirsty and her dad, David, who had built the house for them, had based this open-plan space on the Walton house – Kirsty had been obsessed with the TV show The Waltons as a child – with two windows either side of the door looking onto a verandah. There was a solid fuel-burning stove and even a radio cunningly disguised to look like an old-fashioned wireless.
In an hour’s time David would be coming through that door, a compact, muscly bundle of contained energy, nose twitching, on the hunt for something to criticise. David and Linda, Kirsty’s mum, lived in an ‘executive bungalow’ four miles away in Grantown-on-Spey. Bram had hoped that four miles out of town was far enough