This Must Be the Place (11 page)

The man is our father.

He has ordered coffee, Italian-style, in a tiny cup. It looks like mud but smells dark and rich. Niall has herbal tea because that’s the kind of person he is. It’s a flower sort, not berry: he says berry teas are an ‘abomination’, which is one of my favourite Niall words. He’s taken out the teabag and the tea is so weak it’s barely tea at all. Have I mentioned my brother is the coolest person in the world?

I have a soda, no ice.

The man, my father, is asking Niall about Berkeley and Niall is using his clipped-off sentences to reply and you can see that the man, our father, is thinking it’s his fault and I want to say to him: it’s OK, he always does that, it’s not just you.

‘So do you use that tunnel building place? Is that where the lab is?’ the man is saying, and he looks so like Niall that it’s really quite distracting. It was the first thing I thought when I walked in here: that man over there is like an old Niall. Then I realised it was him, the person we were here to see. Dumb Phoebe. He has the same hair that grows in, like, twenty different ways, the brow that juts out over the eyes, which sometimes look fierce and other times just puzzled, even the same hands. Wide, flat nails with big lumpy knuckles. As I look at his hands I get the sensation that I’m looking down the wrong end of a telescope at something far away and almost indiscernible. I can see this hand in mine, except I’m much smaller and I have to reach up to hold it, and the hand is warm and large and covers mine completely, and my feet are in little blue Mary Janes that I just know are new and I am being told to line them up with the edge of the sidewalk and to wait, always wait, until my dad tells me it’s safe to cross. Check and check again, he is saying, and then keep checking while you cross because you can never be too careful. The hand covering mine. And it’s odd because I always tell Niall that I can’t remember Dad, not really. I remember the shape of a man’s back standing at the kitchen door, looking out. But that could have been anyone. I remember the sight of bristles in the bathroom sink after he’d shaved, a bathrobe hanging off the back of a door, a briefcase in the hallway, shoes large as boats kicked off by the sofa, the noise of a typewriter coming from the den. Nothing more.

‘And is it actually on top of a fault line?’ he is saying, and Niall is nodding, and I am suddenly aware of something flowing between this man and Niall, the wide current of a tide, back and forth. Niall was twelve when Dad left; he had him for twelve years and that’s a long time. There’s no tide for me.

‘How come you know so much about Berkeley?’ I blurt, and even though it comes out as kind of rude, he turns towards me and you can tell by the eager, quick twist of his body that he’s pleased I’ve spoken.

‘I worked there for years,’ he says. ‘All the time I was living with you guys.’

‘You worked at Berkeley?’ I say.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Like Niall?’

‘Yes.’ He gives me a smile and he looks so happy to see me, his eyes travelling all over my face, and a sudden wave of something crashes over me and I can’t tell if it’s happiness or sadness. It kind of feels like both.

‘I never knew that,’ I mutter.

Niall doesn’t say anything. He just stares at his hands, which are upturned on his knees so that his palms are staring right back at him.

‘Are you a seismologist too, then?’ I ask.

‘No.’ Dad shifts in his seat, moves his newspaper from the table to the bench. ‘I’m a …’ and he says a word I don’t understand.

‘A what?’

He says the word again.

‘What is that?’ I ask.

‘I study language and the way people use it.’

I still don’t get it but I don’t want him to think I’m dumb so I shut up and nod. Niall has started, throughout this exchange, to rub at the skin of his wrist and when he claws his hand, switching from using his palm to using his fingernails, I am putting out my hand to stop him, because you have to do that with Niall, have to remind him not to scratch, when I see that Dad is doing the same.

Dad has his hand on Niall’s inflamed arm. ‘Still bothered with that, huh?’ he says.

Niall shrugs.

‘What have they got you on, these days?’

‘The usual.’

‘Which is?’

‘Steroids and emollient.’

‘Hmm.’ Dad puts his head on one side. He’s tapping on Niall’s wrist, where the skin is torn and red, the way I’ve seen Niall do sometimes and I’m wondering how Niall is doing with this because he doesn’t like to be touched, doesn’t like to talk about his skin. ‘Same old, same old,’ Dad says. ‘You still see Zuckerman?’

Niall sits, his back in a curve. ‘Nah. Self-prescribe, mostly.’

‘You still go to the …?’

Niall lifts his head and looks Dad in the eye. ‘Daycare unit?’

Dad stops the tapping. He withdraws his hand. I feel again the tide pulling between them. ‘Yeah,’ he says, fiddling with his cup, putting the spoon in and out.

‘No,’ Niall says. ‘I don’t.’

There is a pause and I’m wondering if the people around are looking at us and whether any of them could guess the situation and what they would say if they did.

‘So, what grade are you in now, Phoebe?’ Dad says. ‘Tenth?’

‘Eleventh,’ I go.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Eleventh. How are you liking it?’

‘It’s OK.’

There is another pause. Niall picks up his wet teabag from his saucer. It weeps a stream of drops onto the table. He puts it back.

‘Any classes you particularly enjoy?’ Dad says.

I shrug. I want to leave, I think, and I’m wondering if Niall feels the same.

‘Do you have any notion yet of—’

‘Where have you been all this time?’ I shout, because suddenly I’m mad, I’m mad as hell. How can he just walk into a coffee shop and ask about Niall’s job and my grades and expect us to answer and pretend everything’s normal? Because that’s what this scenario feels like: normal. It feels outrageously, weirdly normal to be sitting here with our dad, and it is normal, except that it totally isn’t.

‘Where did you go?’ I’m yelling. ‘What happened? How could you leave like that? Why haven’t you come before?’

Niall is saying, ‘Don’t,’ in that way he has, like the way he talks to the dog if it’s barking or Mom if she’s losing it and he’s scared, I can tell, because he knows he’s the one who’s going to have to deal with me after this. Not Mom, because we probably aren’t going to tell her; not Stella, because she hates me now; not anyone.

‘Don’t, Phoebe,’ Niall is whispering, holding on to my elbow like a cop. ‘Don’t.’

‘It’s OK, Niall.’ Dad is calm. He is leaning forward, holding out a wad of napkins. ‘You’re perfectly entitled to ask those questions.’

I take the wad. I press it to my face and it feels good.

‘It’s a natural reaction,’ Dad is saying. ‘You’re completely within your rights to yell at me.’

I take the tissues away from my face to look at him.

‘I would yell at me,’ he continues. ‘In fact, I often do. The thing is, Phoebe, I’ve been living abroad. But I wrote you both every month and again on your birthdays. I don’t suppose you ever … got those letters?’

I shake my head. Niall stares down at his hands; he starts on his wrist again with all five nails but this time Dad and I don’t stop him.

‘I used to hope one might make it through,’ he says, almost to himself, ‘just one. I would apply for permission every year, sometimes more, to see you but it was never granted.’

I picture all those letters, thirteen times ten makes a hundred and thirty. Mine and Niall’s together makes two hundred and sixty. I wonder what Mom did with them. Did she burn them, throw them in the trash? The thought makes me cry even more and Niall is scratching, and Dad says more. He says that for a long time he tried to see us every week but Mom always managed to thwart him, in one way or another. He says he spent all his money on court cases to gain more time with us and to try to enforce the time he was supposed to have, but it didn’t work. He was totally broke when he went away – ‘broke and broken-hearted’ – and then he met this woman and married her. He says he flew in this morning with the express purpose of tracking us down. ‘I was at Newark airport – about to go visit my dad, actually – and I’ve been thinking for a while that Niall is over twenty-one now. Legally an adult. So I’ve been planning to come, to give seeing you another go. But there I was, in the States, so I just got on a plane for California and I decided I wasn’t going to leave until I found you both. And here we are.’

He sits back in the booth. He picks up a spoon and looks at it as if he’s never seen one before. ‘I never gave up on the hope I might see you both again,’ he says, apparently to the spoon. ‘There wasn’t a day, an hour, a minute when I didn’t think about you. I want you always to know that.’

I have no idea what to do with this information so I take a huge slurp of my soda and it’s gone kind of flat but, even so, it floods the back of my throat and I gag and cough, and Niall has to smack me on the back and he smacks me way too hard because he’s never been able to gauge the appropriate amount of pressure for things – he’s forever breaking jars or taps or window catches by accident. And while I’m coughing, I hear Niall say, ‘So whereabouts do you live?’

Dad says, or seems to say, ‘Island.’

‘What?’ I get out. ‘An island? Like, a tropical island?’

‘Not an – the.’

‘The island?’

‘The country,’ Niall says, ‘not the land form.’

I almost start crying again because I can’t understand what everyone is talking about and Niall just seems to get Dad, in the way he only ever got me, and I feel left out, and I hate feeling left out when it’s Niall because Niall is the only one I’m 100 per cent sure will never leave me out of anything – no matter how young or dumb I am, I know he’ll include me in everything – and suddenly it seems there’s this whole other unit I never knew about, with this man I don’t remember.

‘Island, island, island,’ Niall is saying.

‘Island, island,’ Dad is saying, ‘you’ve never heard of island?’

‘Of course I’ve heard of islands!’ I shriek. ‘I just don’t get—’

Then I hear Dad say, ‘Where the Sullivans came from,’ and the penny drops.

‘Ireland,’ I say, and everyone breathes again. ‘As in part of England.’

Dad goes to speak, then changes his mind. ‘Yup,’ he says instead. ‘You got it.’

‘Strictly speaking,’ Niall says, ‘it’s not part of England. It’s been an independent state, politically and fiscally, since—’

‘It’s next to England,’ Dad says hastily, giving me a smile, and I want to smile back, seeing him do this normal-dad stuff, smoothing things over between me and Niall, and again I feel that rearing sensation of something far away yet close, and I wonder if he used to do this when we were kids. He must have done.

‘And you’re married?’ I say.

He nods.

‘What’s her name?’

Oddly, he seems to hesitate. ‘Claudette.’

‘French?’ Niall asks.

‘Half,’ Dad says, and it strikes me that he does the thing Niall does, missing out words that other people consider mandatory, and I wonder if Niall got it from him.

A thought strikes me and I sit up straight. ‘Do you have kids? I mean, other kids?’

Dad nods again. ‘I do.’

‘How many?’

‘Two. A boy and a girl.’

‘Like us?’

Dad smiles. ‘A girl and a boy, I should have said. Like you but the other way round.’

‘What are their names?’

‘The girl is Marithe and the baby is Calvin. You want to see a photo?’

‘Yes,’ I say, even though I sort of don’t.

Dad reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. Niall and I lean over to look. Some people are trapped behind a sheet of celluloid. A small girl in a blue dress holds the hand of a woman with long hair. She has a baby on her hip. The baby is looking upwards as if something in the sky has caught its attention. The little girl stares out and it occurs to me she must have been staring at Dad, at Mr Daniel Sullivan, our father.

As if he senses my thoughts, Dad says, ‘She reminds me a lot of you.’

‘Who?’ I go.

‘Marithe.’

I stare into the face of the girl. She looks like a girl, nothing more.

‘Look,’ Dad says, and he flips the photo over and there, on the other side of the wallet, are me and Niall. Aged about six and twelve, in the back garden, holding hands. Or, rather, I’m holding on to Niall’s hand and he’s permitting me to do so. And Dad’s right. I do look like Marithe: the same tilted-up nose, the same red-blond hair, although Marithe’s is long and I was never allowed to grow mine. Too much like hard work, Mom always said.

But Niall, as usual, is thinking about something else entirely.

‘That’s your wife?’ Niall says, pointing at the woman with the baby.

Dad waits a moment before replying, ‘Yes,’ in a voice that’s weirdly uncertain, as if he’s not sure this is the true and correct answer.

Niall looks at the photo. He looks at Dad. He says, ‘Claudette,’ in a reflective, questioning tone.

Again, there is the sense of something flowing between the two of them and this time it doesn’t make me mad: it makes me kind of happy.

Dad inclines his head.

‘As in …’ and Niall says a word that could have been ‘whales’ or ‘wills’ or ‘wells’ and I’m not really listening. I’m not interested in his wife, though she is pretty, in a skinny, boho, European sort of a way. I’ve got my eye on that girl, the way she’s standing on one foot, the other raised as if she’s about to make a dash for it. Go, I want to say to her, my little doppelganger across the Atlantic, go for it.

‘Wow,’ Niall says, in a drawn-out way. ‘OK.’

AUCTION CATALOGUE:

CLAUDETTE WELLS MEMORABILIA

London, 19 June 2005

From the private collection of Mr Derek Roberts, former personal assistant to Ms Wells.

LOT 1

DATE PLANNER FOR THE YEAR 1989

Black and gold cover, some creasing to corners, notations on all pages in the hand of Ms Wells.

Note to collectors: 1989 was the year Ms Wells left university and moved to London. The diary records the dates of her final exams, the date of her arrival in London, the times of various job interviews and, in late December, the evening on which she first met Timou Lindstrom.