This Must Be the Place (3 page)

The car door is wrenched open and my wife slides back into the passenger seat. Eleven more to go. The baby bursts into tears of relief. Marithe yells, ‘One! One gate! One, Daddy, that’s one!’ She is alone in her love of the Gates. The dashboard immediately starts up a hysterical bleeping, signalling that my wife needs to fasten her seatbelt. I should warn you that she won’t. The bleeping and flashing will continue until we get to the road. It’s a bone of contention in our marriage: I think the hassle of fastening and unfastening the seatbelt is outweighed by the cessation of that infernal noise; she disagrees.

‘So, your dad,’ my wife continues. She has, among her many other talents, an amazing ability to remember and pick up half-finished conversations. ‘I really think—’

‘Can you not just put the seatbelt on?’ I snap. I can’t help it. I have a low threshold for repetitive electronic noises.

She turns her head with infinite, luxurious slowness to look at me. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she says.

‘The seatbelt. Can’t you just this once—’

I am silenced by another gate, which looms out of the mist. She gets out, she walks towards the gate, the baby cries, Marithe yells out a number, et cetera, et cetera. By the penultimate gate, there is a dull pressure in my temples that threatens to blossom into persistent dents of pain.

As my wife returns to the car, the radio fizzes, subsides, crackles into life. We keep it permanently switched on because reception is mostly a notion in these parts and any snatch of music or dialogue is greeted with cheers.

‘Oh, Brendan! Brendan!’ an actress in a studio somewhere earnestly emotes. ‘Be careful!’ The connection dissolves in a crackle of static.

‘Oh, Brendan, Brendan!’ Marithe shrieks, in delight, drumming her feet into the back of my seat. The baby, quick to catch the general mood, gives a crowing inhale, gripping the edges of his chair, and the sun chooses that moment to make an unexpected appearance. Ireland looks green and pleasant and blessed as we skim along the track, splashing through puddles, towards the final gate.

My wife and Marithe are debating what Brendan may have needed to be careful of, the baby is repeating an
n
sound and I am thinking it’s early for him to be using his palate in such a way as I idly turn the dial to see what else we can find.

I pull up at the last and final gate. A Glaswegian accent filters through the white noise, filling the car, speaking in the self-consciously serious tones of the newsreader. There is some geographical blip that means we can, on occasion, pick up the Scottish news. Something about an upcoming local election, a politician caught speeding, a school without textbooks. I twirl the dial through waves of nothingness, searching for speech, panning for a human voice.

My wife gets out of the car; she walks towards the gate. I watch the breeze snatch and toy with hanks of her hair, the upright, ballet-dancer’s gait of her, her hand in its half-mitten as she grips the gate lock.

The radio aerial strains and picks up a female voice: calm but hesitant. It’s something about gender and the workplace, one of those issue-led magazine programmes you get in the middle of the morning on the BBC. A West Country octogenarian is speaking about being one of the first women employed as an engineer, and I’m about to turn the dial further, as it’s the kind of thing my wife will be avid to hear and I am really in the mood for some decent music. Then a different voice comes out of the little perforated speakers near my knee: the dipping, vowel-lengthened accent of the educated English.

‘And I thought to myself, my God,’ the woman on the radio says, into my car, into the ears of my children, ‘this must be the glass ceiling I’ve heard so much about. Should it really be so hard to crack it with my cranium?’

These words produce within me a deep chime of recognition. Without warning, my mind is engaged with a series of flashcards: a cobbled pavement indistinct with fog, a bicycle chained to a railing, trees dense with the scent of pine, a giving pelt of fallen needles underfoot, a telephone receiver pressed to the soft cartilage of an ear.

I know that woman, I want to exclaim, I knew her. I almost turn and say this to the kids in the back: I knew that person, once.

I am remembering the black cape thing she used to wear and her penchant for unwalkable shoes, weird, articulated jewellery, outdoor sex, when the voice fades out and the presenter comes on air to tell us that was Nicola Janks, speaking in the mid-1980s.

I slap my palm on the wheel. Nicola Janks, of all people. Never have I otherwise come across that surname. She remains the only Janks I ever knew. She had, I seem to recall, some crazy middle name, something Grecian or Roman that bespoke parents with mythological proclivities. What was it now? I am recalling, ruefully, that it’s no real surprise that things from that time might seem a little hazy, given the amount of—

And then I am thinking nothing.

The presenter is intoning, in the straitened, delicate way that can mean only one thing, that Nicola Janks died not long after the interview was recorded.

My brain performs a series of jolts, like an engine about to stall. I look instinctively for my wife. She has swung the gate open and is waiting for me to drive through.

There is the sensation that a window somewhere has blown open or a single domino has fallen against another, causing a cascade. A tide has rushed forward, then pulled back out, and whatever was beneath it is altered for ever.

I gaze back at my wife. She is holding the gate. She leans her weight against it so that it doesn’t blow back against the car. She is holding it, trusting that I will drive the car through, the car that contains her children, her offspring, her beloveds. Her hair fills with the Irish wind, like a sail. She is searching the windscreen now for my face, wondering why I am not moving forward, but from where she is standing, the glass is opaque with the reflections of clouds. From where she is standing, I might not even be here at all.

The train pulls over the border, in an easterly direction, in and out of rain showers. I sit with the newspaper my wife bought me rolled in my hand like a baton, as if I am on the brink of guiding an invisible orchestra through a symphony.

It’s been ten years since I did the reverse journey, on a pilgrimage of sorts. I’d never been to Ireland then: it had simply never occurred to me to come. I am not one of those Irish-Americans coshed by a sense of Eiresatz nostalgia, filled with backwards-looking whimsy about a country that our great-grandparents were forced out of in order to survive. Within my family I was alone in this: my sisters all wore Claddagh rings, went to St Patrick’s Day parades and gave their children names with tricky clusters of
d
s and
b
s.

I was working at Berkeley, somewhat uncomfortably, as part of the cognitive sciences department. My marriage had just ground to a halt: my wife had been having an affair with a colleague for years, it had transpired. This revelation had pushed me into a minor dalliance, which had in turn prompted my wife to sue for divorce. I was living in the apartment of a friend who was in Japan on a sabbatical; the cuckolding colleague had moved into the house from which I had so recently been ejected. My soon-to-be ex-wife had morphed into a vengeful harpy who had decided I should pay her astronomic amounts of alimony in return for minimal contact with my kids. Week after week, she refused to honour the custody arrangement our lawyers had thrashed out. I was pouring my entire salary into fighting this; I was having ill advised affairs with two different women and preventing their discovery of each other was causing me undue complications and evasions.

In the middle of this brew, my grandmother died and, according to the surprising instructions in her will, was cremated. The usual familial disagreements ensued as to what we should do with her ashes. My aunt favoured an urn, in particular an antique Chinese ginger jar she’d seen on sale; my father wanted to go ahead with a burial. An uncle put out the suggestion of a family plot; another was keen to go the way of some kind of woodland, tree-planting deal. It was a cousin who said, shouldn’t we put her with Grandpa?

We all looked at each other. It was the end of the wake: the priest had left, the guests were dwindling, the room was filled with crumpled napkins, crumbled cake and wreaths of cigarette smoke. My dad and his siblings lowered their eyes.

The truth came out, as truths are meant to do at funerals: no one quite knew where Grandpa’s remains were. The story was that, years ago, he and Grandma had taken what everyone agreed was their first vacation, to Ireland. Grandpa had retired from the business and they had never seen the country of their grandparents, all their friends had been, they had a little bit put by, and so on and so forth. Fill in for yourselves the usual reasons why people go on vacation.

They flew to Dublin. They saw the Ring of Kerry, then looked around Cork, the Dingle Peninsula. They saw the famous dolphin. For some reason – no one knew why – they ended up in Donegal, the forehead of the dog, that slice of country squeezed in next to the British annex. Did one of their ancestors come from Donegal, I wanted to know, or perhaps the Protestant North? This latter suggestion was shouted down. They, and we, were 100 per cent Catholic Irish, my uncle insisted. To suggest otherwise was a dire insult.

Whatever their ancestry, my grandparents were staying, for a reason that will never be known, at a B-and-B in Buncrana. My grandmother was filing her nails at what she would later always refer to as an ‘armoire’ – my father was very clear on that point – when my grandfather turned from the window and said, ‘I have the strangest feeling in my legs.’

She didn’t look up. She would regret this. Daniel, she would say to me later, always look up, if someone says that to you, always. I can confidently report that no one ever has. In the event, she did not look up. She kept on with the nail filing and said, ‘So sit down.’

He didn’t sit down. He fell down, right across the carpet, knocking over the nightstand and an ornamental bowl that my grandmother had to pay for before checking out. A brain haemorrhage. Dead in an instant. Aged sixty-six.

I have the strangest feeling in my legs
. How’s that for your last words?

Long story short: my grandmother was of the generation that didn’t make a fuss. Didn’t create waves. They just swallowed whatever bitter pill life dealt them and got on with it. It would never have occurred to her to have her husband’s body flown back to the States, to be honoured by his numerous offspring. No, she didn’t want to put anyone to any trouble so she had him cremated the very next day, with the local priest in attendance. She did the deed, she checked out and she came home. She had to pay an excess baggage fee to bring home his suitcase, a detail that always sent my father overboard with rage (he never did cope well with financial outlay of any sort). But what had happened to the ashes, nobody quite knew.

The plight of my long-deceased grandfather touched a raw nerve in me. I left the wake in a frenzy of disgust: it was somehow very typical of my family to go to the trouble of lugging home the clothes of a dead man but overlook his actual ashes. To have never asked my grandmother for the specific location of his final immolation. How could his remains have been forgotten, consigned to some lonely Purgatory in a country where none of us had ever lived, alone, abandoned? No doubt I was imagining my own ashes being left to moulder in some faraway place, my children never collecting them because they were permitted to see me only once a week, between the hours of three and five p.m., at a place of their mother’s choosing. Because whenever this paltry, unjust amount of time came around, their mother left a message with their father’s secretary to say the children were ill/on a school trip/had a test/couldn’t make it that day. Because the legal system is irrevocably tilted towards the female parent, no matter how unfaithful or vindictive she is. Because, however hard the father tries—

I digress.

After I got back to San Francisco, I got hold of the names of all the funeral homes in that part of Ireland and, in between fielding calls from my lawyer, attending court appearances at which I might as well have thrown several thousand dollars into a trash-can and dropped in a lit match, attending separate liaisons with my two lovers, trying to find an apartment where I could live when my friend returned from Japan (an eye-wateringly expensive three-bedroomed place because, the lawyer said, it was crucial to show I was ‘able to provide a home for the children’), I called them. I would sit at the kitchen table at three a.m., holding on to the end of a joint as if my life depended on it – and perhaps it did – and dial a number on my list. Then I would listen to the soft, cushiony vowels of the reply: ‘Hello.’ Said more like
hellouh
: the closing sound elongated, the tongue lowered, further back than it would have been in the mouth of an American. There was no ‘How may I help you?’ follow-up either, just a matter-of-fact
hellouh
.

It took me a while to get used to.

So, I would sit there in the dark, in my colleague’s kitchen, surrounded by crayoned drawings by children who weren’t related to me, insomnia raging through me, and I would ask: Can you help me, can you tell me, did you cremate a man called Daniel Sullivan twenty years ago, on a day in late May? Yes, to add to the surrealism of the situation, my grandfather and I have the same name. There were times, in the dead of the San Francisco night, when I felt as though I were trying to track down the ashes of my former self.

At my question, there was always a momentary pause and, after a scuffling, a few exchanges I was convinced were often in Irish, the thunk-swoosh of a filing cabinet being opened, the answer was always no. Said
nooooo
.

Until one day a woman (girl, perhaps – she sounded young, too young to be working at such a place) said: yes, he’s here.

I held the phone to my ear. I’d been in court that day, where I’d been told I had no further recourse: there was nothing I could do to ensure I could be part of my son and daughter’s upbringing; there was no way to force my ex-wife to honour the contact agreement; I just had to hope ‘she would see sense’; and, in the words of my lawyer, we’d ‘come to the end of the road’. At which I roared, in the domed vestibule of the courthouse, so that everyone in the vicinity turned towards me, then quickly away, all except my ex-wife, who walked steadily to the exit, without looking back, and even the swish of her ponytail was triumphant: ‘It’s parenthood. There’s not supposed to be an end of the road.’