This Must Be the Place (42 page)

And Who Are You?

Niall, Donegal, 2013

D
espite his fatigue, despite his thirst, Niall keeps on putting one foot in front of the other. The terrain is uneven and steep, the precipitation intense, but he is bound to continue. He has, for a number of reasons, gone too far with this escapade to turn back. No other option is available to him at this present time.

He pauses for a moment, listening to the tidal draw and suck of his breath. He checks the hand-drawn map once more, even though he doesn’t need to. He has always had a photographic sense of such things, an ability to process the one-dimensional into the three.

He stands under the branches of a yew tree, which seems to hoard rainwater in its spiked, waxy leaves. He permits himself to register discomfort in the skin of his neck, his wrists, his left ankle: he recognises the urge to scratch, to really tear into it; he breathes, he makes an attempt to push the urge from him, to stand apart from it. Just to be on the safe side, he bandaged himself – badly – on the arms and legs before he set off yesterday.

When Niall was a child, the ten-minute walk home from school began to take him twenty minutes, then thirty, then forty. He was arriving back more than an hour late before his mother noticed.

Why? she wanted to know. Why? his father asked him. Why? said his grandmother. Was he playing with other boys on the way? Was he going over to someone’s house? Even aged six, it struck Niall as significant that neither of his parents asked him those questions. Other children had been noticeably absent in their theorising.

The time of the walk crept above an hour, then to an hour and a half. After that, his father was waiting at the school gate for him: show me, he said, the route you walk. Niall showed him and they were home in ten minutes.

He didn’t tell his father about the fear that had gripped him for some time, that when he got home, when he opened the door and stepped in over the threshold, his home might look completely different. The carpet in the hall, the one with the geometric pattern that linked up to itself in satisfying decimal blocks, wouldn’t be there; the coatstand would be gone, the mirror with bevelled edges, the yellow dish in which his parents put their car keys, their loose change, their pocket detritus. Something told him, every day, that while he was out at school his parents might have moved or vanished or been abducted and that an entirely different family would be living in his house. He would go into the kitchen and there would be another woman with a different face, a different voice, standing at the counter. Hello, she would say, and who are you?

Niall places the folded map carefully in his pocket, dabs the rain from his face with his bandaged hand, and continues up the track. There is, just as the map had led him to expect, a bend up ahead. He is expecting – hoping – to get some visual clue to his destination at that point.

The thought rises in him that the cure for that particular childhood anxiety was not his father’s presence on the walk, not the cakes his mother would defrost for his return home – it was Phoebe.

On the track, Niall stops. There is the sensation that the ground might give way beneath him, the very bedrock collapsing, giving in to sudden erosion. The itch in his neck, in his left ankle, flares, crackles, sears, as if some internal thermostat has been turned up. He breathes once, twice. He bangs the ankle against the opposite foot, taps at his neck with the back of his hand.

Can he think about this? He finds himself constantly checking. Phoebe as a child is OK, he’s found, but nothing beyond the age of around nine.

So it was Phoebe who cured him of the fear that his parents, his home, everything that was familiar and dear would vanish. She was born around that time and her presence in the house somehow dispelled any threat of annihilation, of supernatural theft. He would get home and there she would be, on her playmat, her gaze wise and knowing, her fist outstretched to grip his hand, to hold him firm. And by the time she was up on her feet, she would run to meet him at the door. Make things with pipe-cleaners, was her take on solving life’s worries, build me a fort of cardboard boxes, help me draw a unicorn, dig with me in the sandbox until we find treasure.

Niall rounds the corner and the rain suddenly clears. He takes in the sight of the house, which he’d known would be there. Is this the place? It is bigger than he was expecting, more substantial – more opulent, he supposes. He’d understood it was some kind of gatehouse, an outlying building of a Protestant mansion. This place looks like a small kind of mansion in its own right.

He proceeds, but with caution. It can’t be the place. The map makes no hint at another house in the area, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. He is just about to get out the map again to have another look when a person appears from round the side of the barn and he knows instantly, without a shadow of doubt, that he is where he is meant to be.

The person is barefoot, an apple in one hand. She has a musical instrument – the name of which currently eludes Niall – slung on her front. She gnaws at the apple, once, twice, and flings it towards a tree-trunk, where it shatters into white and falls to the ground. Then she sees Niall. She regards him for a moment, standing on one foot, wiping her mouth. ‘Are you lost?’ she calls.

The piercing acuity of the question, coming from her mouth, floors Niall. He shakes his head. He doesn’t, at this moment, trust himself to speak.

‘The village is that way,’ she says, and points behind him, ‘the mountain over there.’ She sweeps her hand behind her.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘I have a map.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Good.’

She puts the fingers of her right hand on the vertical keyboard of the musical instrument and presses a number of the keys, silently, squinting into the sudden sun to look at him.

That squint, that quizzical gaze, is so familiar to Niall it is as if someone is tunnelling into his chest with a narrow flensing instrument. He has to look away, look down, shuffle his feet, quell the urge to scratch at his neck, his wrist. He never expected this.

He taps his bandaged fingers against his pulse-point and, all of a sudden, the word comes to him: accordion. The instrument is an accordion. He can see the page of an encyclopaedia, summoned up from some distant afternoon, some hour between school and dinner, when he would lie on his front in his bedroom, committing the pages of information to memory, for want of anything better to do. Operated by a mechanism recalling that of bellows. Auditory changes effected by valves, opened and shut by the use of keys. Featured frequently in folk music of both Celtic and Eastern European origin.

Niall has to shake his head to rid himself of this shimmering textual visitation. ‘I’m … ah …’ he begins. How to say this? ‘I’m looking for Daniel Sullivan.’

‘That’s my dad.’ The girl shrugs. ‘He doesn’t live here any more.’

‘Oh,’ Niall is taken aback. Some part of his mind is still running on accordions and supplies him helpfully with one further fact: often decorated with inlaid mother-of-pearl. He makes a supreme effort to return himself to the moment, to the here and now, to the fact that his father doesn’t live where he’d said he did.

‘I didn’t know that,’ Niall manages to say.

‘He lives in London, these days,’ the girl says, in her incongruous, sing-song, almost-Irish accent, still regarding him with those unsettling eyes.

‘OK. I’m sorry, I had no idea. He didn’t tell me he’d … moved. I would never have … I’m sorry. Maybe I should …’ Niall half turns, as if to go back, but stops, when he realises there is nowhere to go.

‘How do you know my dad?’ the girl with the accordion is saying.

Niall gives in to the urge to scratch his wrist. He can’t not do it – just for a moment, he has to, there’s nothing to be done. ‘I … er …’ He scratches, he drags his nails over the spot and it is an exquisite, unbearable, temporary relief, he counts four, he counts five, he will stop at nine, yes, he will. ‘Well, he’s my dad too.’

Niall curses himself immediately. He shouldn’t have said that. That was stupid. He hadn’t meant to. If he hadn’t been distracted by his skin, he would never have said it, he would never have given it away. He could have walked away from here unscathed, no harm done, back to the village, find a bed for the night, then back to the States, to his apartment, to everything over there.

‘Really?’ the girl says, standing straighter. ‘Wait a minute, are you … whatshisname? From America?’

‘Yes,’ Niall says. ‘I’m whatshisname from America.’ He has to take his nails away from his wrist, he has to, he knows this but he can’t, he just can’t. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘this feels like a mistake. I should have called first or written or something. Didn’t mean to—’

‘Wait here,’ she says, and runs into the house, the accordion wheezing as she goes.

Seconds later, the front door disgorges three or four dogs that surge around him, sniffing at his genital area and whining in high-pitched unison, and a Chinese girl in her teens. She is wearing a nightdress and possesses such startling, nascent beauty that Niall decides it’s best not to look at her at all.

‘Marithe says you’re Daniel’s son,’ she says, in an accent that is possibly English, Niall isn’t sure. ‘Is that right?’

Niall always tells the truth: it’s the way he’s programmed. ‘Yes.’

The young girl with the black hair and nightdress examines him carefully. He notices her taking in the backpack; he sees her eyes linger on the bandages around his wrist, one of which, he now sees, is showing a red bloom of blood. Her fine-hewn features carry the hint of suspicion, of disbelief, and who can blame her, really?

‘I don’t think we knew you were coming,’ she says, ‘did we? Daniel doesn’t live here any more.’

A great weariness crests over Niall’s head. ‘I know that now,’ he says, rubbing at his eyelid. ‘Marithe told me. Listen, I’m sorry for just turning up like this. Daniel told me … I thought … I just thought … I think I’m going to go. Sorry to disturb.’

The girl seems uncertain how to proceed. She fiddles with the nightdress collar, clears her throat. ‘My aunt’s not here at the moment. She’s taken Calvin to the beach. She’ll be back in an hour or so. If you … maybe give us your number? We could call you? Later on?’

Niall shakes his head. ‘Don’t worry, er … sorry, you are …?’

‘Zhilan. I’m Marithe’s cousin.’ She tilts her head, as if towards Britain. ‘From the other side of the family.’

‘I’ll get in touch with my dad some other way. It was a – a spur-of-the-moment thing and … well, I’ll take off.’

He starts to back away. The dogs form a circle around him, as if to escort him from the property.

‘He looks a bit …’ Zhilan murmurs, over her shoulder, and from behind her steps out the girl, Marithe, this time minus her accordion, and her reappearance shocks Niall all over again, like an electrode applied to a temple, shocks him to his marrow: the length of red-gold hair over the shoulder, the milk-white skin, those wide-spaced eyes, the angle of the nose. It is joyful and exhilarating and excruciating to look at this girl, all at once. It feels like the thing he most wants and the thing he is least able to bear.

He thinks of his grief over his sister as an entity that is horribly and painfully attached to him, the way a jellyfish might adhere to your skin or a goitre or an abscess. He pictures it as viscid, amorphous, spiked, hideous to behold. He finds it unbelievable that no one else can see it. Don’t mind that, he would say, it’s just my grief. Please ignore it and carry on with what you were saying.

Behind him, as he moves away, he can hear the cousins whispering, conferring: ‘Is he crying?’ one of them says.

Is he? He’s aware that he’s moving unsteadily, that the ground is bucking beneath him. I am sleep-deprived, he wants to say, I am dehydrated, I am not myself, I am somewhat out of sorts, and four months ago my sister was in a drugstore with her friend when a masked teenager burst through the door and waved a gun in the air and told them all to get down on the floor and Phoebe, my sister, took longer to do this than everybody else because she had this problem with her back, so the kid shot her. He shot her through her head, her beautiful, clever head. And now her head doesn’t exist any more and neither does her back and neither does she.

He seems to have made contact with the ground. He can feel stones pushing up through the knees of his jeans, can smell the wet-earth scent of it. It seems to make sense to him. To be here, on the ground, in the rain.

They were buying lip gloss. This fact still makes him angry; it makes him furious. His sister died because she wanted some fucking lip gloss. Last week he went into the drugstore and stood in the place she’d died – he’d asked the police to show him exactly where – and then after a while he filled a basket with every tube of lip gloss they had and took it to the counter and paid for it, and then he had lit a fire in the sink at his apartment and thrown them in, one by one. He’d gone back the next day and done the same and then on the third day the security guard had barred his way and said he was not permitted entry. There had been a scene of sorts, with the police and then the head of his department and his mother was there too. So Niall had got out the piece of paper his father had given him at the funeral and booked a flight.

When things become clear again, it strikes him that he has never been in a room of this colour. He isn’t quite sure what colour it is: midway between green and blue and grey. It’s all three at once and yet none of them exactly. The ceiling has gold stars stuck to it. He is sitting in an enormous, sagging chair that seems to embrace him on three sides. Over his legs is a patchwork quilt: tessellated fabric hexagons of varying patterns but uniform size. There is a stove and next to it a nest of kittens stir and sigh around their striped-browed mother, who regards Niall with incurious yellow eyes.

A woman is moving about the other end of the room, arranging logs in a basket, pushing books into place on the shelves, setting the table, lifting a kettle from the range. Niall looks at the line of her jaw, the set of her hands, the braid of hair hanging down her back. She is dressed in a man’s shirt with a cardigan over it, a pair of reading glasses pushed to the top of her head. Even though he has known for some time whom his father married, it is quite something to see her here in the flesh, no longer young, but still unmistakably her, still unmistakably in existence.