This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘Came to find you,’ he says.

  My brother talks like this, missing out words that other people would consider mandatory. I asked him once why he didn’t like prepositions and he frowned and told me I actually meant personal pronouns. That was the name for little words like I, you, we, et cetera. And I’ve never forgotten it: personal pronouns.

  When I get to him, I throw my arms around him, which he doesn’t normally like but it’s OK when I do it. Here is what my brother smells of: paper, computers, cotton, emollient, toast, soap substitute, herbal tea, windowless rooms. My brother smells of hard work. My brother smells of intelligence, of all-nighters, of education, of dedication and sometimes, I think, loneliness. He wouldn’t agree with that, though. My brother graduated from high school a year early with the highest grades ever in the history of high grades. He is legendary among the staff of this school. There are teachers here who still haven’t gotten over him leaving.

  Niall pushes my hair out of his face. When we were little, we had exactly the same hair, coppery-red and curly, the hair of our ancestors from Kerry, but his has darkened to a near-brown and I have blond highlights, these days.

  He pulls away and looks at me, hard, hands around my arms. Can he smell the dope or whatever it was? Would Niall know what drugs smell like?

  ‘A drive?’ he says.

  As the car speeds away down Mission Boulevard, I crack the window, push the back of my head into the seat, let the breeze do whatever it wants with my hair. Which turns out to be:

  – tugging the side of it out the window

  – tossing the top part up and over my head

  – making single strands lash into my face and stick to my lip gloss

  – pushing the right side in a circular motion, round and round, as if an invisible person between me and Niall is twirling it around their finger.

  I reach out and push the CD into its slot. Yes, my brother is the only person I know under the age of thirty who still uses CDs. You are guaranteed, in Niall’s car, to hear music you’ve never come across in your life.

  Sure enough, the car is filled with a loud, strange sound that is halfway between yelping and singing. Hundreds of women, somewhere far away, were recorded yipping and whooping while other people behind them hit rocks with sticks and jangled bells.

  ‘Niall,’ I go, ‘what the fuck?’

  Niall doesn’t take his eyes off the road. My brother is the cleverest person I know but he is kind of a monotasker.

  ‘Mongolian throat singing,’ he says.

  ‘Throat singing? Is that, like, a real thing or did you just make it up?’

  ‘Oh, it’s real. Listen.’

  We listen. The women are reaching a crescendo – a climax, Niall calls it, without any irony whatsoever – and the guys in the background are bashing away at their rocks and I want this never to end, this car ride, with my brother and the wind and the throat singers from Mauritius or wherever.

  My brother is the coolest person I know. And he does it without even trying. This is what makes him cool; it’s the essence of his inimitable coolness. He isn’t cool in the way that the numbskulls at school would define cool. He’s beyond that. He wears science fair T-shirts that are slightly too small, and his hair grows out in all directions, and he would have no idea what the new movies are or what trainers you should and shouldn’t be wearing. I go and stay with him on weekends whenever I can, and when I got back from my last trip, Casey announced to the lunch table that I had spent the weekend visiting my brother, who was a post-grad at Berkeley, and everyone piled in to ask me if I’d been to wild parties, had I seen inside a frat house, was there a beer keg, had I got totally wasted, did I hook up with any of my brother’s hot friends?

  I didn’t say that when I got there my brother was really psyched because he’d heard there was geophysical activity expected. I didn’t say that my brother and I spent the night at his lab, that he rolled out a sleeping-bag for me under a desk, that I fell asleep watching the flickering arms of the seismographs, that my brother was too excited to sleep, that he woke me up at three a.m. because a tremor had been registering and he wanted me to see it: Look, he said, look at that. Isn’t it beautiful?

  This is what my brother finds beautiful: scribbling needles on a seismograph. This is what I do on my wild weekends in Berkeley: watch dials in a lab. This is the coolest person on the planet: my brother, the seismologist.

  ‘So,’ Niall says, as we pull up at a red light, ‘what’s the deal with you?’

  I clear the hair from my face. ‘What do you mean?’ I retort. ‘There is no deal with me. Have you been talking to Mom? What has she been saying? Have you—’

  Niall is watching the road, watching his rearview mirror. ‘Rarely talk to Mom, as you know. What’s concerning me is,’ and he counts off on his fingers as he speaks (he’s always loved a list, my brother has), ‘your clothing, you and Stella, and the fact that you reek of crystal meth right now.’

  I feel like crying. Don’t, I want to say, please don’t. ‘What’s wrong with my clothes?’ I shriek, my face hot, my hands reaching down to tug at my hem.

  ‘Are you high right now?’ he asks, in the same, neutral voice.

  There is a pause in the car.

  ‘Phoebe,’ he says, and I’m shocked into listening because he doesn’t usually do names, ‘you don’t want to get into crystal, you really don’t, you—’

  ‘How did you—’ I start to cry now because I can’t bear Niall to be disappointed in me: that would be the worst thing in the world. ‘How did you know? I mean—’

  ‘I know, OK?’ he says. ‘It stinks. You stink.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was that,’ I wail. Tears and snot are streaming down my face and I can barely speak for sobbing. ‘I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t take it, not really. A guy shoved it in my face and I turned away but I think a little bit might have got inside me. I’ll never do it again, I promise. I promise, Niall.’

  ‘Nice people you’re hanging out with. You need to stay away from that stuff. And that guy, whoever he is. You haven’t seen what goes into that shit. You might think it’s fun to get high now but you know where it ends?’

  ‘Where?’ I say, in a tiny voice.

  ‘In a long-term psychiatric unit, with you dribbling into a strait-jacket and peeing into an adult-sized nappy.’

  I laugh. I can’t help it. ‘An adult-sized nappy? You have some imagination, Mr Sullivan.’

  Niall turns to me. ‘You refute the existence of adult-sized nappies?’

  ‘I don’t know what “refute” means but I bet they don’t exist.’

  Niall turns back to the road. ‘Huh,’ he says. ‘Shows how little you know.’

  ‘Since when do you know so much about adult incontinence?’

  Niall swings the car to the left and we pull up outside a coffee shop. He pulls on the handbrake and unclicks his seatbelt. He passes a hand through his hair and leans on the steering-wheel, all without looking at me.

  ‘Listen,’ I go, putting my hand on his arm. ‘It’s fine. You don’t have to worry. I don’t do crystal and … I’m not going to hang out with that crowd any more. And me and Stella, well, the thing is—’

  Niall interrupts me to say something, a series of words. They hang in the air between us, clouding it like a swarm of flies. I can hear myself breathing, in-out, in-out, as if I’ve been running. My pulse is tapping against the skin of my neck. I’m thinking, it sounded as if Niall said, ‘Dad called me’. But he can’t have said that. It can’t be that. Because we never see Dad. He left when I was six and he didn’t come back.

  The air-conditioning went off with the engine so the air in the car is suddenly thick with late-spring heat. My nose and throat are itching and sore, with hay fever or with something else, and I’m trying to make the words fit together so that they add up to some kind of sense.

  ‘What?’ I go.

  ‘Dad called.’

  ‘Dad?’ I say, as if I’ve never heard
the word – which is kind of true, I’ll think later.

  Niall nods, turning to look at me.

  ‘You mean …’ I search his face to try and understand. ‘You mean … What do you mean? “Dad”, as in … one of our stepdads?’

  ‘As in our father.’

  ‘Our father?’ I echo and am seized by an uncontrollable giggle because it sounds like I’m about to start to pray, like our grandmother does before meals, and it always drives our mother crazy: she starts rolling her eyes and sighing, and Grandma just doesn’t stop, she keeps pounding through the words while Mom taps her fingers and stares out the window. I let out a laugh but it doesn’t sound like a fun laugh: it sounds kind of harsh and crazy.

  Niall sighs and pulls off his glasses. Without them, his face looks raw, unformed, childlike. He rubs at the skin under his eyes and I suddenly see that his fingers and wrists are patchy and red. His eczema is back with a vengeance, colonising his skin, like an enemy army and, seeing this, what he has just said sinks into me, water into sand, and it sits there in my belly, cold and wet.

  ‘He called you?’ I say. ‘How? I mean, when?’

  ‘Today. This morning. He was in the States, in New York, he said, for the first time in years, and he decided on the spur of the moment to get a flight down here.’

  I turn to look out of the windshield. A woman is crossing the road with a bicycle. The bicycle is white and its turning spokes glitter in the sun. How simple, how elegant her life looks to me: to be wheeling a bike, in the sun, in a yellow dress. ‘Why?’ I hear myself ask.

  ‘To see us.’

  The woman with the white bicycle has reached the opposite side of the road. I see that she has a dog in a basket at the front. The dog looks out, tongue hanging loose, ears pricked. I am consumed with a sharp longing to be that woman. I want her life, her dress, her dog. I want to be thirty and have a bike with a basket – what is the word for that kind of basket, there is one, I know – and be pedalling home to an apartment with long white curtains and bowls of flowers and a husband who loves me. I want to be over all this, to be past it, to be safe and unreachable in adulthood.

  ‘When?’ I say, at the same time as the word ‘wicker’ arrives in my head, like a train at a station. Wicker, I think, with relief. The word is wicker.

  Niall is polishing his glasses on his too-small T-shirt. He puts them on; he pushes them up his nose. He tilts his head towards the coffee shop outside the car and I begin to understand, to read the situation, so I almost don’t need to hear it when he says, ‘Now.’

  It’s really very simple: me and Niall are sitting at a table opposite a man.

  We chose these seats by agreement, one we reached without saying anything. Neither of us wanted to slide into the bench beside him. That much we both knew.

  So we sit side by side, on chairs, facing a man.

  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?’