This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Suki sighs, losing interest. ‘Maybe later,’ she mutters. ‘So,’ she sifts through her bag, searching for a lighter, ‘how many of the guests here today do we think have slept with the bride?’

  Todd surveys the room, speculatively. ‘Male or female?’ he asks.

  Suki rolls her eyes. ‘Male. Obviously. She’s hardly the type.’

  ‘Really?’

  She pulls her how-stupid-you-are face. ‘Of course not. Save your tawdry lesbian fantasies for another time. Now, what do we think?’ She points at a heavy-set, shaven-headed bloke, who looks vaguely familiar to Todd. ‘Him, for sure.’

  Todd points at a blond man from his eighteenth-century-travelogues seminar. ‘And him.’

  Suki nods sagely, then swivels her eyes around the crowd. ‘Possibly him.’

  ‘What about whatshisface from Anthropology?’

  ‘And not forgetting Daniel.’

  Todd turns to look at Suki. ‘Daniel hasn’t slept with her.’

  Suki raises an eyebrow.

  ‘He hasn’t. I’m sure he hasn’t.’

  ‘I heard otherwise.’ Suki tilts her head. ‘And what’s more I heard it was last week.’

  ‘Last week?’ Todd looks at the bride, who is patting the back of her elaborate hairdo with anxious fingers, and then at the groom, who is in his shirtsleeves, laughing at something someone is saying to him. ‘No way,’ he says. ‘He didn’t. He wouldn’t. Not now. He hasn’t been doing that lately, not since … Anyway, she’s not his type.’

  ‘Does he have a type?’ says Suki, opening her eyes wide. ‘I had no idea. He’s always been so egalitarian in his choices. Or, at least, he used to be, before the whole Nicola debacle.’ She stands on tiptoe and swivels her head from left to right. ‘Where is he, anyway?’

  Todd has to stop himself answering immediately. He always knows where Daniel is. It’s a thing with Todd that he can track him, like a sniffer dog. ‘Downstairs, I think,’ he says casually. He prefers to keep this ability, this talent, private. Then adds, ‘Want to go and find him?’

  They descend one of the three staircases – the medium-sized, twisting one that gives onto a low-ceilinged hallway with fringed lamps and peeved-looking grouse in glass cabinets. They pass an alcove where a woman in a flesh-coloured frock is locked in a frenzied grapple with a man in a white shirt. Suki glides by but Todd leans in and gives a theatrical cough, startling them out of their embrace, forcing them to look up at him with dazed, mascara-smeared faces.

  At the bottom of the staircase a gaggle of children in party clothes is being ineffectually herded by a harassed mother in a sweat-darkened dress. She turns to Todd and Suki and, seemingly without seeing them, shrieks, ‘I warned them about serving ice-cream! But did they listen?’

  In answer, Suki puts a cigarette into her mouth and lights it, all in one hand movement. The mother stares, first at Todd, then at Suki, as if she can’t believe her eyes. Todd starts to laugh, gently at first, then finds he can’t stop. He has to lean on Suki and, when she removes herself outside his reach, he has to resort to a handy bookcase. Is this the first effects of the Valium? Hard to say. Something is silting up his veins, that’s for sure, rolling through his brain. It feels like a missed night’s sleep but with softer edges. His limbs have a pleasing weight to them and the lights around the hallway have acquired refracting penumbras.

  ‘Penumbra,’ he says, possibly aloud, to the books in the bookcase. ‘Pen. Um. Bra.’

  Suki removes her cigarette. ‘Shut up, Todd,’ she says briskly.

  The gaggle of children turn suddenly, like startled cattle, and stampede through a doorway, the mother running after them. Todd is repeating her words over and over, inside his head, trying to get the exact pitch and register of her Scottish accent. I warrrned them about serrrrving ice-cream. But did they listen? Said more like lus-un.

  In front of them is a display of stags’ heads. Daniel is nowhere to be seen. He has momentarily fallen off Todd’s radar, wandered out of range. Todd takes a thistle from a floral arrangement and places it in the mouth of the largest stag. Suki strikes up a conversation with an earnest-faced bearded boy.

  Where is Daniel? Todd feels an unspecified, nibbling anxiety. He headed this way a quarter of an hour ago – maybe more. He said he needed some air. Or was it a drink? Something like that.

  Todd is just about to reach out and touch Suki’s arm, to tell her he doesn’t know where Daniel is and should they go and find him, when he becomes conscious that he is twisting his head to look at the door. Someone is entering. Later, he will recall that he heard her before he saw her: that clack-clack of her boots, the jangling metalware of her bag.

  Nicola Janks is moving through the hallway. Or someone who closely resembles her. This person has her glossy, clipped hair, her heavy fringe, the crimson startle of her lipstick, but it is as if she herself is a candle that has been left burning too long. The flesh has melted off her in – what? – a matter of weeks. Her clever fox face is hollowed out at the cheeks, under the eyes: skin stretched over skull. Her hands, clutching that bag of hers with multiple zips, are reduced to wizened claws, marbled with blue. Her sternum sticks up as a ridged spur from the neckline of her dress.

  She passes them with a tilt of her head and a grimace, as if simultaneously to acknowledge and dismiss their shock.

  ‘Hello, sidekicks,’ she says, from the corner of her poppy-red mouth.

  She doesn’t alter her stride. Todd and Suki swivel their heads to watch her go.

  ‘Did you see?’ Suki is hissing as Nicola Janks ascends the stairs, at precisely the same moment as Todd is whispering, ‘What’s happened to her?’

  Todd stands up. He sits down. He stands up again. He says, ‘We have to find Daniel. We have to warn him.’

  Suki says, ‘Fuck.’ Then she says, ‘Did you know she was invited? How come she was invited?’ She screws up her face and moves it close to Todd’s. ‘You stay here,’ she says, pushing him down to a convenient tweed stool. ‘Keep a look-out for Daniel. If you see him, make sure you keep him with you.’

  She disappears up the stairs, two at a time.

  Todd watches the comings and the goings of the hallway. The earnest-faced boy goes into a room, then comes out again surprisingly quickly. More children in party dresses or possibly the same ones. The bride’s mother, walking fast in her aubergine court shoes, her mouth set in a grim line. A couple, not the ones from the alcove, the man’s hand inside the woman’s dress. The mother of the ice-cream comment: she wanders through the hall, glances at Todd, then away, her face tense and alarmed. Suki, in her dragon jacket, gives him a sidelong look as she passes.

  Suddenly someone is patting his cheek with an open palm and saying, ‘Hey, Denham, what’s going on?’

  Daniel is there, in front of him, his shirt untucked, his jacket gone.

  ‘Denham,’ he is saying, ‘wake up, man.’

  ‘I’m awake,’ Todd says. ‘I wasn’t sleeping.’ He stands up to prove it. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Everywhere.’ Daniel grins at him. ‘Nowhere.’

  Todd looks at his friend. Daniel is swaying slightly. His pupils are enormous, blasted into the blue of his irises, his skin pale and moist. He smells of stale wine, of woodsmoke, of mud, of outdoors and something else. Todd frowns. Daniel is due to fly back to the States in less than eight hours. Family emergency, as it’s termed on all the necessary forms. Todd had to go to the head of Daniel’s department yesterday and explain to him that Daniel’s mother is dying – sent home from hospital, he’d said, unfortunately, yes, a matter of weeks – that Daniel needs to go back to New York, for a while, a month or two at the very least. Todd had arranged a flight for him, starting in Glasgow, early tomorrow morning.

  The thought makes Todd feel unbalanced, as if he’s missing some vital limb. He has no idea what Daniel will face when he gets home. Todd pictures darkened rooms, lowered blinds, bedside tables full of pills, a body under blankets. Lots of weeping relatives. The works.
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  He doesn’t let himself think about what it will be like in the flat without Daniel, with no one in the room above him. How he will write his thesis conclusion alone, with only Suki and her cursed hamster for company. How he will get through the last few weeks of term, the rapid acceleration in teaching, the panic of the final-year students and their last-minute seminars. How he is going to face all this without Daniel, Todd doesn’t know.

  He wants to formulate some way to say this to Daniel. To say: don’t go— no, not that. He has to go, his mother is dying, for God’s sake. To say: don’t go for long. Make sure you come back. To say: life without you is unthinkable. But to say any of these things seems impossible here, in this hallway full of severed heads and chemically preserved grouse and abandoned wine glasses, with Daniel in front of him, his face mushroom-pale, his pupils shot.

  ‘What have you taken?’ Todd asks instead.

  Daniel swings his head around to look at him. His face is distant, dangerous. ‘Huh?’

  ‘Daniel,’ Todd whispers, taking his elbow, ‘what did you take?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Daniel slurs. ‘I don’t know. It wasn’t much.’

  ‘Much what?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Daniel says again.

  ‘How many times have I told you—’

  ‘How many times have I told you,’ Daniel mimics, in the voice of a chiding mother, pulling his elbow away. The movement seems to unbalance what equilibrium he has and he staggers sideways, into a table, then a stool, then the floor, a vase recoiling from his shoulder, an antler giving way to his flailing arm. Thistles, water and snapped antlers litter the tartan carpet in a confused arc.

  ‘Right,’ says Todd. ‘Let’s go.’ He takes Daniel’s hand. ‘It’s OK,’ he says to the people gathered around them, staring at Daniel in horror. ‘I’ve got him.’ He levers Daniel up off the floor, brushes broken glass and thistle particles off his clothes, then manhandles him out of the door.

  The air outside is sharply cool, the sky fading to indigo ink. Small flies circle the lamps. Daniel leans against him, breathing unevenly.

  ‘Listen,’ Todd says, as they stagger together over the gravel in a strange, forward-momentum waltz. ‘I need to tell you something but first I have to say that you mustn’t take stuff that doesn’t come from me, OK? I’ve told you this before. You’ve got no idea what’s in it. What comes from my cousin is pure. You know that. But everything else is—’

  ‘What a place,’ Daniel exclaims, still leaning on him. ‘What a fucking place. Look at it.’ He flings out an arm, then seems to peer at something. ‘Are those mountains?’ he asks, pointing at a line of peaks beyond the trees.

  ‘Yes,’ Todd says. ‘The thing is—’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Am I sure about what?’

  ‘That they’re mountains. They look so … so far away.’

  ‘Hmm. Daniel, the thing is—’

  ‘Aha!’ Daniel yells, ecstatic, yanking his hand out of Todd’s inner pocket and up into the air. ‘What have we here?’

  All the time they were walking together, yakking about mountains, Daniel had been searching Todd’s stash. Pickpocketing him, in effect.

  ‘No,’ Todd says, feeling his grasp on Daniel’s frame loosening and slipping. ‘Really don’t, Daniel. Give it back.’

  Daniel pushes him away and Todd has to stop himself snatching at him, grabbing him by the chest.

  ‘Don’t be such a whaddayacallit,’ Daniel says.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Party pooper.’

  ‘Come on,’ Todd says, holding out his hand. ‘You really don’t need any more.’

  ‘Au contraire, Pierre,’ Daniel says, with a smile, brandishing the tab.

  Todd makes a leap for it but Daniel, at six foot whatever, snatches it effortlessly out of his grasp.

  ‘Let’s see,’ Daniel says. ‘One for me, one for you and one for—’

  Todd makes another futile leap. ‘Daniel, listen. We saw Nicola.’

  This seems to make an impression. Daniel stalls, the plastic wallet high above his head, like a child answering a question. ‘Nicola? My Nicola?’

  ‘She’s here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘At the wedding.’

  ‘This wedding?’

  ‘Yeah. And—’

  ‘Oh,’ Daniel slides a palm down his face. ‘That’s kind of … I mean, why now, why here, why on earth—’

  ‘She seems …’ Todd swallows. ‘She looks … different,’ he finishes weakly.

  Daniel cocks his head, as if having trouble hearing the conversation. ‘Different how?’

  ‘Um …’ Todd tries to order his thoughts. ‘She looks … thin.’

  ‘Thin?’ Daniel says again, his hand falling to his side. He smiles, a crooked, half-smile, and shakes his head. He shakes it so hard and for so long that Todd worries he will fall over. ‘No, no,’ he says, his voice blurred by the movement. ‘You’re forgetting. She’s always thin.’

  ‘No.’ Todd spreads his hands, helplessly. ‘This is different thin, unhealthy thin—’

  Daniel is still shaking his head. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. She doesn’t do that any more, she got over that, she—’

  ‘Daniel, she looks really ill. Suki thought so too. How long is it since you saw her?’

  Todd isn’t really expecting a coherent answer so is surprised when Daniel says solemnly, ‘Five weeks and three days.’

  Todd leans forward and closes his hand around the plastic wallet of tabs. ‘Suki and I wanted to find you to—’

  Daniel snatches the tabs away.

  ‘You have to get on a plane in a few hours,’ Todd says, holding out his hand. ‘Daniel, come on. You can’t fly home like this. You’re going to need to talk to Nicola. And what about your mum? What about—’

  Daniel’s expression shuts like a book. He slaps a tab onto his tongue, closes his mouth. He places one in Todd’s hand then turns, without a word, and takes off towards the lake.

  When Todd and Suki heard that an American exchange student was being billeted in the vacant room in the eaves of their graduate flat, they were not pleased. They pictured a toothy type with trainers and V-necks and white socks. They pictured someone who might, of all things, attend church. Americans were religious, weren’t they? He would have hotdog-scented breath, a penchant for soft rock and a backpack full of college sweatshirts. He would want to join fraternities.

  ‘Typical,’ Suki muttered darkly, shaking the fuel up the U-bend of her lighter. ‘Why couldn’t they put him downstairs?’

  Todd, sitting opposite her in their kitchen, nodded. Downstairs was a flat full of foreign graduate students, mostly scientists, who worked hard, wore ties and looked permanently cold and shocked after about October.

  ‘Or in college,’ Suki continued, painting her nails with the fluorescent yellow tip of a highlighter pen. ‘That’s what the Yanks want, after all. Gargoyles and quadrangles and all that shit.’ She recapped the pen and tossed it among the debris of the table: mugs with desiccated teabags dried onto their rims, plates smeared with baked-bean juice, a crust of bread, possibly wholemeal, a library book about post-structuralism for which neither Todd nor Suki was willing to take responsibility, two ashtrays, a folder, an alarm clock with a blank digital display.

  Todd and Suki had lived together for the two years since graduation. Their success as flatmates was predicated on two things, in Todd’s opinion: first, they had never been close friends before they had shared a flat so had arrived with no expectations or preconceived ideas of how cosy and wonderful it was all going to be and, second, they had never slept together.

  Suki was not his type any more, he was sure, than he was hers. He had once compared her to the chocolate bittermints his mother sent him at Christmas – small, dark, sour, an acquired taste – and she had reached over and snapped his pencil in two. She had eaten the rest of the mints: it was her right, she said. They kept their bike keys in the empty box, which lived beside the kettle.<
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  Two years of harmony, or as much harmony as you can get between the precious, late and only child of two Highgate psychoanalysts, and a stressed, over-stretched, cash-strapped graduate, who was the first person in his family to get to tertiary education. And now a third party was about to be catapulted into their midst.

  ‘I hope he’s not going to be friendly,’ Suki snarled, slapping shut her book on post-Newtonian cultures.

  As it turned out, they needn’t have worried on that score. It was a while before they caught their first glimpse of their new flatmate. The only sign that he’d actually moved in was the appearance of a packet of pungent Italian coffee in the kitchen, a red toothbrush in the bathroom and, one morning, the pale, elongated balloon of a condom floating in the toilet bowl, transparent and alien as a sea creature.

  ‘I take it that thing’s not yours?’ Suki said, without looking up from her lecture notes, as Todd entered the kitchen.

  ‘Er, no.’ Todd shook the cereal box and found it empty. Then he turned, suddenly offended. ‘But it might have been.’

  Suki snorted, turned a page, then another.

  Todd sighed. He flicked down the switch on the kettle. The state of his romantic life had begun, of late, to bother him. He didn’t know how one obtained sex here. It was the least erotic place in the universe, he’d decided. Undergraduates were off-limits – the faculty frowned on that sort of thing – and the graduate girls were all intent on their books. How, then, had this American made a conquest so fast?

  A few days later, a woman entered their kitchen. It was mid-afternoon. She had streaked hair spilling over one shoulder and she was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a band from Manchester. It reached almost to her knees but, despite this, it was possible to tell that she was naked underneath. Neither Todd nor Suki had ever seen her before.

  She opened the fridge. She got out a loaf of bread, a slab of butter, then found a plate. She proceeded to make two sandwiches.

  ‘Hello,’ said Suki, in what might appear, to people who didn’t know her, as a friendly manner.