This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘You certainly will.’ Daniel stood. He came over to her, put one arm around her, then the other and this time she didn’t pull away. ‘And while I’m gone,’ he said, ‘I want you to get well. OK? No more of this demon.’ He seized her face between his hands, forcing her to look up at him and Todd thought that perhaps he should go now, that perhaps he’d seen enough. ‘OK?’ Daniel said again. ‘You have to start feeding yourself, Nic. It’s as simple as that.’

  Nicola nodded, whispering something, and the two of them were pressing their foreheads together and Todd was backing away, crouching low so they wouldn’t see him, so they wouldn’t be disturbed, but a branch or reed or something must have caught his ankle because one moment he was upright and the next he was on his side, winded, lungs empty, and Nicola’s voice was its usual sarcastic rasp, saying, ‘Spying again, are we, Mr Denham?’

  There are people here in the forest Todd doesn’t know. Two blokes, who said they worked with the groom, a girl with pale hair, who spoke in an accent like Daniel’s. Todd had mentioned this to Daniel and he had rolled his eyes. She’s Canadian, he’d said, as if it ought to have been obvious. There were a few wanderers-in from the wedding party, which was still going on back near the house, in a large tent with blue fairy-lights and a band playing hits from twenty years ago. Todd and Daniel had been back several times to get supplies and the bride was dancing in her stockinged feet on a near-empty dance-floor, arms in the air, eyes shut, hair fallen to her shoulders.

  There had been a moment when Todd thought the Canadian girl with the slight lisp might like him. She had sat on a log with him and they had passed a joint between them and she had told him that her ancestors had emigrated from a valley like this, somewhere in Scotland, six generations ago.

  So it had seemed possible that she was interested in him. But then Daniel had come crashing through the trees with more firewood in his arms and thrown it in one go onto the fire, making sparks and glowing smuts float up to mix with the leaves. Then he had reached over and changed the track on the ghetto-blaster and the girl with the ancestors had got up to dance in the kiln-like glow and then, after a while, Daniel had said he was going to look for more wood and the girl had stopped dancing. She’d said could she go with him but Nicola had been there and she had stood up quickly, followed Daniel into the trees, and the Canadian girl had sat down again on the log.

  Todd and Daniel had a room in a B-and-B that Suki had booked for them: Todd knew this. But somehow it seemed foolish to leave the fire. It made no sense, especially as the sky above the tangle of branches was beginning to drain of its dark and drop a moist, greyish film into the forest. It made no sense at all. What made sense was this: to lie down on the spread of pine needles, next to the fire, as close as you could. There were so many pine needles. Thousands, millions of the things, all exactly the same. Laid across and underneath and on top of each other, forming the most comfortable surface ever. It seemed miraculous to Todd, their similarity, their uniformity. He said this to Daniel, who was lying on the other side of the scarlet embers: Isn’t it amazing?

  Yeah, Daniel replied, with a yawn. Oh, yeah.

  There arrived an interlude. Todd could see the pine needles near his head and then it seemed he was back in his childhood bedroom, only it wasn’t the same. One of the walls was made up of thick bushes that pressed in on his bed, on his eiderdown. Somehow he knew his brother was on the other side of the bushes but he couldn’t get to him, couldn’t reach him, because the bushes were so sharp, so spiked.

  Someone was swearing. This became clear to Todd. Someone was stumbling about near his head with heavy feet, picking things up and swearing.

  ‘What?’ Todd mumbled, keeping his eyes closed. It seemed only minutes since they’d gone to sleep, seconds perhaps, but he could tell that the fire was out, that it was early morning. Somewhere above them, birds were screeching in horrible unison, an orchestra of mistuned violins.

  ‘My flight,’ Daniel was saying hoarsely, off to the left, ‘my fucking flight.’

  Todd sat up. He was instantly awake. His head felt ringingly empty: it was clear to him what he had to do. He had to get Daniel to the airport. He had to get Daniel to his flight.

  Daniel was leaning with one hand against a tree, yanking on his shoe. He was dressed – that was something. Mud-stained trousers, a torn jacket, hair hanging in his eyes.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Todd got to his feet, the axis of the ground tipping only for a minute. ‘It’s OK.’ He looked at his watch. He tapped it. He held it to his ear. There was an answering, reassuring click-click of mechanical motion. ‘We’ve got time.’

  ‘We have?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Todd grabbed his jacket off the ground, where he had apparently been lying on it. ‘We need to get to the B-and-B, get the car and drive to the airport.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It’ll take us … I don’t know … an hour. At most.’

  ‘Right.’ Daniel seized him by both arms, pulled him close. ‘Slap me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, slap me.’

  Todd looked into his face. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Daniel rubbed at his bloodshot eyes, eased open his jaw, once, twice. ‘Go for it.’

  Todd slapped him with one hand, then the other.

  ‘Thanks,’ Daniel said, shaking his head.

  ‘So,’ Todd began, ‘we really could—’

  ‘Oh, man,’ Daniel said. He was looking past him at something.

  ‘What?’ Todd turned.

  Nicola Janks was lying on the ground, near to where the fire had been.

  Todd and Daniel regarded her. She was on her side, legs tucked up, feet bare. Her lips – pale without their customary red stain – were slightly parted, her eyes shut tight.

  ‘Is she sleeping?’ Daniel whispered.

  Todd put his head on one side. He considered her one way, he considered her the other. ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Should we wake her?’

  Todd looked at his watch. He went over to her. He tapped her ankle with his toe. Nothing. He tapped her again. He looked at his watch. He looked up at his friend. Daniel looked back at him, his face blank. He seemed to be waiting for Todd to speak. A long moment passed.

  ‘Is she OK?’ Daniel said.

  Todd bent over her. He touched her arm. Her skin was cool as marble.

  ‘Did you give her anything?’ Todd asked, as he leant over her face.

  ‘No,’ Daniel said, quickly. ‘I don’t think so. Unless …’

  Todd could see, in the morning light, that the roots of her hair were brown. A nondescript dun colour. So the raven sheen was all a construct, he thought. He could also see that Nicola Janks was so thin you could see each bone of her frame: the ulna and the radius of the arm – the terms reached him from a distant biology lesson – meeting the humerus with aligned precision.

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘I might … She might have had some of that …’

  ‘Coke?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You gave her coke?’ Todd hissed, gesturing at her emaciated form. ‘In this state?’

  Daniel looked stricken. ‘I … don’t know. I might have. I … I don’t really remember.’

  ‘Jesus, Daniel. Where did you get it, anyway?’

  ‘This … guy. At the bar.’

  Todd sat back on his heels. He thought about Daniel’s plane. He imagined it waiting on the tarmac at the airport. Perhaps it was being cleaned right now, a team of women in overalls entering its aisles and rows, armed with sprays and cloths and wipes. He thought about Daniel’s mother, about the oxygen tanks and lowered blinds.

  He picked up Nicola’s wrist in his fingers and waited.

  The forest inhaled, breeze sifting through the trees, a shower of needles falling some way off, behind them.

  ‘She’s fine,’ Todd said, dropping her arm. ‘I can feel her pulse. She’s just sleeping. Look, why don’t you go to the B-and-B, wake Suki and get her
to drive you to the airport?’

  Daniel thought about this, shifting from foot to foot. ‘I don’t know.’ He scratched the back of his head.

  ‘Go,’ Todd said. ‘I mean it. I’ll take care of this. Of her. I’ll explain the whole thing. But just go. You’ll miss your flight. Off you go.’

  Daniel looked away from him, through the trees, towards the light.

  ‘Go,’ Todd said again. ‘Run. I’ll see you when you get back.’

  Something Only He Can See

  Lucas, Cumbria, 1995

  Lucas moves by instinct through his dark garden. If he thinks about it, he will stumble, but if he lets his muscle-memory guide him, he will be fine. He rounds the patio, makes his way past the rockery and comes upon the black mass of the big evergreen tree sooner than he’d expected. He slides in behind it, to a space between its fronded branches and the wall. He places the walkie-talkie telephone receiver, brought with him so Maeve doesn’t have to get up from the sofa to answer it, in his coat pocket.

  Only then does he light his cigarette.

  He doesn’t want Maeve to spot the orange glow through the dark. Nicotine is known to inhibit sperm motility or give it two heads or make it go round in circles or something like that. He doesn’t remember, even though she’s told him countless times. It’s just one cigarette, he tells her inside his head. It can’t possibly zap all his spermatozoa. Can it?

  He shivers inside his all-weather down coat and draws on the spunk-mutating cigarette, eyeing the neighbours’ house, a slate-covered villa, like theirs. It’s a second-home, of course, as most in the village are, lit up only at weekends. This lot come from London, where the dad works as a banker, and have four children. A shocking, unjust number, really, when you think about it. The mother just seems to pop them out, one after another, her stomach permanently inflated, her breasts constantly being heaved out of her garments in the back garden for some infant or other to nourish itself. Lucas can’t look any more; Maeve avoids the garden at weekends.

  He and Maeve have lived here for five years, since giving up their jobs as social workers in Manchester and downshifting to this Cumbrian village, starting a business taking schoolkids on outward-bound adventures. From their back windows, you can see green fields and hills bisected by rivers and a white waterfall. Maeve takes the little children on nature walks, sketching or dam-building; he leads the older ones up Helvellyn or instructs them on how to build a shelter in the wild.

  Real children fill their days, he thinks, as he takes another drag, and would-be, wished-for, imagined children fill their evenings, their weekends, their nights.

  He is just leaning sideways to get a better view of the neighbours’ pantry, where the eldest child – a pale, almost wordless boy of around ten – is standing on a ladder, hand deep in a canister of what is possibly raisins or chocolate drops, when the phone rings. His sister – it has to be. He knew she would call tonight.

  ‘Is that you?’ he says, putting it to his ear.

  ‘It is indeed,’ Claudette’s voice replies. ‘I see your phone manner hasn’t improved.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘It hasn’t. What in God’s name do you want?’

  She laughs, as he knew she would. ‘I want to know about today. How did it go?’

  Lucas inhales deeply on the cigarette and considers how to answer this. Should he say that he and Maeve waited for a whole agonising hour in the embryo transfer room, which had no windows and very little light, save for a cone cast by a lamp on the doctor’s table? Maeve on the bed, covered with an insufficient blanket – Lucas could see her shivering with the cold or the anticipation or perhaps both – and the doctor holding up an X-ray to the light. Lucas exhales his smoke into the chill Cumbrian night air. How to distil the magnitude of what happened today into the smallness of a reply?

  ‘Well,’ he flicks away his ash, ‘it went. We had two embryos put back.’

  ‘Oh.’ She lets out a sigh. ‘Good.’

  ‘We saw them.’

  ‘You saw what?’

  ‘The embryos.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘They showed them to us on this screen up near the ceiling.’

  Back-lit in green, the embryos had hovered above them, like notions, like deities: vast, beautiful, terrifying. Geometric in structure, they were like a proliferation of soap bubbles or the huge, heavy blooms of flowers. Lucas had wanted to shout, oh, and, hello, and, there you are. He thought they were the most exquisite things he had ever seen. Maeve’s hand held his in a fierce, cold grip. He had wanted to shut his eyes in a final, desperate wish but dared not tear his gaze from that screen, from those illuminated sea-creatures floating in their aquatic dish. Please, he said to them, please, please.

  ‘One of them,’ he says to Claudette, ‘we were assured, was of top, sure-to-be-a-winner quality.’

  ‘Thank God. That’s great. I’ve got all my fingers crossed for you.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound entirely comfortable.’

  ‘I don’t care. This has to be your time, it just has to be.’

  He presses his back into the wall of the shed. ‘Let’s hope.’

  She shifts position or someone near her says something.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asks.

  ‘I’ve just got up.’

  A typical reply from his sister: most people would not be able to decode this kind of Claudette crypticism but, to Lucas, it’s second nature. It tells him that she’s probably not at home, in either LA or New York, that she’s taken off somewhere but isn’t ready yet to say exactly where, that she and Timou have either had a row and she’s done a runner or they are in a good phase and holed up together in some dazzling tropical retreat.

  Then there is that noise again. A snuffling. A sense of her moving, her attention being divided. And then he realises.

  ‘How’s my nephew?’ he says. ‘How’s the …’ forcing himself to form the word they never say, the collection of letters they never use ‘… baby?’

  ‘Fine.’ She snips the word, as if with a very sharp pair of scissors. ‘How are you?’

  He wants to say to her, please don’t. Don’t not talk about him. Don’t pretend Ari doesn’t exist for my sake.

  ‘No,’ he says, pushing himself to joviality. The cheery uncle: fond but distant, involved but relaxed. He’s almost convinced himself. ‘Tell me properly. How is he?’

  ‘He’s …’ He senses her thinking. What to say? What not to say? How to navigate this? ‘He’s sitting up on his own now. He’s reaching for food. He’s got your eyes.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lucas says.

  ‘And his hair’s starting to curl. He’s basically a mini-you.’

  And that’s enough, he wants to say. Any more and I won’t be enjoying this, I’ll just be coping. Any more after that and I’ll be unhappy. Next comes despondency, then despair.

  But Claudette senses this. God knows how but she does. He loves her for that, his sister, loves her for the fact that she moves things along, tells him about a letter she had from their mother, about a script her agent is telling her to do.

  ‘So,’ she says, ‘how long is it until …’

  ‘We find out if it’s worked or not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fourteen days.’

  ‘That seems like a long time.’

  ‘I know. The two-week wait.’

  ‘How are you going to fill the days? Have you got any plans?’

  ‘For the next two weeks?’ Lucas thinks about this. ‘Not ask Maeve every five minutes whether she has any symptoms. Not follow her to the loo to see if everything is OK. Not call the doctor. Just keep our heads down, I guess, our hopes low, our fingers crossed. There’s not much happening at work at the moment, it being winter, so we were thinking we might—’

  ‘You don’t fancy a trip, do you?’ Claudette interrupts.

  ‘A trip?’

  ‘A quick change of scene. For both of you. With me.’

  ‘You mean to LA?’

  ‘No,
not LA. Somewhere else.’

  Lucas smiles, takes a drag on his cigarette. ‘OK,’ he says, ‘spit it out. Where are you?’

  They are waiting, Lucas and Maeve, on a strip of gravel outside the thing like a cattle shed that serves as an airport in this part of the world. He has a rucksack at his feet, a hat with earflaps pulled down low on his head; Maeve is huddled inside her waterproof. The wind comes at them horizontally, whipping through a line of ragged trees to tug at the fastenings of his jacket and toss his hat strings in a manner that feels distinctly derisive.

  Lucas is experiencing a falling sensation in his midriff, a premonition that this trip is a mistake, one of Claudette’s less inspired impulses, and a suspicion that he has exercised a gross lack of judgement in agreeing to come. It is a feeling all too familiar from his childhood, from the many times his sister persuaded him to do something with her, lured him into acting as her accomplice, to tackle something or attempt something, and halfway through the execution, Lucas would be overtaken with dismay, with regret: how had she convinced him that this was a good idea? How badly were they going to be punished? Making a zip wire from a bedroom window to the ground. Rigging up a makeshift bridge across a flood-swollen river. Rescuing an injured bird from a high branch. Hauling off their mother’s mattress to act as a crashmat for somersaulting off the windowsill.

  And, now, almost thirty years later, here he is again, agreeing on the spur of the moment to drop everything and meet his erratic and hopelessly unreliable sibling in the middle of nowhere. What’s more, dragging his possibly (maybe, hopefully, goddamn-better-be) pregnant wife along with him. Maeve had done nothing to deserve that kind of treatment. What was he thinking, leaving their business, their house, their bonsai-tree collection, and embarking on a trip of mysterious and possibly spurious purpose? It’s only a couple of days, he’d told Maeve, when she’d fixed him with her stare.

  He knew she’d been thinking about the last time they’d answered one of Claudette’s late-night suggestions of a trip. They had met up in Rome. Claudette and Timou got into a flaming row on the Ponte Sisto (it was to do with what an Italian location scout had said to them earlier in the day, about artistic ownership or the challenges of collaboration or something along those lines). The two of them were going at it, Claudette furious and tearful, Timou gesticulating and yelling, when a gang of photographers had turned up and started taking pictures. Claudette had turned on them and hurled a handful of stones (they were small stones, she insisted to the carabinieri afterwards, tiny, just gravel really, not rocks, not boulders, not at all), and when one of the photographers, struck in the face and bleeding, called Claudette a word that implied her profession was something other than acting, Timou had yanked him off his scooter and punched him. They had all been kept at the police station until the middle of the night. Maeve had murmured to Lucas, as they sat with their backs against the interview-room wall, never again.