This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  At that moment, Ari lifts his head from her breastbone and twists around in the sling. He raises his hand and seems to point at something beyond them, beyond the window, at something only he can see.

  ‘Ah dang-nang-nah, ah bleuf, ah blee,’ he says.

  It is a long and complicated utterance. His fist opens and closes. Lucas looks at him, properly; his nephew looks back at him, fixing him with an intent, questioning gaze. What a child, he is about to say, but doesn’t because at that moment he feels, for the first time ever, not quite the presence but the possibility of another child, to the back and slightly to the side of him, a form, a being, standing at his leg. It isn’t so much a visitation or a haunting, just the idea of someone who might yet appear, might still exist.

  Lucas puts his hand to the worn wood of the sill; he concentrates on this sensation, careful not to turn around, to scare it away. On the greenish glass in front of his face, his exhalations appear, then fade, appear, then fade, the unseen showing itself, over and over, the invisible making itself known.

  The Tired Mind is a Stovetop

  Daniel, Sussex, 2010

  It is just after three p.m., Greenwich Mean Time, and I am standing in the car park of a secondary school in an unprepossessing town in the English commuter-belt.

  This is not a sentence I’ve ever constructed before; I have never put that collection of words in that particular order.

  I am lurking, in my crumpled clothes, in the shade of some trees, partially hidden by a car the exact shade of bile, my bag at my feet. My heart has taken it upon itself to perform a series of trips or tricks inside my ribcage: a type of cardiac pratfall. It has decided to miss or stumble over every tenth or eleventh beat. The effect is one of unremitting anxiety, interspersed with spikes of panic. I have to press my hand to my chest, as if to reassure my heart, to tell it to behave. Sweat prickles along my hair line, inside my collar. I’m fine, I tell myself, tell my heart, we’re fine. But what if I somehow miss Todd? What if I don’t find him? What if I drop dead of a heart attack right here? Would the police be able to track down Claudette, to reunite her with my lifeless body? Is there enough ID on me for them to locate her?

  The clutter of brick buildings in front of me is silent. The doors are shut. The windows are still. But it’s almost the end of the school day and, any minute now, the place is going to erupt into activity and I will, I think, come face to face with my erstwhile friend Todd Denham for the first time in twenty-four years.

  A short internet search at Newark airport revealed that the vinyl-loving, cardigan-wearing, Derrida-reading Todd of the late 1980s is now a high-school teacher in Sussex. It cannot be him, I told myself as I sat in a slightly too small airport chair, staring into my laptop screen. It must be another man with the same name.

  But click on a ‘personnel’ tab for the school and there is his biography: born in Leeds, England, attended such and such a university, now teaching Media Studies. It had to be him.

  Outside the school, I take a deep breath, I take two, I ignore another bungled heartbeat. I pick up my bag. I put it down again. I knock my temple, lightly at first, against the peeling bark of a eucalyptus tree. I have to stay on top of this situation, whatever this situation turns out to be. I have to keep my wits about me.

  The automatic doors of the school sweep open and I stand straighter. A janitor-type person in overalls steps out into the searing sunshine, carrying a toolbox. He comes down the steps and disappears around the side of the building.

  I watch as the automatic doors suck themselves shut.

  Here I am, I think, loitering outside a school, lying in wait for someone in order to ask them whether or not I left a woman dead in a forest. Just an average day, then. Nothing to see here.

  The doors trundle open, trundle back.

  And something pushes its way into my thoughts. A rare appearance, this one, and I think it’s because there is something about the school entrance that reminds me of the linguistics department in that university in England. It’s not the ranks of cacti embedded in gravel or the woman behind a reception desk, who is wearing a thick layer of beige make-up (reminding me, unpleasantly and fleetingly, of my first wife), or the aquarium where neon-hued fish circle in their filtered environment, coshed by boredom. No, it’s those double electric doors, curved in shape, which open and shut with a hesitant glide, creating momentary parentheses around those who pass through. There is something about the noise of them, the whoosh-clunk as they open and shut, open and shut.

  I have done an assiduous job, all these years, of keeping Nicola from my thoughts. I have staved off recollections, reassessments, memories of her. But here I am, waiting and waiting, and I’m thinking about Nicola, my first love, and also, in the simultaneous way you can, especially when jet-lagged, as if the tired mind is a stovetop that can keep several burners chugging away, keep more than one pan on the boil, I’m thinking how glad I am that Claudette, my current love, my hopefully permanent love, doesn’t go in for much make-up. She’s not a devotee of the caked slap that some women coat and obscure themselves with.

  I’m also thinking – and this has just occurred to me – whether it is possible that I married my first wife as a reaction to Nicola (I dislike the word ‘rebound’: we homo sapiens are not rubber balls; we are surely more complex, sentient beings than that, our choices are surely more finely nuanced)? I’d always thought that marriage was in some ways a response to the death of my mother, me seeking stability, permanence, distraction, but now I wonder if it didn’t have something to do with my severance from Nicola.

  The thing is, I called Nicola from the States. I called and called but never got an answer. And so I wrote to Nicola. I can recall this with perfect clarity. A couple of months or so after my mother died, while I was still in the States, having been delayed by a small and unfortunate brush with the New York Police Department, it was becoming clear that I wasn’t going to make it back to England. So I went to Manhattan, to a stationery shop, where I bought a pad of heavy-grain creamy notepaper and with it I wrote Nicola a letter. I worked and reworked it until it was perfect. I told her I was beyond sorry, that I was a shit and an idiot, that I still wanted her, if she still wanted me. I told her I’d been offered a research-assistant job at Berkeley and that she should come out there and join me.

  No reply, of course, which rankled and stung, heaped pain upon pain. It was one thing to refuse someone but not even deign to reply? I was dumbfounded by that, her lack of response. I remember hurling stones into the river one night, denouncing her to the impassive gulls that swung above me: I spared them no detail of her heartlessness, her narcissism, her cold, careerist outlook on life, her callous disregard of love, of men, of unborn children.

  In most species, the injured male will withdraw, go to ground, nurse his wounds in private, only re-emerging into the light when he appears whole again. And so I took myself to Berkeley, to the Sunshine State, where no one knew me, where I had no commitments, no history, no reputation, nothing. I began all over again, thrusting Nicola from my thoughts, seeking ways to smother my love for her so that it would no longer smoulder within me. And so, ergo, my first wife. She was, it strikes me now, the opposite, the anti-Nicola.

  Again, the school doors ease open and shut.

  So here’s what I remember about Nicola and sliding doors. That I had seen her around the university – she was, after all, pretty hard to miss. She was part of the Social-Sciences department, which shared an atrium with Literature and Linguistics, complete with a set of curved, automatic doors. I’d done a little homework on her, found out who she was, established that she was single. I’d turned up at her lectures, we’d talked afterwards, we’d been in a group who had gone for coffee. There was no feeling, though, that I was getting very far, in any real sense. She gave off this aura of indifference, aloofness – which only, of course, served to sharpen my desire.

  One evening, I sat through a lecture on the sociological and political ramifications of female
psychiatric disorders. I even, I recall, took some notes. At the end, I went up to her and suggested dinner sometime.

  She didn’t answer so I think I emitted some vapid theorising about the position of male disorders within the parameters of feminism, et cetera, et cetera. She carried on sliding her notes into her bag, throughout my rambling speech, and then she turned around. ‘What do you want, Daniel?’ she asked me, her chin raised.

  ‘I wanted to ask you … about your … your position on the male perspective … whether you—’

  She cut me off with a toss of her gleaming hair. ‘What do you really want?’

  I held her gaze. I shoved my hands into my pockets. I took them out. ‘To take you to dinner,’ I said. ‘And then to take you to bed.’

  Her eyebrows shot up, disappearing under her fringe. She looked me up and down. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Well, I appreciate the candour. Shall we go?’

  We went. I was battling astonishment and still getting my bearings in the situation – doing some quick accounts in my head as to where I could take her to eat and whether I could afford to pay – when, ahead of her on the escalator on the way out, I felt her lean forward, felt her breath on my neck, her hand on my shoulder. She bit me on the ear. This brilliant, beautiful, bold woman nipped the cartilage of my upper ear between her gleaming incisors.

  What else was there to do but to take her firmly by the wrist, pull her off the escalator, past the noticeboards and into a conveniently accessible restroom? It was quick, it was wordless, it was anything but gentle. I kicked open the door with its picture of a wheelchair, she reached to snap on the light as I pushed her up on to the handbasin. Her pantyhose got ripped, my glasses got broken, she dragged her nails across my butt, which stung to some considerable degree, later, in the shower.

  Afterwards we stood, panting into each other’s hair. I was wondering what to say, how to break the silence, what does anyone say in that situation, when one of those automated air-freshener things suddenly went off, somewhere near the ceiling, making her sneeze. She always was a little atopic around cleaning products. She sneezed again. We made the necessary adjustments to our clothes. I righted a lock of her hair that had fallen the wrong side of her parting.

  She picked up her bag, straightened her jacket and looked at me, not quite smiling. I saw she was about to speak and I braced myself, unsure of what was coming.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘where are we going for dinner?’

  I am roused from my soporific reverie by a sound like water rushing over stones: a susurration, a sense of motion.

  A thousand teenagers are pouring out of the school. Once through the bottleneck of the doors, they break, regroup and bond as groups of three or four. They call to each other in their particular argot: pure Home Counties cut with Teen American. A lot of yips, heys, elongated vowels. They swing bags through the air. Hair is flicked, stroked, tossed. Trousers are worn tight but low; shoes unlaced. The females link arms with their chosen peers; the males perform mock-violence upon those they recognise as their tribe. Most, if not all, display what I think of as ‘the screen-hunch’: head bent, eyes down, one hand engaged in fondling, stroking, manipulating a phone.

  I scan them all as a whole, a large, seething organism. I look for one that reminds me of Ari, of Niall: I find a boy with Ari’s height but none of his rangy elasticity. I see someone with a jacket like Niall’s but his face is too wide, too tan. I seek out one with the same colouring as Phoebe and Marithe but there isn’t a single child who matches the coppery, fire-tone manes of my daughters.

  And then a man comes out through the glass doors. He has no beard, no cardigan and hardly any hair. But there is something in the set of his shoulders, the way he grips his briefcase.

  My first thought is: no, it can’t be him, this is some non-descript middle-aged man with a shirt and tie and male-pattern baldness. My second thought is: yes, it is him, it has to be him. My third, and most uncomfortable, realisation is that when he lays eyes on me he will undoubtedly go through the same mental process.

  Todd Denham, the new Todd Denham, with mid-brown slacks pulled up just a little too high, and a buttoned-up check shirt, comes down the steps. He navigates his way through the groups of kids. He doesn’t meet anyone’s eye. His face is cast down to the ground. He tugs, then smooths his fringe and I remember it, that gesture, a compulsive thing he did as he was walking, when he was thinking.

  I’m expecting him to approach one of these parked cars, get out his keys, sling his briefcase into one of the passenger seats, at which point – I have it all planned – I will appear and say – what? Remember me? Remember a forest? It has been circling my mind, the question of what her death might have meant for Todd. He was the one on the ground, there, with her. The one left behind. The one who took the rap, who pulled the wool over my eyes to save me. The one who would have had to pick up the pieces, face the music, deal with the situation. I cannot imagine what might have come next for him, as I flew away home. Police, ambulances, questioning, suspicion? Even just that moment of being left in a forest with a dead girl: how do you go on from that?

  It is regrettable, I know, to spring this on him, to have to do this here and now, in front of his pupils, but what choice do I have?

  I am just about to break cover when I see that Todd is walking past all the cars. He is picking up his pace and heading out of the school grounds, on foot.

  I follow him for a block or two. He walks quickly – I remember that too – head down, as if searching for something dropped or lost. We make our way past a row of houses in that beamed, fake-Tudor style that this part of England apparently went crazy for a while back and then onto a shopping street that could be picked up and placed down anywhere in the Western world and nobody would think anything was amiss. Dry-cleaners, bakeries, supermarkets, a pet shop, a café, with unenticing and tired-looking scones arranged on doilies in the window.

  Todd pauses outside a newsagent, looking perhaps at the day’s papers, but then moves on. He seems to hesitate at the door of a grocery store, briefcase dangling at the end of his arm, but again thinks better of it.

  I am just about to increase my pace, to catch up with him, to tap him on the shoulder, enough already with the private-detective act, when he disappears. Just like that. Vanishes off the street.

  I almost break into a sprint. To have come this far and lose him. How typical would that be? I am hurrying, sweating, swearing, panicked as I reach the place he dematerialised, and find myself looking into the window of a Chinese restaurant.

  ALL YOU CAN EAT the sign reads. BUFFETT. The misspelling barely registers, which is a testament to my extreme mental agitation. There, behind it, partially obscured by reflection, is Todd Denham, holding an empty plate, lifting up the lids of some big, aluminium platters, one by one.

  I go in, I accept a plate and a napkin from the girl at the door, I walk past drumlins of chow fan, mountains of prawn crackers, swamps of wonton soup and I catch up with Todd by the spring rolls.

  ‘Hello,’ I say, putting my hand on his arm.

  He starts and pulls away, in reflexive surprise. He always was a jumpy sort. He glances at me, his face startled but blank and, seeing no one familiar, he glances away again.

  It’s taking him a moment but it’s coming, I know it is, I can see it, here it comes, and – there it is! – the realisation dawns.

  He looks at me again. ‘Oh,’ he says, his face twisted with incredulity, with shock. ‘Oh. Jesus.’

  I am just saying, facetiously, with a smirk, ‘No, just Daniel,’ when Todd’s plate tilts. A cascade of chow fan and spring rolls falls to the floor, and how pretty it looks there, in a way, on the red carpet, but how annoying too, as it’s all over my shoes and trousers.

  There follows an interlude of wiping and sweeping: the girl at the door gets involved, and someone else in the same uniform, with a dustpan and brush and damp cloths. Todd and I grapple and apologise and bump into each other as we help and hinder.

  Th
en order is restored and we are seated together at a table and the girl is there with a pencil and pad so Todd and I have to go through the motions of ordering jasmine tea and draught beer, listening to the price options, for all the world as if he and I do this kind of thing every week: getting together over a Chinese.

  Eventually, the girl leaves and we are alone, facing each other.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ is Todd’s opening gambit. His face is unsmiling, his manner bordering on unfriendly. His hands, I notice, are gripping the sides of the table.

  ‘Working,’ I say slowly, registering this hostility. ‘I’m in Sussex for … a conference. Thought I’d look you up.’

  Todd, to his credit, clearly doesn’t believe this for a second. He dabs at his forehead with a paper napkin. ‘Why now?’ he says.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I said, why now?’ He screws the napkin into a tight sphere in his fist. ‘I mean, it’s been, what – thirty years?’

  I am, I admit, a little taken aback by his manner, and also horribly dismayed. This coldness of his can only confirm my worst fears, surely. Am I looking across the table at a man looking back at a murderer? Is this the expression a person assumes when reacquainted with an unwelcome spectre from their past? I had, I now see, been counting on a little more bonhomie, a tad more recollection of the warmth that once existed between us but that now seems like the expectation of a madman. Why, if the circumstances under which we parted all those years ago were what I think they were, would he be even remotely pleased to see me?

  ‘Twenty-four,’ I say, in a nervy, strangled voice. ‘Around that.’

  ‘So, nothing at all from you for twenty-four years and then, all of a sudden, I’m treated to an appearance in a Chinese restaurant.’ Todd moves his teacup from one side of his plate to the other. ‘How come? How did you find me?’