This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Sober, sober, calm, calm. The eyes of the ladies upon him, peering at him through their spectacles, muttering to each other, one of them over by the animals, replacing the crystal diorama. He has every right to be there: he would like to say this to them. Sober. How to achieve this when he hasn’t slept in – how long? – two nights, maybe three, hasn’t eaten since he can’t remember when, hasn’t been home for a long time, camping out at the apartments of aunts and uncles, on his youngest sister’s sofa, when—

  Daniel is brought to a halt by a box of trinkets, perched on top of a bookcase. A brooch in the shape of a terrier, a ring of adjustable circumference, a beribboned bangle, a lone earring. He reaches down and plucks out a hair comb. A curving band of clear turquoise plastic, radiating out from which is a row of long, sharp spines. A kind of flattened miniature porcupine. He holds it up to the light. One spine is half broken. Bubbles are trapped in the plastic, lens-like, tear-shaped.

  His mother had some of these. He knows she did. He has a distinct memory of her sitting in the kitchen, the newspaper open in front of her on the table, her hair held back at the sides by these plastic combs. Were they turquoise? Yes, he’s positive they were.

  He feels his pulse quicken, his lungs compress, as they always do when he finds something of Teresa’s. He has three things now, no, four – the shoes, the silk scarf with blue swirls, that yellow cardigan, the gold bracelet – and this comb makes five. He clutches it in his hand, so hard that the teeth make a neat row of impressions on his palm, but it is a good kind of pain, a real kind of pain, the sort that feels clean and uncomplicated and purely physical. It is hers. It has to be. He lifts it to his face and sniffs it. Yes. It smells of her. It does. It really does.

  ‘Can we help you with something?’

  The question comes from close behind him and is not really a question at all, conveying as it does the exact opposite of its semantic implication. Does that, Daniel finds himself wondering before he turns around, count as a rhetorical question? Not really. It doesn’t contain rhetoric, merely threat. There ought, he feels, to be a special linguistic coinage for this type of enquiry. One that purports to be helpful but is anything but. Maybe he will invent one. He could write a paper on it, perhaps, introduce the concept to the world, claim it as his own.

  He turns, comb still in hand. The thrift-store ladies are upon him. Three of them. Weird sisters indeed. He bares his teeth in something he hopes passes for a grin. ‘I’m just browsing,’ he tells them, lifting the hand that holds the comb.

  ‘Sir,’ the tallest one says, and Daniel laughs with delight at this appellation – to be called that while being thrown out of a shop is too much, too fantastic, the semantics too elastic to be believed. He should definitely do some research into this. ‘We need to ask you to leave.’

  ‘May I ask why?’ Daniel says. He is keen to enter into and sustain this display of politeness-as-hostility.

  That floors them. They exchange faltering glances; they lace and unlace their hands.

  ‘I merely,’ he says, ‘wish to purchase this comb and then make a further perusal of your most interesting stock. Is that not what you philanthropic ladies are here for? To sell said stock to benefit the city’s unfortunates?’

  More exchanged glances. Shifting feet. The tallest lady, the one who called him ‘sir’, mutters something under her breath, then shuffles back to her position behind the till. Daniel is watching her progress, then contemplating an embroidered handkerchief folded on the counter next to her – familiar or not? – when he feels a hand on his arm.

  ‘Did you find anything else of your mother’s?’

  Daniel looks down at the woman. She is, he would guess, older than his mother, in her late seventies or even early eighties. Whereas Teresa will never now see seventy. ‘How do you know about my mother?’ he says to this woman, who mentions her so casually, so intimately, as if she knows him, knows them, knows all about it.

  ‘You told me,’ the old lady in the glasses and string of beads says, a kind face she has, with rheumy eyes and cheeks that Daniel finds he would like to touch, slack and cushiony they would feel, he is sure, ‘about what your father did. When you were in here yesterday.’

  ‘I was in here yesterday?’

  The lady nods. ‘And the day before. You come in every day, dear.’

  ‘I do?’

  The lady smiles at him again, then nods towards the other woman at the till. ‘Don’t mind her. You do what you have to do.’

  Teresa had been in the ground for three days when Daniel returned to the apartment to find that his father had cleared out everything that had belonged to her and taken it all to a thrift store. Her clothes, her jewellery, her books, her toiletries, her scarves, her gloves, her tins of toffee, even the cushion she liked to position behind her back as she read on the couch. Daniel had torn through the bedroom, the kitchen, the living room, searching for something, anything of hers, while his father had sat, arms folded, in a chair. If you think, his father said, when Daniel came to a standstill in front of him, that you can go off making a spectacle of yourself with your mother barely cold, you have another thing coming.

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ Daniel had screamed.

  His father had leapt out of his chair. ‘My roof, my rules. I won’t have that language here. It belongs in the gutter, along with the person who uttered it. Your sisters came and chose something to keep of your mother’s but you,’ he jabbed Daniel in the chest, ‘you were off drinking yourself into oblivion so you,’ he jabbed him again, ‘get nothing.’

  Daniel had let out a mirthless laugh. ‘No, you’re the one who gets nothing. Don’t you see? You’re a heartless bastard, always have been. You kept her hobbled, financially and emotionally, and you can’t even see where that leaves you, can you? You don’t even recognise—’

  His father had cuffed him then, twice, across the head, just as he always had done, behind the ear, and the noise inside his head was so familiar, so old – the hot, high pitch of ringing – that Daniel had wanted to laugh again. He hadn’t, though. He had said, that is the last time you will ever hit me, and left, slamming the front door behind him. He hadn’t been back since.

  The thrift-store lady still has her hand on his arm. ‘It takes everybody in different ways.’

  Daniel stares down at her. ‘What does?’

  ‘Grief.’ She shakes her head. ‘You never can tell how people will react. Remember that your dad is hurting too. He probably didn’t mean to upset you.’

  Daniel is about to say, you don’t know my dad, the man isn’t capable of feelings, when he is gripped by a sudden certainty that he will vomit. That rush of saliva, that heated pressure on the cranium, the heaving twist in the gut.

  He pushes the lady aside – gently, he will hope later – and barges through the shop, through the racks of clothes that release the scent of a hundred empty wardrobes, past the books that have been read and reread or perhaps never picked up at all, past the rows of household trinkets that were given in good faith or love or ill-judgement, out through the door.

  He is hit by a wall of icy air. Winter has come early in Brooklyn. The flat grey sky above him expresses a steady, peppering sleet. Daniel clutches his overcoat around himself, gulping at the air, steadying himself against a streetlight.

  He’s going to puke, he can feel it coming. Whatever is in his stomach is going to make a reappearance, he knows it. What could it be anyway? No food, some whiskey maybe, or was there a vodka or two, from that place in Queens where he ended up last night? Whatever it is, it will not be pretty.

  And, just as suddenly as it arrived, the urge is gone. It is not going to happen. Daniel screws up his eyes. He breathes deeply. He pushes himself upright. He is wondering what to do next, where to go – was there something he had planned today, something he had promised to somebody? – when he hears footsteps coming along behind him.

  It is the purposeful tread of a woman. The stacked heel of a boot. Someone who has so
mewhere to be, someone pressed for time, someone who always knows what she is about.

  The certainty that it is Nicola behind him is abrupt and powerful. Nicola, here, on this street in downtown Brooklyn, where he is standing in days-old clothes, a half-bottle of whiskey in his pocket, a baggie of dope and a hair comb that may or may not have belonged once to his mother, late of this parish, gripped in his hand.

  Nicola has come. She is here. To save him, to forgive him, to take him into her arms, to enfold him within the drapes of her cloak.

  Daniel turns. He swings himself round, heart pounding so hard that he’s sure she will see it there in his chest, sure it will burst from him and lay itself at her feet.

  But the woman is all wrong. She has hair spiked and stiff with gel, a fuzzy pink jumper, jeans and hooped earrings, and Nicola would never wear such things, never. She isn’t nearly as tall as she should be and her skin isn’t clear and pale as milk, her eyes nowhere near large enough. She is all wrong. She gives him a strange look as she passes him, wrinkling her nose, curling her lip.

  ‘You,’ Daniel hears himself roar, ‘you are all wrong. You know that?’

  The woman whips her head round, eyes wide, then looks quickly away. She increases her pace in her heavy boots, the noise of which pierces Daniel through the chest in a way that feels entirely new and devastating, and then she breaks into a run.

  ‘All wrong,’ he yells again, to her retreating back, to the cloud of pink emanating from her fuzzy jumper, to the way her strappy little shoulder bag bounces off her hip as she moves.

  The faces of the thrift-store ladies float up towards the surface of the shop window, then recede.

  I thought I saw you today.

  The sentence cuts through his mind, like a scythe through grass. He puts a hand into his coat pocket and sifts through what he encounters there. The cold nub of a bottle top, some loose change, the baggie, a subway token, half a shoelace, some curls of paper. He withdraws one of these and squints at it. Some kind of receipt – numbers in purplish ink, telling him that he spent exactly three dollars and fifty cents on something called sundries and received one dollar and fifty cents in change. Something is written across it in his handwriting: The regret is crushing me. All I want to do is rewind time and do everything differently.

  He is composing a letter to Nicola. It is going to be a long letter and it is going to say everything he wants. Everything. Nothing will be left out. Which is why he must write these things down when they come to him, so that nothing is forgotten, so that he has them all there, when he finally comes to the moment and sits down, in front of some paper – beautiful paper it will be, he is going to buy some at a good stationery store, she appreciates that kind of thing – with a proper pen to write the whole thing from start to finish.

  He turns over the piece of paper about crushing regret and, fishing for a pencil stub in his other pocket, starts to write I thought I saw you today, leaning on the streetlight. Lucky, he is thinking, that it’s a bit of pencil he has on him because a pen wouldn’t work at this angle, on this surface.

  He is thinking about the word angle and how close it is to angel and he has got as far as the downstroke of y in you when he hears the gulp of a police siren, a block or so away. There it is again. The stuttering wail, the city’s recurring riff. Daniel looks one way and sees the faces of the thrift-store ladies, still watching him. He looks the other, sees an alleyway, a befouled gap between buildings, and slips into it. He doesn’t run, he doesn’t move quickly, he doesn’t attract attention. It’s just a sideways slide to remove himself from view.

  Once in the alley, he picks up speed. He is moving parallel to the river now; he has always oriented himself in Brooklyn according to the East River. Past a clutch of dumpsters, an old mattress, a leaking gutter. The flank of a marmalade cat flashes ahead, disappearing over a wall. He pockets the piece of paper and the pencil and, as he does so, he feels the spikes of the comb. Was that it? Did they call the cops because he forgot to pay twenty cents for a shitty plastic comb? Those witches. He will, though, go back there tomorrow and give them the money. Because not to do so would be bad karma. Because he needs to keep going to the shop, in case anything else of his mother’s turns up. Because that is what his mother would have said he should do.

  I was not in my right mind. The words come from a place deep within him. He is not thinking them. They are not words of a cerebral, conscious nature. Such an act would never have come from my heart. You must know that.

  That’s a good one but he hasn’t time, now, to stop and write it down. He will remember it. He will.

  Daniel re-emerges on a different street, one thick with people, walking up and down, to and fro, going in and out of shops, calling to their children, lugging bags over their shoulders, going about their daily business. They are wearing coats, hats, mittens. Daniel doesn’t know how winter could have come on so fast. It seems no time at all since he was in England, and it was summer time, and he and Nicola drove into the countryside, taking a rug and their books, and they sat beside a bend in a river, and when the heat became too much, Daniel dived into the water, which was cool and green and slow-moving. When he emerged his naked body was streaked with slime, which made Nicola burst out laughing, her cigarette trembling at the end of her fingers. How can it now be winter and he is here in Brooklyn and everything is different? Nicola, the river, the summer, England, his mother – all of them gone.

  Daniel heads into the wind, away from the river. He has no idea where he is going but there is some urgency about the way he is moving so he is just going to trust his instincts, his interior compass. Maybe his body knows something he doesn’t. Taxis and cars and buses power past. A man with a scraggly beard thrusts a leaflet into Daniel’s hand, without making eye contact, already turning away. Daniel passes a shop with a bank of pomegranates under a plastic sheet and he recalls his mother slicing one open in their kitchen. Him standing at her hip, just able to see over the counter’s edge, the fruit’s pale, lacquered skincase giving way to a jewelled interior – the scarlet, wet shock of it. Did she tell him then the story of the girl who ate six of those red seeds – such duality in them, that opulent, bursting flesh and that mean, hard little kernel – and was condemned to live underground for half her life, shackled to the king of the underworld?

  Daniel thinks of wet, cloying earth, a vertical tunnel into the ground, a place sealed up, a place of no return. Wasn’t it the mother who went down to the underworld to save her daughter, who took on the evil king, who ensured her child’s safety for at least half the year? He shudders, groping again in his pockets, seeking something – the paper, the pencil, the comb, the bottle. No, not the bottle. Or, maybe, yes: the bottle.

  He unscrews the cap, tilts it into his mouth and the whiskey hits the back of his throat with a fiery fist. He swallows and waits for the drink to sink down through him, outlining his digestive tract, reassuring him of his physical presence, his continuing life.

  An amount of time later – he isn’t sure exactly how much – Daniel is walking in through the gates of the cemetery. He comes here at least once a day. It gives things an aim, a kind of routine. He makes his way along the gravelled path, letting his eye rest on the hundreds and hundreds of gravestones, watching the way they pull themselves into diagonal columns as he passes, then unpeel themselves, then line up again. An endless process of arrangement and disarrangement.

  He turns a corner, then another. He is aware of someone standing near his mother’s grave, head bowed, hat held to chest, in the time-honoured position decreed in cemeteries – Daniel has no idea why. They’re all dead, he wants to shout to this man, in his camel coat, with his slickly combed silver hair. They can’t see if you’ve got your hat off or not and, frankly, even if they could, do you think they would care?

  He stumbles as he ascends the grassy slope, his feet tangling under him, his hand coming into contact with the wet grass, and he lets out a volley of curses – quietly, he believes, accidentall
y. The man turns and, for a moment, it looks to Daniel as though he has been standing, head bowed, at his mother’s grave.

  Daniel looks at him as he struggles upright. Does he know him? He doesn’t think so. He examines the camel coat, the hat, fitted now back on the man’s head, the trousers with perfect creases down their centres. There is nothing familiar about him at all.

  Daniel moves in a possessive rush towards Teresa’s grave. Who is this person who dares to stand there, looking down at his mother’s grave, this person whom Daniel has never met? The man with the combed silver hair steps sideways, drawing on a pair of leather gloves. He gives Daniel a sidelong glance and Daniel can feel him, in his turn, taking in Daniel’s stained coat, with the torn hem, his scuffed boots, the whiskey bottle, which for some reason he still has clutched in his hand, the general air of someone unkempt, unwashed, unslept.

  My mother died, Daniel wants to say, OK? It wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t anyone’s fault, but I’m having trouble keeping my head above water.

  The man raises his eyes and, for a moment, their gazes lock, and it is not a look of opprobrium or disapproval or disgust, as Daniel might have expected. Daniel feels the lack of these judgements, feels it in the sudden shame of his appearance, the whiskey bottle. They seem to burn him, these failings. The man with the silver hair looks at Daniel with nothing but compassion. It is beatific, his gaze, omniscient, almost priest-like. It is as if this man knows him, to his very core, knows everything about him. What else do you know about me? Daniel wants to blurt out, in fear, in fascination. What else do you see? But the gaze bestows understanding, absolution and forgiveness, all at once. Daniel has not been looked at like that for what seems a long time, in such a way that says, you poor child, and also, all will be well. He hasn’t, he realises, been looked at like that since his mother passed away.

  And then it is over, as quickly as it began. The man gives him a nod and moves off, his feet shushing through the grass. Daniel has an urge to run after him, to take him by the arm and say, who are you, what were you to my mother? But he doesn’t. He leans, catching his breath, on her gravestone, that slab of blackish marble with letters cut into it that lies at a perpendicular angle to the length of her body, laid out as it is beneath his feet.