This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Beloved wife and mother.

  There is a sudden dink in his ear canal, followed by a shurr-shurr. It’s the thrift-shop tinnitus. Daniel shakes his head, bangs his palm against his ear, but it comes again: dink-dink-shurr.

  He pushes himself away from the gravestone – metallically cold today – and, stepping around where he estimates his mother’s head and shoulders are, he makes off across the cemetery. He moves with speed and purpose now, along the gravel path, through the gates, just as the silver-haired man did, turning left along the road.

  He has to go several blocks before he finds a working phone, one that hasn’t had its cord cut, its mechanisms slashed free. This one no longer has a door but the phone itself appears to be fine. He snatches up the receiver, as if at any moment it might vanish from sight, leaning back to hurl the empty whiskey bottle into a trash can, followed by the dope, some tissues, a ring-pull from a can. The pieces of paper with writing on them he carefully smooths and flattens with his palm and lays them out next to the phone, where he can see them. Then he slots in quarter after quarter – every coin he has on him. He has no idea how much money will be chewed up by a phone call to England but he imagines it won’t be cheap.

  No matter. Just a short call will do. He is going to set a course for himself, the right course, the only course. His fingers fly over the buttons – he knows her number, of course, off by heart, knows to add the international code, knows how to route this piece of electronic trickery so that any minute now the phone will ring on the wall in Nicola’s house and they will be connected, him and her, and he will say all the things he wants to say. He will say: I can’t be without you. He will say: Come. He will say: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  He hears the faint ringing and he is picturing the phone, the way it hangs next to the fridge, picturing Nicola crossing her hallway from her study, stretching out her arm and—

  ‘Hello?’

  It’s a man’s voice. Terse yet hesitant. Daniel listens for a moment, confounded. The man says it again: ‘Hello? Is there anybody there?’

  Daniel replaces the receiver. Confusion buzzes through him as his coins are shucked and swallowed by the machine. He knows that voice. It was Todd. But what was Todd doing answering Nicola’s phone? Why was Todd in Nicola’s house?

  Daniel stands for a moment, thinking. He must have misdialled. That was it. He must have called Todd’s house by mistake, dialled that number, rather than Nicola’s. He will call again, make sure he’s getting the right number, then maybe he’ll call Todd, to explain.

  He’s collecting his change, slotting it back into the machine and pressing down the numbers when he hears a car door slam, some footsteps, then someone seizes him by both arms.

  ‘Hey,’ he protests, as the coins fall from his fingers. He twists in the person’s grasp, catching a flash of uniform, a peaked cap. Then another cop is upon him and they have him spreadeagled against the roof of their car, his face jammed into its paintwork. He can see his curls of paper, with the things he needed to tell Nicola, scuttering all over the sidewalk. He can see the telephone receiver dangling loose in the breeze, see the tiny holes where, even now, Nicola’s voice might be heard, might be answering, might be speaking. He is struggling, of course, because who wouldn’t in his situation? But the cop has him in such a hold that he can’t move, can’t reach out and lift the phone to his ear and say, yes, here I am.

  At the police station, he is allowed one call and he makes another attempt to reach Nicola but the duty sergeant laughs at him, a scraping, jeering sound, and whips the phone out of his hand. You want to make long-distance calls, he says, you do it on your own dime.

  It is several hours before he is brought up to the front desk and he is hoping against hope that it will be his youngest sister who has come to collect him. She is the most forgiving, the one least likely to tell their father that he was hauled off the street for stealing from a thrift store. But it’s not her. His eldest sister is standing at the desk, leaning over to sign something the sergeant is holding. She has on a jacket over her pyjamas, her face is drawn and creased, and Daniel feels bad because he knows she’ll have to be up early to get her kids off to school.

  As he walks towards her, she glances at him, then looks away, shoving her hands deep into her pockets. ‘Get in the car, Danny,’ is all she says.

  When All the Tiny Lights Begin to be Extinguished

  Daniel, Paris, 2010

  Here’s a little-known fact about my wife: she is one of those people to whom it is impossible to lie. I don’t know how she does it. She is able to sniff out an untruth, a vacillation, a cover-up, a white lie, a whopper at twenty paces. The kids try it, I try it, on occasion, and we give up, defeated, every time: it never works. She has this way of staring at you, her eyes stretched and unblinking, while not saying anything at all, until you crack, until you cry out, OK, OK, it wasn’t like that at all, I made it up.

  Is it a form of telepathy, I have asked myself, never for a moment putting such abilities past her, or is it because she is herself so much practised in the art that she knows each trick of the trade, as it were? We are, after all, dealing here with a woman who has more skeletons than the average graveyard in her closet.

  So, with this ability of hers at the front of my mind, I am not, shall we say, in my most relaxed state as I get myself back down the hill, through all the gates and off again to the airport, in slightly weary pursuit.

  And where am I off to this time? Paris. Where else would Claudette run to?

  My wife rarely travels – it is a major trauma for her to leave the valley, let alone Donegal – but she will go to Paris two or three times a year. She seems to feel an umbilical pull to the city of her birth. There is also an imperviousness, a self-containment, an incuriosity about the French national character that means she is not stared at, wondered about from afar. She can don a pair of sunglasses, a hat and move about the city unbothered.

  Also, I reasoned to myself as I checked my passport, swapped my travel-soiled clothes for clean ones, where else would you go? Whose company would you seek out if you were mad at your husband? The astringent Pascaline Lefevre, naturellement.

  Winter is the best season to see Paris, I’ve always thought, when the pavements are sheer with frost, when the sun is low in the sky, when the Seine is swollen and brown, twisting fibrously beneath the bridges. In summer, to be frank, there are just too many people, too many of my goddamn compatriots, jostling about to get themselves photographed with some national monument or other in the background. But I’ll take spring, when the pollarded fists of the plane trees are beginning to show green.

  So I play my part. I get myself on a plane, for a criminal amount of money. On the road again. I touch down in Charles de Gaulle after midnight and decide that to announce myself at Pascaline’s at that hour wouldn’t exactly get me off on the right foot so I get a taxi to a street where I know there is a string of hotels. I get a room, I take a shower, I fall into the bed and I sleep, I sleep, I sleep, until I’m woken by some delivery vans banging shut their doors, the drivers swapping Gallic insults, and I realise I passed out for the whole night, that it’s the next day already.

  I call Pascaline’s apartment and Claudette answers the phone and I ask her to come and meet me and, although she tells me to go fuck myself and that she’d rather chew off her own arm than be at what she terms my ‘beck and call’, I hang up secure in the knowledge that I’ll be seeing her – all limbs intact – and my children in the next few hours. The key to life with Claudette is knowing that her default setting is overreaction and outrage. If cornered, she will become livid. It’s only when she calms down that she can think clearly and form an appropriate response. It’s just a matter of sitting it out, waiting for the storm to pass. I’ve always reckoned that my predecessor, Timou, must never have worked this one out.

  By lunchtime, I am waiting, as arranged, on the green-painted chairs that line the children’s boating pond in the Jardin du Luxembo
urg. Will she come? Have I wasted my time? What will I do and where will I go if she doesn’t turn up?

  Kids lean on the circular wall of the pond, poking at their sailboats with sticks, overlooked by tired mamans or authoritarian grandmères. I turn up my face towards the sun and bury my gloveless hands in the pockets of my overcoat. The ground is gritty beneath my feet. A couple of businessmen hurry past, pecking with their fingers at their phones, a walker with three ridiculous, fluffy mammals that don’t, in all conscience, deserve the appellation ‘dog’. What is it with the Parisians and their miniature yappy canines? I’ve never understood it: they exercise such impeccable, flawless taste in all other areas but this.

  Pigeons stalk and croon under the legs of the scattered chairs, searching for crumbs. I am rehearsing my lines, running through approaches in my head: an old girlfriend, a long time ago, something happened, I made a mistake, a … what is the phrase she uses with the children when they have done something wrong? … a choice, I made a poor choice. I have to get this right, I am telling myself. You get one shot and one shot only with Claudette.

  A keen, chill breeze whips past and I am just watching the clouds scudding over me when my head turns.

  I’ve heard them before I’ve seen them. Rounding the corner past the palais and the watery folly, where you can feed the ducks with a backdrop worthy of a Gothic novel, or pull faces at the guards in their officious little uniforms, are my children. Some of my children.

  Ari is pushing Calvin in his stroller, at a speed neither his mother nor I would permit. They veer and race along the path, Ari shouting or singing ‘The Marseillaise’ at the top of his voice, Calvin emitting those deep baby belly-laughs. Marithe is cantering beside them and appears to be whipping her big brother around the legs with a stick. My children, my children.

  I stand and wave, like the idiot I am, yelling in my large American voice. Several people around me reel back in horror but I don’t care.

  That I can see no sign of their mother doesn’t dent my joy. I jump up and down on the spot, still waving, for Ari and I have a long tradition, a stupid joke, that if we see each other from far off, we will wave theatrically and expansively until we are right up close, pretending that we haven’t grasped that the other person has seen us.

  Ari is pushing the stroller so can’t wave back but Marithe takes up the family tradition and waves and waves, running towards me until she’s about a foot away. Then she stops. She starts rooting about in her pocket, as if she’s forgotten I’m there. I don’t care. I sweep her up and throw her into the air.

  ‘Daddy, don’t,’ she’s saying. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

  Ari and Calvin arrive. Ari is still singing, Calvin is shouting, ‘Bap, bap, bap!’ over and over again. I embrace Ari with the hand that isn’t engaged in holding Marithe; he ruffles my hair and pinches my cheek in the manner of an indulgent grandparent; I bend down to Calvin who shouts, ‘Bap!’ right in my ear and socks me in the jaw with a kick. Marithe is holding out her hand to me, in the palm of which is what is possibly a worm or perhaps an elastic band covered with mud and saying it’s her friend and she loves it more than anything in the world, apart from Maman. I’m not taking this the wrong way when Marithe’s shoe catches me painfully in the upper leg and I put her down.

  ‘Where have you been, Daddy?’ she says, accusingly, fixing me with a stare disconcertingly like one of her mother’s. She’s wearing dungarees I’ve never seen before, decorated with embroidered rabbits, the tails of which are something that looks like sheep’s wool. Claudette must have made them while I was away.

  ‘Where have I been?’ I repeat. ‘Everywhere. Over there and over here and then over that way.’ I pick her up again because I just need to but she struggles to get free. ‘Did you know that, at one time, if Ari had sung that song here in Paris he could have had his head chopped off?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Daddy,’ Marithe says severely. ‘Nobody could chop off Ari’s head. He’s too tall.’

  She stalks off towards the boating pond, disgusted by my attempt at a history lesson.

  ‘So,’ I say, looking back at my stepson, ‘where’s your mother?’

  Ari seats himself on one of the green chairs and gets something out of his pocket. ‘She’s coming,’ he says. ‘She went back to change her shoes.’

  I sit down beside him. ‘And, er, what kind of mood is she in?’

  Ari shakes his head. ‘Oh, boy.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I try to peer into his face, try to glean something of his mother’s frame of mind from it, and what I see does nothing to ease the dart of fear that is now piercing my chest. Ari avoids my eye, gets up to fetch something from the hood of the stroller.

  When he sits down again, he says, ‘You, my friend, are in so much trouble.’

  I swallow but my throat feels dry. ‘Really?’

  Ari looks at me. ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘No, come on, tell me what she said. Did she—’ I stop. It has hit me that Ari is rolling a cigarette. To smoke, right here in front of me, involving the inhalation of carcinogens and addictive chemicals. ‘Hey!’ I say, reaching for the tobacco tin, one of mine, I’m sure. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Rolling a cigarette,’ my teenage stepson says, with infinite calm.

  ‘You can’t smoke! You’re sixteen years old, for Chrissake. Are you crazy? Give me that.’

  Unperturbed, Ari turns away, out of my reach, strikes a match, inhales, and the craving for a drag of what he’s got uncurls in my gut.

  ‘You shouldn’t be smoking.’ I make one last feeble stab at protest, before I say, ‘OK, let me have one and I won’t tell your mother.’

  Ari blows out a ring of smoke, making a scoffing noise that means, you think she doesn’t know?

  I open the tin, roll myself one, light it and inhale, a process that takes about two seconds. I’ve had a lot of practice. Marithe comes up to ask for some euros for a boat, which I give her. I turn Calvin around so he can watch his sister, and Ari and I sit side by side, smoking together.

  A group of park workers in waterproofs and waders arrive and start dipping large fishing nets into the pond. I don’t know what they’re looking for but Marithe abandons her newly hired sailboat and goes over to watch. She’s always loved a bit of filth: algae, mud, manure, anything will do. Beside me, Ari is removing his chestnut-leather gloves and laying them one by one across his leg. I’ve got to hand it to him: Ari is one stylish boy. I’m not sure quite how this happened: his mother scrubs up well, as we know, but most of the time she dresses like a maniac. The house looks like a garage sale crossed with the bottom of a birdcage and I struggle along sartorially. Somehow, from this messy brew, this tall, elegant child emerged, looking like a model for avant-garde tailoring. I sometimes wonder if it’s his Scandinavian genes coming through: that pared-down aesthetic of his, the clean lines of him.

  If there has been one bone of contention in my marriage with Claudette, it’s that Ari has no contact with his father. It’s against nature, it’s wrong and, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t sit easily with me. The boy has a father, living and breathing, in Stockholm, and he doesn’t see him. I’ve had this out with Claudette, time and time again, but she always says the same thing: he has no interest in Ari and we have to protect Ari from that.

  You see, Claudette will cry, sitting up in bed, he knows that if he wants to see Ari all he has to do is get in touch with Lucas. He knows that. He’ll get in touch when he’s ready and apparently he isn’t ready yet … I will usually interrupt at this point to say, but he ought to be given another chance, another opportunity, I don’t think he’d give you away but he might want to see his son, he might just need us to reach out to him, and also Ari might want it but be afraid to suggest it.

  Claudette won’t be moved and the few times I’ve approached Ari with the idea he has smiled his enigmatic smile and shaken his head.

  It’s nothing to do with you, Claudette says, if I raise the subje
ct, and I have to admit she’s mostly right. Drop it, she tells me. And so I do. Until the next time I can’t keep it in.

  ‘So,’ Ari says to me now, as we sit in the Jardin du Luxembourg, ‘what did you do?’

  ‘What?’ I say, startled. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Ari says. ‘That’s why … that’s why …’ The utterance nose-dives off a cliff. Ari shakes back his fringe, passes his cigarette into the opposite hand, suddenly, poignantly childlike again. We both know his speech has closed up on him, like a trap.

  ‘Tap it out,’ I murmur, keeping my eyes on the pond, on Marithe, who just might decide to vault over the wall and into the pond, if history is anything to go by. When Ari was a kid, I’d offer him my palm to use as a drum, a beating board, something to take it all out on. He would smack my hand with his fist, often painfully hard, until he could gain a rhythm that loosened the words so they could make their way out from wherever they’d been trapped. ‘Come on,’ I proffer my palm, for old times’ sake. ‘Tap it out.’

  Ari ignores my hand. I see his ankle jiggling up and down and, in a moment or two, he’s able to go on. ‘That’s why we’re in Paris, that’s why Claudette is clearing out the cupboards—’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ I say.

  ‘Are you seeing someone else?’

  ‘Ari,’ I say, hurt, ‘I would never—’

  ‘That’s what she thinks.’

  ‘I know she does. But she couldn’t be more wrong. You have to believe me. It’s just … it’s hard to explain.’

  ‘Well,’ Ari stands, crushing his cigarette under his boot, ‘you’d better start trying because here she comes now.’