A Place Called Here

by Cecelia Ahern

  “I’m not a people person.” I looked around as I heard another bout of laughing.

  Helena continued talking as though she hadn’t even heard it. “Of course you’re not. You’ve just spent the guts of your life working to find them.”

  I registered her statement but decided not to respond to it. “Do you not hear these sounds?”

  “I grew up beside a train station. When friends stayed over they’d be kept awake all night by the noise and the vibrations. I was so used to it I couldn’t hear a thing, yet the creaking on the stairs when my parents went to bed woke me every time. Are you married?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I’ll take that as a no. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Have you got children?”

  “I’m not interested in children.” I sniffed the air, “What is that smell? And who is laughing? Is there somebody nearby?”

  My head whizzed around like a dog trying to snap at a fly. I couldn’t discern where the sounds were coming from. They had seemed to be coming from behind me but when I’d turned around the noise appeared to be louder in the other direction.

  “It’s everywhere,” Helena explained lazily. “What the new people here compare to a surround-sound system. You probably understand that more than I.”

  “Who’s making that noise and is someone smoking a cigar?” I sniffed the air again.

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “And you didn’t when you first arrived here? Helena, I don’t know where I am and what’s going on, and you’re not being much help.”

  Helena at least had the honesty to look embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I’d forgotten what it’s like.” She stopped and listened to the sounds. “The laughter and these smells are just entering our atmosphere now. So far, what do you know about people who come here?”

  “That they’re missing.”

  “Exactly. So the laughter, cries, and scents that arrive are missing too.”

  “How can that be?” I asked, utterly confused.

  “Sometimes people lose more than just socks, Sandy. You can forget where you put them first of all. Forgetting things is just parts of your memory missing, that’s all.”

  “You can remember again, though.”

  “Yes, but you don’t remember all things and you don’t find all things. Those things end up here, like the touch and smell of someone, the memory of their exact face and the sound of their voice.”

  “That’s bizarre.” I shook my head, unable to take it all in.

  “It’s really very simple if you remember it like this. Everything in life has a place, and when one thing moves, it must go somewhere else. Here is the place that all those things move to.” She held her hands up to display our surroundings.

  A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Have you ever heard your own laughter or cries?”

  Helena nodded sadly. “Many times.”

  “Many times?” I asked in surprise.

  She smiled. “Well, I had the great privilege of being loved by many people. The more people who love you, the more people you have out there to lose memories of you. Don’t make that face, Sandy. It’s not as desperate as it sounds. People don’t intend to lose memories. Although there are always some things that we would rather forget.” She winked. “It could be that the real sound of my laughter has been replaced by a new memory, or that, when a few months after I went missing my scent left my bedroom and my clothes, the scent they tried so hard to remember was altered. I’m sure the image I have of my own mother’s face is very different from how she actually looked but, forty years on and no reminder, how is my mind to know, exactly? You can’t hold on to all things forever, no matter how hard you grip them.”

  I thought of the day I’d hear the sound of my own laughter drifting overhead, and I knew it would happen only once because there was only one person who knew the true sound of my laughter and my cries.

  “All the same”—Helena looked up to the now bright sky with tears in her eyes—“you do sometimes feel like catching them and throwing them back to where they came from. Our memories are the only contact we have. We can hug, kiss, laugh, and cry with them over and over again in our minds. They’re very precious things to have.”

  Chuckles, hisses, snorts, and giggles filtered through the air, floating by our ears on the wind, the light breeze carrying the faint scents like the forgotten smell of a childhood home; a kitchen after a day’s baking. There’s a mother’s forgotten smell of her baby, now grown up: baby powder, skin cream, candy-smelling skin. There are older, musty smells of favorite grandparents: lavender for Grandma; cigar, cigarette, and pipe smoke for Granddad. There are the smells of lost lovers: sweet perfumes and aftershaves, the scent of sleepy morning lie-ins or simply the unexplainable individual scent left behind in a room. Personal smells as precious as the people themselves. All the aromas that had gone missing in people’s lives had ended up here. I couldn’t help but close my eyes and breathe in those scents and laugh along with the sounds.

  Joan stirred in her sleeping bag and I snapped out of my trance. My heart began to race in anticipation of finally seeing beyond the woods.

  “Good morning, Joan.” Helena sang so loudly she succeeded in waking Bernard, too. He awoke with a start, raising his head and revealing his spaghetti-strip hair hanging to the wrong side. He looked around sleepily, his hand feeling for his glasses.

  “Good morning, Bernard,” Helena said so loudly she succeeded in waking both Marcus and Derek.

  I stifled a laugh.

  “Here you go, a nice hot cup of coffee to wake you up.” She thrust steaming mugs in their faces.

  They looked at her sleepily in confusion. As soon as they’d taken their first sip of coffee Helena threw off her blanket and rose to her feet.

  “Well, that’s enough hanging around, now. Let’s go, everybody.” She started folding her blanket neatly and packing away the utensils.

  “Why are you talking so loudly and what’s the rush?” Joan held her messy bed head and whispered as though she was suffering a hangover.

  “It’s a brand-new day so let’s drink up and we’ll head back as soon as you’re all done.”

  “Why?” Joan asked, sipping quickly.

  “What about breakfast?” Bernard moaned like a child.

  “We’ll have that when we get back.” Helena grabbed his mug from him, threw the remainder of the coffee over her shoulder and packed the mug in a bag. I had to look away out of fear of laughing.

  “What’s the rush?” Marcus asked. “Is everything OK?” He watched her intently, still unsure of my presence.

  “Everything’s fine, Marcus.” She placed a hand on his shoulder caringly. “Sandy just has some work to do.” She smiled at me.

  I did?

  “Oh, how lovely. Are you staging a play? It’s been such a long time since we’ve done a play,” Joan said excitedly.

  “I do hope you give us notice of the auditions well in advance because we’ll need time to prepare. It’s been awhile,” Bernard said worriedly.

  “Don’t worry,” Helena jumped in to say, “she will.”

  My mouth dropped open but Helena held a hand up to stop me from protesting.

  “Have you ever thought of doing a musical?” Derek asked, packing away his guitar. “There would be huge interest in taking part in a musical.”

  “That’s a very strong possibility.” Helena spoke as though dismissing a child.

  “Will there be group auditions?” Bernard asked, a little panicked.

  “No, no,” Helena said, smiling, and I finally knew what she was up to. “I think Sandy will want to spend a little time with everyone alone. Well”—she lifted Bernard’s blanket from off his shoulders and began folding it while he watched open-mouthed—“let’s get ourselves ready so we can show Sandy around. She’ll need to find a good venue for the show.”

  How quickly Bernard and Joan got ready.

  “By the way, I me
ant to ask you,” Helena whispered, “were you working when you arrived here?”

  “What do you mean exactly?”

  “Were you on a job or following the trail of somebody at the time you arrived here? It’s such an important question but I forgot to ask it.”

  “Yes and no,” I replied. “I was jogging by Shannon Estuary when I found myself here but my reason for being in Limerick was work-related. I had just taken on a new case five days beforehand.” I thought back to the phone call that I’d received from Jack Ruttle late one night.

  “The reason I ask is because I wonder what it was about that person out of all the missing people you’ve searched for, that brought you here. Had you a strong link to him?”

  I shook my head but knew I wasn’t quite telling the truth. The late-night phone calls with Jack Ruttle had been very different from all my other cases. They were phone calls I enjoyed receiving, he was someone I could talk with about other things besides business. The more I spoke to the likable Jack, the harder I worked trying to find his brother. There was only one other person in my life who could allow me to feel similarly.

  “What was the missing person’s name?”

  “Donal Ruttle,” I said, remembering the playful blue eyes from the photograph.

  Helena thought about it. “Well, we might as well start now. Anyone here know a Donal Ruttle?” She looked around.

  17

  Jack paced alongside the red Ford Fiesta, feeling a mixture of impatience, frustration, and anxiety. Occasionally he would stop, stare in the passenger window, and will the door to open so he could grab the file and hungrily scoff the information on the pages. Then he’d calm down and pace again. He looked around, not wanting to venture far from the car in case Sandy Shortt returned and drove off without him.

  He couldn’t believe Sandy was the woman from the petrol station. They had passed by each other as though they were strangers, but just as when he’d been speaking over the phone, he had felt something when he saw her, a bond that linked them. At the time he had thought it was because they were the only two in the place so early in the morning, but now he knew that connection was more. And now, here again, he had come across her in a hidden place. Something was drawing him to her. What he’d give to go back to that moment so he could talk to her about Donal. So she had come to Glin after all. He knew she wouldn’t have let him down, and she had driven through the night just as she’d promised. Finding her car in this desolate spot only raised more questions than he already had. If she was in Glin, where had she been on Sunday when they were due to meet?

  He looked at his watch. Three hours had passed since he’d come across the car and there was still no sign of her. A more important question reared its ugly head: Where was she now?

  He sat down on the dilapidated curb by the car and did what he had become accustomed to doing over the past year. He waited. And he wasn’t going to budge an inch until Sandy Shortt came back to her car.

  I followed the group through the trees, my heart beating so loudly I could barely hear Bernard, who was chatting to me constantly about his previous years’ acting experience. I nodded now and then when I felt his eyes on me. Disappointingly, there had been no reaction to Donal’s name when asked; just shrugged shoulders and mumbles of “I don’t know.” But a reaction had stirred within me as soon as Helena mentioned his name to the others because hearing it made it all become real to me. I would be seeing people I had been searching for for years.

  I felt as though all my life’s work led up to this moment. Nights of no sleep, distancing myself from possible friends and caring parents had left me living a solitary life I had been content with, but it was a life haunted by friendships and relationships with people I’d never met. I knew everything about them: their favorite colors, their best friends’ names, their favorite bands—and I felt that with every step I took I was closer to meeting my long-lost friends, my missing parents, uncles, aunts, and family. Recognizing these emotions alerted me to the island I had become. None of those missing people I thought of so fondly would even know me. When their eyes fell upon me they would see a stranger, yet my eyes would see anything but. Though we had never met, family photos of past Christmases, birthdays and weddings, first days of school, debutante balls were firmly imprinted in my memory. I had sat with crying parents and been shown photo album after photo album, yet I couldn’t remember a day when I had shared a couch with my own family and had done the same. The people I lived for didn’t even know of my existence and I hadn’t acknowledged that of the people who lived for me.

  I could see up ahead where the trees ended. The stillness of the woods was dissipating and instead there was lots of movement, noise, and color. So many people. I stopped walking with the group and shakily held out my hand to hold on to the trunk of a pine.

  “Sandy, are you OK?” Bernard asked, stopping beside me.

  The group stopped walking and turned to look at me. I couldn’t even smile. I couldn’t pretend everything was OK. The master of lying was caught in a web of lies I’d weaved myself. Helena pushed her way from the front of the group and rushed over to me.

  “Go ahead, all of you. We’ll meet you later on.” She dismissed them, and when they didn’t move: “Go on!” Slowly they turned round and reluctantly left the shade for the light.

  “Sandy.” Helena softly placed her hand on my shoulder. “You’re trembling.” She put her arm around my shoulders and held me to her. “It’s OK, you’ve nothing to fear here. It’s perfectly safe.”

  It wasn’t the safety of the place my body shook for. It was the fact that I had never felt as if I belonged anywhere. I had spent my life detaching myself from anyone who wanted to be close, dissociating myself from friends and lovers because they never answered my questions, nor tolerated or understood my searches. They made me feel like I was wrong and, without them knowing it, maybe even a little crazy, but I had a passion to just find. Finding this place was just one big answer to a life-long question that had caused me to sacrifice everything. I’d hurt so many people who loved me in order to help those whom I couldn’t see, and now as I was just about to see them I was afraid to let them in, too. I used to think that I was a saint, just like Jenny-May Butler on the nine-o’clock news; I thought I was Mother Teresa with a missing-persons file, making sacrifices to help others. In reality I’d sacrificed nothing. My behavior suited me and only me.

  The people in this place were the people I had clung to. When I grabbed my bag by the door of my family home in Leitrim it was for these people. When I ended relationships and turned down invitations to nights out it was for these people.

  But now that I’d found them, I had no idea what to do.

  18

  Helena and I stepped out of the darkness of the shaded woods and entered a world of color. I held my breath at the sight before me. It was as though grand red curtains had parted to welcome a production on such a scale I could barely focus on one thing for long enough. What welcomed my eyes was an entire bustling village of nations gathering. Some people were walking alone, others gathering in twos, threes, groups, and in crowds. Sights of traditional costumes, sounds of combined languages, scents of cuisines from all over the world. It was rich and alive, bursting at the seams with color and sound as though we’d followed the path of a pulse to reach the heart of the woods. And there it pumped, people flowing here, there, and everywhere.

  Sophisticated wooden buildings lined the street with doors and windows decorated with ornate carvings. Each building was constructed from a different timber, the varying shades and grains camouflaging the village so that it and the woods were combined and almost one. Solar panels lined the roofs, and the hundreds of roofs extending into the distance. All around were wind turbines, up to one hundred feet tall, with blades going around and around in the blue skies, their dark shadows circling on rooftops and roadways. The village was nestled among the trees, among mountains, among wind machines. Before me, hundreds of people, dressed in traditional
costumes from all eras, lived in a lost place that looked real and smelled real and, when I held out my hand and felt the fabric of someone rush by, felt real. I fought with myself to believe it.

  It was a scene I was familiar yet unfamiliar with all at the same time because everything I could see was composed of recognizable elements from home, but used in such very different ways. We hadn’t stepped backward or forward, we had entered a whole new time. A great big melting pot of nations, cultures, design, and sound mixed to create a new world. Children played; market stalls decorated the road and customers swarmed around them. So much color, so many new sounds, unlike any country I’d been in. A sign beside us said HERE.

  Helena linked my arm, a gesture I would normally have shrugged off had I not physically needed her to prop me up. I was stunned. I was Ali Baba who’d stumbled across the cave of treasures, Galileo after his discoveries through the telescope. More important, I was a ten-year-old girl who had found all her socks.

  “Every day is market day,” Helena explained softly. “Some people like to trade whatever bits they’ve found for things of value. Sometimes they’re of no value at all but it’s become a bit of a sport now. Money is worthless here; all we need is found readily on the streets. There is, however, a requirement to help the village. Our occupations are more in the nature of community service rather than for self-gain—age, health, and other personal reasons permitting.”

  I looked around in awe. Helena continued talking softly in my ear, holding my arm as my body shook.

  “The turbines are something you will see throughout the land. We have many wind plants, most of them among the mountain gaps that produce wind funnelling. One wind machine can produce enough electricity for up to four hundred homes a year, and the solar panels on the buildings also help generate energy.”

  I listened to her but barely heard a word. My ears were tuned in to the conversations around me, to the sounds of the monstrous wind-turbine blades breaking through the air. My nose was adjusting to the crisp freshness that seemed to fill my lungs with cool air in one small breath. My attention turned to the market stall closest to us.