Another Place

by Matthew Crow

  He unfurled his long legs and allowed his feet to dip into the water of the rock pool that was forming with the ebb of the tide.

  ‘I’m so much more than that,’ he said dryly. ‘Aren’t you the girl with the loudmouth friend and the attitude?’

  ‘That’s just about the size of it,’ I said, sitting down next to him and removing my shoes, rolling the cuffs of my jeans before dipping my feet in the water next to his. ‘I’m Claudette,’ I said, and anticipated the inevitable tension that followed.

  ‘Oh,’ Jacob said in a tone of voice I was fast getting used to. It lay somewhere between realisation, pity and primal fear. ‘So you’re the…’ he said and then stopped himself, the way a good liberal always should. Because there is no way to end sentences that start like that and get away with it entirely scot-free.

  ‘Yep. That’s the one,’ I said, stretching my legs further into the water, letting it swallow me inch by inch by inch until I was on the edge of the rock, my hands digging into rough stone to keep myself from slipping under. ‘Just to be clear I’m the crazy one, not the one that’s missing.’

  ‘I gathered that,’ he said, wiping his mouth with his hand and trying not to blush. There was a moment’s pause before he looked pained and sheepish and muttered, ‘Sorry.’

  I smiled and shrugged.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘How are you… feeling?’

  ‘What does it matter?’ I said.

  ‘I’m just trying to say the right thing,’ he said half apologetically and half defensively.

  ‘Smart-ass is my default setting, I’m afraid,’ I said, and smiled. ‘I guess it’s hard to explain. I feel like I have to describe myself to everybody that knows me at the moment. Everyone I’ve ever met… All I mean is that you don’t know me, or you didn’t before. Can’t I just be however you find me, in this moment? However I am to you now? This is me. Lets take it from here.’

  ‘I like that. You sound like an inspirational meme. The type of thing people write over a picture of Marilyn Monroe whether she said it or not.’

  I laughed and leant back so that I was resting on my elbows, staring straight ahead. The rocks beneath us were invisible. Beyond my body was the grey infinity of the ocean.

  ‘You’re funny. Ish.’

  ‘Thanks. Ish,’ Jacob said, leaning backwards and mimicking my pose.

  ‘Where are you from anyway?’

  ‘Everywhere,’ he said. ‘… Nowhere.’

  ‘That’s deep.’

  He twisted his face as the rough rocks scraped at his back and sat up again.

  ‘My dad was in the army. We moved around a lot. Every year, just about. I never stayed in one place long enough to be from anywhere, really. I was always the new kid. Just about on the verge of inventing myself when we’d be dragged to another base and I’d have to start again.’

  ‘I hear that,’ I said, sitting back up.

  He told me about how he travelled from place to place, never staying anywhere for longer than a month.

  ‘The next stop just always seems so exciting. I’m always convinced the next one will be the place for me,’ he said.

  He showed me his arms. Each tattoo had been drawn in a different city, and each meant something different to him. From his wrist to his elbow he traced a map of the world and the parts he’d managed to see before taking flight once more.

  ‘What if you never find what you’re looking for?’ I said. ‘What if you pass over the place that’s meant for you because you were too eager to leave or too impatient to give it a proper chance?’

  He shrugged. ‘Then I’ll die trying,’ he said. ‘With a ton of interesting memories.’

  ‘How come you ended up here?’ I asked as a seal’s head pierced the water in the distance before disappearing beneath. ‘It’s not a natural progression from Thailand.’

  ‘Ran out of money. My aunty and uncle own the café, said they’d give me twenty quid a day and let me sleep in the stock room if I helped out with the summer rush.’

  ‘How long are you here for?’ I asked.

  ‘As long as it takes.’

  ‘Where will you go next?’

  ‘Wherever I can,’ he said.

  ‘You talk like a seventies rock star,’ I said as a breeze blew a shiver across my spine.

  ‘Poetic and insightful?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘Stoned and pretentious,’ I corrected him.

  Jacob thought for a moment and then shrugged.

  ‘When you’re right you’re right,’ he said.

  We sat in silence for a stretch of time that felt longer than it was. Jacob shifted on his seat and looked in his bag for something that wasn’t there. I dragged my legs out of the water and let the sun dry the saltwater in tiny crystals between the folds of fabric.

  ‘What happened, really?’ he asked. ‘You know what it’s like around here. People talk. A story gets to your ear so stretched out you can’t even recognise its origin. Was it as bad as people said?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It didn’t feel like I was there at the time. Not totally. Not the me I recognise.’

  ‘Like a blackout?’

  ‘Sort of, but brighter – like, fiercer? It was like someone opened the cages at the zoo. Suddenly this wildness that had been more or less contained got out. But I don’t mean to make it sound glamorous and exotic. It wasn’t. It was boring and frightening and it hurt. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Was it that bad?’ he asked and I nodded.

  ‘Then after the light comes the dark. The part before, the wildness, that bit’s different. In that moment, you’ve stumbled upon the meaning of life and you’re invincible. When the depression hits – that’s the hardest bit.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ he said.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Of course. Everyone gets depressed from time to time,’ he said and I shook my head.

  ‘Yeah, but I am. It is. Like pigment or faith or hair colour or something. It really is always there.’

  ‘You live in a place most people just visit,’ he offered.

  ‘That was cheesy as hell,’ I said. ‘But pretty much on the money.’

  We walked back up towards the promenade together as Jacob buttoned his white shirt in preparation for his evening shift at the café.

  ‘It was nice meeting the girl behind the legend,’ he said as we reached the point at which we would have to part ways.

  ‘You too,’ I said. ‘And believe me, I don’t say that often. We could hang out again if you like. I could do with as many friends as I can get at the moment. Besides, you could use a girl like me. I know these streets. Know where it is and isn’t safe to do yoga. I could be your bodyguard.’

  ‘And I can be your long lost pal?’ he said and I smiled.

  ‘Sure thing, Betty,’ I said as I made my way from him.

  ‘Stay safe, Al,’ he yelled back after me.

  8

  Blessed

  They say it’s a shame that you never get to enjoy your own funeral, and I couldn’t help but feel it was the same with Sarah and her absence. The longer she was gone the more she got what she had always needed when she was here – to be acknowledged, to be missed, to be thought of as more than just a problem to be dealt with.

  She was like a child’s toy, unwanted until somebody else had her.

  I was in my room, watching the local news. All these weeks on and Sarah was still the main story, but I’d noticed the narrative around her change in the days and weeks after she went missing. She’d gone from being the Big Bad Wolf to being Little Red Riding Hood. Sarah Banks; the fairy tale with a twist. And now we were left to consider in her absence what no one had taken the time to consider while she was still here: that maybe she didn’t choose to veer off the beaten track. Maybe she was led. And maybe the reason she’d never found her way home was that, for her, there never had been a home to go back to.

  Dad knocked on my door as I was switching from the news report to
a lifestyle make-over show where they were discussing the merits of a pastel capsule collection.

  ‘Planning a change of look?’ he asked. ‘What are you up to on the laptop?’ I made a concentrated effort not to roll my eyes at him. Dad was of the belief that the internet was essentially a holding pen for thieves and sex pests all waiting to take what they could. When I’d informed him that I was just as likely to be raped and murdered by a stranger I met on the street as in a chat room he hadn’t been as placated as I’d assumed he would be. I got away with the laptop on the grounds of schoolwork, but I could tell he still wasn’t happy about it.

  ‘Revision,’ I said, as he bent down and kissed my head, lingering to catch sight of my screen.

  ‘I’m off to work, then. It’s just a few hours overtime,’ he said unsurely. ‘And if you need me…’

  ‘The number’s on the fridge,’ I said. ‘Got it. Go.’

  As soon as he was out of the door, I reopened the Facebook page. It was time for my weekly spruce-up.

  In Hollywood all the famous actors have body doubles. They literally pay another person to act out their most intimate and epic scenes. The scenes we remember them for are often the very scenes in which they didn’t ever appear.

  Most of us can’t afford shit like this. We just have the internet, where we pick and preen at our replicants.

  Spellcheck.

  Edit.

  Filter.

  Photoshop.

  Then, once we’re happy with the electronic footprint that everybody else can see, we sit back and feel lousy about how our real lives are never as fun and exciting than the artisanal ones we share online.

  I logged on and scrolled down the page to glean the most pertinent pieces of news and information from my friends and classmates.

  That week, unsurprisingly, every second post was a link to a news report about Sarah or a clip of the town on YouTube.

  A girl in the year below me had uploaded a photograph taken from above; her face was in a pout and two-thirds out of shot, but her tits were enormous and perfectly central. 62 Likes.

  ‘Six years today Granddad, Never Forget X x x x x x x’ posted a girl I had met at an underage disco. Her sadness and bravery garnered 21 Likes, a ‘U OK HUN?’ and a heart made out of a pointy bracket and the number 3.

  Donna had papped her brother visiting a porn site and tagged her mum, aunty, uncle and every one of her cousins in the photograph. 42 Likes, three LOLs, an expletive from her brother and a ‘Take this down and call me now’ from her mum.

  Charlotte had added a ‘Which Biscuit Are You?’ quiz (she was an iced gem). Dylan Tovey’s new football boots rendered him #blessed, and Stacey Brisket wondered ‘Why Is It Always Me?’ (12 Likes, one ‘Inbox Me, bbz.’)

  Along the right-hand side of the page were various adverts. One for a local psychotherapy centre, from the time I had searched the words ‘suicide methods’; another for an S&M singles dating site, presumably from one of the evenings when my pornography consumption ran to the exotic; and an Amazon link for a book I once tried to Google a cheat-essay on for school, when I was too depressed to write it myself. I hovered momentarily over the dating site before ignoring all three potential futures – health, love and knowledge.

  I clicked through to my profile page. I was in dire need of a makeover.

  First, I changed my photo to a shot of me and some ‘friends’ (social butterfly). In the picture I look like I’ve been caught beautifully off-guard when in fact I had been painfully aware my photo was being taken at the time.

  Next, I crafted my status update: a link to a semi-obscure song that everybody knows (accessible) featuring at least one line that alludes to homecoming (enigmatic) by an old band (cultured) but in a rare live recording on YouTube (edgy). I added a veiled reference to my triumphant return from the crazy house (informative) and hit ‘Post’.

  I wrote a comment on Donna’s wall (sociable) making sure to include an in joke (beguiling).

  I Liked three posts by almost-strangers (generous).

  Then I shared a page that had been set up to try and raise awareness of Sarah’s last sightings and appearance (selfless and caring).

  Finally, I topped it all off by following an art gallery in town that I will never visit (wanker) and gifting three stars to a book that I would never finish (learned yet discerning).

  At last I allowed myself to admire my handiwork, my own virtual body double. At least there’s one dimension where I’m complete and whole and functioning. For another week anyway.

  Later that day I knocked gently on Mr Fitzpatrick’s front door. He lived in a downstairs flat, like us, but his curtains were almost always closed. Somehow it made even his front yard look gloomy and overcast.

  I knocked once more, and was about to turn and leave when the door opened slowly and the old man’s pale face peered at me from the dingy hallway.

  ‘I brought you some cake,’ I said, presenting him with a napkin that was beginning to soak through with sugars from a home-made cream sponge. ‘Dad made it. He’s pretty good. It was my birthday yesterday, we had plenty left over so it’s not like we’re going without or anything.’

  Mr Fitzpatrick looked at me uncertainly, and then glanced towards the end of the street.

  ‘What’s this in aid of?’ he asked suspiciously, opening the door another inch.

  I shrugged and handed the gift towards him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I suppose you were nice to me the first day I got out of hospital, when nobody else was.’

  ‘Manners should be expected, not rewarded,’ he said.

  ‘Look. Do you want the cake or not?’

  ‘Are you alone?’ he asked.

  I nodded yes and the door opened another inch or so as he stepped to one side.

  ‘You’d better come in then I suppose.’

  His house was warm and damp, with a sharp, ripe smell, like a fruit basket left out in the sun.

  His living room was cluttered, but with an odd sense of order about the place. Scrapbooks and photo albums on every shelf and surface – stacked high on top of his boxy old television set, lined up along the length of the upright piano, left higgledy-piggledy along the mantelpiece. On the low, wooden coffee table one album was open at the picture of a boy – around my age, maybe older – and a newspaper cutting that had been glued to the page and folded back on itself, so that only the bottom half of a toothpaste advert was showing.

  ‘You can sit down if you must,’ he said, indicating to one of two single armchairs in the front room.

  ‘No thank you,’ I said. ‘I’m not staying. I just thought I’d say hello.’

  I placed the cake down on the coffee table and tried to get a better look at the open album.

  ‘It’s kind of you, to have brought the cake,’ the old man said, clearing his throat as if he was trying to interrupt my train of thought, or intercept whatever question I was about to ask. ‘Unnecessary, but kind. I shall enjoy it with a cup of tea later on when I listen to the evening news.’

  ‘Are these all albums you’ve made?’ I asked. ‘Or are some of them ones you’ve been given by family and stuff?’

  Some of the albums were dated; others even had titles.

  ‘Torquay, 1962’ one said in swirling, old-fashioned handwriting. The type nobody bothers with any more.

  ‘Graduation’ said another.

  ‘They’re all mine. Just a little hobby,’ he said, sitting down heavily in his chair. ‘My way of remembering the good bits.’

  I perched on the arm of the chair opposite his.

  ‘Of your family?’ I asked and he nodded. ‘Is that your son?’

  ‘At my age memories are all you’ve got,’ he said, reaching forward and closing the open album.

  ‘I doubt my dad could fill an entire album with my good memories the way I’m going. Let alone a whole room of them.’

  ‘Well, he can always devote a page to the time you delivered cake,’ Mr Fitzpatrick said, and I smiled at
what may well have been his first ever attempt at a joke.

  ‘Baby steps I suppose. Anyway memories don’t have to be all you’ve got. My grandma didn’t have any friends after Granddad died. Then Dad got her a computer and signed her up to Silver Surfer classes at the library. Now she lives in Tenerife with her new husband and works two days a week in a shop that sells magnets.’

  Mr Fitzpatrick smiled and shook his head. ‘So there’s hope for us all.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Grandma was a real catch. But there’s no harm in trying. Anyway, why do you never talk to anybody?’ I asked, pacing over to the piano and playing one of the two chords that I knew.

  ‘I talked to you,’ he said, standing too, and placing his fingers next to mine, playing a mirroring chord that hung heavy in the room like smoke.

  ‘It took you sixteen years to say anything even remotely nice.’

  ‘You’d never given me reason to be nice. Besides, people don’t talk to me.’

  ‘You scare them,’ I said.

  ‘They scare themselves,’ he corrected me. ‘People have an idea. An impression. Of who you are. What you are. It can be very hard to change that, even if you are inclined to try. Which I am not. You of all people should know that.’

  ‘Preach,’ I said, thinking of Jacob.

  ‘You’re religious?’ Mr Fitzpatrick asked, clearly surprised.

  ‘God no,’ I said. ‘It’s just something people say, you know, when you agree with something. Preach. It’s supposed to be funny. But now that I’m explaining it I’m not entirely sure why.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘As pleasant as this has been, what exactly are you here for?’ he asked, sitting back down in his chair.

  I sat too, and dug my elbows into my knees.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I honestly don’t. I got out of hospital less than a week ago and it’s like I’m spending my entire time trying to find the person I’m supposed to be now, this fixed, functioning, whole person.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘My friends are treating me like I’m some volatile stranger and my dad’s acting like nothing happened and everything’s fine, and meanwhile everybody’s looking for Sarah Banks and everything’s the same but different and…’ I stopped to catch my breath.