There's No Place Like Here (10 page)

How quickly Bernard and Joan got ready.

“By the way, I meant 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

J
ack 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

H
elena 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.

“It’s a mobile phone,” a British gentleman explained to an elderly stall owner.

“What use have I for a mobile phone?” The Caribbean stall owner dismissed him, laughing. “I’ve heard those things don’t even work here.”

“They don’t, but—”

“But nothing. I have been here forty-five years, three months, and ten days.” He held his head high. “And I don’t see how this music box is a fair trade for a phone that doesn’t work.”

The customer stopped fuming and appeared to view him with more respect. “Well, I’ve been here only four years,” he explained politely, “so let me show you what phones can do now.” He held the phone up in the air, pointed it at the stall owner and it made a clicking sound. He showed the screen to the salesman.

“Ah!” He started laughing. “It’s a camera! Why didn’t you say?”

“Well, it’s a camera
phone
but, even better, look at this. The person who owned it took a whole pile of photos of themselves and whatever country they live in.” He scrolled down the phone.

The stall owner handled it gently.

“Somebody here might know these people,” the customer said softly.

“Ah, yes, mon,” the salesman replied gently, nodding. “This is very precious indeed.”

“Come on, let’s go,” Helena whispered, leading me by the arm.

I began to move as though on autopilot, looking around open-mouthed at all the people. We passed the customer and stall owner; they both nodded and smiled. “Welcome.”

I just stared back.

Two children playing hopscotch stopped their game on hearing the men’s salutation. “Welcome.” They both gave me toothless grins.

Helena led me through the crowd, through the choruses of welcomes, the nods and smiles of well-wishers. Helena acknowledged them all politely for me. We walked across the street toward the large wooden two-story building with a decked porch across the front. An intricate carving of a scroll and theatrical feathered pen decorated the door. Helena pushed the door open and the scroll and feather halved as though bowing and holding out their arms to make way for us.

“This is the registry. Everyone comes here when they first arrive,” Helena explained patiently. “Everybody’s name and details are logged in these books so that we can keep track of who is who and how many people are here.”

“In case anybody goes missing,” I said smartly.

“I think you’ll find that nothing goes missing here, Sandy.” Helena was serious. “Things have no place else to go and so they stay here.”

I ignored the chill of her implication and instead tried unsuccessfully to inject humor into the situation. “What will I do with myself if I’ve nothing to look for?”

“You’ll do what you’ve always wanted; you’ll seek out those you searched for. Finish the job you started.”

“Then what?”

She was silent.

“Then you’ll help me get home, right?” I asked rather forcefully.

She didn’t respond.

“Helena,” a cheery fellow called out from where he was sitting behind a desk. On the desk a series of numbers was displayed. Beside the main door there was a board with all the countries of the world, their associated languages, some of which I’d never even heard of, and their corresponding numbers. I matched one of the numbers on his desk to a familiar one on the board. COUNTRY: IRELAND. LANGUAGES: GAELIC, ENGLISH.

“Hello, Terence.” Helen seemed glad of the interruption to our conversation.

It was then that I looked around the room for the first time. There were dozens of desks in the large room. Each desk had a series of numbers and behind each desk sat a person of a different nationality. Lines had formed before the tables. The room was quiet and filled with the tension of hundreds of people who had just arrived, who couldn’t yet comprehend their situation. They each looked around the room nervously with wide, terrified eyes as they hugged their own bodies for comfort.