There's No Place Like Here (29 page)

“Sandy!” Bobby exclaimed.

I shushed him. Wanda mulled it over. Slowly but surely her face began to crumple. Bobby kicked me in the leg and I leaned forward. “Wanda, don’t worry about it.” I tried to soften my voice as much as I could. “It’s not your fault that I don’t like you.” In the background Bobby tutted and sighed. “If you were ten years older, it’s very possible that I could like you.”

Her eyes lit up. Bobby shook his head at me. “What age will I be then?” she asked, kneeling excitedly on her chair and leaning forward on her elbows on the table to get closer to me.

“You’ll be fifteen.”

“Nearly the same age as Bobby?” She was hopeful.

“Bobby is nineteen.”

“Which is four years older than fifteen,” Bobby explained politely.

Wanda seemed delighted by this and gave him another shy gummy smile.

“But I’ll be twenty-nine when you’re fifteen,” Bobby explained, and I saw her face fall. “Every time you get older, I get older.” He laughed. He was confusing her fallen face with a lack of understanding and he continued. “I’ll always be fourteen years older than you, you see.” As I watched her face falling along with the penny in her mind, I signaled for him to stop.

“Oh,” she whispered.

Your heart can break at any age. I think that’s when I started liking Wanda.

I hated going to sleep in the place they called Here. I hated the sounds at night that drifted into the atmosphere from home. I hated to hear the laughter, I wanted to block my nose to the smells, close my eyes to the people wandering in from the woods for the first time. I was afraid each noise would be me, I was afraid each sound would be a part of me forgotten. Bobby and I shared that fear. We stayed up late into the night talking about the world he had left behind: music, sport, politics, and everything in between, but mostly we spoke about his mother.

Jack returned to Mary Stanley’s house after leaving Dr. Burton at the OCA meeting. Once again angry words had been shared between them, the doctor firing threats of stalking charges and everything he could think of to make Jack back off from his search. After wandering around Dublin city for the afternoon, he had left a voice-mail on Gloria’s phone telling her he wouldn’t be home for another few days; that it was complicated but that it was important. He knew she would understand. He had postponed his trip to Leitrim to visit Sandy’s parents after being warned off by Dr. Burton. Instead, he hoped to share his thoughts and concerns with Mary before he moved on with his search. He needed to know whether to continue or not. He needed to know if he was chasing his own shadow, whether there was any purpose to him searching for Sandy if those who knew her well weren’t concerned.

Mary had welcomed Jack to stay with her for another night and they sat in her living room once again watching a video of Bobby performing in his sixth class school play,
Oliver
. He noticed Bobby had an unusual laugh, a loud chuckle that came from deep inside him, causing everyone around him, including the audience, to smile. Jack found himself with a grin on his face as Mary turned off the tape.

“He seemed like a happy lad,” Jack commented.

“Oh, yes.” She nodded enthusiastically, sipping on her coffee. “He was that, indeed. He was always cracking jokes, always acting the class clown and letting his words get him into trouble and his laugh get him out of it. People loved him.” She smiled. “That laugh of his…” She looked at a photograph on the mantelpiece, Bobby’s face a picture of delight, his mouth wide open mid-laughter. “It was infectious, just like his grandfather’s.”

Jack smiled and they studied the photo.

Mary’s smile faded. “I have a confession to make, though.”

Jack was silent, not sure he wanted to hear it.

“I don’t hear that laugh anymore.” Her voice was almost a whisper, as though if she said it any louder it would make it true. “It used to fill the house, it used to fill my heart, my head, all day, every day. How can I not hear it anymore?”

From the faraway look in her eyes Jack could tell she wasn’t asking him for a reply. Then she shook her head as if failing to hear it again.

“I remember how it used to make me
feel
. I remember the atmosphere just one simple giggle would evoke in a room. I remember people’s reactions. I can see their faces and the impact the sound made on them. I can hear it on the videos when I play it back, I can see it on his face in photographs, I hear versions of it, I suppose, echoes of it in other people’s laughter. But without all those things, without the photographs, videos, and echoes, when I’m lying in bed at night, I can’t remember it. I don’t hear it, and I try to, but my head becomes a jumble of the sounds I’ve made up and the sounds I’ve recalled from memory. But as much as I search and search, my memory of it is missing…” She looked over at the photo on the mantel again, cocked her ear as though listening for the sound. Then her body seemed to collapse into itself as she gave up.

Bobby and I were both tucked up on the couch in Helena’s home. Everybody had gone to bed, apart from Wanda, who had sneaked back in and was hiding behind the couch, overexcited by the fact that her dear Bobby was staying the night in her house. We knew she was there but ignored her, hoping she would get bored and go to sleep.

“Are you worried about the meeting tomorrow night?” he asked.

“No, I don’t even know what reason I have to be worried. I don’t see what I’ve done wrong.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong but you know things, you know too much about people’s families for everybody’s comfort. They will want to learn how and why.”

“And I’ll tell them I’m a hugely sociable person. I move around the Irish social scene talking to friends and family of missing people,” I said drily. “Come on, what are they going to do to me? Accuse me of being a witch and burn me at the stake?”

Bobby smiled lightly. “No, but you don’t want your life being made difficult.”

“They couldn’t possibly make it any more difficult. I’m living in a place where lost things go. How bizarre is that?” I rubbed my face wearily and muttered, “I’m definitely going to need some serious counseling when I get back.”

Bobby cleared his throat. “You’re not going back. You need to get that out of your head for a start. If you say that at the meeting you’ll definitely be asking for trouble.”

I waved him off, not interested in hearing that again.

“Maybe you could start writing your diaries again. It looked like you enjoyed doing that.”

“How do you know I wrote diaries?”

“Well, because of the diary in one of your boxes back at the shop. I found it down by the river just at the back of the shop. It was dirty and damp but when I saw your name written on it I brought it back to the shop and spent a lot of time restoring it,” he said proudly. On my lack of reaction he quickly added, “I promise I didn’t read it,” he lied.

“You must be thinking of somebody else.” I forced a yawn. “There wasn’t a diary there.”

“There was.” He sat up. “It was purple and…” He trailed off trying to remember it.

I began to pull on a thread on the hem of my trousers.

He snapped his fingers and I jumped in fright, feeling Wanda behind the couch jumping, too. “That’s it! It was purple, kind of a suede material that was ruined because of the damp but I cleaned it up as much as I could. Like I said, I didn’t read it but I did open up the first few pages and there were doodles of love hearts all over it.” He thought again. “Sandy loves…”

I pulled on the thread more.

“Graham,” he continued. “No, it wasn’t Graham.”

I tightly wrapped the fine filament around my baby finger watching my skin squeezing through, watching the blood being caught.

“Gavin or Gareth…Come on, Sandy, you must remember. It was written so many times I don’t know how you could forget the guy.” He kept on thinking aloud while I kept on pulling the thread, wrapping it tighter and tighter.

He snapped his fingers again and said, “Gregory! That’s it! Sandy loves Gregory. It was written all over the inside of the book. You must remember it now.”

I spoke quietly. “It wasn’t in the boxes, Bobby.”

“It was.”

I shook my head. “I spent hours going through everything. It’s definitely not there. I would have remembered it.”

Bobby looked confused and irritated. “It was bloody well there.”

With that, Wanda gasped from behind the couch and jumped up.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, seeing her head popping up between mine and Bobby’s.

“You’ve lost something else?” she whispered.

“No, I haven’t.” I contradicted her but felt a chill again.

“I won’t tell anyone,” she whispered, her eyes wide. “I promise.”

There was a silence. I fixed my eyes on the black thread that kept on coming. Suddenly and completely inappropriately, I heard Bobby laugh loudly, one of his finest, loudest laughs I had heard from him yet.

“The situation is hardly very funny, thanks, Bobby.”

Bobby didn’t reply.

“Bobby,” said Wanda in a childish whisper that ran down my back.

I looked up at Bobby, noticed the deathly pale of his face, his mouth hung open as though the words that had run from his vocal cords had chickened out last minute, refused to jump, and instead stood on his lips in fear. Tears formed in his eyes and his bottom lip trembled and I realized the laughter hadn’t come from his mouth at all. It had floated from there to Here, carried on the wind, over the treetops and into this place, landing somewhere among us. While I attempted to process all this, the door to the living room was pushed open and Helena appeared sleepy-eyed in her robe, her hair tousled and her face a picture of worry. She froze at the door while she studied Bobby, making sure she had heard correctly. His look said it all, and she charged at him, holding her arms out. Plonking herself on the couch, she held his head to her chest and rocked him as though he were a baby while he cried and mumbled through his tears how he’d been forgotten.

I sat on the other end of the couch and kept on pulling the thread. It kept on coming, unraveling more and more with every minute spent in this place, unable to stop this fine thread from detaching itself from the seams.

40

I
have found that the many imbalances within our individual lives result in an overall more worldly balance. What I mean is that no matter how unfair I think something is, I need only look at the bigger picture to see how, in a way, it fits. My dad was right when he said that there was no such thing as a free meal:
Everything
comes at a cost to others, most of the time at a cost to ourselves. Whenever something is gained, it has been taken from another place. When something is lost, it arrives elsewhere. There are the usual philosophical questions: Why do bad things happen to good people? Within every bad thing I see good, and, likewise, within every good thing I see bad, however impossible it is to understand it or see it at the time. As humans we are the epitome of life; in life there is always balance. Life and death, male and female, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, win and lose, love and hate. Lost and found.

Apart from the Christmas turkey my dad won in the Leitrim Arms pub quiz when I was five years old, my dad had never won anything in his life. The day Jenny-May Butler went missing was the day that my dad won £500 on the lotto scratch cards. Maybe he had a good thing owed to him.

It was a summer day. There was only one week left before we were to go back to school and I was dreading even the thought of it, but apart from the anxiety for the week ahead, without having to get up every morning for school over the past few months I had lost all sense of time. Weekdays were the same as weekends. For a few months a year, the dreaded Sunday nights were the same as Friday and Saturday nights. This night was a Sunday night but, unusually for this time of year, it was a dreaded one. It was six forty P.M., still bright, the cul-de-sac was busy with kids playing, just like me, forgetting what day it was but knowing that whatever day it was, it sure was a great one because tomorrow would be exactly the same. My mother was in the front garden with my grandma and granddad getting the last few warm evening sunrays. I was sitting at the kitchen table anxiously waiting for the doorbell to ring. I was drinking a glass of milk and watching the clothes in the washing machine go around and around, trying to identify each garment that flashed by, just to occupy my mind.

My dad had eyed me warily as he came back and forth from the TV room to the kitchen, grabbing food he wasn’t supposed to be eating while on his new diet. I didn’t know whether he was trying to scope me out or whether he was eyeing me to see if I had noticed him stealing food. Either way he’d asked me three times already what was wrong, and I’d just shrugged and told him nothing. It was one of those occasions when telling someone wouldn’t make it any better. He checked on me from time to time, noticing how I’d jumped when the doorbell rang (only my mum, who had forgotten to put the door on the latch). He made a few faces at me to try to make me laugh, cramming a few biscuits into his mouth all at once to pretend he was entertaining me and not his stomach. I smiled for his sake; he seemed happy enough with that and then moved into the TV room again, this time with a lemon square up his sleeve.

You see, I was waiting for Jenny-May to call around.

She had challenged me to a game of King/Queen. It was a game we used to play on the road with a tennis ball. Each person stood in the boxes that were drawn on the road with chalk and then the idea was to bounce the ball first in your own box before passing it into someone else’s. They had to do the same and if they missed it, if they failed to bounce it in their own box first or if the ball went outside the lines, they were out. The idea was to try to make it to the box at the top, which was the King’s box, which was where Jenny-May was for the duration of the game. Everybody used to always say how wonderful she was at playing the game, how amazing and brilliant and talented and fast and precise and how gag, gag, make me puke, she was. My friend Emer and I used to watch the games from our wall. We were never allowed to play because Jenny-May wouldn’t let us. I merely commented to Emer one day that one of the reasons Jenny-May always won was because she always
started
in the top box. This meant that she didn’t have to work her way up like everybody else did.