This Must Be the Place (10 page)

It seems as if the side of my head is missing. I can feel air whistling through my skull, like a draught. I have to put up my hand to check it’s still there. It is. I touch my cheekbone, my hair, the shell-whorl of my ear. It’s the strangest feeling. I tip my head one way, then the other, then stop because I’m worried my brain might roll out and fall on the ground with a splat.

I pass a boy I vaguely recognise and he is standing outside the gym door, spinning a basketball on one skinny brown finger. He’s just there, in a slant of sun, a ball poised and balanced in motion. He’s doing it for no reason other than that he wants to and he’s good at it. I stop and watch the ball rotate and it doesn’t appear to be connected to his hand and it seems like the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen so I laugh and give him a clap. He turns and looks at me, surprised, and I know it’s because I’m judged to be one of the popular girls now, one of the untouchables, and I shouldn’t really be acknowledging him. By rights, I should just walk by him as if he isn’t there. Hey, Phoebe Sullivan, he says, and raises his hand and lowers it, showing off now, but he doesn’t drop the ball. I want to say, how do you know my name, but I smile at him and walk on.

In the parking lot, I see someone who looks like Stella. She’s wearing one of the overall things that she and I always used to buy if we found them in vintage stores and I’d forgotten the thrill of seeing one on the rails. Some of them have a name badge on the lapel and it seemed like the funniest thing to us to wear overalls with a name that wasn’t ours. I remember finding one that said ‘Randy’ and we nearly got thrown out of the changing rooms because we were laughing so hard.

It is Stella, without a doubt. She has the overall arms tied around her waist, a red blouse on the top, the way I used to wear them. She’s dyed the tips of her hair a bright, jumping blue and I can see it from a long way off. She’s standing at the bottom of the school steps, talking to some boy, and this seems like the best coincidence ever. I set my course towards her. I’m going to say, Stel, where have you been, how could I lose you, let’s walk together, do you want to come back to mine?

Then I realise it’s my brother she’s talking to. Niall is standing in the parking lot, arms crossed in front of him, car keys hooked on a finger. His hair stands up from his head, just like it always does, as if he’s recently been electrocuted. I want to spread my arms wide and run towards them. My two most favourite people in the world, ever, here, in front of me.

As I approach, I see Stella turn her head and clock my presence. She turns back to Niall and I know what she’s saying: Gotta go.

It’s what she says at the end of every phone call, every day, every conversation, every lesson. Gotta go. You can spend the whole day with Stella, wound up in a long, meandering chat and then, with two short words, it’s over and she’s gone. I used to tease her about it. You’re about to say ‘Gotta go’, aren’t you? I’d go to her. Yep, she’d say, gotta go. And then she’d be gone. Over and out.

So Stella looks up at my brother – she’s still only five foot two, even in her thick-soled boots, my Eastern European
babushka
genes, she used to say – says it, gotta go, and she wheels away, without another glance in my direction.

Niall pushes his glasses up on his nose and pats the skin of his inner arm, which is what he does when he gets the urge to scratch.

‘What are you doing here?’ I call out to him.

‘Came to find you,’ he says.

My brother talks like this, missing out words that other people would consider mandatory. I asked him once why he didn’t like prepositions and he frowned and told me I actually meant
personal pronouns
. That was the name for little words like I, you, we, et cetera. And I’ve never forgotten it: personal pronouns.

When I get to him, I throw my arms around him, which he doesn’t normally like but it’s OK when I do it. Here is what my brother smells of: paper, computers, cotton, emollient, toast, soap substitute, herbal tea, windowless rooms. My brother smells of hard work. My brother smells of intelligence, of all-nighters, of education, of dedication and sometimes, I think, loneliness. He wouldn’t agree with that, though. My brother graduated from high school a year early with the highest grades ever in the history of high grades. He is legendary among the staff of this school. There are teachers here who still haven’t gotten over him leaving.

Niall pushes my hair out of his face. When we were little, we had exactly the same hair, coppery-red and curly, the hair of our ancestors from Kerry, but his has darkened to a near-brown and I have blond highlights, these days.

He pulls away and looks at me, hard, hands around my arms. Can he smell the dope or whatever it was? Would Niall know what drugs smell like?

‘A drive?’ he says.

As the car speeds away down Mission Boulevard, I crack the window, push the back of my head into the seat, let the breeze do whatever it wants with my hair. Which turns out to be:

– tugging the side of it out the window

– tossing the top part up and over my head

– making single strands lash into my face and stick to my lip gloss

– pushing the right side in a circular motion, round and round, as if an invisible person between me and Niall is twirling it around their finger.

I reach out and push the CD into its slot. Yes, my brother is the only person I know under the age of thirty who still uses CDs. You are guaranteed, in Niall’s car, to hear music you’ve never come across in your life.

Sure enough, the car is filled with a loud, strange sound that is halfway between yelping and singing. Hundreds of women, somewhere far away, were recorded yipping and whooping while other people behind them hit rocks with sticks and jangled bells.

‘Niall,’ I go, ‘what the fuck?’

Niall doesn’t take his eyes off the road. My brother is the cleverest person I know but he is kind of a monotasker.

‘Mongolian throat singing,’ he says.

‘Throat singing? Is that, like, a real thing or did you just make it up?’

‘Oh, it’s real. Listen.’

We listen. The women are reaching a crescendo – a climax, Niall calls it, without any irony whatsoever – and the guys in the background are bashing away at their rocks and I want this never to end, this car ride, with my brother and the wind and the throat singers from Mauritius or wherever.

My brother is the coolest person I know. And he does it without even trying. This is what makes him cool; it’s the essence of his inimitable coolness. He isn’t cool in the way that the numbskulls at school would define cool. He’s beyond that. He wears science fair T-shirts that are slightly too small, and his hair grows out in all directions, and he would have no idea what the new movies are or what trainers you should and shouldn’t be wearing. I go and stay with him on weekends whenever I can, and when I got back from my last trip, Casey announced to the lunch table that I had spent the weekend visiting my brother, who was a post-grad at Berkeley, and everyone piled in to ask me if I’d been to wild parties, had I seen inside a frat house, was there a beer keg, had I got totally wasted, did I hook up with any of my brother’s hot friends?

I didn’t say that when I got there my brother was really psyched because he’d heard there was geophysical activity expected. I didn’t say that my brother and I spent the night at his lab, that he rolled out a sleeping-bag for me under a desk, that I fell asleep watching the flickering arms of the seismographs, that my brother was too excited to sleep, that he woke me up at three a.m. because a tremor had been registering and he wanted me to see it: Look, he said, look at that. Isn’t it beautiful?

This is what my brother finds beautiful: scribbling needles on a seismograph. This is what I do on my wild weekends in Berkeley: watch dials in a lab. This is the coolest person on the planet: my brother, the seismologist.

‘So,’ Niall says, as we pull up at a red light, ‘what’s the deal with you?’

I clear the hair from my face. ‘What do you mean?’ I retort. ‘There is no deal with me. Have you been talking to Mom? What has she been saying? Have you—’

Niall is watching the road, watching his rearview mirror. ‘Rarely talk to Mom, as you know. What’s concerning me is,’ and he counts off on his fingers as he speaks (he’s always loved a list, my brother has), ‘your clothing, you and Stella, and the fact that you reek of crystal meth right now.’

I feel like crying. Don’t, I want to say, please don’t. ‘What’s wrong with my clothes?’ I shriek, my face hot, my hands reaching down to tug at my hem.

‘Are you high right now?’ he asks, in the same, neutral voice.

There is a pause in the car.

‘Phoebe,’ he says, and I’m shocked into listening because he doesn’t usually do names, ‘you don’t want to get into crystal, you really don’t, you—’

‘How did you—’ I start to cry now because I can’t bear Niall to be disappointed in me: that would be the worst thing in the world. ‘How did you know? I mean—’

‘I know, OK?’ he says. ‘It stinks. You stink.’

‘I didn’t know it was that,’ I wail. Tears and snot are streaming down my face and I can barely speak for sobbing. ‘I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t take it, not really. A guy shoved it in my face and I turned away but I think a little bit might have got inside me. I’ll never do it again, I promise. I promise, Niall.’

‘Nice people you’re hanging out with. You need to stay away from that stuff. And that guy, whoever he is. You haven’t seen what goes into that shit. You might think it’s fun to get high now but you know where it ends?’

‘Where?’ I say, in a tiny voice.

‘In a long-term psychiatric unit, with you dribbling into a strait-jacket and peeing into an adult-sized nappy.’

I laugh. I can’t help it. ‘An adult-sized nappy? You have some imagination, Mr Sullivan.’

Niall turns to me. ‘You refute the existence of adult-sized nappies?’

‘I don’t know what “refute” means but I bet they don’t exist.’

Niall turns back to the road. ‘Huh,’ he says. ‘Shows how little you know.’

‘Since when do you know so much about adult incontinence?’

Niall swings the car to the left and we pull up outside a coffee shop. He pulls on the handbrake and unclicks his seatbelt. He passes a hand through his hair and leans on the steering-wheel, all without looking at me.

‘Listen,’ I go, putting my hand on his arm. ‘It’s fine. You don’t have to worry. I don’t do crystal and … I’m not going to hang out with that crowd any more. And me and Stella, well, the thing is—’

Niall interrupts me to say something, a series of words. They hang in the air between us, clouding it like a swarm of flies. I can hear myself breathing, in-out, in-out, as if I’ve been running. My pulse is tapping against the skin of my neck. I’m thinking, it sounded as if Niall said, ‘Dad called me’. But he can’t have said that. It can’t be that. Because we never see Dad. He left when I was six and he didn’t come back.

The air-conditioning went off with the engine so the air in the car is suddenly thick with late-spring heat. My nose and throat are itching and sore, with hay fever or with something else, and I’m trying to make the words fit together so that they add up to some kind of sense.

‘What?’ I go.

‘Dad called.’

‘Dad?’ I say, as if I’ve never heard the word – which is kind of true, I’ll think later.

Niall nods, turning to look at me.

‘You mean …’ I search his face to try and understand. ‘You mean … What do you mean? “Dad”, as in … one of our stepdads?’

‘As in our father.’

‘Our father?’ I echo and am seized by an uncontrollable giggle because it sounds like I’m about to start to pray, like our grandmother does before meals, and it always drives our mother crazy: she starts rolling her eyes and sighing, and Grandma just doesn’t stop, she keeps pounding through the words while Mom taps her fingers and stares out the window. I let out a laugh but it doesn’t sound like a fun laugh: it sounds kind of harsh and crazy.

Niall sighs and pulls off his glasses. Without them, his face looks raw, unformed, childlike. He rubs at the skin under his eyes and I suddenly see that his fingers and wrists are patchy and red. His eczema is back with a vengeance, colonising his skin, like an enemy army and, seeing this, what he has just said sinks into me, water into sand, and it sits there in my belly, cold and wet.

‘He called you?’ I say. ‘How? I mean, when?’

‘Today. This morning. He was in the States, in New York, he said, for the first time in years, and he decided on the spur of the moment to get a flight down here.’

I turn to look out of the windshield. A woman is crossing the road with a bicycle. The bicycle is white and its turning spokes glitter in the sun. How simple, how elegant her life looks to me: to be wheeling a bike, in the sun, in a yellow dress. ‘Why?’ I hear myself ask.

‘To see us.’

The woman with the white bicycle has reached the opposite side of the road. I see that she has a dog in a basket at the front. The dog looks out, tongue hanging loose, ears pricked. I am consumed with a sharp longing to be that woman. I want her life, her dress, her dog. I want to be thirty and have a bike with a basket – what is the word for that kind of basket, there is one, I know – and be pedalling home to an apartment with long white curtains and bowls of flowers and a husband who loves me. I want to be over all this, to be past it, to be safe and unreachable in adulthood.

‘When?’ I say, at the same time as the word ‘wicker’ arrives in my head, like a train at a station. Wicker, I think, with relief. The word is wicker.

Niall is polishing his glasses on his too-small T-shirt. He puts them on; he pushes them up his nose. He tilts his head towards the coffee shop outside the car and I begin to understand, to read the situation, so I almost don’t need to hear it when he says, ‘Now.’

It’s really very simple: me and Niall are sitting at a table opposite a man.

We chose these seats by agreement, one we reached without saying anything. Neither of us wanted to slide into the bench beside him. That much we both knew.

So we sit side by side, on chairs, facing a man.