This Must Be the Place (35 page)

‘No,’ I said, thinking, Hell, yes. ‘Not at all, I just—’

‘How long do you plan to stay in Donegal?’ she asked and, caught off-guard, I looked at her. Her face was impossible to read and seemed suddenly and uncomfortably close to mine, in the steamed-up little car. A minuscule crease appeared between her perfectly arched eyebrows. ‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ she said.

‘Not at all. The thing is …’ I faltered, mesmerised by the separate strands of her eyelashes, which seemed so intriguingly dark in comparison to the golden sheen of her hair, by the constellation of freckles that plotted itself across the bridge of her nose.

I attempted to hijack and drag my renegade attention back to the conversation. It was a question, I was almost sure. But what had been the question? That was the question. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘what did you say?’

The crease had deepened to a frown. ‘I just wondered how long you were planning to stay around here but you don’t have to say, if you’d rather not. Obviously, it’s none of my business and—’

‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘Could be a while.’ My leg moved convulsively against my bag, inside which, I knew, and my leg knew, was an air ticket with tomorrow’s date on it. ‘I’m just, you know, travelling around a bit. Hired a car. Thought I’d see a bit of the old country.’ The old country?
The old country?
Had I actually said that? ‘I don’t have to be back in the States until the beginning of next semester. So. It could be a while.’

‘Oh.’ Her expression cleared and she smiled at me, an astonishing, wide, beatific smile. ‘That’s great. You see, I was wondering, and I know it’s a big favour and you must please say no if you’d rather not …’

She was off, explaining something about whether or not it would be possible for me to do some sessions with Ari while I was there. I watched her hands, moving through the close air of the car, as she said that of course she would pay me for my time and reimburse me for any expenses incurred. I watched the tresses – because it was the kind of hair which warranted that noun, usually confined to usage only within fairytales – of her hair move on the surface of her coat. I watched the timpani beat of her pulse in a vein that traversed the hollow in the lee of her collarbone. It was taking everything in me not to say,
smile at me like that again and I’ll do anything you want
. My twenty-something self seemed to be riding in the ascendant today, for some reason, and I had to tamp him down, tie him up, gag him, at all costs. There was no way I was letting him out, giving him free rein in this car. I experienced briefly, disquietingly, a flitting image of a payphone in the dim hallway of my English-exchange-year house, and I banished it quickly, without permitting myself to ask why.

‘You know,’ I said, holding up my hand to stop her, ‘I would love to help you –’

‘Thank you,’ she burst out, ‘thank you so much.’

‘– but I’m not sure I’m the man for the job. I’m not qualified to help someone like Ari. I’m not a speech therapist or even a specialist in developmental dysfluency.’

‘But those things you said to him, about starting off with another sound or finding a different word, they were—’

‘All things I got from doing a research-assistant job, twenty years ago,’ I interjected gently. ‘I’m a linguist. I specialise in language change, in the genetics, if you like, of what we say. I really don’t know very much at all about the challenges that Ari is facing. I wouldn’t feel confident in …’

She placed the flask between the seats and the droop of her head, the tremble of her hands, was heartbreaking to witness. I caught wind suddenly, and for the first time, of her keen isolation, the bravery it must take for her to be there, alone with the boy.

‘There must be practitioners within reach,’ I said. ‘You’re not that far from Belfast, are you? A couple of hours’ drive? Even Dublin, if you had to. You could quite feasibly find—’

‘It would be tricky,’ she cut across me, looking away, out of the window, at where her son was running through the wet field, dragging a fallen branch after him.

I took a breath. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I get it.’

‘You get what?’

‘I get why it would be tricky. I know who you are. I didn’t know yesterday, when we changed the wheel, but it came to me last night, when Mrs Spillane let slip your name. I don’t know why the penny didn’t drop straight away. I suppose the last thing I was expecting to find here was, well, you.’

She bit her lip. ‘I have to ask if you—’

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to tell anyone. I can keep a secret.’

‘Can you?’

I nodded. ‘Sure.’

She brushed some strands of hair off her face and lifted her chin. It was a gesture that would become infinitely familiar to me, but I didn’t know that at the time.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and the words had an air of finality to them. I could see that the conversation was over: she had extracted as much as she could from me and now she would return to whatever it was she had here. I could see that I would step out of the car, say my goodbyes, drive back to the B-and-B, then travel on to America, home and work, the task of finding an apartment, and the struggle to see my kids. This encounter in the middle of nowhere with a woman of ineffable mystery would, in a few weeks, have taken on the quality of something dreamt, something made up. Had I really sat in the car of Claudette Wells and looked out with her into the rain, into the mountain and the flat, steely waters of Lough Swilly beyond?

I was swigging the dregs of my cup, looking around for a place to put it, about to take my leave, when the car door opened and Ari clambered in, hair plastered seal-like to his scalp, jacket wet and glistening.

‘Will you come to the beach with us?’ he said, with perfect clarity, a huge grin on his face, looking from me to her and back again. ‘We’re going there n-n-now and we’re going to have f-fish and chips and then we’re going to—’

‘Ari,’ his mother murmured, ‘Mr Sullivan probably has other things to do. He is on holiday and we mustn’t—’

‘It’s Daniel,’ I said. ‘Call me Daniel. And I don’t have anything else to do. I’d love to come to the beach.’ I gave Ari a smile, then allowed myself to look his mother full in the face, for the first time that day. ‘As long as that’s OK with you.’

I stand now in our kitchen as my coffee brews. I look at the phone, resting in its cradle. I look at Marithe’s coloured pencils, standing upright in their pot, tips sharpened to arrowheads. I examine a stack of laundry, a skyscraper of folded vests, leggings, sweaters. I am a detective at the scene of a crime. Nothing escapes my gaze. I look again at the faded chinoiserie curtains, at the women endlessly crossing and crossing their bridges, and it all falls into place. I know exactly where Claudette will have gone.

The Logical Loophole

Maeve, Chengdu, China, 2003

M
aeve wakes with a jolt. She is lying on her side and it is stiflingly, oppressively humid: she is damp with sweat and tangled in the sheets. The room is filled with a strange, shrill noise, like that of a malfunctioning machine or burglar alarm. It seems to drill into her ear canals and vibrate there at a persistent, painful frequency. She sits up and leaps from the bed, almost in one movement.

There is a silhouette across the room. Maeve can see its cut-out shape against the never-quite-dark hotel windows. It is a child, standing in a cot, hands gripping the bars. Maeve fumbles for the bedside lamp and clicks it on.

The situation becomes illuminated.

She is all the way across the world, without Lucas. It is the middle of the night. Hard to tell what time exactly: the road outside seems to grind all hours, with lights and lorries and horns.

She is alone in a hotel room, with a child.

The child is making a noise.

It isn’t so much crying, Maeve thinks, as she stands there, because that would involve different notes, pauses for intakes of breath, tears even. This is more high-pitched. It is one-note. There is no let-up in its timbre, no pause. It is a call of distress, of grief, of abandonment.

Maeve puts out her hands for the child and lifts it into her arms. This is what you’re supposed to do at such times; she knows this. She tries to emulate this lift and hug but the baby has other ideas. It arches its back, leaning away from her, as if to get a better look at her, as if to assess whether it wants to be held by her. Its eyes are black, wide, terrified, the skin around them drawn and wet.

‘It’s OK,’ Maeve tries. She pats the baby’s back. ‘Ssssh, it’s OK.’

The baby’s arms are held out stiffly from its body and it turns its head from one side then the other, as if to look for someone in a position of higher authority, someone it recognises.

‘Don’t cry,’ Maeve croaks, although crying herself now. ‘It’s me, Maeve.’ Then she corrects herself: ‘Mummy, I’m Mummy, remember?’

The child lurches back in her arms, heels pressing into Maeve’s abdomen. Everything about its body is saying: I don’t want to be hugged by you. I don’t like you. I don’t know you. Amazing, one part of Maeve’s mind is telling her, how a child of only a year and a half – or two perhaps, impossible to know exactly – can express this without a single word.

Maeve inhales. She must remain calm. She must keep it together. Everything is going to be all right.

Maybe the baby is hungry.

Maeve seizes on the idea. Hungry! Of course! Why didn’t she think of that? Just hungry, that’s all: she doesn’t hate Maeve, she doesn’t want Maeve to put her down, she just needs a bottle.

Maeve puts the baby back into the hotel cot and goes into the bathroom, where she prepared the feeds earlier. She takes one of the bottles, all brought from home two days ago and sterilised this morning (can it only have been this morning, the same day as this one? It feels like weeks, months, lifetimes ago) and counts in the right number of scoops.

She’s doing this, she really is, she’s coping, she’s being a parent. A mother. She wishes, not for the first time today, that Lucas was here, that Lucas was with her, not waiting uselessly at home.

She comes back into the bedroom, walking with new confidence and purpose, shaking the bottle.

‘Look what I’ve got for you!’ She hears herself trying a new, sprightly voice. ‘Milk!’

The baby is still in the cot, still standing, still making the endless noise, which is beginning to sound a little hoarse, a little desperate and mad, but Maeve wills herself not to be discouraged.

‘Here!’ Maeve says and goes to pick her up again, then gets halfway before seeing it isn’t going to work because she’s holding the bottle and so has to clumsily lower her back down, turn, place the bottle on the bedside table and pick her up.

Again, she feels horror and reluctance reel through the child. Maeve grits her teeth, sits down on the bed, trying to manoeuvre her into a sort of sitting position in the crook of her elbow. That’s how you feed an infant, isn’t it? They are supposed to bend in the middle somehow and use your body as a kind of chair but this one doesn’t seem to bend. She is rigid, livid, stricken. Maeve has got herself a non-bending baby.

‘There, there,’ Maeve hears herself say. She hooks one arm around her shoulders and makes a lunge for the bottle, which she has positioned just out of reach, a movement that elicits a scream from the child, a proper noise of fear, so by the time Maeve has got the bottle in front of her face, she is too upset, too rigid with panic to drink it.

Maeve tries putting the teat into the child’s mouth but her lips are stretched out in a scream and won’t join together to suck. She tries wetting her open mouth with a few drops of milk, so the baby gets the idea, but it just drips out again and down her chin.

They stare at each other, Maeve and this baby, alone in a hotel room, far from home. Maeve sees: black eyes, creased into crescents, but still seeing, still knowing. She sees hands, heartbreakingly small and soft, with fingers clenched and thumbs outstretched, each nail just a shade too long and ingrained with some kind of blackish substance. Should she have bathed her after all? She had balked at this, after they had made it back to the room, the baby and her, after they had staggered through the odyssey of their day: the long wait at the Social Welfare Centre, the endless checking and rechecking of forms, the handing over of the envelope of cash (clean, unmarked, new American dollar bills, so many of them, more than Maeve had ever seen), and then the door opening and a facilitator coming towards her holding what looked to Maeve like a mannequin with black hair held up in a single elastic band and a face with an expression that was devastatingly grumpy, wary, sceptical.

What, though, had she been expecting? That the child would toddle towards her, beaming, arms outstretched, ready to be swept into a hug, ready for all the affection and desperation and fierce craving that builds up, as behind a dam, from – count them – fourteen years of childlessness, five rounds of fertility treatment, three near-but-not-quite adoptions?

Maeve has thought about the moment when she would meet her child for the first time, over and over again, mostly when she is alone. She has taken the idea out, like a gift, and viewed it from all angles, invented and embellished and pursued every possibility. Ever since she and Lucas, exhausted and worn down by UK procedures for adoption, had decided on adopting from China, she had pictured herself and him waiting in a clean but functional orphanage entrance hall. It would be grey concrete, Communism-sparse, with kindly young staff in uniforms, rows and rows of iron cribs, plastic toys lying on the floor, yellow curtains, the smell of rice cooking. There they would be and there would be babies. Hundreds of them, lined up, each with shining hair and tiny faces and one would be for them. It would be theirs. They would pick it up and take it home and then they would all live happily ever after. Simple.

What she had not imagined was being bussed, with other parents-in-waiting, to a place like the Social Welfare Centre, which looked like a department store or shopping mall, with an enormous, towering, apricot façade and a fountain outside with statues of featureless concrete children endlessly pouring urns into scummy water. She had not imagined waiting in a room that seemed more suited to low-budget civic weddings than adoption hand-overs, with swags of metallic-bright fabric, fake rubber plants in brass pots, long trestle tables with white cloths, a dais in the corner with an empty microphone stand. She had not imagined that the children would be brought in, one by one, held up like raffle prizes, the names of the intended parents shouted out loud so that you had to concentrate, you had to listen, so as not to miss your cue. What a thought: to have come this far and then be scuppered, left babyless again, after a moment of inattention or a failure to understand a Chinese-accented pronunciation of your surname. She had not imagined doing this without Lucas but the last two times – two! – they had come to Chengdu, having been told that there was a child, a baby for them there, they had found that by dint of actually being in China they had missed a crucial telephone call on their home phone in Cumbria, which, remaining unanswered, meant that their baby had been allocated to someone else.