This Must Be the Place (53 page)

She’d sat herself down on his bed and he had smiled at her, in a way that meant he didn’t mind her interrupting but he might have to go on working anyway.

‘Can’t sleep?’ he’d said absently, his eyes still on his screen.

And Marithe had taken a deep breath. Why, she’d said, do we live here? And why won’t Mum go anywhere and why are we home-schooled and what is it, what is the thing that everybody knows and I don’t? I know there is something.

Ari had looked at her then. He’d looked at her for a long time. She could see him weighing up answers in his head, see him trying to decide what to say, how much to tell her. Then he’d bitten his lip and said, ‘You should really ask Mum’.

Marithe had banged him on the leg. ‘I have asked her,’ she’d said. ‘She just smiles and shakes her head.’

Ari looked up at the ceiling and sighed. ‘She’ll kill me if I tell you,’ and Marithe felt blood rushing through her chest, thick and fast. She felt that she was close to something she’d almost always known, something that had been on the other side of a curtain, all her life, and Ari had the power to whisk the curtain away. She was close, she was so close. ‘Tell me,’ she urged. ‘Please.’

‘You have to promise not to let on that you know. You have to swear.’

‘I promise.’

‘I mean it, Marithe. You have to swear on … the donkey’s life.’

Marithe squeezed her eyes shut, tried not to picture the donkey, whom she loved more than any other animal in the world, ever, and said, ‘I swear.’

Then Ari did something surprising. Instead of speaking, he typed something quickly into his keyboard, hit return, then swirled the laptop around so that Marithe could see the screen.

‘There,’ he said.

Marithe looked at the screen. She couldn’t comprehend what was appearing there. She glanced at her brother, who was sitting up in bed, arms folded. Image after image of Claudette, much younger, materialised on the screen: her on a flight of stone steps, standing in a lake in a white shirt, in an embrace with a man Marithe didn’t recognise, on a stage in a red dress that trailed on the ground, close to the camera, far away. ‘What,’ she’d said, ‘are these?’

Ari had explained the unbelievable. That Claudette, their mother, had been an actress and film-maker, a famous one, a very famous one, a long time ago, when he was just a baby.

‘You can find her films just about anywhere,’ he’d said. ‘People still watch them. They’re classics.’ Then he’d shut the laptop with a snap, his face twisted in a way that was very familiar to Marithe.

‘What?’ she’d demanded. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘There’s more,’ she’d cried. ‘I know it! I can tell by the way you’re pressing your lips together.’

So Ari sighed and they argued and wrangled for a bit longer and Marithe had to promise she wouldn’t tell Calvin and that she’d never let on to Claudette that Ari had told her, and that if Claudette ever did tell her, Marithe had to pretend she didn’t know.

Eventually, Ari reopened his laptop and typed in something else. He hit return. He frowned. He clicked a few times and then he turned the screen back.

It was an article from a newspaper, dated several years before Marithe was even born. Marithe read the headline, she read the words. She looked at the accompanying picture of her mother, grainy, in black and white, standing at a window, holding a dark-haired toddler.

When she looked up, her brother was regarding her with an expression of concern, of sympathy.

‘I don’t …’ she began, trying to master her thoughts.

‘You don’t what?’ Ari said, after a moment.

‘I don’t get it.’

‘What don’t you get?’

‘Any of it!’ Marithe rubbed her eyes; she suddenly felt incredibly tired, almost tearful. ‘It says she disappeared. It says they think she might have drowned. It says you, too, but … but how can they say that … when …’ she was crying now, tears coming hot and fast down her cheeks ‘… when we know it isn’t true, when I can see you right here in front of me?’

‘Marithe—’

‘It doesn’t make any sense. How can it be written in a newspaper that you and Mum might have drowned in Sweden when—’

‘She made it look like that.’

‘Deliberately?’

Ari nods. ‘She had to put them off the scent, to give us time to get away.’

‘But that’s an awful thing to do, to make people think you’ve died, to lead them to believe—’

‘Listen, everyone realised very soon afterwards that we hadn’t died, that she’d staged the whole thing. They traced us through several airports. She’d used our French passports, which put off the police a bit longer as they were searching for our British ones. My father, Timou, gave an interview about it at some point – there’s a picture of him with our other passports.’ Ari looked at Marithe. ‘I only know all this because I’ve researched it online. She won’t talk about it to me either.’

Marithe stared at her brother. Ari was biting his lip, clicking his pen on and off. ‘But why would she go to those lengths? What was she trying to get away from?’

‘I don’t know exactly,’ Ari said, reaching for his cigarettes, ‘but whatever it was it must have been pretty bad for her to do something as drastic as that. Don’t you think?’

Marithe stands in the zoo and this knowledge rests on her, like a coat with stone-loaded pockets. Most of the time she can be as she always was with her mother: they drive to the beach, they walk to pick up the milk from the farm, they study together, they chat as they dig the garden, they make dinner, they chop wood. Other times, often when her mother is engaged in some task, shelling beans or straining cheese or patching Calvin’s trousers, she finds herself staring at Claudette and turning over the facts, quickly and stealthily, like the pages of a forbidden book: a famous actress, a disappearance, the waters surrounding the city of Stockholm, only the rowing-boat was found, leaving Ari’s father behind, suspected sightings but none of them confirmed. She will look at her mother’s hands and think, she lifted Ari into the rowing-boat. She will look at her mother’s face and think, she acted in films, she wrote films. She will cast her eyes over her mother’s shoulders, bent over an atlas with Calvin, and think, you were so unhappy that you ran, you escaped, you hid yourself away.

She hates that this now sits between them, that this gully has appeared: she knows but can’t tell Claudette that she knows. She twists her fingers into the wires of her headphones, until their tips turn magenta-vivid.

She shuts her eyes, trying to blind herself to everything she knows, trying to unknow it. She hears Calvin’s breathing, she hears Zoë’s voice, asking Ari if he will draw her a hopscotch when they get home, she hears her father talking to her mother, not what he is saying, just the rumbling timbre of his voice.

She opens her eyes and finds her mother is looking at her in that way she has sometimes: motionless, penetrating, unblinking. Marithe cannot tear her gaze away. Her father and mother are holding hands. A strange shoot of hope unfurls somewhere in her and she feels again the wrongness, the disjointedness of them no longer living together. Oh, she wants to say, do you think you might, would it be possible?

Then she sees they aren’t holding hands, after all. His father has his hand pushed towards Claudette but Claudette’s fingers are curled around the purse on the table in front of her.

Claudette looks at Marithe and Marithe looks back, and the sense that her mother knows it all floods through her. She knows what Marithe was just thinking; she knows that Marithe knows about everything. Relief and fear compete within her but her mother blinks, then smiles at her. She raises her hand in a gesture that might be an indication to come forward and might be a sign to say, all will be well; everything is going to be all right.

For Dear Life

Daniel, Donegal, 2016

Y
ou know what’s strange about having kids over the age of ten?

They don’t go to bed.

Time was, you could put them in the bath at seven p.m., stick them in their pyjamas, read them a story and by eight o’clock they’d be asleep: job done. You and your spouse could lift your heads and look at each other for the first time all day. You’d have two or three clear hours in which to do whatever you liked. Talk to each other, read a book, something a little more horizontal, or just revel in the idea that no one would tug on your sleeve and make strange demands of you. (I once wrote down my favourite of these: ‘Daddy, while you’re cooking dinner, can you make me a puppet theatre?’ Marithe, aged four.)

But the over-tens, now, that’s a whole other matter. They hang around. They refuse to be compliant about bathing. They wolf down their dinner, then require further sustenance. They want entertainment, conversation, help with suddenly remembered projects, debates over pocket money, holiday destinations, choice of available beverages. You might try to slope off somewhere, to some armchair in a quiet corner of a house, to open a book, when in bursts a teenager, incandescent with rage because the laces have broken on a particular pair of sneakers.

It is, in some ways, harder than all the cajoling and soothing and settling you have to do with the under-fives and I thought, at the time, it couldn’t get harder than that.

So, anyway, here I am, having inveigled my way into the house of my ex-wife, formerly my house, where I lived for almost ten years. It looks remarkably like it always did, except that she’s repainted everything, but that doesn’t in the least bit surprise me. Claudette has an internal engine that moves at a speed faster than that of any other human I have ever known. She cannot stand still, cannot sit, of an evening, on a sofa and just contemplate her house, her rooms, her home, the way it is. No, she must get on, she must work, she must change things, always. It’s nothing short of a compulsion. She doesn’t see a room, an alcove, a wall, a piece of flooring: she sees a work-in-progress, a project just waiting to be embarked upon.

The sitting room is still smoky blue, however, I’m happy to see, and the gold stars are still in place and I am, for the first time, pleased to look at them. Whenever I caught sight of them, in the time I used to live here, all I could think about was how Claudette had scaled a ladder while six months pregnant to stick them up. My fury about that used to kind of take the edge off my appreciation. But now? Now I can see their appeal, their idiosyncratic genius.

I am sitting in one of the leather armchairs by the stove, trying to stop myself wondering who might have advised her about that mud-spattered four-wheel-drive vehicle parked in front of the house. Claudette has less than zero interest in cars so somebody must have helped her buy it. Of course, my mind is galloping ahead, whisking me towards disaster: another man, another marriage, has my place been taken so soon?

It’s past ten o’clock. Ari has put Zoë to bed, and has shut himself away upstairs to catch up on some work, or so he said. Calvin is in bed, although not asleep, judging by the plaintive requests for drinks from his room, and Marithe is slumped on the couch, like a felled tree.

Claudette is moving around the house, clattering dishes in the kitchen, flitting past the door with armfuls of laundry, picking dead leaves out of a plant, straightening the books on the shelf. This is silent Claudette-speak for ‘Time to leave, Daniel.’ I know this, she knows this, but I’m not ready, not quite.

On the sofa, my daughter, my only living daughter, yawns, her mouth opening pink, like a cat.

‘Sleepy, honey?’ I say, ever hopeful.

‘Nnnn,’ Marithe says, through another yawn. She turns over onto her side, rubbing her eye and her face is soft and blurry, like it was when she was a baby. ‘Dad?’

‘Yes?’

‘Are we still coming to New York next month? Me and Calvin?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Even though you came to Ireland?’

‘You bet. I booked all the tickets. Your mom’s got them. I’ll be there to fetch you from the airport, like always.’

‘Can we go to that place again?’

‘Which place?’

‘The one with the train tracks and the ice lollies.’

I’m mystified by this description. ‘Train tracks? You mean the subway?’

Marithe shakes her head and strands of hair fall over her eyes. ‘Nah.’ She raises her arm above her head. ‘Up high. Like, a park.’

‘Oh, you mean the High Line.’

She smiles, under her hair. ‘The High Line,’ she whispers, half to herself.

‘You want to go there? Sure, we can go there.’

‘Can Niall come, like last time?’

‘We can ask him. I’m sure he’ll come if he’s not busy.’ I go over to the sofa and take her by the hand. ‘Come on, sweetheart. Time for bed, I think.’

Marithe stumbles to a standing position, leaning on my arm as we move up the stairs. ‘Does Niall still live with you?’ she asks.

‘No, not any more. He has his own place now.’

‘Have I been there?’

‘No.’

‘Can we go?’

‘Sure.’

At the bathroom door, she turns to look at me. ‘Is he still sad?’ she asks.

I reach out my hand to brush the hair off her face. ‘Niall is a lot better. You mustn’t worry about him. It’s nice that you do but Niall is OK.’

My daughter looks me in the eye and says, devastatingly, ‘Are you still sad?’

I swallow. ‘Am I still sad … about … Phoebe?’

She frowns, concerned, and nods. And I look at her, this perfect being, her skin so vital, so pale that you can see the life-blood coursing beneath it. I am beset by twin sensations: that I am lucky, the luckiest man in the world, to have this daughter, these children, and that I would kill, maim, destroy any person who tried to harm them.

‘I will always be sad about Phoebe,’ I say, with an effort to keep my voice even, ‘and so will Niall. But what happens is that, after a few years, you slowly realise it’s OK to be happy too.’

She looks at me for a moment longer, as if checking the veracity of this idea. Then she turns and goes into the bathroom.

‘I’ll come tuck you in,’ I say, as I walk away.

I go back along the corridor, down the stairs, across the hallway and into the sitting room, where the heat from the wood-burner hits me in the face as soon as I open the door. There is no one there.