This Must Be the Place (6 page)

I unloop the bag from my neck and let it fall to the floor. I reach for my cigarettes, I loosen my tie, I twist my chair around, I shift some papers from one side of the desk to the other and then, quickly, before I can stop myself, I turn my chair back round and hit the return button. I hit it hard. My finger joints throb from the impact.

The timer icon appears, tiny grains of electronic sand slipping through its waist. It flips itself, once, twice. Then a blue list appears. Library catalogues, mainly, from universities. Numbers and codes for academic papers by her, a link to a textbook she co-edited, a mention of the radio programme heard earlier, with an option to download the podcast. This, my eye sees, has a link for a biography so I click on that and it unscrolls before me, the short life of Nicola Janks.

A novena of birth, nationality, schools, degrees, teaching posts, publications: how strange it is to be distilled in this way, as if we are in the final analysis just geography, coordinates, output. Is this what will be left of us all – computer-coded facts?

The four numbers at the biography’s end slide into me, like a cold blade. That the year of her death is, indeed, 1986 seems at once devastating and inevitable. Of course, I think, of course it was then. I knew it already, I find. Perhaps I always did.

Five minutes later, I am moving across the grey concrete slabs that separate the university from the rest of the world. I need some air, a walk, a change of scene. I need to find a cab. Something like that. I cannot stay in that box of an office with my screen staring back at me. I have three cigarettes rolled inside my tin and I intend to smoke them, one after another, before I go to the airport.

I am moving along a bridge, the traffic grinding in contraflow along the pavement edge. There are roadworks ahead, a vat of boiling tar giving off a choking stench and great clouds of smoke. The river beneath is brown and swollen with rain, lapping oily waves at its banks.

When I reach the other side, there is a bench. I sit myself down on it. I start searching my pockets for a lighter. I have time, I tell myself, taking a snatched glance at my watch. Plenty of time. I am just going to take a short moment to steady myself, and then I am going to press on.

The bench is in one of those small parks – marooned green spaces that fill an empty lot on a street and you wonder, in this city, what might have happened there, what crisis could have occurred to clear the area of buildings. And it seems to me, as I sit there, among the ornamental hedges and genuflecting chrysanthemums, as I spark my lighter with a shaking hand and inhale the smoke, that my life has been a series of elisions, cover-ups, dropped stitches in knitting. To all appearances, I am a husband, a father, a teacher, a citizen, but when tilted towards the light I become a deserter, a sham, a killer, a thief. On the surface I am one thing but underneath I am riddled with holes and caverns, like a limestone landscape.

A taxi, I am intoning to myself. I need to find one, then get a flight to Brooklyn, my sisters and my dad. I need to get on a plane and spend a few days there. I need to be at that party – and then? Then I come back here. Then I stay on track and get on with the life in hand. Then I do not start poking around, finding out whatever the hell happened to Nicola Janks, going off to uproot the truth about that. It is over and done. The woman is dead. Twenty years or more have passed. I am not to start dropping myself down, like a speleologist, into those holes and caverns and start digging around. I have to focus, have to stop trembling, slow my galloping pulse. I have to put Nicola Janks on a shelf for a while, find a cab for the airport and get my head around spending the next few days with my dad and—

There is a movement to my left. A man and his child, a girl, are sitting down on the bench. I glimpse a pair of scuffed trainers, the ones with flashing lights on the soles, trousers with the hems rolled up. The phrase
room for growth
floats unbidden through my mind as I turn to look at them. There is the girl, there is the father.

It is the child who draws my gaze. She is standing, one arm outstretched. I see that the arm is twisted and held out like that because she is scratching, in the desperate, driven, focused way that only an eczema-sufferer can. She is tearing at her inner elbow, fingernails clawed and intent, seeking relief, seeking to feel something, anything, other than the torment of her condition. I see the grim determination of the child’s gaze, concentration under suffering.

Here, then, is another hole, another cavern in the life of Daniel Sullivan. Perhaps the largest, most devastating of all. I have to push off from the bench, to move, to force myself away, so great is the grief that has torn through me. I set one foot in front of the other, again and again, putting distance between me and the pair in the park. I have my gaze set on the road. I am treading carefully, as if the ground beneath me is not as firm and sure as it looks, as if it is riddled with underground rivers, as if at any moment a sinkhole may yawn open under my shoes. I am looking out for the lit sign of a cab. I have lost or dropped my cigarette somewhere along the way. The sensation that begins at my feet and trembles all the way through me is akin to the beginning of a seismic event.

Before I leave the park, I will permit myself one last glance at the child by the bench. I tell myself this as I move away. I see a cab, I signal and it slows down. Just before it reaches me, at the kerb, I turn. The girl is crying; the father is bent over his bag, searching for a cream, a lotion, anything. I crane my head to see, and the movement causes something to poke me in the ribs. I feel inside the pockets of my jacket, my palms sliding along the silky, slippery lining. My fingers encounter the reassuring rectangle of my passport. Folded into it will be my ticket. A flight to the States, my first in five years, a return to the house of my father. There it is, in my breast pocket, directly above my thudding, tripping, treacherous heart.

I Am Not an Actress

Claudette, London, 1989

I
t was almost the 1990s, the very start of the final decade of the millennium, and we had just arrived in London. We had not long ago left university. Just months previously, we had been holding the whole of critical theory in our heads; we had crammed all night to memorise the dates of European wars, the fluctuations in meaning of the imperfective aspect in Russian. We had entered exam halls, turned over the papers set down on the desks, taken up our pens and known that these were the last exams we would ever sit.

The things we knew! The sequence of Shakespeare’s plays, the defining characteristics of a villanelle, each and every muscle in the human hand, the myriad similarities and differences in the multiple translations of
The Iliad
. We were experts, in our way, with sharp spikes in our knowledge: we knew everything there was to know about one narrow field.

And now? Now we camped out on the floor of anyone who’d have us and we were looking for jobs.

Now we pored over the vacancy columns in the newspapers. Now we wondered what it was we were going to do, how to be, how to live. Now we realised that all the things we had learnt were useless. That no one would ever ask us what degree we got. Or how to recognise a metonym or what were the dates of Chaucer or the dying words of Robespierre or the stages of Italian unification or the finer details of Disraeli’s foreign policy. We saw that no one cared. All they wanted to know was: can you type? Are you familiar with word processing, spreadsheets, phone systems? Can you fix a photocopier? Can you replace the carbon in a fax machine? Can you answer the phone while making coffee at the same time as opening the post and tidying the in-trays?

We wondered at times whether our degrees had been worth it.

It was very nearly the 1990s. We arrived in short skirts with thick tights, tiny T-shirts that showed our flat, childless stomachs, trainers in bright neons, coloured cagouls bought from second-hand market stalls. We were hopeful. We wanted this to work. We looked at the clothes the people wore in the offices in which we temped. How did they do it? We wondered and studied. The trouser suits and spike heels, the shirts with crisp fronts and high collars, the handbags with tooled flaps and brass fastening, coats of tweed that buttoned down the front. And the hair: straight and flat as paper, cut so that it swung cleanly around the cheeks. How to achieve these things when we had no iron, no fixed abode, no regular salary, nothing in our suitcases but creased clothes that weren’t right for our new life?

We kept reading in newspapers and magazines that London was where it was at, the epicentre of cool, that the best bands were playing every night in pubs just round the corner. We never quite understood this. When we went to the pubs, they seemed dim and close, rows of people sitting with their backs turned, music from hidden speakers cutting through the smoke. London to us, then, was exhausting, a struggle to keep up the appearance of knowing what you were doing, of long journeys on the tube, of finding somewhere to write, rewrite and print your CV when none of us had a computer. London was about interviews, about a desperate scramble to find a niche in this vast, threatening ecosystem, just a small one, a toehold, to pull off that magic pairing of job + flat, with any luck simultaneously, because one seemed impossible without the other. So, we temped and stayed on the sofas of long-suffering friends or relatives or lovers until we could find the golden key to open the door, to persuade the city to admit us, to pass Go, to reach the point where we could say, yes, this is my address, and, yes, I would like to buy a monthly travel pass – no more messing about with day tickets for me.

We went out because the city was there and we were grown-up and we were free, and because we couldn’t impose all evening, every evening, on the people whose sofas we were sleeping on. We went to repertory cinemas in basements for all the films we’d heard of but never had the chance to see. We went to parties in warehouses in the east of the city where drum’n’bass pulsed from speakers and blokes in knitted hats offered us cocaine and a famous artist was said to be about to arrive, any minute now. We arranged to see each other by phone, at work, snatched conversations, fixing on a café or bar that one of us knew about, one of us could identify. We would make it with time to spare, clutching our street maps and day tickets. Our sense of different locations began to mesh. One day we grasped that we didn’t need to change tube lines to get from Leicester Square to Covent Garden: they were just five minutes’ walk apart.

One of us landed a job, a proper job, at a newspaper. We were amazed. Some of us phoned others to discuss this occurrence. Some of us were jealous. Then another of us was appointed as an assistant at an art gallery. More phone calls.

The worst fear was not that the city might defeat you, not that you might not find that job, might not secure that flat, might fail to master the different tube lines, what colour they were and where they intersected; the worst fear that kept us all awake at night was that you might have to go home. You might have to return to your parents and say, here I am. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t manage it. I couldn’t pull it off.

More and more of us were finding work. One signed the lease on a flat right by the river, and there was a party, and you stood on the balcony and you breathed in the smoke and noise and splintered light of the city and you knew you didn’t have much longer, that you had to do something quick.

You went into the temping agency again and you knew the woman didn’t like you. You weren’t sure why. You’d passed your typing test, you’d smiled nicely, you’d worn a clean blouse (borrowed without permission from the girl whose floor you were occupying that week, washed and replaced that night).

The temping agent glanced up when she saw you come in, then down. ‘Nothing this week,’ she said, and you were about to turn and go, when she added, ‘unless …’

You stopped, at the top of the stairs.

‘Are you interested in film?’ she said, as she lifted some papers on her desk, first one way, then the other.

‘Yes,’ you said, ‘yes, I am.’ You were, as it happened, but you’d have said yes if she’d asked if you were interested in chicken farming.

‘Something just came in from … the Film Society,’ she said, and it was as if you’d suddenly run up a hill – your pulse was galloping and your lungs were empty. This was it: this was your route in, your pass, your golden key, your way to effect the metamorphosis into adulthood. It took everything you had in you not to snatch the proffered piece of paper from her hand.

‘It’s only a few days’ work and they’re looking for someone with experience but you could call. It might be worth a try. Fix a time to go in tomorrow.’

‘I’ll go now,’ you said, groping in your bag for your map.

The Society occupied a building under a bridge at the edge of the Thames. When you stood at the entrance, gathering yourself before you went in, you had the river at your back and buses over your head, sliding in opposing directions, north and south.

The job required you to fold two thousand fliers and put them into two thousand envelopes. Two thousand address labels then had to be affixed and the envelopes fed, one by one, through a franking machine. You got the job: two days’ work. You executed it in a damp-smelling room in the basement. You thought that might be it but they said, come back tomorrow. You came. You were sent to the printer’s to collect a box. More fliers. More envelopes. The franking machine. You were sent the next day to the post office.

You watched everyone carefully. You saw what they did, how they spoke, what they drank. You made them their coffee without being asked. You took an old T-shirt and, after some deliberation, cut off its arms and hems and wore it over a white shirt, just like the deputy programmer did.

At the end of two weeks, they said there was a permanent job as an admin assistant in the office upstairs and would you like it as you seemed to have a good work ethic, it wasn’t very much money but it was a start, and what did you think? You said, yes, yes, please, yes, I would, yes I have a good work ethic, I do, yes, I love to work, I love it.