Authors: Maggie O'Farrell

Tags: #General, #Literary, #Fiction

This Must Be the Place (45 page)

Claudette sinks onto a rock. What is she doing? How did she get to this place, crying as she walks along a beach? How did everything go so wrong?

She pulls out her phone and looks at it. She has banned herself from calling Daniel; it is not allowed, it is not right, it is not fair on him. They are separated; it is over. This, she must accept.

She presses the button that lights up the phone. There is, she is both annoyed and elated to see, a signal. A faint one, but a signal all the same.

Daniel takes a right off Haverstock Hill. There is a library down here that he likes, an old-school place with kids’ storytimes and stern librarians and clanking radiators and ancient computers and geriatrics dozing at tables.

He has left the supermarket, abandoned his shopping basket right there in the aisle. He considered taking the vodka, just slipping it into his coat pocket, but good sense prevailed, just in time.

He walks down the side-street, past lines of parked cars, past wrought-iron gates, past cats sitting on doorsteps, past windows that give views of sofas, dining tables, kitchen cupboards, lit rooms, where other lives are being lived out.

Sometimes he wonders what the hell he is doing here, in this city, where he has no connections, no history, no contacts, other than his stepson, who is a student at the university. He had a job here, of course, for a while, but not at the moment. ‘Compassionate leave’, they called it.

The thing was, Daniel thinks, as he gazes into a house where he can see a child, juice box in hand, staring into a television screen, he had believed his move here to be temporary, a marital blip. He had no idea his split with Claudette would turn out to be permanent. Isn’t that often the way of these things? Shortly after the conversation in the bedroom that morning, he had taken himself (in a state of injured, wronged rage) to London, he had thought for a while. He would take the six-month contract he’d been offered and serve her right. He was entirely of the opinion that he could win her round, when he was good and ready, when she’d had time to see sense. He’d thought he could get her back, fool that he was, but first –
first
– he had to sort out the Nicola issue.

How do you absorb the idea that you’ve killed someone into your ordinary life? How do you go about the minutiae of the everyday when you know that, because of you, a girl is dead? It’s impossible. The spectre of the girl lying in the woods, the girl in a hospital bed, haunted the rooms of his flat, his new, diminished life in London. She lurked around corners at the university, she hung about on Underground stairwells, she sat in the empty place opposite him at his tiny dining-table.

Then he’d got a call on his cell phone in the middle of the night and he’d seen it was Niall and he remembers being pleased – alone, as he was, in a flat in London, away from everyone he loved. He remembers snatching it up eagerly and saying, hey, how are you?

You know what his immediate thought was, on being told that his daughter had been shot dead in a drugstore? That it was his fault. That it was karma, it was comeuppance, it was punishment for him running away from that forest and not going back. An eye for a eye, a girl for a girl.

Even now, almost a year on, he cannot shake that conviction. He knows it was somehow down to him.

Daniel climbs the steps to the library, holds the door for a woman with a double stroller and seats himself in the travel guides and non-fiction section, grabbing a selection of books at random.

He opens something called
The Big Book of Facts: Everything You Need to Know About Everything
, questioning the wisdom of repeating ‘everything’ in the title, which is a pretty ugly and prosaic word, when you think about it. Here is a page with graphs of world grain consumption per continent, America coming out top of all grain-guzzlers. A diagram of the rate of polar ice melting. A league table of land animals and their respective speeds in kilometres per hour.

Daniel flips the pages and finds himself looking at pie charts of gun crimes.

He shuts the book with a snap. He lays his head on the table, on top of the cover, and the word ‘everything’ stretches away from his eyes, the wrong way round, in vast, unavoidable letters.

‘
Maman?
’ Claudette says, into her phone. ‘
C’est moi
.’

During the ensuing pause on the line, it hits Claudette with a plummeting sensation that she should never have rung Pascaline. What was she thinking? She’d only done it to stop herself calling Daniel. Can she hang up, before it’s too late, pretend that her phone ran out of charge, that she lost the signal? Her mother possesses an unnerving ability to decode her moods immediately and she doesn’t want to talk about how she’s feeling right now, not at all.

Claudette tries valiantly to inject an upbeat tone into her voice: ‘
Ça va?
’

‘What’s wrong?’ Pascaline replies, in English, which she reserves for interrogation purposes. ‘You sound terrible.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Claudette says. ‘I’m fine. How are you?’

Pascaline ignores the question for a second time. ‘Where are you?’ she asks. ‘Who is with you?’

Claudette takes a deep breath. ‘No one,’ she says, and bursts into tears.

The dogs find a length of bladderwrack to squabble half-heartedly over, the clouds move along the coast in a stately procession, the tide pulls off the strand, leaving furrows and ridges in the sand, and Claudette must listen to her mother’s theories as to why her marriage broke down.

‘The point is, my darling,’ Pascaline is saying, as her daughter hurls stone after stone into a nearby rockpool, ‘that his behaviour had nothing to do with you. Nothing at all.’

‘I’m don’t know about that. It’s not as if I—’

‘None of it was your fault.’

Claudette sighs. ‘You don’t think perhaps you’re a little bit biased?’ She squeezes her eyes shut. ‘You know, I really don’t want to talk about this any more.’ But then she finds that, in fact, she does. ‘I just wonder,’ she says to her mother, as she sits on the beach, ‘whether I did the right thing. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked him to leave. I thought that maybe some time apart might give him the jolt he needed. But now everything is so much worse with him, of course, and I still wonder if—’

‘He needs to get well,’ Pascaline interrupts, ‘before you can even consider—’

‘I know that,’ Claudette says irritably, ‘you don’t need to tell me that. But maybe he can’t get better on his own in London. Maybe he needs to be here, with us, with—’

‘The man is an alcoholic,’ Pascaline says bluntly. ‘That would not be easy for you, for the children. You want to know what I think?’

‘Not really,’ Claudette mutters.

‘I think that the person you are missing today is the old Daniel. Not the current one. Yes?’

Claudette moves her feet in semi-circles about herself. Could this be true or is it just more of her mother’s intrusive psychobabble? She presses her hand to her eyes. She can’t tell any more. She can no longer think clearly about Daniel.

The dogs come and stare at her, martyred, affronted at this hiatus in their walk, as Pascaline offers more ideas as to why Daniel went off at the deep end and a list of reasons why Claudette should sell the Donegal house and move to Paris.

Daniel sits on a bench next to the duckpond. Dusk gathers itself around him, spreading out from the branches of the trees. He shivers inside his coat. There are footsteps from the path behind him, people going to and fro, back from work, back from school, on their way home. In front of him, across the pond, lights come on in the windows of the big houses.

In one hand, he holds a bottle of whiskey and a joint, in the other the little amber bottle. The tip of the joint glows orange and its smoke drifts sideways in the evening breeze.

He is alternating, one toke on the joint, one sip of the whiskey, one pill from the bottle (he refuses to say ‘pillule’).

It is proving to be an interesting combination.

The ducks draw silver lines after themselves over the surface of the pond. A siren sounds from the north, getting closer and then veering away. Somewhere to his left, a horse-chestnut tree is dropping its fruit: conkers land every few minutes with a cracking thud, green, spiked cases splitting open, the polished seeds rolling free. None of it matters. Nothing matters. His daughter is dead and nothing can bring her back.

Claudette moves through the house, pen and paper in her hand.
Paint bathroom
, she writes, underneath
Reseal windows Ari’s room
and
Stair carpet?
.

She needs to give this place a revamp, a new life. Out with the old, in with the new. All this gloom today is caused by an uncertain feeling that life is moving on, the children getting older, and maybe – just maybe – the idea of being alone is a disquieting one.

Because, Claudette thinks, as she sits down on the top stair, how likely is it that she will meet someone else? She will stay in this house, despite Pascaline’s exhortations to move to Paris, and realistically how many potential husbands will come wandering up her track, carrying the ashes of their grandparent in a box?

Claudette looks down the curve of the stairs and up at the skylight, which is turning a deep, inked blue. ‘The witching hour,’ Daniel always called this time of day. He used to go out in it, every evening, and have a last cigarette as he walked the perimeter of the garden. He liked the moment, he said, when it was neither day nor night, but indefinably both.

She puts down her pen, she puts down her list. She picks up her phone. Everything, she sees, has been leading to this. She was always going to call Daniel today: that much was clear from when she got up. It was written into the weft of the day: Claudette will call Daniel.

She presses the buttons. She waits for the ring. She wants to hear his voice. She wants to say hello. She wants to say, I am sitting at the top of the stairs and it is halfway between day and night. And: our children are with your son, on a causeway made by a giant. And: I am thinking of you. And: do you still think of me?

Daniel walks through the lobby to his flat, registering, as he always does, its unpleasantly high temperature, compared with the sharp air outside. Another thing living in that house in Ireland has done to him is that he cannot stand central heating any more. He keeps his flat at Arctic levels, much to Ari’s amusement.

At his door, he can’t find his keys. He feels in his coat pockets, but they contain only the empty amber bottle and conkers, handfuls of them.

He tries his trouser pockets, hearing now that the telephone inside his flat is ringing. Who might it be? Ari? One of his sisters, calling with unwanted advice, numbers of grief counsellors, offers of visits?

Still no keys. Is it possible he left them behind? Has he locked himself out?

The phone continues to ring. Daniel tries his coat pockets again, his shirt pocket – nothing. He jumps up and down on the spot, hearing the unmistakable jangle of his keys. Still, the phone rings.

He pats himself all over. There. They’re in the top pocket of his coat. He remembers now transferring them when he was bending to collect the conkers.

He yanks them out, he slots one into the door, he unlocks it, he steps through and, as he does so, the phone falls silent.

Daniel stands for a moment in his hallway. The flat breathes its emptiness at him. He hangs up his coat. He makes his way to bed, flicking off the lights, one by one.

An Unexpected Outcome

Transcript of interview between Timou Lindstrom and a journalist for the
London Courier

Dalsland, Sweden, 2014

LC
: Testing, testing. [
Background noise, some shuffling, throat clearing, the machine switched off then on again, the cry of a bird
.] So, I am sitting here with Timou Lindstrom, by the side of a lake in Dals … how do you say it? … Dalsland?

TL: [
correcting him
]
Dals
land.

LC
: Dalsland.

TL: [
correcting him again
]
Dals
land.

LC
: [
laughs
] OK. Well, moving on. Is it OK if I record this interview?

TL: Of course.

LC
: Great. So, Timou, we are in what I would call the middle of nowhere. We’re surrounded by forests, birds, lakes. We’re sitting outside a small wooden shack. It’s taken me almost two days to reach you. This is where you live now? How come you chose somewhere so remote?