There's No Place Like Here (25 page)

She leaned forward and lowered her voice. The man took the hint and went back to reading his magazine.

“It’s usually just a few days each time. The longest was almost two weeks but that was at the beginning. This is by far the longest in a while,” she whispered. “When you find her, tell her to come back to…” She looked sadly at the door to Dr. Burton’s office. “Well, just tell her to come back.”

As quickly as she’d spoken, she stopped, took the watch from the counter, placed it in a drawer, and carried on typing. “Kenneth,” she called, ignoring Jack now. “Dr. Burton will see you now. Go right in.”

It’s difficult beginning a relationship with someone you were never allowed to know anything about.

Our relationship to date had been based on me, and I was finding it hard to make the transition to it suddenly being about the both of us. Every week our meetings were centered on how
I
was feeling, what
I
had done that week, what
I
thought and what
I’d
learned. He was allowed to access my mind whenever he wanted, that was the sole reason for our relationship; for him to delve into my mind and try to figure me out. And to try and stop me from trying to figure him out.

A more serious relationship, a more
intimate
relationship was proving to be the opposite. I had to remember to ask him about him, and to remember that he couldn’t now know everything that was inside my head. Some things had to be held back, for safekeeping, for self-preservation, and in a way, I lost my confidant. The closer we got, the less he knew about me, the more I learned about him.

An hour a week had been intensified and roles had been reversed. Who’d have thought Mr. Burton had a life beyond the four walls of the old school. He knew people and did things that I never knew about; things that I was suddenly allowed to know about but wasn’t sure whether I wanted to. How could a person historically incapable of sharing a bed
and
a head not need to run from all of that? Sure, I went missing for days at a time.

No, the age gap didn’t matter, it had never mattered. The years weren’t the problem; it was the time that was the fault. This new relationship existed without a ticking clock. There was no long hand to dictate the end of a conversation; I could not be saved by the proverbial bell. He could access me at all times. Of course I ran.

There’s a fine line between love and hate. Love frees a soul and in the same breath can sometimes suffocate it. I walked that tightrope with all the gracefulness of an elephant, my head weighing me to the side of hate, my heart hoisting me to the side of love. It was a wobbly journey and sometimes I fell. Sometimes I fell for long periods of time, but never for too long.

Never for as long as this.

I’m not asking to be liked. I’ve never yearned to be liked, nor am I asking to be understood; I’ve never been that, either. When I behaved that way, when I left his bed, let go of his hand, hung up the phone, and closed his door behind me, even
I
had difficulty liking me, understanding me. But it’s just how I was.

How I
was
.

35

B
obby stood at the door of the stockroom, arms folded across his chest, a scowl on his face.

“What?” I scrambled to my feet and towered over him. He didn’t seem so confident now that I’d risen to my full six-foot-one height. He dropped his hands by his sides and looked up at me. “Your name
isn’t
Bobby Stanley?”

“No, according to everybody else here, my name is Bobby Duke,” he said defensively, accusingly, childishly.

“Bobby
Duke
?” I rubbed my face in frustration. “What?” I repeated. “The guy from the cowboy movies? Why?”

“Never mind the
why
.” His face reddened. “I think the issue here is that you are the only one who knows my real name. How?”

“I know your mother, Bobby,” I said softly. “There’s no great mystery, it’s as simple as that.” The past few days had consisted of secrets, mysteries, and little white lies. It was time to stop all that, for now anyway. All I wanted to do was meet the people I had been searching for, tell them all that I knew, and then bring them home. That is what I would do. While contemplating all this I suddenly noticed that Bobby had gone completely silent and had whitened ever so slightly.

“Bobby?” I said.

He didn’t speak, just backed away a little from the doorway.

“Bobby, are you OK?” I asked a little more gently.

“Yeah,” he said, not looking at all OK.

“You’re sure?”

“I kind of knew that,” he said quietly.

“What?”

“I kind of knew that you knew my mum. Not just when I first opened the shop door this morning and you called me Mr. Stanley and not just when everybody from the auditions told me that you knew so much, but I kind of knew when I kept finding all of your things.” He looked beyond me to my lost life, scattered on the floor. “When you’re on your own, you look for signs. Sometimes you make them up, sometimes they’re actually there, but most of the time you can’t tell the difference between the two. I believed in this one the most.”

I smiled. “You’re exactly as she said you’d be.”

His lower lip trembled and he tried to stop it. “Is she OK?”

“Apart from missing you like crazy, she’s OK.”

“Ever since Dad left it was always just her and me. She’s on her own now; I hate that she’s on her own.” His voice went up and down as he tried to control it.

“She’s never alone, Bobby; she has your uncles, aunts, and grandparents. Besides she brings anyone and everyone who’ll listen into her home and goes through photo albums and home videos of you. I don’t think there’s one person in Baldoyle who hasn’t seen you score against St. Kevin’s in the finals.”

He smiled. “We could have won that match had it not been…” His voice trailed off.

I continued for him: “Had it not been for Gerald Fitzwilliam getting injured in the second half.”

He raised his head and looked at me, light in his eyes. “It was Adam McCabe’s fault,” he tutted, and shook his head.

“He should never have been put in midfield,” I said, and he laughed. He laughed that loud, cartoon laugh that I’d heard so many times in the home videos, the laugh that his family spoke about so much. The high-pitched, addictively funny sound that instantly made me giggle.

“Wow,” he said, followed by a breath. “You know her
well
.”

“Bobby, believe me, you don’t need to know your mother well to know that.”

Jack sat in Mary Stanley’s home, drinking coffee and watching home videos of her son, Bobby.

“See this bit here.” Mary inched forward suddenly in her chair, coffee spilling over the side of her mug and falling onto her blue jeans. “Ah.” She jumped back, making a face, and Jack leaped forward thinking she’d burned herself. “That’s where it all went wrong,” she said angrily.

Jack realized she was still referring to the television and he sat back on the couch.

“See him?” she pointed at the TV, spilling coffee again.

“Watch yourself,” Jack warned her.

“I’m fine.” She rubbed her leg without looking. “This is where it all went wrong. We could have won that match had it not been for him.” She pointed again. “Gerald Fitzwilliam, getting injured right there in the second half.”

“Mmm,” Jack replied sipping his coffee and watching the amateur footage of the match jumping up and down on the screen. Most of the time all he could see was a blur of green followed by closeups of Bobby’s head.

“It was Adam McCabe’s fault,” she tutted, and shook her head. “He should never have been put in midfield.”

Bobby brought me up a small winding staircase, which led to his residence above the shop. I sat waiting for him in his living room on an impressive leather couch I imagined somebody had impatiently waited to be delivered, for longer than the average four-to-six-week period. He brought me in a glass of orange juice and a croissant and my ravenous stomach gurgled in thanks.

“I thought everybody was supposed to eat in the eatery,” I said, attacking the fresh croissant, which flaked in my hands.

“Let’s just say the chef has a soft spot for me. She has a son my age back home in Tokyo. She slips me food every once in a while and I occasionally tease her, disgust her, and do other son-like things.”

“Charming,” I murmured, face covered in pastry.

Bobby was staring at me, his food untouched on his plate.

“Whapft?” I said with a mouthful of food. He continued staring and I quickly swallowed. “Is there something on my face?” I felt around.

“I want to hear more,” he said sombrely.

I looked sadly to the remainder of food on my plate, wanting so much to finish it but knowing by the look on Bobby’s face that I owed it to his mother to start talking fast.

“You want to know about your mum?” I washed down the crumbs with orange juice.

“No, I want to know about you.” He got comfortable on the couch while I watched him, suddenly uncomfortable, with my mouth agape.

“I was told you ran an acting agency. Was it through the agency that you became friends with my mum?”

“No, not really.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You don’t run an acting agency do you? You don’t seem like the type.”

My mouth dropped open and I felt oddly insulted. “Why, what
type
of person usually runs an acting agency?”

“People that aren’t like you,” he said, but with a smile. “What do you really do?”

“I search,” I said, smiling. “I hunt.”

“For talent?”

“For people.”

“For talented people?”

“I suppose everybody I look for has a talent of some sort, although I’m not too sure about you.” Bobby looked confused and I decided to drop the awkward humor and place my trust in him. “I run a missing-persons agency, Bobby.”

At first he looked shocked. Then, as the realization hit him, he began to smile, the smile grew into a grin, the grin worked its way into laughter, laughter became the addictively funny sound I knew so well, and then I was laughing too.

Suddenly he stopped. “Are you here to bring us all home or are you just visiting?”

I looked at his hopeful face and immediately felt sad. “Neither. I’m stuck here too, unfortunately.”

At moments when life is at its worst there are two things that you can do: 1) break down, lose hope, and refuse to go on while lying facedown on the ground banging your fists and kicking your legs, or 2) laugh. Bobby and I did the latter.

“OK, here’s what you have to do.
Do not
tell anybody else this news,” Bobby said.

“I haven’t. Apart from Helena and Joseph, nobody else knows.”

“Good. We can trust them. The idea for the play was Helena’s?”

I nodded.

“Clever move.” His eyes glistened mischievously. “Sandy, you really need to be careful. People were talking this morning at the eatery.”

“People don’t usually talk at the eatery?” I joked, tucking into the remainder of my croissant.

“Come on, this is serious. They were talking about you. The group of auditionees must have told their friends and their families here about what you’d told them, who in turn told a few other people, and now
everybody’s
talking.”

“Is it really that bad that they know? I mean, what harm will it do if they all know I used to look for missing people?”

Bobby’s eyes widened. “Are you crazy? The vast majority of people here are settled and wouldn’t go back to their old ways if you paid them, and not just because money is of absolutely no use to them here. But there are a number of people, the kind of people that are how I was when I arrived. These people haven’t found their feet yet because they are still trying to find their way out. Those people will latch onto you like you don’t know what and you’ll be wishing you’d never opened your mouth.”

“Helena said the very same thing to me. Did that happen before?”

“
My god
, did it happen before. Well not
exactly
the same circumstances.” He waved his hand dismissively and dropped the dramatics. “Years ago, before I even arrived here, some old guy claimed that some of his things kept going missing. If you ask me it was his mind more than anything. Well, as soon people heard, there wasn’t a toilet he could go to without company. He was followed absolutely
everywhere
. When he went to the eatery, people flocked to his table; they followed him to the shops and even waited outside his home. It was madness. Eventually he had to give up his job because huge numbers would shadow him.”

“What was his job?”

“He was a postman.”

“A postman? Here?” I screwed up my face.

“What’s so odd about that? We need postmen here more than anywhere. People need to get letters, messages, and packages to others in surrounding villages, because even though we have telephones, televisions, and computers, there’s no network or service on any of them, just static and a lot of fuzz. Anyway he couldn’t keep cycling into villages with a trail of people behind him. Villagers were giving out about it but the people who followed him thought he was miraculously going to find his way out of here.”

“And what happened?” I asked, now on the edge of my seat.

“They all drove him crazy, even more crazy than he already was. There was nowhere he could go in privacy.”

“Where is he now?”

“I dunno.” Bobby appeared suddenly bored by the story. “He disappeared. He’s probably a few towns away or something. Joseph would know, as they were very close. You should ask him.”

A chill entered my body and I shivered.

“Are you cold in here?” Bobby asked, incredulous. “It’s always so hot upstairs, I find. I’m absolutely sweating.” He picked up our plates and glasses.

He may have acted cool, but I saw him. I saw him from the corner of my eye, giving me a long, long look before he exited the room. He wanted to see if his seed had been planted. He needn’t have worried. It had.

36