This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  The girl turned. ‘Oh,’ she said, shaking her hair out of her eyes. ‘Sorry. Dreadful manners. Hi. I’m Cassandra.’

  ‘Hi, Cassandra,’ Suki said, then jabbed him with her pen. ‘Todd, say hello to Cassandra.’

  ‘Hello, Cassandra.’

  Cassandra cut her sandwiches into quarters, arranged them on a plate, then left. They heard her climbing the stairs to the attic. Only minutes later, it seemed, came the muffled crack-crack of the headboard hitting the wall.

  ‘Well,’ Todd said, reaching over to switch on the radio, ‘I guess he likes sandwiches.’

  One night, fuelled by a heat-and-eat macaroni cheese from the corner shop, and some excellent dope from Marrakech, Suki and Todd decided to break into the American’s room. They tiptoed, shushing and nudging each other, up the stairs to the attic. Suki had brought one of her credit cards to slide into the lock but there was no need. The door was ajar. At the sight of a desk chair, draped with an empty leather jacket, Todd lost the impulse for snooping.

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t …’ he began, stepping back to the edge of the small landing, but Suki had pushed the door and walked in.

  There was a long pause. Todd strained his ears for an exclamation, a comment, anything, but Suki, uncharacteriscally, was silent.

  ‘What?’ Todd said. ‘What’s in there?’

  His mind flashed through options – strange sex toys, disturbing pictures, a dead body. His? The American’s? Had he hanged himself, or overdosed and been lying there for days?

  ‘Shit,’ Suki murmured, and Todd could bear it no longer. He pushed through the door, stepping on Suki’s foot and banging into the desk.

  The room was much as Todd had last seen it – low, slanting ceilings, bare window out onto blackened branches. A desk in the corner, a bed squeezed in next to it. But the walls were filled with words. Hundreds of them. Written in slanting black capitals on index cards and tacked to the faded floral wallpaper.

  Villain, was the first one Todd saw, and next to it, animosity. He turned his head. Silly and hierarchy jumped out at him. Next to the door: dizzy, annoy, pagan, profane, doom, fatal.

  Suki padded forward and gave one of the cards a tap with her thumbnail. She let out a long, swooping whistle. ‘Mad,’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’ Todd whispered back.

  ‘Mad as a hatter.’

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Yep. Totally lost it.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Todd whispered. ‘Maybe there’s some … I don’t know … scheme behind it all. I mean—’

  ‘Scheme?’ Suki hissed, pulling her cardigan sleeves down over her hands. ‘Do you see any evidence of schematic thinking in this?’ She gestured around her so violently that the word discreet fluttered to the carpet.

  Todd bent to pick it up, then changed his mind. ‘Perhaps we should—’

  At that moment, they heard the front door slam shut. They leapt towards the landing and hurled themselves down the stairs and into their own rooms, then shut the doors.

  The very next day, coming back from a lustreless seminar with some first years, none of whom had completed the assignment he had set them the previous week, Todd entered the gate and nearly tripped over a figure, hunched over an upturned bicycle.

  ‘Oh,’ Todd said, righting himself by clinging to the low wall. ‘Sorry, didn’t see you there.’

  The person stood. He was wearing an enormous black overcoat, thick-soled workman’s boots and the Mancunian band T-shirt. He had black hair that was shaved at the sides but obscured most of his face; his eyes were an incongruous, startling gas-flame blue.

  Todd experienced a spasm of doubt, of fear. Was this person about to hurt him? Was there any way he could dart around him and reach the door first? Was there any conceivable scenario in which he, Todd, could outrun, outwit, outsmart this person?

  Then the person smiled, whacking Todd on the upper arm in what seemed to be an amiable way, and began to talk: ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you must be Todd. You’re Todd? The elusive Todd. I’ve seen your name on the doorbell and letters and things. Yours and Suki’s. Now, you can tell me this, is it Suki or Sucky? How do you say it? Suki? OK. Got it. So, listen, what can you tell me about bicycle chains? I’ve been grappling with this thing for half an hour and I hate to admit defeat. I thought we were going to be able to work together for a while there but then the fucker went and reneged on me. Are they always like this? I haven’t had a bicycle since sixth grade but they tell me it’s compulsory round here. Kind of like an admission requirement. Hey, are you hungry? I made a whole load of chilli. I’ve got a girl coming over later but I made so much—’

  ‘Cassandra?’ Todd managed to get in.

  ‘Oh,’ Daniel Sullivan pulled a wry face under his heavy, black fringe, ‘no. Cassandra turned out to be very … Well, never mind. This girl I met in the library yesterday. She’s kind of the opposite of Cassandra, in a lot of ways. Sort of big-boned and generous, you know? Anyway. So I made the chilli and … Are you going in? Me too. We’ll go in together.’

  They went into the flat, Todd and Daniel. They ate chilli. Todd explained his thesis to Daniel. Daniel played some of Todd’s vinyl. Todd asked him about the words on the walls and Daniel said he was trying to mine potential patterns in semantic amelioration and pejoration. Todd had no idea what Daniel was talking about and tried to understand as Daniel riffed on attitudes to language change: decay or evolution?

  When the girl turned up, she was dismayed to see that the loquacious American exchange student, who had so charmed her in the library the day before, had a friend with him. A pale, nervy sort of friend who fiddled with the record player, turning up the volume and, when she was speaking, had the unnerving habit of muttering inaudible asides to Daniel, making Daniel smile and occasionally laugh. The whole effect was very off-putting, not to mention the way they both insisted on reading out the words stuck to the walls in medieval English pronunciations. All in all, it was a very disappointing evening, she told her friends later. She would never again accept dinner invitations from strangers in libraries.

  Some weeks into their second term of living with Daniel, Suki marched straight into Todd’s room without knocking and shook him through the blankets.

  ‘You’ll never guess who the penthouse guest was last night,’ she hissed into Todd’s ear.

  ‘Don’t care,’ Todd said blearily, his lids shut tight.

  Suki waited for a moment, then said, ‘Nicola Janks.’

  Todd opened his eyes.

  Nicola Janks was, scandalously, several years older than them. Todd and Suki knew her only by sight – and reputation. She had her own house, her own car, a lectureship, that elusive triumvirate of letters after her name, and a burgeoning sideline career as a media pundit. She stuck out, somewhat, among her rather more conservative colleagues, in whose breasts she elicited paranoia and envy in equal measure. She had written books on gender and society, which were published by mainstream publishers and sold in actual bookshops, not just academic ones. She wrote features for broadsheets. She appeared on the radio and, occasionally, on television, where she said things like ‘the toxicity of accepted phraseology’ and ‘the impossibility of neutrality in the camera’s gaze’ and ‘eating disorders are a cry for autonomy, for gender-role recalibration’. She stalked about the corridors and quadrangles in a swooping black cloak thing, leaving behind her a trail of fascinated and awed undergraduates. Todd had always thought she looked like a crow, albeit a rather glamorous one.

  That she had descended from the heights of proper grown-ups with mortgages and insurance, tenure and television appearances to their dingy flat – and Daniel – was astonishing. What was more astonishing was that she stayed put. She and Daniel cooked dinner together. They went out to films. They drove about town in her little red car. She renamed him ‘Dan’: she would call the flat and ask, ‘Is Dan around?’ The flow of other women through Daniel’s room ceased altogether. Daniel assumed the preoccupation and equanimity of a man
in a permanent adult relationship. He was sober, mostly calm; he worked hard. He was also absent, several nights a week, because he was staying over at Nicola’s.

  On these evenings, Todd would stand in the doorway to Daniel’s abandoned room, pushing the door away from him and letting it swing back, over and over again. This was not a development he had ever expected.

  And then Todd and Suki returned from the cinema one evening to find Daniel at the the kitchen table, already one third into a bottle of whisky. ‘Ever seen the inside of an abortion clinic?’ were the words with which he greeted them. He squinted, as if he was having trouble seeing them, proffering the whisky. ‘Let me tell you,’ he said, taking a swig, ‘it is not a happy place.’

  This was considered by all concerned to be a hiatus, an interval, if you like, in the drama that was Daniel and Nicola. But it turned out that there was one final scene to be played out.

  The next day, apparently still inebriated, Daniel was observed to resume certain old activities. He was seen, haggard and pale of face, making effortful phone calls from the hallway. Todd and Suki assumed he was on the phone to Nicola, who had stayed up in London for a few days to recover with a friend. He apprehended Suki in the kitchen sometime during the afternoon and asked her whether she had ever considered that Pro-Lifers might have a point. Suki said, no, of course I bloody haven’t. And: go to bed, Daniel, sleep it off. Around dinner time, Daniel suddenly disappeared out of the door before Todd could stop him. Todd ran out into the road to call after him, to say, where are you going, come back, but it was too late. Daniel was off, unsteadily, weaving from one side of the road to the other, on the bike that always looked too small for him.

  It was Todd who, later that evening, met him on the stairs. Todd was going down, to see a showing at the repertory cinema, and Daniel was coming up, with a wavy-haired woman from the teacher-training course. They were both drunk and the woman was wearing Daniel’s coat.

  Todd wanted to say, Daniel, stop, what are you doing, think about this. But who ever does, in these situations? There was nothing for him to do but stand to one side, letting his friend and the woman lurch past.

  The following morning played out with all the precision, ill-timing and miscommunication of a farce – or, perhaps, a tragedy. Nicola Janks drove up to the house in her little red car, a day or two earlier than expected. Suki, who happened to be watching from an upstairs window, later said she climbed out of the driver’s seat with a caution and slowness that suggested the act caused her pain. She was coming up the garden path before Suki thought to warn Daniel, by which time he was coming down from his room. As was the trainee teacher.

  Suki was darting out of her bedroom, thinking she could forestall the disaster, get to Daniel in time to warn him, to enable him to put Nicola off until he’d got the wavy-haired woman – whose name no one, afterwards, would ever remember – out of the way. But what was forgotten in the melee was that Daniel had given Nicola a key.

  All parties met on the landing: Nicola coming up from the passageway, Todd and Suki arriving from their rooms, Daniel and the woman descending from his.

  It will be disagreed upon, later, as to what Nicola was carrying. The heavy black-leather bag will be a given but Suki will say it was also a spray of lilies. Todd will insist it was a bag of breakfast groceries – croissants, a baguette, a pot of jam. The kind of things grown-ups buy. Either way, what she is holding, be it flowers, groceries or both, slides to the floor.

  Nicola stares, her arms empty. Her gaze moves from Daniel to the woman and back again. She is deathly white, bloodless. She leans against the wall. Daniel begins to talk and talk, his arms thrashing through the air, his hands raking through his hair. Todd and Suki withdraw to their rooms. The wavy-haired woman bursts into tears. Then she leaves. Nobody tries to stop her. Daniel fetches a chair. Nicola sits down. Then she gets up. She tries to go. Daniel bars her way. He is shouting by this point. Nicola still says nothing, which, everyone later agrees, is not like her. Daniel tries to stop her going down the stairs. It’s only when he puts his hands on her, on her arm, that it happens. She hits him. Right across the face and only once. A crack of a blow, just below his left eye. It is an act done quickly, efficiently. And then Nicola Janks leaves.

  There is a clearing in the trees. Todd has decided some time ago – it is unclear exactly when – that the right thing to do is to walk around its perimeter, around and around. The thick carpet of pine needles has begun to be trodden down in a circular rut, in a way that is pleasing to him.

  Someone has lit a fire. Probably Daniel. He’s good at that sort of thing. He’d been some kind of Scout or whatever it was they had in America, and could tie knots, and build shelters and create emergency stretchers out of coats and branches.

  It was Daniel who started the splinter party in the woods. He had come in here after his conversation with Nicola by the lake and, because he was Daniel, people began to follow him. Where’s Daniel? they said. Where’s he gone? Because they always did. Daniel was one of those people whom others follow. It’s because, Todd has often thought, he doesn’t appear to want or expect it. It just happens.

  People are gathered around the fire: flittering figures and a lull of voices, pierced by the occasional shriek, burst of song or exclamation. Suki had been here – she’s gone now – and Todd has a definite recollection of her saying it was getting much too fucking feral for her liking, and stalking off back to the house, the dragon on her jacket disappearing into the criss-crossing branches of the trees. There are a few people from uni, various hangers-on, boyfriends and girlfriends acquired since graduation. There is a bottle of whisky, which tastes hot, and vodka, which tastes cold. Todd has experimented by taking alternate swallows and shared his insight with Suki, before she left, but she pulled a face and said, take it easy. When he told Daniel, he had leant in to listen, then nodded, very slowly and for a long time.

  There is a ghetto-blaster, which appeared from somewhere, hanging by its handle from a tree, and the firelight seems to leap and flare in time to the heavy beat. The rhythm finds its way into Todd’s very body and he has to stop walking to check that, yes, his pulse is keeping time.

  This seems to him an amazing, revelatory thing.

  Daniel is crashing about in the undergrowth, yanking bits off trees and hurling them onto the fire: branches, leaves, logs. His face is shuttered, intent, wheaten in colour, his suit torn in several places, his hands muddied and cut. The fire is getting larger and larger, the fierce flames reaching up towards the trees above.

  When Todd came upon him and Nicola beside the lake, or loch or whatever it is they call it up here, Daniel had been saying, ‘Jesus, look at you, you’re breaking my heart.’

  Nicola had laughed that throaty laugh of hers. ‘How ironic,’ she’d said, in her brittle, atonal voice. She took a quick, nervy drag of her cigarette. ‘Anyway, it’s nothing.’ She shrugged as she exhaled. ‘Just an old demon reasserting itself. I’ll be right as rain.’

  Daniel put out a hand to touch her but she stepped away.

  ‘And,’ she said, flicking her ash to the ground, ‘you don’t exactly look the picture of health yourself. Been burning the candle at both ends, have you?’

  Daniel scratched his head. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I can well imagine.’

  ‘No,’ Daniel said quietly, ‘I don’t think you can. I’ve been …’ he dragged his hands through his hair ‘… I don’t really know what I’ve been doing. I’m just … My life seems to have been rediverted onto this whole other track. I can’t sleep, I can’t work, I can’t do anything even close to—’

  ‘Poor you,’ Nicola interrupted. ‘Is that what you want me to say? That it must all have been so terribly difficult for you? That—’

  ‘No,’ Daniel cut in. ‘Stop it, Nic. You know I don’t mean that. It’s just that when I look back to that day when … that day in London, when … that day of the … you know …’ he took a deep breath, as if trying to order his tho
ughts ‘… when I look back to that day, I—’

  ‘You know what I feel when I look back to that day?’ Nicola spoke over him, in a tone so low that Todd had to strain to hear.

  Daniel looked at her. ‘What?’

  ‘That I don’t recognise myself. I remember wondering if I was making a huge mistake.’ She throws her cigarette to the ground, turning to address him. ‘If I was doing the wrong thing. I felt so certain, at one point, that I should be keeping it, that I should be binding my life to yours. And now …’ she brought up her hands to her face ‘… now I have to question my judgement, question everything, because I obviously had no inkling of the kind of person you really are. I don’t know how I could have misread you so badly, how I could have failed so spectacularly to see you for what you really are. I can’t believe I ever even considered having a child with someone like you. I look back to that day,’ she said, ‘and ask myself how I could have been so wrong about you.’

  ‘You weren’t,’ Daniel muttered.

  ‘I wasn’t what?’

  ‘Wrong about me. Not then, not that day.’

  She let out a small scoffing noise and turned away. Daniel lowered himself to a rock and, just as Todd knew he would, got out his tin and papers and began rolling himself a cigarette. His movements were deliberate, careful, but his hands, distributing the tufts of tobacco, were shaking.

  It was only when he put the cigarette into his mouth that he spoke: ‘I’m flying back to New York tomorrow.’

  ‘I heard,’ Nicola said, smoothing back her hair. She bent at the knees and selected a pebble from the ground. ‘I’m really sorry about your mother.’ She weighed it in her hands, then tossed it towards the loch.

  There was a moment’s silence, then a splash, out on the water. It made Daniel turn his head.

  ‘Are you coming back?’ she asked, searching for another pebble.

  ‘Of course,’ Daniel said quickly. ‘In a month or so. Maybe two.’

  She must have picked up a handful of stones because Todd could hear her sifting them in her palm. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘perhaps I’ll see you then.’