A Place Called Here

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I look around and search for familiarity. I wander constantly and search for the road that leads out of here but there isn’t one. Where is here? I wish I knew. It’s cluttered with personal possessions: car keys, house keys, mobile phones, handbags, coats, suitcases adorned with airport baggage tickets, odd shoes, business files, photographs, tin openers, scissors, earrings scattered among the piles of missing items that glisten occasionally in the light. And there are socks, lots of odd socks. Everywhere I walk, I trip over the things that people are probably still tearing their hair out to find.

There are animals too. Lots of cats and dogs with bewildered little faces and withering whiskers, no longer identical to their photos on small-town telephone poles. No offers of rewards can bring them back.

How can I describe this place? It’s an in-between place. It’s like a grand hallway that leads you nowhere, it’s like a banquet dinner of leftovers, a sports team made up of the people never picked, a mother without her child, it’s a body without its heart. It’s almost there but not quite. It’s filled to the brim with personal items yet it’s empty because the people who own them aren’t here to love them.

How did I get here? I was one of those disappearing joggers. How pathetic. I used to watch all those B-movie thrillers and groan every time the credits opened at the early morning crime scene of a murdered jogger. I thought it foolish that women went running down quiet alleyways during the dark hours of the night, or during the quiet hours of the early morning, especially when a known serial killer was on the prowl. But that’s what happened to me. I was a predictable, pathetic, tragically naïve early morning jogger, in a grey sweat suit and blaring headphones, running alongside a canal in the very early hours of the morning. I wasn’t abducted, though; I just wandered onto the wrong path.

I was running along an estuary, my feet pounding angrily against the ground as they always did, causing vibrations to jolt through my body. I remember feeling beads of sweat trickling down my forehead, the centre of my chest and down my back. The cool breeze combined to cause a light shiver to embrace my body. Every single time I remember that morning I have to fight the urge to call out to myself and warn me not to make the same mistake. Sometimes in that memory, on more blissful days, I stay on the same path, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. How often we wish we’d stayed on the same path.

It was five forty-five on a bright summer’s morning; silent apart from the theme tune to Rocky spurring me on. Although I couldn’t hear myself I knew my breathing was heavy. I always pushed myself. Whenever I felt I needed to stop I made myself run faster. I don’t know if it was a daily punishment or the part of me that was keen to investigate, to go new places, to force my body to achieve things it had never achieved before.

Through the darkness of the green and black ditch beside me, I spotted a water-violet up ahead, submerged. I remember my dad telling me as a little girl, lanky, with black hair, and embarrassed by my contradictory name, that the water-violet was misnamed too because it wasn’t violet at all. It was lilac-pink with a yellow throat but even still, wasn’t it beautiful and did that make me want to laugh? Of course not, I’d shaken my head. I watched it from far away as it got closer and closer, telling it in my mind, I know how you feel. As I ran I felt my watch slide off my wrist and fall against the trees on the left. I’d broken the clasp of the watch the very first moment I’d wrapped it around my wrist and since then it occasionally unlatched itself and fell to the floor. I stopped running and turned back, spotting it lying on the damp estuary bank. I leaned my back against the rugged dark brown bark of an alder and, while taking a breather, noticed a small track veering off to the left. It wasn’t welcoming, it wasn’t developed as a rambler’s path but my investigative side took over; my enquiring mind told me to see where it led.

It led me here.

I ran so far and so fast that by the time the play-list had ended on my iPod I looked around and didn’t recognise the landscape. I was surrounded by a thick mist and was high up in what seemed like a pine-tree-covered mountain. The trees stood erect, needles to attention, immediately on the defensive like a hedgehog under threat. I slowly lifted the earphones from my ears, my panting echoing around the majestic mountains, and I knew immediately that I was no longer in the small town of Glin. I wasn’t even in Ireland.

I was just here. That was a day ago and I’m still here.

I’m in the business of searching and I know how it works. I’m a woman who packs her own bags and doesn’t tell anyone where I’m going for a straight week in my life. I disappear regularly, I lose contact regularly, no one checks up on me and I like it that way. I like to come and go as I please. I travel a lot to the destinations of where the missing were last seen, I check out the area, ask around. The only problem was, I had just arrived in this town that morning, driven straight to the Shannon Estuary and gone for a jog. I’d spoken to no one, hadn’t yet checked into a B & B, nor walked down a busy street. I know what they’ll be saying, I know I won’t even be a case – I’ll just be another person that’s walked away from my life without wanting to be found; it happens all the time – and this time last week they probably would have been right.

I’ll eventually belong to the category of disappearance where there is no apparent danger to either the missing person or the public: for example, persons aged eighteen and over who have decided to start a new life. I’m thirty-four, and in the eyes of others have wanted out for a long, long time now.

This all means one thing: that right now nobody out there is even looking for me.

How long will that last? What happens when they find the battered, red 1991 Ford Fiesta along the estuary with a packed bag in the boot, a missing persons file on the dashboard, a cup of, by then, cold not yet sipped coffee and a mobile phone, probably with missed calls, on the car seat?

What then?

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Wait a minute.

The coffee. I’ve just remembered the coffee.

On my journey from Dublin, I stopped at a closed garage to get a coffee from the outside dispenser and he saw me; the man filling his tyres with air saw me.

It was out in the middle of nowhere, in the midst of the countryside at five fifteen in the morning when the birds were singing and the cows mooing so loudly I could barely hear myself think. The smell of manure was thick but sweetened with the scent of honeysuckle waving in the light morning breeze.

This stranger and I were both so far from everything but yet right in the middle of something. The mere fact that we were both so completely disconnected from life was enough for our eyes to meet and feel connected.

He was tall but not as tall as I; they never are. Five eleven, with a round face, red cheeks, strawberry-blond hair, and bright blue eyes I felt I’d seen before, which looked tired at the early hour. He was dressed in a pair of worn-looking blue denims, his blue and white check cotton shirt crumpled from his drive, his hair dishevelled, his jaw unshaven, his gut expanding as his years moved on. I guessed he was in his mid-to-late thirties, although he looked older, with stress lines along his brow and laughter lines … no, I could tell from the sadness emanating from him that they weren’t from laughter. A few grey hairs had crept into the side of his temples, fresh on his young head, every strand the result of a harsh lesson learned. Despite the extra weight he looked strong, muscular. He was someone who did a lot of physical work, my assumption backed up by the heavy work boots he wore. His hands were large, weather-beaten but strong. I could see the veins on his forearms protruding as he moved, his sleeves rolled up messily to below his elbows as he lifted the air pump from its stand. But he wasn’t going to work, not dressed like that, not in that shirt. For him this was his good wear.

I studied him as I made my way back to my car.

‘Excuse me, you dropped something,’ he called out.

I stopped in my tracks and looked behind me. There on the tarmac sat my watch, the silver glistening under the sun. Bloody watch, I mumbled, checking to see that it wasn’t damaged.

‘Thank you,’ I smiled, sliding it back onto my wrist.

‘No problem. Lovely day, isn’t it?’

A familiar voice to match the familiar eyes. I studied him for a while before answering. Some guy I’d met in a bar previously, a drunken fling, an old lover, a past colleague, client, neighbour or school friend? I went through the regular checklist in my mind. There was no further recognition on either side. If he wasn’t a previous fling, I was thinking I’d like to make him one.

‘Gorgeous.’ I returned the smile.

His eyebrows rose in surprise first and then fell again, his face settling in obvious pleasure as he understood the compliment. But as much as I would have loved to stay and perhaps arrange a date for sometime in the future, I had a meeting with Jack Ruttle, the nice man I had promised to help, the man I was driving from Dublin to Limerick to see.

Oh, please, handsome man from the garage that day, please remember me, wonder about me, look for me, find me.

Yes, I know; another irony. Me, wanting a man to call? My parents would be so proud.

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Jack Ruttle trailed slowly behind an HGV along the N69, the coast road, which led from North Kerry to where he lived in Foynes, a small town in County Limerick, a half-hour’s drive from Limerick city. It was five a.m. as he travelled the only route to Shannon Foynes Port, Limerick’s only seaport. Staring at the speedometer, he telepathically urged the truck to go faster while he gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white. Ignoring the advice of the dentist he had seen just the previous day in Tralee, he began to grind his back teeth. The constant grinding was wearing down his teeth and weakening his gums, causing his mouth to throb and ache. His cheeks were red and swollen, and matched his tired eyes. He’d left the friend’s couch he was sleeping on in Tralee to drive home through the night. Sleep wasn’t coming easily to him these days.

‘Are you under any stress?’ the dentist had asked him while studying the inside of Jack’s mouth.

An open-mouthed Jack had swallowed a curse and fought the urge to clamp his teeth down on the white surgical finger in his mouth. Stressed wasn’t even the word.

His brother Donal had disappeared on his twenty-fourth birthday after a night out with friends in Limerick city. After a late-night snack of burger and chips in a fast-food café he had separated himself from his friends and staggered off alone. The chipper was too packed for any particular person to be noticed; his four friends were too drunk and too distracted by their attempts to bring a female home for the night to care.

CCTV showed him taking €30 out of an ATM on O’Connell Street at 3.08 a.m. on a Friday night, and later he was caught on camera stumbling in the direction of Arthur’s Quay. After that, his trail was lost. It was almost like his feet had left the earth and he’d floated up towards the sky. Jack prepared himself for the fact that in a way, maybe he had. His death was a concept he knew he could eventually accept if only there was a shred of evidence to support it.

It was the not-knowing that tortured him; the worry and fear that kept him awake every night and the inconclusive search of the Gardaí that fuelled his continuous quest. He had combined his trip to the dentist in Tralee with a visit to one of Donal’s friends who had been with him the night he went missing. Like the rest of the crowd that were there that night, he was a person Jack felt like punching and hugging all at the same time. He wanted to shout at him, yet console him for his loss of a friend. He never wanted to see him again, yet he didn’t want to leave his side in case he remembered something – something he’d previously forgotten that would suddenly be the clue they were all looking for.

He stayed awake at nights looking through maps, rereading reports, double-checking times and statements while, beside him, Gloria’s chest rose and fell with her silent breathing, her sweet breath sometimes blowing the corners of his papers as her sleeping world crept in on his.

Gloria, his girlfriend of eight years, always slept. She had slept soundly through the entire year of Jack’s horrid nightmare, and still she dreamed. Still she had hopes for tomorrow.

She had fallen into a deep sleep after hours spent at the garda station, the first day they worried about not hearing from Donal after four days of silence. She slept after the Gardaí had spent the day searching the river for his body. She slept after the day they’d spent hours attaching photos of Donal to shop windows, supermarket notice boards and lampposts. She slept the night they thought they had found his body down an alley in the town and slept the next night when they discovered it wasn’t him. She slept the night the Gardaí said there was nothing more they could do after months of searching. She slept the night of his mother’s funeral, after seeing the coffin of a grief-stricken mother being lowered into the dirt, to join her husband at long last after twenty years in this life without him.

It frustrated Jack, but he knew it wasn’t a lack of caring that caused Gloria’s lids to close. He knew this because she held his hand when they sat through the questions at the garda station that first time. She stood beside him as the wind and rain lashed at their faces, by the river, watching the divers appear on the surface of the grey murky water with faces more gloomy than when they had disappeared to the world below. She had helped him stick posters of Donal to windows and poles. She had held him tightly when he cried the day the Gardaí stopped looking and she stood in the front row of the church and waited for him while he helped carry his mother’s coffin to the altar.

She cared all right, but one year on, she still slept at night during the longest hours of his life. The hours when Jack cared most about everything but the hours when, deep in her sleep, Gloria didn’t and couldn’t care at all. Every night he felt the distance grow between her world and his.

He didn’t tell her about coming across the woman, Sandy Shortt, from the missing persons agency in the Golden Pages. He didn’t tell her he had called her. He didn’t tell her about the late-night phone calls all last week and the new sense of hope this woman’s determination and belief had filled his head and heart with.

And he didn’t tell her that they had arranged to meet on this very day in the next town because … well, because she was sleeping.

Jack finally managed to overtake the long vehicles, and as he neared home he found himself alone on the now quiet country road in his twelve-year-old rusting Nissan. The interior of his car was silent. Over the past year he found he was intolerant of unwanted noise; the sound of a TV or a radio in the background was merely a distraction to his pursuit of answers. Inside his mind was manic: shouting, screaming, replays of previous conversations, imaginings of future ones all leaped around his head like a bluebottle trapped in a jam jar.

Outside the car the engine roared, the metal rattled, the wheels bounced and fell over every pothole and bump in the surface. His mind was noisy in the silent car, his car clattered in the quiet countryside. It was five fifteen on a sunny Sunday morning in July and he needed to stop for air, for his lungs and for the front deflated wheel.

He pulled over at the deserted petrol station, which would be closed until later in the morning, and parked beside the air pump. He allowed the birdsong to fill his head temporarily and push out his thoughts while he rolled up his sleeves and stretched his limbs from the long journey. The bluebottle momentarily settled.

Beside him a car pulled up and parked. The population of the area was so small he could spot an alien car a mile away … and the Dublin licence plate gave it away too. Out of the tiny battered car, two long legs dressed in grey sweatpants appeared, followed by a long body. Jack stopped himself from gawking but from the corner of his eye he watched the curly-black-haired woman taking long strides to the coffee dispenser by the door of the shuttered garage. He was surprised that someone of her height could even fit into the small car. He noticed something fall from her hand and heard the sound of metal against the ground.

‘Excuse me, you dropped something,’ he called out.

She looked behind her in confusion and walked back to where the metal was glistening on the ground.

‘Thank you,’ she smiled, sliding what looked like a bracelet or a watch onto her wrist.

‘No problem. Lovely day, isn’t it?’ Jack felt the pain in his swollen cheeks worsen as they lifted in a smile.

Her green eyes sparkled like emeralds against her snow-white skin and glinted as they caught the sunlight streaming through the tall trees. Her jet-black curls twirled around her face playfully, revealing parts of her features, hiding others. She looked him up and down, taking him in as though analysing every inch of him. Finally she raised an eyebrow. ‘Gorgeous,’ she replied, and returned the smile. She, her jet-black curly hair, the Styrofoam cup of coffee, legs and all, disappeared into the tiny car like a butterfly into a Venus flytrap.

Jack watched the Ford Fiesta drive into the distance, wanting her to have stayed, and once again he noted how things between him and Gloria, or perhaps just his feelings for her, were changing. But he hadn’t time to think about that now. Instead he returned to his car and leafed through his files in preparation for his meeting later that morning with Sandy Shortt.

Jack wasn’t religious; he hadn’t been to church for over twenty years. In the last twelve months he had prayed three times. Once for Donal not to be found when they were searching the river for his body, the second time for the body in the alley not to be him, and the third time for his mother to survive her second stroke in six years. Two out of three prayers had been answered.

He prayed again today for the fourth time. He prayed for Sandy Shortt to take him from the place he was in and to be the one to bring him the answers he needed.

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The porch light was still on when Jack arrived home. He insisted on it being left on all night for Donal’s sake, as a beacon to guide his brother home. He turned it off now that it was bright outside and tiptoed around the cottage quietly, careful not to wake Gloria, who was enjoying her Sunday lie-in. Scouring through the linen basket of dirty clothes, he grabbed the least crumpled garment he could find and quickly changed out of one check shirt and into another. He hadn’t washed as he didn’t want the electric shower and ceiling fan in the bathroom to wake her. He’d even held back from flushing the toilet. He knew it wasn’t his overflowing generosity that was causing him to behave that way and yet he couldn’t quite summon the shame in knowing that it was exactly the opposite. He was deliberately keeping his meeting with Sandy Shortt a secret from Gloria and the rest of his family.

It was as much to help them as it was to help him. In their hearts, they were beginning to move on. They were trying their utmost to settle back into their lives after the major upheaval and upset of suffering the loss of not one but two family members in one year. Jack understood their positions, they had all reached a point where no more days off work could be taken, sympathetic smiles were being replaced by everyday greetings, and conversations with neighbours were returning to normal. Imagine, people were actually talking about other things and not asking questions or offering advice. Cards filled with comforting words had stopped landing on his doormat. People had gone back about their own lives, employers had moved around shifts as much as possible and now it was back to business for all concerned. But to Jack it felt wrong and awkward for life to resume without Donal.

Truthfully it wasn’t Donal’s absence that held Jack back from joining his family in bravely carrying on with the rest of his life. Of course he missed him but, as with the death of his mother, he could and would eventually get through the grief. Instead it was the mystery that surrounded his disappearance; all the unanswered questions left question marks dotting his vision like the aftermath of flash photography.

He closed the door behind him to the cluttered one-bedroom bungalow where he and Gloria had lived for five years. Just like his father, Jack had worked as a cargo handler at Shannon Foynes Port his entire working life.

He had chosen Glin village, thirteen kilometres west of Foynes, for the meeting with Sandy Shortt as it was a place none of his family inhabited. He sat in a small café at nine a. m., a half-hour before they were due to meet. Sandy had said on the phone that she was always early and he was eager, fidgety and more than willing to give this fresh idea a go. The more time they had together, the better. He ordered a coffee and stared at the most recent photograph of Donal on the table before him. It had been printed in almost every newspaper in Ireland and seen on notice boards and shop windows for the past year. In the background of the photo was the fake white Christmas tree his mother had set up in the living room every year. The baubles caught the flash of the camera and the tinsel twinkled. Donal’s mischievous smile grinned up at Jack as though he was taunting him, daring him to find him. Donal had always loved playing hide-and-seek as a child. He would stay hidden for hours if it meant winning. Everyone would become impatient and declare loudly that Donal was the winner just so that he could leave his place with a proud beaming smile. This was the longest search Jack had ever endured and he wished his brother would come out of his hiding place now, show himself with that proud smile and end the game.

Donal’s blue eyes, the only similar feature between the two brothers, sparkled up at Jack and he almost expected him to wink. No matter how long and hard he had stared at the photograph, he couldn’t inject any life into it. He couldn’t reach into the print and pull his brother out; he couldn’t smell the aftershave he used to engulf himself in, he couldn’t ruffle his brown hair and ruin his hairstyle as he annoyingly had, and he couldn’t hear his voice as he helped their mother around the house. One year on he could still remember the touch and smell of him, though unlike the rest of his family, to him the memory alone wasn’t enough.

The photo had been taken the Christmas before last, just six months before he went missing. Jack used to call round to his mother’s house once a week, where Donal was the only one of six siblings who remained living there. Apart from the habitual short casual conversations between Jack and Donal that lasted for no more than two minutes at a time, that Christmas was the last occasion Jack had spoken to Donal properly. Donal had given him the usual present of socks and Jack had given him the box of handkerchiefs his oldest sister had given him the year before. They’d both laughed at the thoughtlessness of their gifts.

That day, Donal had been animated, happy with his new job as a computer technician. He’d begun it in September after graduating from Limerick University; a ceremony at which their mother had almost toppled off her chair such was the weight of her pride for her baby. Donal had spoken confidently about how he enjoyed the work and Jack could see how much he had matured and become more comfortable after leaving student life behind.

They had never been particularly close. In the family of six children, Donal was the surprise baby, nobody more surprised than their mother, Frances, who was forty-seven at the time she learned of the pregnancy. Being twelve years older than Donal meant that Jack had moved out of home by the time Donal was six. He lost out in knowing the secret sides to his brother that only living with someone brought, and so for eighteen years they had been brothers, but not friends.

Jack wondered, not for the first time, if he had known Donal better, whether he could have solved part of the mystery. Maybe if he’d worked harder at getting to know his little brother or had had more conversations about something rather than nothing, then perhaps he could have been out with him on the night of his birthday. Maybe he could have prevented him from leaving that fast-food restaurant or maybe he could have left with him and shared a taxi.

Or maybe Jack would have found himself in the same place as Donal was right now. Wherever that place was.

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Jack slugged back his third cup of coffee and looked at his watch.

Ten fifteen.

Sandy Shortt was late. His legs bounced up and down nervously beneath the table, his left hand drummed on the wood and his right hand signalled for another coffee. His mind stayed positive. She was coming. He knew she would come.

Eleven a.m., he tried calling her mobile number for the fifth time. It rang and rang and finally, ‘Hello, this is Sandy Shortt. Sorry I’m not available at the moment. Leave a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.’ Beep.

Jack hung up.

Eleven thirty, she was two hours late, and once again Jack listened to the voice message Sandy had left the previous night.

‘Hi, Jack, Sandy Shortt here. I’m ringing to confirm our meeting tomorrow at nine thirty a.m. in Kitty’s Café in Glin. I’m driving down tonight.’ Her tone softened. ‘As you know, I don’t sleep,’ she laughed lightly, ‘so I’ll be there early tomorrow. After all our conversations I look forward to finally speaking to you in person. And, Jack,’ she paused, ‘I promise you I’ll do my best to help you. We won’t give up on Donal.’

Twelve o’clock, Jack played it again.

At one o’clock, after countless cups of coffee, Jack’s fingers stopped drumming and instead made a fist for his chin to rest on. He had felt the café owner’s gaze on his back as he sat for hours waiting nervously, watching the clock and not giving up his table to a group willing to spend more money than he. Tables filled and emptied around him, his head snapped up every time the bell over the door rang. He didn’t know what Sandy Shortt looked like; all she had said was that he couldn’t miss her. He didn’t know what to expect but each time the bell tinkled, his head and his heart both lifted with hope and then fell as the newcomer’s gaze flitted past him and settled on another.

At two thirty, the bell rang once more.

After five and a half hours waiting, it was the sound of the door opening and closing behind Jack.