There’s No Place Like Here

18

Helena and I stepped out of the darkness of the shaded woods and entered a world of color. I held my breath at the sight before me. It was as though grand red curtains had parted to welcome a production on such a scale I could barely focus on one thing for long enough. What welcomed my eyes was an entire bustling village of nations gathering. Some people were walking alone, others gathering in twos, threes, groups, and in crowds. Sights of traditional costumes, sounds of combined languages, scents of cuisines from all over the world. It was rich and alive, bursting at the seams with color and sound as though we’d followed the path of a pulse to reach the heart of the woods. And there it pumped, people flowing here, there, and everywhere.

Sophisticated wooden buildings lined the street with doors and windows decorated with ornate carvings. Each building was constructed from a different timber, the varying shades and grains camouflaging the village so that it and the woods were combined and almost one. Solar panels lined the roofs, and the hundreds of roofs extending into the distance. All around were wind turbines, up to one hundred feet tall, with blades going around and around in the blue skies, their dark shadows circling on rooftops and roadways. The village was nestled among the trees, among mountains, among wind machines. Before me, hundreds of people, dressed in traditional costumes from all eras, lived in a lost place that looked real and smelled real and, when I held out my hand and felt the fabric of someone rush by, felt real. I fought with myself to believe it.

It was a scene I was familiar yet unfamiliar with all at the same time because everything I could see was composed of recognizable elements from home, but used in such very different ways. We hadn’t stepped backward or forward, we had entered a whole new time. A great big melting pot of nations, cultures, design, and sound mixed to create a new world. Children played; market stalls decorated the road and customers swarmed around them. So much color, so many new sounds, unlike any country I’d been in. A sign beside us said HERE.

Helena linked my arm, a gesture I would normally have shrugged off had I not physically needed her to prop me up. I was stunned. I was Ali Baba who’d stumbled across the cave of treasures, Galileo after his discoveries through the telescope. More important, I was a ten-year-old girl who had found all her socks.

“Every day is market day,” Helena explained softly. “Some people like to trade whatever bits they’ve found for things of value. Sometimes they’re of no value at all but it’s become a bit of a sport now. Money is worthless here; all we need is found readily on the streets. There is, however, a requirement to help the village. Our occupations are more in the nature of community service rather than for self-gain-age, health, and other personal reasons permitting.”

I looked around in awe. Helena continued talking softly in my ear, holding my arm as my body shook.

“The turbines are something you will see throughout the land. We have many wind plants, most of them among the mountain gaps that produce wind funnelling. One wind machine can produce enough electricity for up to four hundred homes a year, and the solar panels on the buildings also help generate energy.”

I listened to her but barely heard a word. My ears were tuned in to the conversations around me, to the sounds of the monstrous wind-turbine blades breaking through the air. My nose was adjusting to the crisp freshness that seemed to fill my lungs with cool air in one small breath. My attention turned to the market stall closest to us.

“It’s a mobile phone,” a British gentleman explained to an elderly stall owner.

“What use have I for a mobile phone?” The Caribbean stall owner dismissed him, laughing. “I’ve heard those things don’t even work here.”

“They don’t, but-”

“But nothing. I have been here forty-five years, three months, and ten days.” He held his head high. “And I don’t see how this music box is a fair trade for a phone that doesn’t work.”

The customer stopped fuming and appeared to view him with more respect. “Well, I’ve been here only four years,” he explained politely, “so let me show you what phones can do now.” He held the phone up in the air, pointed it at the stall owner and it made a clicking sound. He showed the screen to the salesman.

“Ah!” He started laughing. “It’s a camera! Why didn’t you say?”

“Well, it’s a camera phone but, even better, look at this. The person who owned it took a whole pile of photos of themselves and whatever country they live in.” He scrolled down the phone.

The stall owner handled it gently.

“Somebody here might know these people,” the customer said softly.

“Ah, yes, mon,” the salesman replied gently, nodding. “This is very precious indeed.”

“Come on, let’s go,” Helena whispered, leading me by the arm.

I began to move as though on autopilot, looking around open-mouthed at all the people. We passed the customer and stall owner; they both nodded and smiled. “Welcome.”

I just stared back.

Two children playing hopscotch stopped their game on hearing the men’s salutation. “Welcome.” They both gave me toothless grins.

Helena led me through the crowd, through the choruses of welcomes, the nods and smiles of well-wishers. Helena acknowledged them all politely for me. We walked across the street toward the large wooden two-story building with a decked porch across the front. An intricate carving of a scroll and theatrical feathered pen decorated the door. Helena pushed the door open and the scroll and feather halved as though bowing and holding out their arms to make way for us.

“This is the registry. Everyone comes here when they first arrive,” Helena explained patiently. “Everybody’s name and details are logged in these books so that we can keep track of who is who and how many people are here.”

“In case anybody goes missing,” I said smartly.

“I think you’ll find that nothing goes missing here, Sandy.” Helena was serious. “Things have no place else to go and so they stay here.”

I ignored the chill of her implication and instead tried unsuccessfully to inject humor into the situation. “What will I do with myself if I’ve nothing to look for?”

“You’ll do what you’ve always wanted; you’ll seek out those you searched for. Finish the job you started.”

“Then what?”

She was silent.

“Then you’ll help me get home, right?” I asked rather forcefully.

She didn’t respond.

“Helena,” a cheery fellow called out from where he was sitting behind a desk. On the desk a series of numbers was displayed. Beside the main door there was a board with all the countries of the world, their associated languages, some of which I’d never even heard of, and their corresponding numbers. I matched one of the numbers on his desk to a familiar one on the board. COUNTRY: IRELAND. LANGUAGES: GAELIC, ENGLISH.

“Hello, Terence.” Helen seemed glad of the interruption to our conversation.

It was then that I looked around the room for the first time. There were dozens of desks in the large room. Each desk had a series of numbers and behind each desk sat a person of a different nationality. Lines had formed before the tables. The room was quiet and filled with the tension of hundreds of people who had just arrived, who couldn’t yet comprehend their situation. They each looked around the room nervously with wide, terrified eyes as they hugged their own bodies for comfort.

I noticed Helena had joined Terence at his desk.

He looked up as I approached them. “Welcome.” He smiled softly. I sensed sympathy in the older man’s voice, and his accent revealed his Irish roots.

“Sandy, this is Terence O’Malley. Terence, this is Sandy. Terence has been here for…oh gosh, how many years has it been now, Terence?” Helena asked him.

Eleven years, I thought.

“Almost eleven years now,” he replied with a smile.

“Terence worked as a-”

“Librarian in Ballina,” I cut in before even thinking about it. Ten years on, he was still recognizable as the single, fifty-five-year-old librarian who had disappeared on his way home from work eleven years ago.

Helena froze and Terence looked confused.

“Oh yes, I told you that before we came in,” Helena jumped in. “Silly me. I must be getting old, repeating myself like that.” She laughed.

“I know the feeling.” Terence laughed, pushing his sliding spectacles back up his nose.

I’d always thought his nose was exactly like his sister’s. I studied it some more.

“Well.” Terence began to fidget under my glare and he turned to Helena for backup, “Let’s get down to business now, shall we. If you wouldn’t mind taking a seat, Sandy, I’ll help you go through this form, it’s very simple really.”

As I took a seat before the desk I looked at the lines around me; to my right a woman was helping a young boy onto the chair before her desk. “Permettimi di aiutarti a sederti e mi puoi raccontare tutto su come sei arrivato fin qui. Avresti voglia di un po’ di latte con biscotti?”

He looked at her with big brown eyes, as lost as a puppy, and nodded. She nodded to someone behind her, who disappeared through a door behind the desk and returned moments later with a glass of milk and a plate of cookies.

To my right, a bewildered-looking gentleman stepped up to the front of the line. The man at the desk, name tag reading “MARTIN,” smiled at him encouragingly, “Nehmen Sie doch Platz, bitte, dann helfe ich Ihnen mit den Formularen.”

“Sandy.” Terence and Helena were calling me, trying to get my attention.

“Yes, what, sorry.” I snapped out of my trance.

“Terence was asking you where you are from.”

“Leitrim.”

“Is that where you lived?”

“No. Dublin.” I looked around as more people were led into the room looking dazed.

“And you went missing in Dublin,” Terence confirmed.

“No. Limerick.” My voice was quiet as all the thoughts in my head got louder and louder.

“…you know Jim Gannon…Leitrim town?…”

“Yes,” I replied, watching a young African woman draping her ochre-colored blanket tighter around her body as she looked around at her strange surroundings in fear. Armbands of copper, weaved grasses, and beads decorated her skin. We locked eyes for a moment before she quickly looked away and I continued speaking to Terence as though I wasn’t really there. “Jim owns the hardware store. His son taught me geography.”

Terence laughed happily about it being a small world.

“A lot bigger than I thought,” I replied, my voice sounding like it was coming from somewhere else.

Terence’s voice came and went in my head as I looked around at all the faces, all the people who had one moment ago been on their way to work, or walking to the shop, and who had suddenly found themselves here.

“…for a living?”

“She’s involved in theatre, Terence, she runs an acting agency.”

Some more mumbling as I tuned out.

“…is that right, Sandy? You run an agency of your own?”

“Yes,” I said absentmindedly, watching as the little boy beside me was led by the hand through a door behind the Italian registry desk.

He watched me with big worried eyes all the way. I smiled at him lightly and his frown softened. The door was closed behind him.

“Where does that door lead?” I asked suddenly in the middle of one of Terence’s questions.

He stopped. “Which door?”

I looked around the room and noticed for the first time there was a door behind each desk.

“All of them. Where do they all lead to?” I asked faintly.

“That’s where people are briefed on what we know, where we are, and what happens here. There’s counseling services and employment opportunities, and we arrange for somebody from here to come to greet them so that they can guide them around for however long they’re needed.”

I looked at the large solid-oak doors and didn’t say anything.

“As you have already met Helena, she will be your guide,” Terence said gently. “Now we’ll just get through the last of these questions and then you can get out of here, which I’m sure you’re anxious to do.”

The main door opened and sunlight filled the room again. Terence had asked me another question, but I was distracted by the person in the doorway. I watched as a young girl, no older than ten, with soft, bouncing blond curls and big blue eyes walked into the room. She sniffled and wiped her eyes, following the guide who led her into the room.

“Jenny-May,” I whispered, my head becoming dizzy again.

“And your brother’s name?” Terence asked working his way down the form.

“No, hold on a minute, she doesn’t have a sister,” Helena interrupted. “She told me earlier she was an only child.”

“No, no,” Terence sounded slightly agitated, “I asked her if she had any sisters and she said Jenny-May.”

“She mustn’t have heard you correctly, Terence,” Helena said calmly, and the rest of their sentences turned to murmuring in my ears.

My eyes continued to follow the little girl as she was led through the room; my heart beat faster just as it always did when Jenny-May Butler was within a few feet of me.

“Maybe you could clear this up.” Terence looked at me. His face appeared and faded from my vision.

“Maybe she’s not well, Terence. In fact she looks very pale.” Helena’s voice was close to my ear now. “Sandy, would you like to-”

That’s when I passed out.