There’s No Place Like Here

23

I spent the next half hour searching the road for my watch, retracing my steps over and over again in my usual obsessive way. I combed the long grass by the sides of the uncultivated fields and dug my hands deep into the soil lining the forest. The watch was nowhere to be seen but this brought a strange kind of comfort to me. My mind instantly erased where I was and all that had happened, and for those few moments I was me again with one goal. Finding. As a ten-year-old I would hunt for a single sock as though it had the value of the rarest diamond in the world, but this time it was different; the watch was worth far more.

Joseph and Helena watched over me worriedly as I uprooted grass followed by sods, in order to find the precious jewel that had clung to my wrist for thirteen years. Its inability to remain where it should have been for too much of that time pretty much tallied with the inconsistency of the relationship with the person who had given it to me. But even those times when it released itself from my clutches and flew off, drawn in the opposite direction to the one I was heading, I always looked out for it and wanted to be near it. That way too, exactly like the relationship.

Helena and Joseph didn’t pretend, as my parents used to when I had a hunting episode. They looked worried and they were right to, because for people who said nothing could or ever had gone missing in this place, they were finding it difficult having to munch on and digest their own words. At least that’s what the obsessive side of me thought. The rational side of me reckoned the more obvious cause for their concern may have just been me, on my hands and knees, covered in dust, dirt, grass stains, and muck.

“I think you should stop looking now,” Helena said with a hint of amusement on her face. “You have lots of people to meet at the Community Hall, not to mention now needing a shower and change of clothes.”

“They can wait,” I said, clawing my way through the grass, feeling soil gathering beneath my fingernails.

“They’ve waited long enough,” Helena said forcefully, “and frankly so have you. Now stop trying to avoid the inevitable and come with me now.”

I stopped clawing. There was the word I was so used to hearing from Gregory’s mouth. Avoid. Stop avoiding things, Sandy… Was that what I was doing? How I could be avoiding things by concentrating fully on one thing and refusing to leave it had always been beyond me; surely avoidance meant walking in the other direction. It was people like Gregory, my parents, and now Helena and Joseph, who were avoiding dealing with the fact that something had gone missing and couldn’t be found. I looked up at Helena, who looked doll-like beside Joseph’s huge frame. “I really need to find that watch.”

“And you will,” she said so easily that I believed her. “Things always show up here. Joseph said he would keep an eye out for you and maybe Bobby will know something.”

“Who’s this Bobby that I keep hearing about?” I asked, getting to my feet.

“He works in Lost and Found,” Helena explained, handing me the luggage I had abandoned in the middle of the road.

“Lost and Found.” I laughed, shaking my head.

“I’m surprised you didn’t end up in the front window,” Helena said gently.

“That’s Amsterdam you’re thinking of,” I smiled.

Her forehead wrinkled. “Amsterdam? What are you talking about?”

Dusting myself off, I left the search scene behind me. “Helena, you have so much to learn.”

“A wonderful piece of advice, coming from someone who spent the last thirty minutes on her hands and knees trawling through muck.”

We left Joseph standing in the middle of the road, hands on his hips, logs and axe by his feet, surveying the dusty path.

I arrived at the Community Hall dressed as Barbara Langley from Ohio. Her legs, it seemed, were far from long and had a penchant for miniskirts and leggings I didn’t even dare try on. The other items she unfortunately missed out on wearing on her New York trip were stripy sweaters with shoulder pads that brushed my earlobes and jackets covered with badges of peace signs, yin-yang emblems, yellow smiley faces, and American flags. I had hated the eighties the first time round; I had no intention of reliving it.

Helena had laughed when she saw me in skin-tight stonewashed jeans that stopped above my ankles, white socks, my own trainers, and a black T-shirt with a yellow smiley face.

“Do you think Barbara Langley was in The Breakfast Club?” I asked, trudging out of the bathroom like a child who had been forced to replace their play clothes with a dress and tights for Sunday dinner of green vegetables aplenty.

Helena looked confused. “I have no idea what clubs she was a member of, although I do see others wearing those kinds of clothes here.”

I ended up doing what I had been convinced I would never resort to, grabbing marginally more decent items of clothing lying alongside the roads as we made our way to the village.

“We can go to Bobby’s afterward.” Helena had tried to cheer me up. “He has a huge collection of clothes to choose from or else there are a few clothes-makers around.”

“I’ll just get some secondhand clothes,” I insisted. “I won’t be here by the time they finish making me a wardrobe.”

She snorted at that, much to my annoyance.

The Community Hall was a magnificent oak building with a large double-door entrance similar to the others. On it were larger-than-life carvings of people gathered together, arms and shoulders touching and hands holding while their hair and clothes flapped in a breeze trapped in the walls of wood. Helena pushed open the twelve-foot-tall doors and the crowd parted for us.

A stage stood at the top of the forty-foot-long hall; all around it on three sides were rows of solid oak chairs and the same above on a second gallery level. A red velvet curtain parted and was held back on both sides by a thick golden rope. On the entire length of the back wall on the stage was a canvas covered in handprints created by hands dipped in black paint. They were all of different sizes, representing different ages from babies to the elderly as they lined up in a row of at least one hundred across and one hundred down. Above it were two words written in many languages, but reading the English I saw that they meant strength and hope. It was so familiar to me.

“They are the handprints of each person that lives and has lived here over the past three years. Each village has the same in its community hall. I suppose it’s our emblem now for here.”

“I recognize it,” I said, thinking aloud.

“Oh no, you couldn’t.” Helena shook her head. “The Community Hall is the only place you’ll see this in the village.”

“No, I recognize it from home. There is a national monument just like it on the grounds of Kilkenny Castle. Each hand was cast from the actual hand of a relative of a missing person. Beside it is a stone with an inscription of the words,” I said, and closed my eyes and recited the inscription I had run my finger over so many times: “This sculpture and area of reflection is dedicated to all missing persons. May all relatives and friends who visit find continuing strength and hope. The cast of your mother’s hand is there.”

Helena looked as though she was holding her breath as she searched my face, waiting for me to somehow announce that I was joking. I didn’t and she exhaled slowly.

“Well, I don’t know what to say.” Her voice shook and she turned to look at it. “Joseph thought it would be a nice idea for everyone to do that.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Wait until he hears what you’ve told me.”

“Wow,” I said, looking around the rest of the building. It was more like a theater than a community hall.

“This seats twenty-five hundred people,” Helena explained, moving on from what I had told her though understandably seeming somewhat distracted. “The chairs are taken out if we need to hold more but it’s very rare that the entire community will attend anything. It’s used for lots of different things such as a ballot hall, a discussion forum between the elected council and the community, art galleries, debates, even a theater on the rare occasions that plays are staged. The list goes on.”

“Who is on the elected council?”

“A representative from each nation in the village. We have over one hundred nations in this village alone and every village has its own council. There are dozens of villages.”

“So what happens at these council meetings?” I asked with amusement.

“The same as everywhere else in the world; everything that needs discussion and decision is discussed and decided.”

“What are the crime levels here?”

“Minimal.”

“How is it kept that way? I don’t recall seeing the long hand of the law patroling the streets on our way here. How is everyone kept on the straight and narrow?”

“There has been a judicial system in place for hundreds of years. We have a courthouse, a rehabilitation institute, and a security council, but getting every nation to abide by the same rules isn’t always easy. The council at least encourages talk and debate.”

“So this is the sounding house? Do they actually have any power?”

“The power that we have vested in them. Everybody gets one of these in their information pack when they arrive.” Helena took a pamphlet from a display on the wall. “You should have got one too, if you bothered to look through your folder. There are voting guidelines.”

I flicked through the pamphlet, reading aloud: “Vote for those with the ability to listen and to make decisions on behalf of the people in a manner reflecting consensus and serving the well-being of all.” I laughed. “What else is preached, two legs good, four legs bad?”

“They are the basics of good leadership.”

“Well, does this pamphlet for how to elect a leader work?” I smirked.

“I should think so.” She made her way over to Joan, who was on the far side of the room. “Seeing as Joseph is on the council.”

My mouth dropped as I watched her cross the room. “Joseph?”

“You seem surprised.”

“Yes, well, I am surprised. He seems so…” I searched for the correct way to explain without offending her. “He’s a carpenter,” I eventually settled on.

“Those on the council are ordinary people with their own day jobs. He’s merely called on to voice decisions when decisions need voicing.”

I couldn’t stop smiling. “I just get the feeling that everybody here is playing ‘House,’ you know? It’s hard to take seriously.” I laughed. “Come on, I mean we’re in the middle of nowhere and you have councils and courthouses and who knows what else?”

“You think it’s funny?”

“Yes!” I smiled. “Everywhere I look everyone’s playing dress-up in other people’s clothes. How can this place, wherever this place is, have any kind of order or rules at all? It exists completely without logic; it lacks all sense of practicality.”

Helena seemed offended at first but then became sympathetic, which I hated. “This is life, Sandy, real life. Sooner or later you’ll discover that nobody’s playing any games here. We’re all just getting on with life and doing what we can to make it as normal as possible, just like everybody else, in every other country, in every other world.” She approached Joan. “How did you get on with Sandy’s list?” she asked, ending our conversation.

Joan looked up in surprise. “Oh, hello, I didn’t hear you both coming. You look”-she gave my eighties outfit the once-over-“different.”

“Did you get in touch with everyone on the list?” I asked, ignoring her disapproving gaze.

“No, not all of them,” she said, glancing down at her page.

“Let me see.” I grabbed her notepad, my body surged with a sudden rush of adrenalin. My eyes scanned through the list of thirty names I had provided her with: fewer than half of them had ticks beside them. Joan continued talking as I read through the names so quickly I was barely able to take them in. My heart beat wildly and skipped a beat each time my eyes registered a name and I realized that person was alive and well and that soon we would be meeting.

“As I was saying,” Joan spoke, angry I had jumped ahead of her story, “Terence at the registry was no help because he couldn’t give out any information unless someone from the council requested it for official reasons.” She eyed Helena warily. “So I had to just ask around the village, but you’ll be pleased to know, Sandy, the Irish community here is so small that everyone knows everyone anyway.”

“Go on,” Helena urged.

“Well, I got in contact with quite a lot of people, twelve in total,” she continued. “Eight are interested in auditioning, the other four said they’d take part in the production in some way but definitely not on stage. But I didn’t get the likes of, let me see…” She put her glasses on and lifted the page.

“Jenny-May Butler.” I finished the sentence for her, my heart plunging into the depths of my stomach.

Helena looked at me, obviously recognizing the name from the time of my collapse.

“Bobby Stanley,” I read another name, my hopes dashed. I continued, “James Moore, Clare Steenson…” The list of untraceable people went on.

“Well, just because they’re not here doesn’t mean they’re not in the next village,” Joan tried reassuring me.

“What are the chances of that?” I asked, feeling hopeful again.

“I won’t lie to you, Sandy. The majority of the Irish community are in this village,” Helena explained. “Five to fifteen people, at most, arrive each year, and because there are so few of us we tend to stick together.”

“So Jenny-May Butler must be here,” I said forcefully. “She has to be here.”

“What about the others on the list?” Joan said in a quiet voice.

I scanned it quickly, Clare and Peter, Stephanie and Simon…I had sat with their relatives long into the night, thumbed through photo albums, and wiped tears through promises of finding their children, brothers, sisters, and friends. If they weren’t here then it meant I could only suspect the worst.

“But Jenny-May.” I started digging into the facts of the case I’d stored in my brain. “There was no one else. Nobody saw anything or anybody.”

Joan looked confused; Helena sad.

“She has to be here. There was nothing sinister at all about her disappearance,” I rambled on to myself. “Unless she’s hiding, or else she’s in another country; I didn’t look into other countries.”

“OK, Sandy, why don’t you just take a seat now? I think you’re burning up,” Helena interrupted.

“I’m not burning up.” I swatted her hand away. “No, she’s not hiding and she can’t be in another country. She’s my age now.” I looked to Joan and everything was clear. “You have to find Jenny-May Butler, tell everyone that she’s my age. She’s thirty-four years old. She’s been here since she was ten, I know it.”

Joan nodded her head quickly, almost afraid to say no. Helena held out her hands toward me, afraid to touch me yet afraid to move away. I noticed the faces of the two women as they watched me. Worried. I quickly sat down and drank from a glass of water Helena had thrust into my hands.

“Is she OK?” I heard Joan ask Helena as they moved away.

“She’s fine,” Helena said calmly. “She just really wanted Jenny-May for the play. Let’s do our best to find her, shall we?”

“I don’t think she’s here,” Joan whispered.

“Let’s look anyway.”

“Can I ask why I was given a list of thirty to find? How does Sandy know they can act? When I contacted them all, they were very surprised. Most of them have never been involved in amateur dramatics. What about all the others who are interested in taking part? They’re still allowed to audition, aren’t they?”

“Of course, everyone’s allowed.” Helena pawned her off. “The people on the list were just special, that’s all.”

Of the two thousand people reported missing in Ireland every year, between five and fifteen will never be found. The thirty people I had chosen were the ones I had spent my entire working life obsessed with finding. Others I had found, others I could give up looking for, knowing something sinister was involved, that harm had sadly come to them or that they’d merely walked away of their own accord. But these thirty on the list, they were the ones who had disappeared without a trace and without reason. These were the thirty who haunted me, the thirty without a crime scene to examine or witnesses to question.

I thought of all their relatives and of how I’d promised I’d find their loved ones. I thought of Jack Ruttle, of how only last week I had made that promise. I thought of how I had failed to show up at our meeting in Glin and how now I had once again failed.

Because according to the list, Donal Ruttle wasn’t here.