There’s No Place Like Here

4

When Jenny-May Butler went missing, her final insult was to take a part of me with her. The older I got, the taller I got, the more that hole within me stretched, an abyss that continued to grow as I got older. But how did I physically go missing? How did I get to where I am now? First question, and most important, where am I now?

I’m here and that’s all I know.

I look around and search for familiarity. I wander constantly and search for the road that leads out of here, though there isn’t one. Where is here? I wish I knew. It’s cluttered with personal possessions: car keys, house keys, cell phones, handbags, coats, suitcases adorned with airport baggage tickets, odd shoes, business files, photographs, can 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 those B-movie thrillers and groan every time the credits opened at the early-morning crime scene, the murdered body lying on the ground in workout clothes. 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 naive early-morning jogger, in a gray sweatsuit 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 a canal, 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 center of my chest, and down my back. The cool breeze caused a light shiver to course through my body. Every single time I remember that morning I have to fight the urge to call out and warn myself 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 morning; silent apart from the music from my iPod 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 when I was 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 nevertheless, wasn’t it beautiful and didn’t 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 unhooked 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 playlist had ended on my iPod I looked around and didn’t recognize the landscape. I was surrounded by a thick mist and was so high up in what seemed like a pine-covered mountain. The trees stood erect, like needles at attention, immediately on the defensive the way a hedgehog bristles 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 she’s going for a whole week. I disappear regularly, I lose contact regularly, no one checks up on me. I come and go as I please and I like it that way. I travel a lot to the destinations 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 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 her life without wanting to be found; it happens all the time. If this had happened to me 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: 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 trunk and a missing-persons file, a cup of, by then, cold not-yet-sipped coffee, and a cell phone, probably with missed calls, on the dashboard?

What then?