A Place Called Here. Cecelia Ahern
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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?
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