A Place Called Here. Cecelia Ahern

Washing cars, painting picket fences, weeding the flowerbeds, and mowing lawns on Saturday mornings while surreptitiously looking around the neighbourhood brought shameful thoughts. People were shocked at themselves, angry that this incident had perverted their minds.

      Pointed fingers behind closed doors couldn’t give the Gardaí any leads; they had absolutely nothing to go on but a pretty picture.

      I always wondered where Jenny-May went, where she had disappeared to, how on earth anyone could just vanish into thin air without a trace without someone knowing something.

      At night I would look out my bedroom window and stare at her house. The porch light was always on, acting as a beacon to guide Jenny-May home. Mrs Butler couldn’t sleep any more, and I could see her perpetually perched on the edge of her couch, as though she was on her marks waiting for the pistol to be fired. She would sit in her living room, looking out the window, waiting for someone to call by with news. Sometimes I would wave at her and she’d wave back sadly. Most of the time she couldn’t see past her tears.

      Like Mrs Butler, I wasn’t happy with not having any answers. I liked Jenny-May Butler a lot more when she was gone than when she was here and that also interested me. I missed her, the idea of her, and wondered if she was somewhere nearby, throwing stones at someone else and laughing loudly, but that we just couldn’t find her or hear her. I took to searching thoroughly for everything I mislaid after that. When my favourite pair of socks went missing I turned the house upside down while my worried parents looked on, not knowing what to do but eventually settling on helping me.

      It disturbed me that frequently my missing possessions were nowhere to be found and on the odd time that I did find them, it disturbed me that, in the case of the socks, I could only ever find one. Then I’d picture Jenny-May Butler somewhere, throwing stones, laughing and wearing my favourite socks.

      I never wanted anything new; from the age of ten, I was convinced that you couldn’t replace what was lost. I insisted on things having to be found.

      I think I wondered about all those odd pairs of socks as much as Mrs Butler worried about her daughter. I too stayed awake at night, running through all the unanswerable questions. Each time my lids grew heavy and neared closing, another question would be flung from the depths of my mind, forcing my lids to open again. Much-needed sleep was kept at bay and each morning I was more tired yet none the wiser.

      Perhaps this is why it happened to me. Perhaps because I had spent so many years turning my own life upside down and looking for everything, I had forgotten to look for myself. Somewhere along the line I had forgotten to figure out who and where I was.

      Twenty-four years after Jenny-May Butler disappeared, I went missing too.

      This is my story.

       2

      My life has been made up of a great many ironies. My going missing only added to an already very long list.

      First, I’m six foot one. Ever since I was a child I’ve been towering over just about everyone. I could never get lost in a shopping centre like other kids; I could never hide properly when playing games; I was never asked to dance at discos; I was the only teenager that wasn’t aching to buy her first pair of high heels. Jenny-May Butler’s favourite name for me – well, certainly one of her top ten – was ‘daddy-longlegs’ which she liked to call me in front of large crowds of her friends and admirers. Believe me, I’ve heard them all. I was the kind of person you could see coming from a mile away: I was the awkward dancer on the dance floor, the girl at the cinema that nobody wanted to sit behind, the one in the shop that rooted for the extra-long-legged trousers, the girl in the back line of every photograph. You see, I stick out like a sore thumb. Everyone who passes me, registers me and remembers me. But despite all that, I went missing. Never mind the odd socks, never mind Jenny-May Butler; how a throbbing sore thumb on a hand so bland couldn’t be seen was the ultimate icing on the cake. The mystery that beat all mysteries was my own.

      The second irony is that my job was to search for missing persons. For years I worked as a garda. With a desire to work solely on missing persons cases, but without working in an actual division assigned to these, I had to rest solely upon the ‘luck’ of coming across these cases. You see, the Jenny-May Butler situation really sparked off something inside me. I wanted answers, I wanted solutions and I wanted to find them all myself. I suppose my searching became an obsession. I looked around the outside world for so many clues I don’t think that I once thought about what was going on inside my own head.

      In the Guards sometimes we found missing people in a state I won’t ever forget for the rest of this life and far into the next, and then there were the people who just didn’t want to be found. Often we uncovered only a trace, too often not even that. Those were the moments that drove me to keep looking far beyond my call of duty. I would investigate cases long after they were closed, stay in touch with families long after I should. I realised I couldn’t go on to the next case without solving the previous, with the result that there was too much paperwork and too little action. And so knowing that my heart lay only in finding the missing, I left the Gardaí and I searched in my own time.

      You wouldn’t believe how many people out there wanted to search as much as I did. The families always wondered what my reason was. They had a reason, a link, a love for the missing, whereas my fees were barely enough for me to get by on, so if it wasn’t monetary, what was my motivation? Peace of mind, I suppose. A way to help me close my eyes and sleep at night.

      How can someone like me, with my physical attributes and my mental attitude, go missing?

      I’ve just realised that I haven’t even told you my name. It’s Sandy Shortt. It’s OK, you can laugh. I know you want to. I would too if it wasn’t so bloody heartbreaking. My parents called me Sandy because I was born with a head of sandy-coloured hair. Pity they didn’t foresee that my hair would turn as black as coal. They didn’t know either that those cute podgy little legs would soon stop kicking and start growing at such a fast rate, for so long. So Sandy Shortt is my name. That is who I am supposed to be, how I am identified and recorded for all time, but I am neither of those things. The contradiction often makes people laugh during introductions. Pardon me if I fail to crack a smile. You see, there’s nothing funny about being missing and I realised there’s nothing very different about being missing: every day I do the same as I did when I was working. I search. Only this time I search for a way back to be found.

      I have learned one thing worth mentioning. There is one huge difference in my life from before, one vital piece of evidence. For once in my life I want to go home.

      What bad timing to realise such a thing. The biggest irony of all.

       3

      I was born and reared in County Leitrim in Ireland, the smallest county in the country with a population of about 25,000. Once the county town, Leitrim has the remains of a castle and some other ancient buildings, but it has lost its former importance and dwindled to a village. The landscape ranges from bushy brown hills to majestic mountains with yawning valleys and countless picturesque lakes. But for a two mile coastal outlet on Donegal Bay, Leitrim is all but landlocked, bounded to the west by Sligo and Roscommon, to the south by Roscommon and Longford, to the east by Cavan and Fermanagh, and to the north by Donegal. When there, I feel it brings on a sudden feeling of claustrophobia and an overwhelming desire for solid ground.

      There’s a saying about Leitrim and that is that the best thing to come out of Leitrim is the road to Dublin. I finished school when I was seventeen, applied for the Guards and I eventually got myself on that road to Dublin. Since then I have rarely travelled back. Once every two months I used to visit my parents in the three-bedroom terraced house in a small cul-de-sac of twelve houses where I grew up. The usual intention was to stay for the weekend but most of the time I only lasted a day, using an emergency at work as the excuse to grab my unpacked bag by the door and drive, drive, drive very fast on the best thing to