A Place Called Here. Cecelia Ahern

school friend? I went through the regular checklist in my mind. There was no further recognition on either side. If he wasn’t a previous fling, I was thinking I’d like to make him one.

      ‘Gorgeous.’ I returned the smile.

      His eyebrows rose in surprise first and then fell again, his face settling in obvious pleasure as he understood the compliment. But as much as I would have loved to stay and perhaps arrange a date for sometime in the future, I had a meeting with Jack Ruttle, the nice man I had promised to help, the man I was driving from Dublin to Limerick to see.

      Oh, please, handsome man from the garage that day, please remember me, wonder about me, look for me, find me.

      Yes, I know; another irony. Me, wanting a man to call? My parents would be so proud.

       6

      Jack Ruttle trailed slowly behind an HGV along the N69, the coast road, which led from North Kerry to where he lived in Foynes, a small town in County Limerick, a half-hour’s drive from Limerick city. It was five a.m. as he travelled the only route to Shannon Foynes Port, Limerick’s only seaport. Staring at the speedometer, he telepathically urged the truck to go faster while he gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white. Ignoring the advice of the dentist he had seen just the previous day in Tralee, he began to grind his back teeth. The constant grinding was wearing down his teeth and weakening his gums, causing his mouth to throb and ache. His cheeks were red and swollen, and matched his tired eyes. He’d left the friend’s couch he was sleeping on in Tralee to drive home through the night. Sleep wasn’t coming easily to him these days.

      ‘Are you under any stress?’ the dentist had asked him while studying the inside of Jack’s mouth.

      An open-mouthed Jack had swallowed a curse and fought the urge to clamp his teeth down on the white surgical finger in his mouth. Stressed wasn’t even the word.

      His brother Donal had disappeared on his twenty-fourth birthday after a night out with friends in Limerick city. After a late-night snack of burger and chips in a fast-food café he had separated himself from his friends and staggered off alone. The chipper was too packed for any particular person to be noticed; his four friends were too drunk and too distracted by their attempts to bring a female home for the night to care.

      CCTV showed him taking €30 out of an ATM on O’Connell Street at 3.08 a.m. on a Friday night, and later he was caught on camera stumbling in the direction of Arthur’s Quay. After that, his trail was lost. It was almost like his feet had left the earth and he’d floated up towards the sky. Jack prepared himself for the fact that in a way, maybe he had. His death was a concept he knew he could eventually accept if only there was a shred of evidence to support it.

      It was the not-knowing that tortured him; the worry and fear that kept him awake every night and the inconclusive search of the Gardaí that fuelled his continuous quest. He had combined his trip to the dentist in Tralee with a visit to one of Donal’s friends who had been with him the night he went missing. Like the rest of the crowd that were there that night, he was a person Jack felt like punching and hugging all at the same time. He wanted to shout at him, yet console him for his loss of a friend. He never wanted to see him again, yet he didn’t want to leave his side in case he remembered something – something he’d previously forgotten that would suddenly be the clue they were all looking for.

      He stayed awake at nights looking through maps, rereading reports, double-checking times and statements while, beside him, Gloria’s chest rose and fell with her silent breathing, her sweet breath sometimes blowing the corners of his papers as her sleeping world crept in on his.

      Gloria, his girlfriend of eight years, always slept. She had slept soundly through the entire year of Jack’s horrid nightmare, and still she dreamed. Still she had hopes for tomorrow.

      She had fallen into a deep sleep after hours spent at the garda station, the first day they worried about not hearing from Donal after four days of silence. She slept after the Gardaí had spent the day searching the river for his body. She slept after the day they’d spent hours attaching photos of Donal to shop windows, supermarket notice boards and lampposts. She slept the night they thought they had found his body down an alley in the town and slept the next night when they discovered it wasn’t him. She slept the night the Gardaí said there was nothing more they could do after months of searching. She slept the night of his mother’s funeral, after seeing the coffin of a grief-stricken mother being lowered into the dirt, to join her husband at long last after twenty years in this life without him.

      It frustrated Jack, but he knew it wasn’t a lack of caring that caused Gloria’s lids to close. He knew this because she held his hand when they sat through the questions at the garda station that first time. She stood beside him as the wind and rain lashed at their faces, by the river, watching the divers appear on the surface of the grey murky water with faces more gloomy than when they had disappeared to the world below. She had helped him stick posters of Donal to windows and poles. She had held him tightly when he cried the day the Gardaí stopped looking and she stood in the front row of the church and waited for him while he helped carry his mother’s coffin to the altar.

      She cared all right, but one year on, she still slept at night during the longest hours of his life. The hours when Jack cared most about everything but the hours when, deep in her sleep, Gloria didn’t and couldn’t care at all. Every night he felt the distance grow between her world and his.

      He didn’t tell her about coming across the woman, Sandy Shortt, from the missing persons agency in the Golden Pages. He didn’t tell her he had called her. He didn’t tell her about the late-night phone calls all last week and the new sense of hope this woman’s determination and belief had filled his head and heart with.

      And he didn’t tell her that they had arranged to meet on this very day in the next town because … well, because she was sleeping.

      Jack finally managed to overtake the long vehicles, and as he neared home he found himself alone on the now quiet country road in his twelve-year-old rusting Nissan. The interior of his car was silent. Over the past year he found he was intolerant of unwanted noise; the sound of a TV or a radio in the background was merely a distraction to his pursuit of answers. Inside his mind was manic: shouting, screaming, replays of previous conversations, imaginings of future ones all leaped around his head like a bluebottle trapped in a jam jar.

      Outside the car the engine roared, the metal rattled, the wheels bounced and fell over every pothole and bump in the surface. His mind was noisy in the silent car, his car clattered in the quiet countryside. It was five fifteen on a sunny Sunday morning in July and he needed to stop for air, for his lungs and for the front deflated wheel.

      He pulled over at the deserted petrol station, which would be closed until later in the morning, and parked beside the air pump. He allowed the birdsong to fill his head temporarily and push out his thoughts while he rolled up his sleeves and stretched his limbs from the long journey. The bluebottle momentarily settled.

      Beside him a car pulled up and parked. The population of the area was so small he could spot an alien car a mile away … and the Dublin licence plate gave it away too. Out of the tiny battered car, two long legs dressed in grey sweatpants appeared, followed by a long body. Jack stopped himself from gawking but from the corner of his eye he watched the curly-black-haired woman taking long strides to the coffee dispenser by the door of the shuttered garage. He was surprised that someone of her height could even fit into the small car. He noticed something fall from her hand and heard the sound of metal against the ground.

      ‘Excuse me, you dropped something,’ he called out.

      She looked behind her in confusion and walked back to where the metal was glistening on the ground.

      ‘Thank you,’ she smiled, sliding what looked like a bracelet or a watch onto her wrist.

      ‘No problem. Lovely day, isn’t it?’ Jack felt the pain in his swollen cheeks worsen as they lifted in a smile.

      Her