A Place Called Here

  I had noticed. The atmosphere was relaxed; people were peaceful and went about their daily duties efficiently yet without rushing or panic. There was room to breathe, space to think, time to spend wisely, and lessons to be learned. People who were once lost took time to reflect, to love, to miss, and to remember. Belonging was important, even if it meant joining a hopeless play.

  “Won’t Joseph mind that he can’t take part?”

  Helena laughed. “Oh, I don’t think that will worry him in the slightest.”

  “Joseph is from Kenya?”

  “Yes.” We began walking back toward the village. “Along the coast of Watamu.”

  “What was it he called me yesterday?”

  Helena’s expression changed and I knew she was feigning ignorance. “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, Helena, I saw your face when he called me it, you were surprised. I can’t remember the word, kalla…kappa something; what does it mean?”

  Her forehead wrinkled in pretend confusion. “Sorry, Sandy, I’ve no idea. I honestly can’t remember.”

  I didn’t believe her. “Did you tell him what I do for a living?”

  Her face changed to that same intrigued look from yesterday. “He knows now, of course, but he didn’t then.”

  “He didn’t when?”

  “When he met you.”

  “Of course he didn’t, I don’t expect him to be psychic, I just want to know what he said.” I stopped walking out of frustration. “Helena, please be straight with me, I can’t take riddles.”

  Her face pinked. “You’ll have to ask him, Sandy, because I don’t know. Whatever it was, it must have been in his local Kiswahili language, and I’m far from being an expert.”

  I was convinced she was lying and so we walked in silence. I looked at my watch again, anxious that I would soon be sharing messages from family members at home. Messages they sent off in their prayers every night to land here and be told. I questioned my ability to transmit their sentiments accurately. What I had said to Helena the previous day was true, I wasn’t a people person; finding them didn’t mean wanting to spend time with them. Wondering where Jenny-May went didn’t mean wanting to go there or wishing she’d return.

  Helena, as usual, in her own instinctive way picked up on my feelings. “It was nice being able to tell Joseph about my family at long last,” she said gently. “We spoke about them until my lids closed and I dreamed about them until the sun came up. I dreamed about my mother and her organization, about my father and his searching for me.” She closed her eyes. “I woke up in this place this morning hardly knowing where I was after spending hours in my dreams where I grew up.”

  “I’m sorry if I upset you. I’m not quite sure how to tell people what it is their families would want me to say.” I twisted my watch around as we walked, wanting to turn back the time that kept ticking on around my wrist.

  Helena’s eyes opened and I could see a layer of tears settling on her lower lashes, building up in an invisible reservoir. “Don’t think that about yourself, Sandy. I felt soothed by your words, how could I not be?” Her face brightened. “I woke up knowing I had a mother out there still minding me. Today I feel protected, like I’m swaddled in an invisible blanket. You know, you’re not the only one whose lifelong questions have been answered I now have photographs in my mind that I never had before; an entire catalog has been filed and stored, all in one night.”

  I just nodded. There was nothing to say.

  “You will be fine with these people; I know you will be more than fine. The people on the list you have given will be arriving in how long?”

  I looked at my watch. “An hour and a half.”

  “Right, in ninety minutes they’ll all be there with the full intention of spending a short while of their lives calling Romeo from a balcony or reenacting the great escape through the art of mime.”

  I laughed.

  “Anything more you tell them will be a bonus, no matter how you phrase it.”

  “Thank you, Helena.”

  “No problem.” She gave my arm a comforting pat and I tried to stop myself from stiffening.

  I looked down at my clothes. “There’s just one more problem. I’ve been wearing this tracksuit for days and I would really love a change of clothes. Is there anything you have that I could borrow?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Helena said walking off in the direction of the trees. “You wait here; I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just a minute…” Her voice disappeared, along with her short salt-and-pepper hair and billowing lemon pashmina, into the darkness.

  I tapped my foot impatiently, wondering and worrying about where she’d gone. I couldn’t lose Helena now. Up ahead I spotted the towering figure of Joseph leaving the woods, carrying logs in one hand, an axe in the other.

  “Joseph!” I called.

  He looked up and waved with the axe, a motion that wasn’t particularly heartwarming, and he made his way toward me. His bald head shone like a polished marble, his flawless skin making him appear younger than his years.

  “Everything OK?” he asked with concern.

  “Yes, I think so. Well, I don’t know,” I added with confusion. “Helena just disappeared into the woods and—”

  “What?” His eyes darkened.

  I realized my error. “I don’t mean disappeared. She walked, walked into the woods a few minutes ago.” Disappearing from here was impossible, so no wonder Joseph was alarmed. “She told me to wait here for her.”

  He set the axe down and watched the woods. “She will return, kipepeo girl.” His voice was gentle.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means she will come back,” he said with a smile.

  “Not that, what does the Kenyan word mean?”

  “It is what you are,” he said lazily, his eyes not moving from the trees.

  “Which is?”

  Before he had a chance to answer the question, Helena reappeared tugging what appeared to be luggage behind her. “Found this for you. Oh, hi, sweetheart, I thought I heard you tapping away at the trees. Name on the bag says Barbara Langley from Ohio. Hope for your sake Barbara from Ohio has long legs.” She dropped the bag by my feet and dusted off her hands.

  “What is this?” I asked open-mouthed, studying the baggage ticket on the handle. “This was bound for New York over twenty years ago.”

  “Great, you’ll have a nice retro look,” Helena joked.

  “I can’t wear someone else’s clothes,” I protested.

  “Why not? You were going to wear mine.” Helena laughed.

  “But I know you!”

  “Yes, but you wouldn’t have known the person who wore them before me,” she teased, heading off before me. “Come now, how much time have we left? We’re going to the auditions now,” she explained to Joseph, who nodded solemnly and picked up his axe again.

  I looked at my wrist. My watch was gone.

  “Oh, damnit,” I grumbled, dropping the bag back down on the ground and searching around my legs.

  “What’s wrong?” Helena and Joseph stopped walking and turned around.

  “My watch fell off my wrist again,” I grumbled, standing back and scouring the ground.

  “Again?”

  “The fastener on it is broken. Sometimes it just opens and falls onto the ground.” My voice was muffled as I went down on my knees and searched closer to the ground.

  “Well, you were wearing it just a minute ago so it can’t have gone far. Just lift the bag,” Helena said calmly.

  I looked under the bag.

  “That’s funny.” Helena came over to where I stood and leaned over to get a closer look at the ground. “Did you go anywhere when I went into the trees?”

  “No, nowhere. I was waiting right here with Joseph.” I began crawling around the dusty ground.

  “It can’t have gone missing,” Helena said, not at all worried about the situation. “We
’ll find it, we always do, here.”

  We all stood still as we looked around the small area I hadn’t moved from for over five minutes. There was nowhere else it could have fallen. I shook out my sleeves, emptied my pockets, and checked the bag to see if the watch had got caught up. Nothing, no sign, nowhere.

  “Where on earth did it roll to?” Helena muttered, examining the ground.

  Joseph, who had barely said a word since he’d joined us, stood still in the same place he had been standing all along. His eyes, as black as coal, appeared to have absorbed all light from around him. They were on me the whole time.

  Just watching.

  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 eve
ryone 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?”