This Must Be the Place Read Online Free

my legs.’
    She didn’t look up. She would regret this. Daniel, she would say to me later, always look up, if someone says that to you, always. I can confidently report that no one ever has. In the event, she did not look up. She kept on with the nail filing and said, ‘So sit down.’
    He didn’t sit down. He fell down, right across the carpet, knocking over the nightstand and an ornamental bowl that my grandmother had to pay for before checking out. A brain haemorrhage. Dead in an instant. Aged sixty-six.
    I have the strangest feeling in my legs . How’s that for your last words?
    Long story short: my grandmother was of the generation that didn’t make a fuss. Didn’t create waves. They just swallowed whatever bitter pill life dealt them and got on with it. It would never have occurred to her to have her husband’s body flown back to the States, to be honoured by his numerous offspring. No, she didn’t want to put anyone to any trouble so she had him cremated the very next day, with the local priest in attendance. She did the deed, she checked out and she came home. She had to pay an excess baggage fee to bring home his suitcase, a detail that always sent my father overboard with rage (he never did cope well with financial outlay of any sort). But what had happened to the ashes, nobody quite knew.
    The plight of my long-deceased grandfather touched a raw nerve in me. I left the wake in a frenzy of disgust: it was somehow very typical of my family to go to the trouble of lugging home the clothes of a dead man but overlook his actual ashes. To have never asked my grandmother for the specific location of his final immolation. How could his remains have been forgotten, consigned to some lonely Purgatory in a country where none of us had ever lived, alone, abandoned? No doubt I was imagining my own ashes being left to moulder in some faraway place, my children never collecting them because they were permitted to see me only once a week, between the hours of three and five p.m., at a place of their mother’s choosing. Because whenever this paltry, unjust amount of time came around, their mother left a message with their father’s secretary to say the children were ill/on a school trip/had a test/couldn’t make it that day. Because the legal system is irrevocably tilted towards the female parent, no matter how unfaithful or vindictive she is. Because, however hard the father tries—
    I digress.
    After I got back to San Francisco, I got hold of the names of all the funeral homes in that part of Ireland and, in between fielding calls from my lawyer, attending court appearances at which I might as well have thrown several thousand dollars into a trash-can and dropped in a lit match, attending separate liaisons with my two lovers, trying to find an apartment where I could live when my friend returned from Japan (an eye-wateringly expensive three-bedroomed place because, the lawyer said, it was crucial to show I was ‘able to provide a home for the children’), I called them. I would sit at the kitchen table at three a.m., holding on to the end of a joint as if my life depended on it – and perhaps it did – and dial a number on my list. Then I would listen to the soft, cushiony vowels of the reply: ‘Hello.’ Said more like hellouh : the closing sound elongated, the tongue lowered, further back than it would have been in the mouth of an American. There was no ‘How may I help you?’ follow-up either, just a matter-of-fact hellouh .
    It took me a while to get used to.
    So, I would sit there in the dark, in my colleague’s kitchen, surrounded by crayoned drawings by children who weren’t related to me, insomnia raging through me, and I would ask: Can you help me, can you tell me, did you cremate a man called Daniel Sullivan twenty years ago, on a day in late May? Yes, to add to the surrealism of the situation, my grandfather and I have the same name. There were times, in the dead of the San Francisco night, when I