This Must Be the Place Read Online Free Page A

felt as though I were trying to track down the ashes of my former self.
    At my question, there was always a momentary pause and, after a scuffling, a few exchanges I was convinced were often in Irish, the thunk-swoosh of a filing cabinet being opened, the answer was always no. Said nooooo .
    Until one day a woman (girl, perhaps – she sounded young, too young to be working at such a place) said: yes, he’s here.
    I held the phone to my ear. I’d been in court that day, where I’d been told I had no further recourse: there was nothing I could do to ensure I could be part of my son and daughter’s upbringing; there was no way to force my ex-wife to honour the contact agreement; I just had to hope ‘she would see sense’; and, in the words of my lawyer, we’d ‘come to the end of the road’. At which I roared, in the domed vestibule of the courthouse, so that everyone in the vicinity turned towards me, then quickly away, all except my ex-wife, who walked steadily to the exit, without looking back, and even the swish of her ponytail was triumphant: ‘It’s parenthood. There’s not supposed to be an end of the road.’
    For something to come right, to have someone say, yes, here he is, seemed an impossibility, a tiny sweetener in all the oceans of bitterness in which I was currently drowning.
    ‘You have him?’ I said.
    There was a slight pause, as if the girl was taken aback by my emotion.
    ‘Yes,’ she said again.
    ‘Well, where is he?’ I’d heard that funeral homes dispose of ashes if they are not taken away by relatives. I wanted to know where he’d been scattered, so I could tell the family and we could decide what to do with Grandma.
    But instead of saying, we chucked him out the back door, into the sea breeze, into the nearest rose bush, over a convenient cliff, she uttered the unbelievable sentence: ‘He’s in the basement.’
    For a mad moment, I had an image of Grandpa pottering about in a low-ceilinged but pleasant space, dressed, as he so often was, in slacks, a mustard-yellow shirt and a bow-tie, spending the last twenty years rearranging storage jars or setting up a ping-pong table or sorting nails in toolboxes or whatever the hell it is people do in basements. We thought he was dead, I would shout. But he’s just been in your basement all this time!
    I cleared my throat and tightened my grip on the phone. ‘The basement?’
    ‘Shelf Four D.’
    ‘Four D,’ I repeated.
    ‘When do you want to come and collect him?’
    The question took me by surprise. It had never occurred to me that Grandpa would need to be fetched, like a child from a birthday party. I realised in that moment that I hadn’t really expected to find him: the whole thing had been a distraction for me during the lowest point of my life thus far. To have found him was discombobulating, unexpected, unreal.
    Ireland: I pictured damp hillsides of vivid green, stone bridges arching over silvering streams, women with an abundance of auburn hair running their fingers up the strings of harps.
    ‘Next week,’ I almost shouted, ‘I’ll come next week.’
    Which was how I ended up alone, in the middle of rural Ireland during spring break, ten years ago, alternately drinking myself into oblivion or eating takeaways in a series of B-and-Bs with slippery bedcovers and single portions of milk.
    I say ‘alone’, when actually I was accompanied by my grandfather, who was sporting a small, taped cardboard box and occupied the passenger seat of the hire car. He and I got along very well, which was not quite how I remembered it when he was alive.
    ‘Remember that time you spanked me with a hurling stick for sassing you at table?’ I would say, as we bowled across the Irish countryside, which looked surprisingly close to how I’d imagined it, hump-backed bridges and all. Lots of sheep, though: more than I’d ever thought possible.
    Or: ‘How about that time you told my sister that no decent man would have her because she ate a lamb