This Must Be the Place Read Online Free Page B

chop with her fingers?’
    Grandpa kept his counsel. He didn’t even complain when I ground the gears on the stick-shift or wavered to the wrong side of the road or ate only potato chips and Guinness for lunch or fired up a joint when it was way past my bedtime.
    Then, one day near the end of my allotted fortnight, I was driving from the coast in the direction of the border. Grandpa and I were discussing whether or not we would head elsewhere to check out the scene – Galway, maybe, Sligo, or over the border to Ulster – whether or not we’d had enough of Ireland (I was pretty sure he had). I was rounding a bend when I caught sight of a child at the side of the road. Just crouching there, his chin in his palms.
    There was something about him that didn’t seem quite right. I hit the brakes and backed up slowly, lowering my window.
    ‘Hey, kid,’ I said, in my friendliest voice. ‘Everything OK?’
    He stood up. He was barefoot, six or seven years old, and was dressed in a weird, padded-jacket thing that looked as though it had been made by free-spirited people under the influence of something fun.
    He opened his mouth and the beginning of a sound came out. It might have been ‘I’ or possibly ‘my’. It was followed by silence. But not any kind of silence: a terse, freighted, agonising silence. He stared intently at the ground in front of him, his jaw locked, his hands balled into fists. I could see his little chest struggling to draw in breath. He looked in my direction, then away. He was covering for himself pretty well, something I always find just heartbreaking: the bravery of it, the struggle, the small ways kids find to cope. The boy glanced skywards, in imitation of someone deep in thought or giving what he might say some consideration, but I wasn’t fooled. I had, a long time ago, been a research assistant on a programme for stuttering and I was remembering all those kids we worked with, mainly boys, for whom speech was a minefield, an impossibility, a cruel requirement of human interaction.
    So I took a deep breath. ‘I see you have a stutter,’ I said, ‘so please take as much time as you need.’
    He flicked his eyes towards me, and his expression was incredulous, stunned. I remembered that, too. They can’t believe it when you’re so open about it.
    Sure enough, the kid said, in the rushed diction of a long-term stutterer: ‘How did you know?’
    He didn’t sound Irish, I wasn’t surprised to hear. He looked like a blow-in, a settler – I’d heard there were English hippies in the area.
    I leant on my car window and shrugged. ‘It’s my job. Sort of. Or it used to be.’
    ‘You’re a sp-sp—’ He stumbled, just as I’d known he would, over the term ‘speech-therapist’. Ironically, it’s a phrase almost impossible for a stutterer to say. All those consonant clusters and tongue-flexing vowels. We waited, the kid and I, until he’d got out an approximation of the term.
    ‘No,’ I said finally. ‘I’m a linguist. I study language and the way it changes. But I used to work with kids like you, who have trouble speaking.’
    ‘You’re American,’ he said and, as he did so, I realised his pronunciation was more complex than I’d originally thought. There was English in there, mostly, but something else as well.
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    ‘Are you from New York?’
    I took out a cigarette from the glovebox. ‘I’m impressed,’ I said. ‘You have an ear for accents.’
    He shrugged but looked pleased. ‘I lived there for a while when I was little but mostly we were in LA.’
    I raised my eyebrows. ‘Is that right? So where are your mom and dad right now? Are they—’
    He interrupted but I didn’t take it the wrong way: kids like him have to talk when they can, whether there’s a gap in the conversation or not. ‘We had a house in Santa Monica,’ he blurted, not answering my question at all. ‘It was right on the beach and Maman and I went swimming every morning until one day the