This Must Be the Place Read Free Page A

green and pleasant and blessed as we skim along the track, splashing through puddles, towards the final gate.
    My wife and Marithe are debating what Brendan may have needed to be careful of, the baby is repeating an n sound and I am thinking it’s early for him to be using his palate in such a way as I idly turn the dial to see what else we can find.
    I pull up at the last and final gate. A Glaswegian accent filters through the white noise, filling the car, speaking in the self-consciously serious tones of the newsreader. There is some geographical blip that means we can, on occasion, pick up the Scottish news. Something about an upcoming local election, a politician caught speeding, a school without textbooks. I twirl the dial through waves of nothingness, searching for speech, panning for a human voice.
    My wife gets out of the car; she walks towards the gate. I watch the breeze snatch and toy with hanks of her hair, the upright, ballet-dancer’s gait of her, her hand in its half-mitten as she grips the gate lock.
    The radio aerial strains and picks up a female voice: calm but hesitant. It’s something about gender and the workplace, one of those issue-led magazine programmes you get in the middle of the morning on the BBC. A West Country octogenarian is speaking about being one of the first women employed as an engineer, and I’m about to turn the dial further, as it’s the kind of thing my wife will be avid to hear and I am really in the mood for some decent music. Then a different voice comes out of the little perforated speakers near my knee: the dipping, vowel-lengthened accent of the educated English.
    ‘And I thought to myself, my God,’ the woman on the radio says, into my car, into the ears of my children, ‘this must be the glass ceiling I’ve heard so much about. Should it really be so hard to crack it with my cranium?’
    These words produce within me a deep chime of recognition. Without warning, my mind is engaged with a series of flashcards: a cobbled pavement indistinct with fog, a bicycle chained to a railing, trees dense with the scent of pine, a giving pelt of fallen needles underfoot, a telephone receiver pressed to the soft cartilage of an ear.
    I know that woman, I want to exclaim, I knew her. I almost turn and say this to the kids in the back: I knew that person, once.
    I am remembering the black cape thing she used to wear and her penchant for unwalkable shoes, weird, articulated jewellery, outdoor sex, when the voice fades out and the presenter comes on air to tell us that was Nicola Janks, speaking in the mid-1980s.
    I slap my palm on the wheel. Nicola Janks, of all people. Never have I otherwise come across that surname. She remains the only Janks I ever knew. She had, I seem to recall, some crazy middle name, something Grecian or Roman that bespoke parents with mythological proclivities. What was it now? I am recalling, ruefully, that it’s no real surprise that things from that time might seem a little hazy, given the amount of—
    And then I am thinking nothing.
    The presenter is intoning, in the straitened, delicate way that can mean only one thing, that Nicola Janks died not long after the interview was recorded.
    My brain performs a series of jolts, like an engine about to stall. I look instinctively for my wife. She has swung the gate open and is waiting for me to drive through.
    There is the sensation that a window somewhere has blown open or a single domino has fallen against another, causing a cascade. A tide has rushed forward, then pulled back out, and whatever was beneath it is altered for ever.
    I gaze back at my wife. She is holding the gate. She leans her weight against it so that it doesn’t blow back against the car. She is holding it, trusting that I will drive the car through, the car that contains her children, her offspring, her beloveds. Her hair fills with the Irish wind, like a sail. She is searching the windscreen now for my face, wondering why I am not moving