This Must Be the Place Read Free Page B

forward, but from where she is standing, the glass is opaque with the reflections of clouds. From where she is standing, I might not even be here at all.
    The train pulls over the border, in an easterly direction, in and out of rain showers. I sit with the newspaper my wife bought me rolled in my hand like a baton, as if I am on the brink of guiding an invisible orchestra through a symphony.
    It’s been ten years since I did the reverse journey, on a pilgrimage of sorts. I’d never been to Ireland then: it had simply never occurred to me to come. I am not one of those Irish-Americans coshed by a sense of Eiresatz nostalgia, filled with backwards-looking whimsy about a country that our great-grandparents were forced out of in order to survive. Within my family I was alone in this: my sisters all wore Claddagh rings, went to St Patrick’s Day parades and gave their children names with tricky clusters of d s and b s.
    I was working at Berkeley, somewhat uncomfortably, as part of the cognitive sciences department. My marriage had just ground to a halt: my wife had been having an affair with a colleague for years, it had transpired. This revelation had pushed me into a minor dalliance, which had in turn prompted my wife to sue for divorce. I was living in the apartment of a friend who was in Japan on a sabbatical; the cuckolding colleague had moved into the house from which I had so recently been ejected. My soon-to-be ex-wife had morphed into a vengeful harpy who had decided I should pay her astronomic amounts of alimony in return for minimal contact with my kids. Week after week, she refused to honour the custody arrangement our lawyers had thrashed out. I was pouring my entire salary into fighting this; I was having ill advised affairs with two different women and preventing their discovery of each other was causing me undue complications and evasions.
    In the middle of this brew, my grandmother died and, according to the surprising instructions in her will, was cremated. The usual familial disagreements ensued as to what we should do with her ashes. My aunt favoured an urn, in particular an antique Chinese ginger jar she’d seen on sale; my father wanted to go ahead with a burial. An uncle put out the suggestion of a family plot; another was keen to go the way of some kind of woodland, tree-planting deal. It was a cousin who said, shouldn’t we put her with Grandpa?
    We all looked at each other. It was the end of the wake: the priest had left, the guests were dwindling, the room was filled with crumpled napkins, crumbled cake and wreaths of cigarette smoke. My dad and his siblings lowered their eyes.
    The truth came out, as truths are meant to do at funerals: no one quite knew where Grandpa’s remains were. The story was that, years ago, he and Grandma had taken what everyone agreed was their first vacation, to Ireland. Grandpa had retired from the business and they had never seen the country of their grandparents, all their friends had been, they had a little bit put by, and so on and so forth. Fill in for yourselves the usual reasons why people go on vacation.
    They flew to Dublin. They saw the Ring of Kerry, then looked around Cork, the Dingle Peninsula. They saw the famous dolphin. For some reason – no one knew why – they ended up in Donegal, the forehead of the dog, that slice of country squeezed in next to the British annex. Did one of their ancestors come from Donegal, I wanted to know, or perhaps the Protestant North? This latter suggestion was shouted down. They, and we, were 100 per cent Catholic Irish, my uncle insisted. To suggest otherwise was a dire insult.
    Whatever their ancestry, my grandparents were staying, for a reason that will never be known, at a B-and-B in Buncrana. My grandmother was filing her nails at what she would later always refer to as an ‘armoire’ – my father was very clear on that point – when my grandfather turned from the window and said, ‘I have the strangest feeling in