“It is what you are,” he said lazily, his eyes not moving from the trees.
“Which is?”
Before he had a chance to answer the question, Helena reappeared tugging what appeared to be luggage behind her. “Found this for you. Oh, hi, sweetheart, I thought I heard you tapping away at the trees. Name on the bag says Barbara Langley from Ohio. Hope for your sake Barbara from Ohio has long legs.” She dropped the bag by my feet and dusted off her hands.
“What is this?” I asked open-mouthed, studying the baggage ticket on the handle. “This was bound for New York over twenty years ago.”
“Great, you’ll have a nice retro look,” Helena joked.
“I can’t wear someone else’s clothes,” I protested.
“Why not? You were going to wear mine.” Helena laughed.
“But I know you!”
“Yes, but you wouldn’t have known the person who wore them before me,” she teased, heading off before me. “Come now, how much time have we left? We’re going to the auditions now,” she explained to Joseph, who nodded solemnly and picked up his axe again.
I looked at my wrist. My watch was gone.
“Oh, damnit,” I grumbled, dropping the bag back down on the ground and searching around my legs.
“What’s wrong?” Helena and Joseph stopped walking and turned around.
“My watch fell off my wrist again,” I grumbled, standing back and scouring the ground.
“Again?”
“The fastener on it is broken. Sometimes it just opens and falls onto the ground.” My voice was muffled as I went down on my knees and searched closer to the ground.
“Well, you were wearing it just a minute ago so it can’t have gone far. Just lift the bag,” Helena said calmly.
I looked under the bag.
“That’s funny.” Helena came over to where I stood and leaned over to get a closer look at the ground. “Did you go anywhere when I went into the trees?”
“No, nowhere. I was waiting right here with Joseph.” I began crawling around the dusty ground.
“It can’t have gone missing,” Helena said, not at all worried about the situation. “We’ll find it, we always do, here.”
We all stood still as we looked around the small area I hadn’t moved from for over five minutes. There was nowhere else it could have fallen. I shook out my sleeves, emptied my pockets, and checked the bag to see if the watch had got caught up. Nothing, no sign, nowhere.
“Where on earth did it roll to?” Helena muttered, examining the ground.
Joseph, who had barely said a word since he’d joined us, stood still in the same place he had been standing all along. His eyes, as black as coal, appeared to have absorbed all light from around him. They were on me the whole time.
Just watching.
23
I spent the next half hour searching the road for my watch, retracing my steps over and over again in my usual obsessive way. I combed the long grass by the sides of the uncultivated fields and dug my hands deep into the soil lining the forest. The watch was nowhere to be seen but this brought a strange kind of comfort to me. My mind instantly erased where I was and all that had happened, and for those few moments I was me again with one goal. Finding. As a ten-year-old I would hunt for a single sock as though it had the value of the rarest diamond in the world, but this time it was different; the watch was worth far more.
Joseph and Helena watched over me worriedly as I uprooted grass followed by sods, in order to find the precious jewel that had clung to my wrist for thirteen years. Its inability to remain where it should have been for too much of that time pretty much tallied with the inconsistency of the relationship with the person who had given it to me. But even those times when it released itself from my clutches and flew off, drawn in the opposite direction to the one I was heading, I always looked out for it and wanted to be near it. That way too, exactly like the relationship.
Helena and Joseph didn’t pretend, as my parents used to when I had a hunting episode. They looked worried and they were right to, because for people who said nothing could or ever had gone missing in this place, they were finding it difficult having to munch on and digest their own words. At least that’s what the obsessive side of me thought. The rational side of me reckoned the more obvious cause for their concern may have just been me, on my hands and knees, covered in dust, dirt, grass stains, and muck.
“I think you should stop looking now,” Helena said with a hint of amusement on her face. “You have lots of people to meet at the Community Hall, not to mention now needing a shower and change of clothes.”
“They can wait,” I said, clawing my way through the grass, feeling soil gathering beneath my fingernails.
“They’ve waited long enough,” Helena said forcefully, “and frankly so have you. Now stop trying to avoid the inevitable and come with me now.”
I stopped clawing. There was the word I was so used to hearing from Gregory’s mouth. Avoid. Stop avoiding things, Sandy… Was that what I was doing? How I could be avoiding things by concentrating fully on one thing and refusing to leave it had always been beyond me; surely avoidance meant walking in the other direction. It was people like Gregory, my parents, and now Helena and Joseph, who were avoiding dealing with the fact that something had gone missing and couldn’t be found. I looked up at Helena, who looked doll-like beside Joseph’s huge frame. “I really need to find that watch.”
“And you will,” she said so easily that I believed her. “Things always show up here. Joseph said he would keep an eye out for you and maybe Bobby will know something.”
“Who’s this Bobby that I keep hearing about?” I asked, getting to my feet.
“He works in Lost and Found,” Helena explained, handing me the luggage I had abandoned in the middle of the road.
“Lost and Found.” I laughed, shaking my head.
“I’m surprised you didn’t end up in the front window,” Helena said gently.
“That’s Amsterdam you’re thinking of,” I smiled.
Her forehead wrinkled. “Amsterdam? What are you talking about?”
Dusting myself off, I left the search scene behind me. “Helena, you have so much to learn.”
“A wonderful piece of advice, coming from someone who spent the last thirty minutes on her hands and knees trawling through muck.”
We left Joseph standing in the middle of the road, hands on his hips, logs and axe by his feet, surveying the dusty path.
I arrived at the Community Hall dressed as Barbara Langley from Ohio. Her legs, it seemed, were far from long and had a penchant for miniskirts and leggings I didn’t even dare try on. The other items she unfortunately missed out on wearing on her New York trip were stripy sweaters with shoulder pads that brushed my earlobes and jackets covered with badges of peace signs, yin-yang emblems, yellow smiley faces, and American flags. I had hated the eighties the first time round; I had no intention of reliving it.
Helena had laughed when she saw me in skin-tight stonewashed jeans that stopped above my ankles, white socks, my own trainers, and a black T-shirt with a yellow smiley face.
“Do you think Barbara Langley was in The Breakfast Club?” I asked, trudging out of the bathroom like a child who had been forced to replace their play clothes with a dress and tights for Sunday dinner of green vegetables aplenty.
Helena looked confused. “I have no idea what clubs she was a member of, although I do see others wearing those kinds of clothes here.”
I ended up doing what I had been convinced I would never resort to, grabbing marginally more decent items of clothing lying alongside the roads as we made our way to the village.
“We can go to Bobby’s afterward.” Helena had tried to cheer me up. “He has a huge collection of clothes to choose from or else there are a few clothes-makers around.”