“He seemed like a happy lad,” Jack commented.
“Oh, yes.” She nodded enthusiastically, sipping on her coffee. “He was that, indeed. He was always cracking jokes, always acting the class clown and letting his words get him into trouble and his laugh get him out of it. People loved him.” She smiled. “That laugh of his…” She looked at a photograph on the mantelpiece, Bobby’s face a picture of delight, his mouth wide open mid-laughter. “It was infectious, just like his grandfather’s.”
Jack smiled and they studied the photo.
Mary’s smile faded. “I have a confession to make, though.”
Jack was silent, not sure he wanted to hear it.
“I don’t hear that laugh anymore.” Her voice was almost a whisper, as though if she said it any louder it would make it true. “It used to fill the house, it used to fill my heart, my head, all day, every day. How can I not hear it anymore?”
From the faraway look in her eyes Jack could tell she wasn’t asking him for a reply. Then she shook her head as if failing to hear it again.
“I remember how it used to make me feel. I remember the atmosphere just one simple giggle would evoke in a room. I remember people’s reactions. I can see their faces and the impact the sound made on them. I can hear it on the videos when I play it back, I can see it on his face in photographs, I hear versions of it, I suppose, echoes of it in other people’s laughter. But without all those things, without the photographs, videos, and echoes, when I’m lying in bed at night, I can’t remember it. I don’t hear it, and I try to, but my head becomes a jumble of the sounds I’ve made up and the sounds I’ve recalled from memory. But as much as I search and search, my memory of it is missing…” She looked over at the photo on the mantel again, cocked her ear as though listening for the sound. Then her body seemed to collapse into itself as she gave up.
Bobby and I were both tucked up on the couch in Helena’s home. Everybody had gone to bed, apart from Wanda, who had sneaked back in and was hiding behind the couch, overexcited by the fact that her dear Bobby was staying the night in her house. We knew she was there but ignored her, hoping she would get bored and go to sleep.
“Are you worried about the meeting tomorrow night?” he asked.
“No, I don’t even know what reason I have to be worried. I don’t see what I’ve done wrong.”
“You haven’t done anything wrong but you know things, you know too much about people’s families for everybody’s comfort. They will want to learn how and why.”
“And I’ll tell them I’m a hugely sociable person. I move around the Irish social scene talking to friends and family of missing people,” I said drily. “Come on, what are they going to do to me? Accuse me of being a witch and burn me at the stake?”
Bobby smiled lightly. “No, but you don’t want your life being made difficult.”
“They couldn’t possibly make it any more difficult. I’m living in a place where lost things go. How bizarre is that?” I rubbed my face wearily and muttered, “I’m definitely going to need some serious counseling when I get back.”
Bobby cleared his throat. “You’re not going back. You need to get that out of your head for a start. If you say that at the meeting you’ll definitely be asking for trouble.”
I waved him off, not interested in hearing that again.
“Maybe you could start writing your diaries again. It looked like you enjoyed doing that.”
“How do you know I wrote diaries?”
“Well, because of the diary in one of your boxes back at the shop. I found it down by the river just at the back of the shop. It was dirty and damp but when I saw your name written on it I brought it back to the shop and spent a lot of time restoring it,” he said proudly. On my lack of reaction he quickly added, “I promise I didn’t read it,” he lied.
“You must be thinking of somebody else.” I forced a yawn. “There wasn’t a diary there.”
“There was.” He sat up. “It was purple and…” He trailed off trying to remember it.
I began to pull on a thread on the hem of my trousers.
He snapped his fingers and I jumped in fright, feeling Wanda behind the couch jumping, too. “That’s it! It was purple, kind of a suede material that was ruined because of the damp but I cleaned it up as much as I could. Like I said, I didn’t read it but I did open up the first few pages and there were doodles of love hearts all over it.” He thought again. “Sandy loves…”
I pulled on the thread more.
“Graham,” he continued. “No, it wasn’t Graham.”
I tightly wrapped the fine filament around my baby finger watching my skin squeezing through, watching the blood being caught.
“Gavin or Gareth…Come on, Sandy, you must remember. It was written so many times I don’t know how you could forget the guy.” He kept on thinking aloud while I kept on pulling the thread, wrapping it tighter and tighter.
He snapped his fingers again and said, “Gregory! That’s it! Sandy loves Gregory. It was written all over the inside of the book. You must remember it now.”
I spoke quietly. “It wasn’t in the boxes, Bobby.”
“It was.”
I shook my head. “I spent hours going through everything. It’s definitely not there. I would have remembered it.”
Bobby looked confused and irritated. “It was bloody well there.”
With that, Wanda gasped from behind the couch and jumped up.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, seeing her head popping up between mine and Bobby’s.
“You’ve lost something else?” she whispered.
“No, I haven’t.” I contradicted her but felt a chill again.
“I won’t tell anyone,” she whispered, her eyes wide. “I promise.”
There was a silence. I fixed my eyes on the black thread that kept on coming. Suddenly and completely inappropriately, I heard Bobby laugh loudly, one of his finest, loudest laughs I had heard from him yet.
“The situation is hardly very funny, thanks, Bobby.”
Bobby didn’t reply.
“Bobby,” said Wanda in a childish whisper that ran down my back.
I looked up at Bobby, noticed the deathly pale of his face, his mouth hung open as though the words that had run from his vocal cords had chickened out last minute, refused to jump, and instead stood on his lips in fear. Tears formed in his eyes and his bottom lip trembled and I realized the laughter hadn’t come from his mouth at all. It had floated from there to Here, carried on the wind, over the treetops and into this place, landing somewhere among us. While I attempted to process all this, the door to the living room was pushed open and Helena appeared sleepy-eyed in her robe, her hair tousled and her face a picture of worry. She froze at the door while she studied Bobby, making sure she had heard correctly. His look said it all, and she charged at him, holding her arms out. Plonking herself on the couch, she held his head to her chest and rocked him as though he were a baby while he cried and mumbled through his tears how he’d been forgotten.
I sat on the other end of the couch and kept on pulling the thread. It kept on coming, unraveling more and more with every minute spent in this place, unable to stop this fine thread from detaching itself from the seams.
40
I have found that the many imbalances within our individual lives result in an overall more worldly balance. What I mean is that no matter how unfair I think something is, I need only look at the bigger picture to see how, in a way, it fits. My dad was right when he said that there was no such thing as a free meaclass="underline" Everything comes at a cost to others, most of the time at a cost to ourselves. Whenever something is gained, it has been taken from another place. When something is lost, it arrives elsewhere. There are the usual philosophical questions: Why do bad things happen to good people? Within every bad thing I see good, and, likewise, within every good thing I see bad, however impossible it is to understand it or see it at the time. As humans we are the epitome of life; in life there is always balance. Life and death, male and female, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, win and lose, love and hate. Lost and found.