This Must Be the Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

men showed up and Maman took the flare from the boat and she – she – she—’
    He came to the end of this intriguing burst of articulacy and began to struggle in silence, cheeks red, the volatile confederacy of his tongue, palate and breath dissolving into chaos and strife.
    ‘Santa Monica is beautiful,’ I commented, after a while. ‘It sounds like you had fun there.’
    He nodded, his mouth shut tight, not trusting himself to speak.
    ‘So you live over here now? In Ireland?’
    He nodded again.
    ‘With your mom? Your … maman ?’
    Another nod.
    ‘And where is she? Is she …’ I wondered how to put this without sounding threatening ‘… nearby or …?’
    He jerked his head behind him.
    ‘She’s back there?’
    ‘Th-th-th-the … t-t-t-tyre … bur-bur-burst.’
    ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘OK.’ I pulled up the handbrake and got out of the car. I smiled at him but didn’t get too close. Kids can be jumpy, and rightly so. ‘You think she could use some help?’
    Dog-like, he dived into the bushes and reappeared on a track I hadn’t noticed. He grinned and set off, zigzagging one way, then the next. We went round a bend, then another, the kid shinning up a tree and down again, turning every now and again to regard me with amusement, as if it was a great joke that he had procured my company like this. At the approach of another bend, he dived again into the undergrowth. There was the sound of a rustle, a giggle, and then a woman’s voice: ‘Ari? Is that you?’
    ‘I found a friend,’ Ari was saying, as I came around the bend.
    Up ahead on the track a van was raised on one side with a jack. A woman was crouched beside it, tools spread out around her. The sun was so strong that she was just a silhouette, and her hair was so long that it brushed the ground.
    ‘A friend?’ she said. ‘That’s nice.’
    ‘Here he is,’ Ari said, turning towards me.
    The woman jerked her head around and rose up from the ground. At this point, I could only register that she was tall, for a woman, and thin. Too thin, her collarbone standing out like a coat-hanger from her chest, her wrists a circumference that suggested to me she might not possess the strength required to wield those tools. She had a mass of honey-coloured hair and her mouth was screwed up in a displeased pout. She was wearing a pair of overalls, rolled up over a pair of mud-encrusted wellingtons. She was not at all my type. I remember consciously forming this thought. Too skeletal, too haughty, too symmetric. She had a face that seemed somehow exaggerated, as if viewed through a magnifying-glass: the features excessive, the eyes over-large, widely spaced, the top lip too full, the head disproportionately big for the body.
    She tilted her head, she spoke, she gestured: she did something, I don’t remember what. All I knew was that the next moment she looked perfect, startlingly so. This would be my first experience of her protean quality, the way she could appear to be a different person from second to second (a major reason, I’ve always thought, that cinematographers loved her). One minute, she seemed too thin and kind of bug-eyed, if I’m honest; the next she was flawless. But too flawless, like the ‘after’ illustration in a plastic surgeon’s office: cheekbones like cathedral buttresses, a mouth with a deeply grooved philtrum, pearled skin with just the right amount of freckles across the impeccably tilted nose.
    I’d later find out that she’d never darkened the door of a plastic surgeon, that she was, as she liked to say, 100 per cent biodegradable. I’d also find out that the filthy overalls concealed a pair of stupendously pneumatic breasts. But, at the time, I was thinking that I preferred women with a bit of curve on them, women whose bodies welcomed yours, women whose beauty was flawed, unusual, held secrets of its own: a touch of orthogonal strabismus, a nose as ridged and stark as that on a Roman coin, ears that protruded just a