Free This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell

spinning away from his white-gloved hands.
    The nurse appears in the doorway, a blue column of surgical scrubs against the off-beige of the clinic walls, and runs a finger down the list of names on her clipboard.
    It will be Niall walking across the floor, in just a moment. She’s going to say his name, he is sure. 17 He can see her lips, her jaw getting ready to form the initial n sound; he watches her draw breath. It will be his turn, he knows it.
    The nurse speaks a name.
    It is not his. 18
    Niall curls his gloved fingers – nails kept short, always, filed down to the nub, but even so – and takes a deep breath, like a swimmer catching sight of an enormous wave, like a hiker learning that there are many more miles to go. He is aware of his skin, his surface, his outer layer, responding to this disappointment, a heated surge between his clothes and that part of him he thinks of as his ‘self’.
    The itch, the discomfort, the rash, the inflammation, the redness, the maddening, distracting ailment: this is not him. It is not who he is. There is him and there is his condition. They are two entities, forced to live in one body.
    It is 14:36. Niall swallows, pressing his clipped nails into his palms where, even through the layers of protective cotton gloves, he can feel their power, their force. Another half-hour, maybe more.
    He breathes again, shakes the hair out of his eyes, tries to concentrate on the gyroscope but there is a stinging, torched sensation along his inner arm, between his shoulder blades, around his neck, circling his ankles like a tourniquet.
    The door to the treatment room clicks shut, admitting that other family (a mom, a dad, a little girl, younger than Phoebe, with a raw, bleeding, scaled complexion that is not as bad as his). And he and his father are alone in the waiting room.
    Next to him, there is a sudden, lunging movement. His father is up, out of his seat. He seems to spring forward, scattering papers and coats and spectacles. All the strength, frustration and fury that Niall knows his father keeps coiled deep within him is about to be unleashed and Niall quails. He flinches. He says, ‘Dad? Dad?’ without even being conscious of deciding to speak because he knows that his father has been building up to this ever since he got into the car – before that, even. Niall doesn’t know what his father is about to do – he never knows in moments like these – but what he does know is that it won’t be good.
    ‘Dad!’ Niall hisses, in the hope that he can recall his father to himself.
    But Daniel vaults over the coffee-table, over the soft-cornered magazines, the leaflets about emollients and skin-safe detergents, the unloved toys in plastic boxes. He crosses the room in two strides, and when he reaches the opposite wall, he stops only to seize a pen from his jacket pocket and Niall sees what Daniel is about to do.
    ‘Dad,’ Niall says, ‘don’t – please don’t. Don’t. You mustn’t. Please. Dad?’
    His dad doesn’t listen. Niall hadn’t really expected he would. When his dad is like this, nothing gets through to him 19 – he is insensible to pleas, reason, requests, begging. He brandishes his marker pen aloft, like a dagger, and then he begins to deface the dermatology advertisements, one by one, muttering as he goes.
    ‘I cannot,’ he is saying, through clenched teeth, ‘look at these things for a second longer. The day has come, my friends. It’s time for a bit of truth.’
    Niall has no idea if his father is addressing the posters or the people in them. What difference would it make? His dad has always hated these advertisements; they make him livid. They are stuck to each available space of wall and feature smiling children sporting organic cotton underwear or clothing with flat seams or scratch mitts that fasten around the shoulders. What enrages his father is that the skins of the models are perfect: pale, smooth, untroubled, at peace. They bounce on beds in the