Free This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell Page B

somebody help him?
    The noiseless shoes of the nurses come running.
    Niall walks with the stiff-legged gait 21 that must be adopted when all your joints are pasted, gauzed, padded. He moves along the treatment ward – the nurses all smile at him, say hello. When he was small, his mother used to bring him, just the two of them, and when Phoebe was born, she would come too and Niall would push her up and down the corridors in her stroller until it was time to be seen. Now Phoebe is at grade school, she can’t come any more. This makes her stamp her foot: when Niall comes home in his wrappings she will take one look at him and wail, why didn’t you take me to the clinic, I love the clinic, why can’t I go? His mother doesn’t come any more either because she’s gone back to work. 22
    Niall wanders through the ward, past the nurses’ station and into the room with UV treatment units, where there aren’t usually many people. If he can pass enough time before returning to the waiting room, his father might decide it’s not worth going back to school for the rest of the day. He might take him to the space and science centre, where they can walk the halls together, stand under the pinpricked dome of the planetarium, and Niall can tip back his head to look up, far up, into space, safe inside his wrappings.
    Niall takes a couple of rides in the elevator. He loiters for a while in the corridor. He wanders past the UV machines, watching people turn blue under the lights. He visits the drinks machine but remembers he doesn’t have any money in his pockets so makes do with the water fountain. When he thinks it’s about time to find his dad, he makes his way back to the waiting room and is just about to turn into the open door, when he hears a voice say, ‘I do like your artwork.’
    Niall pulls himself up short, stepping behind the door. He knows that voice, he’s sure. It’s a woman who comes, as they do, on a Wednesday afternoon, with her teenaged daughter. She wears pantsuits, her hair arranged over one shoulder, and shoes that clip on the clinic lino. She always engages Niall’s dad in conversation and sometimes Niall wants to say, can’t you see he’s working, he’s grading papers, leave him alone.
    ‘For the sake of argument,’ 23 his father’s voice comes out as a slow rumble – he’s probably concentrating on his reading, ‘who says it’s mine?’
    The woman again: ‘How would you know what I’m talking about, unless it was you?’
    ‘Who says I know what you’re talking about?’
    ‘I saw you look at the wall when I said artwork –’
    ‘What wall?’
    ‘– which proves it was you.’
    A short silence. Niall can picture his father giving the woman his piercing, amused stare. ‘It does?’
    Niall gazes at a display of leaflets. Advice about sun protection for sensitive skins. Anti-bacterial lotions. How to cope with facial dressings.
    ‘So,’ the woman beyond the door persists, ‘where’s your son?’
    ‘In there.’
    ‘He went in on his own?’
    His father must have nodded because there is a gap. Then the woman says, ‘Listen, I’m not giving you a hard time about the posters. I just wish I’d thought of it. Who wants to see an advert for eczema products featuring children with flawless fucking skin and—’
    ‘Not me.’
    ‘Not you. Or me. Or any of us. Bravo,’ she says, ‘that’s what I say.’
    Fucking. The word presses into Niall’s mind, like a thumbtack. Kids at school say it. A teacher sent someone home last week for shouting it at recess. He has never heard adults say it to each other like this, casually, thrown out, as part of a normal sentence. The silence beyond the door swells like dough in an oven, until Niall can bear it no longer and steps into the doorway, into the room. His father says, ‘There you are.’ The woman’s head snaps round so that she can look at him and could it be said she had been leaning close to his father, a little bit too close?
    ‘Hi!’