“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 meal: 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.

Apart from the Christmas turkey my dad won in the Leitrim Arms pub quiz when I was five years old, my dad had never won anything in his life. The day Jenny-May Butler went missing was the day that my dad won £500 on the lotto scratch cards. Maybe he had a good thing owed to him.

It was a summer day. There was only one week left before we were to go back to school and I was dreading even the thought of it, but apart from the anxiety for the week ahead, without having to get up every morning for school over the past few months I had lost all sense of time. Weekdays were the same as weekends. For a few months a year, the dreaded Sunday nights were the same as Friday and Saturday nights. This night was a Sunday night but, unusually for this time of year, it was a dreaded one. It was six forty P.M., still bright, the cul-de-sac was busy with kids playing, just like me, forgetting what day it was but knowing that whatever day it was, it sure was a great one because tomorrow would be exactly the same. My mother was in the front garden with my grandma and granddad getting the last few warm evening sunrays. I was sitting at the kitchen table anxiously waiting for the doorbell to ring. I was drinking a glass of milk and watching the clothes in the washing machine go around and around, trying to identify each garment that flashed by, just to occupy my mind.

My dad had eyed me warily as he came back and forth from the TV room to the kitchen, grabbing food he wasn’t supposed to be eating while on his new diet. I didn’t know whether he was trying to scope me out or whether he was eyeing me to see if I had noticed him stealing food. Either way he’d asked me three times already what was wrong, and I’d just shrugged and told him nothing. It was one of those occasions when telling someone wouldn’t make it any better. He checked on me from time to time, noticing how I’d jumped when the doorbell rang (only my mum, who had forgotten to put the door on the latch). He made a few faces at me to try to make me laugh, cramming a few biscuits into his mouth all at once to pretend he was entertaining me and not his stomach. I smiled for his sake; he seemed happy enough with that and then moved into the TV room again, this time with a lemon square up his sleeve.