This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell

says, ‘Now.’
    It’s really very simple: me and Niall are sitting at a table opposite a man.
    We chose these seats by agreement, one we reached without saying anything. Neither of us wanted to slide into the bench beside him. That much we both knew.
    So we sit side by side, on chairs, facing a man.
    The man is our father.
    He has ordered coffee, Italian-style, in a tiny cup. It looks like mud but smells dark and rich. Niall has herbal tea because that’s the kind of person he is. It’s a flower sort, not berry: he says berry teas are an ‘abomination’, which is one of my favourite Niall words. He’s taken out the teabag and the tea is so weak it’s barely tea at all. Have I mentioned my brother is the coolest person in the world?
    I have a soda, no ice.
    The man, my father, is asking Niall about Berkeley and Niall is using his clipped-off sentences to reply and you can see that the man, our father, is thinking it’s his fault and I want to say to him: it’s OK, he always does that, it’s not just you.
    ‘So do you use that tunnel building place? Is that where the lab is?’ the man is saying, and he looks so like Niall that it’s really quite distracting. It was the first thing I thought when I walked in here: that man over there is like an old Niall. Then I realised it was him, the person we were here to see. Dumb Phoebe. He has the same hair that grows in, like, twenty different ways, the brow that juts out over the eyes, which sometimes look fierce and other times just puzzled, even the same hands. Wide, flat nails with big lumpy knuckles. As I look at his hands I get the sensation that I’m looking down the wrong end of a telescope at something far away and almost indiscernible. I can see this hand in mine, except I’m much smaller and I have to reach up to hold it, and the hand is warm and large and covers mine completely, and my feet are in little blue Mary Janes that I just know are new and I am being told to line them up with the edge of the sidewalk and to wait, always wait, until my dad tells me it’s safe to cross. Check and check again, he is saying, and then keep checking while you cross because you can never be too careful. The hand covering mine. And it’s odd because I always tell Niall that I can’t remember Dad, not really. I remember the shape of a man’s back standing at the kitchen door, looking out. But that could have been anyone. I remember the sight of bristles in the bathroom sink after he’d shaved, a bathrobe hanging off the back of a door, a briefcase in the hallway, shoes large as boats kicked off by the sofa, the noise of a typewriter coming from the den. Nothing more.
    ‘And is it actually on top of a fault line?’ he is saying, and Niall is nodding, and I am suddenly aware of something flowing between this man and Niall, the wide current of a tide, back and forth. Niall was twelve when Dad left; he had him for twelve years and that’s a long time. There’s no tide for me.
    ‘How come you know so much about Berkeley?’ I blurt, and even though it comes out as kind of rude, he turns towards me and you can tell by the eager, quick twist of his body that he’s pleased I’ve spoken.
    ‘I worked there for years,’ he says. ‘All the time I was living with you guys.’
    ‘You worked at Berkeley?’ I say.
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    ‘Like Niall?’
    ‘Yes.’ He gives me a smile and he looks so happy to see me, his eyes travelling all over my face, and a sudden wave of something crashes over me and I can’t tell if it’s happiness or sadness. It kind of feels like both.
    ‘I never knew that,’ I mutter.
    Niall doesn’t say anything. He just stares at his hands, which are upturned on his knees so that his palms are staring right back at him.
    ‘Are you a seismologist too, then?’ I ask.
    ‘No.’ Dad shifts in his seat, moves his newspaper from the table to the bench. ‘I’m a …’ and he says a word I don’t understand.
    ‘A what?’
    He says the word