This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell

says the woman, baring her teeth at Niall. ‘You’re looking very comfy and cosy there.’
    Niall plants himself in front of his father. ‘Let’s go,’ he says.
    His father glances at him, glances at the woman, then starts to shuffle everything into his briefcase: papers, pens, journals. He hands Niall his jacket, helps him on with it because it can be hard to insert a bandaged arm into a sleeve, his father knows this. Niall picks up the gyroscope from the table; it doesn’t fit in his pocket so he carries it carefully in his hand. Then he and his father are trailing themselves and their possessions across the floor, and they are about to leave, they are almost safe, when the woman leaps up, comes after them, takes his father’s arm.
    ‘Your glasses,’ she says, and she is holding them out to him, their frail legs crossed over each other.
    Niall looks at her and feels the pressure of her touch on his own arm, as if he and his father are neurologically interchangeable. He watches as his father turns, thanks her, accepts the glasses, which he is always forgetting, 24 and Niall sees that there is a small piece of folded paper tucked into them. Lined, yellow paper, 25 a kind that his father never uses. He sees his father seeing it but pretending not to. The glasses are slid into the breast pocket of his jacket with a few more thanks, and then they leave.
    Niall doesn’t know it but there is something about this moment that will imprint itself on his mind: the geometric shapes of sunlight in the unit waiting room, angling themselves over chair arms and table-tops, his father turning from him towards the woman, the woman’s voice saying, your glasses, the piece of yellow paper that his father accepted then hid, the hard edges of the gyroscope pressing into his fingerpads through the meshing of his gloves. In a matter of months, the unbelievable will have happened and his father will have disappeared from his life and he won’t see him again for many years, his mother will say terrible things about his father, and Niall and his sister Phoebe will listen to these things and believe them, yet not believe them, all at the same time. Either way, his father will be gone, the house will be as if he was never there, and sometimes Niall will lie awake and wonder if he’d imagined his father, dreamt him up. Had he ever been there at all? Then he will think about the day his father produced a gyroscope from his pocket and they set it going together, on the table in the Paediatric Acute Dermatology Daycare Unit and it spun, a perfection of balance, of poise, sending points of light streaming over the walls. 26

It’s Really Very Simple
    Phoebe, Fremont, California, 2010
    I ’m under the bleachers with the rest of the crowd from eleventh grade and they have a glass tube filled with something and it’s bubbling away, with a kind of animal roar, and some of them are taking it in turns to inhale it and the air is wreathed with its chemical stench and I’m pretty sure it’s not weed, and I’m not sure what it is but don’t want to ask, and I’m regretting wearing the skirt I bought with Casey at the weekend. It’s kind of short, a slippery fabric, and I’m having trouble keeping it so my underwear doesn’t show. I’m wishing I’d worn cut-offs, like Casey, instead of this skirt.
    You can hear the yells and whistles from football practice out on the field and the grind of cars from the road. I like the way, under here, the people up on the bleachers look like shadows as they walk up and down the steps. Shadows without bodies attached to them. Kind of like Peter Pan but the other way round.
    I want to point this out to Casey but she would raise her thinned brows and roll her amber eyes and say something like, God, Phoebe Sullivan, you are so weird.
    Stella would have totally got it. She would have flopped onto her back, looked up and said something like, yeah, in that drawn-out way she has.
    I’m tugging down on my hem and