Names for Nothingness

by Georgia Blain

  ‘Will you tell her that I have her daughter,’ Liam asks, ‘so she is not too surprised?’

  Kalyani tells him she will be fine, his hand light on Liam’s shoulder as he speaks. ‘There is no preparation for each moment,’ he says. ‘Each one is what each one is,’ and he gestures for Liam to sit.

  Liam does as he asks. He holds Essie in his lap and she does not want him to put her down. He attempts to place her on the grass, but she clings tighter, and so he lets her stay where she is. ‘We are going to see your mother,’ he tells her, ‘it will be good, won’t it?’ and he does not know who he is trying to convince, or what he thinks of this place. ‘I’m sure she has missed you. She will be so pleased to see you,’ but Essie only starts to cry.

  ‘Shh,’ and he stands slowly, holding her tight in his arms as he walks around a frangipanni, the knotted branches still clothed in thick green leaves and creamy flowers, despite the fact that this is the cooler season.

  Gradually Essie’s tears stop, and he is horrified to find himself promising her that he will not leave, that he will look after her, his words a rote attempt at consoling that should not be uttered.

  ‘Shh,’ he says again. ‘Shh,’ not knowing what else to say.

  This time it is an announcement from the platform that startles Sharn. She opens her eyes again as the voice tells her that there has been a delay with a train.

  ‘Is that us?’ she asks the man next to her, but he does not hear her.

  She taps him on the shoulder and he switches off the Walkman.

  She realises the pointlessness of her question. If he has not heard her, he will not have heard the announcement.

  ‘Do you know the time?’ she asks him.

  He points to his watch.

  ‘We’re running late,’ she says, more to herself than to him.

  He shrugs his shoulders and switches the music on again.

  Liam, too, glances at his watch. He has no idea how long he has been waiting, and just as he is beginning to wonder whether he should try to find someone, he sees her, walking towards him.

  ‘Caitlin?’ He says her name hesitantly, unsure whether this woman is in fact her.

  ‘Caitlin?’ He repeats himself, taking one step closer as he does so.

  The sun is in his eyes and he shades them with his palm. It is Caitlin, and he cannot quite believe it. He wants to open his arms to her, to encircle her in his hold, but he has Essie, her own small hands firmly clasped around his neck, and he just looks at her, amazed, unable to believe that he has reached her at last.

  ‘Look at you.’ It is all he can think of to say. ‘Look at you,’ like some parody of a doting parent who has not seen his child for years. ‘Oh, Caitlin,’ and he is crying now, embarrassed as he does so. ‘Look,’ he says to Essie, ‘it’s Caitlin, look.’

  But neither of them moves. Caitlin does not reach for her child as he had hoped she would, and Essie stays with her face buried in his neck.

  She beckons for him to follow her and he does, to a garden at the side of the house where they can be alone. There is an avocado tree, and it is tall and slender, providing a high green shelter of leaves against the warmth of the autumn sun. A rusted seat is next to it, but she does not head towards it, instead she kneels on the grass, folding her white robes across her knees as he sits next to her.

  ‘Caitlin,’ he says again, but she shakes her head, smiling slightly as she does so.

  ‘She doesn’t exist.’

  Sitting in his lap, Essie sucks her thumb and looks up at this woman, a woman it seems neither of them knows, and the momentary joy he had felt on first seeing her seems to evaporate. He looks away and he wonders whether they will both just remain silent, but then she speaks again.

  ‘How are you?’ she asks, and he tells her he is fine. Essie is heavy in his lap, a presence between them. Caitlin reaches to touch her, but as Essie shrinks back, she pulls her hand away, the movement so quick it may never have happened.

  ‘And Sharn?’

  Liam does not answer. He shifts Essie slowly to the grass, keeping her hand in his.

  ‘She looks well,’ Caitlin says, and it is a comment made without emotion.

  ‘She is.’

  Caitlin meets his gaze, her eyes as pure and direct as he has always remembered them to be, an indescribable colour, he thinks to himself, a colour that changes with the shifting of the light.

  ‘Sharn says that you wanted us to take her, that you were worried about her,’ but as he speaks, Liam knows what he has always known: Sharn failed to tell him the truth. Caitlin had never asked her to take Essie. Caitlin would not ask anything, nor would she demand anything. Sharn had just acted, and as he realises this, he shakes his head.

  ‘Why didn’t you come for her?’ he asks.

  She does not answer him immediately, and when she does her words are opaque. She tells him about Satya Deva, about the peace she has found, and he does not understand.

  ‘We are taught to live in the moment,’ she explains, ‘to accept.’

  He looks down at Essie, who has turned her attention to a white butterfly dancing across the green grass. She crawls towards it, and as he watches her determined attempt to catch something she has no hope of even reaching, he tries to understand.

  ‘It is how I want to live. It is right for me.’ She touches his hand. ‘It is difficult,’ and he hears a catch in her breath, ‘but it is what I return to, every time.’

  He lifts his gaze, wanting to see her certainty. It is there for him to take should he choose to do so, and in that moment he is surprised at how like her mother Caitlin looks. It is strange that he has not seen it before. As he thinks of Sharn, he wishes she were here with him, despite knowing the gulf between the Sharn he longs for and the reality of what they have become together. It is just that he does not know if he can make this decision alone.

  Sitting on the train, Sham, too, is wanting him, so much so that she is, in fact, right there by his side, envisaging it with such clarity that she is no longer even aware of the sharp, thin music coming from the young man’s Walkman, she is no longer even aware of him, or of the train itself.

  She has transported herself. With her cheek pressed against the windowpane, she is right there with them; Liam, Caitlin, Essie and her. Her breath is short and sharp, her entire body tensed with the effort of being elsewhere.

  Liam, too, breathes in sharply.

  ‘She is your daughter.’ He is trying to understand, and it requires shifting all of his heart and mind in a new direction, because there is Essie, and he cannot deny her existence.

  Caitlin looks down. ‘You have to throw it all away,’ she tells him, ‘everything you have held as truth. I am not what I was and I do not live in the way I once did. It may seem incomprehensible, even wrong, to you, but it is simply different.’

  He does not reply.

  ‘When she went,’ and Caitlin nods in Essie’s direction, ‘it was not easy. But I had to let go. I had to accept. This is the way I live. And now you are back.’ She touches his hand lightly. ‘That is now, and that, too, is of no consequence.’

  ‘Don’t you want to hold her?’ Liam asks, reaching for Essie as she crawls back towards them, but as he utters the words, he knows the question has no place here.

  She stands slowly and tells him she will get some food for them, some water.

  Lying back on the lawn and waiting for her return, he lets Essie clamber over his chest. She is clutching a twig in one hand, and she tries to prise his mouth open with it, laughing as he pretends to snap at it. A new game, he thinks to himself. This is what happens. And then you repeat it over and over again until eventually one of you grows tired of it. And so he snaps at the stick, sometimes barking like a dog, sometimes growling like a tiger. When the twig finally breaks, Essie rolls off him and crawls over to a pile of leaves.

  Liam stares up at the clear sky and as he feels the warmth of the sun on his skin, he wonders what it would be like to truly know what nothing is
and in knowing that to want no longer. He can feel it, almost, and he lets out a long, low breath, wanting all the anxiety, all the tension, to go.

  Underneath the avocado tree, Essie picks up piles of leaves and lets them flutter to the ground. He watches her, barely aware that he is doing so, but nevertheless he enjoys the sight of her absorbed in the moment, and as he props himself up on his elbows, Caitlin walks back across the grass towards them.

  And then it happens; this sudden jarring of the sky against his senses, this awareness of Essie’s leaves, not floating but falling, and this heaviness that descends. This is the place he has come to and he thought it would be clear. He thought he would simply hand her over and go, sure in the knowledge that he had acted as he should. At least, most of the time that was what he had thought. But he suddenly does not know if he can accept all that she is asking him to, and as he looks around him he sees this place as Sharn saw it, as Freya described it, and it frightens him.

  He loves Caitlin. He has known her since she was a small child. He has carried her in his arms. He has put her to sleep. He has held her when she cried. He has even let her go, only to travel for miles to see her now walking towards him, this woman who tells him Caitlin is no more.

  ‘You weren’t there,’ Sharn had said, you didn’t see.’

  He looks over to where Essie is playing and he watches as Caitlin walks straight past her without even glancing in her direction.

  He sits up and rubs at his eyes, wanting only a clear vision for himself, something that he can rely upon.

  ‘What do I do?’ he asks her.

  She sits by his side.

  ‘Do I leave her?’ and he nods in Essie’s direction, ‘or do I take her back?’

  As she cuts an apple into quarters, she does not look up. Her head is bent in complete concentration on the task.

  ‘Tell me,’ he asks, hating the panic that has somehow found its way into his voice, the fear into his soul. Because I don’t know, he wants to say, only a moment ago it was almost clear, but now it has gone, and I have no idea what I should do about anything; Essie, Sharn, you, all of it.

  But he says nothing and she just looks over to where her daughter plays under the tree.

  ‘Nada,’ she calls out, and Essie looks up.

  He smiles to himself at the ridiculousness of his own thoughts, because he wonders, foolishly, whether it is Essie’s actual name that Caitlin has uttered, or counsel: let it go, do nothing, nada, nothing at all.

  ‘Really?’ he asks, and she does not reply.

  Essie crawls towards them, making a path through the pile of leaves, neither heading for Liam nor Caitlin but to somewhere in between them, sitting back on her knees as she looks at them.

  ‘Nada.’ Liam utters the word softly, almost imperceptibly.

  ‘See the sea,’ Caitlin whispers, and they both smile, in a moment that Liam wants to last, aware that as he wants this it will only flutter out of his grasp, his smile gone as he looks across at her.

  He walks over to where Essie sits, unable to trust his ability not to break down. He wants the warmth of Essie in his arms and he holds her tight.

  ‘I’ve never filmed her,’ he tells Caitlin when he finally speaks again, and he is surprised for a moment at this realisation.

  ‘You still can.’

  They look at each other, and they are both aware that this statement holds no answer, only possibilities. It is not, as it could be seen to be, a suggestion from Caitlin as to the course of action that he should take. That is up to him. He kisses Essie and he wants to be able just to let her go, to let everything go, but he does not know if he can. He is alone and he must act. He looks up at the sky, and in that moment the breeze stirs above them, fanning out the leaves of the traveller palms, the sound like the slow rush of the wheels on the track when a train departs from the station, pulling out from the platform.

  She is moving.

  As Essie rocks safe in Liam’s arms, Sharn sways gently in time with the motion of the carriage, her eyes fixed on the window, watching it all; the houses, the cars, the roads, beginning to dissolve, receding now, blurred streaks vanishing behind her as the train picks up speed.

  Liam holds Essie tight, the sweetness of her skin filling his senses, helping him to surrender to the loss – him, Caitlin and Sharn, a trinity that has bound him for as long as he can remember – while giving him the strength to do what he knows he has to do. He has Essie and that is right. As he stares up at the sky, he can do no more than keep this child close and admit that all he once held nearest to his heart has changed.

  Miles away, Sharn, too, looks at the past disappearing before her eyes. For her the only change that now matters is the one that she hopes she can effect. With the glass cool against her skin, she watches the speed make a mockery of all that appears to be permanent, there and then gone. This is what she wants: the present to recede into a nothingness, so that she can get there more quickly, onwards, forwards, fast enough to go right back to the beginning, to another place, a better place than here.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to everyone who helped me in bringing this book to its final form: Nikki Christer and Sarina Rowell at Picador; Jo Jarrah, who did an absolutely wonderful job with the edit; Fiona Inglis, my agent; and the Australia Council for the grant that enabled me to take the time to write.

  I would also like to thank Jo-anne McGowan and Philip Braithwaite for sharing stories that helped me in shaping the material; and, finally, a big, loving thank-you to Andrew and Odessa.