Nothing On Earth

by Conor O'Callaghan

  ‘We spoke on the phone.’

  ‘We did indeed.’ Flood smiled when he said that. She had called long distance twice early in the year: once to ask initially if he would consider a rent-to-buy, and once to arrange for keys. She had called from a payphone next to the laundry room in the basement of their old apartment block, with prepaid minutes. Flood’s smile must have meant he didn’t need reminding that they had spoken. ‘That’s why I asked for you.’

  ‘We were wondering when we’d see you.’

  ‘I meant to drop by sooner.’ Every time he spoke, it appeared something else had caught Flood’s attention. ‘When did you get here?’

  ‘Few days ago.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Flood turned to acknowledge the others’ presence. ‘Marcus said he saw a big blue truck pull up.’

  ‘Marcus?’

  ‘Sister’s youngest. I have him on night security for the time being.’

  The girl’s father wiped chicken grease from his hands and stood looking up at Flood and said something like, ‘Paul.’

  ‘Good man, Paul.’ Flood started towards the front of the house. ‘There’s a couple of bits and bobs.’

  The three of them walked the close: Helen and Paul and Flood. Paul looked like he wasn’t entirely sure where he was. He kept squinting at the unblemished blue above them and nodding vacantly at whatever Flood and Helen were saying.

  ‘Have you made yourselves known to Harry and Sheila?’

  ‘In number three?’

  ‘The very one.’ Flood shaded his eyes and peered downhill towards the only other house occupied. The rest were bare breeze block, black cavities where there should have been doubleglazing. A handful didn’t even have slates on the roof. ‘Smashing folks altogether.’

  Coming back was her idea. Paul, she knew, would make that clear to Flood. There were several moments, during Flood’s tour of the close, when Flood said something and Paul rubbed the underside of his nose as if he were trying to stifle a smirk. They walked; Paul drifted several paces behind and she slowed her own pace to let him catch up. They stopped to inspect something, and Paul came to a standstill to one side, hands in pockets, rocking on his heels. Whenever she asked a question, she made a point of raising her voice to try to include him.

  ‘When can we expect other neighbours?’

  ‘We’ve a few nibbles.’

  ‘Nibbles?’

  ‘Possible buyers. Young family like yourselves. From the midlands. Any day now.’

  Flood lifted things as he spoke, arranging scraps of iron rod or plastic tubing into neat rows, as if that made any difference. His beard was copper with flecks of white in it. His arms were thick, brown. The hot sun, directly overhead, threw a little black pool in which Flood seemed to stand knee-deep. He kept shading his eyes and peering at her. He kept turning phrases that sounded comical, even when they weren’t meant to be. At one point, crossing the dust track back towards their house, he asked, ‘How long were you over beyond?’

  ‘Over beyond?’

  Flood nodded sideways, towards the open country on the road away from town, as if the next parish were the continent. ‘In foreign parts.’

  ‘Ten years,’ she said.

  ‘That long? The place must be unrecognizable.’ Did Flood regret the last part of what he’d said? He might well have done, from the way he examined the ground between them. ‘Have you been up the town?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  They stopped at the bottom of the driveway to theirs. Paul backed indoors without a goodbye. She wondered about apologizing, but Flood didn’t seem that bothered.

  ‘Nothing much to see. Handful of pubs and a filling station with a minimart. There’s a film club in the courthouse one night a month, if you’re interested.’

  Helen laughed, openly this time. It sounded like he was asking her on a date. When she laughed, Flood blushed and tried to laugh as well, and she felt mean.

  ‘You never know,’ she said.

  Flood laid one hand on the sign that read ‘Show House’. The letters were branded into a lacquered slice of oak. ‘I’ll leave that there for now,’ he said. She hadn’t forgotten that that was part of the deal. She just hadn’t said so to the others. ‘In case people want to look around.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So hold on to the few sticks of furniture for the time being, if that’s okay.’

  There wasn’t much: a coffee-table made from chrome and glass, a sleigh bed in the master upstairs, a photo in a walnut frame on the mantelpiece of some anonymous retired couple whom Martina had already christened George and Georgina.

  ‘I quite like them. I always like other people’s things more than my own.’ She had assumed that Flood would know what she meant. When he said nothing, and just looked as puzzled as he did, she tried to brush it off. ‘I suppose I’m odd that way.’

  ‘They’re just things, stuff I got in a discount warehouse, to take the bare look off.’ Flood tucked his shirt into his jeans and pulled a cluster of keys from one of his back pockets. ‘You can burn them when we’re done.’

  ‘No, I do, I like them,’ she said again, and wished she hadn’t. ‘And it’s not as if we’re not glad of them.’

  ‘When might you be in a position to complete?’

  ‘To complete?’

  ‘The buying end of the deal.’

  ‘Sooner than later,’ she said. She hadn’t told Paul or Martina this either. ‘That’s the hope.’

  ‘Good so.’ Flood gestured towards a dinky caravan parked about fifty yards up the site, between the houses and the two identical apartment blocks at the top of the close which he referred to as ‘townhouses’. ‘Marcus will be up there from six every night.’ Flood looked mortified by the name. ‘Don’t know where they got “Marcus” from. And pass no remarks to Slattery.’ When Helen shrugged, Flood made a circle with his index finger. ‘Used own this land.’

  It was true what she had said. She preferred being surrounded by others’ things. For days after, she replayed her conversation with Flood. For some reason she didn’t fully understand herself, she had expected from him a smile of assent, not the bewildered sideways shift she’d got. Gradually, the way you do, she created a version in which Flood was mildly curious, enough to ask her what she meant. The belongings of strangers came with a history, she would tell him. The history made a kind of noise around those things. She preferred that second-hand noise to the silence of the new. It was reassuring. That was why she agreed to holding on to the show house’s flotsam: the coffee-table, the bed, the couple scissored from a pensions brochure . . . That was why she held on to them all.

  A door shut, of its own accord, somewhere on the ground floor. Everyone was definitely in bed. She lay for the guts of an hour beside Paul, just listening, to see if it would happen again. She stopped on the third step from the bottom and, almost embarrassing herself, asked of the darkened hallway, ‘Hello?’

  From the next house up there was a sound. It was like a hollow ball hopping off the chimney breast. It was so faint at first that she wasn’t sure if there was a sound at all or just the memory of a sound like it. She slid a beanbag over to the bay window and knelt on it, her elbows on the windowsill. It took a while, but gradually her eyes adjusted to the dark outside, which was fairly watery anyway. The greys of the bare blocks differentiated themselves from the black of slates and windows. There was no light in the caravan. There were pools of hardened cement and chalk. Lots of weeds had sprouted up around the townhouses; ragwort mostly, but she had seen a few poppies too. Frayed tyres, a mangled aluminium ladder, shale and random scattered scraps of timber and scaffold. Hours the sound went on, or seemed to, a rhythmic thudding that was slight but still insistent enough to tremble the glass on George and Georgina in their frame. Then it just stopped. She stayed there until the enamel light that precedes sunrise had made everything vaguely visible, expecting whoever it was to emerge at any second and walk across the close. It was going to be another roasting day.
/>   She posted a notice about child-minding on the community board in the supermarket halfway into town. She walked there with the girl for something for lunch and brought a card that they had made. The man at the till asked to read it first before it went up. There had been a few complaints recently about the nature of the notices.

  ‘The nature of them?’

  ‘What they said,’ the man said, ‘type of thing.’ The man was being delicate. ‘What they’re advertising.’

  There was a handful of shoppers, all queuing along the cooked-meats counter. Even so, the man served Helen first.

  ‘These are before me.’ She was pointing at the others queuing.

  ‘You’re grand,’ he said. The other shoppers neither agreed nor complained. ‘We’ll let you go ahead.’

  An opening behind the man led through to the serving side of a bar or a lounge of some description. She could see a mop, and rows of unopened minerals and tonics. The lunchtime news was warbling in the background. The silver outline of a pool table shone in the murk. The man was looking at her gazing through the door open at his back. He asked, ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Helen said.

  She told Sheila about putting the notice up in the supermarket. She told her later the same week, a morning they had agreed to go down to number three for coffee.

  ‘You’re great,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘You are, love. You’re great.’

  Sheila had her gas fire switched on, as in the depths of winter, an armchair pulled over beside it, a hanky tucked up her sleeve. Her hands had that soft paper-thin skin that elderly people often have. Helen and the girl had both bathed, to wash off some of the dust, and put on fresh shorts and tank-tops. They were sitting on a sofa in the bay alcove, as far from the fire as they could manage. There was a plate of chocolate biscuits wrapped either in green or orange foil. The girl had one of each. Sheila asked Helen, ‘Are you not hungry?’

  ‘I’m trying to lose weight.’

  Sheila kept talking about Marcus. ‘Super swimmer,’ she said. Sheila had a soft spot for Marcus. ‘Used be in the papers all the time. Harry goes way back with two of Marcus’s uncles, on the other side.’ She must have meant not the Flood side. ‘They did a lot of deals together across the border in the war.’

  ‘I still haven’t met Harry.’

  ‘You will. He’s not himself at the moment. A bit seedy.’ Sheila looked at the ceiling, which Helen took to mean that Harry was laid up in bed. ‘He thinks the world of your husband.’

  Paul had borrowed Harry’s ladder to lift boxes into the attic, and had said what a gent Harry was. Everyone always assumed Helen and Paul were married. The girl stopped eating for a second, after Sheila said ‘husband’. For something to say, Helen started describing Ute and Benedikt.

  ‘Who, love?’

  ‘The couple I worked for,’ she said, ‘over beyond.’ Flood’s phrase in her mouth tasted strange, but Sheila didn’t seem to notice. ‘That’s why I left an ad in the supermarket, to get a job like the one I had with them.’

  ‘You’re great.’

  She couldn’t remember what that meant, to be great in the way that Sheila kept saying it. ‘So are you!’

  ‘No, you are.’ Sheila was still perched out on the edge, still looking into flame that never changed shape. ‘You’re very brave to come back and make a proper go of it.’

  Marcus was up in the caravan every night, without fail, from six o’clock. He arrived on a racing bike, wearing a hi-vis singlet and workmen’s boots. He had spiky hair dyed peroxide. He had a golf club that he practised swinging in the dust, chipping pebbles into the townhouses when he looked too distracted for words and it was still scarcely dusk. He had a black-and-white portable television that lit up the inside of the caravan, like a sparkler inside a birdhouse.

  ‘I should bring him up something.’

  She was standing in the bay window of the front room. The room had nothing of theirs in it except two beanbags and a forty-two-inch screen. Paul and Martina were just back from work in the software plant on the ring road, still in their suits, and somewhere behind.

  ‘Bring what precisely?’ Martina asked.

  ‘I should bring Marcus up some biscuits or something.’

  ‘Leave Marcus to me. I’ll take care of Marcus.’

  ‘I bet you will.’ Helen had followed them into the kitchen, was slouched in one of the other chairs and peering wide-eyed over the rim of her coffee mug. There was no food cooking. Paul had a bicycle clip on the right leg of his slacks; Martina still had her runners on, laces undone.

  ‘Bet I will what?’

  ‘Take care of Marcus.’

  ‘Well . . .’ You could never fully tell with Martina. She took in her stride every different thing with an ease, a lightness, that could feel the same every time. ‘Poor Marcus, on his own in his little caravan every night.’

  They walked to the pictures, herself and Martina. They turned left at the end of the close, passed the supermarket facing the church and crossed straight through the roundabout for the ring road. That was the first time they went up the town. Two streets, five pubs, a Chinese takeaway, a filling station with a minimart, a hardware shop. There was nobody else around. The cinema was just what Flood had said: a courthouse at the far end of the main street that screened old films on the same night of every month.

  A chap with lip-piercings and a circular hole in one of his earlobes ripped their two tickets in half. They squeezed into a double seat, one row back from the very front. They had always shared a double seat as children. The film had already started, the credits, the music. Martina had brought a giant bag of popcorn that she seemed scared to eat for fear of the noise her eating would make. She set the bag across the dip created by their touching legs and linked her arm into Helen’s.

  ‘There’s nobody else here.’

  ‘I know,’ Martina said. Helen was telling her not to worry about the noise. ‘Still.’

  There was a family of three in the film, taking care of a hunting lodge in the wilderness through the winter months. The nearest life to them was the ranger’s office on the other side of the state. Vast white drifts were mounting against the outside walls and doors.

  ‘Snow!’ Martina whispered. ‘Looks to die for.’

  All the corridors, all the floors, were empty. A boy on a tricycle kept speeding down them, around corners, the racket of the tricycle’s wheels on bare boards alternating with the carpet’s silence. You could hear the reels turning. You could all but hear the column of vivid dust swirling above their heads. Several times they jumped at once. When the boy jolted to a standstill at twin girls in blue dresses, some of the popcorn got sprayed beneath the row of seats in front of them.

  ‘Jesus!’

  The twins spoke in unison, their voices distorted electronically. The piercings guy who had ripped their tickets was slouched in the back row and laughing out loud at parts that were not meant to be funny, even at the part when a man kissed a woman who turned to decomposing flesh in his arms. They watched the credits to the very end, down to the symbols and logos of bodies responsible for funding for the film, until the house lights faded up and the screen scrolled back into its case and the space was just a courthouse once again.

  They called for a drink at the lounge belonging to the supermarket, the one opposite the church halfway out from town, on what locals called ‘the old road’. There was just the two of them and a row of regulars at the counter. Martina asked, ‘Have you heard anything back from the von Trapps?’

  The von Trapps was what Martina called Ute and Benedikt, though she had never met them. Helen had emailed Ute to say they had arrived and settled in. She had mentioned to Martina that she had written.

  ‘Nothing back.’

  When it was Helen’s shout, Martina rested a flat hand over the rim of her glass. A man on a high stool at the bar, well spoken and butty, insisted on paying.

  ‘I insist,’ he
said. ‘I knew your family.’ He held a crisp twenty between two fingers and wafted it across the bar and informed the barman, ‘For our new neighbours.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Helen said. She said it to Martina, resting the glasses on their table. ‘You have the midget up there to thank.’

  Martina raised hers to him, smiled and nodded silent thanks. She said, ‘I’ll pretend to drink it,’ and let her lips touch the rim. It wasn’t like Martina, abstinence wasn’t.

  ‘Are you pregnant?’

  ‘I wish! I promised Marcus I’d drop up, and I don’t want to be plastered.’

  Martina had gone walkabout a few evenings, but never said where she was going. The idea of her wandering up to Marcus made Helen feel safe in a way that she didn’t understand. So did the thought of her sister wishing she was expecting. ‘You’ve already made yourself known to him, so?’

  ‘Didn’t I say I would?’ Martina leaned forward again and this time actually lapped from the head of her second pint. Martina had this cat-that-got-the-cream expression which always wound Helen up. She had it then. ‘He’s lovely.’

  ‘He said he knew our family.’

  ‘Marcus?’

  ‘Not Marcus,’ Helen said. All roads were leading to Marcus in Martina’s head. ‘The wee chap at the bar who bought the drinks.’

  ‘Did he say anything else?’

  Martina went to get change for the pool table. She was up there a good five minutes, the lad behind the bar teasing her about her cue action and the row of regulars chiming in. Playing was Martina’s idea. It was Martina who rested the coins into their slots and held the tongue in until the rack was clear, who placed the balls into the triangle frame, who asked the men if they went in any particular pattern. Martina seemed to love them gawking, especially when she missed the white ball altogether and they cheered. Martina never had to watch her figure. The barman came around and stood behind her and held it for her and got her to position her hands on top of his and showed her how. Helen finished her second pint and sipped at the one Martina had no intention of drinking, situating her lips to fit the crescent Martina’s lipstick had left.