Nothing On Earth

by Conor O'Callaghan

  ‘Nothing works,’ he was growling. ‘Why does nothing fucking work?’

  She switched off all the lights indoors so that the inside dark merged with the dark of the garden. Paul rattled the handle of the patio door half-heartedly, thumped on the double-glazing, but the face stayed where it was. She turned all the lights back on, ran up to the caravan and rapped on its thin door with her knuckle.

  ‘Come in,’ Marcus’s voice called.

  Marcus was seated, one knee drawn up to his chest. Martina stood in the square yard of floor space in a bikini top. ‘Hello there,’ Martina said, as if her sister were someone she kind of knew from work. Martina had her arms roped around herself. She was shivering.

  ‘Hello back.’ The inside of the caravan smelt of something resembling disinfectant. She felt suddenly self-conscious, having nothing around her except a wet towel. She said, ‘Excuse the intrusion.’

  Marcus had been watching Lost. He had seen nothing. She could hear her own raised voice saying how she couldn’t see the point of Marcus being paid to watch Lost in a caravan while all that shit was going on around them on site.

  ‘All what shit?’ Marcus had stood out of his seat. ‘If you have a problem with the way I’m performing my duties, then you should speak to my uncle about it.’

  When Martina shouted, ‘You’re being rude,’ which of them was she shouting at?

  ‘Otherwise,’ Marcus snapped, ‘I’ll bid you goodnight.’ He pushed the inside of the caravan door with the toe of his steel-capped boot so that it swung outwards, flimsily, on its hinges. Helen ran back down to the house to find Paul scrabbling for a hammer, the only tool they possessed, under the sink.

  ‘Where the hell,’ she asked, ‘do you think you’re going with that?’

  ‘Round the rear access.’ Paul’s voice was shaking. ‘Sick of this.’

  The black was impure. It wasn’t the black you get in winter, which is so absolute as to sparkle. This was the virtual black of a May that was almost over and was already the hottest in recorded history. The black was grainy, fraying with greys and pinks at the edges, like darkness that someone had captured on video. When Paul materialized at the back gate, he had the hammer cocked shoulder-high and was taking long, slow steps. He looked a bit of a clown, like something out of a cartoon: to Helen, a beach towel knotted around her and her wet hair combed back; to the girl, who was at her mother’s shoulder and still had headphones around her throat; to Martina, who had put on a sweater and followed her sister back down to the house.

  ‘Nothing,’ he shouted. ‘Not a sinner.’ Helen unlocked the patio door, stepped out onto the warm cement and told Paul to come back in. ‘I wanted to find something. Someone.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she said. What did he mean? Did he mean that nothing there, and nothing there repeatedly, was the biggest fear of all? Still gripping the knot of her towel, she held out her free hand to him. ‘Please come in.’

  That was more of it. The light not working on the patio, the outline of a face at the end of the garden, the rooms too hot to get a proper night’s sleep. She thought that she could even hear cicadas. There couldn’t have been cicadas anywhere near. It must have been just a memory from their previous life, of the noise of cicadas from forests all around the apartment complex, that millions-deep, deafening chorus.

  Paul said to lie on. It sounded like he was getting dressed when he said it. He knew she hadn’t slept much in the night, he was mumbling, and there was nothing that needed doing. She heard the door slam, his bike whirr down the close.

  For twelve years Helen had looked on from the fringes of Paul’s life, his college peers and his work colleagues. However much he tried to include her, from the moment the girl was born she experienced the parties in basement flats and wine-bar Christmas bashes with all the sadness of a revenant. She was always there and not there. She could see and hear everything, but her own words never seemed to land on the far shore and she drifted through those rooms with invisibility’s weightlessness.

  The girl called up that it was almost noon. They walked in single file. The automatic door of the supermarket didn’t open. There wasn’t even a reflection. What had been Flood’s phrase? Wasting away. Only when the girl arrived, ten paces behind, did the door’s two halves slide apart.

  ‘Will there be,’ a woman behind the counter asked, ‘anything else?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Anything at all?’

  The road home was hot and depopulated, as if the whole world was observing a siesta. The only noise was the gravel beneath their sandals. That and the grating scream of steel being cut in the distance. The girl ate on her beanbag, speaking into her laptop’s screen. Its drum-beats and distortions, its frequent high-pitched shrieks, like a courtyard with a peacock hidden in it, could be difficult to bear. The volume of the telly was up as far as it would go. That was on top of the cacophony of appliances in standby mode, the spring-loaded chains in the doors slowly forcing themselves shut.

  Even the colours in the photo of George and Georgina on the mantelpiece seemed loud: the mauve of her blouse, his sweater’s canary yellow, their white teeth, the sea’s sapphire, the solitary smoking peak behind them, the streaks of evening vermilion. At the precise moment the shutter fell, George was speaking and Georgina was laughing at whatever he was saying. His lips were shaped around a vowel, her eyes half closed, her head leaning back.

  ‘Oh, now.’

  Their father used say that. Whenever he arrived first at the conclusion of some yarn and was waiting for the others to catch up, he would roll his fingers on the arms of his armchair and sigh, ‘Oh, now.’

  Outside, the bricks of their drive felt almost too hot for her bare feet. She could all but hear the earth cracking, the breeze blocks creaking under their own weight, the braids of fibre-optic cable suffocating underground. The close was a morgue. Sheila’s front room wobbled with artificial flame. No cars on the road. The supermarket, in passing, looked deserted. Somewhere out beyond the immediate horizon was light traffic, like the inner storm of a seashell pushed hard against the ear. Oh, now. The phrase kept buzzing in her head. Oh, now, oh, now . . .

  The ring road’s hard shoulder had tar dyed red. The only other souls about were two figures, walking as well, some distance behind. However much she tried to pick up speed, they seemed to have gained with each glance back. A man and a woman, treading the shimmer, appearing airborne even. The chrome logo of the software plant where Paul and Martina worked was blinding with the reflection. In there, somewhere, whichever way you looked at it, were both her other halves. One vehicle beeped. At her, or at the couple in her slipstream? They were getting louder behind her, their steps and chatter.

  The big gates, when she reached them, had a handmade sign tied to them saying the black gloss was still wet. The first headstones were grey and worn; those farther in were newer, more polished; farther still was all plastic grass and bouquets, unconsecrated scrub and thistle. Who were they beckoning? Her footfalls were being overtaken by their echoes. If not her, then who were they calling?

  ‘Where’s your mam?’

  Paul was home ahead of Martina. That was how he explained it later on. He got home ahead of Martina and found all the windows wide open, the front door ajar and his daughter before the telly with a mini-screen in her hands. He said that she pulled a headphone away from one ear and shrugged quizzically, as if asking him to ask again.

  ‘Your mam?’

  He remembered leaving his bike in the hall. He came back downstairs within seconds, still sleeved in sweat from the cycle ride in his suit.

  ‘Did she go out?’ He said it was like talking to the blank walls. Lifting one headphone off his daughter’s ear, he heard himself barking, ‘Did your mother go out for something?’

  3

  Dear Ute (and Benedikt and Sophie!)

  We have never met, but I feel as if I already know all of you loads! I am the sister of Helen, your former nanny. Perhaps Helen spoke about me
at some point. I hope you are all well and that Sophie is enjoying kindergarten.

  One afternoon a week ago, Helen went out and didn’t return. Myself and her husband Paul were both at work. When we got back Helen was gone, and nobody has seen or heard from her since.

  I have been writing around to everyone Helen knows, to ask if they have heard anything. Have you? I know how badly my sister missed all of you after we moved home. She mentioned that she had written to you recently. I have even wondered if Helen went back. She loved your flat and described it so often to me. Whenever I imagine her still alive and safe, it is in your lovely home. If you know of anything that might be helpful, please do get in touch.

  Forgive me for writing in English. Forgive me, too, if you are the wrong people. I never knew my sister’s employers’ full names, only their first names and their occupations. I found you on the internet.

  Thank you for reading this!!

  Martina (Helen’s sister) ox

  ‘Still no word?’ Flood had pulled up to the end of their drive. He had his window down full, his shirt sleeves rolled up. The engine of his banger was revving.

  ‘Still no word,’ Martina said.

  ‘That’s a terror.’

  Martina was out the front, brushing dust that had blown in from the rest of the site, fighting a losing battle. The hot spell had wrung every ounce of moisture out of the muck. Flood’s car was covered in it. Even Flood himself, when he climbed from the car, seemed coated in dust. Cleaning was one of several odd offshoots of Helen’s disappearance. Martina had become house-proud in a way that she had never been before. Of the two sisters, it was Martina who had always been the slob.

  ‘She’ll show up.’

  This was Flood’s usual tack: Helen would show up, one day soon, out of nowhere. With houses still to flog, Flood was determined to put an upbeat spin on what had happened. Martina, on compassionate leave to mind the girl, had seen more of Flood in the past fortnight than she had in the month before that. The sun was directly overhead, so that the shadows they cast were minimal.

  ‘Uncle of mine was gone ten years. Ten years! They found his body in the Thames, shipped it home, buried him. Not five miles from here.’

  Martina had heard the story about Flood’s uncle. Twice before from Flood, and once from Sheila, who said it had been all over the papers at the time. ‘Really.’ Martina wanted to say that she had heard it. She wanted to tell Flood to take a running jump. But that wasn’t how she and Helen had been brought up.

  ‘Then his two daughters won tickets for The Phantom of the Opera. They were stood in an Underground train on the way to the show when one of them heard her name being said behind her. Who was there when she turned around?’

  ‘Go away . . .’

  ‘The man himself.’ Flood was shaking his head. ‘The divil knows who they buried.’ You’d swear Flood was hearing his own story for the very first time. ‘She’ll show up yet.’

  ‘Any sign of this tar?’ According to Flood, if you mentioned Flood to Slattery, Slattery bolted. You mentioned the promise of tar to Flood and you saw his face glaze, his watch twitch. She said, ‘It’s like the desert here.’

  Flood was shifting backwards towards his car. ‘You have the flip-flops and togs. All you need is a beach towel around your neck.’

  Helen would never have gone to London. Helen and Paul had spent three months there, the summer before his last year at university. She’d hated the stickiness of it, the proximity to home, the way that you felt always within earshot of news. She hated most of all the Sundays there, the jarred familiar accents on buses, the desolate municipal playgrounds you went to with your little daughter, the brass of some Salvation Army band on the corner of a half-open shopping precinct that would make you want to run howling into the nearest hills.

  Martina had told all this to the officers in the first few days. There was no way that Helen would have gone there. Martina said that they had no family to speak of. Did Helen have any close friends Martina knew of whom she might have gone to? Martina said that she and Helen were best friends.

  ‘After Mammy and Daddy,’ she said, ‘we just stuck together.’

  She had felt her face reddening when she said that. She wasn’t certain if that made her look embarrassed, about to cry or both.

  ‘Could I ask you to take your daughter into the front room?’ the female officer said to Paul. ‘We’d like to address a few questions to Martina, alone. Is that okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Paul said. He let the girl slip through ahead of him. ‘Sounds worrying.’

  Martina had scrunched a face of bemusement, if only to say that she had no clue either. They made sure that the partition door was closed properly. The female officer said, ‘How would you characterize your relationship with Helen’s husband?’

  ‘Paul?’ She had said his name softly, so that it wouldn’t be audible in the front room. ‘They aren’t married.’ She glanced between them, both looking straight at her, waiting for an answer. ‘What do you mean exactly?’

  ‘Martina, we’re not here to judge.’ The officer’s voice had come with a trained kindness, an off-the-record intimacy that they must all have learned. ‘We have lives of our own. We do understand how things can go.’

  ‘No,’ she said. Her way of clipping that came over every bit as horrified as she felt. ‘Paul is my sister’s husband. He and I . . .’ She heaved an angry, protracted sigh. ‘Just because I’ve lived with them . . .’ She all but scoffed at the officers, with their studied familiarity, their residual acne and their questions copied from evening drama. ‘Never.’

  Martina and Paul had both sat in while the officers interviewed the girl, the last one to have seen Helen. Was there anything in particular about that day that she could remember? Anything at all that seemed unusual? When the girl spoke, she looked at her father for correction or reassurance. After every natural stop, Paul looked up at the others to make sure they had understood. She and her mother had walked to the supermarket to buy rolls and sliced ham for lunch. They had both eaten out the back, in the sun. Her mother had said it was too hot and gone in to get a hat. After that, the girl couldn’t remember very much. She had gone inside herself, for a while, to watch telly. She couldn’t remember seeing her mother from that point onwards. Next thing she knew, in fact, her father was home and very flustered.

  The officers had asked for a recent photo. Paul emptied a plastic tub of photos onto the floor. He looked small and sad down there, on his knees on the polished boards, sliding pictures around with his hands. He looked, Martina thought, like the little boy he must once have been, sorting his Top Trumps cards.

  Forty-eight hours. That was what they said. Over ninety per cent of missing-persons cases got resolved within forty-eight hours. Within a week, a close-up of Helen – squinting, lakeside, Martina’s arm visible around her shoulders like an ermine collar – was on posters everywhere.

  You never know how you might react until it happens. The odd thing is, nobody cried. Or, at least, Martina could remember none of the others crying. She had, initially, to herself, in the spare room. But Paul seemed too intent on looking after his daughter, and the girl seemed too wrapped up in whatever screen was before her. After the authorities and the posters, after several articles in provincial papers and a brief notice in one of the nationals, nobody said anything really. Martina didn’t want to upset them by continually talking about her sister, but kept hoping that Paul or the girl would. When nobody did, it occurred to her that maybe their reticence was out of consideration for her. Maybe, as a form of kindness, they were waiting for Martina to raise it. Gradually, a dazed, muted normality reconvened, in which Helen’s disappearance went weirdly unmentioned.

  Maybe the really odd thing was Paul occasionally calling his daughter Helen. At first it was just a mistake, that commonplace parent’s slip of the tongue. The girl stopped correcting him. She seemed to like being called by her mother’s name. She said so and Paul forgot that he was mixing them up. Even
Martina, who could see how weird it was, called her Helen on a couple of occasions as well. Sometimes that was the only way you could get the girl’s attention. Other times it felt like keeping Helen, the real one, nearby.

  She surfed nights on sites for missing persons. This was some people’s world, belonging to a family member who had disappeared, keeping one another afloat with the Xs of strangers’ chatroom kisses and groundless hope. It was one of those nights, prompted by the officers’ questions, that she wrote to Ute. The Ute she found, the one most likely to fit the bill, was under ‘Features’ with the state broadcaster. It wasn’t true what Martina had said in the email, that she had been writing around to all the people Helen knew. There was nobody else to write to.

  Martina and the girl sunbathed out the back. The days were still cloudless, searing. They rose late, long after Paul had left, ate muesli on beanbags in front of some chat-show or antique weepie, tidied around the kitchen and basked away the rest of each day on beach towels on the patio. There was no work happening on site. By early afternoon, the sun had moved around to the back of the house and cast the slatted shadows of fences across the garden’s parched muck.

  Most afternoons Marcus would text, asking when he was going to see her again and why she had stopped visiting at nights. He addressed her, in every text, as ‘babes’, which made her feel ancient. It was, indeed, possibly the very first thing ever to make her feel ancient. The endearment post-dated her: she had never known anybody call anybody ‘babes’.

  ‘Who was that?’ the girl would ask.

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Again?’

  She gently pressed a finger on her niece’s nose. She said, ‘Keep that out, missy.’ She wasn’t sure if the girl had ever realized about herself and Marcus, and she would have been mortified by the idea of trying to explain. She kept her phone on vibrate on the counter top in the kitchen, so that its drone was loud and unmistakable even when she was out in the sun.