Nothing On Earth

by Conor O'Callaghan

  ‘There’s nobody also!’ The drone had become unmistakable to the girl. ‘What must he want?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’re not texting back?’

  ‘Very little credit. Nosy!’

  Martina took redundancy at the software plant. Her boss, given the circumstances, negotiated a minuscule package on her behalf. She bought creepers and trellis wire for the back wall. She bought sun-loungers in the discount supermarket off the ring road. They walked there: two miles max, and yet she had to drag her niece by the hand for the last bit. They both wore baseball caps and were drenched with sweat by the time they arrived. The supermarket’s inside seemed black at first. Its air-conditioned temperature came as a relief. Once their eyes adjusted to the indoor murk, they could see that the produce wasn’t shelved. It was just piled high on pallets you had to climb up onto to pull things down. Some of the ‘Special Offer’ signs hanging from the ceiling were in a language neither of them recognized or could decipher. All the food came in wrapping that looked off-colour, in brand names that sounded fractionally to one side of what you would expect. The sun-loungers were flat-packed, down at the end. She got a trolley, squeezed two of the loungers into it, and phoned for a minicab. They sheltered in the porch, until someone shouted, ‘Martina,’ from out there in the glare. She gave him a ten, though the fare was nowhere near that, and said not to bother about the change. He asked her, ‘Are you not the lassie who went walkabout?’

  ‘Who went . . .?’

  ‘Walkabout.’

  ‘Walkabout?’ The girl started giggling and Martina had to nudge her several times across the back seat. The driver must have read about Helen in the paper. ‘Am I not the lassie who went walkabout? I am of course! Just over here, thanks. We’ll go walkabout from here.’

  ‘You’re welcome back.’ He winked into the rear-view mirror, as if he was equally in on the joke.

  ‘You’re very good,’ she said.

  The driver insisted on hauling the boxes from the boot. He gave her the card of his minicab firm.

  ‘Ask for Dermie, and Dermie’ll be there in a jiffy.’

  ‘Let me guess. You wouldn’t be Dermie by any chance?’

  ‘No flies on you!’

  Dermie was five nothing, a navy anorak fading at the elbows that smelt of the inside of his cab. He asked if the girls would manage to assemble the sun-loungers. Martina had to apologize for her niece. ‘Something else,’ she said. ‘Private joke. You’re as good.’

  Dermie shouted up to them, from the driver’s door, ‘I’d kill to see you stretched out on one of those.’ He was gesturing at the boxes. He meant the sun-loungers. He meant Martina. She waved and muttered that his name sounded like a skin disease.

  She went topless. They had always gone topless before. Everyone did. Paul was at work all day, the girl accepted her going topless as second nature, and it wasn’t as if there were many neighbours to scandalize. She had a bright silk scarf that she knotted across herself as a bikini top in case there was the stir of someone else around or Flood rang the doorbell, which he hadn’t done in a while. Marcus didn’t get there until six. They had the place to themselves all afternoon. The girl could be nervous. More than once she was convinced that she saw something flitting between the fences that partitioned the rear gardens. How could she not be nervous, after everything that had happened? Martina, as was always her way, made light of the shadows. She did it for her own sake as much as for anyone else’s, but you would never have guessed that.

  ‘Probably just Dermie,’ she would yawn. She talked about Dermie as if they were lovers and wedding bells weren’t far off. ‘I told him to come around the back if there was no answer.’

  ‘In his anorak?’

  ‘Hope so. I love a man in an anorak.’

  Slattery too. Slattery was their other phantom. Any peculiar happening or sound was blamed straight away on Slattery or on Dermie or on both of them. A gate unbolting down the way, or a call that was dead by the time Martina could press ‘answer’, was Dermie or Slattery. Or, when things got particularly silly after a day pickling in the screaming sun, it was George and Georgina, still on the mantelpiece and spoken of like elderly relatives Martina did messages for. Or it was all of them at once, sniffing around the margins like a pack of dogs.

  ‘I don’t care who sees,’ she said once. ‘They can have a good peep for all I care.’

  ‘That’s what Mutti said about you.’

  Martina pushed her sunglasses back onto her hairband, propped herself on her elbows and shaded her eyes. The girl hadn’t mentioned her mother once since her disappearance. She was smirking when she said that, or seemed to be. Not meanly, more teasing. Martina could hardly see her since the sun was directly behind her head. She was a silhouette, a blind spot, an eclipse. She seemed to be sitting upright, head bowed, playing with beads or something between her legs.

  ‘What did your Mutti say about her darling sister? Tell me.’

  ‘She said that you loved being gawked at.’

  It was true. Martina knew it was true that Helen had said that from the word the girl used. ‘Gawked’ was pure Helen. Or, rather, it was the kind of word Helen had loved using. The longer they’d spent over beyond, the more Helen sprinkled her conversation with quaint words that their father would have spoken, that had made her homesick and eventually a little sweet on Flood.

  ‘That’s what your mam said? That I like being gawked at?’

  ‘That you love being gawked at.’ The girl shaded her own eyes and turned her face up to the dome of azure.

  ‘The cheek of her.’ Martina said it to let the girl know that it was okay, that she was forgiven, that Martina thought it was funny. ‘I’ll be ancient long enough and nobody will want to gawk at me then. I might as well enjoy it while they do.’

  Paul’s mother and father visited, just for the day. The mother didn’t take off her coat once. Deep red, woollen, it stayed buttoned to her throat all afternoon. The father had trailered a few bits that had lain untouched in Paul’s old room: a dog-leg computer desk, a filing cabinet painted grey gloss, a giant chrome-plated fan. Paul and his father carried them into the front room. Paul, knowing his father was no longer supposed to lift heavy objects, said that he could move them upstairs piecemeal later on.

  Martina put a gingham cloth on the picnic table. She asked Paul to wheel in the leather swivel computer chair that had come in the trailer. She said the two girls – she was including herself in the word – would sit on that. The rest sat on picnic chairs. Martina had asked Sheila to join them. Sheila said that it was lovely, whether or not it was.

  ‘It makes a lovely change from packing,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Packing?’ Martina asked.

  ‘I’m moving in with my daughter. I’ll probably rent below.’ Sheila patted Paul’s arm. ‘You hold on to Harry’s ladder, pet.’

  ‘You know Sheila’s husband passed on recently,’ Martina said to Paul’s parents. She didn’t want to say ‘died’. She recalled the phrase that everyone had used with them years ago, how odd and oddly acceptable ‘passed on’ had become, until she could hear it in her own voice there at the table.

  ‘Ah, go on,’ Paul’s mother said. Martina couldn’t remember Paul’s mother’s name. She couldn’t ask, after all those years of being effectively family. ‘And this was only recently?’

  That was what they talked about. Harry’s passing on. Sheila sniffled a little, but otherwise looked chuffed to be able to recount the details once more. Paul’s father had his mouth open, speechless, all the way through. Paul’s mother had one leaf of lettuce suspended mid-air on a fork. Martina and Paul were the only ones on wine. She kept trying to catch his eye, to get a refill as quietly as possible, but Paul was too caught up in the story, even though he had heard it several times. Harry ‘melted’. That was the word Sheila kept using. Fit as a fiddle one day, at the doctor’s the next, buried four weeks later. He just melted.

  ‘Paul?’ Martina wiggled her emp
ty lime-coloured picnic cup in his direction. ‘When you’re ready.’

  It was easy for Sheila, holding court like that. Everyone could listen to what she was saying without embarrassment. Harry was almost seventy-nine when he died. They had been together for over fifty years. There was a funeral that half the town came out for. Harry had had a proper send-off – one that made Sheila’s stories possible.

  ‘You never know, do you?’ Sheila had her hanky out. She was dabbing the corner of each dry eye. ‘Five weeks between the tests and the funeral.’ Even Paul, who never seemed to notice anything he didn’t have to, had stopped eating. ‘He was my best friend, and he just melted.’

  Martina asked if anyone fancied coffee and drilled water from a bottle into the kettle. She had the leather seat to herself after that. The telly was on in the front room. For ages it looked like nobody was going to say a thing. Sheila was too absorbed in her own performance. Paul was staring at his parents, who had the look of people who had realized it was down to them, but neither could conjure a phrase to get there. They weren’t grieving in any way that was visible, and they were maybe a bit embarrassed by that. They were anxious, they kept saying, to get most of the homeward route completed before dark. It wouldn’t be dark until after ten, yet they were talking as if it was November. Helen wasn’t their daughter. They didn’t really care that much, but had just enough gumption to make it appear that they did, if only for their granddaughter’s sake.

  It was Sheila who asked, ‘What’s the latest?’

  ‘Very little,’ Paul said. ‘All we have is one possible sighting, walking on the ring road. Barefoot no less.’

  Even then, his parents said nothing. They gazed gravely at the table, as if calculating how long they could reasonably leave it before heading.

  ‘I’ve posted lots of notices online.’ Martina was determined not to let them off the hook. ‘Chatrooms, and stuff like that.’

  ‘Of course.’ Sheila clearly hadn’t a clue what she was on about. ‘And how will you manage?’

  ‘I’ve taken redundancy. Paul will keep working, for the time being.’

  ‘You’re very good.’

  Did Sheila mean Martina was accepting responsibility that wasn’t really hers to accept? Martina had been dwelling on what the officers had asked her, wondering if there were rumours. She wanted to make it clear that she and Paul weren’t together, an item. Once again, she hesitated until it felt too late, and then she immediately regretted that she hadn’t said anything.

  Maybe it was the sunbathing that was the oddest reaction of the lot, odder than occasionally calling the girl Helen. The way they took to sunbathing. The way they were, indeed, passionate about sunbathing. They bought new bikinis, discussed sunscreen factors and angles to the sun, invented their own screening and rotation system and gave it a name: ‘The Spit’. Martina made it their military regime. Four sides, twenty minutes each and twenty indoors; three diminishing levels, the last and longest a weak oil with tints of bronze. It wasn’t just about being brown. They called it their work. The girl loved being in charge of the timer she set on Martina’s phone. ‘Everybody turn,’ she sang, when the timer timed down into beeps. She recorded herself and saved it as the timer alert. You knew when the electronic Everybody turn! Everybody turn! squeaked twice that time was up.

  Martina got into the habit of drinking small bottles of rosé in the afternoon. She waited until after four, the day’s regime mostly over. She wore yellow rubber flip-flops, drank from a picnic cup and drifted around the garden sipping after the girl had put on her headphones. They were out there every evening when Paul, his day’s work behind him, pushed his bike through the front door. Martina thought nothing of tiptoeing around him in the kitchen, in shades and briefs, asking how all the lads at the plant were getting on. Everything looked green inside, after hours in the glare. The fitted units, the table and chairs, even Paul slumped there in his suit, they would all be lime green for a while.

  ‘I feel like a pig,’ she said. The cord of her sombrero was around her throat, and her arms were folded behind her back. ‘One that’s been on a spit, I mean.’ Paul laughed a quiet, weary laugh, making a meal of removing his cycle clips. ‘Are you okay?’ She was smiling to herself, at his refusal to look up, at her sister’s words spinning in her head. She loved being gawked at. She placed one finger under his chin and gently pushed his face upwards. ‘Are you okay?’

  She thought nothing, eventually, of giving the little one tipples of rosé, of letting her go topless too. The sun shifted sideways across each day. South-east to south-west was sunbathing prime time. They positioned and repositioned the loungers to keep facing it full on. The radio changed voices, stations. Every now and then you could hear a lorry barrelling past on the road or a car alarm warbling. A hot-air balloon crossed directly overhead late one Friday. Its stripes were orange and purple. You could make out heads leaning over the basket. Martina and the girl stood on their sun-loungers, as if that made them any nearer the balloon, and whooped. After it had drifted from sight, Martina said how daft they must have looked, two naked insects waving among the half-built houses and dilapidated hardware and scorched earth. It must have been one of those afternoons, around about then, in that state, that I saw them.

  They were often past giggly by the time Paul got home. Mostly, he didn’t seem to know where to put himself. They would hear him, from the garden, entering the kitchen. They would call to him, but he never came out, and he could take an age upstairs to change out of his suit.

  Once, and once only, Martina followed Paul up while he was changing. She tapped on the door and walked straight in without waiting to be summoned. She hadn’t put on a T-shirt before coming up. She was in their room, Paul and Helen’s, before it occurred to her that she hadn’t put anything on. She wanted to know if they would phone out for a Chinese. Martina and the girl had been talking all afternoon about phoning out for Chinese.

  ‘On me,’ she said. She folded her arms, laughed at him for staring and asked again what he thought about Chinese for dinner.

  ‘What is?’

  It was like Paul had never seen her in next to nothing before, or any woman for that matter. It was like Paul didn’t speak English any longer. He was still staring at her. Martina had on bronzing oil. Her skin was glistening with it. Her shoulders felt red and sore. Her navel was pierced with some kind of crystal stud. Her arms had freckles peppered on them. She tilted her head and, unfolding her arms, formed a rope of her falling hair.

  He said, ‘What’s on you?’

  ‘Food!’ She sat down on the end of the bed where Paul was sitting. It was only then that she noticed he was clutching his suit trousers in his lap. She asked him, ‘Are you okay?’

  Red dust off the site had stuck to the oil on her skin. From the way her skin glittered, there must have been particles of mica in the dust. She had the exact same solitary mole on the underside of one of her breasts that Helen had.

  ‘I never noticed that before,’ he said. He sounded like a little boy.

  ‘I should hope not.’ Her voice was soft, like tar in hot sunlight. ‘It’ll be okay.’

  For the first time, after weeks of keeping calm, the weirdness of it all was apparent on his features. The weirdness of what? Of his wife going missing, and her face in newspapers and on community noticeboards in shops. Of the way the world just carried on after a fashion, like a lake’s surface flattening after a splash, and expected the three of them to follow. Of how the girl assumed her missing mother’s name. Of how Martina’s presence probably helped to bypass any grief he might have been expected to experience. Of how like his vanished wife she must have been, in the bedroom that had been theirs, almost completely naked, her black hair and green eyes, the tiny gap between her front teeth.

  ‘Helen,’ Paul said. crouching slightly forward.

  ‘Sssh,’ she was saying very softly. ‘It’s okay.’

  He closed his eyes, squeezing them tight. ‘Helen.’

  ‘It�
��s okay.’ She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She wasn’t even certain what was happening. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’

  His breath stopped, kind of rattled, and released after several seconds. There was the smell then, like disinfectant. Martina went into the en-suite for some reason, ran the taps, sloshed suds around her hands, though she hadn’t touched him at all. Paul sat there, head bowed, not moving. She shut the en-suite door quietly. She said she meant it when she’d said that it would be okay, that she would see him downstairs. She stepped onto the landing and shrieked, ‘Jesus, Helen!’

  The girl was barefoot on the landing, her headphones removed. It was possible that she had been standing out there all along and met Martina emerging from the master bedroom with her hands freshly washed. Martina said, ‘Your daddy’s just a bit wobbly, love. I was talking to him.’

  ‘Is he okay?’

  ‘He’s grand. Let him dress and we’ll go down and pick something from the menu.’

  The nearest takeaway, in town, was called the Lucky House. The woman delivering arrived in a van and shouted through the open door. It was Paul who went out. She stood there staring past him into the house, even after Paul had paid her. There was a small boy in the passenger seat of the van. The food was steaming in a brown bag. They had thrown a handful of fortune cookies on top. Martina had dressed and laid the table, and the three of them ate as if nothing was any different.

  ‘This day has been bizarre,’ the girl said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Martina was glancing back and forth between the girl and Paul. When the girl didn’t reply immediately, she asked again, ‘Helen, how was it bizarre?’

  ‘I saw Mutti in the garden.’

  ‘Your mother? Today?’

  ‘While you were upstairs. She walked across the garden.’

  ‘While we were . . .?’

  ‘Upstairs. Talking.’

  Martina and Paul waited. This, they seemed to agree, tacitly, together, at once, was the girl’s way of telling them she believed something had happened. Perhaps even that she had heard. Martina, not for the first time, wanted to explain that nothing really had happened, that they had nothing to hide, but she couldn’t order the words properly in her head. The girl had not really seen her mother in the garden. She was just saying the thing most likely to disturb. She was just saying something that would be certain to cause guilt.