Nothing On Earth

by Conor O'Callaghan

  ‘Martina?’ Paul didn’t dare look at his daughter. Slattery must have meant Martina when he said that, out on the doorstep, about a third person. ‘Made what?’

  ‘Here. Tonight,’ Hazel said. ‘I wish Martina could have made it here tonight.’

  ‘I said that, honey.’ Slattery was balancing cheeses on a marble block. ‘When they arrived, I said we had been expecting all three of them.’

  ‘Isn’t Martina your wife’s sister?’

  ‘I warned you she was a huge fan.’ Slattery was blushing. Or was that just the wine and the heat of the kitchen and the summer that was in it? ‘Fetch your scrapbook, Haze.’

  The scrapbook was wrapped in floral-embossed wallpaper, and in it was glued every cutting they knew about from all the newspapers. Hazel had even taken a poster from one of the filling stations out the road and folded it in two. She held the scrapbook longest at the article that featured a photo of them all: Paul, his daughter, Martina, seated on the sill of the bay window. The reflection of the flash in the double-glazing had made a blind spot of Martina’s head. Hazel was rubbing her thumb around and around the bright sun where Martina’s face should have been.

  ‘Has she gone out?’

  ‘Martina?’

  ‘Has she a hot date?’ Hazel asked.

  ‘Kind of thing.’

  ‘You know I met them?’ Slattery said.

  ‘Really?’ Paul wasn’t sure how much he could trust Slattery’s word. ‘Both of them?’

  ‘Your wife mainly. I saw them together in Rainey’s around the end of May.’

  ‘In?’

  ‘Rainey’s?’ Slattery sounded suspicious of Paul’s ignorance. ‘The supermarket and lounge just down the road. It belongs to the Rainey family.’

  ‘News to me.’

  ‘I bumped into them there at the end of May and bought them drinks. I spoke to your wife only, to be honest, not to her sister.’

  Helen and Martina did go to the pictures together, once, and did stop for one at the lounge belonging to the supermarket.

  ‘She mentioned something all right.’

  ‘Perhaps they had no idea who I was.’ When Paul didn’t protest, Slattery gave a petty shrug. ‘I told your wife I had known their folks.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Not well, obviously, but I had met both of them at different times.’

  That wasn’t what Paul meant. He wasn’t asking Slattery if he had really known their parents. He was asking if Slattery had said that to Helen. Paul had never known anyone raise their parents with Helen or Martina.

  This was why they had been invited. It had to be. Slattery had a smile that said, ‘In your own time . . .’ All those years of skirting around Helen’s past, of accepting Martina’s presence and her protectiveness of her sister, of keeping the girl in the dark. Nobody had ever asked Paul anything. Even Helen had scarcely spoken of it. Oddly, this moment, at the table of a stranger whose wealth was rumoured to come from food manufactured for consumption by dogs, was the closest Paul had ever got to its core. It is conceivable that he wanted to say something, to spill whatever was left to him, but there was still his daughter to think of. His shoulders ached: he was only propping the floodgates shut a while longer.

  How much did Slattery know? More than him? There were times Paul wondered if parts of the truth, and therefore its entirety, had been withheld from him. Slattery wanted juice. You could all but hear the saliva accumulating in his jowls. He could swing for it, Slattery could. Slattery could swing for whatever dirt he was chasing. They all could. Refusing to meet their fat faces gazing at him, Paul pushed his plate towards the centre of the table and coughed.

  Slattery finally said, ‘Unimaginable, really.’

  The girl vomited onto her plate. Just like that. She had eaten every scrap, had sat in pale speechlessness, and now was heaving loudly all over her place-setting shreds of animal flesh swimming in acrid human stomach acid.

  ‘Something didn’t agree with you,’ Slattery said.

  Paul hauled her to the sink. With the second substantial heave came stuff other than food or bile. There was dust in there, sawdust. There were also tiny shards of wood, masonry and steel. Paul tried to run the taps to wash it away before anyone else saw, but nothing came out.

  ‘We should leave.’

  ‘A quick coffee?’

  ‘She’s covered in sick.’ Was Slattery, Paul’s tone meant to ask, even thicker than he appeared? ‘I should really get her home.’

  At the door, Slattery said something about going to ‘Portgal’ until the end of the summer, about hooking up when they got back. The door dragged shut behind them, the crunch of gravel underfoot ceased and the long grass was silver in the light of a torch borrowed from their hosts.

  ‘It looks strange from up here,’ the girl said.

  They could see the outline of the close, their house alarm’s blue strobe, and the town’s and ring road’s smattering of lights in the distance.

  ‘Freaks!’ Paul screamed into the darkness. The air was too dry for echoes.

  The girl laughed and screamed too. ‘Bloody freaks!’

  The Poles were at it full throttle. A bigger than usual gang, a ghetto-blaster cranked up, some drunken singing, raised voices and possibly even a scuffle. By two a.m., Paul had had enough. He pulled on his tracksuit bottoms and thumped on their bell. Nothing. The rear gate was locked. He climbed onto one of their bins and, when there was no evidence of a party, jumped into their garden. Though the patio light was still on, the kitchen was unlit and empty. He could see yellow coming down the stairs, and there seemed to be movement up there. He shielded his eyes and, pressing against the back door, glimpsed only himself in what must have been a long mirror against the nearest wall. His two images, on the glass and on the mirror behind it, were like concentric reflections. They receded when he stepped backwards. When he moved closer again, they loomed into one another, frame into frame, gaze into gaze, mouth into hollow mouth.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  ‘What happened?’

  There was no hiding it, not now or any more, to his bleary-eyed daughter standing in slippers in their hall, deadlock bolted behind him.

  ‘There was nobody there for anything to happen,’ he said. ‘Nobody except some nutter staring straight back out at me.’

  After the water, the money ran out. The phone line went dead, and with it the modem. Even the electricity stopped pumping into their walls. A couple of times a week they walked to the library, where she charged her laptop for free at a power point beneath the back shelves and he riffled the local papers trying to find some mention of Flood’s fall from grace. Nobody said anything to them. Otherwise, they made do with Helen’s scented candles scattered from the bathroom throughout the house, and with Slattery’s torch, used sparingly to save on batteries. The banging on their door resumed, sometimes in the small hours, sometimes during the day. The envelopes piled inside the letterbox. One day a page with red writing was glued to the door.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Something about repossession,’ he said. ‘Nothing to do with us.’

  They started sleeping in the attic, to get as far away from the banging as they could. Paul laid a few unscrewed wardrobe doors as flooring and squeezed two mattresses up through the trap into the attic. It was sweltering up there, with no window and all that hot air under the roof and the smell of melting wax. Mostly he read paperbacks that had been stacked on Martina’s bedside stool, while his daughter kept trying to video-call old schoolfriends via a weak unencrypted signal she occasionally picked up. Paul had saved the last satsuma from the bag he had bought in the supermarket. He held it over a flame and gazed at it, marvelling at its glow. He gazed at it so long that its zest began singeing. The girl’s calls kept dropping or, worse, being scrambled by a high-pitched whistle or a monotonous backbeat. One by one, the disembodied voices receded. It was too much, lying there, eyes shut, hearing your daughter asking, ‘Kannst du mich hören?’
or ‘Hallo, ist da jemand?’ of a mute screen.

  ‘They can’t hear you,’ he said. ‘There’s nobody there, pet.’

  Once, no sleep to be had up in that furnace, he asked from one side of the darkness to the other, ‘Why did she keep saying my name?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Haze. Frau Slattery.’ He could hear his daughter sniggering gently. ‘All she kept saying was my name, over and over and over.’

  ‘I thought she was talking to him,’ the girl said. ‘I thought his name was Paul too.’

  ‘Ah . . .’

  ‘What did you see in the townhouse? I want to know.’

  ‘I saw Martina’s sombrero, hanging on a nail. That’s it, and some graffiti next to it.’

  ‘So be it?’

  After a long pause, Paul said, ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘Do you believe in demons?’

  ‘What kind of question is that?’

  ‘Just what I said.’ Her voice was still very young. ‘Do you believe in demons?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I asked first.’

  ‘I believe,’ Paul said, ‘that if we don’t believe in demons, they won’t believe in us. Do the demons believe in us? That’s the question. The day the demons believe in us, we’re in real trouble.’

  Martina’s phone rang and cut off before either of them could find it. The number read ‘withheld’. Late one weekend afternoon, the house lights came up all at once, the fridge shivered, a country ballad on the radio kicked in during its chorus. Paul whooped, ‘Yee-haw!’ and took the hammer to the shopping trolleys still lying around the site from the water runs and retrieved their coins. They ran to the supermarket and bought oats, nuts and syrup to bake flapjacks. The girl and her mother had always baked flapjacks, and Paul figured making flapjacks might liven up the place.

  ‘How are you since?’

  The old biddy in the supermarket was handing back their change in coppers when she asked that. Since what? Like they were compadres, Paul spat on the hard shoulder home, like they had ever even conversed about fucking anything.

  Paul sat at the table watching his daughter, saying how like her mother she was getting. He told her how gorgeous she was, a young woman almost, how tall she was becoming. He thought he could smell burning. There was, as well, in the core of his skull, like a wasps’ nest ablaze, this sizzle that he could scarcely hear his own voice above.

  ‘You’re not going to just disappear on me too,’ he said, almost shouting. ‘Are you?’

  ‘No chance.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said no chance!’ The girl was shouting too. ‘I’m not going to just disappear!’

  All the while, she was setting the timer on Martina’s phone and wiping the mixing bowl, the spoons, tying her curls into a crushed-velvet scrunchie and watching through the oven’s glass door. Once, she turned and smiled, the way her mother used. All the rooms were pure gold, with the bulbs still on and sun out the back. She was wearing only Martina’s silk scarf as a bikini top and sweatpants that were far too loose on her. Her abdomen was exposed, the white crease marks that the elastic of her knickers cut in her skin, the twin pelvic bones like a pair of dainty fists covered with a cotton handkerchief. Just when they looked golden, perfect, the power died. The long-range weather forecast cut off in medias res, the fridge released a death rattle and all the rooms returned to the old gold of natural light. She said, ‘I’m pretty sure they’re done anyway.’

  She divided the tray into twenty careful rectangles, three cuts lengthways and four widthways, the tip of her tongue on the chapped point of her upper lip, and rested each separately with the butter knife on a rack to cool.

  ‘About ten minutes,’ she said.

  She said it again, walking into the front room. She said it from the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘They’re done,’ she said. ‘Ten minutes to cool.’

  She stopped around the middle step. Everybody turn, the kitchen started bleating, Everybody turn . . .

  ‘Papa? Please.’

  She put her head around each bedroom door, saying his name as she did. She stood at the foot of the ladder and spoke into the attic’s black square.

  ‘Please, Papa, please.’

  Both front and back doors were still locked from the inside. It was then, she said, that she started screaming, ‘Papa, please! Papa, please!’ It was then that she couldn’t find the keys, that she heard them rattling in the pocket of her father’s jacket and unlocked the front door’s bolt from within and sprinted without breathing or stopping until she reached a door, which she hammered on and which I, finally, held open.

  5

  YOU KNOW THOSE stories, where the child is lost in the wilderness and presumed dead? For years her family keeps returning. Eventually, their hope dwindles. The family disintegrates: the mother remarries, the father lives alone. Then a creature wanders into the nearest village, semi-feral and with scant language. The villagers form a circle and stare. Someone asks questions she doesn’t answer, or can’t. Someone else remembers the family who came on holiday many moons ago and lost a daughter in the mountains, who kept returning to find her. One man, who had been acquainted with the family, had been employed as a guide even, recalls the girl’s name, and the sound the name’s word makes when said aloud is met by a flicker of recognition in her.

  That’s what it was like. It was as if she had come running, for all she was worth, out of some urban legend or ‘real life’ story in one of those magazines you read in a doctor’s waiting room. The first door she happened on was mine, and she banged on that, and sat with me in my front room, and waited for the law to arrive, and answered a few routine lines of enquiry, and agreed to accompany us all back to her house.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  The older one in plain clothes, who appeared to be in charge, squinted slightly in my direction.

  ‘I had to say something to the ladies at the gate,’ I said.

  Still he said nothing, and still I felt obliged to explain myself for some reason, in spite of that little voice inside pleading with me to stop apologizing.

  ‘Sorry for keeping you.’

  Because of the barriers the builder called Flood had erected across the entrance to the close, we left the cars outside and pushed our way through. It was still good and bright. The girl had the key so tight in her hand, since bolting from the house, that its ridges left sore-looking imprints inside her fist. It didn’t matter: the front door to her house was still open.

  I was the only one who stayed outside, by my own choosing.

  ‘I’ll wait outside,’ I said.

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’d only be in the way.’

  I could hear the officers shouting into each of the rooms before entering. Every once in a while I glimpsed shapes flitting across a window, and torchlight piercing those spaces that were shaded from the setting sun. It may be the exaggeration of hindsight, but there did seem to be something about the place. Call it an air, an eerie soundlessness, if you will. They were in there a good quarter of an hour and, in all that while, standing waiting on the bricks of their dusty drive, I scarcely heard a peep from the town or the ring road or its Saturday-evening traffic. The site was an absolute state, no tar laid, rubble everywhere, windows with holes in them, doors gaping, scraps of plastic and wiring and chalkboard, the skeleton of a car ploughed into a hill of muck. The charred shell of a caravan, which presumably had been there once for security, sat up towards the buildings that were meant to be flats. What if he came back? What if the father were to materialize there and then, only to find me whistling at the end of his drive and his daughter indoors with officers of the law I had summoned?

  I stepped up to the door and beckoned through. ‘Any joy?’

  The door had partly pushed aside vast drifts of mail, as if the house had been deserted for years. There was also a repossession notice on the door, and all the doors for that matter, a white bill glued to t
he wood with a warning in red print not to remove it. The hall was black. The frame of a racing bike leaned against one of its walls. The interior smelt of nothing but dust and sunscreen lotion. Through the back windows, even though they were smeared with dirt, I could just about make out a couple of sun-loungers and a layer of grey parched muck where a lawn should have been.

  I shouted again, ‘Anything?’ There was even a moment, mad as it sounds, when I wondered if anyone would ever re-emerge from that house. I had left with them to go in search of the girl’s father. How would I explain returning alone to the ladies at my gate? ‘Hello . . .?’

  I stepped out again to the end of the drive, trying to see into the upstairs windows. Finally, I heard voices and saw shadows preceding them back through the door.

  ‘Nothing.’

  The female officer made a face in my direction – a kind of wince. The girl had put a couple of things in a bag that had the crest of some designer outlet on it. She still had on her father’s jacket: she had, it appeared, refused to change into something of her own. They were all of them, I remember, covered with sweat when they stepped out: beads on foreheads, and jackets removed, and shirt sleeves matted to skin.

  ‘What will happen now?’ I asked.

  She was looking straight at me, the officer, mouthing: ‘I haven’t the foggiest.’

  We all came back to my house. Things had quietened down at the supermarket. Mercifully, there was nobody waiting at my gate. The girl sat sniffling in front of the evening’s programmes and being comforted. I boiled and reboiled the kettle, made several pots of tea that were never even poured, and the men in plain clothes alternated between ringing for instructions from superiors or relevant services and quizzing the girl. The same stuff, over and over again. Was there anywhere her father might have gone? Were there relatives? The girl said her grandparents, the father’s folks, had gone away. She didn’t know where, but it transpired that they were on a pilgrimage in Medjugorje.

  ‘What about the sister?’ It was me who asked that. I had kept my mouth shut, or as good as, until then. The girl had made no mention of her mother’s sister, and the officers appeared to have forgotten momentarily. ‘Wasn’t there a sister?’