Nothing On Earth

by Conor O'Callaghan

  ‘We’ve asked her that already,’ the younger woman officer said. ‘Over in the house.’ She looked amused by my involvement. ‘She says Martina and her daddy had a row of some description. Martina went back abroad, isn’t that right?’

  ‘That’s right,’ the girl said.

  ‘We’ll be sure to chase it up.’

  My telly was on mute in the background, a man picking lottery balls from a tube and placing them in a row on a rack, numbers facing outwards. They asked her about the writing on her skin.

  ‘Writing?’

  ‘The words on your skin. Did you write them yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what do they say?’

  The girl slowly opened the jacket she was wearing. She peered into the petite folds of flesh on her tummy. One by one, she ran a finger under each of the various smudged phrases.

  ‘Words just.’

  ‘What words?’ The woman officer was doing all the talking. She was being very gentle, but insistent with it. ‘Can you read me out some of the words?’

  The girl glanced around at the four of us. It must have felt peculiar, being asked to read aloud to a roomful of strangers words inscribed on your body. It must have felt particularly peculiar to have all these grown-ups gazing at your naked flesh. Her flesh, where there was no ink or dirt, was perfectly unblemished. No goose-pimples or anything like that. It was red from the sun, and even inclined to brown in patches. It had the texture, her skin, of the pure fine suede of a peach. She peered down at herself once again and stretched her skin in various spots and spoke as if each word were acres apart from all the rest.

  ‘This is it,’ she said. ‘Haze. Not quite the ticket. You are very good. Spring-loaded. Walkabout. There you are. So be it. On his plate. Heading up. Gilt.’

  The younger of the detectives struggled to stifle a giggle. The woman was giving him a filthy look. He had his elbows propped on his knees and started vigorously inspecting his interlocked fingers. The older one’s phone went off in his shirt pocket. He took it outside.

  ‘Do you mind if I have a look?’ The woman was kneeling now. She had one of the girl’s arms in her hand and was pushing the sleeve down from shoulder to wrist. The arm was criss-crossed with blue ink. ‘What do the words mean?’

  ‘Nothing,’ the girl said.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘People said them and I wrote them to remember.’

  The second detective summoned me into the hall. He used an odd phrase to do so: he said, ‘If I could borrow you a sec.’ I knew he meant me by the way he touched the elbow of my blazer. I drew the door behind me, assuming he didn’t want the girl to hear whatever it was he had to tell.

  ‘No luck with social,’ he whispered on my doorstep. ‘Saturday night, you know?’ He shrugged and shook his head. He had, I remember now, a pipe that he lit then, out on my front step. ‘This far off the beaten track,’ he continued. ‘Anywhere else, any other time of the week.’ Still I said nothing. ‘But placing her immediately could be tricky.’

  It was as if he were leaving spaces, deliberately, for me to say what he wanted me to say. However determined I was not to say what he wanted, each space he left felt like a little vortex that I couldn’t resist being sucked into.

  ‘If needs really be,’ I heard my own voice sighing, ‘she can stay here. She’ll be plenty safe.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  There was surprise in his voice when he said that. He even permitted himself a pursed smile. He had cornered me into offering something that I didn’t want to offer and of which he was always going to disapprove. It never occurred to me that the girl would stay. It just seemed the proper thing to offer, being the nearest to her home, being the one she came to first.

  ‘How old did you say she is?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said. He was concentrating on his pipe. He couldn’t seem to get a draw out of it. ‘About twelve?’

  ‘That young? Really?’

  They all hung on for a couple of hours. At one point, there was talk of a bed for her in a care home in the capital, but that was over an hour’s drive away and, besides, the girl seemed distraught at that idea of going far from her home. Two of them sat in the front room with her, the older detective and the uniformed woman, stepping outside every now and then to take a call. The third, the giggler, was sent off to wait in the car at the entrance to the site, in case anyone or anything turned up. Around eleven the pair of them asked me into my kitchen to inform me that there was no life on the close, no sign of her father. I told them I would ask my cleaner if the girl could stay with her for the night. They went in to talk to the girl, while I called my cleaner once more to ask her. Staying in the close, I could hear them explaining, wasn’t an option.

  ‘Your daddy will turn up tomorrow,’ the female officer was promising. ‘Nothing surer.’

  ‘If he doesn’t?’

  ‘Let’s not even go there.’

  They waited till my cleaner returned. When she arrived, she had an overnight bag, a maroon sports hold-all, slung over her shoulder. She held up the bag and said, ‘If it’s okay by everyone, I thought it would be less disruptive if I stopped here rather than her coming to ours.’ When none of us said anything, she added, ‘She’ll get more peace here.’

  That idea, of my cleaner being with us in the house overnight, seemed acceptable. In one way, I was as relieved as they were by her suggestion. In another, to be honest, I was put out by the suspicion implicit in their relief. All this was happening on my doorstep, with my blessing, and yet somehow that added up to me being not entirely trusted. I pointed out that the spare room, which was made up and in which the girl could sleep, had a door with a key that she could lock from within; meaning that she would be perfectly safe with or without my cleaner staying over. But the words, spoken out loud and in that order, may have sounded shrill.

  The officers assured us that they would be back first thing in the morning. They spoke to the girl in the front room, explaining to her that my cleaner would be staying over with us. She just looked vacantly at them. They offered some further comforting blather and disappeared into the silvery darkness, their siren black and silent.

  ‘Are you set?’ I asked the girl. I remember wondering how much English she could really speak. ‘Are you not wiped?’

  After that, I let my cleaner bring her up to the spare room. She picked up the girl’s bag of things fetched from her house, and with the other hand coaxed her up out of her seat. I sat where I was, listening to my cleaner talking softly, pragmatically, on the staircase, as if the girl were some accident victim relearning to walk. My cleaner would take my room across from the girl’s, I thought, and I would bunk on the couch downstairs. There was extra linen somewhere. Eventually I could hear the door of the spare room clicking shut. I could even hear the girl’s key twisting within. The staircase creaked once again.

  ‘She’s a bit wobbly, as you might expect,’ my cleaner said. ‘But she knows she’s safe too.’

  ‘You’re as good.’

  She had the hold-all on her shoulder again. She asked, ‘Do you really need me to stay?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. After my little speech in the kitchen, I had no option but to play indifference. The thought of her not stopping with us, however, made me sick to my stomach and inclined to panic. ‘But having promised the officers . . .’

  ‘I’ll come over at the crack of, before anyone is up and about.’ She laughed. ‘I have nothing in the bag anyway. It was just to reassure her nibs.’ Then she seemed embarrassed. ‘One thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She’s in her flowers.’

  ‘She’s . . .?’

  ‘. . . in her flowers?’

  ‘Leviticus,’ I said. ‘I was never sure entirely what that meant.’

  ‘You know . . .’ She rolled her tongue around the inside of one cheek. ‘Time of the month?’ I put my face in my hands. ‘But she assures me she’s got towels or what-have-you.’ I remember
groaning. She said, ‘It’ll be grand.’

  I say this in the interests of honesty. We led the law to believe, my cleaner and I, that she would stay over with us. I was honest in all other aspects of this nightmare. This was the one falsehood, and even then it was one by omission only. At no subsequent point, as far as I’m aware, did anyone think to ask either of us, separately, whether or not my cleaner had actually stopped over on that first night. Without ever agreeing or even discussing it, neither of us has seen fit to divulge that minor truth. She said goodnight very quietly, tiptoed to the door and left me to push its latch with the softest imaginable click. The beam of her people-carrier blanched the curtain and disappeared.

  I sat a bit on my own, the telly on and the door of the front room open. The telly’s benign white noise, its voices and gunfire and orchestral sweeps, might have been audible to the girl and possibly of some comfort. Every once in a while I hit ‘mute’ and listened. There wasn’t a whimper from upstairs. I was used to having the place to myself. Oddly, her presence in the house and my care of her made for a loneliness that never otherwise had been the case. Desperate for some familiarity, I even tried calling my younger brother in Florida. It would have been still only early evening there. Back then, we still called one another out of the blue. Sometimes, if you caught him and his wife at the right time of their day, my brother would put it to speaker and we chatted while they ate. My call went straight to voicemail and threw me. I held on after the beep, but could think of no message and succeeded in leaving only what must have been my muffled breathing and my sitting room’s static hiss.

  I sat until I could keep my eyes open no longer, switched off all the power points and stood alone in the murk of the downstairs hall. I think I even dabbed myself with water. I would never have been the nervous sort, but the thought of her up there in the room, able to step out at any moment and meet me on my own landing, gave me pause. I removed my shoes and put my faith in the soundlessness of the carpet’s pile. I did wonder about tapping on her door and asking if everything was all right – it was so quiet – but I thought better of it. That might have scared her. Instead, I left the shaving light on in the bathroom, locked my own door as quietly as I could and lay in that magenta dark you get on a summer night.

  I had known who she was when she appeared at my door. I knew the story inside out. There were the sisters’ parents, going the way they did, and then the sisters emigrating. Their eventual return was big news locally, far more so than they seemed to be aware of. One of the sisters and the husband of the other twin got work in the new American factory. Some saw the quieter sister and her daughter, whom people said had a foreign accent, streeling around as if they were going to or coming from a beach that was nowhere near. Then the girl’s mother’s face was in the window of every shop and supermarket you stepped into, on telegraph poles all over the county. The story was reported everywhere initially, died away, and people did wonder: one minute she was this young mother back home to make a go of it with her family, the next she had vanished and there didn’t appear to be much urgency about finding her.

  I had walked over to the close, as they called it, a couple of times. Sheila and Harry were old friends of mine. It was Sheila who suggested that I pop up to number seven. She suggested it more than once, but at first I wasn’t fussed. They were tomorrow’s young, with their worldwide webs and their several languages. The last thing they wanted was yesterday’s man on their doorstep, preaching ancient, hollow words. They weren’t part of the congregation. They weren’t really at Harry’s removal or grave, though I did see the mother standing out on the close when Harry’s coffin was being carried from the house. After the story broke, Sheila started saying it to me again and with ever greater insistence. She said she thought they would be glad of a friendly face, of a bit of counselling. In my position, it is expected. So I did; go up, that is. But I do remember feeling like an old fraud approaching their house, acting out a parody of my role, stalking souls in torment.

  There was no answer. I pressed the bell three times, but still nothing. I was inclined to turn on my heels there and then, in the knowledge that I could tell Sheila I had tried. But I could hear life around the back, voices and music too, possibly from a radio. Before I ever got to the rear gate or made my presence known, I saw them through a sliver in the partition fence that went all the way down to the wall at the rear: the girl and a woman who was unusually fetching. They were drinking, talking in snatches, laughing. They were sunbathing, only their bottoms on – nothing else. The woman’s skin was quite tanned, I remember, and basted in oil. They seemed oblivious of anything around them. I could have stayed there hours, unnoticed, gazing at their bare skin roasting. There is something about the flesh of young womanhood, a carnality so intensely consuming as to be almost ghostly. I could hardly draw my eyes away from it. But, as well as seeing them, I could also see myself watching them and how that would have looked to someone else who might have come along. So I backed away, my steps silent and my breath held. I turned and quickened only when I reached the end of their drive. Sheila had moved into her daughter’s by then. There wasn’t another sinner around. When I got out onto the open road, I did something I hadn’t done in years and haven’t since: I ran.

  She was back, the mother. That’s what I thought, completely forgetting about the sister. I thought the woman I had spied on, sunbathing topless in their unseeded garden, was the woman who had disappeared. After the initial fuss, the coverage and the lull, the same young mother had come back with little or no ceremony, and with an explanation so simple as to be embarrassing. There they were, basking in it, like lizards, and word of her return had simply never reached my ears. I said it to my cleaner one of the mornings she was in.

  ‘That family,’ I said, ‘whose mother disappeared.’

  ‘In the new development out the road?’

  ‘She came back?’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  My cleaner had heard nothing. She asked me, ‘Why do you say so?’

  I could hardly say because I had seen them sunbathing topless in their garden, but I hadn’t worked out another story, and I blushed and rustled the paper she had brought. She could see that it was in my head. She seemed amused and wouldn’t let it go.

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Oh, just . . .’

  It came up again, a couple of days later. My cleaner had asked around. We had forgotten about a sister, identical to her, living with them and taken up with her brother-in-law. I sighed when she added that last part.

  ‘Taken up with?’ I asked, in spite of my best efforts not to.

  ‘A regular couple,’ she said. ‘That’s what they’re saying.’

  She was always doing that, invoking some faceless plural to lend substance to flimsy word-of-mouth. Those moments that she did so were the closest we ever came to quarrelling. In all other respects, my cleaner was a dream. If I am honest with myself, I would have to say that since I was probably a little soft on the woman I had seen sunbathing, I was hurt on her behalf by those rumours.

  ‘They being?’ I asked. The annoyance in my voice should have been plain. ‘The idle of the parish?’

  ‘The sister might well be still alive,’ my cleaner said, seemingly heedless of my tone. ‘Be a right mess if she does come back.’

  I let it go. I confess that I was fascinated. That was as far as it ever went. What form did that fascination take? I would go out of my way to drive by the house, would slow past the close and look up. You would see the father and daughter traipsing back from the town with water bottles in bulk. I thought of stopping to ask them if they wanted a lift home, the girl and the father, who had started to look thin and dishevelled. The sister was never with them. I confess, too, since I wish more than anything now to be completely honest, that I did look up the local papers in the reference section of the library. I did get copies of the reports. But I wasn’t the only one and I never pretended othe
rwise, though there was a time when the small fact of my interest in them was treated like a huge secret revealed under duress. It was just fascination. At the very worst, it was prurience. Was I guilty of prurience? Possibly. And for that I am ashamed. But prurience definitely is as far as it ever went.

  I scarcely slept a wink that night. All of it was churning in my head. There were moments, too, when I was convinced that I could hear rummaging across the landing. Once, even, I got up to make sure that my bedroom door was locked, and I stood in darkness trying to hear noises other than my own creaks and those that are normal for any house at night. After hours lying motionless, I rose at five, dressed without washing, crept down in stockinged feet to where my shoes were waiting on the bottom step and let myself out the back door. It was late in August by then and not quite light. There was an edge of cold to it, suddenly, and talk of the weather breaking. Leaving the girl alone and locked inside a house that was strange to her was probably wrong, but my cleaner would be over within a couple of hours, I knew that, and the relief of getting out of there was huge, and the sharp autumnal nip felt beautiful. I was never so happy, or early for that matter, going about my Sunday-morning routine as I was then.

  The girl was at the table when I got back around eleven. The radio was doing its usual gentle round-table prattle. My cleaner was there, as good as her word, removing her apron as I stepped in. She asked me, ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ I said. ‘Here?’

  ‘We’re all fine here.’ There was a forced clarity to my cleaner’s voice when she said this. She glanced over at the girl gazing at a plate. Then she said, with reproach in her tone, ‘When I came in, Madam was sitting at the table. Heaven knows how long she’d been there. So we said we’d get the breakfast going.’

  ‘I had to go over early to do some things,’ I said. ‘Did we sleep?’ Not a word of answer. I asked my cleaner, ‘Anything from the station?’ The idea of a day alone with her nibs was not something I wished to countenance. ‘Word of any sort?’