Nothing On Earth

by Conor O'Callaghan

  ‘Not a thing.’ She had on her best jacket. ‘I’ll look in later on.’

  ‘You’re very good.’

  After she left, the girl started eating. She had, for some reason, been waiting for it to be just ourselves. Her eating was memorable for one thing: she ate her breakfast with a spoon. Sausages, rashers, eggs, the works. She ate them all with a spoon and with the ferocity of someone who had not smelt hot cooked food in weeks. She devoured it, even using her hands at times.

  ‘Take your time,’ I told her.

  I was laughing when I said that. I was saying it only to hide my embarrassment, and hers. She was finished within minutes, before I was even halfway through my own breakfast. I placed one of my sausages on her plate.

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Did they not feed you up in that close?’ I regretted, immediately, the way it made my view of their circumstances obvious; and that thoughtless past tense, as if she would never be back there. She didn’t touch the sausage at first. ‘I’ll butter some bread,’ I said, clinking the tip of my knife off the edge of her plate. ‘You eat that.’

  She was very touching. She was just a small girl. I felt immediately protective of her. Where part of me did not want her there, another part wanted her never to leave. After a certain age, a man has to work hard to look trustworthy. That’s even truer in this vocation. You want desperately to prove to the world that you are not like that, however much the world assumes you are. You put yourself in the way of danger to prove that you still can be. Trusted, I mean. It’s like those old movies where the lost wastrel is taken in by the decrepit recluse and each is changed for the better. I felt sufficiently sentimental about her to have had something of that nature in my head. I felt, also, that it might help to treat her like my own as long as she was there – to give her some routine, some solidity.

  ‘Bath,’ I said. ‘You have clean things?’

  ‘Is there water?’

  That was another oddity. She seemed preoccupied with water, its availability, its whereabouts, as if she had just returned from the missions.

  ‘Hot water?’ I said. ‘There’s loads.’ She looked puzzled. More than that, I would say. She looked amazed. ‘Give yourself a good long soaking. And don’t appear back down until you’re a sight cleaner than you are.’

  That was the first time she smiled. That is, in my company. She tucked her hair behind one ear and giggled a little. So I waved an ironic wave up and down in her direction, as if to say, ‘You should take a look in a mirror.’ Her skin, presumably, was still covered in blue ink. She struggled up from her chair, laughing more loudly. I remember the inside of her mouth: the bad state her teeth were in, the tongue parched grey.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘I thank you.’

  ‘Go.’

  I thank you. That one went round and round in my head downstairs, as I tidied away the breakfast things, while the taps plashed water into the bath and her footsteps moved back and forth from her room. The taps stopped, the door shut, but the lock, I noticed, did not click. I sat on the last step of the stairs, hearing sudsy water sloshing and her staggered mothy singing in a foreign tongue. When she stood in the kitchen a while later, her black hair was wet and sleek, her skin much fairer than it had seemed before.

  ‘Go on inside,’ I said. ‘You know how to work the remote?’ She nodded to that. ‘I’ll keep trying the station to find out what’s happening.’

  She watched telly for most of the afternoon. It wasn’t obvious that she was seeing what was on. The usual Sunday programmes came and went: hurling, cowboys, antiques . . . I worked, or pretended to, at the kitchen table littered with papers and documents that made me look far busier than I really was. I got no answer from the garda station, or from either of my cleaner’s numbers. A couple of times I sat in and asked what she was watching. Shortly before tea, she appeared beside me in the kitchen. She wanted to know where she would be staying, said she needed to go over to the house to fetch her laptop. I couldn’t see the harm of it, as long as she understood that she wouldn’t be staying there. I tried calling the station again. This time someone did answer, the same eejit who had answered first time the previous night. I asked to speak to one of the officers. He said they were all off duty, but assured me that it was being dealt with and that someone would be coming for the girl that evening. I told him where we were headed and for how long. This time, for some reason best known to your man, my call was not logged. They would later claim I had made no contact with them. Mercifully, my phone record told a different story.

  We parked, as we had the previous evening, at the entrance to the close, pushed through Flood’s wire barrier and walked the hundred yards or so up to the house.

  ‘I’ll wait out here.’

  ‘I want you to come in,’ she said.

  The drifts of post were there from the previous day: dozens of official-looking letters, flyers for pizza delivery, council notices, free local newspapers, cards for tradesmen, charity sacks for castoffs that had been due for collection months before, trial subscriptions and credit offers nobody had ever requested, legal warnings with red stamps and one handwritten note in green biro on a piece of blue-lined paper torn raggedly from a copybook, all crushed up against the bottom step of the stairs. We kicked through them like snow. A standard-ration telephone sat upside-down, its wires unplugged and spooled around it. On the mantelpiece was a framed photo of an elderly couple. They had their arms around one another, beaming, but the skyline in the background looked very far away. Some of the bits of furniture, like a glass coffee-table with a chrome fruit bowl, had obviously survived from the show-house days. Around them, in the front room, lay the flotsam of a family’s life: a large telly with wire spaghetti and boxes underneath; two cheap acrylic beanbags with the impressions of having been sat in recently; cobwebs and popcorn crumbs. In the far corner was a stack of rubbish that looked as if it had come from some student’s bedsit: a dismantled computer table with a maple veneer; a metal filing cabinet the colour of putty and a tower of empty drawers next to it; several football posters all scrolled into one; a sleeping bag bulging out of its shiny sleeve and a wafer-thin black dartboard with yellow numbers.

  The worktop in the kitchen didn’t have a spare inch on it, with tins of beans and apricots bought in bulk, and bottles of water still cellophaned together and warm to the touch. The sink was heaped with unwashed plates, pots and cutlery, patches of fuzz and mould, a stench like someone had got sick and never mopped it up. I had to concentrate hard on not looking as horrified as I felt. A picnic table had two matching plastic chairs at it, and two other chairs stacked in the corner beside a wicker basket full of junk. The windows were so filthy as to be almost opaque. The door out onto the patio was bolted. The back garden’s stubble was littered with poppies and empty wine bottles. Out in the middle, marooned in no man’s land, were the two cheap white plastic sun-loungers situated parallel to one another.

  Everything was caked in orange dust off the building site: the windows, the furniture, the bottles and tins, their packaging, even the dirty dishes in the sink, the loungers out the back, the envelopes in the hall. I had only to run one finger along the nearest thing and my fingertip’s skin came up red-black and the thing’s surface gleamed all over again. I could taste the dust coating the inside of my mouth, like paprika left out for years and gone stale, flavourless. Or it was like being in a house on some volcanic island where the residents – however hard they showered on the deck, and removed all footwear upon entrance, and swept religiously – couldn’t stop the ash bleeding into the house.

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ I called. I was in the kitchen. The girl had already disappeared above. ‘You won’t take ages, will you?’

  Outside was getting very gloomy, what with nights starting to close in and a bank of cloud that looked as if it might overspill. None of the light switches worked. The taps yielded no water. It was unaccountably clammy. I parked in a chair at their picnic table, removed my blazer, unbuttoned my collar and roll
ed up my shirt sleeves as far as they would go. On the glass of the patio window there seemed to be the faint outline of letters drawn in the dust ages before with someone’s finger, but the words the letters formed were no longer legible.

  How long was I there? Probably not as long as it seemed, but long enough for it to get fairly murky. I climbed the stairs to hurry her along. She was talking, chirpily enough it has to be said, up in the attic. I walked in and out of the bedrooms. A stale, dry air hung in them, of dirty laundry strewn all over the floors and beds, of trashy novels gauzed in the dust of hair and dead skin. The fitted wardrobes in the master bedroom had been stripped of their doors, and hanging there were all the mismatched colours of her mother’s clothes. The single mattress was gone from the bed in the girl’s room. On the futon in the box room there was an open laptop with purple dog-eared Post-its around its margins and a screen coated in dust. I remember, most of all, a round hairbrush on a stool, full of long black curls that must have been the sister’s. When I picked it up, it smelt of coconut.

  The ladder, one of those rickety telescopic aluminium jobs propped into the attic’s trap, wobbled under my weight. I could just about discern the outline of two mattresses, sheets and sleeping bags in disarray around them. I could smell old candles, though there was no flame, and something like an orange decomposing. She was at the other end, seated upright against the breeze blocks, legs crossed yoga-style under her, the bulb of the laptop’s screen making her face’s contours a vivid sapphire. She was saying, ‘Nein, nein . . .’ and a second distorted voice responded in kind against a background of flak that was like a dog barking away off in a valley. There was also what sounded like rain on the slates above us. When she saw me, she said, ‘Ein sec,’ and the laptop hushed.

  ‘Are we set?’ I did my best to clear the tremble from my own voice.

  ‘What?’ She looked in my direction, but her eyes were without focus and her gaze was more past me than at me. I put it down to the light from her screen and the strange half-silhouette I must have appeared to her, climbing out of an underworld that was scarcely brighter than hers.

  ‘Are we fit, ready?’ I wasn’t sure if she was getting a single word I was uttering. ‘You can bring that with you.’

  ‘Bring what with me?’

  ‘Your computer. Bring it with you and we’ll make tracks.’

  The second I disappeared from view, there was laughter and then the voices resumed their chirping. Her mother was long gone. There was no mention of her auntie. The previous afternoon, her father had vanished as well. Not twenty-four hours ago, she’d appeared at my door in a blind panic. Now she was up there chewing the fat with whomever, laughing, as if none of this had happened. I slumped back on the same chair that my blazer was on, and resolved to wait there. It was indeed trying to rain outside. Huge sweat drops were bouncing off the weeds’ leaves, forming rivulets down the double-glazing.

  There are moments when the empty space of a room takes on the shape of one who must have stood there and who perhaps should still be there. In those moments, that space is like a cavity, an entrance even. It hangs heavy with absence. Its translucence collects, magnifies. Everything the other side of it appears minutely out of proportion with everything else outside its frame. It acquires a quality. There is no other word for it. The quality the empty space acquires is that of a lake’s surface or of some lead-based mirror glass. It feels as though you could almost reach forward and dip your bare hand in it, through it, until your hand disappears up to the wrist. So it was that late afternoon – sitting waiting for the girl to come back down, her distant murmuring in a strange tongue, the scent of sun oil so strong as to be almost tangible, the garden’s clay at last blackening with falling rain – that the shape the room’s empty space took before me seemed to belong to one or other sister. So much so that I even stood up from my white picnic chair, that I approached, that I reached my shaking hand out towards it, that I even spoke.

  ‘Yes?’

  To what? Something that was surely not there or, rather, nothing that did appear to be. If I concentrated hard enough, I could simply step forward and slip into it as into some interior quarter. I, too, could enter its thin air.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The girl had been watching from the threshold between the kitchen and the hall, a fresh hoodie on her. She looked frightened, of me. How I must have appeared, standing there sleeved in perspiration, one arm outstretched, trying to come into contact with little other than the humid murk of that dishevelled kitchen.

  ‘I saw a spider,’ I said. I was mortified. ‘I think I got it.’

  She walked around me, hands pouched in her hoodie. She drifted, indeed, on purpose it seemed, across the empty space I had been reaching out to, into the front room and back again. She touched nothing. She just looked at things. She studied them even, as though she had never glimpsed any of them before. She peered longest at the photo of the couple on the mantelpiece. She eventually said, ‘George and Georgina.’

  ‘Your mother’s parents?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘They were here when we came.’ She was speaking in the plural still, albeit a past-tense plural. ‘We called them George and Georgina.’

  I remember thinking how slight and isolated her presence was, wandering around the rooms her parents and her auntie had once filled with limbs and voices, pausing now and then in some sort of recognition, steeling herself to be brave, conceding all those inanimate objects to the immediate past.

  ‘I’m ready for leaving,’ she said.

  ‘Laptop?’

  ‘Don’t need it.’

  ‘I thought that’s what we came for.’

  The rain was torrential. She flipped her hood up in the porch, I pulled my blazer above my head, and we both dashed to my car. I had to set the wipers to top speed and the fan at full blast to demist the windscreen. I asked her who she had been talking to in the attic. She said it was her best friend. She said, ‘You?’

  ‘Me?’ I knew what she meant and she recognized that she had no need repeating the question. ‘I thought there was someone else in the room. For a second.’

  ‘That happens.’

  She went up to my spare room, the one she had slept in the first night. She went up at my instruction to get out of her sopping clothes. She had little else to change into. I knew that, and left a bundle of my own bits folded on the floor of the landing. I put fish fingers under the grill. I set to making a small coal fire in the front room. It had been months since the hearth was lit. But it had turned unexpectedly chilly, and I thought the idea of a fire might comfort the girl. When I spun away from the flame, she was standing beside my upright piano, combing her wet hair with her fingers.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. I don’t remember ever swearing like that. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  She wore only the sweatshirt I had left out, one with ‘Virginia’ printed across the breast that had been a gift from my brother years before, when he was a law student over there. The sweatshirt fell almost to her knees. Below its hem her legs were bare and bore a couple of bruises. The sleeves were dangling well beyond her fingertips. She held her arms out, one at a time, and I rolled each cuff several turns until her wrists were visible.

  ‘What did your dad and your mam’s sister fight about?’

  I had wanted to ask that several times before then, but had thought better of grilling her with questions, like all the others, and squandering whatever morsel of trust I had won. She was saying something about a hairdryer, I think, when I asked her this. At first, I thought she might not have heard. Or that she had heard and was choosing to ignore. Then she said, ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ When she didn’t answer that, I forced the issue. ‘What does nothing mean, Helen?’

  ‘There was no fight,’ she said. ‘She just went out and never came back. A month ago.’

  ‘You should have told that to the officers.’ I wasn’t cross with her, but I may have
sounded as if I was. ‘You should have told them that your auntie was gone missing too.’ I was more horrified. I slumped onto the piano stool. ‘What possessed you to lie to them?’

  ‘Papa said to tell nobody. People might think there was something wrong with us.’

  It was at that point that she wept openly. Her face creased into itself and plump tears streamed down. She rubbed the knuckles of her index fingers into her eyes, the way a baby does, instinctively. She even sat down on my knee. Just like that. I don’t believe she realized what she was doing. We stayed in that position for several minutes. I could feel her thin bones through my slacks. I could smell her shampoo’s coconut scent. She was heavier than you might have expected, as if all the secrets she had inherited added to her weight.

  I wanted to hold her head in my hands. Instead I sat frozen, like one carrying some invisible globe, while her hair fell around her bent head and her whole frame shook. I shooed her towards the swelling fire and washed my hands with carbolic soap at the sink. Her sobs were still audible above the kettle’s singing. I stepped back in with a tray bearing mugs and a plate of fish-finger sandwiches.

  ‘Now,’ I said.

  We could hear the rain still hammering outside. At first, I didn’t know where to put myself. Nobody came or called, much as we waited. Nobody picked up in the garda station the couple of times I dialled, or at either of my cleaner’s numbers.

  ‘I want to stay here again.’

  ‘Not a hope.’

  I was pleased with myself for making that much clear. We dragged a pair of easy chairs to either side of the hearth, ate off our laps and set in for a vigil of sorts. I remember the buttery tomato sauce that squeezed out and dribbled between her fingers, which she licked clean. I remember how, when she had finished, she wiped her hands dry on the sweatshirt; her fascination with the fire, the way she sat forward, elbows on knees and poker dangling, watching its flurries and lulls, prodding crevices in the slack for evidence of life; the way she shivered and lifted coals carefully, one by one, with the tongs. She had, she said, seen Slattery do it and had been dying to ask for a go.