Nothing On Earth

by Conor O'Callaghan

  ‘So the Slatterys had you up?’

  ‘Freaks,’ she said.

  ‘Freaks.’ I said it in such a way as to suggest that she was being uncharitable, though I knew she was right.

  ‘That’s what Papa called them.’

  ‘Take this.’ I had poured two thimblefuls of brandy and handed one to her. ‘My mother used always give us this for shock or toothache or the like.’

  ‘Is she still alive?’

  ‘My mother?’ I was laughing. ‘Lord, no!’

  That was the only prompt she needed. She just launched forth and, when I never once made to interrupt, she kept going. The more she spoke, the more fluent she became. The metallic edge seemed to wear off her voice while she talked, staring forward, her features flushed in the glow. I heard everything she had not mentioned to the officers: the hours devoted to sunbathing; the words on the back window; the puzzled email from Ute that her auntie left open on a screen; her mother walking across the garden in a bridesmaid’s dress on the same evening that the girl had heard her father and auntie in the bedroom . . .

  ‘Martina said they were just talking,’ she said. ‘But they weren’t.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘She went all red when she found me outside the room. And her hands were wet.’

  There was a sliver of anger in her voice when she said that last bit. The auntie had resumed her visits to the security lad, Marcus. Neither the girl nor her father ever alluded to her nightly absences. One night the auntie didn’t come home and her father searched the townhouses. The builder, Flood, said the lad had been in Reading for weeks. They told no one that her auntie was gone. Her father was made redundant. Slattery invited them to his house and knew everything about them. The feeling that someone else was present had driven them up into the attic this past month, scared stiff. She even acted out the exchange that she and her father had had in the darkness of the attic. She said she had asked him about demons because of all the noises they kept hearing.

  ‘Noises?’

  ‘Noises,’ she said. ‘The wall banging from the empty house joining ours. The Poles in number three.’

  ‘The Poles?’ I knew for a fact that number three had remained vacant since Sheila had moved in with her daughter.

  ‘Papa called them that,’ she said. ‘I never saw them.’

  I remember her small hands cupped around the tumbler, the look of worry on her face whenever I thought I heard the phone ringing and raised one finger to stall her story, the way she could scarcely bring herself to utter some of it and giggled through other stuff, such as Slattery’s airs and war booty. Her teeth were a little bucked, though only in a way that added to her prettiness, and stuck out whenever she was amused. She would tilt her head, at lengthy regular intervals, to get her hair dry. The skin of her jawline, throat and breastbone was so pure and pale. After the amusement subsided, her fire-bound gaze clouded over and she resumed precisely where she had tapered off.

  It is possible, as I say, that I heard more than she said; or that my memory has added to her telling those details that I wanted to hear but which the girl could not have witnessed or imparted. But I do still believe she saw far more than her family realized. And I think part of me recognized something of my own means of inhabiting the world in her description of herself. In every episode she was the faceless, ever-present bystander, marginal to the point of being overlooked, but observing and absorbing everything. She was there all along – you could say we both were – and yet had gone too easily unnoticed. I was even inclined to wonder if she recognized something of the same in me. I remember wishing I could offer her more in the way of shelter, being touched by her and wanting her to feel as touched.

  At some point in that late evening, during the unbroken spell in which she spoke and I listened, the dial tone of the landline died. I must have walked to the stand in the hall and back a dozen times. No line at all, either coming in or going out. Even my mobile yielded only an uninterrupted drone whenever I pressed the ‘call’ button. We sat waiting until some ungodly hour, in the hope that a car would pull up. I didn’t want her to stay. It was not safe, as much for me as for her. I stood in the porch, peering at the deluge, as if attempting to will the world back to us. There were already huge pools along the edges of the road. All the lights on the old road were blank, and there was not the slightest splash of traffic. In the distance, however, towards the town, there was a pink, wavering glow on the skyline and the faint echo of sirens. I even considered driving towards it. In a moment of panic I considered finding coats for us both, and making our way towards those echoes, that glow.

  Finally, I shut the front door, blanked the porch light and headed back inside, knowing that there was nothing else for it but for her to stop a second night.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  I said it loudly, though it appeared then that she had only pretended to doze off. She dragged all her hair across one shoulder and twisted it with one fist into a loose spiral. When she faced away from the fire towards me, she seemed momentarily older somehow, no longer quite the child. So much so that I even stepped backwards. She rose and left the room, brushing past me as she did, forgetting to pretend to regain consciousness as well.

  ‘We’ll drive over to the station in the morning,’ I called after her, ‘and sort this once and for all.’

  I remember setting the guard in front of the fire, wedging it firmly with the poker. The handle of the poker was still clammy from her grip. I lifted her tumbler off the tiles of the hearth. She had taken only a few sips and most of what I had poured for her was still sitting in it. There were marks on the rim where she had sipped. I remember holding that tumbler against the light of the fire’s remnants and being able to make out the shape of her lips, her smears of saliva and breadcrumbs; inhaling the musk off her drink; positioning my own lips where hers had marked the glass, and keeping them there. It was lukewarm, her drink was, sweet, like the dregs of red lemonade left overnight. I remember the scorch of it on my tongue and in my throat when I finally threw my head back and swilled and knocked off all the power points.

  ‘Can I sleep in your room?’

  She was on the landing. She had her head bowed, her hair down around her face. She had the cuffs of my sweatshirt rolled back down and bunched around her fists. She was shivering. I said something like, ‘Ah, here.’ I was at my wits’ end. I did want to protect her, but I needed to protect myself too. There was always going to be a reckoning, somewhere down the line, and I was wise enough to realize even then that I would have this truth to tell.

  ‘We can drag the mattress over,’ she said, still looking downwards. ‘I can sleep on your floor, like I used do with Papa.’

  ‘Not a hope.’ I was snorting light-heartedly when I said it, letting her down as softly as I could manage. I was trying to shepherd her towards her own space. ‘Not a hope in hell.’

  ‘Please, Father.’ I’ll never forget it, how she said that. ‘Please.’

  I held open the door of the room in which she had slept the night before and nodded inwards. ‘Let’s go.’

  She tiptoed through her own things scattered around the floor. I folded back the sheets that she must have straightened from the previous night and she curled beneath the bedding, my sweatshirt still on her. I remember gathering her saturated clothes, leaving them to dry on the footboard and standing bedside.

  ‘Now,’ I said.

  The rain was fairly pummelling down. I straightened out the hem of her sheet and blanket. She tucked her face below the edge of the fold, so that all you could see were her hair and the nape of her neck. I wanted to tell her that she was perfectly safe, to pat the back of her head and the hairline where black strands dissolved into white skin, to rub my thumb around that ball of bone at the top of her spine. Instead, I pulled her door behind me, switched off the landing light and twisted the key of my own lock as slowly as I could manage.

  I did think about her. If I’m guilty of anything e
lse, I’m guilty of that. I’m guilty of thinking about the girl in bed in the room across from my own. I am a man as well, after all. She was twelve, or so they said. But even then I wondered if she might have been more than that. She was as pitiful as she was pretty, and she was pretty in spades. There was something about that combination, at my mercy, that I could not help imagining. For the second time I lay in the dark across the landing from her. This time I was relieved to get that far away. I remember closing my eyes, sighing deeply and seeing my own mother walking towards me, on a track in a field next to our homeplace. I remember feeling very happy to see her, in sunlight there, inching towards me. I called something, but she didn’t hear or understand. When she got nearer, I could see that she had ‘Virginia’ printed across her breast, and that her legs and feet were bare and covered with scratches.

  ‘Father,’ she was calling. To me. I remember puzzling, even in dream, how strange it was that our late mother should be walking towards me in a sweatshirt given to me by my brother, and that she should address me as such.

  ‘Father.’

  The handle and lock were rattling. How long had I been asleep? Three hours? The rain was still lashing outside. Ten minutes? I had no idea.

  ‘Father, please.’

  My own heart was pounding in my chest. She was just a child, I kept telling myself. She was a small soul in immense pain. I should have gone out to her, seen what the matter was.

  ‘Father, please.’

  But the thought of her grandparents and her missing parents had crossed my mind umpteen times by then. I knew little about the sister. Whoever was out there was the one who had survived them all and I, to my eternal shame, was too scared to go and face whatever demon was on my landing.

  ‘Father? Please . . .’

  She kept calling my name. My door shuddered, every once in a while at first, and then constantly for ages. I just lay there. If I’m guilty of one last thing, I’m guilty of just lying there, saying nothing and doing nothing. I was scarcely breathing, as if not breathing would make it recede. Even when her door slammed around dawn and I could have sworn I heard screaming, I did nothing. The screams were muted by the walls and wood between us, but they were clear enough and they were clearly hers.

  She was gone the following morning. She was gone and her made bed looked as if it had never been slept in. But that’s not right, since ‘gone’ implies a where to be gone to. She wasn’t anywhere. That’s the way I have come to think of it, to phrase it. By the following morning she was nowhere, and I was the last to have seen her, and all hell broke loose.

  6

  ‘FROM THE BEGINNING,’ he says. ‘Tell us what you saw.’

  It is the first one who says that, the older man in plain clothes who had taken the call out to my doorstep that first Saturday evening and tried to fix up something with social services. Curtin. That was his name. By which I mean his real name. For various reasons, the identities of all the others have been protected. By virtue of being definitively no longer with us, he is the only character in any of this who goes by his real name. Which is odd, considering how other-worldly his presence sometimes felt. Curtin. I must have been told his name more than once before, but it hadn’t registered until then and there in that windowless room. The younger man, the one who had sniggered at the words on the girl’s skin, sat slightly outside the lamplight. I never caught his name, or perhaps it was never told to me properly. On the table between us microphones were propped on mini-stands. There was also the red pinhead glow that told us we were being recorded.

  Possessing copies of our exchanges was an entitlement that I, at my brother’s insistence, exercised. My brother acted on my behalf, to some extent. His training was overseas, under a different jurisdiction. He had also retired by then. But we spoke several times on the phone during those autumn months. And he communicated with Curtin, informally, on my behalf. The one thing my brother was adamant about was that I – or ‘we’ as he preferred to phrase it – should receive copies of all recorded interviews. So I have them still, on discs in a see-through plastic tub the size of a shoebox, in an upstairs room that acts as an office. Mostly, I let them gather dust on the shelf there. Nowadays, whenever I play them back, it is against my better self. Mostly, I get free of it and forget. Then, for whatever reason, memory stirs. I pull down the recordings, sit late listening in sequence, and then feel hung-over for days.

  It is Curtin who is always first to speak. There is the clunk of the thing, the mechanism, switching into life. There is paper rustling. There are always the shrieks of chairs being pushed away for extra legroom. Then Curtin speaks. He says the time and date and place. He itemizes those present. His voice, all business, is not entirely his. It is excessively pronounced, clipped, delivering archival information. Then, after a few throat-clearing coughs and snuffles, his more relaxed northern gravel kicks in.

  ‘In your own time so,’ he says. ‘Tell us everything you remember seeing.’

  The truth I maintained then was almost exactly the same as it is now. I saw nothing. I heard plenty, far more probably than I should have, and I have recounted faithfully everything I heard. Much has been said and reported, by others, about what happened. Some of that is true, and other parts are pure fairy tale, or at least according to what I know. And, yes, much of this account exceeds what I could possibly have seen or heard. It has, I accept, merely blossomed in the rubble of years between those events and my remembering of them. Perhaps too much has been said. But now, for what shreds of my dignity I still possess and for my fragile peace of mind, I need to make this one truth clear: I saw next to nothing.

  How long ago is this? Lately, I find it hard to tell. There are days now when it feels like this happened to someone else and that I, too, am merely one of those who read about it in the papers or who caught it on the evening bulletin. There are days when it feels as if all this happened in a whole different century, and in a place very far from here. That last part is correct. I am not ‘here’ any more. I am writing from elsewhere. I hope never to be posted in that place again. For a long time, now and then, in company, I would be asked to repeat my name and my face would grow familiar. There was a phase when I felt famous even, when crowds parted where I walked and friends muttered to one another and shutters clicked. Mostly, in company long after, an element of tact would register around me. There would be twitches, a change of subject, while those who accidentally found themselves in my presence figured out an acceptable angle of approach or, more often, of withdrawal.

  Odd times, though rarely, some careless twit would puncture that tact by blurting, ‘Weren’t you the guy who . . .?’

  I was never greatly bothered by the eejits, the blurters. In many respects, they were infinitely preferable to the mortified dumbstruck majority.

  ‘Yes,’ I would say. ‘That was me.’

  They always came back to the same question: ‘What was she like?’ And I always resorted to the safest equation.

  ‘What was she like?’ I would say. ‘She was like nothing on earth.’ She was. ‘Like nothing on earth.’

  It is morning now, early autumn. Two sides of this building are bathed in light growing warmer and more vivid by the minute. Two sides are dew-damp terrace cushions and stone cold underfoot. Give it time, I tell myself each morning. Come evening, all will be reversed: those terrace cushions will feel dry to the touch and the palm fronds out front will cast no shadows. Meantime, the odd car or scooter buzzes along the dust track beneath the olive trees, bells gong in one of the hamlets down in the valley, a cacophony of dogs answers in staggered chorus and the peaks that form our nearest horizon sparkle with marble and quartz as if with snow.

  Give it time. I am far from alone. There is a gardener who doubles as the Sunday-morning bell-ringer. I believe he knows all about me, though he and I have never really conversed. He materializes, in straw hat and braces, on slopes beneath the house. He heaps dead twigs and windfalls onto the compost midden, and covers all with cuttings of
grass or leaf. There are some Saturdays when he flirts with the black-frocked ladies who dust down the tiny church for Sunday’s only early mass. Those days he wears the suit he usually keeps for the Sabbath. He has a stick and a German shepherd.

  ‘Ombra,’ he once said to me.

  I had carried into the sun a little table from the utility room. I was eating bread and jam, soaking in the first morning of real heat. He had appeared around the corner of the house. He was next to me before I knew he was there. My coffee cup rattled a little on its saucer, and his dog came sniffing at my feet.

  ‘Ombra,’ he said again, pointing to the dog.

  ‘Si,’ I replied at last, realizing that he was telling me the creature’s name. ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Ombra,’ he repeated. He came towards me and patted my shoulder. ‘Molte ombre.’

  Here was a medieval monastery fallen into ruin when my landlady’s father had bought it after the war. As children, they drove south through the night with their parents and spent every August here. The rest of the complex belongs to her brothers, but they never come. The chiesa, which my landlady subsidizes out of her cut of the family foundation, is open to the locals. She needs someone here year-round to keep the house from falling into disrepair and to maintain the immediate grounds in some semblance of order. Even she had heard where I had fallen from, that I was in need of a soft place to land. My name had been passed on to her by a friend of my brother, someone close to the hierarchy. I was visited, though not by her, to outline the arrangement. Then she wrote to me on headed notepaper, with a cursive hand in black ink that had already faded mauve by the time it was delivered. She said how pleased she was that I had agreed, though I had agreed to nothing. There didn’t seem to be any choice in the matter. If I am honest, it gave me something to say to people, a future to describe that did not sound entirely without hope. She told me not to hesitate to ask if ever there was anything I needed, but left no details for reaching her. The ticket passed on to me was for a seat that was going spare on a chartered plane. I was met by my own name misspelt on a piece of cardboard and taxied up inland. A woman who had known my landlady from infancy was waiting on the step with keys and with no English. Her hair, I remember, was dyed ebony.