Nothing On Earth

by Conor O'Callaghan

  How long ago? Five years? I assumed that this would be a stop-gap, a halfway house on the path to another life. Five years at least, if not twice that, and no prospect of it ending. I pay no rent or bills. The meters are read remotely. I keep all post for my landlady in a wicker laundry basket inside the main door: it is overspilling. My shelves are well stocked with non-perishables, and once a week a box of fresh produce is delivered to the doorstep. I don’t know where it comes from or who drops it off. There is no set time. However hard I try, however long I sit and watch in hope of passing the time of day, I never see them approach or leave.

  I suspect it was my brother who requested that I be offered a role in the sacraments, and for that I am grateful. Sundays, the bell gonging in the valley is ours, us. The black-frocked ladies multiply. They climb the cobblestones in hats, bearing wildflowers hand-picked along the road as gifts for the holy well in the courtyard. A local cleric drives here from an adjacent parish in an antique black Mercedes. He conducts his masses like some crooner or matinee idol, swaying behind the pulpit, incanting the responsorial psalms. I serve. Though I remain familiar with few of their words, I am well able to follow the rhythm of the sacraments. I take a second chalice. I mutter, ‘Il corpo di Cristo.’

  ‘Amen,’ the ladies sing back. Like egrets, they open their mouths to receive.

  Afterwards, while he babbles all his news in the vestry, I fold my borrowed cassock and return it to the red sports bag in which he carries his things. The glare outdoors is intense. The locals chat under the trees for another hour; though they live on the same mountain, presumably this is the only time of the week they meet. I shade my eyes and sidle through my door. I hear their voices, their laughter, bubble and ebb. I hear their valedictions.

  The other six days of the week revert to being mine and mine alone. I do odd jobs, to keep my hand in, to justify my presence. I take a power hose to the cobbles. I keep the woodshed stocked. I prune the younger of the olive orchards. I shoulder a chainsaw to where a pine has fallen in my forest and make logs of it and fill a trailer. Odd days a flock of pilgrims in hiking boots will ask for directions, or a newly married couple will have their wedding snaps taken among my groves, or some unfortunate will beat a track to my door selling matchboxes off the bar of his bicycle. After the sun falls suddenly, I draw all drapes to block out the dark and make up a daybed for myself just off the kitchen. But there are nights, I confess, when it catches up with me again. I bring down the box of discs. I listen to myself. Not everything, or not everything any more. Time was I could listen in entirety, in sequence, until the grey before sunrise entered the house and the land without began twittering. Now I go back only to the moments of desperation, when the man I was back then is at pains to clear his name.

  ‘And you insist that you had no previous knowledge of the family, in any significant way?’

  When Curtin speaks, there is compassion in his voice. It was my definite feeling at the time that he believed me. Or that he at least trusted my fundamental innocence. Nothing has changed that sense. When he speaks, he sounds as if he is trying to help me.

  ‘In no significant respect,’ I say. Initially, I seem determined to respond to them in their own terms. ‘No.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  The younger one says this, from the margins. He sounds farther from the mic. His voice is sharper, couched in echoes, like a nail rattling around inside a tin can. It has a sniping quality to it. He never speaks complete sentences. He fires words, fragments, whenever he thinks he has me.

  ‘Meaning,’ I say, with some mild amusement, ‘I had no knowledge of the family.’

  ‘Not what the librarian says.’

  I say nothing and my reticence, I concede, sounds uncomfortable. I remember feeling acute embarrassment then. I doubt how much they know. Until they tell me, I’m pretending to have no idea what they mean. Curtin resumes where his junior colleague has left me dangling.

  ‘It seems the librarian in the town has come forward with details of your research.’ There is an infinitesimal pause there, before that final word is pronounced so particularly. The pronunciation is clearly a matter of delicacy, nothing meaner, and yet the younger one can be heard to guffaw in the background. ‘What might you like to tell us about that?’

  I can be heard to snuffle at this point. I had forgotten going to the reference section of the library. I honestly thought nothing of it.

  ‘I did have some curiosity about the family,’ I say, ‘especially after the first sister disappeared.’

  ‘Curiosity?’

  ‘Fascination. It was quite a story, you have to admit. But I assume everyone had the same fascination, didn’t they? I don’t believe I was alone in my fascination.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘By the sounds of it, from what the girl told me, Hazel Slattery’s fascination was far greater than mine. You’d do well to speak with her.’

  ‘Take it as read that we will speak to whomsoever we need to speak to.’ Curtin sips from his tea mug here. ‘Was there any particular reason for your own curiosity?’

  Did he have a pipe? Or have I just dreamed that detail for the purposes of verisimilitude? Once, doubtless, he would have stoked up in that room. Those days were long gone, even back then. Instead he flaked plug with a little stainless-steel knife and rolled the flakes between his palms. The pipe sat dry and cold on the table between us. Occasionally Curtin held it to his lips and tapped its rim with a matchbox as if creating suction. If you wear headphones and crank up the volume, you can almost hear something of that, the dry suck down the chamber of the pipe, the matches tumbling in their box.

  ‘I knew Harry and Sheila,’ I can be heard to say. ‘Knew? I still know Sheila, obviously. And I said the funeral mass for poor Harry. Sheila and Harry were their only neighbours in the close?’ There is a minor rising terminal here. I am not sure, clearly, if they understand who I mean. In the absence of any grunt of assent, I carry on. ‘Sheila kept on at me about calling up, particularly after the young mother disappeared. I was reluctant. They’d never been to mass, and I didn’t really trust my ability to comfort them. Also, to be frank, they seemed in a world of their own up there, and a fairly peculiar world at that.’

  ‘So you decided to find out more for yourself?’

  ‘I did.’ I laugh at this point. Why do I laugh? Embarrassment again? Perhaps a bit of that. I think I saw then, for the first time, how pathetic I must have looked across the table, red-faced and sweating, reluctantly admitting to chasing details of one young woman who had vanished. ‘She just kept nagging, Sheila did, about the girls up the close and the weird life they had. So, yes, I did go up to the reference section to read back issues of the local paper, if that’s what you mean by research. Is that so terrible? And, like I say, it doesn’t sound like I was the only one. And I didn’t make any bones about it. There was no cloak-and-dagger, as it were. I asked and waited at the table and had the papers brought to me.’ I laugh again. I dearly wish that I didn’t laugh in those gaps, but I do and it just sounds bad. ‘In broad daylight.’

  ‘We know all that,’ Curtin says. ‘You’re only admitting to something we told you.’ He laughs as well, but gently. ‘But that’s not the question, is it?’ There is a quiet insistence in everything he says, one that I admire. I think, if I recall correctly, that I admired his quiet insistence even then. ‘The question is, why? Why, apart from perfectly natural curiosity, did you go out of your way to read up about that particular family?’

  They know, I remember thinking. They know that I called up, that I watched the sister and the daughter sunbathing. They are telling me that they know. They are giving me a chance to admit to it before they admit to knowing. They are testing my credibility.

  ‘Because, I suppose, I knew that I was going to have to call up to the house, reluctantly, and because I wanted to know for myself what I was calling up to.’

  ‘And so you did?’ Curtin asks.

  ‘Did what?’

  �
�Call up.’

  There is no discernible question mark at the end of that. However often I flick back and replay that phrase, it still sounds more statement than enquiry. They know.

  ‘I did,’ I say eventually. ‘Indeed I did.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Someone saw. I was seen calling at their door. I was seen slipping down their rear access and peering through one of the wooden partition fences that divide the gardens. Whoever it was saw me came forward after the story broke.

  ‘I called up one midweek afternoon. I rang the front doorbell. There was no answer. I was about to turn and go home. But I could hear life around the back, so I went down the lane between number five and number six, which also takes you through to the back of number seven. Just to say hello.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Did I what?’

  ‘Say hello . . .’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I saw the sister and the child through the fence, in their garden.’

  ‘The sister?’

  ‘The girl’s auntie, her mother’s twin, lived with them. I thought you had spoken with her first time round. Martina.’

  ‘Martina.’ Curtin says that like one impressed by the depth of research, but possibly mocking with it. ‘Good man.’

  I wish I could erase my uttering of her name. I wish I could delete the illusion of intimacy my saying of her name creates. I say, ‘Or at least I assume that’s who it was.’

  ‘But you didn’t make yourself known to them?’

  ‘I didn’t, I couldn’t. They were sunbathing – nothing on almost.’

  ‘More than we bargained for,’ the younger one yelps. He claps, too, and you can hear Curtin shushing him. They had no idea about any of this. They had just been fishing, sifting debris.

  ‘So you rang the bell, you say.’ Curtin is recapping slowly. ‘Nobody answered. Then you went around the back because you could hear life.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And you watched the two girls, topless as the man says, through the fence. For how long was this?’

  ‘No time at all.’

  ‘If you had to put a number on it? In minutes . . .’

  ‘Couple of minutes at the very most.’

  He looked amazed, Curtin did. When I said a couple of minutes, his eyes widened like I had said a couple of hours. He wrote in a notebook, with a stainless-steel pen. Or, rather, he held the pose before writing, nib inches above the paper.

  ‘I understand it doesn’t look great,’ I say. ‘But it happened only once, and it was a complete accident.’

  ‘An accident?’ When the younger one asks that, he is being sarcastic in a way that throws me. ‘You still had a good peep for yourself?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s altogether fair.’ It is around this point that my voice starts to sound animated. Alongside Curtin’s measured tones, it becomes excited even. ‘Look, I went around to make myself known, okay? Once I saw the state they were in, I could hardly say hello, could I?’ A further gap in which, I remember, they just stared blankly back. I can barely listen to myself. ‘It was an awkward situation that I left as quickly as I could. And, by the way, there was no row between Martina and the father. The girl told me she just vanished too.’

  ‘She told you that?’

  ‘She did.’

  I don’t call them fools, but I remember wanting to while Curtin and his sidekick leaned into one another and conferred. They had been trawling for Martina, but until that moment it had never occurred to them to ask me if the girl had said anything of her auntie’s whereabouts.

  ‘And the reason you were at their house in the first place?’ It is Curtin who asks this, with an air of finality. At first, I say nothing in response to this question. I have, my refusal says, gone over this clearly and honestly already. This lasts until Curtin prompts: ‘Remind us.’

  ‘Their neighbour Sheila kept begging me to call and see them,’ I repeat, with a sliver of childish petulance. ‘By all means ask her if you don’t believe me. That kind of thing is my job, much as this kind of thing is yours, I imagine.’

  ‘Was.’ He was, I remember, grinning at me.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The younger one is grinning cruelly at me when he says, ‘Was your job.’

  I was not held in custody as such, nor was I charged with anything. I was, however, moved immediately to a parochial residence in another town nearby while my house was subject to the scrutiny of the force. That was a period, lasting months, which felt like unofficial house arrest. There seemed to be a squad car parked permanently out on the road, and no end of peers nearby to invigilate me. My movements were certainly not my own.

  I was surrounded by three clean-shaven, ruddy-cheeked lads immersed in their various community schemes. To them, I was an ageing warhorse fallen on hard times. I went months there, feeling like a sibling returned from the equator in some minor disgrace. My presence was completely passive: speaking only when spoken to, and spoken to only collectively to be made to feel included; sitting hours in some seldom-used reception room, listening to the world’s murmur elsewhere; being looked in on, if only to check that I was still there, and asked if there was anything I needed.

  ‘Anything you need,’ my new young colleagues pleaded, ‘just let us know and we’ll fetch it for you.’

  ‘You’re very good.’

  ‘Anything at all.’

  ‘My car?’

  Anything but my car, it seemed. My car had already been classified as evidence, of what heaven only knows, and was out of commission. Besides, a car meant freedom of a kind that must have been no longer available to me. They glanced at one another and managed to become distracted by something completely unrelated: a microwave pinging in the background, or schoolgirls yelping out on the pavement. They swapped places, as if by rota, making certain that I was alone as little as possible.

  ‘Anything at all,’ they bleated, once the car had been removed from the options menu.

  ‘Thank you.’

  They were nice lads, to be fair, fresh-faced curates and novices far younger than myself. They behaved much as I would have done at their age. It must have been strange for them to have the likes of me in their midst. They wanted to seem as natural as they could manage. But the truth is I was news, and that fact created an invisible exclusion zone around me, one they were too timid to consider breaching. Instead, they went about their daily routines and took turns invigilating me from a safe distance. They feigned indifference to my presence and, I suspect, whispered excitedly about me out of earshot. For the first time in any of their lives, they were close to the centre of something that felt significant. They found themselves on the inside, and people hung on their every titbit. Otherwise, they worked hard at concealing that excitement from me. They popped their heads around the door, as if they had forgotten I was there, asked what I was watching on the telly, then retreated.

  I remember that sitting room too well. The peat-brown three-piece suite, the mantelpiece empty of any ornaments, the electric fire with crystals illuminated by a flickering light, the placeless landscapes on opposing walls, the patterns on the wallpaper and carpet bleeding into one another . . . I will never forget it. It was a place devoid of love. Nobody cared enough to fill those empty spaces with things. What things were sprinkled about were sparse and there only as a matter of routine. Whoever had chosen those things had done so decades before and with a carelessness that remained almost palpable. The room was not loved by its inhabitants, the room seemed to say, nor were its inhabitants themselves loved.

  Every once in a blue moon, I was collected and driven there. Where? No one place, but rather several different places and at irregular intervals. Specifically? I am no longer sure. I remember those autumnal months like one whose movements were involuntary and blindfolded. It was a market town initially, a wide street with a statue on an island in drizzle. When we pulled in to a standstill, people crowded around the vehicle a
nd shouted. Some carried cameras. I was advised to cover my head with a stone-coloured mac, belonging to no one, which was lying on the back seat. It was, the driver said, for my own good. Apart from Curtin’s, the names escaped me: I was told them once, on my initial arrival, but was too dazed to take them in. Thereafter, it was assumed that I knew. They stood and shook my hand every time. They even thanked me for joining them, as if I’d had a choice.

  I waited for them to bring up the fact that I did tell my cleaner it would be fine to leave me alone with the girl, having led the authorities to believe that she would stop the night with us. I assumed that this had come up in the course of their interviews with her. I wondered if they were knowingly withholding this, waiting to see whether or not I would volunteer the information. I got it into my head that it was a test of my innocence. They were waiting for me to be the one to leap, as they had done with the sunbathing incident. A couple of times I nearly did. I wondered if volunteering yet more truth, however suspect it made me look, would win their trust. But I could never piece the right words together in my head. Over several weeks, it became clear to me that they had no clue. So I sang dumb.

  Every such outing ended with me being ferried back in time for the evening meal. The lads did their own cooking and cleaning, of which they were terribly proud. My presence at the dinner table at first rendered them tongue-tied. They didn’t know what to say, neither to me nor to one another with a suspect in their midst, and confined themselves to the smallest talk conceivable. I tried to engage them in chat about football. They knew nothing. I tried even to ask them about Curtin, if any of them had ever crossed his path. I thought I might as well use their curiosity about me to satisfy my own. Nothing again. Gradually, however, they came back with scraps. They had asked others, in passing, and brought little facts to me. I knew they would. It was too good to resist, trafficking trivia ostensibly on my behalf. As that damp winter took hold, and I became more of a fixture and the story gathered dust, they rediscovered their tongues enough to chat across me. Inevitably, I graduated into their little running joke.