Names for Nothingness

by Georgia Blain

  Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.

  The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.

  Georgia Blain has written a number of novels for adults including the bestselling Closed for Winter, which was made into a feature film. Her memoir Births Deaths Marriages: True Tales was shortlisted for the 2009 Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers.

  In 1998 she was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists and has been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the SA Premier’s Awards and the Barbara Jefferis Award. She lives in Sydney with her partner and daughter.

  HOUSE of BOOKS

  GEORGIA BLAIN

  Names for Nothingness

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

  First published by Pan Macmillan, Sydney, in 2004

  Copyright © Georgia Blain 2001

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 436 4 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 74343 090 3 (ebook)

  Contents

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Acknowledgments

  PART 1

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN LAST WEEK that the petals started to fall. They lie damp and crushed on the bricks below, the brilliant pink already faded and grimy. Every year this happens, seemingly overnight, a loss that is both sudden and inevitable, and Sharn looks out over the bare branches, wondering at how it has managed to creep up on her yet again.

  She has her two cigarettes laid out on the step below her, and she lights the first one, the smoke acrid in her mouth, as she sits on the concrete landing at the back of the flat.

  The few remaining blossoms are scraggly in the evening light. They cling with no conviction to the twigs, just one moment away from floating to the ground, and she leans forward, almost precarious in her balance, to see whether she can send them on their way. One sharp breath of air and they teeter on the brink of falling, another and they would be gone.

  From behind her she can hear the front door open and she knows that Liam is home. She is going to go in and tell him to be quiet, Essie has just gone to sleep, but that would mean putting out her cigarette and so she stays, head resting against the railing, as he comes out onto the back steps.

  ‘Got a drink for me?’ he asks, and she just points through the door towards the fridge.

  He sits behind her and takes the second of her cigarettes, the match flaring sulphurous as he lights it, and as he leans forward to kiss her, she moves back.

  ‘There was a story on the news tonight,’ and she looks up towards the darkening sky. ‘A woman who came home to find her husband dead.’

  Liam is silent and she turns to face him.

  ‘As good as dead.’

  He picks up his glass.

  ‘They took him to hospital and put him on life support.’ She stops, wondering whether the cry she just heard was Essie’s or another child’s, somewhere out in the surrounding flats. It is quiet again, and she waits for a few seconds before continuing. ‘The doctors say there’s no chance of recovery. They want to turn the machines off. But she won’t let them.’

  She reaches for Liam’s cigarette and inhales deeply. She will still have a second, and she stands, slightly dizzy from the nicotine, and squeezes past him to where she has left the packet on the table. She wipes at the ring of moisture from the beer bottle and picks up the cap, irritated with the way he leaves his rubbish lying there – so much so that she flicks it towards him (just missing his shoulder) as she makes her way back outside.

  ‘She’s sent his photo to a group of faith healers and they have told her they can make him well but it will take them six weeks. She wants the hospital to wait.’

  The night has settled in now and it is cold as she sits back down on the cement step. Liam is waiting for her to finish, and she can’t even be bothered to tell him that that’s it, that’s the story.

  ‘What happened?’ he asks.

  ‘I don’t know.’ It is obvious to her that he has missed the point, it has been obvious since she began telling him, and she looks across at him.

  He sighs with the effort of trying to remain pleasant in the face of her hostility. ‘It’s going to happen more and more,’ he eventually says.

  ‘What?’ She can hear the irritation in her own voice.

  ‘Situations like this. There’re so few hospital beds. They can’t keep people on life support forever.’

  She watches the tip of her cigarette glow and then fade as she stares out across the yard, the tree now barely visible in the darkness.

  ‘That wasn’t the point,’ she tells Liam, but he doesn’t hear.

  She stubs the cigarette out, grey ash on the railing, and leans forward once more as she expels a great breath of air into the night, unable to tell whether she has delivered the final death blow to the few remaining flowers.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Bringing on the winter.’

  And as she bends down to pick up their cigarette butts, he tells her that it’s going to come anyway, ‘no matter what you do’, his voice soft in the stillness, so soft as to be inaudible even if she had stayed out there with him, but she has gone back inside, his final words heard by no one but himself.

  Later, in the darkness, Liam wakes. It is just before dawn. He does not know how he is aware of this, but he is. The sky has not yet paled, the birds have not yet begun to sing, but he will lie still until the night turns to day, and then he will eventually slump back into sleep only moments before he has to get up, tired beyond belief, to go to his studio.

  Next to him, Sharn is curled up, her thick, dark hair spread across the pillow, and he gently cradles himself into the curve of her back, fearful of disturbing her but wanting her warmth.

  He can smell her skin, and he would like to whisper that he still loves her, that it is hard to still love her, to sustain himself on memories of what their life once was, but he is trying, and he is, if nothing else, dogged in his persistence. But he says nothing. He fears the emptiness of the words should he utter them out loud, and he turns onto his back again and stares up at the ceiling, hating his continued failure to effect any change.

  It has been just over four months since Sharn travelled north to bring Caitlin home, and
in the time since her return, they have both been paralysed, locked in a stillness that does not shift.

  He should have left the job he was doing and gone with Sharn when she went up there, but instead he had let her go on her own. She returned less than a week later. He remembers opening the door to find her, not with Caitlin as he had expected, but with this child in her arms, Caitlin’s child. Seventeen weeks ago, and still Caitlin has not followed; there has been no call, no letter, no knock on the door, no attempt from Caitlin to reclaim her daughter. They no longer discuss this, neither of them mentioning the vigil they are keeping, the waiting that hangs over them both. But then, this is not surprising; there seems to be so little that they discuss these days.

  He stretches out, trying to bring sleep to each limb, and remembers how, at first, he believed it would only be a week or so until Caitlin turned up or, at the very least, contacted them. ‘We need to ring her,’ he would say to Sharn as each day passed, never quite able to believe that something as simple as making a telephone call was seemingly impossible.

  After two weeks he had tentatively suggested that perhaps he should take Essie back to Caitlin. ‘What’s the point?’ Sharn had asked. As soon as Caitlin was ready to have her she would come and get her. Surely Caitlin’s lack of contact told him enough.

  He eventually agreed to wait another week, but when the time came he once again did nothing, his inaction continuing with each new deadline he set. He knows what he should do, and the weight of that knowledge is no longer bearable.

  He looks at Sharn in the darkness and then closes his eyes, trying to find peace by recalling the moments that he keeps, like old postcards, to be brought out, thumbed over, gazed at fondly. His sustenance.

  First he goes back to Sassafrass, because this is where he always starts, returning to the moment he met Sharn, there in the garden, sixteen years ago. He was waiting for Simeon to come and show them their room when he saw her walking towards them. He didn’t notice Caitlin at first. She was a three-year-old child then, small enough to hide within the folds of Sharn’s sarong, silent, unnoticeable.

  ‘Simeon said to let you know that you’re in that one,’ and Sharn had pointed to a small lilac-coloured shack at the edge of the garden. ‘He’ll be back soon.’

  She had a frangipanni tucked into the shoulder strap of her singlet. He remembers the milky sweetness of the perfume mixed with the tang of her sweat. She had looked at him, ignoring Jen, and told him that her name was Sharn and that she was the hired help.

  He thanked her for letting them know where their room was.

  She grinned. ‘Only doing what Simeon says’ and she looked at him once again, taking him in with a directness that he later admitted was confronting as well as flattering.

  (‘I was full on,’ she would sometimes say when they used to recall their first meeting.

  ‘You still are’ he would tell her now if they ever discussed their past, which they no longer do.)

  And then she had turned and left them, aware that Liam’s eyes were still on her, watching her as she made her way down to the river track, Caitlin silent by her side.

  It is no good. He sighs as he tries to recall another moment, anything that will take him away from the anxiety that does not seem to be dissipating. He will stay with Sharn. He will stay at Sassafrass. This time it is an afternoon that he returns to. They are in the vegetable garden as the storm rolls in, the first hint of cool after the heavy heat of the day. He is meant to be at one of Simeon’s workshops, but instead he has come to help Sharn pick lettuces for the evening meal.

  Everyone else is in the main hall. They are letting out primal screams and their voices ring out loud and harsh in the stillness, but he barely hears them. He is engrossed in her. The strength of her arms, the sheen of sweat across her clavicle, the curve of her thigh beneath the thin dress.

  The thunder claps and a streak of lightning darts, terrifyingly close, across the purple sky as the rain falls, heavy and warm.

  She looks at him and smiles, her teeth white against the darkness of her tan, her eyes alive with joy, and they link hands, drinking in each other’s breath.

  That was when he kissed her.

  He remembers and he leans in closer to where she lies there in the bed next to him. He breathes in the scent of her hair, wanting only to keep remembering.

  He is still at Sassafrass, and she is lying by the river, the sunlight warm on her skin, the grass dancing, golden, around her. She is dressed in blue, and her singlet matches the softness of the sky.

  He walks towards her, his step quiet against the crumbling richness of the river dirt, but still loud enough to wake her, and she leans on one elbow as she looks up at him. She smiles and he knows, with an electric shock of certainty, that she does love him, and that she will leave with him, before she even holds out her hand, before she even speaks the answer he has been waiting weeks to hear.

  And then she dissolves, the next memory sliding into focus, taking him to a different place, to the city, about a year later, and he is back in the first house they shared. Sharn is at work and he and Caitlin are alone. She sits as she always sits, passive, doing as he suggests but no more. He draws her a picture of a cat, a black cat, tiptoeing gingerly along the top of a fence, and he asks her what she thinks.

  ‘Not a very good likeness, I know,’ and he is putting the paper away, not expecting a response, because there never is one, when he is startled by a touch on his knee.

  ‘I like it,’ she tells him.

  She is four and they are the first words she has ever spoken, not just to him, but to anyone, and as he resists the urge to lift her up and squeeze her tight, to whoop with joy at the extraordinariness of this event, she asks him to draw another.

  ‘Just like that one,’ and she points to a ginger tom, a stray, crouching low beneath the peach tree, tail flicking as it watches the birds pecking at the blossom.

  And then there is Sharn again, one last time as he drifts into sleep. Arms and legs tangled in his, hair knotted around his limbs, sweet wet smell of sex; in his dreams he longs for her, and it is a longing that doesn’t fade, that cannot be pinpointed to a single time or moment. It runs through everything, a strand that re-emerges as one frame melts into the next, a yearning for what has gone that creeps stealthily into his subconscious.

  She is kissing him and it is her eyes that he sees, closed, in close-up, the waxy skin, the darkness of her lashes, fluttering slightly and then still as he finally stops seeing, as he is enveloped in a darkness that is no longer awareness …

  And then Essie wakes him. He had not slipped deep enough into sleep to let her single cry slide over him unnoticed and he gets up, uncertain as to whether morning has finally come, or whether it is still night.

  She is asleep, thumb in her mouth, her skin pale in the darkness, and as he tucks her in, he kisses her gently.

  SHARN WAKES, immediately aware that Liam is not in bed beside her. It is morning, and she calls out to him, panicked at his absence.

  She finds him, moments later, asleep on the floor in Essie’s room, a blanket lying across his otherwise naked body. She looks at him, stretched out, peaceful, and as she bends down to cover him, she reaches hesitantly to stroke the softness of his hair back from his face, but he wakes at her touch, and she pulls her hand back, mouthing for him to be quiet, Essie is still asleep, come back to bed.

  Alone in their room, she waits for him. It is only six-thirty, neither of them has to be up yet, but he does not follow her, and she is surprised to hear the sound of the shower, the water drumming against the bath. It is cold, and she pulls the blanket closer to her body, wanting these last few moments of sleep before she has to get ready for work.

  Twenty minutes later, he is dressing by the side of the bed, searching through the pile of clothes on the floor for a clean T-shirt.

  ‘What’s the occasion?’ He has rarely got up before her, and although her words are light, the uncertainty that has nagged at her since she fi
rst woke is still there.

  ‘Can’t sleep,’ he says, and it is all he says as he goes to get Essie, who is calling out from her room.

  He is taking her to his mother’s this morning, an arrangement Sharn knows was not wanted.

  ‘She thinks that what we are doing is wrong’ Liam had told her earlier, and he had not looked at her, his refusal to meet her gaze confirming what she knew; that he agreed with Margot, despite the fact that he used the word ‘we’ rather than ‘you’.

  Sharn had told him that that was by the by, irrelevant, and none of Margot’s business. ‘Will she or won’t she? It’s as simple as that,’ and she had tightened her fist in frustration, her nails digging into her skin, because she needed to go back to work and they had no other choice.

  She would. Liam had called Margot again, and she had said that she would do all that she could to help. ‘Because that’s the way she is,’ and he had not looked at Sharn, not directly, as he told her that this couldn’t go on. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  Standing in the bathroom, trying to comb the knots out of her hair, she listens to Liam explain the arrangements to Essie. She is about to tell him that she doubts a child who is not yet one needs such details, but she stops as she sees her face in the mirror. There is a sharpness in her expression that makes her look away.

  I am not a likeable person. She hardly dares whisper the words out loud.

  (‘Have you always been like this?’ Liam would ask on the rare occasions when he had simply had enough, and she would wonder when it had begun, because no, she does not want to think that this is the way it has always been.)

  She bites at her bottom lip, a nervous habit she has had for as long as she can remember, and turns back to the task of combing her hair. She cannot untangle one of the knots, and as she holds up the offending strand she searches for the scissors in the bathroom cabinet, suddenly aware of how quiet it is. ‘Liam,’ she calls out, but there is no answer.