Names for Nothingness

by Georgia Blain

  The flat is empty. Essie’s breakfast plate is still there on the table, Liam’s half-drunk cup of coffee is next to it.

  They have gone – and he has never left without saying goodbye.

  I am causing trouble.

  She knows it. Pushing it over the line, nudge by nudge. They had gone to bed barely speaking, and he has left with no attempt at reparation. Until recently she has always taken it for granted that Liam would be there to stop her when she reached the edge, one arm held up as he tells her he still loves her, no matter how irascible she is.

  ‘As much as the day I first saw you,’ he has always said.

  The relief of the affirmation would always let her breathe again.

  ‘You don’t love,’ she would smile, ‘not on first meeting.’

  But she knows that is not entirely true. It may not be love as such, but there is something. She can still see him as she saw him then, sitting with Jen and waiting for Simeon. She had been so lonely. Just her and Caitlin, living alone by the river. She had come on to anyone at that time; the guests, Simeon (whenever he could get away from Mirabelle), men in the nearby town. It was the way she was. And then she met Liam, and she thought how different life could be.

  As she searches through a bowl of loose change for her keys, she wants to tell him that she is sorry; she knows she should not be so sharp with him. She wants to tell him how much she needs his love. But they are words that never seem to get said.

  She glances at the clock and realises she has to get going. The weather has turned overnight and she cannot put on the sandals she has worn for the last three months. She searches for an old pair of Liam’s boots (‘I can’t believe you have the same size feet,’ and he would look at her and grin, her impossibly large feet anchoring a slight frame). His clothes are still spread across the bedroom floor. They smell of him, but any softness she feels towards him evaporates as she upturns his jeans and his keys fall out of the pocket. He must have taken hers. She is meant to open up the office. She will have to call him, catch him at Margot’s and get him to meet her outside the legal centre on his way in to work. She dials the number, apprehensive at the thought of speaking to Margot, who will try, in a way that will be all the more irritating for its lack of assertiveness, to make her disapproval felt.

  The phone rings twice.

  ‘Liam?’ Margot’s voice quavers (as always).

  ‘No, it’s Sharn,’ she tells her. ‘He hasn’t got to you yet?’

  ‘No-o.’ She draws out the word, not wanting to get Liam into trouble, following it quickly with a suggestion that the traffic may be bad. ‘Shall I get him to call you?’ she asks.

  Sharn tells her that it’s all right, that she doesn’t really have time to wait, and she wants to hang up, to get off the phone before Margot has a chance to ask her if she has heard from Caitlin, if they have come to any decision yet, but she is not quick enough.

  ‘No,’ Sharn says. ‘And I’m sorry about this, I’m really sorry that we’ve had to ask you to do this, and I appreciate it.’ She can hear the edge in her own voice.

  ‘It’s just that …’ Margot hesitates, ‘a child needs to be with its mother –’

  Sharn cuts her off. ‘I have to go,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, Margot, but I’m really very late.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll see you by four,’ Sharn promises, and as she hangs up she starts dialling, trying to find someone to come and let her into the office, muttering his name, Liam, Liam, Liam, over and over, as she waits for Lou to pick up the phone.

  IT IS ONLY A TEN-MINUTE DRIVE to Margot’s, and there is no hurry.

  Liam does not, as Sharn believes, have any pressing work on at the moment. No jobs have come in for a couple of months. The money that he has been depositing into their account has been borrowed from his mother.

  ‘It is just temporary,’ he had promised. ‘Until we take Essie back. Until Sharn can go back to work.’

  But he is tired of lying. He is tired of coming home at night after pretending to work, and he is tired of then pretending to communicate. All morning the need for change has kept pulling at him, stronger than ever, and as he sits in the car, he does not know how long he will be able to remain still in the face of its force.

  He glances into the rear-vision mirror and Essie grins, her two top teeth tiny and milk white. He reaches back and feels her fingers curl around his own, the gentle pad of her soles soft against his arm as she kicks at him. She has grown since Sharn brought her back. ‘Remember how hungry she was?’ Sharn would say to him each time he had put forward the possibility of returning her to Caitlin. She wants him to agree that Essie was malnourished, but he has less and less conviction in the memory she holds up as truth.

  ‘Da da.’

  She has only just started trying to form words, her gurgles being shaped into sounds that he is beginning to recognise.

  ‘I am not your dada,’ he tells her and then, as he catches her quizzical glance in the rear-vision mirror, he wishes he hadn’t.

  Caitlin had always called him Liam. She had opted for Sharn’s name as well, never using the words ‘mum’ or ‘mummy’.

  Right from the start, she would seek him out, creeping up to sit by his side as he took part in Simeon’s creativity sessions. The whole workshop process was not for him, he had come along because this was something Jen had wanted to do. He only had to glance around the room to see that he did not find the sessions as amazing as the others did. So he was relieved when Caitlin came to be with him, when she provided a distraction from something that he had never really had any enthusiasm for, an experience that he had agreed to take part in because there had seemed no reason not to.

  Sometimes he would slip out from the back of the room, taking Caitlin with him. In the heat of the garden, he would show her how to build miniature huts from bamboo, or tiny images from petals spread out across the grass. Other times, he drove her into town, the windows wide open, the fields of cane waving phosphorescent green under the shimmering heat of the sky. He would talk to her, pointing out everything they passed, describing it as if she were blind, wanting to give her words, thousands of words that she could store up for later use, because he always believed that the time would come when she would speak.

  (‘It’s just the way she is,’ Sharn had said to him. ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ and she turned away from him. ‘The doctors say there’s nothing wrong with her physically. And I can’t afford a specialist.’ She looked around her room and then back up at him. ‘I mean, what do I have?’)

  In those early days, he was particularly wary about voicing his opinion when it came to Caitlin. Sharn was her parent, he wasn’t, but as he fell in love with Sharn, his friendship with Caitlin also grew. He liked her, and it was not just because he knew that being with Sharn also meant being with her daughter.

  He smiles now as he remembers those trips into town with Caitlin. There was no stopping him on those drives, his words would tumble out in a rush, his chatter broken only by bursts of song, old rhymes that he remembered from his childhood, sung to her loudly and tunelessly.

  Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John, went to bed with his trousers on.

  At first he had wanted her to laugh, to squeal in delight, to utter some sound in response to the joy he found himself expressing in her presence.

  One shoe off and one shoe on.

  He would sing to her over and over again, altering his tone, his voice, his facial expressions, while her smile deepened, her eyes danced, and her hands clapped in merriment – and her voice remained silent.

  It was a lesson for him. He came to enjoy entertaining her as a pure act within itself. He stopped seeking a response that he was never going to receive, and he told himself that he had no right to urge her to be anything other than what she was.

  But perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps his constant failure to act has always been, as Sharn tells him, not just a matter of him being relaxed (his description of himself). Perhaps
it just isn’t enough.

  On the days when he is meant to be working, when he has told Sharn that he is cutting a corporate video, that he will be back late, he sits by himself in the room that he has hired as an office, and goes through his old Super 8 films. He knows he should be ringing around for work, calling people he has done jobs for in the past, chatting about this and that before he tries, casually, to slide in the question: ‘So, you guys been busy?’

  And they will tell him, always, that they’ve been frantic, run off their feet, because no one in this business ever dares to admit anything other than success.

  ‘That’s great,’ and he hates the sound of his own voice as he says that he, too, has a whole lot of work in the pipeline, but in the meantime, if there’s ever any call for an editor, you know, whatever, even just a small job, his words trailing off as he waits for the standard response, the sure thing, we’ll be in touch, to round off a conversation that he has come to realise will never be anything other than this: a shameful display of his own vulnerability.

  He needs them, but he is not part of their world. He doesn’t know how to go out drinking after work. He can’t pretend that an ad or corporate excites him. And so he has stopped trying. Not suddenly, just slowly, from a few calls a day to a couple a week and, now, none.

  When he loops the Super 8 onto the projector, the film a smooth plastic ribbon that runs taut from spool to spool, he braces himself for the images of what he was before he met Sharn, what he became with Sharn and what he is now.

  The dust dances in the thin beam of light and the spools whirr, the end of the film clicking against the body of the Elmo as he runs it back to the start, threading the beginning through. He reaches across to turn off the desk light, and with the curtains drawn the room is dark, broken only by the white square on the wall, and then the first splash of colour, the first frames of his life, captured, flickering like moth wings before his eyes.

  There he is. Trekking in the Himalayas. He is seventeen, handsome and completely carefree, grinning into the camera, doing as his then girlfriend, Lise, had directed him, pointing to the snow behind him, holding it in his hand, while the camera zooms in and then out again to capture him rubbing it into his face with glee.

  Or, another reel. Jen asleep in a car. Her face resting against the window, her long pale hair hiding her expression from the lens. They were driving to Sassafrass. She had inherited money, and when she heard about Simeon she decided that he was the one who could help her. She wanted to be a writer. Why not? She had paid for both of them, but when he had stayed on (not because of the workshops; it was Sharn that had kept him there), he had called Margot to cover six more months of courses.

  And then there is Sharn herself. Beautiful and young. Grinning at him cheekily, smiling shyly; there are boxes and boxes of footage. Sharn and Caitlin, him and Sharn, Sharn on her own; he knows what each reel is from the label, and he is surprised at how closely the images reflect his own memories of the past, at his own ability to edit out the bad, grey days that never made it onto film and have failed, until recently, to leave an indelible stain on his own heart.

  ‘You have an unwavering ability to ignore the negative,’ Sharn would tell him, and when she was happy she would say it with delight, leaning forward to kiss him as she spoke.

  But when the hard times came, her words were impatient, his inability to face up to reality became the mark of a fool, and he would flinch under the sharpness of her tongue.

  He knows where it is, the third box on the fourth shelf, the label: Sharn, Sharn, Sharn, the first footage he ever shot of her, sixteen years ago. He had brought his camera with him, hiding it in the bottom of his bag when they arrived (suddenly aware that he did not want to put his own creativity under Simeon’s gaze), bringing it out only when he met with her, away from the others. She is sitting outside her shack with Caitlin, washing her daughter in a tub of water, scrubbing the river mud off her, her long, curly black hair damp with sweat. She glances up as he approaches but the directness of her gaze does not last for long. She was changeable with him at that time. Forthright one minute, gently confiding the next, and then distant, as though she had no interest in him whatsoever.

  It is Caitlin who registers delight. Jumping out of the tub, she runs towards the camera, her arms wide, her naked body wet and still smeared with mud. He remembers how he dropped the camera (the last few seconds of footage show a blur of grass, yellow green rearing up towards the lens) and ran, only to let himself be caught by her moments later.

  This is the reel that he has marked out as a possible first. The beginning of his labour of love, an editing together of their life in an attempt to immerse himself in what he would like to see as reality. This is what he has been doing on all the days he has been pretending to work, and it is a task that has, until recently, absorbed him. But he knows that it cannot go on forever, the money he borrowed from Margot has almost gone, and he flinches at the thought of confessing to Sharn that he is once again without work.

  More pressing still is the question of Essie.

  She meets his glance in the rear-vision mirror as he finally starts the car. He has been sitting without moving for some time now, he has no idea for how long. This is what he does. Time seems to just drift through his fingertips.

  ‘Ba,’ she tells him, slipping her thumb out of her mouth to utter the syllable, and he agrees with her, yes, it is a bus, rounding the corner up in front of them.

  He does not even know what her name is, the name that Caitlin used (if any) when she held her, a tiny baby in her arms, because he hadn’t been there when Sharn had gone to bring Caitlin home. Essie is just a name they made up after Sharn admitted to not knowing what she was really called (‘she didn’t tell me, she wasn’t speaking, no one was, she only told me to take her’), and because of this he does not use it often.

  She is looking out the window, an old T-shirt of Caitlin’s clutched in her hands, and he croons to her, softly, under his breath. The nursery rhymes that he used to sing – still there, lodged in his heart.

  SHARN HAD ONLY BEEN AT SASSAFRASS for two months when she went into labour. It came on so fast; she was down on all fours and vomiting, and there was no time to get over to the house for help. It was Simeon who heard the screams, and he halted the workshop, momentarily, to get Mirabelle.

  ‘Go to her,’ ‘he said, quick.’

  And she did.

  When Sharn remembers that afternoon, it is the screams that she hears. First her own and then Caitlin’s, a piercing newborn howl.

  The heat was unbearable, and the blood and the stench, and she could neither move nor call out, don’t leave me, as Mirabelle stepped out into the milky haze of the day.

  ‘I’ll fetch water,’ she said, ‘from the river,’ but Sharn knew she just wanted to get away, and as she watched Mirabelle disappear she held that baby in her arms, her tiny head rolling back on her shoulders, and she knew that if she had the strength, she, too, would have done the same. Walked. As far and as fast as she could go. ‘See,’ she muttered to herself, ‘there I go.’ Through the long grass by the side of the river, up the path to the main house and then along the track to the main road, and in her mind she is standing there, one arm held out, hitching her way out of there, flagging down the first ride to come her way. Gone.

  ‘She is a beautiful girl,’ Liam would sometimes tell her in those first few months after his arrival, when they would talk, just the two of them, by the river.

  He was not the first to comment on Caitlin’s beauty; her pale oval face, the dark liquid of her eyes, and the stillness of her expression were remarkable. Even Sharn would sometimes stop and just look at her, overwhelmed by her existence. But she is not mine, that’s what she kept telling herself. She is someone else’s child. It is all just a terrible mistake, a wrong turn, the real me is still out there somewhere, striding down the side of the highway, alone.

  In the gardens, up in the house, by the side of the river, Caitlin looked for L
iam, following him wherever he was. And Sharn, too, did the same. Listening for the coolness of his voice, turning to see the softness of his gaze, watching him staring into the distance at each of Simeon’s workshops, not really there, just looking out for them.

  His touch was gentle as he helped her shift the furniture so she could sweep. His knock on the door was hesitant as the darkness descended. He didn’t want to wake Caitlin, he didn’t want to bother her, but did she want to walk?

  ‘Not really,’ she would say, ‘too tired.’

  His skin was smooth as she watched him take off his clothes and jump from the boulders into the cool depths of the swimming hole. His hair gleamed, sleek as an otter’s, as he swam towards her. ‘Come in,’ he would say.

  But she would stand up and tell him that she had to go, work to do, because she didn’t want to wreck this. She was scared. She could see herself, miles away, wanting to come back now, but too scared to take those first steps.

  ‘Sex was my thing,’ she once told Liam. ‘You know, some girls are bright, some are good at sport; I was good at fucking.’

  She remembers those words now, and she finds it hard to recall the bravado she had once had, bravado tinged with fear at falling in love.

  ‘Well, you took your time with me,’ he had grinned.

  And she had.

  As she waits outside work now, looking for Lou who has promised to bring the key, she wishes, once again, that she had not become so hard. She is worn down. That is how she feels, and it does not seem ever to lift.

  At night-time, sometimes, or during the day when it is quiet, she lists what she would like, the few things that she tries to believe have the capacity to make everything okay. It is, she knows, an attempt to contain the anxious sadness that seeps like vapour through her being, defining her worries into a simple inventory of items that are lacking, no more, no less.

  This morning she is particularly ill at ease, unable to find any distraction in finalising her list, unable even to add up the figures.