Names for Nothingness

by Georgia Blain

  She would make dinner. She looked in the fridge. There was nothing but a block of cheese, hard and dry, and the remains of a leg of lamb sitting in a pool of solidified lard. She closed the fridge door, and leant against the kitchen table. They probably wouldn’t even notice if she walked out now. But she didn’t move. She watched as the credits rolled up the screen. Margot leant forward and switched the television off, plunging the room into darkness. Liam turned on a lamp and poured himself another glass of wine.

  ‘Professor Reiby used to make that point,’ Margot said.

  ‘What happened to him?’ Liam asked.

  They were going to discuss old family friends, an incoherent ramble that would cross generations and cities, blurring casual acquaintances, relations and people they had never even met with little regard for any logical links, and Sharn braced herself.

  ‘I think I need to eat,’ she said faintly from the kitchen, and Margot took off her glasses and rested them on an empty, but dirty, plate.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What a lovely surprise having you both come over.’

  She opened the fridge and pulled out the leg of lamb that Sharn had rejected only moments earlier. She found a wilted lettuce and a couple of very overripe tomatoes, and placed them all on the table.

  ‘We could order something, I suppose,’ and she looked absent-mindedly at the food, more concerned about the lack of quantity than quality.

  ‘This’ll be fine,’ Liam assured her.

  As she laid out the plates, she asked Sharn how Caitlin was. It was a question she always asked, and one that Sharn usually answered by simply saying that she was fine (her answers to Margot’s questions were nearly always monosyllabic, the brevity an attempt at preventing any further opening up of the conversation, because talking with Margot always carried with it the possibility of endless twists and turns). But this time she was caught off-guard. It was not a question she had expected. Margot knew what had happened. Sharn didn’t know why she was asking, she could only guess that she had simply forgotten.

  ‘We don’t know,’ she answered, staring at Liam, who glanced away.

  Margot looked momentarily confused, and then she realised her mistake and reached for Sharn’s hand and squeezed it in her own.

  ‘I’m sure she’s fine,’ she said. ‘She’s a sensible girl.’

  ‘She is,’ Liam added.

  It was extraordinary, Sharn thought to herself, this complete faith on both of their parts, this lack of concern. She found it hard to understand at the best of times, but even harder after seeing Liam’s sadness only that morning.

  She didn’t say anything.

  Later, as they drove home, he told her she could have tried ‘to be nice to Margot. She’s lonely.’

  She had been living on her own for over thirty years now, ever since Liam’s father had left them. He had moved to America where he remarried, a topic that Margot always avoided discussing, exhibiting more than her usual evasiveness in doing so.

  ‘I don’t know how long she can go on by herself,’ he said.

  Probably years, Sharn thought, but when he looked at her accusingly she just shrugged her shoulders. ‘Who knows?’

  And she wanted to shout at him, to tell him that she had tried, that she was trying, but she just turned to the window and stared out at the night.

  She didn’t sleep well. Normally she crashed out, exhausted, but lately all she had repressed during the day, the countless times she had kept quiet, danced around her, and she did not know how long she could keep on doing this. Her attempt at passivity had not altered Liam. He was no different.

  In the morning she ran further than she usually did, despite the fact that she had less energy than she had ever had. She ran until she felt light-headed, until her thoughts had been pounded out of her, and only then did she turn for home.

  She was relieved that Liam had gone, that she had this brief respite from the pretence that she had chosen. She ate toast on the back steps and wondered at its lack of taste. She drank coffee that sank, bitter, to the bottom of her stomach. She cleared away her dishes, leaving Liam’s where he had left them, scattered across the kitchen table.

  ‘Relax,’ he would tell her. ‘I’ll do it.’

  He probably would, late at night when he got in, or perhaps he would just use them again the next morning. At the last minute, she washed them anyway.

  Whatever. She mouthed the word to herself as she passed the mirror in the hall, not daring to look for too long at the person she was pretending to be. Whatever.

  And she breathed in deeply as she realised that this pretence was only ever going to be the act of a martyr, foolish and useless to the extreme.

  ‘Maybe you should just go and get her,’ Lou suggested when they talked about it later.

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I don’t know, you bring her home. There must be therapists, counsellors, cult deactivists, or whatever they’re called,’ and she shrugged her shoulders.

  Sharn smiled ruefully. She kicked at a loose rock on the footpath outside the legal centre and watched it hit the tyre of a parked car with a gentle thwack.

  ‘I’m not good at this,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sitting here with my hands tied,’ and she held her arms up in the air, wrists together, and rolled her eyes. ‘I’m just not the type.’

  Lou put her arm around her shoulders. ‘Maybe you’ve got no choice.’ She looked at Sharn. ‘You’re going to have to truly let go, not just pretend, or you’re going to have to do something.’ She wiped Sharn’s hair from her eyes. ‘Doing neither isn’t doing you any good.’

  Sharn stared up at the sky. ‘I know,’ she said, and as she blinked in the harshness of the sunlight, she felt the stillness of the afternoon and wondered when the change would come.

  SHE CANNOT GO ON.

  She cries out, but it is like a whisper that comes out of her mouth, a hiss from another body, escaping before she can silence it.

  The baby is already awake. Caitlin (for it is Caitlin now) tries to hush her, to hold her still, but she squirms in her arms, her face screwed up, red and angry because she is hungry, and she is trying to feed her but she only pulls away.

  Please, she says, somebody.

  There is no response.

  They are out the back on their own, in a room behind the kitchen where they will not wake anyone. They have a single bed in a corner of the storeroom, and there is only one window. Each day she leaves it wide open, leaning out to catch the drops of afternoon rain spitting against the heat of the earth, hoping that the room will cool by evening, but it stays hot, still, airless, and when night descends, she is terrified.

  Help me. Somebody.

  Even if she were with the others, they would not answer. Not now. They are on retreat, and there is no place for her and this child, not when she cries like this. She does not want to feed, and there is no refuge in the present, no safe harbour, no sanctuary, no way of escaping from this fear.

  She holds the baby close, but she pushes with small, tight fists, body rigid in anger, mouth open wide, her scream high-pitched and piercing in the quiet.

  It is dark. All the lights are off and everyone is asleep. She paces round and round this room, willing her just to sleep or feed, the desire for relief overwhelming everything. She does not want to be here. And she cannot do this anymore.

  She leaves the baby on the bed and closes the door behind her so that she cannot hear her. She walks out into the kitchen, into the hall, the temperature dropping as she makes her way towards the coolness of the central rooms.

  What am I doing? Help me, please. Somebody. Anybody.

  I do not even know who I am.

  There is a phone. She has seen it. She knows it is there. In one of the rooms on the other side of the house. No one uses it. No one asks to use it. But it is there, and she feels her way, running her hands down the wall, walking quickly now, her breath sharp and tight in her chest as she opens the door
, quietly, stealthily, not wanting to make a sound.

  It is not even a question of thinking. She knows the numbers – how could she not know them? – and she presses them in one by one, her fingers slippery with sweat. Two, three rings and there is an answer.

  ‘Hello?’

  Help me. Please. I do not know who I am.

  ‘Hello?’

  And Sharn is about to hang up. Caitlin knows it. She can hear the irritation in her voice as she begins to ask, ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s me, just me,’ and as Caitlin speaks, she stops, her intake of breath harsh, her silence sudden, abrupt.

  ‘Caitlin?’ she says.

  Caitlin lets go of the phone, letting it clatter to the ground, her whole body sliding down the wall until she is sitting on the floor. The receiver is within reach, and as she picks it up she holds it far enough away not to be able to hear whether Sharn is still talking, and then she hangs up, her voice gone as quickly as it appeared, leaving her just as she was, alone in the silence.

  SHARN HAD NOT BEEN ASLEEP. She had been lying on her back staring at the ceiling and wondering when it would rain, because it was stinking hot, the window letting in no air, only the sound of cars, doors slamming and people calling out to each other on the street below.

  And then the phone had rung, and she had known, even before she picked it up, that it would be Caitlin; Caitlin, or – at the very least – news of Caitlin.

  ‘It was her,’ she said to Liam, ‘I know it was. How could it not be?’ And she told him again exactly what had happened, exactly what she had said (it’s me, just me), Liam sitting up next to her as she had heard those words; it’s me, just me, totally out of the blue and yet not unexpected, not at all, because she had always known that the stillness of their situation could not continue indefinitely.

  Liam took the phone from her and spoke into it. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘Caitlin?’

  But there was, of course, no answer.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, and she nodded.

  Even he was slightly rattled, his calm certainty that Caitlin was fine shaken by the call. Sharn could see it, and she got up and searched for something to put on.

  She took the phone out to the kitchen and sat at the table, looking at it, half expecting Caitlin to call back. After about five minutes, she rang directory assistance and said that she wanted to be put through to the last call that had been made to her number. ‘It was my daughter,’ she explained. ‘I don’t know where she was ringing from.’

  She saw herself reflected in the darkness of the window as she listened to the operator telling her that they couldn’t do as she asked, that it sounded like it was a matter for the police, if there was trouble.

  Sharn just hung up.

  She looked at the wall; the photographs that Liam had taken were hung in a row. Her gaze stopped on the one he had given her for her thirtieth birthday. It was a picture of the three of them, Caitlin staring straight at the camera, she and Liam looking at each other. She remembered the disappointment she had felt on opening the present. She had looked at it briefly and then wrapped it in the tissue again.

  ‘You don’t like it,’ he had said, and she told him that it was fine, a good photo, she had just expected something more for an occasion like her thirtieth.

  Caitlin looked out at her, silent. Three years old and she had not uttered a word. Her pale hair was short and her eyes were serious. The emptiness, the strangeness of their relationship pinched tight in Sharn’s stomach, and she rested her head in her hands.

  She did not hear Liam as he came out into the kitchen, she did not even know he was there until he sat opposite her and reached for her hand.

  ‘What can we do?’ he asked.

  It was an empty question. One that held only a hint of real desire for action, because it was predominantly just another statement of his resignation to the whole matter. They were helpless, or at least that was how he saw it, and most of the time he did not see their helplessness as any cause for alarm.

  But I am her mother, Sharn wanted to say. It is a fact that we all seem to forget, but it is a fact. No matter how I may behave, I am her mother. She looked at him, biting down on her lip so that the flesh turned white, and when she finally spoke it was Freya she talked about, not Caitlin, and not herself, and she knew she wanted to feed that desire for action, make it grow, now.

  She told him the details of their discussion, knowing that she was shaping it in its retelling, not omitting words as such, but moments, particulars: the harshness of Freya’s laugh, the bitterness in the tight stretch of her mouth, her momentary doubts about Freya’s remembrance of the past; this was what she left out as she fashioned a picture of the life that Caitlin had chosen.

  He did not express any anger at her failure to tell him earlier. He held her hand and listened.

  ‘She’s just one person,’ he said when she finally finished.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘She’s telling you how she saw it. Caitlin was happy when I saw her. I know she was.’

  Sharn sighed. Now that the surprise of the phone call had worn off, she could see him slipping back into the comfort of inaction, the ease of just letting others be, a stance he had always preferred and clearly one that he had been jolted out of only momentarily.

  The first dawn light was coming through the back window, the change almost imperceptible as Sharn looked at the softening of the black night sky. A single bird chirped and she stood up.

  ‘I’m going back to bed.’

  He yawned as he pushed his own chair back, stretching slightly as he stood.

  She moved over as he lay next to her, her body shifting into the curve of his, and he curled his arm around her waist, burrowing his head into the softness of her hair.

  ‘It will be all right,’ he whispered.

  She didn’t answer. Not straight away. She just rolled over and faced him, lifting his head in her hands so that he was forced to look directly at her when she finally spoke.

  ‘You know I’m going, don’t you?’ and she did not shift her gaze from his.

  ‘When?’ he asked.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  She would ring Freya as soon as it was morning. She would find out how to get there and then she would just go. She had already waited too long. She knew that now. And she lay still, cradled in the warmth of his arms, watching the daylight creep into the room as she waited for the last of the night to end.

  LATER, WHEN SHARN RETURNED from her journey, she told Liam that she drove nearly the whole way there in one hit. She was mad. But she just didn’t feel that she could stop. Once she had finally made up her mind to go, she wanted to be there. She covered about 900 kilometres that first day, and she would have kept going if she hadn’t seen the sign.

  It was the turn-off that led to Sassafrass, the road that went round the back of the hills and along the edge of the river. Liam used to drive it with Caitlin when he went into town. She would watch him buckle her in next to him, Caitlin’s back pressed against the vinyl bench seat so that she could see everything they passed. Caitlin loved those trips. It was there in her face. The excitement in her eyes, the tightness of her smile and the bright colour in her cheeks gave it away. Because she never liked to express her enthusiasm. Not directly.

  The sign just had the name of some distant town, much further up the valley, but Sharn recognised it when she saw it. And the cluster of boulders that leant against each other near the turn-off. She remembered them too. They used to say that they were male spirits. Those moronic hippy chicks who would blame their relationships falling apart on the bad female energy and not the fact that the men were into screwing around.

  She pulled over because she was curious. She wanted to see it again. But she suddenly realised she was too tired to make the rest of the journey without resting, so she decided to stay in the pub and drive out there in the morning. It was only a slight detour, and then she could keep taking that
road further north to where Caitlin was.

  The air was heavy, leaden and still. She had forgotten how oppressive it could be. She lay awake most of the night listening to the whine of the mosquitoes and trying to find a breath of cool air. Downstairs in the pub, it was quiet. No one there, just the low hum of the television coming up through the floor. She would have preferred noise, a band, drunks, anything to distract her from the heat and the humidity, anything other than that silence.

  When she woke, her hands shook, her head ached, and she felt nauseous. The lack of sleep made her so ill that she almost didn’t take the detour. She didn’t want to add any complications to what was already a difficult journey, but as she drove onto the main road she saw that sign again, and she found herself turning in that direction without hesitation. She couldn’t be that close and then not go there. She wanted to see it again.

  It took about an hour. The road was a potholed dirt track that flooded when the rains came. There had been heavy falls and it was slippery beneath the tyres. Twice she thought she would be bogged, and the yellow mud that coated the windscreen made it difficult to see. Everything looked overgrown. The same but different. Uncared for, wild, buzzing with life, yet decaying.

  When she came to the gates, she almost drove straight past. She wasn’t even really looking for them, she had forgotten they were there. She thought she would just know where to turn off, that it would all be so strong in her memory she couldn’t possibly pass it. But that’s not how it was. She didn’t really know where she was, and her mind kept playing tricks on her, teasing her with what she thought were real fragments of the past.

  The gates had collapsed. They had fallen into the mud. That was what made her look at them, not because she remembered them. She was driving so slowly that she saw the sign, still hanging onto the wood by one nail only. The rainbows (god, how she hated those rainbows) and those words: ‘Sassafrass: A Peaceful Community’.

  She didn’t know what she expected when she drove up. Maybe Simeon would still be there, just as he always had been, dressed in his Indian clothes, surrounded by adoring followers. She had no idea how he would greet her, she hadn’t let her mind travel that far.