Names for Nothingness

by Georgia Blain

  They have left her on her own and she cannot bear to comprehend it.

  ESSIE WAKES TWICE IN THE NIGHT, giving a small cry as she rolls over, and Liam sits up and searches for Caitlin’s old T-shirt (which she has dropped on the floor) to comfort her.

  After the second time, he cannot get back to sleep. As his eyes slowly adjust to the darkness of the room, Essie becomes visible. She is lying on her back, arms flung out across the bed, her entire body abandoned to sleep.

  She does not look like either Caitlin or Sharn, although occasionally he has caught glimpses of Caitlin in the way she cocks her head to the side when she listens, and the unblinking stare of her eyes as she sucks her thumb and looks into the distance. But perhaps he is simply searching for a similarity. He does not know.

  ‘She probably looks like her father,’ he had remarked to Sharn shortly after her return.

  ‘Whoever he is,’ Sharn had replied. Moments later, she added that she found it disturbing.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘The way in which history repeats itself,’ and she looked out to the back garden, her gaze remote, removed. ‘I ran away. I had a child young, and I did it on my own.’ She chewed on her fingernail, concentrating on tearing it back to the quick. ‘And now she’s gone and made the same mistakes.’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ he told her.

  ‘Really?’ and Sharn had got up and gone back inside.

  Lying in the darkness, Liam looks at Essie again and wonders who her father is. She is a slight child, fine featured, with deep-set dark eyes and olive skin. Her small size may simply be due to the fact that she had been, as Sharn insisted, underfed in her first few months of life. They had given her bottles every few hours and mashed-up fruit and vegetables, bread crusts, dry biscuits; she had eaten it all with a hunger that had given Sharn a fine thread upon which to hang her assertion that she had been right to do as Caitlin asked, to take her away. It was not always stated, but he could see it in her eyes each time Essie consumed large quantities of food, both of them watching without comment; words not spoken, but heard nonetheless.

  Essie turns now, curling up on her side and sucking her thumb as she soothes herself back into the depths of sleep, and he inches over to the far side of the bed to give her the space she needs, closing his eyes again in an attempt to relax. It does not work. His mind is still awake, the enormity of his decision to make this journey tightening around him with a grip that is cold and hard.

  All that Sharn told him on her return is still right there, fresh in his memory. He listened to her as she had asked and still, at the end, he had felt, in his heart, that it was wrong. She should have tried to help Caitlin look after her child. Yet he has done nothing until now, and he turns over onto his other side, his back aching with an inability to find rest. Even now, now that he has finally decided to act as he always felt he should, he is aware of how easily he could turn back; pack Essie in the car tomorrow morning and drive back to Sharn.

  ‘We’ll just wait a little longer,’ he would say.

  Because there is a doubt in his heart. Caitlin has not come as they both expected. She has not reclaimed her daughter; and if she has not done this, then how can he help the doubt that lingers?

  In the first few years after they returned from Sassafrass he had wanted to have a child with Sharn. He never told her this directly and each time they circled the topic she had evaded giving him any kind of definitive answer. He never said: I want to have a child, do you want one too? Probably because he always knew what her response would be. It was not what she wanted. The first experience had filled her with a horror she had not forgotten, and she had no desire to throw herself back into it again. Even though he knew it would have been different, and he wanted so much for her to recognise this as well.

  Liam had never known how Caitlin felt about motherhood. It was not an issue either of them had discussed with her, nor was it one that she had ever brought up. They simply assumed she was too young, that if it happened it would not be until she was much older, and she had never said or done anything to give them any reason to think differently.

  He had had no idea. None. Not until Sharn rang him from up north. (‘She has a baby.’ Her words had been faint with her own disbelief. He had felt a wave of excitement at the thought, a joy that had surprised him with its sweet freshness.) He had not heard from her again. Not until her return, there at the door with Essie in her arms.

  The sky is softening from a deep black into what resembles dawn, but he cannot be certain. He looks out at the single light that shines over the car park and searches for the first sign of morning. At least then he will not have to attempt to sleep any longer, and he closes his eyes once more, finally giving up on rest, and in that moment his body drifts slowly towards the sleep he has been longing for.

  Some hours later, he sits with Essie on his lap eating toast in a cafe on the outskirts of town. It is the only place open. He had asked Margot to transfer money into his account because he does not even have enough to put petrol in the car. She promised him she would do it last night and he hopes it will be there this morning.

  They are the only people in the cafe, and the owner serves them begrudgingly. Liam cuts up small squares of toast for Essie and dips them in milk. She wants to get down onto the floor, and eventually he gives up, letting her eat at his feet despite the owner’s scowl of disapproval.

  As he drinks his sour, lukewarm coffee, Liam feels exhausted. His hands are shaking as he attempts to lift the cup to his mouth, and he avoids looking at himself in the mirror that runs behind the counter.

  Essie, on the other hand, is wide awake. She throws her breakfast across the floor, squealing with delight as she does so. He picks her up and gives her his car keys, only to have her drop them on the ground every few seconds and squawk for his attention when he fails to pick them up immediately. When she becomes bored with this, she takes his sunglasses and tries to put them on, almost jabbing her eye out in the process. He responds to each potential disaster almost too late, reaching out to remove a glass from her flailing hands, a knife, a fork, a bowl of sugar; his body barely able to react with the speed needed. When she finally succeeds in knocking a cup to the floor, the china shattering at their feet, the owner comes out from behind the counter with a cloth in his hand.

  Liam apologises. ‘You know what they’re like at this age,’ he says in an attempt to try to be pleasant.

  The owner just grunts, but as he is about to turn back to his post, he stops and looks at Liam curiously. ‘She yours?’ he asks.

  It is not that Liam looks too old to have a child of Essie’s age, men of his age have small children. He knows, he has seen them often; friends of his who are now going through the early days of rearing babies and who look at him with envy, their thoughts clear in their glances: you were sensible, you got it over and done with young.

  The undertone of suspicion in the owner’s question is probably more to do with how bad Liam looks. He can see it. He would point the finger at himself and declare, loud and clear, that man is on the run, that man has done something wrong.

  He wipes Essie’s mouth with a serviette and says that she is his granddaughter. ‘I guess. I mean, she’s my stepdaughter’s daughter,’ he adds, aware of the fact that he is raising the level of suspicion as he speaks, but how else can he explain their relationship to each other?

  ‘Holidaying?’

  Liam looks out at the bleak misery of the shopping centre, and beyond that the sprawl of ugly houses. He remembers the times he used to take Caitlin camping. They would pack a couple of sleeping bags, food, a cooking pot, water and nothing else, and they would drive with no fixed destination in mind, pulling over wherever they felt like it, sleeping under the crisp darkness of starry skies, and waking to the exhilarating emptiness of the land.

  Not likely, he wants to say. Not in this dump. But he holds his tongue.

  ‘Sort of,’ and he attempts to tidy up the mess Essie has made, and
then gives up. Bugger it, he can clean it himself. It’s not like he has anything else to do.

  At the register, Liam counts out his change. He is ten cents short, and at the owner’s mercy.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ he says, embarrassed, and hoping that he will be told it’s fine, it doesn’t matter, but he isn’t.

  The owner just waits, hand held out, while Liam hunts through his pockets for a spare coin that may have escaped his attention. He remembers then that he has a couple of dollars in the glove box.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ he promises, but this is not good enough. The owner wants him to leave his wallet.

  ‘For ten cents?’ Liam looks at the man incredulously. He does not often lose his temper and he is surprised at the rush of anger he feels at the ridiculousness of this demand.

  ‘I’ve got a business to run.’ And the owner folds his arms across his chest.

  Liam just stares at him and then, with Essie under his arm, he turns and walks out, his wallet still in his pocket.

  He buckles Essie into her seat and doesn’t even bother searching through the glove box for the change. Let him call the police.

  He drives down to the beach, stopping at an automatic teller machine on the way. Margot has deposited the money as he asked, and he takes it all out, uncertain how much he’ll need and whether he’ll be able to get cash near where Caitlin is living.

  The beachfront is just around the corner, off the main road that leads out of town. Essie has never seen the ocean, and he wants to show her before they go any further.

  ‘Look,’ he tells her, and she stares obediently out the car window, sucking her thumb as she gazes at the grey sea, small choppy waves racing back in to the shore.

  He opens the car door; the wind is low and mean, whipping up squalls of grit. He was going to take Essie down onto the sand, and although he hesitates for a moment, he eventually decides to do it anyway. He lifts her out of her seat and tells her to rest her head on his shoulder and to close her eyes. She does as she is asked, and he shields her face with his hand.

  The wind is, as he had hoped, not as bad on the beach itself. In the shelter of the dunes, it is almost still. Essie stands and then drops down on all fours again, amazed at the size of the playground where she has been deposited. She rolls on her back and then onto her front, wallowing in the softness, and he smiles as he sees the fine yellow grains coating her mouth, her ears, her hair, her grin wide and delighted as she revels in the expanse.

  ‘Good, hey?’

  She does not look back as she crawls down to the shoreline, arms and legs working rapidly, and he lets her go for a moment or two before he realises that she has no intention of stopping and that he will have to get up and follow her. Together they reach the edge of the dry sand, the tide licking up over the high-water mark as he scoops her up in his arms.

  ‘See,’ he tells her. ‘See the sea.’

  Whether it be from exhaustion, or the sadness of remembering Caitlin as a child, or the strain between him and Sharn, he does not know, but there are tears in his eyes.

  ‘We have to go,’ he whispers in Essie’s ear, and he carries her back towards the car park, the seagulls swooping low overhead.

  WHEN LIAM TOLD MARGOT of his decision to make this journey, he did not go into details. He picked Essie up and said, quite simply, that he was taking her back to Caitlin. Was he doing this with Sharn? She hadn’t asked. She would never presume to be so direct, and he had told her that it was just something he felt he should do. To say any more was too painful.

  ‘I’m sure you are doing the right thing, my darling.’ Her eyes had been clouded with uncertainty, with anxiety, but still he had not offered her any further details.

  For the same reason, he found himself unable to leave a note for Sharn. He tried, but each time he attempted to put it down in words, it had been too large for the page.

  He can only do this step by step. To think ahead, to try to contemplate any moment other than the one that exists now, would paralyse him.

  He has been tired all morning and Essie’s good humour has also lapsed into irritability. After about half an hour on the road, she rubs sand into her eyes and starts crying. He tries to soothe her with gentle words, and then he reaches behind him and attempts to rub the grit away with the edge of her T-shirt, but neither works. He pulls over and searches for a bottle of water on the floor of the car. Carefully he wipes at the edges of her eyelids, and she blinks once, twice, before looking up at him, the whites of her eyes still red, but the sand now gone.

  ‘Ah, Sharn,’ he finds himself saying again and again, and it is like a chant as the road stretches before him. ‘How did we get here?’

  But the memory of their conversation the previous evening slides in with scalpel-like precision each time he finds himself yearning for her. There is no going back.

  Twenty minutes later, Essie is crying again. It is not like her. She is, as Caitlin was, a relatively calm child.

  ‘What is it?’ and he is surprised at the frustration in his own voice.

  She cries a little louder and he reaches behind to soothe her, but she only pushes his hand away.

  We are getting on each other’s nerves, he thinks, and he turns the radio on, searching for a local station with music. He sings loudly to a pop song from the seventies but still Essie cries, and he realises he has no choice but to pull over again.

  Her nappy is wet. He changes it, fumbling for a clean one in the back of the car. He will have to buy more at the next town. When he has finished, they sit by the side of the road and eat a banana. He lets Essie crawl along the edge of the grass that borders the bitumen, but when she tries to pull herself up on a barbed wire fence, he has to pick her up. He holds her hand in his own and walks with her back towards the car.

  The day is crisp and clear, the sky dazzling in its brilliance. The further north they head, the warmer it becomes, the cold becoming little more than a memory, an occurrence that happens in other people’s lives.

  He remembers how the humidity would finally break at Sassafrass, the skies sharpening into a cobalt blue, arching clear overhead. That was when he used to take Caitlin swimming in the river. At the end of the rains, when the water level had subsided, he would walk out onto a log, holding her carefully.

  ‘We’re going in,’ he would tell her, and she would wrap her arms tight around his neck.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he would ask, and she would grin in anticipation.

  ‘Sure?’

  She would nod, clasping her hands even more firmly and pulling herself up a little higher.

  He would bounce once, twice, and then leap, the pair of them falling down into the deep, cool water, closing their eyes as they plummeted under, and with one hard kick he would swim them both up to the surface again.

  Seeing them, Sharn would dive in and then come up for air, her sharp, angular features bright and alive, her eyes sparkling and the water glittering around her.

  ‘Let’s hide,’ Liam would whisper, and Caitlin would hold on to his shoulders as they went back under again, swimming to the other side of the bank where the reeds grew, tall and slender, a strip of plush green stretching out along the sand.

  ‘Shh,’ and they would stand, perfectly still, perfectly quiet, as Sharn called their names over and over again.

  ‘Now.’ He always gave the order at the right time. Not a moment too late, nor too soon. Leaping out from their hiding place, they would slap their palms down onto the still surface of the river, sending great sprays flying high into the brilliance of the sky, showering on Sharn in a torrent.

  Liam smiles to himself.

  Sharn always speaks of Sassafrass disparagingly. It was hard for her. He knows that. But for him it was different. His memories of Sassafrass are sweet. She told him there was a turn-off somewhere along the way, a road that he could take back there, but he feels no need. Perhaps it is not even as simple as a lack of need. Perhaps, like Sharn says, he does not want to risk tarnishi
ng all that he holds as precious.

  He opens the window wide and feels the gust of fresh air bringing a newfound surge of goodwill, a strange sense of peace within the world. Essie is asleep again, the day is perfect, and the further along the road he travels, the lighter he becomes. He is acting as he feels he should. At last.

  The map is spread open on the passenger seat next to him. He quickly looks across and traces how far it is to the town closest to Caitlin. He knows the name because Sharn told him, because she rang him from there (she has a child, a baby) to tell him that she was on her way home, never once mentioning the fact that she was not travelling alone.

  He still has about six or seven hours to go. He would like to get there today, to have a good night’s sleep before they head out to Caitlin, but he does not know if they will make it. When Essie wakes she will need some lunch and a chance to move around.

  The road takes a slight rise and as he comes down the hill he sees a hitchhiker in the distance, a solitary figure standing near a boulder, luggage on the ground at his feet, thumb stuck out in anticipation of someone finally stopping for him.

  Liam is about to drive on, in fact, he has no real intention of pulling over, but he finds himself slowing down, the dust clouding up behind him as he comes to a stop. It is, perhaps, a memory of himself hitchhiking that has made him act almost involuntarily, or the sudden lifting of his spirits; he does not know, but this is not what he should be doing; they have so far to go, and no time to stop.

  He is young. Probably in his early twenties. Handsome in a Scandinavian way. Deep golden skin, piercing blue eyes and flaxen hair. (Not my type, Sharn would say if she were taking this journey with them and they were discussing the events of the day after Essie had gone to sleep. I’ve never liked the pretty ones, and Liam would grin because he could take her comment as an insult; she does not find him pretty. Of course not. You’re – and she would search for a word that would, without fail, fall short of a compliment – you’re just you.)