Nothing On Earth

by Conor O'Callaghan

  ‘Okay,’ Martina said. The girl had been through more than enough, and this kind of reaction was to be expected, even humoured for the time being. ‘Where exactly?’

  ‘In the garden. I was reading my magazine, and thought someone was trying to . . . I saw it was Mutti. She walked across the garden. I called to her, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t even look around.’

  ‘And what was she wearing?’ Martina asked, smiling, thinking she had finally got it and was happy to play along.

  ‘She was wearing the bridesmaid’s dress she wore at your wedding.’ It was years since anyone had mentioned Martina’s wedding or marriage. ‘Down to the ground, bare arms, and covered all in flowers.’

  Sheila moved out. She left a card in their door the day she moved. The card said ‘Good Luck’ in gold joined-up writing. It had a horseshoe embossed on the cover. A lamp timed on in her front room every night. There was clattering in the other empty shells. Flood came one morning and erected a metal barrier across the entrance to the close, but that made no difference. Sometimes there was hammering on their door: always at night; always the same furious rhythm, as if someone were trapped outside and desperate to get in. But there was never anyone there. Paul called to the local garda station on one of his Saturdays at home and spoke over an intercom to an uninterested voice in a bigger station in the next town. He got a heat-sensitive halogen light fitted above the patio door. It was like a disco in the garden, with the light tripping on and off. Three, maybe four, nights of every week they each lay in their separate unlit rooms, listening to the front door shuddering and joyriders buzzing like mosquitoes out on the ring road.

  The water rationing intensified. The taps ran dry from eight every evening. It hadn’t rained for almost two months. The mounds of muck up at the townhouses had dried to a fine orange sand that blew off in plumes whenever a warm wind came swirling around. The sand got everywhere: into the house, their clothes, everything. It got on the scraps of furniture they had, on the fruit in the picnic salad bowl. Every mug of tea or coffee seemed to have a film on its surface. You took a shower and the shower basin was coated with it, as if you had been at the beach all day. There was no point in cleaning the windows: within twenty-four hours they were gauzed with sand again.

  ‘So be it.’

  ‘So be what?’

  Martina said it to the girl first, sitting on the edge of her lounger. Martina, for the very first time, said ‘So be it’ really slowly, peering above her shades, rising as she spoke. It was the girl who asked, ‘So be what?’

  She pointed at the patio window, until the girl slid into her sandals and stood as well. Then she stopped pointing. The words were in reverse, in a script so odd that they could have been written by a small child or someone’s wrong hand. The three words were on the outside of the patio window, so that they could be read from indoors. Someone had inscribed, with one finger, ‘SO BE IT’ into the dust. Not recently, by the look of it. The letters had filled again, were only minutely lighter in shade than the rest of the glass and legible only from an oblique angle.

  The girl asked, ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. ‘Say nothing to your daddy.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘He has enough on his plate.’

  ‘His plate?’

  She filled a basin with warm suds and washed the window panel. A solitary sparkling panel looked dubious, so she did the rest of the panels of the patio window, and the window over the sink as well, and the bay window in the front room. She even polished them with one of her sister’s old tank-tops as a rag. And yet, however hard she polished, she could never fully eradicate an impression of the words, as if the glass had memory and the letters were burned into it.

  Neither she nor the girl said anything about the words, their phrase. Not then or for a long time. Not to Paul and not even between themselves. Paul never seemed to see them. Though every once in a while one of them would say ‘So be it’ in answer to something completely unrelated and trust that somewhere within earshot the other would hear.

  Things disappeared. The cement mixer disappeared. A stack of breeze blocks diminished, almost imperceptibly, until there was nothing where it had been. A soft-top that joyriders had long since bulldozed into a mound of soil disappeared piecemeal: wheels, doors, upholstery, the instrument panel. A guy in white shorts removed the registration plates, carefully, with a screwdriver he had in his pocket. Martina watched him from the bay window. She told the others he looked as if he was the owner. Even Flood, it seemed, went missing. Where once his visits had been daily, or as good as, leaning out from the driver’s window and asking for news of Helen and generally acting as if he had done them the biggest favour of their lives, now he was nowhere.

  Hi, Martina! Thank you for this. I remember Helen. She came to us a few times only. But years ago, not recently. Really? We stopped her when we discovered items were missing. We worried for Sophie also. I said this to police who called lately and told us. Helen is not with us. I receive no email from her. I & Benedikt are confused. This is too sad. We will pray for you for finding her. xx

  Nothing was the same. Her phone credit ran out. There was, she explained to the girl, no real point topping up. She told the girl, eventually, about the email from Ute.

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Only that your Mutti isn’t there.’ There was little else she could say.

  Some people appeared. A door shut upstairs. ‘Spring-loaded,’ the girl said, but there were definitely voices coming from the master bedroom. When another door shut, minutes after, Martina called from the foot of the stairs, threw on a jacket of Paul’s off the banister and called again from the landing, her heart thumping in her breast, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello,’ a woman’s voice called from inside Paul’s room. Then its door’s chrome handle turned, and wire coat-hangers could be heard jingling on the other side. A man and a woman, both middle-aged, stood among Paul’s strewn clothes.

  ‘Do you mind telling me what you think you’re doing?’ Even Martina was shaken by the anger in her voice. ‘Do you mind telling me who the hell you are?’

  ‘Now hold on a sec,’ the woman said.

  ‘No harm done,’ the man said.

  ‘We did ring the bell. There was no answer and the door was open.’

  ‘Was it?’ She had the jacket wrapped tightly around herself. She wasn’t even sure if the people were real. ‘Leave, please.’

  ‘Now hold on,’ the woman said again. ‘We were led to believe that you were still open for viewing.’

  ‘Do we look as if we’re open for viewing?’

  ‘No harm done,’ the man said again, after they had descended and stepped outside. ‘I’ll give Flood a ring and straighten out the crossed wires.’

  Nothing ever happened about it. Flood didn’t come to explain, and no other viewers appeared. Like everything else, it was never mentioned again. Then one evening at dinner Paul said that the show-house sign was gone. It could have been gone days, weeks, for all they knew. The couple viewing, along with Helen’s disappearance, and Martina’s thing with Marcus, and that one time in the bedroom between her and Paul, and Ute’s email, and those words backwards on the patio window became a tide of unmentionables rising around them.

  Martina started bringing things up to Marcus again. The first few times she left without saying a word, as if she were just popping up for ten minutes, and accidentally didn’t get back until Paul and the girl had gone to bed. She remembered the question Helen had asked her coming home from the pictures and, after a fashion, took to calling its phrasing into the front room.

  ‘I’m heading up.’

  There was no response from inside. She winced after saying it. At least she was being honest. She was no longer pretending to be making a flying visit. She could hear the quiz that Paul and the girl loved, the answers they murmured from their matching beanbags before the contestants answered, the murmur of the fan that Paul’s father had br
ought. She had her own answer lined up in her head if Paul ever asked her. She was going to say that she felt safe. If Paul asked, or if the girl did, she was going to say that Marcus made her feel safe at night. But neither of them ever asked.

  Marcus would step out of the caravan when he saw her coming: hard hat tilted back, hi-vis singlet and nothing underneath, baggy combats and hands in pockets. His way of speaking was the match of his uncle’s.

  ‘There you are,’ he would call, when she was within earshot. ‘I thought I should step out to greet you.’

  ‘You’re a gent.’

  Sometimes she would bake flapjacks and bring him up a plate. He liked those. He liked, as well, Helen’s leftover body spray that Martina sometimes wore. He had a habit of biting and smiling at once. They sat inside the caravan, soaps on the portable. For the first few visits, they just talked. Marcus’s father had died when he was small. Flood had been very good to him. Marcus was planning on going to London soon. There was nothing keeping him at home.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  The way he went red was just like Flood, the way he blushed and snuffed a small laugh and looked at the table between them.

  ‘Almost nothing.’

  The second time Marcus said it, he pronounced ‘nothing’ correctly. When they were just talking, about anything, and his heart was going slow, his soft country accent cut the sharp corners off words. But if it started getting somewhere, coming to a point, he seemed to complete pronunciations properly. She knew he would never initiate anything. She came around to his side of the booth and sat on his knee. She said, ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘By all means!’

  When did he start using phrases like that? Trying to look educated to her! She got his top lip between her teeth and squeezed softly as if it was a strip of rubber, or squid more like. His breath tasted of instant coffee. His clothes smelt of industrial adhesive, in a sweet way. Its reek was in his skin. She went up with something on a plate, listened to him speak and sat on his knee. She never let it get too far. A lit caravan in an unfinished close was like a goldfish bowl. Midnight, or a quarter past at the latest. That was the curfew she stuck to, initially.

  She didn’t make much of an effort to start with. She went up in the shorts and flip-flops she had been wearing all day. A week or so of that and she changed. Jeans maybe, a nice top. The girl asked her if she was going out.

  ‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘I just have all these good clothes I never drag out any more.’

  She would change before they sat to dinner, to make it seem that dinner was the reason she had changed. She had taken to serving it on paper plates, to save on washing up. She set aside one portion of whatever she had cooked in a flat sealed dish to bring up to Marcus, and stored it somewhere out of sight in case Paul asked who it was for. She was always the one who cleared the plates into the black bin bag that hung off the handle of the patio door.

  She was capable, too, of seeing how they must have regarded her from their beanbags. At thirty, she was dressing up every night to go calling on a security guard just turned twenty, in a caravan on a close that was beginning to resemble some historic ruins. She wasn’t only doing it, she was excited by it. The entire day had become a means of manoeuvring to this moment, when she pulled the front door in her wake and forced herself not to turn back towards the bay window.

  ‘There you are,’ Marcus would always say.

  Marcus gave her golf lessons. It was the second week, possibly the third, that she had been going back up. He had mastered the art of chipping pebbles through windows and seemed determined to teach her with his one club. He had bought orange plastic practice balls, with holes in them, especially for her. She wasn’t fussed, but she could see that he had gone to trouble. Marcus stood behind her, fixed her grip, kept both arms around hers and made them swing. She was missing the balls and Marcus was cheering, ‘Fresh air!’

  The balls were bouncing off the walls around the window’s black cavity. She could feel him pressed against the back of her. She whooped when the last one disappeared.

  ‘What happens now?’

  ‘You have to go and get it.’

  ‘I’m not going in there on my own,’ she said.

  The ground was uneven underfoot. Something scattered in one of the upstairs rooms, though there were no stairs. He was stepping backwards, holding both her hands. His felt huge and cold. It was like being blindfolded. It was like pausing at the altar steps. They stopped only when Marcus’s back bumped against solid wall.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘let’s see if you can find it.’

  His buttons unfastened easily. He had no underwear on. She hunkered down, not wanting to kneel and get her jeans dirty, and opened her mouth as wide as she could. She steadied herself with one hand against the vague white of his thigh, and held tight with the other to stop him from pushing too far. He kept filling his lungs in short gulps, as if surfacing repeatedly for air. He smelt, down there, of nothing other than chlorine. She could taste her own lip-gloss smearing on his skin and on her tongue. Her ankles were aching. An image of the tidal pool she and Helen had bussed to one Sunday morning, of her sister’s aquamarine one-piece bathing suit, was flitting through her head. She hummed surprise. She had forgotten how young he was. She assumed that she had ages yet. It came in a cluster of waves and she concentrated on inhaling through her nose, for fear of drowning. It tasted of salt and sweat, of kelp and seawater. It tasted like a colour. Light grey. It tasted of what a mouthful of light grey must taste of.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

  He said that in the caravan. He had made a bed of where the table had been and spread an unzipped nylon sleeping bag over them.

  ‘I’m grand.’ She was laughing, pleased it had happened so quickly. She enjoyed the suddenness, the force of it. ‘It was lovely.’

  She slept in fits and starts. He did several checks of the site. After each, he came back and lay around her. Once, she woke to find him standing over a boiling kettle.

  ‘Tea.’

  He lay on top of her sometime around dawn. He hadn’t asked and she didn’t make to stop him. His trousers were already down around his ankles. She could hear the buckle of his belt tinkling. She was bearing, she felt, all his weight. It was longer than the first time, but not by very much. The tea was strong and lukewarm.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘It’s six o’clock,’ he said. He had the strap of a rucksack across one shoulder. He was hooking the strap with his thumb. ‘My shift’s over.’

  ‘Do I just lock up?’

  ‘Just pull the door behind you.’

  Evenings took the same routine. Martina had cooked before Paul got home, had changed and laid paper plates on the picnic table. Somewhere between supper and the late news, she called through the same words and the door latch clicked and her shadow disappeared up the close. They would have turned in before she got back, whenever that would be.

  She knew the inside of that caravan too well. She became intimate with its every detail. There was the bed, which doubled as a table and bench seats, framed on three sides by brown-and-yellow curtains that were never open. The sleeping bag was shiny purple on the outside and sky-blue cotton on the inside. The kettle and portable were both gone. His hi-vis singlet dangled from a wardrobe door. There was a gas hob with two rusty rings and a cylinder under it, a biscuit tin with stale crumbs and dust. There was a bank calendar that was three years out of date, with a photo of a different fading landscape for every month. It never budged off June, even when July was well under way. It was always strand and ocean in the distance, a foreground of harebells and heather.

  The light grew grey between four and five. She knew that it grew light between four and five because she wasn’t always asleep then. Sometimes she was conscious, seasick. Sometimes she lay alone, watching light grey gradually filling the horizon, the close, the caravan. Where had Marcus gone? She could still
feel the bulk of him on top of her, the thick blunt spike of him coring up into her. Where did everyone go?

  She tiptoed up to the same townhouse. From the entrance she spoke Marcus’s name into the interior black. No answer. She moved forward, stepping the way she had that one time when he had held both her hands and drawn her into him. She closed her eyes. It was just like her wedding day. She remembered closing her eyes for a moment after Paul, who had given her away, took one of her hands and asked her if she was ready. She surprised herself with the memory. Her sister had remembered everything for both of them. All the faces in the rows of seats on either side of the aisle, all turning towards them when the organ started bellowing in the choir balcony, and all the flowers up there at the altar gates. How did the girl, who was only a baby then, know what Helen’s dress had been like?

  When she opened her eyes again, there was a speck on the floor of the downstairs room of the townhouse. It was a tiny orange glow at first, like a planet light years out in space. The ball! It was the plastic golf ball that Marcus had brought and she, with him pressed hard behind her, had chipped through the window’s black hole. It was the orange ball they had forgotten all about, and it was luminous.

  She stood gazing at it for the longest time. The more she stood gazing at the ball, the huger its glow became. It drew all available light into itself and burned it like fuel. She could almost smell her skin burning, the singeing of her hair. You would never have imagined that there could be any light in there to draw upon, but there must have been. There must have been zillions of sparks and scintillas and rays and glimmers swimming around and yet so infinitesimal as to be invisible to her naked eye. Now they were being sucked into the magnetic field that the ball appeared to radiate. Now they were burning, being renewed and being burned again.