Nothing On Earth (11 page)

‘Do help yourself.' Slattery had a bottle of red in one paw, a corkscrew in the other. His face was pure puzzlement. ‘By all means.'

‘Paul.'

Was Hazel's speech confined to one syllable? Slattery poured wine into goblets that had stems stained blue, insisting that their guests tuck in while the food was still hot.

Talk was of Flood. The cowboy Flood was. ‘Cowboy' was the word Slattery kept using. Paul caught his daughter's eye. The girl had yet to touch her food. She hadn't even handled her cutlery. She was staring at her plate. Paul took a lump of bread from the middle of the table and swabbed it with sauce. It tasted of nothing except salt and grease.

‘Are we all grand?'

It was Hazel who said that. Seated now, she had spoken once again. She scarcely moved her lips when she spoke. Her voice was feathery, begging extra attention.

‘Grand,' Paul said. ‘Just waiting for it to cool.'

Flood was one of a thousand similar cowboys, all coming over the hill on their horses. While Slattery spoke, Hazel concentrated on eating as delicately as she could. Her nerves, of which Slattery had warned them, seemed real. Apart from Slattery's bark, the loudest thing in the room was Hazel's knife and fork trying not to clink on the china of her plate. There was something touching about her. Notwithstanding Slattery's bluster, having Paul and his daughter to dinner did appear to be a big deal. She had gone to far too much trouble, with her appearance and with the place-settings: napkins folded into swans. There was something vacant about her as well, Paul thought. Was she all there?

Alas, Slattery was saying, the cowboys had taken over, the cowboys had
carte blanche
.

‘The cowboys?'

‘Flood and his ilk.'

‘Of course.' Paul had a piece of gristle in his cheek. He was waiting for a distraction to spit it into his napkin, trying not to gag. ‘It's really delicious.'

‘Shall I tell them what I call the development, honey?'

‘Paul.'

‘I call it Flanders . . . You know. All the muck and shrapnel. All the poppies, one for every dismembered body lying decomposed underneath. One for every skeleton.'

‘Paul.'

‘Very good.'

‘I call it Flanders Fields. I wander down at sunset some evenings, as you know, and I always holler the same thing leaving, don't I, honey?
I'm off to Flanders Fields
, I always holler.'

‘Yeah.' Paul was getting freaked by Hazel's repeated chirping of his name. He was put out, as well, by his host's description of what was still their home. ‘Very witty.'

War was Slattery's thing. He had dozens of glossy coffee-table tomes on it. He had compiled an inventory of names from the surrounding parishes of young chaps – the sons of good families and farm labourers alike – who had all signed up together in the local post office and had perished together within weeks.

‘Paul.'

‘All right, Haze, all right.'

Slattery stood again, though mostly it was hard to tell, and poured more wine for everyone, except the girl, who had scarcely touched hers. She was too busy sliding lumps around her plate and occasionally lifting a fork with a morsel on it to her lips. After draining the bottle, Slattery left the room.

Paul pleaded with his daughter to eat properly. He didn't really give a damn. He was just trying to fill the air deadened by Slattery's absence.

‘Please,' Paul said to her, ‘don't let me down.'

‘Eat what you like, sweetie.' The more puce with wine the inside of Hazel's mouth got, the more her tongue loosened. ‘Ignore your daddy.'

In spite of the amnesty, or maybe because of it, the girl shovelled several large forkfuls into her mouth and followed them each with a hefty slug of wine. They sat watching her until Slattery returned with a couple of pieces of memorabilia that he had bought at auction: a pair of scissors prised from dead enemy hands; a gas mask the colour of copper. He gave the scissors to the girl: crooked, rusting at the handle, bearing a Gothic inscription on the inside of one of its blades that the girl read aloud, her mouth half full.

‘
Kettenhunde
.'

‘Very impressive,' Slattery said. ‘And its meaning?'

‘Chained dogs,' the girl said.

Slattery was adamant that Paul should try on the gas mask. He stood behind Paul and forced the straps at the back. The inside smelt of old rubber and of sick. Paul raised his glass of wine and, for a joke, tried to take a drink. While the others laughed, Paul swallowed the piece of gristle he had been holding in his cheek all that time and felt his throat coated in its grease. He could hear, but he could hardly see a thing and he couldn't push off the gas mask. Slattery was jabbering on, explaining to ‘the ladies' that he had spent a weekend with it on once, that wearing it gave you a bird's-eye view of what it was like to be actually in a war and facing the enemy. Who was the enemy?

Paul tried to remove the gas mask, but the thing felt suctioned to his head. He tried to say, ‘Please help me get it off,' but he could hear how muffled his voice was by all the tubing, and the others only laughed again.

‘If you say so,' Slattery said.

‘Paul.'

The mask's goggles got fogged with his breathing. The straps at the back of his head had no give in them. The other three were receding into mist: Slattery prattling on about craftsmanship, only the girl's expression and Hazel's voice displaying any awareness of what was happening.

‘Paul.'

Paul stood, tugging at the straps and growling, ‘Please get the fucking thing off me.' Slattery came behind him and said to take slow, even breaths. When they finally yanked off the mask, Paul's beard was dripping sweat, his hair everywhere, and they were staring at him as they might a scuba diver dragged up after a sudden loss of pressure.

‘Cheese and coffee?'

Hazel fetched a hand towel for Paul to rub his head down. It smelt of petrol, the towel did. She said, ‘I wish Martina could have made it.'

‘Martina?' Paul didn't dare look at his daughter. Slattery must have meant Martina when he said that, out on the doorstep, about a third person. ‘Made what?'

‘Here. Tonight,' Hazel said. ‘I wish Martina could have made it here tonight.'

‘I said that, honey.' Slattery was balancing cheeses on a marble block. ‘When they arrived, I said we had been expecting all three of them.'

‘Isn't Martina your wife's sister?'

‘I warned you she was a huge fan.' Slattery was blushing. Or was that just the wine and the heat of the kitchen and the summer that was in it? ‘Fetch your scrapbook, Haze.'

The scrapbook was wrapped in floral-embossed wallpaper, and in it was glued every cutting they knew about from all the newspapers. Hazel had even taken a poster from one of the filling stations out the road and folded it in two. She held the scrapbook longest at the article that featured a photo of them all: Paul, his daughter, Martina, seated on the sill of the bay window. The reflection of the flash in the double-glazing had made a blind spot of Martina's head. Hazel was rubbing her thumb around and around the bright sun where Martina's face should have been.

‘Has she gone out?'

‘Martina?'

‘Has she a hot date?' Hazel asked.

‘Kind of thing.'

‘You know I met them?' Slattery said.

‘Really?' Paul wasn't sure how much he could trust Slattery's word. ‘Both of them?'

‘Your wife mainly. I saw them together in Rainey's around the end of May.'

‘In?'

‘Rainey's?' Slattery sounded suspicious of Paul's ignorance. ‘The supermarket and lounge just down the road. It belongs to the Rainey family.'

‘News to me.'

‘I bumped into them there at the end of May and bought them drinks. I spoke to your wife only, to be honest, not to her sister.'

Helen and Martina did go to the pictures together, once, and did stop for one at the lounge belonging to the supermarket.

‘She mentioned something all right.'

‘Perhaps they had no idea who I was.' When Paul didn't protest, Slattery gave a petty shrug. ‘I told your wife I had known their folks.'

‘Did you?'

‘Oh, yes. Not well, obviously, but I had met both of them at different times.'

That wasn't what Paul meant. He wasn't asking Slattery if he had really known their parents. He was asking if Slattery had said that to Helen. Paul had never known anyone raise their parents with Helen or Martina.

This was why they had been invited. It had to be. Slattery had a smile that said, ‘In your own time . . .' All those years of skirting around Helen's past, of accepting Martina's presence and her protectiveness of her sister, of keeping the girl in the dark. Nobody had ever asked Paul anything. Even Helen had scarcely spoken of it. Oddly, this moment, at the table of a stranger whose wealth was rumoured to come from food manufactured for consumption by dogs, was the closest Paul had ever got to its core. It is conceivable that he wanted to say something, to spill whatever was left to him, but there was still his daughter to think of. His shoulders ached: he was only propping the floodgates shut a while longer.

How much did Slattery know? More than him? There were times Paul wondered if parts of the truth, and therefore its entirety, had been withheld from him. Slattery wanted juice. You could all but hear the saliva accumulating in his jowls. He could swing for it, Slattery could. Slattery could swing for whatever dirt he was chasing. They all could. Refusing to meet their fat faces gazing at him, Paul pushed his plate towards the centre of the table and coughed.

Slattery finally said, ‘Unimaginable, really.'

The girl vomited onto her plate. Just like that. She had eaten every scrap, had sat in pale speechlessness, and now was heaving loudly all over her place-setting shreds of animal flesh swimming in acrid human stomach acid.

‘Something didn't agree with you,' Slattery said.

Paul hauled her to the sink. With the second substantial heave came stuff other than food or bile. There was dust in there, sawdust. There were also tiny shards of wood, masonry and steel. Paul tried to run the taps to wash it away before anyone else saw, but nothing came out.

‘We should leave.'

‘A quick coffee?'

‘She's covered in sick.' Was Slattery, Paul's tone meant to ask, even thicker than he appeared? ‘I should really get her home.'

At the door, Slattery said something about going to ‘Portgal' until the end of the summer, about hooking up when they got back. The door dragged shut behind them, the crunch of gravel underfoot ceased and the long grass was silver in the light of a torch borrowed from their hosts.

‘It looks strange from up here,' the girl said.

They could see the outline of the close, their house alarm's blue strobe, and the town's and ring road's smattering of lights in the distance.

‘Freaks!' Paul screamed into the darkness. The air was too dry for echoes.

The girl laughed and screamed too. ‘Bloody freaks!'

The Poles were at it full throttle. A bigger than usual gang, a ghetto-blaster cranked up, some drunken singing, raised voices and possibly even a scuffle. By two a.m., Paul had had enough. He pulled on his tracksuit bottoms and thumped on their bell. Nothing. The rear gate was locked. He climbed onto one of their bins and, when there was no evidence of a party, jumped into their garden. Though the patio light was still on, the kitchen was unlit and empty. He could see yellow coming down the stairs, and there seemed to be movement up there. He shielded his eyes and, pressing against the back door, glimpsed only himself in what must have been a long mirror against the nearest wall. His two images, on the glass and on the mirror behind it, were like concentric reflections. They receded when he stepped backwards. When he moved closer again, they loomed into one another, frame into frame, gaze into gaze, mouth into hollow mouth.

‘Jesus Christ!'

‘What happened?'

There was no hiding it, not now or any more, to his bleary-eyed daughter standing in slippers in their hall, deadlock bolted behind him.

‘There was nobody there for anything to happen,' he said. ‘Nobody except some nutter staring straight back out at me.'

After the water, the money ran out. The phone line went dead, and with it the modem. Even the electricity stopped pumping into their walls. A couple of times a week they walked to the library, where she charged her laptop for free at a power point beneath the back shelves and he riffled the local papers trying to find some mention of Flood's fall from grace. Nobody said anything to them. Otherwise, they made do with Helen's scented candles scattered from the bathroom throughout the house, and with Slattery's torch, used sparingly to save on batteries. The banging on their door resumed, sometimes in the small hours, sometimes during the day. The envelopes piled inside the letterbox. One day a page with red writing was glued to the door.

‘What does it say?'

‘Something about repossession,' he said. ‘Nothing to do with us.'

They started sleeping in the attic, to get as far away from the banging as they could. Paul laid a few unscrewed wardrobe doors as flooring and squeezed two mattresses up through the trap into the attic. It was sweltering up there, with no window and all that hot air under the roof and the smell of melting wax. Mostly he read paperbacks that had been stacked on Martina's bedside stool, while his daughter kept trying to video-call old schoolfriends via a weak unencrypted signal she occasionally picked up. Paul had saved the last satsuma from the bag he had bought in the supermarket. He held it over a flame and gazed at it, marvelling at its glow. He gazed at it so long that its zest began singeing. The girl's calls kept dropping or, worse, being scrambled by a high-pitched whistle or a monotonous backbeat. One by one, the disembodied voices receded. It was too much, lying there, eyes shut, hearing your daughter asking, ‘
Kannst du mich hören?
' or ‘
Hallo, ist da jemand?
' of a mute screen.