Nothing On Earth (15 page)

‘Your mother's parents?'

‘No,' she said. ‘They were here when we came.' She was speaking in the plural still, albeit a past-tense plural. ‘We called them George and Georgina.'

I remember thinking how slight and isolated her presence was, wandering around the rooms her parents and her auntie had once filled with limbs and voices, pausing now and then in some sort of recognition, steeling herself to be brave, conceding all those inanimate objects to the immediate past.

‘I'm ready for leaving,' she said.

‘Laptop?'

‘Don't need it.'

‘I thought that's what we came for.'

The rain was torrential. She flipped her hood up in the porch, I pulled my blazer above my head, and we both dashed to my car. I had to set the wipers to top speed and the fan at full blast to demist the windscreen. I asked her who she had been talking to in the attic. She said it was her best friend. She said, ‘You?'

‘Me?' I knew what she meant and she recognized that she had no need repeating the question. ‘I thought there was someone else in the room. For a second.'

‘That happens.'

She went up to my spare room, the one she had slept in the first night. She went up at my instruction to get out of her sopping clothes. She had little else to change into. I knew that, and left a bundle of my own bits folded on the floor of the landing. I put fish fingers under the grill. I set to making a small coal fire in the front room. It had been months since the hearth was lit. But it had turned unexpectedly chilly, and I thought the idea of a fire might comfort the girl. When I spun away from the flame, she was standing beside my upright piano, combing her wet hair with her fingers.

‘Jesus,' I said. I don't remember ever swearing like that. ‘I didn't hear you come in.'

‘Sorry.'

She wore only the sweatshirt I had left out, one with ‘Virginia' printed across the breast that had been a gift from my brother years before, when he was a law student over there. The sweatshirt fell almost to her knees. Below its hem her legs were bare and bore a couple of bruises. The sleeves were dangling well beyond her fingertips. She held her arms out, one at a time, and I rolled each cuff several turns until her wrists were visible.

‘What did your dad and your mam's sister fight about?'

I had wanted to ask that several times before then, but had thought better of grilling her with questions, like all the others, and squandering whatever morsel of trust I had won. She was saying something about a hairdryer, I think, when I asked her this. At first, I thought she might not have heard. Or that she had heard and was choosing to ignore. Then she said, ‘Nothing.'

‘Nothing?' When she didn't answer that, I forced the issue. ‘What does
nothing
mean, Helen?'

‘There was no fight,' she said. ‘She just went out and never came back. A month ago.'

‘You should have told that to the officers.' I wasn't cross with her, but I may have sounded as if I was. ‘You should have told them that your auntie was gone missing too.' I was more horrified. I slumped onto the piano stool. ‘What possessed you to lie to them?'

‘Papa said to tell nobody. People might think there was something wrong with us.'

It was at that point that she wept openly. Her face creased into itself and plump tears streamed down. She rubbed the knuckles of her index fingers into her eyes, the way a baby does, instinctively. She even sat down on my knee. Just like that. I don't believe she realized what she was doing. We stayed in that position for several minutes. I could feel her thin bones through my slacks. I could smell her shampoo's coconut scent. She was heavier than you might have expected, as if all the secrets she had inherited added to her weight.

I wanted to hold her head in my hands. Instead I sat frozen, like one carrying some invisible globe, while her hair fell around her bent head and her whole frame shook. I shooed her towards the swelling fire and washed my hands with carbolic soap at the sink. Her sobs were still audible above the kettle's singing. I stepped back in with a tray bearing mugs and a plate of fish-finger sandwiches.

‘Now,' I said.

We could hear the rain still hammering outside. At first, I didn't know where to put myself. Nobody came or called, much as we waited. Nobody picked up in the garda station the couple of times I dialled, or at either of my cleaner's numbers.

‘I want to stay here again.'

‘Not a hope.'

I was pleased with myself for making that much clear. We dragged a pair of easy chairs to either side of the hearth, ate off our laps and set in for a vigil of sorts. I remember the buttery tomato sauce that squeezed out and dribbled between her fingers, which she licked clean. I remember how, when she had finished, she wiped her hands dry on the sweatshirt; her fascination with the fire, the way she sat forward, elbows on knees and poker dangling, watching its flurries and lulls, prodding crevices in the slack for evidence of life; the way she shivered and lifted coals carefully, one by one, with the tongs. She had, she said, seen Slattery do it and had been dying to ask for a go.

‘So the Slatterys had you up?'

‘Freaks,' she said.

‘
Freaks
.' I said it in such a way as to suggest that she was being uncharitable, though I knew she was right.

‘That's what Papa called them.'

‘Take this.' I had poured two thimblefuls of brandy and handed one to her. ‘My mother used always give us this for shock or toothache or the like.'

‘Is she still alive?'

‘My mother?' I was laughing. ‘Lord, no!'

That was the only prompt she needed. She just launched forth and, when I never once made to interrupt, she kept going. The more she spoke, the more fluent she became. The metallic edge seemed to wear off her voice while she talked, staring forward, her features flushed in the glow. I heard everything she had not mentioned to the officers: the hours devoted to sunbathing; the words on the back window; the puzzled email from Ute that her auntie left open on a screen; her mother walking across the garden in a bridesmaid's dress on the same evening that the girl had heard her father and auntie in the bedroom . . .

‘Martina said they were just talking,' she said. ‘But they weren't.'

‘You don't know that.'

‘She went all red when she found me outside the room. And her hands were wet.'

There was a sliver of anger in her voice when she said that last bit. The auntie had resumed her visits to the security lad, Marcus. Neither the girl nor her father ever alluded to her nightly absences. One night the auntie didn't come home and her father searched the townhouses. The builder, Flood, said the lad had been in Reading for weeks. They told no one that her auntie was gone. Her father was made redundant. Slattery invited them to his house and knew everything about them. The feeling that someone else was present had driven them up into the attic this past month, scared stiff. She even acted out the exchange that she and her father had had in the darkness of the attic. She said she had asked him about demons because of all the noises they kept hearing.

‘Noises?'

‘Noises,' she said. ‘The wall banging from the empty house joining ours. The Poles in number three.'

‘The Poles?' I knew for a fact that number three had remained vacant since Sheila had moved in with her daughter.

‘Papa called them that,' she said. ‘I never saw them.'

I remember her small hands cupped around the tumbler, the look of worry on her face whenever I thought I heard the phone ringing and raised one finger to stall her story, the way she could scarcely bring herself to utter some of it and giggled through other stuff, such as Slattery's airs and war booty. Her teeth were a little bucked, though only in a way that added to her prettiness, and stuck out whenever she was amused. She would tilt her head, at lengthy regular intervals, to get her hair dry. The skin of her jawline, throat and breastbone was so pure and pale. After the amusement subsided, her fire-bound gaze clouded over and she resumed precisely where she had tapered off.

It is possible, as I say, that I heard more than she said; or that my memory has added to her telling those details that I wanted to hear but which the girl could not have witnessed or imparted. But I do still believe she saw far more than her family realized. And I think part of me recognized something of my own means of inhabiting the world in her description of herself. In every episode she was the faceless, ever-present bystander, marginal to the point of being overlooked, but observing and absorbing everything. She was there all along – you could say we both were – and yet had gone too easily unnoticed. I was even inclined to wonder if she recognized something of the same in me. I remember wishing I could offer her more in the way of shelter, being touched by her and wanting her to feel as touched.

At some point in that late evening, during the unbroken spell in which she spoke and I listened, the dial tone of the landline died. I must have walked to the stand in the hall and back a dozen times. No line at all, either coming in or going out. Even my mobile yielded only an uninterrupted drone whenever I pressed the ‘call' button. We sat waiting until some ungodly hour, in the hope that a car would pull up. I didn't want her to stay. It was not safe, as much for me as for her. I stood in the porch, peering at the deluge, as if attempting to will the world back to us. There were already huge pools along the edges of the road. All the lights on the old road were blank, and there was not the slightest splash of traffic. In the distance, however, towards the town, there was a pink, wavering glow on the skyline and the faint echo of sirens. I even considered driving towards it. In a moment of panic I considered finding coats for us both, and making our way towards those echoes, that glow.

Finally, I shut the front door, blanked the porch light and headed back inside, knowing that there was nothing else for it but for her to stop a second night.

‘Let's go,' I said.

I said it loudly, though it appeared then that she had only pretended to doze off. She dragged all her hair across one shoulder and twisted it with one fist into a loose spiral. When she faced away from the fire towards me, she seemed momentarily older somehow, no longer quite the child. So much so that I even stepped backwards. She rose and left the room, brushing past me as she did, forgetting to pretend to regain consciousness as well.

‘We'll drive over to the station in the morning,' I called after her, ‘and sort this once and for all.'

I remember setting the guard in front of the fire, wedging it firmly with the poker. The handle of the poker was still clammy from her grip. I lifted her tumbler off the tiles of the hearth. She had taken only a few sips and most of what I had poured for her was still sitting in it. There were marks on the rim where she had sipped. I remember holding that tumbler against the light of the fire's remnants and being able to make out the shape of her lips, her smears of saliva and breadcrumbs; inhaling the musk off her drink; positioning my own lips where hers had marked the glass, and keeping them there. It was lukewarm, her drink was, sweet, like the dregs of red lemonade left overnight. I remember the scorch of it on my tongue and in my throat when I finally threw my head back and swilled and knocked off all the power points.

‘Can I sleep in your room?'

She was on the landing. She had her head bowed, her hair down around her face. She had the cuffs of my sweatshirt rolled back down and bunched around her fists. She was shivering. I said something like, ‘Ah, here.' I was at my wits' end. I did want to protect her, but I needed to protect myself too. There was always going to be a reckoning, somewhere down the line, and I was wise enough to realize even then that I would have this truth to tell.

‘We can drag the mattress over,' she said, still looking downwards. ‘I can sleep on your floor, like I used do with Papa.'

‘Not a hope.' I was snorting light-heartedly when I said it, letting her down as softly as I could manage. I was trying to shepherd her towards her own space. ‘Not a hope in hell.'

‘Please, Father.' I'll never forget it, how she said that. ‘Please.'

I held open the door of the room in which she had slept the night before and nodded inwards. ‘Let's go.'

She tiptoed through her own things scattered around the floor. I folded back the sheets that she must have straightened from the previous night and she curled beneath the bedding, my sweatshirt still on her. I remember gathering her saturated clothes, leaving them to dry on the footboard and standing bedside.

‘Now,' I said.

The rain was fairly pummelling down. I straightened out the hem of her sheet and blanket. She tucked her face below the edge of the fold, so that all you could see were her hair and the nape of her neck. I wanted to tell her that she was perfectly safe, to pat the back of her head and the hairline where black strands dissolved into white skin, to rub my thumb around that ball of bone at the top of her spine. Instead, I pulled her door behind me, switched off the landing light and twisted the key of my own lock as slowly as I could manage.

I did think about her. If I'm guilty of anything else, I'm guilty of that. I'm guilty of thinking about the girl in bed in the room across from my own. I am a man as well, after all. She was twelve, or so they said. But even then I wondered if she might have been more than that. She was as pitiful as she was pretty, and she was pretty in spades. There was something about that combination, at my mercy, that I could not help imagining. For the second time I lay in the dark across the landing from her. This time I was relieved to get that far away. I remember closing my eyes, sighing deeply and seeing my own mother walking towards me, on a track in a field next to our homeplace. I remember feeling very happy to see her, in sunlight there, inching towards me. I called something, but she didn't hear or understand. When she got nearer, I could see that she had ‘Virginia' printed across her breast, and that her legs and feet were bare and covered with scratches.