Nothing On Earth (2 page)

The uniformed woman stepped outside before the rest of us. ‘Thank you.' She was addressing a cluster of ladies gathered at my gate. ‘Thank you now.'

They had seen the siren's revolving violet. It is also possible, when I think of it, that my cleaner had said something to a friend and word had spread over the bush telegraph. The officer was trying to disperse them so that both cars, mine and their unmarked one in which the girl was sitting, could slip away. Though it was no great distance to the house from which the girl had run, it was agreed that we would take the cars. I let all the others leave ahead. I rolled down my window at the gate and listened.

‘Does she need anything?'

‘The poor pet.'

‘Has she somewhere to stop for the night?'

‘You're all very good,' I said. ‘Really.' I meant it. ‘But I don't imagine it will come to that.' I released the handbrake and lifted the clutch to the bite. ‘Go on about your evenings. Everything will be grand.'

I still think of that moment, even now, as the beginning. A good deal happened before that point, but none of it belonged to me. From my own perspective, I keep returning to that moment, when my car inched forward out of my gate and bumped onto the tarmac of the road, as the point of no return: the engine labouring upwards, my hands clammy on the wheel, the posse of ladies in the rear-view mirror, the brake lights of the other car fraying around the bend in the distance.

I knew all about that family. Everyone knew all about them: young people just returned after years out of the country and surviving out there in something resembling wilderness. Their story had been all over the local papers. There had been a lot of speculation, idle largely, and wide of the mark. I liked to think that I knew more than most. I had seen them from a distance, many times. It might be truer to say that I had observed them. Once, at their neighbour's insistence, I had tried calling and had watched them briefly from close quarters. I had done some research of my own. Soon after materializing on my doorstep, that girl would tell me far more than I cared to hear and I would come to realize how little I had known. And maybe, yes, I would in time remember more than even she could possibly have known or told me.

The close was only a half-mile farther out the road, and it took me no more than a minute to get there, but I was never more alone than in that minute or so between my gate and that close. It seemed to drag on for hours, that minute. Only gradually did the ladies recede behind me, and when I finally rounded the long bend, their car had already parked up ahead and everyone was standing waiting for me. Beyond them, the light and shadow of the diminishing hills looked tempting.

I let the car slow naturally, on its gears, indicated towards the other side and ground to a standstill on the white line at the centre of the road, the way you would with oncoming traffic, though there was none. If I am honest, I would even say that I already felt guilty. Why? I had done nothing. I had done nothing apart from let the girl in, call the law and wait. I hadn't laid a finger on her.

THE GIRL'S MOTHER
was not ‘Helen', but Helen will have to do for now. She did have a real name. It was, once, a matter of public record. What was it, her real name? Nobody seems sure any more. There were even moments, towards the end, when Helen wasn't entirely certain herself.

‘Which of you is Helen?'

A man with a beard and check shirt asked that. He was leaning on the frame of an open door, the one from the hallway into their kitchen, when he asked it. Nobody said anything. He smiled and said, ‘Knock, knock,' then just stepped in, like a giant from a fairy story, to where they sat eating a cooked chicken with bare hands at the plastic picnic table she had bought to tide them over.

This was one of those moments when she scarcely recognized her name and sat as motionless as the others. She could hear them, either side of her, giggling slightly. They always shared, she knew, a running joke about her being as vague as fog. Now here she was, so miles away that everyone was gazing at her.

‘I am,' she said, and stood, and put her hand forward for shaking.

This, you could say, is where it really began. The last week of April, a man in a check shirt pretending to be a door, and Helen stirred from heaven knows where to stand and stretch her hand forward the way people are expected to with strangers.

‘Flood.'

Flood's hand felt huge and covered in cracks, like a cement shovel left standing weeks in sun. He had been hoping that Helen was her sister. Martina? Martina sounds about right. Flood had been hoping that Helen was Martina, from the way he was smiling down at Martina, the way men always did, and the way his face fell fractionally when Helen stood. There were, she noticed, little saucers of sweat in the armpits of his shirt. That's the other thing. It happened over the course of one blistering summer. The road up through the close was pure dust.

‘We spoke on the phone.'

‘We did indeed.' Flood smiled when he said that. She had called long distance twice early in the year: once to ask initially if he would consider a rent-to-buy, and once to arrange for keys. She had called from a payphone next to the laundry room in the basement of their old apartment block, with prepaid minutes. Flood's smile must have meant he didn't need reminding that they had spoken. ‘That's why I asked for you.'

‘We were wondering when we'd see you.'

‘I meant to drop by sooner.' Every time he spoke, it appeared something else had caught Flood's attention. ‘When did you get here?'

‘Few days ago.'

‘That's right.' Flood turned to acknowledge the others' presence. ‘Marcus said he saw a big blue truck pull up.'

‘Marcus?'

‘Sister's youngest. I have him on night security for the time being.'

The girl's father wiped chicken grease from his hands and stood looking up at Flood and said something like, ‘Paul.'

‘Good man, Paul.' Flood started towards the front of the house. ‘There's a couple of bits and bobs.'

The three of them walked the close: Helen and Paul and Flood. Paul looked like he wasn't entirely sure where he was. He kept squinting at the unblemished blue above them and nodding vacantly at whatever Flood and Helen were saying.

‘Have you made yourselves known to Harry and Sheila?'

‘In number three?'

‘The very one.' Flood shaded his eyes and peered downhill towards the only other house occupied. The rest were bare breeze block, black cavities where there should have been doubleglazing. A handful didn't even have slates on the roof. ‘Smashing folks altogether.'

Coming back was her idea. Paul, she knew, would make that clear to Flood. There were several moments, during Flood's tour of the close, when Flood said something and Paul rubbed the underside of his nose as if he were trying to stifle a smirk. They walked; Paul drifted several paces behind and she slowed her own pace to let him catch up. They stopped to inspect something, and Paul came to a standstill to one side, hands in pockets, rocking on his heels. Whenever she asked a question, she made a point of raising her voice to try to include him.

‘When can we expect other neighbours?'

‘We've a few nibbles.'

‘Nibbles?'

‘Possible buyers. Young family like yourselves. From the midlands. Any day now.'

Flood lifted things as he spoke, arranging scraps of iron rod or plastic tubing into neat rows, as if that made any difference. His beard was copper with flecks of white in it. His arms were thick, brown. The hot sun, directly overhead, threw a little black pool in which Flood seemed to stand knee-deep. He kept shading his eyes and peering at her. He kept turning phrases that sounded comical, even when they weren't meant to be. At one point, crossing the dust track back towards their house, he asked, ‘How long were you over beyond?'

‘Over beyond?'

Flood nodded sideways, towards the open country on the road away from town, as if the next parish were the continent. ‘In foreign parts.'

‘Ten years,' she said.

‘That long? The place must be unrecognizable.' Did Flood regret the last part of what he'd said? He might well have done, from the way he examined the ground between them. ‘Have you been up the town?'

‘Not yet.'

They stopped at the bottom of the driveway to theirs. Paul backed indoors without a goodbye. She wondered about apologizing, but Flood didn't seem that bothered.

‘Nothing much to see. Handful of pubs and a filling station with a minimart. There's a film club in the courthouse one night a month, if you're interested.'

Helen laughed, openly this time. It sounded like he was asking her on a date. When she laughed, Flood blushed and tried to laugh as well, and she felt mean.

‘You never know,' she said.

Flood laid one hand on the sign that read ‘Show House'. The letters were branded into a lacquered slice of oak. ‘I'll leave that there for now,' he said. She hadn't forgotten that that was part of the deal. She just hadn't said so to the others. ‘In case people want to look around.'

‘Of course.'

‘So hold on to the few sticks of furniture for the time being, if that's okay.'

There wasn't much: a coffee-table made from chrome and glass, a sleigh bed in the master upstairs, a photo in a walnut frame on the mantelpiece of some anonymous retired couple whom Martina had already christened George and Georgina.

‘I quite like them. I always like other people's things more than my own.' She had assumed that Flood would know what she meant. When he said nothing, and just looked as puzzled as he did, she tried to brush it off. ‘I suppose I'm odd that way.'

‘They're just things, stuff I got in a discount warehouse, to take the bare look off.' Flood tucked his shirt into his jeans and pulled a cluster of keys from one of his back pockets. ‘You can burn them when we're done.'

‘No, I do, I like them,' she said again, and wished she hadn't. ‘And it's not as if we're not glad of them.'

‘When might you be in a position to complete?'

‘To complete?'

‘The buying end of the deal.'

‘Sooner than later,' she said. She hadn't told Paul or Martina this either. ‘That's the hope.'

‘Good so.' Flood gestured towards a dinky caravan parked about fifty yards up the site, between the houses and the two identical apartment blocks at the top of the close which he referred to as ‘townhouses'. ‘Marcus will be up there from six every night.' Flood looked mortified by the name. ‘Don't know where they got “Marcus” from. And pass no remarks to Slattery.' When Helen shrugged, Flood made a circle with his index finger. ‘Used own this land.'

It was true what she had said. She preferred being surrounded by others' things. For days after, she replayed her conversation with Flood. For some reason she didn't fully understand herself, she had expected from him a smile of assent, not the bewildered sideways shift she'd got. Gradually, the way you do, she created a version in which Flood was mildly curious, enough to ask her what she meant. The belongings of strangers came with a history, she would tell him. The history made a kind of noise around those things. She preferred that second-hand noise to the silence of the new. It was reassuring. That was why she agreed to holding on to the show house's flotsam: the coffee-table, the bed, the couple scissored from a pensions brochure . . . That was why she held on to them all.

A door shut, of its own accord, somewhere on the ground floor. Everyone was definitely in bed. She lay for the guts of an hour beside Paul, just listening, to see if it would happen again. She stopped on the third step from the bottom and, almost embarrassing herself, asked of the darkened hallway, ‘Hello?'

From the next house up there was a sound. It was like a hollow ball hopping off the chimney breast. It was so faint at first that she wasn't sure if there was a sound at all or just the memory of a sound like it. She slid a beanbag over to the bay window and knelt on it, her elbows on the windowsill. It took a while, but gradually her eyes adjusted to the dark outside, which was fairly watery anyway. The greys of the bare blocks differentiated themselves from the black of slates and windows. There was no light in the caravan. There were pools of hardened cement and chalk. Lots of weeds had sprouted up around the townhouses; ragwort mostly, but she had seen a few poppies too. Frayed tyres, a mangled aluminium ladder, shale and random scattered scraps of timber and scaffold. Hours the sound went on, or seemed to, a rhythmic thudding that was slight but still insistent enough to tremble the glass on George and Georgina in their frame. Then it just stopped. She stayed there until the enamel light that precedes sunrise had made everything vaguely visible, expecting whoever it was to emerge at any second and walk across the close. It was going to be another roasting day.

She posted a notice about child-minding on the community board in the supermarket halfway into town. She walked there with the girl for something for lunch and brought a card that they had made. The man at the till asked to read it first before it went up. There had been a few complaints recently about the nature of the notices.

‘The nature of them?'

‘What they said,' the man said, ‘type of thing.' The man was being delicate. ‘What they're advertising.'

There was a handful of shoppers, all queuing along the cooked-meats counter. Even so, the man served Helen first.

‘These are before me.' She was pointing at the others queuing.

‘You're grand,' he said. The other shoppers neither agreed nor complained. ‘We'll let you go ahead.'

An opening behind the man led through to the serving side of a bar or a lounge of some description. She could see a mop, and rows of unopened minerals and tonics. The lunchtime news was warbling in the background. The silver outline of a pool table shone in the murk. The man was looking at her gazing through the door open at his back. He asked, ‘Everything okay?'