Names for Nothingness

 

Allen & Unwin's House of Books aims to bring Australia's cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation's most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.

The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia's finest literary achievements.

 

Georgia Blain has written a number of novels for adults including the bestselling
Closed for Winter
, which was made into a feature film. Her memoir
Births Deaths Marriages: True Tales
was shortlisted for the 2009 Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers.

In 1998 she was named one of the
Sydney Morning Herald's
Best Young Novelists and has been shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, the SA Premier's Awards and the Barbara Jefferis Award. She lives in Sydney with her partner and daughter.

HOUSE
of
 BOOKS

GEORGIA BLAIN

Names for Nothingness

This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

First published by Pan Macmillan, Sydney, in 2004

Copyright © Georgia Blain 2001

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian
Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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ISBN 978 1 74331 436 4 (pbk)

ISBN 978 1 74343 090 3 (ebook)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Acknowledgments

I
T MUST HAVE BEEN LAST WEEK
that the petals started to fall. They lie damp and crushed on the bricks below, the brilliant pink already faded and grimy. Every year this happens, seemingly overnight, a loss that is both sudden and inevitable, and Sharn looks out over the bare branches, wondering at how it has managed to creep up on her yet again.

She has her two cigarettes laid out on the step below her, and she lights the first one, the smoke acrid in her mouth, as she sits on the concrete landing at the back of the flat.

The few remaining blossoms are scraggly in the evening light. They cling with no conviction to the twigs, just one moment away from floating to the ground, and she leans forward, almost precarious in her balance, to see whether she can send them on their way. One sharp breath of air and they teeter on the brink of falling, another and they would be gone.

From behind her she can hear the front door open and she
knows that Liam is home. She is going to go in and tell him to be quiet, Essie has just gone to sleep, but that would mean putting out her cigarette and so she stays, head resting against the railing, as he comes out onto the back steps.

‘Got a drink for me?' he asks, and she just points through the door towards the fridge.

He sits behind her and takes the second of her cigarettes, the match flaring sulphurous as he lights it, and as he leans forward to kiss her, she moves back.

‘There was a story on the news tonight,' and she looks up towards the darkening sky. ‘A woman who came home to find her husband dead.'

Liam is silent and she turns to face him.

‘As good as dead.'

He picks up his glass.

‘They took him to hospital and put him on life support.' She stops, wondering whether the cry she just heard was Essie's or another child's, somewhere out in the surrounding flats. It is quiet again, and she waits for a few seconds before continuing. ‘The doctors say there's no chance of recovery. They want to turn the machines off. But she won't let them.'

She reaches for Liam's cigarette and inhales deeply. She will still have a second, and she stands, slightly dizzy from the nicotine, and squeezes past him to where she has left the packet on the table. She wipes at the ring of moisture from the beer bottle and picks up the cap, irritated with the way he leaves his rubbish lying there – so much so that she flicks it towards him (just missing his shoulder) as she makes her way back outside.

‘She's sent his photo to a group of faith healers and they have told her they can make him well but it will take them six weeks. She wants the hospital to wait.'

The night has settled in now and it is cold as she sits back down on the cement step. Liam is waiting for her to finish, and she can't even be bothered to tell him that that's it, that's the story.

‘What happened?' he asks.

‘I don't know.' It is obvious to her that he has missed the point, it has been obvious since she began telling him, and she looks across at him.

He sighs with the effort of trying to remain pleasant in the face of her hostility. ‘It's going to happen more and more,' he eventually says.

‘What?' She can hear the irritation in her own voice.

‘Situations like this. There're so few hospital beds. They can't keep people on life support forever.'

She watches the tip of her cigarette glow and then fade as she stares out across the yard, the tree now barely visible in the darkness.

‘That wasn't the point,' she tells Liam, but he doesn't hear.

She stubs the cigarette out, grey ash on the railing, and leans forward once more as she expels a great breath of air into the night, unable to tell whether she has delivered the final death blow to the few remaining flowers.

‘What are you doing?'

‘Bringing on the winter.'

And as she bends down to pick up their cigarette butts, he tells her that it's going to come anyway, ‘no matter what you do', his voice soft in the stillness, so soft as to be inaudible even if she had stayed out there with him, but she has gone back inside, his final words heard by no one but himself.

Later, in the darkness, Liam wakes. It is just before dawn. He does not know how he is aware of this, but he is. The sky has
not yet paled, the birds have not yet begun to sing, but he will lie still until the night turns to day, and then he will eventually slump back into sleep only moments before he has to get up, tired beyond belief, to go to his studio.

Next to him, Sharn is curled up, her thick, dark hair spread across the pillow, and he gently cradles himself into the curve of her back, fearful of disturbing her but wanting her warmth.

He can smell her skin, and he would like to whisper that he still loves her, that it is hard to still love her, to sustain himself on memories of what their life once was, but he is trying, and he is, if nothing else, dogged in his persistence. But he says nothing. He fears the emptiness of the words should he utter them out loud, and he turns onto his back again and stares up at the ceiling, hating his continued failure to effect any change.

It has been just over four months since Sharn travelled north to bring Caitlin home, and in the time since her return, they have both been paralysed, locked in a stillness that does not shift.

He should have left the job he was doing and gone with Sharn when she went up there, but instead he had let her go on her own. She returned less than a week later. He remembers opening the door to find her, not with Caitlin as he had expected, but with this child in her arms, Caitlin's child. Seventeen weeks ago, and still Caitlin has not followed; there has been no call, no letter, no knock on the door, no attempt from Caitlin to reclaim her daughter. They no longer discuss this, neither of them mentioning the vigil they are keeping, the waiting that hangs over them both. But then, this is not surprising; there seems to be so little that they discuss these days.

He stretches out, trying to bring sleep to each limb, and remembers how, at first, he believed it would only be a week
or so until Caitlin turned up or, at the very least, contacted them. ‘We need to ring her,' he would say to Sharn as each day passed, never quite able to believe that something as simple as making a telephone call was seemingly impossible.

After two weeks he had tentatively suggested that perhaps he should take Essie back to Caitlin. ‘What's the point?' Sharn had asked. As soon as Caitlin was ready to have her she would come and get her. Surely Caitlin's lack of contact told him enough.

He eventually agreed to wait another week, but when the time came he once again did nothing, his inaction continuing with each new deadline he set. He knows what he should do, and the weight of that knowledge is no longer bearable.

He looks at Sharn in the darkness and then closes his eyes, trying to find peace by recalling the moments that he keeps, like old postcards, to be brought out, thumbed over, gazed at fondly. His sustenance.

First he goes back to Sassafrass, because this is where he always starts, returning to the moment he met Sharn, there in the garden, sixteen years ago. He was waiting for Simeon to come and show them their room when he saw her walking towards them. He didn't notice Caitlin at first. She was a three-year-old child then, small enough to hide within the folds of Sharn's sarong, silent, unnoticeable.

‘Simeon said to let you know that you're in that one,' and Sharn had pointed to a small lilac-coloured shack at the edge of the garden. ‘He'll be back soon.'

She had a frangipanni tucked into the shoulder strap of her singlet. He remembers the milky sweetness of the perfume mixed with the tang of her sweat. She had looked at him, ignoring Jen, and told him that her name was Sharn and that she was the hired help.

He thanked her for letting them know where their room was.

She grinned. ‘Only doing what Simeon says' and she looked at him once again, taking him in with a directness that he later admitted was confronting as well as flattering.

(‘I was full on,' she would sometimes say when they used to recall their first meeting.

‘You still are' he would tell her now if they ever discussed their past, which they no longer do.)

And then she had turned and left them, aware that Liam's eyes were still on her, watching her as she made her way down to the river track, Caitlin silent by her side.