Names for Nothingness (17 page)

But if Liam was aware of what she was trying to do, he did not comment on it, not at first.

‘You seem good.' He said it casually, the realisation finally dawning one weekend, and she looked across at him. It was after nine and they were both lying in bed. ‘More relaxed.'

She did not reply.

‘Are you?' He sat up and she could see the sudden mistrust that had immediately followed his previous comment.

‘I'm no different,' and she averted her gaze because it was not easy to lie when she felt so angry at how slow he was to realise the change, and worse still how obvious it was becoming that he was not, in fact, going to stir into action as she had hoped.

He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close, but she turned her back to him and looked out the window. She could feel his hands running down her body and she did not move, neither pushing him away nor inviting him to continue.

‘I miss her too, you know,' and his mouth was close to the back of her neck.

She turned to face him and she saw his sadness.

It had always been the three of them, and the absence of Caitlin scared them both. In the softness of the morning light they kissed, and she felt afraid for what would become of them as a pair.

That night they went to Margot's for dinner. Normally she would have made an excuse, arranged to go out with someone else, or told him she was too tired, but the fear that had crept into her heart that morning made her want to try.

When they arrived, it was clear that Margot had forgotten she had asked them. She was sitting on the couch, a cask of wine on the table next to her, journals strewn across the floor, the television too loud. Her glasses were perched low on her nose and she was leaning forward, taking notes as the interviewer asked questions.

They had let themselves in, and they sat on the couch next to her. She smiled at both of them, and told them she would only be a moment.

Half an hour later, Sharn considered leaving. Liam was also engrossed in the program, discussing it in detail with Margot during each commercial break, and she sat at the back of the room, wishing she had never agreed to come.

She would make dinner. She looked in the fridge. There was nothing but a block of cheese, hard and dry, and the remains of a leg of lamb sitting in a pool of solidified lard. She closed the fridge door, and leant against the kitchen table. They probably wouldn't even notice if she walked out now. But she didn't move. She watched as the credits rolled up the screen. Margot leant forward and switched the television off, plunging the room into darkness. Liam turned on a lamp and poured himself another glass of wine.

‘Professor Reiby used to make that point,' Margot said.

‘What happened to him?' Liam asked.

They were going to discuss old family friends, an incoherent ramble that would cross generations and cities, blurring casual acquaintances, relations and people they had never even met with little regard for any logical links, and Sharn braced herself.

‘I think I need to eat,' she said faintly from the kitchen, and Margot took off her glasses and rested them on an empty, but dirty, plate.

‘Of course,' she said. ‘What a lovely surprise having you both come over.'

She opened the fridge and pulled out the leg of lamb that Sharn had rejected only moments earlier. She found a wilted lettuce and a couple of very overripe tomatoes, and placed them all on the table.

‘We could order something, I suppose,' and she looked absent-mindedly at the food, more concerned about the lack of quantity than quality.

‘This'll be fine,' Liam assured her.

As she laid out the plates, she asked Sharn how Caitlin was. It was a question she always asked, and one that Sharn usually answered by simply saying that she was fine (her answers to Margot's questions were nearly always monosyllabic, the brevity an attempt at preventing any further opening up of the conversation, because talking with Margot always carried with it the possibility of endless twists and turns). But this time she was caught off-guard. It was not a question she had expected. Margot knew what had happened. Sharn didn't know why she was asking, she could only guess that she had simply forgotten.

‘We don't know,' she answered, staring at Liam, who glanced away.

Margot looked momentarily confused, and then she
realised her mistake and reached for Sharn's hand and squeezed it in her own.

‘I'm sure she's fine,' she said. ‘She's a sensible girl.'

‘She is,' Liam added.

It was extraordinary, Sharn thought to herself, this complete faith on both of their parts, this lack of concern. She found it hard to understand at the best of times, but even harder after seeing Liam's sadness only that morning.

She didn't say anything.

Later, as they drove home, he told her she could have tried ‘to be nice to Margot. She's lonely.'

She had been living on her own for over thirty years now, ever since Liam's father had left them. He had moved to America where he remarried, a topic that Margot always avoided discussing, exhibiting more than her usual evasiveness in doing so.

‘I don't know how long she can go on by herself,' he said.

Probably years, Sharn thought, but when he looked at her accusingly she just shrugged her shoulders. ‘Who knows?'

And she wanted to shout at him, to tell him that she had tried, that she was trying, but she just turned to the window and stared out at the night.

She didn't sleep well. Normally she crashed out, exhausted, but lately all she had repressed during the day, the countless times she had kept quiet, danced around her, and she did not know how long she could keep on doing this. Her attempt at passivity had not altered Liam. He was no different.

In the morning she ran further than she usually did, despite the fact that she had less energy than she had ever had. She ran until she felt light-headed, until her thoughts had been pounded out of her, and only then did she turn for home.

She was relieved that Liam had gone, that she had this brief respite from the pretence that she had chosen. She ate toast on the back steps and wondered at its lack of taste. She drank coffee that sank, bitter, to the bottom of her stomach. She cleared away her dishes, leaving Liam's where he had left them, scattered across the kitchen table.

‘Relax,' he would tell her. ‘I'll do it.'

He probably would, late at night when he got in, or perhaps he would just use them again the next morning. At the last minute, she washed them anyway.

Whatever. She mouthed the word to herself as she passed the mirror in the hall, not daring to look for too long at the person she was pretending to be. Whatever.

And she breathed in deeply as she realised that this pretence was only ever going to be the act of a martyr, foolish and useless to the extreme.

‘Maybe you should just go and get her,' Lou suggested when they talked about it later.

‘And then what?'

‘I don't know, you bring her home. There must be therapists, counsellors, cult deactivists, or whatever they're called,' and she shrugged her shoulders.

Sharn smiled ruefully. She kicked at a loose rock on the footpath outside the legal centre and watched it hit the tyre of a parked car with a gentle thwack.

‘I'm not good at this,' she said.

‘What?'

‘Sitting here with my hands tied,' and she held her arms up in the air, wrists together, and rolled her eyes. ‘I'm just not the type.'

Lou put her arm around her shoulders. ‘Maybe you've got no choice.' She looked at Sharn. ‘You're going to have to truly let go, not just pretend, or you're going to have to do something.'
She wiped Sharn's hair from her eyes. ‘Doing neither isn't doing you any good.'

Sharn stared up at the sky. ‘I know,' she said, and as she blinked in the harshness of the sunlight, she felt the stillness of the afternoon and wondered when the change would come.

S
HE CANNOT GO ON
.

She cries out, but it is like a whisper that comes out of her mouth, a hiss from another body, escaping before she can silence it.

The baby is already awake. Caitlin (for it is Caitlin now) tries to hush her, to hold her still, but she squirms in her arms, her face screwed up, red and angry because she is hungry, and she is trying to feed her but she only pulls away.

Please, she says, somebody.

There is no response.

They are out the back on their own, in a room behind the kitchen where they will not wake anyone. They have a single bed in a corner of the storeroom, and there is only one window. Each day she leaves it wide open, leaning out to catch the drops of afternoon rain spitting against the heat of the earth, hoping that the room will cool by evening, but it stays
hot, still, airless, and when night descends, she is terrified.

Help me. Somebody.

Even if she were with the others, they would not answer. Not now. They are on retreat, and there is no place for her and this child, not when she cries like this. She does not want to feed, and there is no refuge in the present, no safe harbour, no sanctuary, no way of escaping from this fear.

She holds the baby close, but she pushes with small, tight fists, body rigid in anger, mouth open wide, her scream high-pitched and piercing in the quiet.

It is dark. All the lights are off and everyone is asleep. She paces round and round this room, willing her just to sleep or feed, the desire for relief overwhelming everything. She does not want to be here. And she cannot do this anymore.

She leaves the baby on the bed and closes the door behind her so that she cannot hear her. She walks out into the kitchen, into the hall, the temperature dropping as she makes her way towards the coolness of the central rooms.

What am I doing? Help me, please. Somebody. Anybody.

I do not even know who I am.

There is a phone. She has seen it. She knows it is there. In one of the rooms on the other side of the house. No one uses it. No one asks to use it. But it is there, and she feels her way, running her hands down the wall, walking quickly now, her breath sharp and tight in her chest as she opens the door, quietly, stealthily, not wanting to make a sound.

It is not even a question of thinking. She knows the numbers – how could she not know them? – and she presses them in one by one, her fingers slippery with sweat. Two, three rings and there is an answer.

‘Hello?'

Help me. Please. I do not know who I am.

‘Hello?'

And Sharn is about to hang up. Caitlin knows it. She can hear the irritation in her voice as she begins to ask, ‘Who is this?'

‘It's me, just me,' and as Caitlin speaks, she stops, her intake of breath harsh, her silence sudden, abrupt.

‘Caitlin?' she says.

Caitlin lets go of the phone, letting it clatter to the ground, her whole body sliding down the wall until she is sitting on the floor. The receiver is within reach, and as she picks it up she holds it far enough away not to be able to hear whether Sharn is still talking, and then she hangs up, her voice gone as quickly as it appeared, leaving her just as she was, alone in the silence.

S
HARN HAD NOT BEEN ASLEEP
. She had been lying on her back staring at the ceiling and wondering when it would rain, because it was stinking hot, the window letting in no air, only the sound of cars, doors slamming and people calling out to each other on the street below.

And then the phone had rung, and she had known, even before she picked it up, that it would be Caitlin; Caitlin, or – at the very least – news of Caitlin.

‘It was her,' she said to Liam, ‘I know it was. How could it not be?' And she told him again exactly what had happened, exactly what she had said (it's me, just me), Liam sitting up next to her as she had heard those words; it's me, just me, totally out of the blue and yet not unexpected, not at all, because she had always known that the stillness of their situation could not continue indefinitely.

Liam took the phone from her and spoke into it. ‘Hello,' he said, ‘Caitlin?'

But there was, of course, no answer.

‘Are you sure?' he asked, and she nodded.

Even he was slightly rattled, his calm certainty that Caitlin was fine shaken by the call. Sharn could see it, and she got up and searched for something to put on.

She took the phone out to the kitchen and sat at the table, looking at it, half expecting Caitlin to call back. After about five minutes, she rang directory assistance and said that she wanted to be put through to the last call that had been made to her number. ‘It was my daughter,' she explained. ‘I don't know where she was ringing from.'

She saw herself reflected in the darkness of the window as she listened to the operator telling her that they couldn't do as she asked, that it sounded like it was a matter for the police, if there was trouble.

Sharn just hung up.

She looked at the wall; the photographs that Liam had taken were hung in a row. Her gaze stopped on the one he had given her for her thirtieth birthday. It was a picture of the three of them, Caitlin staring straight at the camera, she and Liam looking at each other. She remembered the disappointment she had felt on opening the present. She had looked at it briefly and then wrapped it in the tissue again.

‘You don't like it,' he had said, and she told him that it was fine, a good photo, she had just expected something more for an occasion like her thirtieth.

Caitlin looked out at her, silent. Three years old and she had not uttered a word. Her pale hair was short and her eyes were serious. The emptiness, the strangeness of their relationship pinched tight in Sharn's stomach, and she rested her head in her hands.

She did not hear Liam as he came out into the kitchen, she did not even know he was there until he sat opposite her and reached for her hand.

‘What can we do?' he asked.

It was an empty question. One that held only a hint of real desire for action, because it was predominantly just another statement of his resignation to the whole matter. They were helpless, or at least that was how he saw it, and most of the time he did not see their helplessness as any cause for alarm.