Names for Nothingness (19 page)

‘This is not about me wanting or not wanting to be a mother.'

They are crossing a line and it is dangerous. Liam knows it. ‘I know.' He sighs. ‘But I don't have it in me, not a second time, not now.' He speaks slowly, softly, fearing that his words will be heard by Essie because, even if she doesn't understand their exact meaning, they amount to a betrayal.

‘I was as good a mother as I knew how to be.' There is a slight crack in Sharn's voice, and Liam winds the telephone cord tightly around his finger, watching the blood drain out of the flesh. ‘I may not have been the parent you were, but then, you chose to be a parent. I had no choice.'

His eyes are stinging from the drive. He lets the cord unravel and rubs his hand across the roughness of the stubble on his cheek.

In the silence that follows, he does not know if she is crying, but when she speaks again, her voice is controlled. ‘I took her because I was worried about her. Caitlin was worried about her. I know I didn't want her. But I saw how they were living. I saw how malnourished she was. I saw. You didn't.'

Liam knows this is true. She has told him this before, and he cannot argue with her. He was not with her when she drove up to see Caitlin. He had a job. It was one of the few times he had had a job in the last year, and he looks over to where Essie is chewing on one of the business cards, the paper soggy in her mouth. She slaps her hand down on the pile in front of her and watches them scatter. She is hungry and he will have to go and feed her soon.

‘Maybe it's just that I have to see it for myself.' He is standing now, and he reaches over to switch on the main light, bathing the room in a dirty orange glow. He catches a glimpse of his face in the bathroom mirror and he looks old.

‘Maybe you could trust me,' she tells him, and her words are bitter. ‘Maybe you could recognise that I do the best I can. Maybe you could see that sometimes doing nothing is not good enough.'

He does not want this conversation to continue. He switches the light off again, and the room seems suddenly dark. Essie turns to look at him, and because she seems about
to cry, he flicks the switch, on, off, on, off, over and over again, in an attempt to amuse her.

‘This isn't about us,' he says, and Sharn is silent for a moment, pulling back the anger that has taken longer to surface than he had anticipated.

‘It is and it isn't,' she tells him. ‘You can travel so far on nothing, and then …' Her words trail off. ‘We don't act together anymore. We don't even talk.'

She is right, although he feels that he is the one who has been forced to live on nothing.

‘I have to go,' he says. ‘I have to get some food for Essie. I have to put her to bed.'

She does not try to stop him, but as she is about to hang up, she asks him to promise her one thing, and he can hear how much she hates having to ask anything of him.

‘What?'

‘Don't do anything to spite me.'

He does not answer.

‘You know. To make a point.'

He tells her that of course he wouldn't.

‘Look with your own eyes. Judge fairly.'

And, as he puts the room key in his pocket and bends down to pick up Essie, he promises her he will do as she has asked.

I
T IS COLD IN THE FLAT
. The heater broke at the end of last winter, the switch on the timer snapping off in Sharn's hands. It was, she was sure, a simple job, but one that neither she nor Liam were capable of doing, and at that stage they had not got around to having it repaired. So they had just left it, gathering dust in the corner of the room, and now that autumn has come again, she wishes she had had it fixed.

There is an old radiator in the bedroom that Margot lent them. She remembers it moments after she hangs up from speaking to Liam and she brings it out to the lounge. It has not been used for months, and the dust sizzles when she switches it on, the smell of singeing hair pungent in the tiny room. It will burn off, she tells herself, and she sits in front of it, holding her hands up to the warmth.

She had not had time to do the dishes that morning and she looks at them piled high in the sink. She never used to care
about things like that. She remembers her mother always cleaning, occasionally berating her for her failure to help, and she wonders when she, herself, changed.

When they first got back from Sassafrass, they had still had good times. They would leave Caitlin with Margot and go out all night. He would cook her breakfast the next morning and bring it to her in bed. He was gentle with her, he was kind. She smiles to herself and then, aware of the emptiness of the flat, says his name out loud. ‘Liam.' Her voice soft in the quiet.

She searches in the cutlery drawer for her pack of cigarettes, but there are none there, and she vaguely remembers finishing them last night as they sat out on the back steps. She had told Liam her story about the woman whose husband had died, who had believed, with complete and utter conviction, that he was not, contrary to all evidence, actually dead. To that woman, there in that room, talking to those reporters, each word she spoke was the truth. Nothing anyone could say would convince her otherwise. He was alive, and as long as she believed in his life it would exist. It was just a matter of faith.

Caitlin's faith in her choice was, without doubt, absolute. Sharn had seen it.

Liam's faith in their life, the three of them together, had, for such a long time, been a strength that had given her room to falter. He had made his decision, choosing to bind his existence up with theirs, and no matter how bad things had become he had stayed resolute in that faith. But that has changed, and she knows it is too simple and neat to select her return with Essie as the date of that change, or even to choose Caitlin's departure as the defining moment. These things are gradual, sliding downhill until there is no going back.

She starts pulling old knives, corks, dead matches and
string out of the drawer in the hope of finding a loose cigarette floating around forgotten. A broken corkscrew, a bread knife that snapped in two years ago, coasters they have never used, there is so much junk, and not a cigarette among it all.

She gathers everything in a plastic bag and takes it out to the front door. She will dump it in the bin. Liam never likes to throw anything away. She, on the other hand, would like to chuck it all out, and she opens the next drawer, pulling out old tea towels, scraps of aluminium foil, paper serviettes that have yellowed with age; everything rubbish.

Keep it, Liam would tell her if he were here now. There's nothing wrong with it.

She looks at the rag in her hands, the edges burnt on the stove, the centre riddled with holes and stains, and she throws it in another bag, but her enthusiasm for the task is waning. She wants a cigarette. She wants to smoke and drink until she feels ill.

She takes the garbage out to the bins and walks up to the local shop, wishing she had thought to put on a coat before she left. But it is not far, and she counts out the change in her pocket. Just enough for a pack.

Sharn has come to this shop for years, but she has never really exchanged more than a few words with either of the owners. She asks for what she wants, pays for it and then leaves. She remembers the owner's wife, Sofia, once attempting to start a conversation with her, and how quickly she had cut her off. She had been fighting with Liam and she had been late for work, and although she knew she had been abrupt, almost rude in her response, she had simply had no time. Sofia has never forgiven her, and she hands over the cigarettes now and takes Sharn's money with no more than a cursory nod of recognition.

Liam, on the other hand, always talks with them. He knows
the intimate details of their lives. Their daughter's wedding and subsequent divorce, their son's attempts to start his own business, their trip home and their disappointment at all that had changed. Caitlin, too, would tell them about school (more than she ever told Sharn), and she would listen to their stories with what always appeared to be a genuine interest.

Having grown up in a small town, Sharn knows what it is for everyone to know everyone else's business and she has never had any desire to try to replicate the experience here. Every time she had entered a shop she was watched, the newsagent never taking his eyes off her as she flicked through the magazines, the woman in the milk bar asking her to empty out her pockets as she ordered a hamburger, her friends keeping watch when she snuck behind the counter of the drive-in bottle shop to nick flagons: she was trouble and everyone knew about it. Now, here she is, fast approaching middle age, and with so little fight left in her.

At home, the kitchen floor is still littered with half the contents of the drawers, and she stuffs it all back in, aware that she no longer has the energy to do the clean-out she had envisaged. The drawer handle comes off as she attempts to close it, and she throws that in too. What's the point? They will never get round to fixing it.

Liam had loved this place when they first moved here.

‘Look at it,' he said, with an enthusiasm she had found difficult to believe. ‘All we need to do is paint and it'll be perfect.'

And they had painted. Her, Caitlin and Liam, and it had looked better, light, fresh and empty. She had been surprised.

But that was years ago, and the paint had been a cheap undercoat, a white that was now grubby, an undercoat they had never got round to covering.

‘It's fine,' Liam would tell her whenever she suggested that
they do it again. ‘What's the point, anyway? It's not like we own the place.'

She sits on the couch, turns on the television and lights the first of her cigarettes, the tobacco sizzling against the bar of the radiator. Essie has gone and there is no reason for her to go outside and smoke in the cold. It was always Liam's rule anyway, and she had simply abided, not wanting to create any friction around Essie, not wanting to give him the chance to tell her that these were his conditions, if she wanted him to help her, these were his conditions. She had needed him, and he knew it.

He has gone and he has taken Essie with him.

She finds it hard to believe.

She stands slowly, and walks to the row of framed photos on the wall. In the picture of the three of them together, he looks at her with love. She touches the image of her own face, the smooth line of her cheek, the darkness of her eyes and the curl of her hair, and then pulls back, wincing slightly.

They have left her on her own and she cannot bear to comprehend it.

E
SSIE WAKES TWICE IN THE NIGHT
, giving a small cry as she rolls over, and Liam sits up and searches for Caitlin's old T-shirt (which she has dropped on the floor) to comfort her.

After the second time, he cannot get back to sleep. As his eyes slowly adjust to the darkness of the room, Essie becomes visible. She is lying on her back, arms flung out across the bed, her entire body abandoned to sleep.

She does not look like either Caitlin or Sharn, although occasionally he has caught glimpses of Caitlin in the way she cocks her head to the side when she listens, and the unblinking stare of her eyes as she sucks her thumb and looks into the distance. But perhaps he is simply searching for a similarity. He does not know.

‘She probably looks like her father,' he had remarked to Sharn shortly after her return.

‘Whoever he is,' Sharn had replied. Moments later, she added that she found it disturbing.

‘What?' he asked.

‘The way in which history repeats itself,' and she looked out to the back garden, her gaze remote, removed. ‘I ran away. I had a child young, and I did it on my own.' She chewed on her fingernail, concentrating on tearing it back to the quick. ‘And now she's gone and made the same mistakes.'

‘It's not the same,' he told her.

‘Really?' and Sharn had got up and gone back inside.

Lying in the darkness, Liam looks at Essie again and wonders who her father is. She is a slight child, fine featured, with deep-set dark eyes and olive skin. Her small size may simply be due to the fact that she had been, as Sharn insisted, underfed in her first few months of life. They had given her bottles every few hours and mashed-up fruit and vegetables, bread crusts, dry biscuits; she had eaten it all with a hunger that had given Sharn a fine thread upon which to hang her assertion that she had been right to do as Caitlin asked, to take her away. It was not always stated, but he could see it in her eyes each time Essie consumed large quantities of food, both of them watching without comment; words not spoken, but heard nonetheless.

Essie turns now, curling up on her side and sucking her thumb as she soothes herself back into the depths of sleep, and he inches over to the far side of the bed to give her the space she needs, closing his eyes again in an attempt to relax. It does not work. His mind is still awake, the enormity of his decision to make this journey tightening around him with a grip that is cold and hard.

All that Sharn told him on her return is still right there, fresh in his memory. He listened to her as she had asked and still, at the end, he had felt, in his heart, that it was wrong.
She should have tried to help Caitlin look after her child. Yet he has done nothing until now, and he turns over onto his other side, his back aching with an inability to find rest. Even now, now that he has finally decided to act as he always felt he should, he is aware of how easily he could turn back; pack Essie in the car tomorrow morning and drive back to Sharn.

‘We'll just wait a little longer,' he would say.

Because there is a doubt in his heart. Caitlin has not come as they both expected. She has not reclaimed her daughter; and if she has not done this, then how can he help the doubt that lingers?

In the first few years after they returned from Sassafrass he had wanted to have a child with Sharn. He never told her this directly and each time they circled the topic she had evaded giving him any kind of definitive answer. He never said: I want to have a child, do you want one too? Probably because he always knew what her response would be. It was not what she wanted. The first experience had filled her with a horror she had not forgotten, and she had no desire to throw herself back into it again. Even though he knew it would have been different, and he wanted so much for her to recognise this as well.