Names for Nothingness (2 page)

It is no good. He sighs as he tries to recall another moment, anything that will take him away from the anxiety that does not seem to be dissipating. He will stay with Sharn. He will stay at Sassafrass. This time it is an afternoon that he returns to. They are in the vegetable garden as the storm rolls in, the first hint of cool after the heavy heat of the day. He is meant to be at one of Simeon's workshops, but instead he has come to help Sharn pick lettuces for the evening meal.

Everyone else is in the main hall. They are letting out primal screams and their voices ring out loud and harsh in the stillness, but he barely hears them. He is engrossed in her. The strength of her arms, the sheen of sweat across her clavicle, the curve of her thigh beneath the thin dress.

The thunder claps and a streak of lightning darts, terrifyingly close, across the purple sky as the rain falls, heavy and warm.

She looks at him and smiles, her teeth white against the darkness of her tan, her eyes alive with joy, and they link hands, drinking in each other's breath.

That was when he kissed her.

He remembers and he leans in closer to where she lies there in the bed next to him. He breathes in the scent of her hair, wanting only to keep remembering.

He is still at Sassafrass, and she is lying by the river, the
sunlight warm on her skin, the grass dancing, golden, around her. She is dressed in blue, and her singlet matches the softness of the sky.

He walks towards her, his step quiet against the crumbling richness of the river dirt, but still loud enough to wake her, and she leans on one elbow as she looks up at him. She smiles and he knows, with an electric shock of certainty, that she does love him, and that she will leave with him, before she even holds out her hand, before she even speaks the answer he has been waiting weeks to hear.

And then she dissolves, the next memory sliding into focus, taking him to a different place, to the city, about a year later, and he is back in the first house they shared. Sharn is at work and he and Caitlin are alone. She sits as she always sits, passive, doing as he suggests but no more. He draws her a picture of a cat, a black cat, tiptoeing gingerly along the top of a fence, and he asks her what she thinks.

‘Not a very good likeness, I know,' and he is putting the paper away, not expecting a response, because there never is one, when he is startled by a touch on his knee.

‘I like it,' she tells him.

She is four and they are the first words she has ever spoken, not just to him, but to anyone, and as he resists the urge to lift her up and squeeze her tight, to whoop with joy at the extraordinariness of this event, she asks him to draw another.

‘Just like that one,' and she points to a ginger tom, a stray, crouching low beneath the peach tree, tail flicking as it watches the birds pecking at the blossom.

And then there is Sharn again, one last time as he drifts into sleep. Arms and legs tangled in his, hair knotted around his limbs, sweet wet smell of sex; in his dreams he longs for her, and it is a longing that doesn't fade, that cannot be pinpointed to a single time or moment. It runs through everything, a
strand that re-emerges as one frame melts into the next, a yearning for what has gone that creeps stealthily into his subconscious.

She is kissing him and it is her eyes that he sees, closed, in close-up, the waxy skin, the darkness of her lashes, fluttering slightly and then still as he finally stops seeing, as he is enveloped in a darkness that is no longer awareness …

And then Essie wakes him. He had not slipped deep enough into sleep to let her single cry slide over him unnoticed and he gets up, uncertain as to whether morning has finally come, or whether it is still night.

She is asleep, thumb in her mouth, her skin pale in the darkness, and as he tucks her in, he kisses her gently.

S
HARN WAKES
, immediately aware that Liam is not in bed beside her. It is morning, and she calls out to him, panicked at his absence.

She finds him, moments later, asleep on the floor in Essie's room, a blanket lying across his otherwise naked body. She looks at him, stretched out, peaceful, and as she bends down to cover him, she reaches hesitantly to stroke the softness of his hair back from his face, but he wakes at her touch, and she pulls her hand back, mouthing for him to be quiet, Essie is still asleep, come back to bed.

Alone in their room, she waits for him. It is only six-thirty, neither of them has to be up yet, but he does not follow her, and she is surprised to hear the sound of the shower, the water drumming against the bath. It is cold, and she pulls the blanket closer to her body, wanting these last few moments of sleep before she has to get ready for work.

Twenty minutes later, he is dressing by the side of the bed, searching through the pile of clothes on the floor for a clean T-shirt.

‘What's the occasion?' He has rarely got up before her, and although her words are light, the uncertainty that has nagged at her since she first woke is still there.

‘Can't sleep,' he says, and it is all he says as he goes to get Essie, who is calling out from her room.

He is taking her to his mother's this morning, an arrangement Sharn knows was not wanted.

‘She thinks that what we are doing is wrong' Liam had told her earlier, and he had not looked at her, his refusal to meet her gaze confirming what she knew; that he agreed with Margot, despite the fact that he used the word ‘we' rather than ‘you'.

Sharn had told him that that was by the by, irrelevant, and none of Margot's business. ‘Will she or won't she? It's as simple as that,' and she had tightened her fist in frustration, her nails digging into her skin, because she needed to go back to work and they had no other choice.

She would. Liam had called Margot again, and she had said that she would do all that she could to help. ‘Because that's the way she is,' and he had not looked at Sharn, not directly, as he told her that this couldn't go on. ‘You know that, don't you?'

Standing in the bathroom, trying to comb the knots out of her hair, she listens to Liam explain the arrangements to Essie. She is about to tell him that she doubts a child who is not yet one needs such details, but she stops as she sees her face in the mirror. There is a sharpness in her expression that makes her look away.

I am not a likeable person.
She hardly dares whisper the words out loud.

(‘Have you always been like this?' Liam would ask on
the rare occasions when he had simply had enough, and she would wonder when it had begun, because no, she does not want to think that this is the way it has always been.)

She bites at her bottom lip, a nervous habit she has had for as long as she can remember, and turns back to the task of combing her hair. She cannot untangle one of the knots, and as she holds up the offending strand she searches for the scissors in the bathroom cabinet, suddenly aware of how quiet it is. ‘Liam,' she calls out, but there is no answer.

The flat is empty. Essie's breakfast plate is still there on the table, Liam's half-drunk cup of coffee is next to it.

They have gone – and he has never left without saying goodbye.

I am causing trouble.

She knows it. Pushing it over the line, nudge by nudge. They had gone to bed barely speaking, and he has left with no attempt at reparation. Until recently she has always taken it for granted that Liam would be there to stop her when she reached the edge, one arm held up as he tells her he still loves her, no matter how irascible she is.

‘As much as the day I first saw you,' he has always said.

The relief of the affirmation would always let her breathe again.

‘You don't love,' she would smile, ‘not on first meeting.'

But she knows that is not entirely true. It may not be love as such, but there is something. She can still see him as she saw him then, sitting with Jen and waiting for Simeon. She had been so lonely. Just her and Caitlin, living alone by the river. She had come on to anyone at that time; the guests, Simeon (whenever he could get away from Mirabelle), men in the nearby town. It was the way she was. And then she met Liam, and she thought how different life could be.

As she searches through a bowl of loose change for her keys,
she wants to tell him that she is sorry; she knows she should not be so sharp with him. She wants to tell him how much she needs his love. But they are words that never seem to get said.

She glances at the clock and realises she has to get going. The weather has turned overnight and she cannot put on the sandals she has worn for the last three months. She searches for an old pair of Liam's boots (‘I can't believe you have the same size feet,' and he would look at her and grin, her impossibly large feet anchoring a slight frame). His clothes are still spread across the bedroom floor. They smell of him, but any softness she feels towards him evaporates as she upturns his jeans and his keys fall out of the pocket. He must have taken hers. She is meant to open up the office. She will have to call him, catch him at Margot's and get him to meet her outside the legal centre on his way in to work. She dials the number, apprehensive at the thought of speaking to Margot, who will try, in a way that will be all the more irritating for its lack of assertiveness, to make her disapproval felt.

The phone rings twice.

‘Liam?' Margot's voice quavers (as always).

‘No, it's Sharn,' she tells her. ‘He hasn't got to you yet?'

‘No-o.' She draws out the word, not wanting to get Liam into trouble, following it quickly with a suggestion that the traffic may be bad. ‘Shall I get him to call you?' she asks.

Sharn tells her that it's all right, that she doesn't really have time to wait, and she wants to hang up, to get off the phone before Margot has a chance to ask her if she has heard from Caitlin, if they have come to any decision yet, but she is not quick enough.

‘No,' Sharn says. ‘And I'm sorry about this, I'm really sorry that we've had to ask you to do this, and I appreciate it.' She can hear the edge in her own voice.

‘It's just that …' Margot hesitates, ‘a child needs to be with its mother –'

Sharn cuts her off. ‘I have to go,' she says. ‘I'm sorry, Margot, but I'm really very late.'

‘Of course.'

‘I'll see you by four,' Sharn promises, and as she hangs up she starts dialling, trying to find someone to come and let her into the office, muttering his name, Liam, Liam, Liam, over and over, as she waits for Lou to pick up the phone.

I
T IS ONLY A TEN-MINUTE DRIVE
to Margot's, and there is no hurry.

Liam does not, as Sharn believes, have any pressing work on at the moment. No jobs have come in for a couple of months. The money that he has been depositing into their account has been borrowed from his mother.

‘It is just temporary,' he had promised. ‘Until we take Essie back. Until Sharn can go back to work.'

But he is tired of lying. He is tired of coming home at night after pretending to work, and he is tired of then pretending to communicate. All morning the need for change has kept pulling at him, stronger than ever, and as he sits in the car, he does not know how long he will be able to remain still in the face of its force.

He glances into the rear-vision mirror and Essie grins, her two top teeth tiny and milk white. He reaches back and feels
her fingers curl around his own, the gentle pad of her soles soft against his arm as she kicks at him. She has grown since Sharn brought her back. ‘Remember how hungry she was?' Sharn would say to him each time he had put forward the possibility of returning her to Caitlin. She wants him to agree that Essie was malnourished, but he has less and less conviction in the memory she holds up as truth.

‘Da da.'

She has only just started trying to form words, her gurgles being shaped into sounds that he is beginning to recognise.

‘I am not your dada,' he tells her and then, as he catches her quizzical glance in the rear-vision mirror, he wishes he hadn't.

Caitlin had always called him Liam. She had opted for Sharn's name as well, never using the words ‘mum' or ‘mummy'.

Right from the start, she would seek him out, creeping up to sit by his side as he took part in Simeon's creativity sessions. The whole workshop process was not for him, he had come along because this was something Jen had wanted to do. He only had to glance around the room to see that he did not find the sessions as amazing as the others did. So he was relieved when Caitlin came to be with him, when she provided a distraction from something that he had never really had any enthusiasm for, an experience that he had agreed to take part in because there had seemed no reason not to.

Sometimes he would slip out from the back of the room, taking Caitlin with him. In the heat of the garden, he would show her how to build miniature huts from bamboo, or tiny images from petals spread out across the grass. Other times, he drove her into town, the windows wide open, the fields of cane waving phosphorescent green under the shimmering heat of the sky. He would talk to her, pointing out everything they passed, describing it as if she were blind, wanting to give
her words, thousands of words that she could store up for later use, because he always believed that the time would come when she would speak.

(‘It's just the way she is,' Sharn had said to him. ‘There's nothing I can do,' and she turned away from him. ‘The doctors say there's nothing wrong with her physically. And I can't afford a specialist.' She looked around her room and then back up at him. ‘I mean, what do I have?')

In those early days, he was particularly wary about voicing his opinion when it came to Caitlin. Sharn was her parent, he wasn't, but as he fell in love with Sharn, his friendship with Caitlin also grew. He liked her, and it was not just because he knew that being with Sharn also meant being with her daughter.