Names for Nothingness (5 page)

Sitting in the darkness by the river at Sassafrass, she used to tell him stories, presenting him with small pictures of her life. He remembers putting his arm around her shoulder when she told him about her mother dying, and feeling her flinch. Her mother's death came only a year after her father suddenly dropped dead from a stroke. (‘God knows why,' Sharn had
said, ‘it wasn't like he ever did anything.') Her mother, on the other hand, kept working until she was too sick to get up. She had cancer. She died two hours after Sharn got her to the hospital. Sharn hadn't even known she was ill.

‘I was sixteen,' she told him. ‘And I was wild.'

She told him about driving out to the mines in the back of a panel van, six or seven of them crammed in, with only the headlights breaking the darkness, the rain and the cold making the windows fog up, the tyres spinning in the mud, and the music so loud you couldn't even hear yourself think.

She used to drink more than any of them, she said. She could knock back whole flagons of cheap wine, and then they would drop them down the shaft, leaning right in after them, daring each other to see who could come closest to letting go and plummeting into the darkness.

And sometimes I wouldn't have minded,' she said. ‘Falling.'

It was little wonder she found herself three months pregnant shortly after her mum had died.

‘That's what happened to girls like me,' and she had looked straight at him, daring him to look away.

She kidded herself that she wasn't really going to have a baby, that this wasn't really happening to her, and she packed her stuff and hitched out of that town, headed for the coast.

By the time she was five months gone, she couldn't hide it anymore, and it was too late. She didn't know what to do, so she just kept moving, but soon she couldn't get any work and she didn't have any money, and she was stuck in this shithole of a town with no friends and nowhere to live. So when she met this bloke who was headed north, she just went with him.

He was, in Sharn's words, ‘out of it all the time'. Too out of it to drive. Too out of it even to start the car after he pulled over for a leak, and after a while she couldn't deal with it. So
she walked. Walked and walked until she landed there, in Sassafrass, too tired to walk anymore.

He told her he was glad she had ended up there, and she looked at him and smiled.

In the stillness of those nights, he had listened, wanting only to look after her. When he had finally summoned the courage to tell her that he loved her, he promised that he would never let her down. He remembers.

She said nothing. She just stared at the ground.

‘You can't promise that,' she said.

‘Why not?'

‘It's just not the way it works.'

Sitting in his studio now, he knows that she will see any decision on his part to take Essie up to Caitlin as a betrayal.

He picks up the canister containing the last film of Caitlin, a roll he shot over a year ago. She was seventeen at the time, and in her final year at school.

‘What do you want to do?' friends would ask, and she would say that she wasn't sure, always listening to their suggestions with dutiful attention, appearing to give heed to their advice, but never revealing what she thought or felt.

Her careers adviser had told her that she should apply for medicine, with law as her second choice, and she had brought the forms home, leaving them incomplete on the kitchen table.

The film flickers, a white square of light on the wall, and then the pink of the crepe myrtle, the bees thick in the flowers, the sky sharp blue, the branches pale and sinewy, all taking shape within the frame. He had wanted to film the blossom. Since their first year in the flat, he had watched it come out, and it had always seemed as though the overwhelming explosion of colour had appeared from nowhere, literally bursting out overnight. He was sitting at the top of
the steep cement stairs that led down to the garden, toying with the idea of doing a time lapse next year, a fast motion of this extraordinary feat of nature, when Caitlin emerged from beneath the foliage, a basket of washing in her arms.

It had been some time since he had included her in any footage that he took. She had asked him not to film her and he had acceded to her request.

‘Why?'

‘I just don't like it,' she had said, and he had not pushed her for any further explanation.

But that morning she didn't stop him. He was filming the tree when she walked into the frame, and he let the camera continue to roll. She is there, projected on the wall above his desk, and as he leans back wanting to see her entire face, he is surprised at the strength of her presence; the clear light in her eyes, the directness of her gaze and the sureness of her smile, a smile that has not changed in all the time he has known her.

The camera angle jolts momentarily, down towards the washing basket, and he remembers now that she was carrying a tiny bird. It had fallen out of its nest, and she had placed it on top of the towels, indicating it to him as she climbed the stairs, unaware that in fact it had died in the few moments since she had picked it up.

As he looks away from the projected image, he catches sight of his reflection in the window, and the face that he sees does not look like his own. He should call Sharn, he should talk to her, and at least attempt to explain himself before he finally commits to a decision, but he does not do it. He knows what she would say, he can almost hear the tightness of her voice, the anger in her words, and the final softening in her tone as she realises that she needs to use all her powers of persuasion to beg him to wait just a little longer for Caitlin, she'll be back, and then if she isn't, they can go together, but not just
yet. And he would, he knows, do as she asks, eventually giving in and promising that yes, he will wait until they both get home, until they both can talk.

But what would change?

The film flickers to an end and he is left in darkness, leaning back and looking only at a square of white.

He rewinds the spool and searches for his phone and his keys. He needs to go and get Essie now, before he changes his mind, and he looks around him at the mess, the boxes on the floor, his notes spread across the table. It doesn't matter, he can leave this place as he likes, and he closes the window, locking it with Sharn's words still in his head: ‘She couldn't look after her, I had no choice.'

I listened, he thinks to himself, I have always listened, and as he shuts the door behind him, the galah screeches one more time, its call ringing out beneath the mass of low-lying clouds overhead.

‘W
HO IS MY DAD?'
Caitlin asked when she realised that Liam was not her father.

‘He was my first boyfriend,' Sharn said. ‘He died. In a car accident.'

Were there photos of him?

There weren't.

What about his parents?

Also dead.

Sharn even made up a name for him. Dave Williams. Sixteen-year-old Dave, skinny, wild, and good to her. Oh yes, he was good to her. And Sharn came to believe in him, just as much as Caitlin and Liam did. And she told Caitlin – probably not often enough in words – that she had wanted her. Yes, even at sixteen she had wanted to be a mother.

But there was no Dave Williams. And that was not how it happened.

They took two cars that night, her and Bill in the panel van, and Dave in his Torana. Bill's dad owned the pub, so he brought the booze, and he had a bottle of Moselle for each of them that night. It was pissing down with rain, so they sat in the back of the van, there on the edge of the quarry, and they made a bet. Whoever could drink theirs the fastest could get the others to do whatever they wanted. No arguments, no backing down. No piss-weak excuses.

They were all up for it. All seasoned drinkers, Sharn included. And she swallowed the lot, she can't remember how many gulps or how long it took, but she felt ill, sick as a dog.

‘Done it,' she said, but Bill held his up and said she was too late. He'd got there first, only a matter of moments, but moments were what counted.

She didn't believe him, but she didn't have a hope in hell of arguing against him and, besides, she felt like shit. She could barely string two words together. She leant against the back door, wanting to throw up. But when she tried to open it to chuck, one of them pulled her back in and closed it behind her. They must have reckoned she was going to run away. Welch on the bet. Who knows?

‘Hold it in,' they told her and she did, God knows how, but she did.

So Bill won and Bill got to say what he wanted. Him and Dave would take it in turns. Him first. Dave second.

She barely even knew what he was talking about, but she told them she was up for it, sure, whatever.

And the next thing she knew, Dave had shifted to the front and Bill was still in the back, and he was fucking her, and when he was done it was Dave's turn, and to tell the truth she barely even knew what it was they were doing, she was so drunk that she might as well not even have been there.

When they'd finished they left her, grinning to themselves
as the Torana's wheels spun in the mud. They left the back door of the van wide open and the rain poured in and Sharn woke up hours later, wet and freezing cold and wondering where the fuck she was. The bottles were on the floor and when she saw them she remembered.

She didn't know what made her do it. Maybe she was just suss, maybe somewhere deep down under how truly shit she felt, she was smart enough to realise she'd been had, because she picked up one of the empties and she smelt it, and there was no booze in it. Not a drop. And it was the same with the other, but when she got to hers, it reeked. To high heaven. Enough to make her throw up, all over the mattress in the back of the van, and then again all over the road, and she remembers thinking, those fucking bastards, they'd set her up, those fucking bastards, and she felt like such an idiot, like such a stupid, fucking idiot, that's what she remembers, just how dumb she felt, and she walked home, wet, covered in sick, and so bloody stupid.

And that's what happened. That's why she never told anyone. Not even Liam. How could she? She didn't want people to know that shit. She didn't even want to know herself. Not when she remembered that.

Just before she turned eighteen, Caitlin posted Sharn and Liam a note. She was leaving. She wanted no contact with them. They weren't to worry. This was what she wanted.

‘Listen,' Liam said. ‘This is her choice. We have to respect it.'

But it was different for him. He had never told her the lies Sharn had told her. He could look back on his past with her and know that it was okay. On the bad days, Sharn couldn't even look at herself.

W
HEN
C
AITLIN MET
F
RASER
, she was in her final year at school. She first talked to him on the bus. She was heading home, and she took the seat next to him, barely registering his presence until he turned and spoke to her.

‘You look a little lost to me,' he said.

She smiled at him and told him that she was fine, she was going the way she always went, and she turned back to the window, aware, from his reflection, that he was still looking at her.

‘That's not what I meant.'

Behind her, Sarah and Janet stood for their stop, and she turned to say goodbye. They raised their eyebrows as they passed, but she did not indicate back to them that yes, she agreed, the person next to her was strange; she just told them she'd see them tomorrow.

‘Is this your last year?' Fraser asked, and Caitlin told him that it was.

‘Any ideas as to what you want to do?'

‘Not really.' She gazed directly back at him.

‘I was the same,' he said. His eyes were dark brown, soft and fringed by long black lashes. ‘I never felt there was a place for me in the world. I suppose I never really agreed with all this world believes in,' and he waved his hand towards the window, the traffic banked up next to them and beyond the rows of houses, baking under the heat of the summer sky. ‘It's hard to just close your eyes and participate in something that feels fundamentally mad.' He grinned at her, his teeth white and his smile broad as he stretched his long, thin legs out under the seat in front of them. ‘I always fought it, right from when I was very young.'

Caitlin reached for the stop button, her hand accidentally brushing against his arm as she did so. ‘And you still do?' she asked.

‘I've chosen a life that involves challenging everything.' His look was direct and she wondered, for just one brief moment, whether he was, in fact, slightly crazed, but the thought did not perturb her. ‘I've chosen to live on the outside,' and he raised his hand in farewell as she stood to make her way through the crush of people.

‘See you,' she said.

‘I hope so,' and the charm of his smile made her look up towards the window as the bus pulled away, searching for his face in the hope that he, too, would be looking for her, following her with his eyes as she turned towards her street.

The day after she met him, her friends asked her who he was, and she told them that she didn't know his name. Apart from that she did not discuss him in the intervening days
before she saw him again, there, in the same row as last time. She made her way down the aisle to the empty seat beside him, surprised at how little hesitation she felt in renewing their conversation. If the truth be known, she had looked for him each day since they had talked, she had thought about him to such an extent that she felt as though she knew him better than she actually did, and seeing him sitting there was no surprise. She had known they would meet again.

‘Hello,' he said as though he, too, had been waiting for her. ‘Where have you been?'

‘I'm always on this bus,' she told him.

He smiled. ‘I've been talking about you,' he said. ‘You have a face you don't forget.'