Nothing On Earth (19 page)

‘Are you telling us she had her period when she stayed with you?'

‘Yes,' I say, ‘that's exactly what I'm telling you. My cleaner escorted the girl up to her room, and when she came back down she told me that she was in her flowers.' My brother was staring sideways at me. He wanted me, I think, to stop speaking. ‘The very phrase she used. I asked her what it meant. I asked her what that phrase meant and she said “time of the month”.'

‘Hence the blood,' Curtin says.

‘When you say you have nothing to test it against . . .' My brother's accent is smooth and curved at the edges. ‘What does that mean?'

‘It means we have no samples, fingerprints or DNA, that we know to be definitively hers.' The lads had told me that Curtin had lost a teenage son in a car accident. Many moons before. His wife had been largely bedridden ever since, and suffered with her nerves. ‘We have fingerprints from the two houses that match, all right, but who they belong to we can't be sure.' Each time I sat opposite Curtin, his boy's death hovered over his head. ‘We have no certificate of birth. Apart from what must have been the father's, the vast majority of samples taken from their house have proven identical to that patch of blood. It means that we're entertaining the possibility that there might never have been any
girl
.'

Curtin drags out that last word. He intends it to sound like a gurgle. He means that ‘the girl' is my phrase. He means that ‘the girl' is possibly my invention.

‘This is such nonsense,' I say. ‘So who was it stayed in my spare room?' My pitch is raised. ‘One of the sisters? Is that what you're saying?' My brother can be heard attempting to placate me in the background. ‘This is cobblers!' I am actually shouting now. ‘She was just a child. You spoke to her yourself, more than once. You even held her hand, remember?' I am working hard to keep my voice from breaking. ‘Do you not think you might have noticed? Do you not think
I
might have noticed? She stopped two nights in my house, thanks to you shower. She sat on my knee, for crying out loud.'

Beyond this point, I cannot bring myself to listen.

One day, not long after, all of it just stopped: the questioning, the vigil, the speculation, the coverage, the disgrace . . . My cleaner had cleaned everything, including the glass from which the girl had sipped brandy and even the orange Virginia sweatshirt in which she had warmed herself. To my surprise, I found the latter folded in the airing cupboard.

Nobody came near me. Nobody called. All sacramental duties were detailed to someone else for the foreseeable future. I became a bit of a recluse. I didn't dare show my face up the street. Closed doors scared me: apart from front and back, every one of them had to be open at all times, for fear of unfamiliar sounds. I could stand in one place, as if in a trance, resurface into consciousness, forgetting what simple act it was I had commissioned of myself, and find that hours had passed. Whole evenings got lost at the foot of the stairs, waiting for a solitary creak to repeat.

I slept in the spare bed. The linen was new: you could tell by the wrapping's creases. I lay awake in the same dark she had lain in, my own face just beneath the fold of the sheets, certain at times that I could hear her footfalls amid the echoes of New Year's revellers on the road.

I even had a bath, something I hadn't done since I was a child. That was the one space they had missed. When I climbed in, there was a ring of blue all around the lower rim. It was from the words in marker that the girl had washed off her skin, a pale, diluted blue, but still intact. She must have washed in an inch of water, and all the words had blurred into a ring of scum that nobody had thought to clean. It wasn't visible from anywhere else in the room. It was only if you climbed in that it became apparent. I remember running my thumb through it, moist from the warm water, and sucking my thumb as an infant would and convincing myself that something of her was mingled in the dirty soap I was swallowing.

I was, I admit, a stranger to myself. It was as if I was retracing her steps, half expecting that, if I kept navigating backwards in her slipstream, she might come into view.

I mustered the courage to go back to the reference section. The librarian turned puce when I came in. I sat at the same table, and when she brought me the local papers in hard binding, her hand was shaking.

No trace was found of the four members of the family. For all Curtin's speculation that there may never have been a girl, I still insist on saying
four
. . . Flood, by all accounts, served time for fraud. Slattery and his wife, eccentrics though they were and doubtless still are, had been in and out of the country for much of that strange summer. Slattery has written and self-published his own version of events, in which he describes himself as being intimate with the family.

Marcus was questioned in Reading and had the word of his employers as alibi. Apparently, text messages from him had been found on the sister's phone, and vice versa. During the course of his questioning, flummoxed probably and grabbing at anything he might use in self-defence, he said some unkind things about Martina. All of it, the texts and his testimony and the emails with the woman abroad, got leaked somehow and revealed details that even I, admittedly, have used here. Poor bereaved Sheila had two separate visits from chaps in plain clothes, and agreed that it was her who had told me to visit. The courthouse did indeed go up. Suspected arson, the reports said, but that, too, proved inconclusive. I walked among its ruins some time that winter. I probably shouldn't have. Doubtless I was seen. But what harm? It was just the once, my hands full of shopping, and there was nothing much on view other than slates caved in and charred timbers.

‘I have nothing more to say,' I said. I said it to Curtin. He was seated in my kitchen one of those evenings I got home. I continued unpacking my things. We had said everything that needed saying. I was in no mood to trawl back through it, to answer yet more questions. ‘I have nothing more, sir, to say to you.'

‘It's something else,' he said. ‘I'm just its messenger.'

‘Are you asking me not to shoot you?'

He spoke to me about this place. He described the arrangement as best he could. It was my brother's idea. My brother had spoken to my superiors, who had given their blessing. My brother had asked Curtin to put it to me. Curtin described what little he knew of this place, its particular nature and this family. He even seemed enthusiastic, which would be hard to countenance for anyone who knew the man. Did he phone in advance? Did he press my bell and did I answer? I don't remember any of that. All I remember is him seated at the table in my kitchen, gloves in hand, refusing anything to drink and keeping on his long grey greatcoat for the duration of what he repeatedly called ‘our chat'. The place would be, he said, part appointment and part retreat.

‘What does that mean?'

‘You'll see.' He rose and came over to where I was leaning against the sink. For a second, I felt sure that he planned to embrace me. I felt sure, indeed, that he was planning to plant a kiss, Judas-like, on my cheek. ‘Will you hear my confession?'

Without waiting for me to respond, positively or otherwise, he produced a set of wooden rosary beads, hunkered painfully onto one knee, made the sign of the cross and began to speak: ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned . . .' I felt so grateful to him. Not since the girl on my landing had anyone addressed me as such. It was as if he was doing it intentionally, restoring a confiscated identity to me. I remember the streak of yellow that years of pipe smoke had bleached in his hair. I remember the antique brown beads pressed to his lips.

They say that when you lose a child, the pain only dulls with distance, but really never ends or goes away. They say the world greys out. Existence becomes mere muscle memory, force of habit devoid of any texture or flavour. I could not have known that Curtin would be dead before the following summer was out, that he was withering within even then, as he knelt muttering his sins at my feet. Wild horses will never drag out of me what he confessed. All I can say is that what he did confess has no direct bearing on this story.

For a time, I would continue to hear scraps by letter from my former cleaner, or an email from one of my young successors, seeking advice and letting certain facts slip. Eventually, those too dried up. Last I heard, the county had bulldozed the close and turned it into a playground where no one ever plays.

The family inhabited, it appears, a world that came apart at the seams and disappeared piecemeal. The girl's mother had worked occasionally for a couple in broadcasting. The mother's sister did a line, briefly, with the lad on night security on the site. After he had upped sticks, she kept donning her finery and going up by herself to his empty caravan. Her sombrero was indeed found hanging on a wall in one of Flood's townhouses. The father, jobless, ignored rent payments and warnings that the bank was taking back Flood's land. There were never any Poles, except for those in Paul's head. The cessation of amenities – water, electricity – only accentuated whatever concluding fantasy he and the girl shared.

All of which is clear enough. Up to this point, the story can be mapped and followed with some certainty. From there, however, its path tapers into long grass. Reason, with all its explanations, takes us this far and no farther.

‘Write down what you saw,' my brother said, the last time we spoke on the phone. It was November then, the one just gone or perhaps the one before that, a blaze of olive logs in the range.

‘I saw nothing.' I was plenty angry with him. ‘I told you. I told you and everyone else.'

‘You must have seen something,' my brother said. ‘Write what you did see. Send it to me when it's finished.'

So I wrote what I did see, what I think I saw and what I know I heard. But I will not be the man they want me to be. I will not wear their scapegoat's crown of thorns. And yet the more truth I tell, the more I seem determined to write myself closer to the centre of a story that should never have been mine. In the time that has elapsed since last we spoke, I have sent my brother half a dozen versions but have heard nothing back. I try calling him. The system's recorded message asks me to recheck the number and dial again. Maybe what has happened to me, and keeps on happening, is merely something that happens to all of us with age. The world depopulates. Gradually our loved ones stop answering. Where has my brother gone? Where does everyone go?

Stick to a story long enough, and the story sticks to you. It has become like a private garden I return to in my head and in which I sit alone. Every now and then I make amendments: prune something, plant elsewhere. I have tinkered so much that I cannot be certain which flowers were here and which were introduced by me. I have assumed the girl's bare bones and seeded into them colours, textures, incidentals that she surely couldn't have shared with me at my hearth. Every time I click ‘attach' and ‘send', I tell myself to leave it to one side, that it is done. But some fresh thing reveals itself and the story alters. Once my brother responds, if ever he does, once he tells me that he has read my story and believes its every word, it will be taken from my hands.

Until he does, it falls to me, in paradise, to keep the chimney warm, the roof from caving in, the gypsies from plundering. What did I see? A biplane buzzes overhead. Hip-hop pulses from a post van left running, the driver's door hanging open. Someone I have never seen before is tending blossoms in the grotto.

I pray that I may forget. Or, failing that, that I may at least remember what forgetting feels like. I dream sometimes that I am retracing a track through woods to where the girl will be, but when I reach the spot there is only a hole burned in the earth where she stood. I keep thinking I see her face at some or other market, across stalls of hardware or rotting fruit. I see her as she appeared on my step, not as she might be now. An owl's shrieks above the courtyard's black are like screams in another room. Some evenings, when I am full of hope fuelled by little more than a late blast of cloudless gold, my door darkens out of nowhere and my peace is shaken asunder by banging.

Conor O'Callaghan
is originally from Dundalk, and now divides his time between Dublin and the North of England.
Nothing on Earth
is his first novel.

TRANSWORLD IRELAND PUBLISHERS
28 Lower Leeson Street, Dublin 2, Ireland
www.transworldireland.ie

Transworld Ireland is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies
whose addresses can be found at
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First published in the UK and Ireland in 2016 by Doubleday Ireland
an imprint of Transworld Ireland Publishers
Copyright © Conor O'Callaghan 2016
Cover photographs © Alamy. Design by R. Shailer/ TW

Conor O'Callaghan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.