Nothing On Earth (4 page)

He disappeared into the en-suite, made one tap whistle, returned to the bedroom and lay on his back with his damp hand holding Helen's. The bedroom, even with the window open as wide at it would go, was stifling. Paul was quickly dead to the world. Helen kicked their one cotton sheet to the end of the bed.

She wondered how it would be with a heavy man lying on top of her. How would that feel? A man of Flood's stature, say. The furnace of him. His bulk, too great to support itself, pressing straight down on top of you. The bristle on your cheek and the soft groaning right there at your ear. The safety, the security, of how that must have felt, to have a huge frame squeezing every ounce of air from your lungs, the pain of being completely full and pinned to a spot, mumbling his name again and again until that word's solitary syllable broke its banks and overflowed and made one lake of several outlying fields.

‘There's someone banging on the door.'

They were woken by banging. Or, rather, Paul had been woken by banging and shoved Helen until she was conscious enough to see him standing at the end of the bed.

‘What time's it?'

‘There it is again,' Paul said.

That was the one time Paul looked scared. He struggled into his cycling shorts, which had been lying on the floor on his side of the bed. Helen heard his footfalls on the varnished stairs, his eventual muttering, the chain, the lock snicking open, and Martina down in the hall complaining that her key wouldn't turn.

‘Your sister. Taking care of Marcus.'

He said that last bit with a tone. He was, the tone meant, repeating the precise phrase of a joke in which Helen had shared.

‘I'll kill her,' she said.

‘Can it wait till morning?'

‘That was really scary.'

‘You put it on the snib,' Paul said.

‘The what?' It was years since Helen had heard anyone use that word. She knew what it meant. She just wanted to hear him say the word again.

‘The snib,' Paul said. ‘You put the front door on the snib.' He turned to face the wall on his side of the bed. ‘There's nobody else in the house, love. This has to stop.'

The weather held. She kept expecting to wake to grey and drizzle, for the dust on the close to turn to muck. If anything, the mornings got clearer and hotter. Martina was always the first to leave. Paul cycled, left later and arrived before Martina. Helen breakfasted in shorts with the back door open, so that a little of the cool of the garden's shade might come indoors. The girl slept in or sat eating cereal on one of the beanbags in the front room, headphones plugged in, the keys of her laptop clicking.

Afternoons were spent unpacking and breaking up boxes for the green bin and keeping the house presentable in case any viewers came. Sometimes, distracted by the heat and by the absence of anything happening on site, Helen and the girl slipped into flip-flops and wandered. Theirs was sandwiched between two shells of houses. The shell to their right, the one farther up the close, was like their own inside out. Above the hearth someone had painted rough concentric circles in different colours, like a target, a bright red disc at the centre. The kitchen sink had a sheath of aquamarine protective contact that the girl pinched at the corner and peeled halfway across the drainer. The row facing theirs was even less finished. No doors, windows or wiring. The façades were still bare block, the roofs just timber strips and felt. They leaned in one of the front bays and could see all the way through the partition and the kitchen to the hill of long, singed grass. Beyond that, in the distance, against a deep blue sky, were horse-chestnuts in leaf and a cluster of chimney stacks.

‘Herr Slattery.'

‘I presume . . .' Helen said.

‘Rich?'

‘I believe so.' Helen could feel her shoulder blades burning. ‘But from what nobody knows.'

There was no grass on the patch that Flood referred to as ‘the green area'. It was just rubble, cubes of foam packaging that appliances must have come in, offcuts of yellow rubber piping and cement lumps in the shape of oil drums that neither of them could budge.

Marcus's caravan was locked. It had a sticker of the Confederate flag on the door, a row of medals strung along the window at the end, between the paled-out back of closed curtains and plastic glass hot from the glare of the mid-afternoon sun. When Helen stood on blocks and shaded her eyes, she could see fragments of the interior through gaps where the curtains didn't meet. It felt weird to think of Martina in there most evenings. She could see a wire coat-hanger sticking upside-down out of the portable. She could see mugs unwashed on a table, one of which was probably still marked with lipstick. She could see a golf club propped against a wardrobe door. It was all bathed in tangerine, like when you close your eyes and face towards the sun.

Once, curious, they strayed into Slattery's avenue. They had been around the site too often, wandered out of the close, turned right away from town and, after a hundred yards or so, come to an avenue lined with broadleaves that cast thick, cool shadow all over the gravel and the slope's wisps of overgrown grass. It was sweltering and the climb was steep. From the gate you could see the roof. Halfway up, Slattery's house disappeared from view. At one point, a shotgun in the distance emptied one of its barrels with a lovely dull crack that echoed and scattered rooks. They stopped only when the ground levelled off and the house reappeared in its entirety. Big windows, old brick at one end, ivied pebbledash the other. There was no life. The girl asked, ‘Will we call?'

‘Like this?' The girl was wearing a baseball cap that kept falling around her eyes. Helen could feel her tank-top clinging to the sweat on her spine. Their flip-flops, feet, were filmed in gravel dust. ‘I don't think we look quite the ticket.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘It means that we're not dressed enough.' She often had to explain phrases to her daughter. She often forgot that the girl had been speaking another language for two-thirds of her life. ‘It means
another time, perhaps
.'

They stepped off the avenue and lay down for a while in the long grass, in the shade. There was a daylight moon, a globe of dandelion seed, directly overhead. The grass tasted of sugar. From nearby, the girl's voice asked, ‘Where are your
Mutti
and papa buried?'

‘Somewhere near here all right,' Helen said. She had a habit of doing that, the girl, of asking questions out of the blue which were oddly in keeping with her mother's train of thought. ‘I've just completely lost my bearings of the area.'

‘Is there a grave?'

‘There must be.'

A vehicle passed on the avenue. It sounded small, by the gentle crunch, and it was moving fairly slowly. A milk float, possibly, or something of that description. They lay still where they were, hoping they were hidden. It was like a scene from one of those ancient films, an enemy convoy too near to breathe.

‘When was the war?' the girl asked, when the coast was clear.

‘What war?'

‘The war the lady said.'

‘Sheila?' The girl must have meant the war in which Harry and Marcus's uncles smuggled across the border. ‘That war? That was the last century.'

They took the shortcut home, downhill across a couple of ditches of whitethorn, a dried stream and the mountain of muck and rocks the diggers had pushed off the site.

‘Like it,' Flood said.

Flood stopped by a few times, in passing, with little or nothing to say. There was no work happening on site, however busy he tried to seem. He was picking something up for another job, looking the place over until the night-watch clocked on at six, passing the time of day. Helen had got her hair straightened one Saturday. She did it, she said, so that people could tell herself and Martina apart. Who did she mean by
people
? It took her a second to realize what Flood was referring to.

‘New style,' Flood said, pointing at her hair. ‘Like it.'

Flood called the summer ‘powerful'. He kept saying that and wiping one hand around the nape of his neck and squinting at the sky. The summer was powerful, and there was no word of it letting up. Flood had a way of sniggering to himself, after the fact, as if he could hear how old-fashioned what he'd said had sounded. He asked, ‘Any sign of Slattery?'

‘No sign.'

‘If he comes down on his quad, making a nuisance of himself, you refer him to me.' Flood did a voice, as though it was meant to mimic a legal euphemism, a veiled threat. ‘And Harry's gone into the hospital.'

‘Really?'

‘For tests, I believe.'

‘Come in,' she said.

‘Just for a minute.' Flood kicked his boots against the step and walked ahead of her down the hall's passageway. ‘I wouldn't fall out with a drop of water while we're still allowed it.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘There's rationing of water coming in,' Flood said. ‘Do you people not read the papers?'

She filled a mug from the cold tap and handed it to him, staying standing. He raised it to her, as if to say cheers. He drained it in one go and wiped his lips with his sleeve. He looked her up and down. He said, ‘You're wasting away.'

She smiled again. It was like she was vanishing, visibly. After that, he said nothing. He just placed the mug on the table. She figured, after a few seconds, that he meant her weight: she was losing weight, diminishing in front of him. What was it Martina had said about Flood on the road home from the pictures? Flood was sweet on Helen. Had Marcus said so? Or was her sister just stirring it?

‘What about that family?'

‘Family?' Flood asked. You could tell by the way he said it that he knew whom she meant, that he was just buying time to think of an answer.

‘The family from the midlands that you mentioned?'

‘Any day now,' Flood said. He was looking across at her, as though he realized he had said the exact same thing the first time they'd met. She ran her middle finger across the nape of her neck, dragging her hair forward over one collarbone and plaiting it, like bread. Maybe he meant something completely different this time. ‘Any day now.'

‘What do you think?' She stepped sideways and spread one arm towards the rest of the room. She was asking him what he thought of her handiwork.

‘You've acquitted yourself very nicely.'

‘I've . . .?' She could see the horror in Flood's expression, the wish that he hadn't worded it that way. It was as if the moment had a hole at its centre, the heat's precise source, and they were standing on opposite sides and staring down into it at once. Another door shut, upstairs. ‘You hear that?'

‘They're spring-loaded,' Flood said. ‘There's a little chain in the hinge. Have you not noticed the doors shutting behind you?'

‘Of course I have!'

‘If you just leave them resting on the latch, they'll keep pulling.' Flood was speaking softly. He was peering a little at her. ‘Might take a while, but they'll keep trying to shut until they do.'

‘I thought we might have had guests.'

‘Guests?'

‘Other people in the house,' she said, ‘apart from us. Please don't tell anyone.'

‘How's herself? No school?' Flood was speaking past Helen to the telly's chirping in the front room.

‘September. No point sending her in for the last month and a bit.'

‘We won't say anything, will we?' Flood called through. Then he said to Helen, as if the girl wasn't there at all, ‘Sure she hardly says anything to anybody.'

Harry died. He went in for tests and never came out. They went down for the removal. It was late in the afternoon, and Paul and Martina were still at work. Helen and the girl rang the doorbell before the coffin was carried out. Someone they had never seen before answered. They asked for Sheila. Sheila looked gorgeous when she came out, in a black one-piece with a gold chain and matching earrings. Her lavender scent, when she embraced them both at once, was the same as Helen's mother used wear. Because of all the oil drums and muck parched to sand, the cortège had to start from the bottom of the close. Flood was among them, waiting in a slate-grey suit. Several of the mourners were holding golf umbrellas as parasols, as if they were in a procession in the tropics. Helen and the girl stood, hands crossed the way they had seen others do when praying, until the coffin was carried out and down to the hearse.

It was that night, the night of Harry's removal, when the girl screamed. That night, or the night immediately after. It was near eleven. Helen was in the bath and the girl screamed, ‘There's someone in the garden!'

‘What, now?'

Helen climbed out of her lukewarm suds, wrapped herself in a beach towel and went into the second bedroom, where the girl was standing at the window. Against their rear wall was a pale thumbnail that might well have been a face staring up at them. They ran downstairs. Paul was at the patio door, trying to peer through his own reflection, flicking the switch of the outside patio light.

‘Nothing works,' he was growling. ‘Why does nothing fucking work?'

She switched off all the lights indoors so that the inside dark merged with the dark of the garden. Paul rattled the handle of the patio door half-heartedly, thumped on the double-glazing, but the face stayed where it was. She turned all the lights back on, ran up to the caravan and rapped on its thin door with her knuckle.

‘Come in,' Marcus's voice called.

Marcus was seated, one knee drawn up to his chest. Martina stood in the square yard of floor space in a bikini top. ‘Hello there,' Martina said, as if her sister were someone she kind of knew from work. Martina had her arms roped around herself. She was shivering.

‘Hello back.' The inside of the caravan smelt of something resembling disinfectant. She felt suddenly self-conscious, having nothing around her except a wet towel. She said, ‘Excuse the intrusion.'