Nothing On Earth (7 page)

Maybe it was the sunbathing that was the oddest reaction of the lot, odder than occasionally calling the girl Helen. The way they took to sunbathing. The way they were, indeed, passionate about sunbathing. They bought new bikinis, discussed sunscreen factors and angles to the sun, invented their own screening and rotation system and gave it a name: ‘The Spit'. Martina made it their military regime. Four sides, twenty minutes each and twenty indoors; three diminishing levels, the last and longest a weak oil with tints of bronze. It wasn't just about being brown. They called it their work. The girl loved being in charge of the timer she set on Martina's phone. ‘Everybody turn,' she sang, when the timer timed down into beeps. She recorded herself and saved it as the timer alert. You knew when the electronic
Everybody turn! Everybody turn!
squeaked twice that time was up.

Martina got into the habit of drinking small bottles of rosé in the afternoon. She waited until after four, the day's regime mostly over. She wore yellow rubber flip-flops, drank from a picnic cup and drifted around the garden sipping after the girl had put on her headphones. They were out there every evening when Paul, his day's work behind him, pushed his bike through the front door. Martina thought nothing of tiptoeing around him in the kitchen, in shades and briefs, asking how all the lads at the plant were getting on. Everything looked green inside, after hours in the glare. The fitted units, the table and chairs, even Paul slumped there in his suit, they would all be lime green for a while.

‘I feel like a pig,' she said. The cord of her sombrero was around her throat, and her arms were folded behind her back. ‘One that's been on a spit, I mean.' Paul laughed a quiet, weary laugh, making a meal of removing his cycle clips. ‘Are you okay?' She was smiling to herself, at his refusal to look up, at her sister's words spinning in her head. She loved being gawked at. She placed one finger under his chin and gently pushed his face upwards. ‘Are you okay?'

She thought nothing, eventually, of giving the little one tipples of rosé, of letting her go topless too. The sun shifted sideways across each day. South-east to south-west was sunbathing prime time. They positioned and repositioned the loungers to keep facing it full on. The radio changed voices, stations. Every now and then you could hear a lorry barrelling past on the road or a car alarm warbling. A hot-air balloon crossed directly overhead late one Friday. Its stripes were orange and purple. You could make out heads leaning over the basket. Martina and the girl stood on their sun-loungers, as if that made them any nearer the balloon, and whooped. After it had drifted from sight, Martina said how daft they must have looked, two naked insects waving among the half-built houses and dilapidated hardware and scorched earth. It must have been one of those afternoons, around about then, in that state, that I saw them.

They were often past giggly by the time Paul got home. Mostly, he didn't seem to know where to put himself. They would hear him, from the garden, entering the kitchen. They would call to him, but he never came out, and he could take an age upstairs to change out of his suit.

Once, and once only, Martina followed Paul up while he was changing. She tapped on the door and walked straight in without waiting to be summoned. She hadn't put on a T-shirt before coming up. She was in their room, Paul and Helen's, before it occurred to her that she hadn't put anything on. She wanted to know if they would phone out for a Chinese. Martina and the girl had been talking all afternoon about phoning out for Chinese.

‘On me,' she said. She folded her arms, laughed at him for staring and asked again what he thought about Chinese for dinner.

‘What is?'

It was like Paul had never seen her in next to nothing before, or any woman for that matter. It was like Paul didn't speak English any longer. He was still staring at her. Martina had on bronzing oil. Her skin was glistening with it. Her shoulders felt red and sore. Her navel was pierced with some kind of crystal stud. Her arms had freckles peppered on them. She tilted her head and, unfolding her arms, formed a rope of her falling hair.

He said, ‘What's on you?'

‘Food!' She sat down on the end of the bed where Paul was sitting. It was only then that she noticed he was clutching his suit trousers in his lap. She asked him, ‘Are you okay?'

Red dust off the site had stuck to the oil on her skin. From the way her skin glittered, there must have been particles of mica in the dust. She had the exact same solitary mole on the underside of one of her breasts that Helen had.

‘I never noticed that before,' he said. He sounded like a little boy.

‘I should hope not.' Her voice was soft, like tar in hot sunlight. ‘It'll be okay.'

For the first time, after weeks of keeping calm, the weirdness of it all was apparent on his features. The weirdness of what? Of his wife going missing, and her face in newspapers and on community noticeboards in shops. Of the way the world just carried on after a fashion, like a lake's surface flattening after a splash, and expected the three of them to follow. Of how the girl assumed her missing mother's name. Of how Martina's presence probably helped to bypass any grief he might have been expected to experience. Of how like his vanished wife she must have been, in the bedroom that had been theirs, almost completely naked, her black hair and green eyes, the tiny gap between her front teeth.

‘Helen,' Paul said. crouching slightly forward.

‘Sssh,' she was saying very softly. ‘It's okay.'

He closed his eyes, squeezing them tight. ‘Helen.'

‘It's okay.' She couldn't think of anything else to say. She wasn't even certain what was happening. ‘It's okay, it's okay.'

His breath stopped, kind of rattled, and released after several seconds. There was the smell then, like disinfectant. Martina went into the en-suite for some reason, ran the taps, sloshed suds around her hands, though she hadn't touched him at all. Paul sat there, head bowed, not moving. She shut the en-suite door quietly. She said she meant it when she'd said that it would be okay, that she would see him downstairs. She stepped onto the landing and shrieked, ‘Jesus, Helen!'

The girl was barefoot on the landing, her headphones removed. It was possible that she had been standing out there all along and met Martina emerging from the master bedroom with her hands freshly washed. Martina said, ‘Your daddy's just a bit wobbly, love. I was talking to him.'

‘Is he okay?'

‘He's grand. Let him dress and we'll go down and pick something from the menu.'

The nearest takeaway, in town, was called the Lucky House. The woman delivering arrived in a van and shouted through the open door. It was Paul who went out. She stood there staring past him into the house, even after Paul had paid her. There was a small boy in the passenger seat of the van. The food was steaming in a brown bag. They had thrown a handful of fortune cookies on top. Martina had dressed and laid the table, and the three of them ate as if nothing was any different.

‘This day has been bizarre,' the girl said.

‘What do you mean?' Martina was glancing back and forth between the girl and Paul. When the girl didn't reply immediately, she asked again, ‘Helen, how was it
bizarre
?'

‘I saw
Mutti
in the garden.'

‘Your mother? Today?'

‘While you were upstairs. She walked across the garden.'

‘While we were . . .?'

‘Upstairs. Talking.'

Martina and Paul waited. This, they seemed to agree, tacitly, together, at once, was the girl's way of telling them she believed something had happened. Perhaps even that she had heard. Martina, not for the first time, wanted to explain that nothing really had happened, that they had nothing to hide, but she couldn't order the words properly in her head. The girl had not really seen her mother in the garden. She was just saying the thing most likely to disturb. She was just saying something that would be certain to cause guilt.

‘Okay,' Martina said. The girl had been through more than enough, and this kind of reaction was to be expected, even humoured for the time being. ‘Where exactly?'

‘In the garden. I was reading my magazine, and thought someone was trying to . . . I saw it was
Mutti
. She walked across the garden. I called to her, but she didn't answer. She didn't even look around.'

‘And what was she wearing?' Martina asked, smiling, thinking she had finally got it and was happy to play along.

‘She was wearing the bridesmaid's dress she wore at your wedding.' It was years since anyone had mentioned Martina's wedding or marriage. ‘Down to the ground, bare arms, and covered all in flowers.'

Sheila moved out. She left a card in their door the day she moved. The card said ‘Good Luck' in gold joined-up writing. It had a horseshoe embossed on the cover. A lamp timed on in her front room every night. There was clattering in the other empty shells. Flood came one morning and erected a metal barrier across the entrance to the close, but that made no difference. Sometimes there was hammering on their door: always at night; always the same furious rhythm, as if someone were trapped outside and desperate to get in. But there was never anyone there. Paul called to the local garda station on one of his Saturdays at home and spoke over an intercom to an uninterested voice in a bigger station in the next town. He got a heat-sensitive halogen light fitted above the patio door. It was like a disco in the garden, with the light tripping on and off. Three, maybe four, nights of every week they each lay in their separate unlit rooms, listening to the front door shuddering and joyriders buzzing like mosquitoes out on the ring road.

The water rationing intensified. The taps ran dry from eight every evening. It hadn't rained for almost two months. The mounds of muck up at the townhouses had dried to a fine orange sand that blew off in plumes whenever a warm wind came swirling around. The sand got everywhere: into the house, their clothes, everything. It got on the scraps of furniture they had, on the fruit in the picnic salad bowl. Every mug of tea or coffee seemed to have a film on its surface. You took a shower and the shower basin was coated with it, as if you had been at the beach all day. There was no point in cleaning the windows: within twenty-four hours they were gauzed with sand again.

‘So be it.'

‘So be what?'

Martina said it to the girl first, sitting on the edge of her lounger. Martina, for the very first time, said ‘So be it' really slowly, peering above her shades, rising as she spoke. It was the girl who asked, ‘So be what?'

She pointed at the patio window, until the girl slid into her sandals and stood as well. Then she stopped pointing. The words were in reverse, in a script so odd that they could have been written by a small child or someone's wrong hand. The three words were on the outside of the patio window, so that they could be read from indoors. Someone had inscribed, with one finger, ‘SO BE IT' into the dust. Not recently, by the look of it. The letters had filled again, were only minutely lighter in shade than the rest of the glass and legible only from an oblique angle.

The girl asked, ‘What does it mean?'

‘I've no idea,' she said. ‘Say nothing to your daddy.'

‘Sure?'

‘He has enough on his plate.'

‘His plate?'

She filled a basin with warm suds and washed the window panel. A solitary sparkling panel looked dubious, so she did the rest of the panels of the patio window, and the window over the sink as well, and the bay window in the front room. She even polished them with one of her sister's old tank-tops as a rag. And yet, however hard she polished, she could never fully eradicate an impression of the words, as if the glass had memory and the letters were burned into it.

Neither she nor the girl said anything about the words, their phrase. Not then or for a long time. Not to Paul and not even between themselves. Paul never seemed to see them. Though every once in a while one of them would say ‘So be it' in answer to something completely unrelated and trust that somewhere within earshot the other would hear.

Things disappeared. The cement mixer disappeared. A stack of breeze blocks diminished, almost imperceptibly, until there was nothing where it had been. A soft-top that joyriders had long since bulldozed into a mound of soil disappeared piecemeal: wheels, doors, upholstery, the instrument panel. A guy in white shorts removed the registration plates, carefully, with a screwdriver he had in his pocket. Martina watched him from the bay window. She told the others he looked as if he was the owner. Even Flood, it seemed, went missing. Where once his visits had been daily, or as good as, leaning out from the driver's window and asking for news of Helen and generally acting as if he had done them the biggest favour of their lives, now he was nowhere.

Hi, Martina! Thank you for this. I remember Helen. She came to us a few times only. But years ago, not recently. Really? We stopped her when we discovered items were missing. We worried for Sophie also. I said this to police who called lately and told us. Helen is not with us. I receive no email from her. I & Benedikt are confused. This is too sad. We will pray for you for finding her. xx

Nothing was the same. Her phone credit ran out. There was, she explained to the girl, no real point topping up. She told the girl, eventually, about the email from Ute.

‘What did it say?'

‘Only that your
Mutti
isn't there.' There was little else she could say.

Some people appeared. A door shut upstairs. ‘Spring-loaded,' the girl said, but there were definitely voices coming from the master bedroom. When another door shut, minutes after, Martina called from the foot of the stairs, threw on a jacket of Paul's off the banister and called again from the landing, her heart thumping in her breast, ‘Hello?'

‘Hello,' a woman's voice called from inside Paul's room. Then its door's chrome handle turned, and wire coat-hangers could be heard jingling on the other side. A man and a woman, both middle-aged, stood among Paul's strewn clothes.