Nothing On Earth (12 page)

‘They can't hear you,' he said. ‘There's nobody there, pet.'

Once, no sleep to be had up in that furnace, he asked from one side of the darkness to the other, ‘Why did she keep saying my name?'

‘Who?'

‘
Haze
. Frau Slattery.' He could hear his daughter sniggering gently. ‘All she kept saying was my name, over and over and over.'

‘I thought she was talking to him,' the girl said. ‘I thought his name was Paul too.'

‘Ah . . .'

‘What did you see in the townhouse? I want to know.'

‘I saw Martina's sombrero, hanging on a nail. That's it, and some graffiti next to it.'

‘So be it?'

After a long pause, Paul said, ‘How did you guess?'

‘Do you believe in demons?'

‘What kind of question is that?'

‘Just what I said.' Her voice was still very young. ‘Do you believe in demons?'

‘Do you?'

‘I asked first.'

‘I believe,' Paul said, ‘that if we don't believe in demons, they won't believe in us. Do the demons believe in us? That's the question. The day the demons believe in us, we're in real trouble.'

Martina's phone rang and cut off before either of them could find it. The number read ‘withheld'. Late one weekend afternoon, the house lights came up all at once, the fridge shivered, a country ballad on the radio kicked in during its chorus. Paul whooped, ‘Yee-haw!' and took the hammer to the shopping trolleys still lying around the site from the water runs and retrieved their coins. They ran to the supermarket and bought oats, nuts and syrup to bake flapjacks. The girl and her mother had always baked flapjacks, and Paul figured making flapjacks might liven up the place.

‘How are you since?'

The old biddy in the supermarket was handing back their change in coppers when she asked that. Since what? Like they were compadres, Paul spat on the hard shoulder home, like they had ever even conversed about fucking anything.

Paul sat at the table watching his daughter, saying how like her mother she was getting. He told her how gorgeous she was, a young woman almost, how tall she was becoming. He thought he could smell burning. There was, as well, in the core of his skull, like a wasps' nest ablaze, this sizzle that he could scarcely hear his own voice above.

‘You're not going to just disappear on me too,' he said, almost shouting. ‘Are you?'

‘No chance.'

‘What?'

‘I said no chance!' The girl was shouting too. ‘I'm not going to just disappear!'

All the while, she was setting the timer on Martina's phone and wiping the mixing bowl, the spoons, tying her curls into a crushed-velvet scrunchie and watching through the oven's glass door. Once, she turned and smiled, the way her mother used. All the rooms were pure gold, with the bulbs still on and sun out the back. She was wearing only Martina's silk scarf as a bikini top and sweatpants that were far too loose on her. Her abdomen was exposed, the white crease marks that the elastic of her knickers cut in her skin, the twin pelvic bones like a pair of dainty fists covered with a cotton handkerchief. Just when they looked golden, perfect, the power died. The long-range weather forecast cut off
in medias res
, the fridge released a death rattle and all the rooms returned to the old gold of natural light. She said, ‘I'm pretty sure they're done anyway.'

She divided the tray into twenty careful rectangles, three cuts lengthways and four widthways, the tip of her tongue on the chapped point of her upper lip, and rested each separately with the butter knife on a rack to cool.

‘About ten minutes,' she said.

She said it again, walking into the front room. She said it from the bottom of the stairs.

‘They're done,' she said. ‘Ten minutes to cool.'

She stopped around the middle step.
Everybody turn
, the kitchen started bleating,
Everybody turn
. . .

‘Papa? Please.'

She put her head around each bedroom door, saying his name as she did. She stood at the foot of the ladder and spoke into the attic's black square.

‘Please, Papa, please.'

Both front and back doors were still locked from the inside. It was then, she said, that she started screaming, ‘Papa, please! Papa, please!' It was then that she couldn't find the keys, that she heard them rattling in the pocket of her father's jacket and unlocked the front door's bolt from within and sprinted without breathing or stopping until she reached a door, which she hammered on and which I, finally, held open.

YOU KNOW THOSE
stories, where the child is lost in the wilderness and presumed dead? For years her family keeps returning. Eventually, their hope dwindles. The family disintegrates: the mother remarries, the father lives alone. Then a creature wanders into the nearest village, semi-feral and with scant language. The villagers form a circle and stare. Someone asks questions she doesn't answer, or can't. Someone else remembers the family who came on holiday many moons ago and lost a daughter in the mountains, who kept returning to find her. One man, who had been acquainted with the family, had been employed as a guide even, recalls the girl's name, and the sound the name's word makes when said aloud is met by a flicker of recognition in her.

That's what it was like. It was as if she had come running, for all she was worth, out of some urban legend or ‘real life' story in one of those magazines you read in a doctor's waiting room. The first door she happened on was mine, and she banged on that, and sat with me in my front room, and waited for the law to arrive, and answered a few routine lines of enquiry, and agreed to accompany us all back to her house.

‘Sorry,' I said.

The older one in plain clothes, who appeared to be in charge, squinted slightly in my direction.

‘I had to say something to the ladies at the gate,' I said.

Still he said nothing, and still I felt obliged to explain myself for some reason, in spite of that little voice inside pleading with me to stop apologizing.

‘Sorry for keeping you.'

Because of the barriers the builder called Flood had erected across the entrance to the close, we left the cars outside and pushed our way through. It was still good and bright. The girl had the key so tight in her hand, since bolting from the house, that its ridges left sore-looking imprints inside her fist. It didn't matter: the front door to her house was still open.

I was the only one who stayed outside, by my own choosing.

‘I'll wait outside,' I said.

‘If you're sure.'

‘Sure,' I said. ‘I'd only be in the way.'

I could hear the officers shouting into each of the rooms before entering. Every once in a while I glimpsed shapes flitting across a window, and torchlight piercing those spaces that were shaded from the setting sun. It may be the exaggeration of hindsight, but there did seem to be something about the place. Call it an air, an eerie soundlessness, if you will. They were in there a good quarter of an hour and, in all that while, standing waiting on the bricks of their dusty drive, I scarcely heard a peep from the town or the ring road or its Saturday-evening traffic. The site was an absolute state, no tar laid, rubble everywhere, windows with holes in them, doors gaping, scraps of plastic and wiring and chalkboard, the skeleton of a car ploughed into a hill of muck. The charred shell of a caravan, which presumably had been there once for security, sat up towards the buildings that were meant to be flats. What if he came back? What if the father were to materialize there and then, only to find me whistling at the end of his drive and his daughter indoors with officers of the law I had summoned?

I stepped up to the door and beckoned through. ‘Any joy?'

The door had partly pushed aside vast drifts of mail, as if the house had been deserted for years. There was also a repossession notice on the door, and all the doors for that matter, a white bill glued to the wood with a warning in red print not to remove it. The hall was black. The frame of a racing bike leaned against one of its walls. The interior smelt of nothing but dust and sunscreen lotion. Through the back windows, even though they were smeared with dirt, I could just about make out a couple of sun-loungers and a layer of grey parched muck where a lawn should have been.

I shouted again, ‘Anything?' There was even a moment, mad as it sounds, when I wondered if anyone would ever re-emerge from that house. I had left with them to go in search of the girl's father. How would I explain returning alone to the ladies at my gate? ‘Hello . . .?'

I stepped out again to the end of the drive, trying to see into the upstairs windows. Finally, I heard voices and saw shadows preceding them back through the door.

‘Nothing.'

The female officer made a face in my direction – a kind of wince. The girl had put a couple of things in a bag that had the crest of some designer outlet on it. She still had on her father's jacket: she had, it appeared, refused to change into something of her own. They were all of them, I remember, covered with sweat when they stepped out: beads on foreheads, and jackets removed, and shirt sleeves matted to skin.

‘What will happen now?' I asked.

She was looking straight at me, the officer, mouthing: ‘I haven't the foggiest.'

We all came back to my house. Things had quietened down at the supermarket. Mercifully, there was nobody waiting at my gate. The girl sat sniffling in front of the evening's programmes and being comforted. I boiled and reboiled the kettle, made several pots of tea that were never even poured, and the men in plain clothes alternated between ringing for instructions from superiors or relevant services and quizzing the girl. The same stuff, over and over again. Was there anywhere her father might have gone? Were there relatives? The girl said her grandparents, the father's folks, had gone away. She didn't know where, but it transpired that they were on a pilgrimage in Medjugorje.

‘What about the sister?' It was me who asked that. I had kept my mouth shut, or as good as, until then. The girl had made no mention of her mother's sister, and the officers appeared to have forgotten momentarily. ‘Wasn't there a sister?'

‘We've asked her that already,' the younger woman officer said. ‘Over in the house.' She looked amused by my involvement. ‘She says Martina and her daddy had a row of some description. Martina went back abroad, isn't that right?'

‘That's right,' the girl said.

‘We'll be sure to chase it up.'

My telly was on mute in the background, a man picking lottery balls from a tube and placing them in a row on a rack, numbers facing outwards. They asked her about the writing on her skin.

‘Writing?'

‘The words on your skin. Did you write them yourself?'

‘Yes.'

‘And what do they say?'

The girl slowly opened the jacket she was wearing. She peered into the petite folds of flesh on her tummy. One by one, she ran a finger under each of the various smudged phrases.

‘Words just.'

‘What words?' The woman officer was doing all the talking. She was being very gentle, but insistent with it. ‘Can you read me out some of the words?'

The girl glanced around at the four of us. It must have felt peculiar, being asked to read aloud to a roomful of strangers words inscribed on your body. It must have felt particularly peculiar to have all these grown-ups gazing at your naked flesh. Her flesh, where there was no ink or dirt, was perfectly unblemished. No goose-pimples or anything like that. It was red from the sun, and even inclined to brown in patches. It had the texture, her skin, of the pure fine suede of a peach. She peered down at herself once again and stretched her skin in various spots and spoke as if each word were acres apart from all the rest.

‘This is it,' she said. ‘Haze. Not quite the ticket. You are very good. Spring-loaded. Walkabout. There you are. So be it. On his plate. Heading up. Gilt.'

The younger of the detectives struggled to stifle a giggle. The woman was giving him a filthy look. He had his elbows propped on his knees and started vigorously inspecting his interlocked fingers. The older one's phone went off in his shirt pocket. He took it outside.

‘Do you mind if I have a look?' The woman was kneeling now. She had one of the girl's arms in her hand and was pushing the sleeve down from shoulder to wrist. The arm was criss-crossed with blue ink. ‘What do the words mean?'

‘Nothing,' the girl said.

‘Nothing at all?'

‘People said them and I wrote them to remember.'

The second detective summoned me into the hall. He used an odd phrase to do so: he said, ‘If I could borrow you a sec.' I knew he meant me by the way he touched the elbow of my blazer. I drew the door behind me, assuming he didn't want the girl to hear whatever it was he had to tell.

‘No luck with social,' he whispered on my doorstep. ‘Saturday night, you know?' He shrugged and shook his head. He had, I remember now, a pipe that he lit then, out on my front step. ‘This far off the beaten track,' he continued. ‘Anywhere else, any other time of the week.' Still I said nothing. ‘But placing her immediately could be tricky.'

It was as if he were leaving spaces, deliberately, for me to say what he wanted me to say. However determined I was not to say what he wanted, each space he left felt like a little vortex that I couldn't resist being sucked into.

‘If needs really be,' I heard my own voice sighing, ‘she can stay here. She'll be plenty safe.'

‘We'll see.'

There was surprise in his voice when he said that. He even permitted himself a pursed smile. He had cornered me into offering something that I didn't want to offer and of which he was always going to disapprove. It never occurred to me that the girl would stay. It just seemed the proper thing to offer, being the nearest to her home, being the one she came to first.