Nothing On Earth (16 page)

‘Father,' she was calling. To me. I remember puzzling, even in dream, how strange it was that our late mother should be walking towards me in a sweatshirt given to me by my brother, and that she should address me as such.

‘Father.'

The handle and lock were rattling. How long had I been asleep? Three hours? The rain was still lashing outside. Ten minutes? I had no idea.

‘Father, please.'

My own heart was pounding in my chest. She was just a child, I kept telling myself. She was a small soul in immense pain. I should have gone out to her, seen what the matter was.

‘Father, please.'

But the thought of her grandparents and her missing parents had crossed my mind umpteen times by then. I knew little about the sister. Whoever was out there was the one who had survived them all and I, to my eternal shame, was too scared to go and face whatever demon was on my landing.

‘Father? Please . . .'

She kept calling my name. My door shuddered, every once in a while at first, and then constantly for ages. I just lay there. If I'm guilty of one last thing, I'm guilty of just lying there, saying nothing and doing nothing. I was scarcely breathing, as if not breathing would make it recede. Even when her door slammed around dawn and I could have sworn I heard screaming, I did nothing. The screams were muted by the walls and wood between us, but they were clear enough and they were clearly hers.

She was gone the following morning. She was gone and her made bed looked as if it had never been slept in. But that's not right, since ‘gone' implies a where to be gone to. She wasn't anywhere. That's the way I have come to think of it, to phrase it. By the following morning she was nowhere, and I was the last to have seen her, and all hell broke loose.

‘FROM THE BEGINNING,'
he says. ‘Tell us what you saw.'

It is the first one who says that, the older man in plain clothes who had taken the call out to my doorstep that first Saturday evening and tried to fix up something with social services. Curtin. That was his name. By which I mean his real name. For various reasons, the identities of all the others have been protected. By virtue of being definitively no longer with us, he is the only character in any of this who goes by his real name. Which is odd, considering how other-worldly his presence sometimes felt. Curtin. I must have been told his name more than once before, but it hadn't registered until then and there in that windowless room. The younger man, the one who had sniggered at the words on the girl's skin, sat slightly outside the lamplight. I never caught his name, or perhaps it was never told to me properly. On the table between us microphones were propped on mini-stands. There was also the red pinhead glow that told us we were being recorded.

Possessing copies of our exchanges was an entitlement that I, at my brother's insistence, exercised. My brother acted on my behalf, to some extent. His training was overseas, under a different jurisdiction. He had also retired by then. But we spoke several times on the phone during those autumn months. And he communicated with Curtin, informally, on my behalf. The one thing my brother was adamant about was that I – or ‘we' as he preferred to phrase it – should receive copies of all recorded interviews. So I have them still, on discs in a see-through plastic tub the size of a shoebox, in an upstairs room that acts as an office. Mostly, I let them gather dust on the shelf there. Nowadays, whenever I play them back, it is against my better self. Mostly, I get free of it and forget. Then, for whatever reason, memory stirs. I pull down the recordings, sit late listening in sequence, and then feel hung-over for days.

It is Curtin who is always first to speak. There is the clunk of the thing, the mechanism, switching into life. There is paper rustling. There are always the shrieks of chairs being pushed away for extra legroom. Then Curtin speaks. He says the time and date and place. He itemizes those present. His voice, all business, is not entirely his. It is excessively pronounced, clipped, delivering archival information. Then, after a few throat-clearing coughs and snuffles, his more relaxed northern gravel kicks in.

‘In your own time so,' he says. ‘Tell us everything you remember seeing.'

The truth I maintained then was almost exactly the same as it is now. I saw nothing. I heard plenty, far more probably than I should have, and I have recounted faithfully everything I heard. Much has been said and reported, by others, about what happened. Some of that is true, and other parts are pure fairy tale, or at least according to what I know. And, yes, much of this account exceeds what I could possibly have seen or heard. It has, I accept, merely blossomed in the rubble of years between those events and my remembering of them. Perhaps too much has been said. But now, for what shreds of my dignity I still possess and for my fragile peace of mind, I need to make this one truth clear: I saw next to nothing.

How long ago is this? Lately, I find it hard to tell. There are days now when it feels like this happened to someone else and that I, too, am merely one of those who read about it in the papers or who caught it on the evening bulletin. There are days when it feels as if all this happened in a whole different century, and in a place very far from here. That last part is correct. I am not ‘here' any more. I am writing from elsewhere. I hope never to be posted in that place again. For a long time, now and then, in company, I would be asked to repeat my name and my face would grow familiar. There was a phase when I felt famous even, when crowds parted where I walked and friends muttered to one another and shutters clicked. Mostly, in company long after, an element of tact would register around me. There would be twitches, a change of subject, while those who accidentally found themselves in my presence figured out an acceptable angle of approach or, more often, of withdrawal.

Odd times, though rarely, some careless twit would puncture that tact by blurting, ‘Weren't you the guy who . . .?'

I was never greatly bothered by the eejits, the blurters. In many respects, they were infinitely preferable to the mortified dumbstruck majority.

‘Yes,' I would say. ‘That was me.'

They always came back to the same question: ‘What was she like?' And I always resorted to the safest equation.

‘What was she like?' I would say. ‘She was like nothing on earth.' She was. ‘Like nothing on earth.'

It is morning now, early autumn. Two sides of this building are bathed in light growing warmer and more vivid by the minute. Two sides are dew-damp terrace cushions and stone cold underfoot. Give it time, I tell myself each morning. Come evening, all will be reversed: those terrace cushions will feel dry to the touch and the palm fronds out front will cast no shadows. Meantime, the odd car or scooter buzzes along the dust track beneath the olive trees, bells gong in one of the hamlets down in the valley, a cacophony of dogs answers in staggered chorus and the peaks that form our nearest horizon sparkle with marble and quartz as if with snow.

Give it time. I am far from alone. There is a gardener who doubles as the Sunday-morning bell-ringer. I believe he knows all about me, though he and I have never really conversed. He materializes, in straw hat and braces, on slopes beneath the house. He heaps dead twigs and windfalls onto the compost midden, and covers all with cuttings of grass or leaf. There are some Saturdays when he flirts with the black-frocked ladies who dust down the tiny church for Sunday's only early mass. Those days he wears the suit he usually keeps for the Sabbath. He has a stick and a German shepherd.

‘Ombra,' he once said to me.

I had carried into the sun a little table from the utility room. I was eating bread and jam, soaking in the first morning of real heat. He had appeared around the corner of the house. He was next to me before I knew he was there. My coffee cup rattled a little on its saucer, and his dog came sniffing at my feet.

‘Ombra,' he said again, pointing to the dog.

‘
Si
,' I replied at last, realizing that he was telling me the creature's name. ‘Indeed.'

‘Ombra,' he repeated. He came towards me and patted my shoulder. ‘
Molte ombre
.'

Here was a medieval monastery fallen into ruin when my landlady's father had bought it after the war. As children, they drove south through the night with their parents and spent every August here. The rest of the complex belongs to her brothers, but they never come. The
chiesa
, which my landlady subsidizes out of her cut of the family foundation, is open to the locals. She needs someone here year-round to keep the house from falling into disrepair and to maintain the immediate grounds in some semblance of order. Even she had heard where I had fallen from, that I was in need of a soft place to land. My name had been passed on to her by a friend of my brother, someone close to the hierarchy. I was visited, though not by her, to outline the arrangement. Then she wrote to me on headed notepaper, with a cursive hand in black ink that had already faded mauve by the time it was delivered. She said how pleased she was that I had agreed, though I had agreed to nothing. There didn't seem to be any choice in the matter. If I am honest, it gave me something to say to people, a future to describe that did not sound entirely without hope. She told me not to hesitate to ask if ever there was anything I needed, but left no details for reaching her. The ticket passed on to me was for a seat that was going spare on a chartered plane. I was met by my own name misspelt on a piece of cardboard and taxied up inland. A woman who had known my landlady from infancy was waiting on the step with keys and with no English. Her hair, I remember, was dyed ebony.

How long ago? Five years? I assumed that this would be a stop-gap, a halfway house on the path to another life. Five years at least, if not twice that, and no prospect of it ending. I pay no rent or bills. The meters are read remotely. I keep all post for my landlady in a wicker laundry basket inside the main door: it is overspilling. My shelves are well stocked with non-perishables, and once a week a box of fresh produce is delivered to the doorstep. I don't know where it comes from or who drops it off. There is no set time. However hard I try, however long I sit and watch in hope of passing the time of day, I never see them approach or leave.

I suspect it was my brother who requested that I be offered a role in the sacraments, and for that I am grateful. Sundays, the bell gonging in the valley is ours, us. The black-frocked ladies multiply. They climb the cobblestones in hats, bearing wildflowers hand-picked along the road as gifts for the holy well in the courtyard. A local cleric drives here from an adjacent parish in an antique black Mercedes. He conducts his masses like some crooner or matinee idol, swaying behind the pulpit, incanting the responsorial psalms. I serve. Though I remain familiar with few of their words, I am well able to follow the rhythm of the sacraments. I take a second chalice. I mutter, ‘
Il corpo di Cristo
.'

‘Amen,' the ladies sing back. Like egrets, they open their mouths to receive.

Afterwards, while he babbles all his news in the vestry, I fold my borrowed cassock and return it to the red sports bag in which he carries his things. The glare outdoors is intense. The locals chat under the trees for another hour; though they live on the same mountain, presumably this is the only time of the week they meet. I shade my eyes and sidle through my door. I hear their voices, their laughter, bubble and ebb. I hear their valedictions.

The other six days of the week revert to being mine and mine alone. I do odd jobs, to keep my hand in, to justify my presence. I take a power hose to the cobbles. I keep the woodshed stocked. I prune the younger of the olive orchards. I shoulder a chainsaw to where a pine has fallen in my forest and make logs of it and fill a trailer. Odd days a flock of pilgrims in hiking boots will ask for directions, or a newly married couple will have their wedding snaps taken among my groves, or some unfortunate will beat a track to my door selling matchboxes off the bar of his bicycle. After the sun falls suddenly, I draw all drapes to block out the dark and make up a daybed for myself just off the kitchen. But there are nights, I confess, when it catches up with me again. I bring down the box of discs. I listen to myself. Not everything, or not everything any more. Time was I could listen in entirety, in sequence, until the grey before sunrise entered the house and the land without began twittering. Now I go back only to the moments of desperation, when the man I was back then is at pains to clear his name.

‘And you insist that you had no previous knowledge of the family, in any significant way?'

When Curtin speaks, there is compassion in his voice. It was my definite feeling at the time that he believed me. Or that he at least trusted my fundamental innocence. Nothing has changed that sense. When he speaks, he sounds as if he is trying to help me.

‘In no significant respect,' I say. Initially, I seem determined to respond to them in their own terms. ‘No.'

‘Meaning?'

The younger one says this, from the margins. He sounds farther from the mic. His voice is sharper, couched in echoes, like a nail rattling around inside a tin can. It has a sniping quality to it. He never speaks complete sentences. He fires words, fragments, whenever he thinks he has me.

‘Meaning,' I say, with some mild amusement, ‘I had no knowledge of the family.'

‘Not what the librarian says.'

I say nothing and my reticence, I concede, sounds uncomfortable. I remember feeling acute embarrassment then. I doubt how much they know. Until they tell me, I'm pretending to have no idea what they mean. Curtin resumes where his junior colleague has left me dangling.

‘It seems the librarian in the town has come forward with details of your
research
.' There is an infinitesimal pause there, before that final word is pronounced so particularly. The pronunciation is clearly a matter of delicacy, nothing meaner, and yet the younger one can be heard to guffaw in the background. ‘What might you like to tell us about that?'