Nothing On Earth (8 page)

‘Do you mind telling me what you think you're doing?' Even Martina was shaken by the anger in her voice. ‘Do you mind telling me who the hell you are?'

‘Now hold on a sec,' the woman said.

‘No harm done,' the man said.

‘We did ring the bell. There was no answer and the door was open.'

‘Was it?' She had the jacket wrapped tightly around herself. She wasn't even sure if the people were real. ‘Leave, please.'

‘Now hold on,' the woman said again. ‘We were led to believe that you were still open for viewing.'

‘Do we look as if we're open for viewing?'

‘No harm done,' the man said again, after they had descended and stepped outside. ‘I'll give Flood a ring and straighten out the crossed wires.'

Nothing ever happened about it. Flood didn't come to explain, and no other viewers appeared. Like everything else, it was never mentioned again. Then one evening at dinner Paul said that the show-house sign was gone. It could have been gone days, weeks, for all they knew. The couple viewing, along with Helen's disappearance, and Martina's thing with Marcus, and that one time in the bedroom between her and Paul, and Ute's email, and those words backwards on the patio window became a tide of unmentionables rising around them.

Martina started bringing things up to Marcus again. The first few times she left without saying a word, as if she were just popping up for ten minutes, and accidentally didn't get back until Paul and the girl had gone to bed. She remembered the question Helen had asked her coming home from the pictures and, after a fashion, took to calling its phrasing into the front room.

‘I'm heading up.'

There was no response from inside. She winced after saying it. At least she was being honest. She was no longer pretending to be making a flying visit. She could hear the quiz that Paul and the girl loved, the answers they murmured from their matching beanbags before the contestants answered, the murmur of the fan that Paul's father had brought. She had her own answer lined up in her head if Paul ever asked her. She was going to say that she felt safe. If Paul asked, or if the girl did, she was going to say that Marcus made her feel safe at night. But neither of them ever asked.

Marcus would step out of the caravan when he saw her coming: hard hat tilted back, hi-vis singlet and nothing underneath, baggy combats and hands in pockets. His way of speaking was the match of his uncle's.

‘There you are,' he would call, when she was within earshot. ‘I thought I should step out to greet you.'

‘You're a gent.'

Sometimes she would bake flapjacks and bring him up a plate. He liked those. He liked, as well, Helen's leftover body spray that Martina sometimes wore. He had a habit of biting and smiling at once. They sat inside the caravan, soaps on the portable. For the first few visits, they just talked. Marcus's father had died when he was small. Flood had been very good to him. Marcus was planning on going to London soon. There was nothing keeping him at home.

‘Nothing at all?'

The way he went red was just like Flood, the way he blushed and snuffed a small laugh and looked at the table between them.

‘Almost nothing.'

The second time Marcus said it, he pronounced ‘nothing' correctly. When they were just talking, about anything, and his heart was going slow, his soft country accent cut the sharp corners off words. But if it started getting somewhere, coming to a point, he seemed to complete pronunciations properly. She knew he would never initiate anything. She came around to his side of the booth and sat on his knee. She said, ‘Do you mind?'

‘By all means.'

‘By all means!'

When did he start using phrases like that? Trying to look educated to her! She got his top lip between her teeth and squeezed softly as if it was a strip of rubber, or squid more like. His breath tasted of instant coffee. His clothes smelt of industrial adhesive, in a sweet way. Its reek was in his skin. She went up with something on a plate, listened to him speak and sat on his knee. She never let it get too far. A lit caravan in an unfinished close was like a goldfish bowl. Midnight, or a quarter past at the latest. That was the curfew she stuck to, initially.

She didn't make much of an effort to start with. She went up in the shorts and flip-flops she had been wearing all day. A week or so of that and she changed. Jeans maybe, a nice top. The girl asked her if she was going out.

‘Not exactly,' she said. ‘I just have all these good clothes I never drag out any more.'

She would change before they sat to dinner, to make it seem that dinner was the reason she had changed. She had taken to serving it on paper plates, to save on washing up. She set aside one portion of whatever she had cooked in a flat sealed dish to bring up to Marcus, and stored it somewhere out of sight in case Paul asked who it was for. She was always the one who cleared the plates into the black bin bag that hung off the handle of the patio door.

She was capable, too, of seeing how they must have regarded her from their beanbags. At thirty, she was dressing up every night to go calling on a security guard just turned twenty, in a caravan on a close that was beginning to resemble some historic ruins. She wasn't only doing it, she was excited by it. The entire day had become a means of manoeuvring to this moment, when she pulled the front door in her wake and forced herself not to turn back towards the bay window.

‘There you are,' Marcus would always say.

Marcus gave her golf lessons. It was the second week, possibly the third, that she had been going back up. He had mastered the art of chipping pebbles through windows and seemed determined to teach her with his one club. He had bought orange plastic practice balls, with holes in them, especially for her. She wasn't fussed, but she could see that he had gone to trouble. Marcus stood behind her, fixed her grip, kept both arms around hers and made them swing. She was missing the balls and Marcus was cheering, ‘Fresh air!'

The balls were bouncing off the walls around the window's black cavity. She could feel him pressed against the back of her. She whooped when the last one disappeared.

‘What happens now?'

‘You have to go and get it.'

‘I'm not going in there on my own,' she said.

The ground was uneven underfoot. Something scattered in one of the upstairs rooms, though there were no stairs. He was stepping backwards, holding both her hands. His felt huge and cold. It was like being blindfolded. It was like pausing at the altar steps. They stopped only when Marcus's back bumped against solid wall.

‘Now,' he said, ‘let's see if you can find it.'

His buttons unfastened easily. He had no underwear on. She hunkered down, not wanting to kneel and get her jeans dirty, and opened her mouth as wide as she could. She steadied herself with one hand against the vague white of his thigh, and held tight with the other to stop him from pushing too far. He kept filling his lungs in short gulps, as if surfacing repeatedly for air. He smelt, down there, of nothing other than chlorine. She could taste her own lip-gloss smearing on his skin and on her tongue. Her ankles were aching. An image of the tidal pool she and Helen had bussed to one Sunday morning, of her sister's aquamarine one-piece bathing suit, was flitting through her head. She hummed surprise. She had forgotten how young he was. She assumed that she had ages yet. It came in a cluster of waves and she concentrated on inhaling through her nose, for fear of drowning. It tasted of salt and sweat, of kelp and seawater. It tasted like a colour. Light grey. It tasted of what a mouthful of light grey must taste of.

‘I'm very sorry,' he said. ‘Are you all right?'

He said that in the caravan. He had made a bed of where the table had been and spread an unzipped nylon sleeping bag over them.

‘I'm grand.' She was laughing, pleased it had happened so quickly. She enjoyed the suddenness, the force of it. ‘It was lovely.'

She slept in fits and starts. He did several checks of the site. After each, he came back and lay around her. Once, she woke to find him standing over a boiling kettle.

‘Tea.'

He lay on top of her sometime around dawn. He hadn't asked and she didn't make to stop him. His trousers were already down around his ankles. She could hear the buckle of his belt tinkling. She was bearing, she felt, all his weight. It was longer than the first time, but not by very much. The tea was strong and lukewarm.

‘Where are you off to?'

‘It's six o'clock,' he said. He had the strap of a rucksack across one shoulder. He was hooking the strap with his thumb. ‘My shift's over.'

‘Do I just lock up?'

‘Just pull the door behind you.'

Evenings took the same routine. Martina had cooked before Paul got home, had changed and laid paper plates on the picnic table. Somewhere between supper and the late news, she called through the same words and the door latch clicked and her shadow disappeared up the close. They would have turned in before she got back, whenever that would be.

She knew the inside of that caravan too well. She became intimate with its every detail. There was the bed, which doubled as a table and bench seats, framed on three sides by brown-and-yellow curtains that were never open. The sleeping bag was shiny purple on the outside and sky-blue cotton on the inside. The kettle and portable were both gone. His hi-vis singlet dangled from a wardrobe door. There was a gas hob with two rusty rings and a cylinder under it, a biscuit tin with stale crumbs and dust. There was a bank calendar that was three years out of date, with a photo of a different fading landscape for every month. It never budged off June, even when July was well under way. It was always strand and ocean in the distance, a foreground of harebells and heather.

The light grew grey between four and five. She knew that it grew light between four and five because she wasn't always asleep then. Sometimes she was conscious, seasick. Sometimes she lay alone, watching light grey gradually filling the horizon, the close, the caravan. Where had Marcus gone? She could still feel the bulk of him on top of her, the thick blunt spike of him coring up into her. Where did everyone go?

She tiptoed up to the same townhouse. From the entrance she spoke Marcus's name into the interior black. No answer. She moved forward, stepping the way she had that one time when he had held both her hands and drawn her into him. She closed her eyes. It was just like her wedding day. She remembered closing her eyes for a moment after Paul, who had given her away, took one of her hands and asked her if she was ready. She surprised herself with the memory. Her sister had remembered everything for both of them. All the faces in the rows of seats on either side of the aisle, all turning towards them when the organ started bellowing in the choir balcony, and all the flowers up there at the altar gates. How did the girl, who was only a baby then, know what Helen's dress had been like?

When she opened her eyes again, there was a speck on the floor of the downstairs room of the townhouse. It was a tiny orange glow at first, like a planet light years out in space. The ball! It was the plastic golf ball that Marcus had brought and she, with him pressed hard behind her, had chipped through the window's black hole. It was the orange ball they had forgotten all about, and it was luminous.

She stood gazing at it for the longest time. The more she stood gazing at the ball, the huger its glow became. It drew all available light into itself and burned it like fuel. She could almost smell her skin burning, the singeing of her hair. You would never have imagined that there could be any light in there to draw upon, but there must have been. There must have been zillions of sparks and scintillas and rays and glimmers swimming around and yet so infinitesimal as to be invisible to her naked eye. Now they were being sucked into the magnetic field that the ball appeared to radiate. Now they were burning, being renewed and being burned again.

THE NEWS WAS
not good. Paul asked how long, as if he were looking at lit X-rays in a consultant's office. End of the week. The staff was skeletal. The operation was being moved to the East. Far or Near? Who knew? The guy even suggested that Paul would have been let go long before now, but for his circumstances.

‘My circumstances.'

‘You know.'

Paul shook his hand, left the building and ran to where his bike was locked, got honked at twice on the ring road, cutting across lanes, breaking lights. His daughter was standing out on the close's dust track in her pyjamas. ‘I felt safer outside,' she said.

‘What the hell is going on?'

‘She's not in her room.'

Paul let his bike go, and heard it hit the ground behind him. Up the stairs: Martina's humid room, his own, the girl's. He was shocked to find nothing; more than anything he was shocked to realize, once again, how disappointed he was to find nothing. There was no answer from the caravan. He picked up his bike from where he had dropped it and coaxed his daughter back inside, insisting that Martina would be back.

‘Simple reason?'

‘There is,' he said. ‘There has to be.'

He told her about the job. He said that he was delighted. To prove it, he burned his suit in one of the empty oil drums on the site. They sprawled out the back, splitting Martina's last small bottle of rosé from the fridge, as ribbons of black smoke from Paul's burning suit tangled upwards into the clear sky, and not once mentioning that there was still no sign of Martina. They slept in, were fairly silent over lunch and walked the mile and a bit that it took to reach the centre of the town from their close. It was mid-afternoon and they felt like aliens. It was, Paul said, like a coach tour of the Balkans, where you take a pit-stop in one of those dying hamlets that had been the centre of some medieval empire. A few upright chairs outside open terrace doors, bearing magazines so out of date they must be used as fans. A handful of lurchers sniffing around the base of a granite statue. A stack of bikes unlocked at the top of the street. The hum of a wireless through someone's open window.