Nothing On Earth (6 page)

Forty-eight hours. That was what they said. Over ninety per cent of missing-persons cases got resolved within forty-eight hours. Within a week, a close-up of Helen – squinting, lakeside, Martina's arm visible around her shoulders like an ermine collar – was on posters everywhere.

You never know how you might react until it happens. The odd thing is, nobody cried. Or, at least, Martina could remember none of the others crying. She had, initially, to herself, in the spare room. But Paul seemed too intent on looking after his daughter, and the girl seemed too wrapped up in whatever screen was before her. After the authorities and the posters, after several articles in provincial papers and a brief notice in one of the nationals, nobody said anything really. Martina didn't want to upset them by continually talking about her sister, but kept hoping that Paul or the girl would. When nobody did, it occurred to her that maybe their reticence was out of consideration for her. Maybe, as a form of kindness, they were waiting for Martina to raise it. Gradually, a dazed, muted normality reconvened, in which Helen's disappearance went weirdly unmentioned.

Maybe the really odd thing was Paul occasionally calling his daughter Helen. At first it was just a mistake, that commonplace parent's slip of the tongue. The girl stopped correcting him. She seemed to like being called by her mother's name. She said so and Paul forgot that he was mixing them up. Even Martina, who could see how weird it was, called her Helen on a couple of occasions as well. Sometimes that was the only way you could get the girl's attention. Other times it felt like keeping Helen, the real one, nearby.

She surfed nights on sites for missing persons. This was some people's world, belonging to a family member who had disappeared, keeping one another afloat with the Xs of strangers' chatroom kisses and groundless hope. It was one of those nights, prompted by the officers' questions, that she wrote to Ute. The Ute she found, the one most likely to fit the bill, was under ‘Features' with the state broadcaster. It wasn't true what Martina had said in the email, that she had been writing around to all the people Helen knew. There was nobody else to write to.

Martina and the girl sunbathed out the back. The days were still cloudless, searing. They rose late, long after Paul had left, ate muesli on beanbags in front of some chat-show or antique weepie, tidied around the kitchen and basked away the rest of each day on beach towels on the patio. There was no work happening on site. By early afternoon, the sun had moved around to the back of the house and cast the slatted shadows of fences across the garden's parched muck.

Most afternoons Marcus would text, asking when he was going to see her again and why she had stopped visiting at nights. He addressed her, in every text, as ‘babes', which made her feel ancient. It was, indeed, possibly the very first thing ever to make her feel ancient. The endearment post-dated her: she had never known anybody call anybody ‘babes'.

‘Who was that?' the girl would ask.

‘Nobody.'

‘Again?'

She gently pressed a finger on her niece's nose. She said, ‘Keep that out, missy.' She wasn't sure if the girl had ever realized about herself and Marcus, and she would have been mortified by the idea of trying to explain. She kept her phone on vibrate on the counter top in the kitchen, so that its drone was loud and unmistakable even when she was out in the sun.

‘There's nobody also!' The drone had become unmistakable to the girl. ‘What must he want?'

‘Nothing.'

‘You're not texting back?'

‘Very little credit. Nosy!'

Martina took redundancy at the software plant. Her boss, given the circumstances, negotiated a minuscule package on her behalf. She bought creepers and trellis wire for the back wall. She bought sun-loungers in the discount supermarket off the ring road. They walked there: two miles max, and yet she had to drag her niece by the hand for the last bit. They both wore baseball caps and were drenched with sweat by the time they arrived. The supermarket's inside seemed black at first. Its air-conditioned temperature came as a relief. Once their eyes adjusted to the indoor murk, they could see that the produce wasn't shelved. It was just piled high on pallets you had to climb up onto to pull things down. Some of the ‘Special Offer' signs hanging from the ceiling were in a language neither of them recognized or could decipher. All the food came in wrapping that looked off-colour, in brand names that sounded fractionally to one side of what you would expect. The sun-loungers were flat-packed, down at the end. She got a trolley, squeezed two of the loungers into it, and phoned for a minicab. They sheltered in the porch, until someone shouted, ‘Martina,' from out there in the glare. She gave him a ten, though the fare was nowhere near that, and said not to bother about the change. He asked her, ‘Are you not the lassie who went walkabout?'

‘Who went . . .?'

‘Walkabout.'

‘Walkabout?' The girl started giggling and Martina had to nudge her several times across the back seat. The driver must have read about Helen in the paper. ‘Am I not the lassie who went walkabout? I am of course! Just over here, thanks. We'll go walkabout from here.'

‘You're welcome back.' He winked into the rear-view mirror, as if he was equally in on the joke.

‘You're very good,' she said.

The driver insisted on hauling the boxes from the boot. He gave her the card of his minicab firm.

‘Ask for Dermie, and Dermie'll be there in a jiffy.'

‘Let me guess. You wouldn't be Dermie by any chance?'

‘No flies on you!'

Dermie was five nothing, a navy anorak fading at the elbows that smelt of the inside of his cab. He asked if the girls would manage to assemble the sun-loungers. Martina had to apologize for her niece. ‘Something else,' she said. ‘Private joke. You're as good.'

Dermie shouted up to them, from the driver's door, ‘I'd kill to see you stretched out on one of those.' He was gesturing at the boxes. He meant the sun-loungers. He meant Martina. She waved and muttered that his name sounded like a skin disease.

She went topless. They had always gone topless before. Everyone did. Paul was at work all day, the girl accepted her going topless as second nature, and it wasn't as if there were many neighbours to scandalize. She had a bright silk scarf that she knotted across herself as a bikini top in case there was the stir of someone else around or Flood rang the doorbell, which he hadn't done in a while. Marcus didn't get there until six. They had the place to themselves all afternoon. The girl could be nervous. More than once she was convinced that she saw something flitting between the fences that partitioned the rear gardens. How could she not be nervous, after everything that had happened? Martina, as was always her way, made light of the shadows. She did it for her own sake as much as for anyone else's, but you would never have guessed that.

‘Probably just Dermie,' she would yawn. She talked about Dermie as if they were lovers and wedding bells weren't far off. ‘I told him to come around the back if there was no answer.'

‘In his anorak?'

‘Hope so. I love a man in an anorak.'

Slattery too. Slattery was their other phantom. Any peculiar happening or sound was blamed straight away on Slattery or on Dermie or on both of them. A gate unbolting down the way, or a call that was dead by the time Martina could press ‘answer', was Dermie or Slattery. Or, when things got particularly silly after a day pickling in the screaming sun, it was George and Georgina, still on the mantelpiece and spoken of like elderly relatives Martina did messages for. Or it was all of them at once, sniffing around the margins like a pack of dogs.

‘I don't care who sees,' she said once. ‘They can have a good peep for all I care.'

‘That's what
Mutti
said about you.'

Martina pushed her sunglasses back onto her hairband, propped herself on her elbows and shaded her eyes. The girl hadn't mentioned her mother once since her disappearance. She was smirking when she said that, or seemed to be. Not meanly, more teasing. Martina could hardly see her since the sun was directly behind her head. She was a silhouette, a blind spot, an eclipse. She seemed to be sitting upright, head bowed, playing with beads or something between her legs.

‘What did your
Mutti
say about her darling sister? Tell me.'

‘She said that you loved being gawked at.'

It was true. Martina knew it was true that Helen had said that from the word the girl used. ‘Gawked' was pure Helen. Or, rather, it was the kind of word Helen had loved using. The longer they'd spent over beyond, the more Helen sprinkled her conversation with quaint words that their father would have spoken, that had made her homesick and eventually a little sweet on Flood.

‘That's what your mam said? That I like being gawked at?'

‘That you
love
being gawked at.' The girl shaded her own eyes and turned her face up to the dome of azure.

‘The cheek of her.' Martina said it to let the girl know that it was okay, that she was forgiven, that Martina thought it was funny. ‘I'll be ancient long enough and nobody will want to gawk at me then. I might as well enjoy it while they do.'

Paul's mother and father visited, just for the day. The mother didn't take off her coat once. Deep red, woollen, it stayed buttoned to her throat all afternoon. The father had trailered a few bits that had lain untouched in Paul's old room: a dog-leg computer desk, a filing cabinet painted grey gloss, a giant chrome-plated fan. Paul and his father carried them into the front room. Paul, knowing his father was no longer supposed to lift heavy objects, said that he could move them upstairs piecemeal later on.

Martina put a gingham cloth on the picnic table. She asked Paul to wheel in the leather swivel computer chair that had come in the trailer. She said the two girls – she was including herself in the word – would sit on that. The rest sat on picnic chairs. Martina had asked Sheila to join them. Sheila said that it was lovely, whether or not it was.

‘It makes a lovely change from packing,' Sheila said.

‘Packing?' Martina asked.

‘I'm moving in with my daughter. I'll probably rent below.' Sheila patted Paul's arm. ‘You hold on to Harry's ladder, pet.'

‘You know Sheila's husband passed on recently,' Martina said to Paul's parents. She didn't want to say ‘died'. She recalled the phrase that everyone had used with them years ago, how odd and oddly acceptable ‘passed on' had become, until she could hear it in her own voice there at the table.

‘Ah, go on,' Paul's mother said. Martina couldn't remember Paul's mother's name. She couldn't ask, after all those years of being effectively family. ‘And this was only recently?'

That was what they talked about. Harry's passing on. Sheila sniffled a little, but otherwise looked chuffed to be able to recount the details once more. Paul's father had his mouth open, speechless, all the way through. Paul's mother had one leaf of lettuce suspended mid-air on a fork. Martina and Paul were the only ones on wine. She kept trying to catch his eye, to get a refill as quietly as possible, but Paul was too caught up in the story, even though he had heard it several times. Harry ‘melted'. That was the word Sheila kept using. Fit as a fiddle one day, at the doctor's the next, buried four weeks later. He just melted.

‘Paul?' Martina wiggled her empty lime-coloured picnic cup in his direction. ‘When you're ready.'

It was easy for Sheila, holding court like that. Everyone could listen to what she was saying without embarrassment. Harry was almost seventy-nine when he died. They had been together for over fifty years. There was a funeral that half the town came out for. Harry had had a proper send-off – one that made Sheila's stories possible.

‘You never know, do you?' Sheila had her hanky out. She was dabbing the corner of each dry eye. ‘Five weeks between the tests and the funeral.' Even Paul, who never seemed to notice anything he didn't have to, had stopped eating. ‘He was my best friend, and he just melted.'

Martina asked if anyone fancied coffee and drilled water from a bottle into the kettle. She had the leather seat to herself after that. The telly was on in the front room. For ages it looked like nobody was going to say a thing. Sheila was too absorbed in her own performance. Paul was staring at his parents, who had the look of people who had realized it was down to them, but neither could conjure a phrase to get there. They weren't grieving in any way that was visible, and they were maybe a bit embarrassed by that. They were anxious, they kept saying, to get most of the homeward route completed before dark. It wouldn't be dark until after ten, yet they were talking as if it was November. Helen wasn't their daughter. They didn't really care that much, but had just enough gumption to make it appear that they did, if only for their granddaughter's sake.

It was Sheila who asked, ‘What's the latest?'

‘Very little,' Paul said. ‘All we have is one possible sighting, walking on the ring road. Barefoot no less.'

Even then, his parents said nothing. They gazed gravely at the table, as if calculating how long they could reasonably leave it before heading.

‘I've posted lots of notices online.' Martina was determined not to let them off the hook. ‘Chatrooms, and stuff like that.'

‘Of course.' Sheila clearly hadn't a clue what she was on about. ‘And how will you manage?'

‘I've taken redundancy. Paul will keep working, for the time being.'

‘You're very good.'

Did Sheila mean Martina was accepting responsibility that wasn't really hers to accept? Martina had been dwelling on what the officers had asked her, wondering if there were rumours. She wanted to make it clear that she and Paul weren't together, an item. Once again, she hesitated until it felt too late, and then she immediately regretted that she hadn't said anything.