Read Online Nothing On Earth by Conor O'Callaghan - Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜And what was she wearing?’ Martina asked, smiling, thinking she had finally got it and was happy to play along.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜So be it.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜I’ve no idea,’ she said. ‘Say nothing to your daddy.’
    â€˜Sure?’
    â€˜He has enough on his plate.’
    â€˜His plate?’
    She filled a basin with warm suds and washed the window