Nothing on Earth

IT WAS AROUND about then that the door started banging. The wood shook with the banging. So did the letterbox’s brass-plated inward flap. Even the cutlery in its open drawer, the delft drying on its drainer, seemed to tremble a fraction. It was a time when nobody called. Early evening, the hottest August in living memory.

On the other side, on a doorstep in the middle of nowhere, stood a story everybody already knew. And the form that story took, as they say, on the evening in question? Breathless skin-and-bone, a girl of twelve or thereabouts. Her tummy, her breastbone, the edges of her ribs, were all visible. She looked like one who had neither eaten proper food nor inhaled fresh air for years. Her teeth were yellow, her nails uncut and filthy. Her skin was sunburned, except for those white lines that had been covered by straps. It was also marked in places, her skin was: scratches, creases, streaks of dirt, and words.

There were actual words scrawled around her skin, dozens in blue, frayed at the edges, blurred by sweat and largely illegible. The more blurred ones resembled bruises. The more intact were like little darns meant to mend those points where the fabric of her flesh had worn threadbare. The words were not confined to her hands and wrists either. They were scattered all over her, and they were hard not to stare at.

‘Come in.’

She was wearing fluffy panda slippers, a pair of light grey tracksuit bottoms smeared with black dust and food stains, and a man’s bomber jacket that was easily five sizes too baggy. She was wearing, also, an odd shade of lipstick: a red-brown that hadn’t been applied with any great care and served only to accentuate her air of wildness. Her hair was wavy jet black and quite long, halfway down her spine. But it had not, by the look of it, been washed for several weeks. Nor was her face particularly clean. Her eyes had black around them: liner, sure, but a lack of sleep as well. Their irises were a bottle green. Like emerald. The jacket hung down around her elbows, her whole torso exposed. A coloured silk scarf was knotted as a bikini around barely pronounced breasts.

And, of course, there were those words. The words had to have been in her own hand: they were in a childish print and they were upside-down, as if she had scribbled them on herself from above and given no thought to how they might look. It was impossible not to be a little scared of her. Which is crazy to say, considering that she was such a slip of a thing, and so obviously terrified herself. Terrified of what? Of me, I suppose, the man she had probably never set eyes on in her strange life before then, standing in front of her, inviting her to enter a nondescript dormer bungalow on a secondary road. Of the whole world, really. She noticed me trying to read the upside-down words in blue pen on her white skin and pulled the two sides of her jacket tight against her.

‘Come in,’ I said again, stepping backwards, holding my door open for her and gesturing with the other hand towards an invisible path past me that she, hesitantly, inched into. ‘Do.’

She had run very fast to my doorstep: she was panting heavily, and her skin was glistening with perspiration. When she passed me, I caught the sharp whiff of baked syrup, stale urine and pure, naked fear.

I won’t ever forget how that girl spoke. I still hear every word she uttered, precious few at first, in the weird intonation she had. She parked herself in an armchair in my front room, the one I usually sat in. She was perched on the edge of it, like a sick bird, and she was squeezing her jacket even tighter around herself.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Helen,’ she said. ‘What they say.’

‘What they call you?’

‘It is my mutti’s name.’

Her English had a sort of freeze-dried quality. It was as if her every phrase had only just been taken out of the vacuum packing it had lain in for years, and was found to be almost too well preserved. It felt parched and brittle, lacking any binding moisture. Every now and then she would pause, appear to redden and almost wait for approval or forgiveness before finishing. And yet there was still an occasional lilt that, I would come to realize, she must have gleaned from listening to her mother and her mother’s sister.

I went back into the kitchen, to get her a glass of something fizzy from the fridge. There was a tin of sweets lying on the table. I paused there, in my kitchen, and inhaled deeply to compose myself. I was just back, after performing the Saturday teatime slot. But on top of that was the shock of her hammering on my door, of the sight of her there on the step and the state she was in.

‘Now,’ I said, keeping my voice steady, returning to the front room with a glass of orange mineral and the tin of sweets. She was staring at the swirls in my carpet. ‘What’s all this drama?’

‘My papa is gone too.’ She tried very hard not to start crying when she said this. ‘One minute he is behind you. And next time he was gone.’

‘What do you mean, gone?’

‘Just gone. I looked all over the house.’

‘Did you try calling him?’

‘We have no more credit.’

It struck me, at the time, as one of several peculiar phrases she used. She said it as if credit were something held and frittered collectively, all at once. I couldn’t altogether get away from the phrase’s implication of belief or the lack of it. We have no more credit . . . Then there was that ‘too’ she had tagged onto her father’s disappearance. Somewhere, buried deep in that ‘too’, was a cluster of implicit acknowledgements: that this wasn’t a first; that she knew I knew that; and that she was aware of my and the whole town’s fascination with her family.

‘I’m sure everything will be fine,’ I told her. Even to myself, my words of comfort sounded trite, hollow as anything. ‘You did exactly the right thing, Helen.’ I remember how oddly puzzled she looked when I used that name. So I did it again, just to test her surface. ‘Settle yourself there, Helen, and I’ll make a couple of calls.’

The local garda station was on answerphone. It was always. The message gave the number for the station in the nearest big town which would have officers on duty. The number rang a dozen times before anyone answered. But answer someone did, eventually, and I spoke to them.

There have been some who have tried to imply that I never made any such call, that the girl would be with me yet were it not for the intervention of the authorities. It was me who called them, within twenty minutes of the girl banging furiously on my door, and my call was logged in their duty register.

The officer on duty sounded barely out of his nappies. He made no bones, initially, of letting me know that he thought I was as daft as a brush. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to run that one by me again,’ he kept saying, and I had to work hard to maintain my manners. I told him everything, standing in the hall, even pulling the door of the front room shut and lowering my voice so that I could explain fully without the girl overhearing. He fairly jumped to life once the connection registered.

‘Now,’ I said, more than a little put out by his attitude, ‘pass me on to somebody senior, like a good chap. You run off and process parking tickets.’

I could hear in the background a radio’s litany of football results from across the water. An older voice, one I didn’t recognize, came on the line. He said he remembered the particulars.

‘So himself is gone now,’ he said.

‘So she says.’

‘Since when is this?’

‘Since twenty minutes ago,’ I said. ‘Just came banging on my door, in a right state.’

‘Okay.’ I could hear his ballpoint clicking. ‘Sit tight,’ he said. This one seemed to grasp immediately the seriousness of what I was reporting. ‘I’ll have someone with you in the next half-hour.’

My cleaner was already out and about, collecting her three sons from football, when she answered. She sounded staggered it was me calling. I never called. She and her sons were with us within minutes. They all came in, the boys with sticky jerseys, flushed faces and orange ice pops, staring at the girl in the armchair. My cleaner addressed a handful of well-meaning questions to her, but got the barest of responses. The girl just sat there, her face blazing with embarrassment and anger, staring intently at the telly that I had switched on for her distraction.

One of the lads asked, ‘Where’s your dad?’

‘I don’t know,’ the girl said. In fact, I would say she growled it.

My cleaner made a face and I edged slightly towards the door. Though she was staring at the screen, there was the suspicion that the girl was still watching everything in the margins of her vision. We shepherded the lads back outside, where they climbed silently into a people-carrier.

‘The authorities are on their way,’ I whispered to my cleaner on the front step. ‘I’ll be sure to buzz you if there are any developments.’

I remember how bright it was standing out there, and how hot, with the sun just starting to set. There was also a lot of traffic at the supermarket across the road, voices and music through lowered windows, people getting stuff for their Saturday tea and tickets for the weekend lottery draw.

‘I’ll pop back later,’ she said. My cleaner, that is. She has asked me not to use her own name, or any name for that matter. ‘Not to leave you marooned with Madam.’ She was always thoughtful that way. ‘Himself should be back by then, and will be able to watch over these lads.’

The girl was still staring hard at the telly. I didn’t pay much attention to what was showing. Some early-evening film suitable for families. Some comedy about mismatched twins reunited after years apart.

‘Not long now,’ I said. ‘Someone will be over to help.’

She didn’t laugh once, not even when I did, at parts of the film that were hilarious. I was sitting opposite, my back to the big window, watching her as much as her film. Because the room faces west, the blind was scrolled down and the light we sat in was bright yellow. There wasn’t an ounce of air in the place.

‘Are we all fine?’ I was just making noise. ‘Do we need to use the loo?’

She made no attempt to acknowledge the fact that I had spoken, just sat where she was, filthy and stinking to high heaven, pretending to be engrossed in the film. The honey pouring through the blinds behind me was all over the room and its trinkets. It was all over her too, accentuating the minute freckles on the bridge of her nose and on her cheekbones, making the green of her eyes seem translucent, like seawater in shallows or rock pools. She looked for all the world like some ingénue being screentested in sepia of the classic era, conscious of scrutiny. Half an hour sitting there and she didn’t speak once or look my way, not until I heard the gravel in my drive crunch under tyres.

‘Thank you for coming.’

There were three of them in all: two men in plain clothes, including the last one I had spoken with, who was as ancient as myself; a second, far younger male; and a younger woman in uniform. The junior pair had, it transpired, met the girl before. I ushered them into the front room. The two men sat where I had been sitting. The uniformed woman stayed standing and asked, ‘Do you remember us from last time?’

‘No.’

They were terribly kind to her. How would they not be? They were all towering over her. She was very small, and by then without anybody in the world.

‘The first thing for us all to do is go back over and check the house,’ the older of the men said to the whole room. He held one hand out towards the girl and, to my surprise at least, she placed her own far slighter hand in his without hesitation and allowed herself to be pulled upright out of my armchair. ‘Chances are your dada is at the house as we speak, and wondering where you are, and going frantic with the worry.’

The uniformed woman stepped outside before the rest of us. ‘Thank you.’ She was addressing a cluster of ladies gathered at my gate. ‘Thank you now.’

They had seen the siren’s revolving violet. It is also possible, when I think of it, that my cleaner had said something to a friend and word had spread over the bush telegraph. The officer was trying to disperse them so that both cars, mine and their unmarked one in which the girl was sitting, could slip away. Though it was no great distance to the house from which the girl had run, it was agreed that we would take the cars. I let all the others leave ahead. I rolled down my window at the gate and listened.

‘Does she need anything?’

‘The poor pet.’

‘Has she somewhere to stop for the night?’

‘You’re all very good,’ I said. ‘Really.’ I meant it. ‘But I don’t imagine it will come to that.’ I released the handbrake and lifted the clutch to the bite. ‘Go on about your evenings. Everything will be grand.’

I still think of that moment, even now, as the beginning. A good deal happened before that point, but none of it belonged to me. From my own perspective, I keep returning to that moment, when my car inched forward out of my gate and bumped onto the tarmac of the road, as the point of no return: the engine labouring upwards, my hands clammy on the wheel, the posse of ladies in the rear-view mirror, the brake lights of the other car fraying around the bend in the distance.

I knew all about that family. Everyone knew all about them: young people just returned after years out of the country and surviving out there in something resembling wilderness. Their story had been all over the local papers. There had been a lot of speculation, idle largely, and wide of the mark. I liked to think that I knew more than most. I had seen them from a distance, many times. It might be truer to say that I had observed them. Once, at their neighbour’s insistence, I had tried calling and had watched them briefly from close quarters. I had done some research of my own. Soon after materializing on my doorstep, that girl would tell me far more than I cared to hear and I would come to realize how little I had known. And maybe, yes, I would in time remember more than even she could possibly have known or told me.

The close was only a half-mile farther out the road, and it took me no more than a minute to get there, but I was never more alone than in that minute or so between my gate and that close. It seemed to drag on for hours, that minute. Only gradually did the ladies recede behind me, and when I finally rounded the long bend, their car had already parked up ahead and everyone was standing waiting for me. Beyond them, the light and shadow of the diminishing hills looked tempting.

I let the car slow naturally, on its gears, indicated towards the other side and ground to a standstill on the white line at the centre of the road, the way you would with oncoming traffic, though there was none. If I am honest, I would even say that I already felt guilty. Why? I had done nothing. I had done nothing apart from let the girl in, call the law and wait. I hadn’t laid a finger on her.

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