Nothing On Earth by Conor O'Callaghan Page A

of the shadows. She did it for her own sake as much as for anyone else’s, but you would never have guessed that.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜In his anorak?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I don’t care who sees,’ she said once. ‘They can have a good peep for all I care.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜What did your
Mutti
say about her darling sister? Tell me.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜That’s what your mam said? That I like being gawked at?’
    â€˜That you
love
being gawked at.’ The girl shaded her own eyes and turned her face up to the dome of azure.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜It makes a lovely change from packing,’ Sheila said.
    â€˜Packing?’ Martina asked.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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