Nothing On Earth by Conor O'Callaghan

Author:Conor O'Callaghan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473540378
Publisher: Transworld

5

YOU KNOW THOSE stories, where the child is lost in the wilderness and presumed dead? For years her family keeps returning. Eventually, their hope dwindles. The family disintegrates: the mother remarries, the father lives alone. Then a creature wanders into the nearest village, semi-feral and with scant language. The villagers form a circle and stare. Someone asks questions she doesn’t answer, or can’t. Someone else remembers the family who came on holiday many moons ago and lost a daughter in the mountains, who kept returning to find her. One man, who had been acquainted with the family, had been employed as a guide even, recalls the girl’s name, and the sound the name’s word makes when said aloud is met by a flicker of recognition in her.

That’s what it was like. It was as if she had come running, for all she was worth, out of some urban legend or ‘real life’ story in one of those magazines you read in a doctor’s waiting room. The first door she happened on was mine, and she banged on that, and sat with me in my front room, and waited for the law to arrive, and answered a few routine lines of enquiry, and agreed to accompany us all back to her house.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

The older one in plain clothes, who appeared to be in charge, squinted slightly in my direction.

‘I had to say something to the ladies at the gate,’ I said.

Still he said nothing, and still I felt obliged to explain myself for some reason, in spite of that little voice inside pleading with me to stop apologizing.

‘Sorry for keeping you.’

Because of the barriers the builder called Flood had erected across the entrance to the close, we left the cars outside and pushed our way through. It was still good and bright. The girl had the key so tight in her hand, since bolting from the house, that its ridges left sore-looking imprints inside her fist. It didn’t matter: the front door to her house was still open.

I was the only one who stayed outside, by my own choosing.

‘I’ll wait outside,’ I said.

‘If you’re sure.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’d only be in the way.’

I could hear the officers shouting into each of the rooms before entering. Every once in a while I glimpsed shapes flitting across a window, and torchlight piercing those spaces that were shaded from the setting sun. It may be the exaggeration of hindsight, but there did seem to be something about the place. Call it an air, an eerie soundlessness, if you will. They were in there a good quarter of an hour and, in all that while, standing waiting on the bricks of their dusty drive, I scarcely heard a peep from the town or the ring road or its Saturday-evening traffic. The site was an absolute state, no tar laid, rubble everywhere, windows with holes in them, doors gaping, scraps of plastic and wiring and chalkboard, the skeleton of a car ploughed into a hill of muck.

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