Nothing On Earth Read Free Page B

his index finger. ‘Used own this land.’
    It was true what she had said. She preferred being surrounded by others’ things. For days after, she replayed her conversation with Flood. For some reason she didn’t fully understand herself, she had expected from him a smile of assent, not the bewildered sideways shift she’d got. Gradually, the way you do, she created a version in which Flood was mildly curious, enough to ask her what she meant. The belongings of strangers came with a history, she would tell him. The history made a kind of noise around those things. She preferred that second-hand noise to the silence of the new. It was reassuring. That was why she agreed to holding on to the show house’s flotsam: the coffee-table, the bed, the couple scissored from a pensions brochure . . . That was why she held on to them all.
    A door shut, of its own accord, somewhere on the ground floor. Everyone was definitely in bed. She lay for the guts of an hour beside Paul, just listening, to see if it would happen again. She stopped on the third step from the bottom and, almost embarrassing herself, asked of the darkened hallway, ‘Hello?’
    From the next house up there was a sound. It was like a hollow ball hopping off the chimney breast. It was so faint at first that she wasn’t sure if there was a sound at all or just the memory of a sound like it. She slid a beanbag over to the bay window and knelt on it, her elbows on the windowsill. It took a while, but gradually her eyes adjusted to the dark outside, which was fairly watery anyway. The greys of the bare blocks differentiated themselves from the black of slates and windows. There was no light in the caravan. There were pools of hardened cement and chalk. Lots of weeds had sprouted up around the townhouses; ragwort mostly, but she had seen a few poppies too. Frayed tyres, a mangled aluminium ladder, shale and random scattered scraps of timber and scaffold. Hours the sound went on, or seemed to, a rhythmic thudding that was slight but still insistent enough to tremble the glass on George and Georgina in their frame. Then it just stopped. She stayed there until the enamel light that precedes sunrise had made everything vaguely visible, expecting whoever it was to emerge at any second and walk across the close. It was going to be another roasting day.
    She posted a notice about child-minding on the community board in the supermarket halfway into town. She walked there with the girl for something for lunch and brought a card that they had made. The man at the till asked to read it first before it went up. There had been a few complaints recently about the nature of the notices.
    â€˜The nature of them?’
    â€˜What they said,’ the man said, ‘type of thing.’ The man was being delicate. ‘What they’re advertising.’
    There was a handful of shoppers, all queuing along the cooked-meats counter. Even so, the man served Helen first.
    â€˜These are before me.’ She was pointing at the others queuing.
    â€˜You’re grand,’ he said. The other shoppers neither agreed nor complained. ‘We’ll let you go ahead.’
    An opening behind the man led through to the serving side of a bar or a lounge of some description. She could see a mop, and rows of unopened minerals and tonics. The lunchtime news was warbling in the background. The silver outline of a pool table shone in the murk. The man was looking at her gazing through the door open at his back. He asked, ‘Everything okay?’
    â€˜Everything’s fine,’ Helen said.
    She told Sheila about putting the notice up in the supermarket. She told her later the same week, a morning they had agreed to go down to number three for coffee.
    â€˜You’re great,’ Sheila said.
    â€˜Am I?’
    â€˜You are, love. You’re great.’
    Sheila had her gas fire switched on, as in the depths of winter, an armchair pulled over beside it,