Read Nothing On Earth for Free Online Page B

she held out her free hand to him. ‘Please come in.’
    That was more of it. The light not working on the patio, the outline of a face at the end of the garden, the rooms too hot to get a proper night’s sleep. She thought that she could even hear cicadas. There couldn’t have been cicadas anywhere near. It must have been just a memory from their previous life, of the noise of cicadas from forests all around the apartment complex, that millions-deep, deafening chorus.
    Paul said to lie on. It sounded like he was getting dressed when he said it. He knew she hadn’t slept much in the night, he was mumbling, and there was nothing that needed doing. She heard the door slam, his bike whirr down the close.
    For twelve years Helen had looked on from the fringes of Paul’s life, his college peers and his work colleagues. However much he tried to include her, from the moment the girl was born she experienced the parties in basement flats and wine-bar Christmas bashes with all the sadness of a revenant. She was always there and not there. She could see and hear everything, but her own words never seemed to land on the far shore and she drifted through those rooms with invisibility’s weightlessness.
    The girl called up that it was almost noon. They walked in single file. The automatic door of the supermarket didn’t open. There wasn’t even a reflection. What had been Flood’s phrase?
Wasting away
. Only when the girl arrived, ten paces behind, did the door’s two halves slide apart.
    â€˜Will there be,’ a woman behind the counter asked, ‘anything else?’
    â€˜Excuse me?’
    â€˜Anything at all?’
    The road home was hot and depopulated, as if the whole world was observing a siesta. The only noise was the gravel beneath their sandals. That and the grating scream of steel being cut in the distance. The girl ate on her beanbag, speaking into her laptop’s screen. Its drum-beats and distortions, its frequent high-pitched shrieks, like a courtyard with a peacock hidden in it, could be difficult to bear. The volume of the telly was up as far as it would go. That was on top of the cacophony of appliances in standby mode, the spring-loaded chains in the doors slowly forcing themselves shut.
    Even the colours in the photo of George and Georgina on the mantelpiece seemed loud: the mauve of her blouse, his sweater’s canary yellow, their white teeth, the sea’s sapphire, the solitary smoking peak behind them, the streaks of evening vermilion. At the precise moment the shutter fell, George was speaking and Georgina was laughing at whatever he was saying. His lips were shaped around a vowel, her eyes half closed, her head leaning back.
    â€˜Oh, now.’
    Their father used say that. Whenever he arrived first at the conclusion of some yarn and was waiting for the others to catch up, he would roll his fingers on the arms of his armchair and sigh, ‘Oh, now.’
    Outside, the bricks of their drive felt almost too hot for her bare feet. She could all but hear the earth cracking, the breeze blocks creaking under their own weight, the braids of fibre-optic cable suffocating underground. The close was a morgue. Sheila’s front room wobbled with artificial flame. No cars on the road. The supermarket, in passing, looked deserted. Somewhere out beyond the immediate horizon was light traffic, like the inner storm of a seashell pushed hard against the ear. Oh, now. The phrase kept buzzing in her head. Oh, now, oh, now . . .
    The ring road’s hard shoulder had tar dyed red. The only other souls about were two figures, walking as well, some distance behind. However much she tried to pick up speed, they seemed to have gained with each glance back. A man and a woman, treading the shimmer, appearing airborne even. The chrome logo of the software plant where Paul and Martina worked was blinding with the reflection. In there, somewhere, whichever way you looked at it,