Names for Nothingness Read Online Free

negative,’ Sharn would tell him, and when she was happy she would say it with delight, leaning forward to kiss him as she spoke.
    But when the hard times came, her words were impatient, his inability to face up to reality became the mark of a fool, and he would flinch under the sharpness of her tongue.
    He knows where it is, the third box on the fourth shelf, the label: Sharn, Sharn, Sharn, the first footage he ever shot of her, sixteen years ago. He had brought his camera with him, hiding it in the bottom of his bag when they arrived (suddenly aware that he did not want to put his own creativity under Simeon’s gaze), bringing it out only when he met with her, away from the others. She is sitting outside her shack with Caitlin, washing her daughter in a tub of water, scrubbing the river mud off her, her long, curly black hair damp with sweat. She glances up as he approaches but the directness of her gaze does not last for long. She was changeable with him at that time. Forthright one minute, gently confiding the next, and then distant, as though she had no interest in him whatsoever.
    It is Caitlin who registers delight. Jumping out of the tub, she runs towards the camera, her arms wide, her naked body wet and still smeared with mud. He remembers how he dropped the camera (the last few seconds of footage show a blur of grass, yellow green rearing up towards the lens) and ran, only to let himself be caught by her moments later.
    This is the reel that he has marked out as a possible first. The beginning of his labour of love, an editing together of their life in an attempt to immerse himself in what he would like to see as reality. This is what he has been doing on all the days he has been pretending to work, and it is a task that has, until recently, absorbed him. But he knows that it cannot go on forever, the money he borrowed from Margot has almost gone, and he flinches at the thought of confessing to Sharn that he is once again without work.
    More pressing still is the question of Essie.
    She meets his glance in the rear-vision mirror as he finally starts the car. He has been sitting without moving for some time now, he has no idea for how long. This is what he does. Time seems to just drift through his fingertips.
    â€˜Ba,’ she tells him, slipping her thumb out of her mouth to utter the syllable, and he agrees with her, yes, it is a bus, rounding the corner up in front of them.
    He does not even know what her name is, the name that Caitlin used (if any) when she held her, a tiny baby in her arms, because he hadn’t been there when Sharn had gone to bring Caitlin home. Essie is just a name they made up after Sharn admitted to not knowing what she was really called (‘she didn’t tell me, she wasn’t speaking, no one was, she only told me to take her’), and because of this he does not use it often.
    She is looking out the window, an old T-shirt of Caitlin’s clutched in her hands, and he croons to her, softly, under his breath. The nursery rhymes that he used to sing – still there, lodged in his heart.

S HARN HAD ONLY BEEN AT SASSAFRASS for two months when she went into labour. It came on so fast; she was down on all fours and vomiting, and there was no time to get over to the house for help. It was Simeon who heard the screams, and he halted the workshop, momentarily, to get Mirabelle.
    â€˜Go to her,’ ‘he said, quick.’
    And she did.
    When Sharn remembers that afternoon, it is the screams that she hears. First her own and then Caitlin’s, a piercing newborn howl.
    The heat was unbearable, and the blood and the stench, and she could neither move nor call out, don’t leave me, as Mirabelle stepped out into the milky haze of the day.
    â€˜I’ll fetch water,’ she said, ‘from the river,’ but Sharn knew she just wanted to get away, and as she watched Mirabelle disappear she held that baby in her arms, her tiny head rolling back on