The End of Nothing by Conor Griffin (Shortlisted)

It was the day before his release, and as was tradition on their wing, a gathering had been organised in his honour. Though the storeroom was mostly dark, he had a sense of where others were and they of him, and as always he sat with his back to the cold wall. After so many of these secret meetings, they all knew this cramped and cluttered space so well they could see it with eyes closed. Through the gloom and shadows, careful hands passed him the blackened plastic bottle. He flicked the lighter’s spark wheel and inhaled through the biro casing melted onto the bottle’s side, the smoke feeling like a living thing in his mouth and throat as he drew it down into him. In the flame’s weak light he saw flickering versions of those waiting their turn, all of them eyeing him and the bottle with quiet impatience. Slow bliss even before the smoke was out of his lungs, and as he’d avoided these occasions for months, he was already nodding catatonic before one of the others took it from his useless hands.

‘Ah man,’ the next in line said after their own inhalation, ‘ah man,’ and he wanted to agree with the sentiment but he didn’t have words.

In their cramped space, music played low from a small radio or a phone. Trance, the sound tinny and self-contained, all treble, and he floated away with it into the air, drifting around on the brittle melody above himself like the smoke. Fragments of random thoughts. Shards of the past. Things almost forgotten. His father often said that Arrigo Sacchi worked as a shoe salesman before becoming a football manager, as though there was an obvious but unspecified life lesson in this. How many more times, Dad? Michelangelo was the turtle who liked pizza, carried nunchaku and coined the term ‘Cowabunga’. His brother Séimí’s breaths would sometimes make a whistling sound when he fell asleep in the back of the car, his head

resting against Darren’s arm until it was numb and no longer felt like his own. His brother would never reach the age of eleven.

He stayed in his sister Naoise’s apartment for the first few weeks after his release. They spent time together without talking much about anything. She cooked for him and they watched television in the evenings. Without ever stating that she was doing so, she censored their viewing, switching between comedies and gameshows, and avoiding news bulletins or dramas. Over those first days he wasn’t able to leave the apartment without her. This specific vulnerability was never stated but tacitly understood, as she stayed physically closer to him than she ever had. Sometimes they walked in the nearby park and it seemed to him that he was being observed even when there was nobody else in sight. In public he felt the movement of his limbs became overly rigid like his joints needed to be oiled, his stiff posture and demeanour blunt messages for other people.

On his first night there, unable to sleep, he had heard her footsteps padding across the hall to the door of his bedroom. A key had turned in the lock and he had walked to the door. He could sense that she was still on the other side, that they were facing each other, the few inches of the now-locked door’s width all that was between them. He could feel the pressure of her weight on the same floorboard he was standing on. He could hear the rhythm of her even breaths above the pulsing of his own blood. After a moment she unlocked it again, and he heard her footsteps as she walked away. It had been an act of love as he knew that she couldn’t lose him again so quickly, but she had immediately realised how fucked up it was. Neither of them ever mentioned it and it was never repeated, so that sometimes he even questioned if it had actually happened.

His presence felt like an invasion of her life. When he arrived, there was a second toothbrush in the bathroom, a second pair of slippers in the hall and a second bathrobe on the back of the bathroom door. They gradually disappeared without explanation that first week. He wondered who these possessions belonged to and if he was the reason that the person was no longer there and if their absence was temporary and dependent on him or if they’d ever return. He didn’t even know if they belonged to a man or a woman. He wanted to ask many questions but, really, it was none of his business and of course she never raised the subject. He could see why she would want to keep any important relationship separate to limit the chance of it becoming contaminated. He didn’t probe further.

She brought him shopping for new clothes. He said that the jeans and t-shirts that he tried on seemed too tight, and she told him that fashions had changed over the eight years.

‘Only farmers wear bootcut jeans now,’ she said. ‘Farmers and everybody from Kilkenny.’

The corners of her mouth turned up as she said this, but overall she was more serious than he’d remembered, as though she had come to realise that her adolescent cynicism about the world and its workings had been all too accurate, but that this discovery was still a disappointment because underneath the currents of youthful piss and vinegar, she had really been hoping for better. Or maybe he was just being overanalytical, as in the many cavernous silences between them, there was too much gaping space to fall into, too much time to think.

They took a trip with their mother to West Cork for the weekend. She hugged him suddenly when they collected her and his arms hung loose by his sides like they were covered in oil or paint and he didn’t want to smear her. It was off-season, February, and Naoise had booked hotel rooms for them in a village by the Atlantic. They drove along the coast, stopping at various viewing points from which it was too misty to see anything beyond the vague, milky suggestion of mountains or sea or headlands. They weren’t appropriately dressed for the weather and got drenched in the ceaseless drizzle at each site, and they dried out again in the car’s heat before repeating the same routine at the next stop.

The same as during her prison visits, his mother didn’t ask him anything about what had happened. She made no reference to it at all. She was edging towards retirement, only working part-time in the nursing home by then. She seemed increasingly insulated from the world, her spikes blunted. She was quietly proud of Naoise’s career success, subtly deferential to her in a way that she hadn’t been in the past, the tension that used to exist between mother and daughter largely gone. Maybe she no longer reminded her of herself so much and this made things easier between them.

They ate in the hotel bar, which was the only kitchen serving food in the off-season, and their mother returned early to the room she was sharing with Naoise. Darren and Naoise walked down to the water, a bitter cold blowing off it and biting into their faces as the halyards of the boats clanked against their masts in the near-darkness. They walked back up to the single open pub. It was almost empty, an American student the only other customer. An old three-bar heater fought a losing battle against the draughts from the door and windows. Darren took a seat and Naoise brought over a glass of red wine for herself and a pint of lager for him. They didn’t take off their coats. They eavesdropped on the conversation between the American and the barman. The American was talking about his writing, and how the pedestrian pace of life in the village and the distance from the rat-race of the faraway city he came from had allowed him to discover his true voice for the first time. Her back to the bar, Naoise rolled her eyes and Darren smiled back when he could. He was used to hiding expressions in confined spaces and was paranoid that he’d be seen and challenged, so he changed the subject. There was a vintage Bisto advert on the wall, the two red-cheeked kids with their noses cocked in the air huffing a visible scent drifting from a kitchen window.

‘Do you remember after Séimí died when we used to mitch school?’ he said.

Those days were planned to the letter by Naoise. She would write a note addressed to their teachers on Basildon Bond notepaper, the script neater than either parent would have managed, the spelling and grammar immaculate. The notes would use a family occasion as an excuse for their absence, something that was never questioned given their recent bereavement. They would walk to a café and order sausage, beans and chips at 11am with apple tart for afters. While they waited for their food they would peruse the dog-eared Argos catalogue that Naoise brought everywhere in her schoolbag, imagining what they would purchase if they were gifted £1,000 each, Naoise favouring high-end stereo equipment and accusing Darren of choosing quantity over quality with his scattergun list of board games, camping equipment, action figures from BBC cartoons he’d never seen on their two-channel television and random gear for sports he’d never played.

They would then go to the cinema, paying for the early film and usually staying for the next. Throughout those days, which seemed endless given their ages and the fact that the hours were theirs and nobody else’s, Darren was never able to fully relax, always fearing that they were on the verge of being rumbled by a figure of authority, be it a teacher, waitress or cinema usher. But there was a confidence about the way every part of these excursions were executed by Naoise that meant that the adults they encountered knew better than to challenge her.

‘I used get the money from the jar Mam had in the wardrobe,’ Naoise said.
‘Whatever few quid was left over from the fundraising for Séimí. I knew she was never going to spend it. A day on the doss. I felt it was the least you deserved.’

‘The least I deserved?’
‘The least we deserved. Slip of the tongue. Whatever.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, and then, only to tackle the silence that felt it might consume them:

‘Do you remember the wishing tree?’

The hawthorn had overhung an ancient holy well that had long since dried out and been capped with concrete. Sundays, they would take Séimí there. It was all they had left.

As was the tradition, scraps of clothing and keepsakes of the afflicted were attached to the tree’s branches with string, staples, elastic, catgut, glue, nails, screws and snarls of audio tape. They cut one of Séimí’s Power Ranger t-shirts into thin strips and tied them each week in the disappearing spaces between the rest of the clutter brought by others. Rosary beads and ribbons, tarnished chains and holy medals. Dummies and toothbrushes and combs. Figurines and bracelets and earrings. Novenas and handwritten prayers illegible through condensation- bubbled clear plastic. Cigarette lighters and glinting fragments of a Kenny Rogers CD. Reading glasses and hearing aids and ferrules from the end of crutches. A television’s remote control. Candles and glass crystals. Vials of blood and spit and Christ knows what. Faded, plastic flowers and old bottle tops. A laminated All-Ireland Final ticket stub and the hat from Monopoly. A rusting prosthetic leg lashed onto the trunk with bandages.

Over the months, the tree became more hunched, the ever-lengthening metres of tourniquets killing its further growth, its branches drooping, the trunk’s bark studded with the silver and bronze coins that had been hammered into it.

Whatever prayers they said didn’t have set words and they never had much to say to the other visitors, nor they to them; they only seemed to hold a mirror to their own desperation and they didn’t much like the reflection.

Strangled with junk, the hawthorn’s branches dried out and weakened, buds no longer sprouting, until the day that they walked from the roadway through the worn path across two fields – Séimí in his father’s arms, kitten-weak – to find nothing left of it but a stump, a notice from the county council affixed to a post beside it.

‘Yes, Darren. I remember the fucking wishing tree.’

She was crying, this shocking to Darren given that she always kept any outward indication of her emotions in shackles. He wondered why the fuck he hadn’t just asked if there was still such a thing as an Argos catalogue. They didn’t say anything else and when she finished her wine they walked back to the hotel, Naoise two steps ahead of him the whole way like they were small children again and he was a burden who existed only to slow her down. He had barely made a dent in his pint. As surprising as it was to himself, he found that he was terrified of alcohol and the places where it might bring him.

Naoise had booked a room at the hotel for their father for their last night. He had promised that he would get the bus across from Cork city to meet them. He hadn’t visited Darren in over two years. Naoise had said that he was now living on disability benefit. She didn’t specify the disability and he didn’t ask. Nobody was surprised when he never arrived and whenever Naoise called him that day his phone was switched off.

‘You realise that he probably won’t show?’ their mother said.
‘Duh,’ Naoise said.
‘Even when he was reliable he was unreliable. I remember when we started going out he went over to Wales to work on a job for a few weeks. We said we’d look at the North Star at the same time every night. Half ten. I found out later he’d been looking at part of Ursa Major instead.’

‘Through the end of a glass no doubt,’ Naoise said. ‘And I never had you down as an astronomer. That means–’

‘Yeah, thanks,’ Darren said. ‘Stars. I’d forgotten how thick I am.’

‘There’s a lot you probably wouldn’t have had me down as,’ their mother said. ‘We could barely keep our hands off each other when he got back. We broke the sofa before I ever got him up into the bedroom.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Naoise said.
‘Speaking of whom, did you really think you were an immaculate conception?’ ‘I’d gladly turn to any religion if it wiped the image currently in my head. The innocent sofa of our childhood cartoon viewing. Count Duckula. Danger Mouse.’ ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,’ Darren said.
‘Don’t worry, you arriving chipped away at the passion,’ their mother said. ‘For the most part anyway. He was a handsome scut in his day, though.’
Their father texted Naoise when they were checking out of the hotel. He’d missed the bus and the battery of his phone had died. He was sorry. Give his regards to Darren.
‘The cat feasted on his homework again,’ Naoise said after she’d hung up.
‘Some things don’t change,’ their mother said, her first time speaking in a while. ‘A day late and a euro short. Give him a job in a bed and he’d sleep on the ground.’
‘He’d give you the shirt off your back,’ Darren said, and after all three laughed there followed a long silence, none of them looking at either of the others, as though all were ashamed and saddened that this was one of the few things that they had left to bond over.

Back in Dublin, it was strange to him that each day didn’t have the same routine, the defined and mandatory set pieces at regular intervals. When to wake, when to wash, when to eat, when to exercise, when to sleep. This sudden, boundless freedom was oppressive and intimidating. He thought that all the hours and minutes and seconds would take on a physical form and suffocate him, overwhelm him, cover him completely, filling his nostrils and mouth and throat and lungs like earth or sand. There was always too much time to fill and this is what he struggled with the most. He often returned to bed when Naoise left for work in the mornings, drifting into half-sleep and blanking out a few hours. This kept him awake at night, but lying in the dark listening to the sparse traffic and occasional drunken shouts felt less isolating than trying to kill time during the day when it seemed everybody else was engaged in some worthwhile or constructive activity. She said that he could stay as long as he wanted but he moved out into a bedsit as soon as he got his first job. She insisted that she help him out financially and paid both the security deposit and his first month’s rent and lodged €800 in a new account for him. ‘You don’t have to,’ he had said. ‘I need to,’ she had said back, a half-beat too quick so that both had looked away from the other. He could see that she was ready to establish some distance between them and that this patronage made things easier for her. He hoped that the second pair of slippers and the toothbrush would reappear after his departure, that the sadness he felt around her apartment was mainly a temporary thing that had come and gone with him, that she was only hiding the joy in her life to protect it, and that for her, his return had been the end of nothing. More than anything else in this new phase of his life, he really wanted to believe this.