The Nothing Man Read online

  It was only then, when I was under the covers, alone in my room in the dark, that I could finally give in. Let it in. The sadness, the grief, the confusion. I would yield and it would rush in and engulf me, a mile-high drowning wave. I knew no matter what happened during the day, whatever the effectiveness of Nannie’s distractions, this was what awaited me at the end of it. I cried myself to sleep every single night and dreamed of decomposing corpses writhing around in muddy graves. Anna’s, mostly. Trying to get out. Trying to get back to me.

  We never, ever talked about what had happened. Nannie didn’t even say their names. But sometimes I heard her whimpering softly in her sleep and once, I walked in on her looking through one of my mother’s boxes of old photos, her lined cheeks wet with tears. I had so many questions about what had happened, and why it had, to us, but I didn’t dare ask them. I didn’t want to upset Nannie. I presumed that her and I being holed up in that cottage meant that the man who had murdered the rest of my family was still out there somewhere and that, by now, he knew that he’d missed one of us. Sometimes, in the twilight moments between sleep and wakefulness, I’d see him standing at the end of my bed. He looked like a killer from a horror movie: crazed, blood-splattered, wild. Sometimes the knife was in me before I’d wake up and realise it wasn’t real.

  Once a week we’d go into the nearest town to exchange our library books and do our food shopping (or to get the messages, as Nannie called it – and as I did too until I realised, at college, that not everyone did). She wouldn’t let me out of her sight on these excursions and told me that, if anyone ever asked, I was to say my first name in full, Evelyn instead of Eve. Afterwards, when I started secondary school one year late, the forms had Nannie’s maiden name on them and I had been issued a further instruction. I was to say my parents had died in a car crash and that I was an only child, but only if I was asked. Never volunteer information, Nannie said. That was the golden rule and one I still follow now.

  I didn’t question this. I just wanted to be normal, to fit in with the other girls in my year. I assumed that how I felt – like my insides were one big, raw, open wound and that my body was just a thin shell built to hide this – was a permanent state that would only be made worse by acknowledging it. I got really good at pretending that I was fine, that everything was, but it was a delicate surface tension that threatened to break at any time.

  I pretended my way all through school, through my Leaving Cert exams and through four years of college at NUI Galway, where I chose to study a business course purely because it was a known quantity. I loved reading and writing and, the night I applied, sat for a long time with the cursor blinking over options with ‘Arts’ and ‘Literature’ and ‘Creative Writing’ in their title. But I couldn’t chance being trapped in a seminar room discussing things like trauma, or grief, or violence, especially not while strangers stared at my face. I’d be undone. Databases and mathematics seemed safer and they proved to be.

  I didn’t dream of reanimated corpses or knife-wielding killers any more, but I had started tormenting myself by searching crowds for my sister’s face, looking for her proxy, for someone who matched what I thought she might look like now – which was what I looked like when I was sixteen, because that was my only data point. I never found any candidates.

  ‘Is it any good?’

  Jim snapped the book shut, releasing a sound that seemed as loud as a thunderclap.

  Steve O’Reilly, the store manager, was standing beside him. Leaning against the shelves with his arms folded, wearing his trademark expression of bemused superiority.

  The inside of Jim’s head was an echo chamber of screams. I was twelve years old … A man broke into our home ... murdered my mother, father and younger sister …The lock was flimsy … But for some reason, he didn’t. He mentally beat them back until he found the words, ‘Not really my thing,’ and returned the book to the shelf, taking the opportunity to pull in a deep breath and moisten his lips.

  His fingers had left misty smudges on the book’s glossy black cover.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Steve raised his eyebrows. ‘Could’ve fooled me, Jim. You looked like you were well into it.’

  Steve was twenty-six and wore shiny suits and came to work every day with globules of gel hardening in his (receding) hairline, yet somehow had the idea that he was a somebody and Jim was a nobody. The greatest challenge of working for him was resisting the urge to correct him about that.

  Jim turned to face Steve dead-on. He mirrored his stance, folding his arms and leaning lightly against the shelves, a simple trick that always seemed to make other people uneasy. His settled his face into a perfectly neutral expression and looked Steve right in the eye.

  ‘Did you need something, Steve?’

  The younger man shifted his weight.

  ‘Yeah. I need you to remember that you’re here to work. This isn’t a library.’ He reached out and took down the same copy of The Nothing Man that Jim had just returned to the shelf. ‘The Nothing Man? What were you doing, Jim? Reliving your glory days? Oh wait, no – you were sitting at a desk somewhere, weren’t you? They didn’t let you chase after the actual criminals.’

  Steve cracked open the book right in the middle, where the pages were different: bright white, thick and glossy, and displaying photographs.

  On the page to Steve’s left was an image of a large detached house and a family of young children posing by a Christmas tree.

  On the opposite one, a pencil sketch.

  The pencil sketch.

  Steve tapped the page. ‘Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard of this.’

  Jim was looking at the sketch upside down but he didn’t need to look at it at all to recall it perfectly. It was of a man with small, hooded eyes set deep into a round, fleshy face. Wearing what looked like a thick knit hat pulled low enough to cover his eyebrows. The angle was slightly off, the head turned a few degrees to the left, as if the man had just heard the artist call his name and was still in the process of turning to respond to it.

  In the book, the sketch took up two-thirds of the page above a small paragraph. Presumably the text said something about it being based on the testimony of a witness who had happened to drive past the house owned by the O’Sullivan family of Bally’s Lane, near Carrigaline, Co. Cork, in the early hours of 14 January 2000, and caught this man walking along the side of the road with her headlights. Walking furtively, she’d said. It was the only glimpse of the killer they called the Nothing Man that anyone had ever got.

  Jim had made sure of it.

  That night, while he waited in the darkness, he thought he’d have some warning if a car approached, that he’d hear the rumble of the engine long before its lights lit up the road. But the car driven by Claire Bardin, an Irishwoman living in France but home for Christmas, seemed to come out of nowhere. She’d surprised him, coming suddenly around a bend, and, unthinking, he’d looked directly into the light. Recalling it now, Jim thought he felt a cold breeze, and for a split second he was back in the dark on the side of the road, tense and determined, his body fizzing with adrenalin.

  It would have been impressively accurate even if Bardin had driven straight to the nearest Garda station to meet with a sketch artist that very night. But she’d done it six months later when, on a trip to Cork for her sister’s wedding, she happened to read a news report about the attack and realised that the date and place matched her odd sighting, which made its accuracy remarkable. The morning after Jim first saw it in a paper, he’d started swimming lengths of the local pool every day until the flesh on his face began to tighten and cling, revealing a harsher jawline and hollows beneath his cheekbones.

  But the eyes and ears. They didn’t change with weight or age – the eyes especially. Even if you opted for surgery you couldn’t change where they sat in the bone structure of the face, the distances between them and your other features.

  And Claire Bardin had got them exactly right.

  Back in the present, Steve was frowning at the sketch.


  ‘Get back to work, Jim.’ He snapped the book shut and tucked it under his arm. ‘I’m off on my break. Don’t let me see you still slacking when I get back.’

  Once he knew the book existed, Jim could think of nothing else. It was a ring of fire around him, drawing nearer with each passing moment, threatening to torch every layer of him one by one. His clothes. His skin. His life. If it reached him it would leave nothing but ash and all his secrets, totally exposed.

  He had to put it out. Now.

  But what was it, really? What was this book? Why had she written it? Why now? Nothing had changed. No one had come for him. If it really was about her search for him then he already knew the ending: spoiler alert, she hadn’t found him.

  But that wasn’t enough. Jim needed to know what Eve Black had filled all those pages with, what she’d been doing since he saw her eighteen years ago standing at the top of the stairs, what she was telling the world about that night.

  When one of the checkout girls asked Jim if he was feeling okay – he looked flushed and sweaty, she said, was he coming down with something? – he saw an opportunity. He radioed Steve to tell him he was going home sick, then turned the radio off before Steve could come squawking back. He punched his time-card and hurried to his car in the shopping centre’s staff car park.

  But Jim didn’t drive home. He drove straight into the city.

  There was a branch of Waterstones on Patrick Street. He’d only been inside once or twice, a long time ago, but he remembered that it was big and that it ran all the way back to Paul Street on its other side.

  Jim didn’t think he was in any danger but still, there was no need to draw attention. He wasn’t going to buy the book from the store where he worked, and neither was he going to get it from some tiny shop where the clerk would likely remember every customer and what they purchased. Buying it online would leave a digital trail and take too long.

  Jim needed a copy now.

  He parked in the multi-storey on Paul Street and walked to the bookshop’s rear entrance. He had put his coat on, hiding his uniform. As the doors swung shut behind him, the buzz from outside died and he was cocooned in the hush of the bookshop.

  There were three, four other customers that he could see, plus a guy in a T-shirt in the corner stacking shelves. Way too quiet altogether. There wasn’t even a radio playing.

  Jim slowly but purposefully made his way to the front of the shop at the other end. He made sure to look like a typical customer. Picking up the odd book here, there, admiring it, reading the back, putting it down again. Stopping to inspect special offers. Having a cursory flip through the books in a bargain box marked LAST CHANCE TO BUY.

  He found The Nothing Man just inside the main doors.

  It had its own table. There were stacks of it on there, each one several books high, arranged in a semicircle. One copy was standing upright in the middle, resting on a little Perspex mount. A handwritten card promised, The story of Cork’s most famous crime, told by a survivor.

  Jim picked one up and placed a palm flat on the cover, as if he could feel what the pages inside held for him, for his future.

  Was it all in here, every bad thing he had done, all the things he had packed away since? The Nothing Man was a threat, yes, but the idea of reading it, of reliving his glory days …

  It also brought the giddy promise of a treat.

  ‘Just came in today, that one did.’ A smiling man was now on the other side of the table, three feet in front of Jim. Mid-forties, dressed casually, wearing a name-tag that identified him as Kevin. ‘Great read, by the way. If you can stomach it. Crazy to think it all happened right here.’

  ‘You’ve read it?’ Jim asked.

  ‘A couple of months ago. We get sent advance copies.’

  ‘And did she? Find him?’

  ‘No. Well, yes and no. You see, it’s hard to say ...’

  No, it wasn’t. Because here Jim was, still free, still unidentified. He considered asking Kevin to explain himself, but he’d already had more of a conversation than was probably wise. Two teenage girls in school uniform came pushing through the doors, laughing and talking loudly, distracting Kevin, and Jim took the opportunity to snatch up a copy of the book and walk away.

  The cash desk was in the middle of the shop. En route, Jim picked up another book the same size as The Nothing Man. Its cover was mostly baby-blue sky above a row of multicoloured beach-huts. He also lifted the first greeting card he saw that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY from the selection by the register.

  The cashier was female. A young, artsy, college-student type who considered each title with great interest as she scanned its barcode.

  ‘Bit of a random selection,’ she said wryly.

  Mind your own business, Jim wanted to roar.

  He said, ‘Well, I’m not sure what she likes. My wife. It’s her birthday.’

  ‘And so you’re …’ The cashier looked at the two contrasting covers in front of her. ‘Hedging your bets?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘If you like, I can help you pick—’

  ‘I’ll just stick with these, thanks.’

  He had planned to leave the store the way he’d come in, but Kevin was down that end of the shop now, straightening shelves, so he turned on his heel and made for the main doors instead.

  As he pushed through them, he saw that the entire front window was filled with copies of The Nothing Man.

  Behind them, pinned to a red felt board, was a collage of old newspaper clippings.

  Horror attack in Blackrock.

  Special Garda Operation To Chase ‘Nothing Man’.

  Family of 4 Dead in Murder Spree in Passage West.

  The last one was factually incorrect, a misprint the morning after when the exact details from inside the house on Bally’s Lane were still as messy as the scene itself.

  Only three people had died in that house.

  That, now, was the problem.

  Back in the car park, he sat in his car and locked the doors. He had purposefully parked in a far corner, away from elevators and the pay machines and so, passing foot traffic. He took the second book, the one with the beach-huts on the cover, out of the bag and slipped off its dust jacket. Then he did the same with his copy of The Nothing Man and swapped the two over, so now each book was wearing the ‘wrong’ cover, disguising its true content.

  Just in case.

  Jim opened his own copy of The Nothing Man and flicked through the opening pages until he found the spot where Steve had interrupted him.

  Then he shifted in his seat, getting comfortable, and read on.

  Every weekend, holiday and summer break I returned to Spanish Point and fell back into life with Nannie the way you fall into your own bed at the end of a long day. I took her greying skin, her shrinking size, the tremors that had crept into her voice, and I put them away with everything else I was determined not to think about.

  Nannie died in her sleep on the Feast of the Assumption in 2010, aged eighty-four. I remember finding her in the morning, the temperature of the skin on her forearm telling me that it was already too late to call for help. Then nothing except blurry, fragmented images for weeks after that.

  I had never really grieved for my parents and my sister, not actively, not in the way that helps a person process their pain and find a way to move forward, around it, alongside it. Now I was grieving for them all. It was as if the tectonic plates beneath my life had shifted, yawning apart, creating a deep and treacherous chasm into which every steady thing suddenly slid. I was the only thing still standing now, the only one of us left, and my feet were slipping. The problem was that, by then, I’d got so good at pretending, no one could tell.

  I finished my degree, graduating with a first. A college friend was now a boyfriend, even though I could never quite trace the threads of our backstory and he knew practically nothing of mine. I sat through what felt like endless meetings in over-lit offices with dusty vertical blinds while documen
t after document was slid across a table to me so I could sign my name by the colourful little stickers that seemed far too jaunty for the task at hand: taking ownership of things that didn’t belong to me because now I was the only one left.

  I pushed everything down, down, down, until it was safely locked away beneath the numbness.

  I was twenty-one years old.

  When college ended, I was set adrift. Studying was a series of small tasks that, once completed, were instantly replaced with another, like a game of whack-a-mole. Get to class. Get that project completed. Study for that exam. All I’d had to do during those four years was keep moving forward, keep putting one foot in front of the other, start on the next thing. Now there was nothing to do except think of things to do, and I found that I couldn’t do that at all. Over the course of six dark months I unravelled, melting into a dull puddle of the person I had been – or had pretended to be. I lost the boyfriend, my few friends and too much weight, in that order. I was a compass needle that couldn’t find true north. The truth was I wasn’t trying to find it, not really. It was so much easier to stop looking, to let go, to sink. And besides, where on this earth were you supposed to point towards when you had no family left?

  The quick sale of Nannie’s home in Cork meant that I was under no immediate pressure financially, so while my classmates took up exciting jobs abroad and postgraduate places, I rented a crappy bedsit off Mountjoy Square and bedded down. I made my life so small that not even my neighbours knew me. At night I lay awake and during the day I sleepwalked. I don’t even know how I passed the hours, only that the time passed and afterwards I had nothing at all to show for it, not even memories.

  After months of this, when I could no longer deny that something greater than my own grief was pulling the circuits apart in my brain, I managed to drag myself to a doctor who pushed me on to a therapist, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the real reason I was there, who I really was and what I’d suffered. Each week I said just enough to keep her writing me prescriptions. I wasn’t even sure the pills were doing anything for me but at the same time I was absolutely terrified that they were. I didn’t want to find out if what felt like rock bottom was merely halfway down. So I kept going to therapy, kept taking the pills, waiting to feel something different, differently.