Careless

"I kept the truth from everyone who could have used it, and then I handed it to the one man who could not. All it took was for somebody to be kind to me."

The afternoon went by and left almost nothing behind.

I had the Year Nines after lunch and a Year Eight class last thing, and of the two of them together I kept almost nothing — a girl in floods over a friendship I did not have the room in me to take in, a name I got wrong twice and then a third time, a scene from a play I had taught for six years coming to pieces in my hands because I had lost my own place in it and could not find the way back.

They noticed. Of course they noticed — thirteen-year-olds missed nothing about an adult except the one thing that was actually the matter — and they had me down as cross, or sickening for something, and they gave me a wide berth and went carefully round me, and I let them, because careful was quiet, and quiet was the only thing I could still do.

Between classes I checked my phone. I did it in the corridor, in the stairwell, once in a locked toilet cubicle with my back against the door — the same three seconds each time, thumb to the screen, the screen coming up, and nothing on it. No missed call. No message. No small grey line of dots to say that somewhere in the world a man was typing. I had gone to that phone so many times since Saturday that my thumb went to it on its own now, the way it used to go to it for the time.

And the clock crawled. There was a clock high on the back wall above the door, where the girls could not see it and I could, and I taught the whole of that afternoon to the back of the room with my eyes going up to it over their heads every minute or so, watching a hand that would not move drag itself round towards the end of a day I did not, in the end, want to reach.

Because I did not want to go home. That was the thing I had not seen coming when I dressed in the dark that morning: that school, which I had driven to like a woman going to the scaffold, would turn into the last warm lit place I had — and that when the bell finally went, I would not want to leave it, because leaving it meant the car, and the mountain, and the pale blue house with the office that had been gone over with a cloth and the back step where a photograph had sat face up in the dark.

At the afternoon break I did not go to the staffroom. I stayed in my room with the door shut and the lights off and ate nothing, because there was nothing in me that wanted food, and something in me that could not have sat down at that long table and made the shapes of an ordinary Monday — the weekend, the footy, whose girl had done what — with Marie's oh, Jenny still going through me every time the kettle came to mind. I sat in the half-dark at my own desk with the cold room around me and my phone face up in front of me, and I marked three folios and could not afterwards have said one word of what was in them.

The last bell went, and the building came apart around me the way it did every afternoon — the roar of it, hundreds of them hitting the corridors at once, lockers and shrieking and somebody's recorder cut off mid-phrase, the whole great release of the day going past my door and down the stairs and out to the buses. And then it drained — fast, and then slow, and then a last reluctant trickle — until the quiet came back up through the floor and the building stood empty and enormous around me.

I did not hurry.

I had every reason to hurry — my son was at my mother's in Battery Point and I had promised her I would not be late, and the drive up the mountain only got worse the darker it got — and I did not hurry, because the moment I picked up that bag and turned off that lamp I had to go back to the house, and I could not make myself do it. So I found things. I wiped the board. I stacked the row of chairs nobody had struck. I put the scripts away, all but one — Serena's green one, still sitting on the front desk exactly where she had left it — which I did not touch, because I did not trust myself to pick it up again.

And I was standing there in my half-buttoned coat, doing nothing, when there was a knock at the open door.

"Jenny?"

Rufus. He taught English in the room on the other side of my wall, and had done for as long as I had been at the school, and in all those years the whole of what lay between us came to a nod in the car park, a roster we both signed, and the once-a-year moment at the school production when he would find me in the wings afterwards and tell me, with real feeling, that it had been wonderful — and mean it, every time, which was more than most of them managed. A tall, stooping, gentle man in cardigans a size too big, who quoted things without meaning to show off, and whom I liked in the mild, uncomplicated way I liked a dozen people I had never once had a proper conversation with.

"Rufus. Hello." I got the smile up — the fourth or fifth time that day I had built it out of nothing, and it was getting harder each time. "Sorry — I'm just on my way out."

He did not take the hint, which was not like him; in six years he had never once pushed past a closed door. He came in. And he did a small thing I marked at the time and went back to many times afterwards: he pushed the door to behind him. Not shut. To — resting it against the frame, quietly, the way I closed Sammy's at night.

"I'm going to be a nuisance," he said, "and you're to tell me to go away if you'd rather. But I've been on the other side of that wall from you all day, and something is wrong, and I found I couldn't get in my car and drive home without asking."

And that was all it took. That was the whole of it — a stooping man in a too-big cardigan, just inside my door, saying something is wrong in a voice with nothing in it but concern — and the thing I had been holding up all day, all weekend, since a telephone went off in the dark on Friday night, began to go.

I turned away from him. I put my hand flat on the desk. I said, "I'm fine, Rufus, honestly, it's just—" and my voice went on the just, cracked clean across it, and there was no bringing it back.

He did not come across the room and put a hand on me, which I could not have stood. He stayed by the door, and he waited, and the waiting was kinder than anything he could have said — and into that space, before I had decided one single thing, before I had weighed anything at all, my own mouth opened and said it.

"Nial's gone."

Two words. I had sat across a steel table from a detective the day before and given him a version of my marriage careful enough to keep my husband alive inside it; I had stood at my own mother's counter that very morning and chosen, out of two true things, the one that would make her lock her door. And here, to a man I had never so much as had a cup of tea with, my mouth simply came open and put the plainest of it into the room before the rest of me had any say. "He went out on Saturday morning to look at a job, and he hasn't come back, and nobody has heard from him, and I don't—" The breath went. "I don't know where he is."

Rufus's face did something I could not have got out of an actor in a hundred years. He had come in on the ordinary Monday assumption that a colleague was having a hard week — a sick parent, a bad result back from the doctor, a marriage gone quiet — and I watched the size of the real thing arrive in him and go right through his face and take the words away from him too.

"Jenny." He got hold of himself. "Have you been to the police?"

"Yes." It came out with more edge than I meant it to. "Yes. And they've decided he's a grown man who's taken himself off, and that a text message I got proves he's fine, and that I'm—" I stopped. I had been going to say a hysterical wife, which was Linda's phrase, out of Linda's mouth across a police counter, and it was not a thing I was going to hand to Rufus. "They're not looking," I said instead. "Not really."

He took that in. Then he said the thing that started the fear back up in me, and he said it so gently, and meaning it so plainly, that it was a moment before I understood what it was going to cost me.

"What can I do?"

Three words, every one of them kind, and I had no idea what to do with a single one.

Because I had spent every hour since Saturday being disbelieved, and being handled, and being turned into a woman that other people were managing between them — and here was somebody simply asking to help, with nothing in his other hand, and I did not know how to take hold of it. He did not stop there. He said he would cover my classes, gladly, for as long as I needed — take the juniors himself, square it with the Head, tell them whatever I wanted told. He said he had a cousin in the police he could quietly ask. He said he would keep an ear out — that people talked, that Hobart was a small town under all its pretending, and that if anything at all was moving he would hear of it and bring it straight to me.

I stood there and let him, and part of me was so grateful I could have gone down on the floor with it. Another part of me — the part that had not slept, the part that had been standing at the back of every room since Saturday with its arms folded — was doing the thing it now did to everybody, which was to stand off to one side and watch him and ask why. Why so much. Why a man who had given me a nod across a car park for six years would offer, inside five minutes, to take my classes and work his own family and put his ear to the ground of a whole city for a woman he did not know.

I hated myself for it while I was doing it. I could not stop doing it. It had Serena's shape, and my mother's shape, and my own son's shape in a sandpit in the dark, and now it had Rufus's, and I stood in my cold classroom running a kind man's kindness through the machine and despising myself the whole way.

"Rufus—" I had to stop him, because the more he offered, the clearer it came to me what accepting any of it would mean. "You're very kind. You're being far kinder than I've any right to ask for." I got my hands moving, gathering the bag, the keys, giving myself a reason to be half turned away from him. "But I need you not to do any of it. Not yet. Not the Head, not your cousin — none of it."

He looked at me. "Jenny, if he's missing—"

"I know how it sounds." I could not tell him why. I could not stand in my own classroom and explain to a decent man that I had already lied to the police about my own marriage, and that every kind adult who walked into that staffroom and said poor Jenny, her husband's left her made the lie a fraction truer, and that I was holding a version of my own life together with both hands and could not afford one more soul putting weight on the wrong end of it. "I'm not ready for the whole school to know. Please. Let me keep it mine a little longer."

Something went across his face — and I could not read it, and I have spent my whole life reading faces, and I could not read his — and then it was gone, and he nodded. "Of course," he said. "Of course. It's yours. I shouldn't have—" He stepped back towards the door. "Whatever you need. Whenever. You know which wall to knock on."

He gave me a last look, and a small sad smile, and he went. I heard him go back into his own room, and the scrape of a chair, and then nothing at all.

I stood in my empty classroom, and the fear came up so fast it took the breath out of me. What had I done. I had told him. I had told somebody. Twenty years of keeping my house and my school on opposite sides of a car park, and I had stood here and handed the whole true thing to a man I knew nothing about — a man who had pushed my door to and asked what he could do and offered me his cousin in the police — and he could walk into that staffroom in the morning and say five words, and it would be everywhere, and it would get to Linda, and it would get back to the police, and it would set like concrete into the story: her husband left her, poor thing, she isn't coping.

I went after him.

I was out of my own door and into the corridor before I had decided to be, calling his name down the length of it, my voice going out into that long empty space and coming back off the lockers at me, too loud, all wrong.

"Rufus—"

He came out of his room at once, alarmed, a red pen still in his hand.

"Please." I had most of myself back by the time I reached him — I had the voice, if not the face. "Please don't tell anyone. I know I've no right to ask it, I know you're only trying to help, but I need you to promise me. Not a word. Not to anybody. Please."

And he did the thing that undid the last of it. He did not answer straight away. He looked at me — one moment, and then another — the red pen down at his side, and something worked behind his eyes that I could not follow, and I stood in that corridor and listened to the silence in front of a promise the way I had been listening to the silence in front of every answer for three days, and I could not tell what was in it.

Then he said, "Your secret's safe with me, Jenny. You have my word."

And there it was — the word I had not used, set down in the corridor between us as though it had come from me. I had not said secret. I had said please, and don't tell, and mine. But Rufus, being kind, wanting only to give me something solid to hold on to, had reached for the word nearest to hand — and now the thing had a name it had not had a minute earlier, and the name was his and not mine. A secret. That was what I had, apparently. On Friday night my husband had been a man who had not come home; and somewhere between a steel table and a school corridor he had become a version, and a lie, and now a secret — and every one of those words had been put into my hands by somebody who was only trying to help.

I thanked him. What I said I could not afterwards have repeated. I got myself back down that corridor and into my room, and I picked up my bag and turned off the lamp, and I left Serena's green script sitting alone on the front desk in the dark, and I went out to the car.