Day or Night

"He gave me his direct number and told me to ring him day or night. I have never once been able to explain why I did not."

I did not move.

I sat in my husband's chair in my husband's office with my husband's notebook open across my knees, and I did not move one muscle, and I did not breathe, and the house waited with me.

Because I had done this before. That was the first thing that came up in me, sitting there in the dark — not fear, nothing anywhere near fear. Recognition. On Saturday afternoon I had gone down my own hallway on the sides of my feet with a framed photograph of my own family held out in front of me like a weapon, and I had come round the kitchen door with my heart going like a fist on a door, and it had been my dog: standing in a lake of spilt milk with her entire head inside a shopping bag and her tail going like a metronome. I had laughed. It had come up out of me and turned into something else about halfway, and I had put my hand flat on the bench and hung on to it until the whole thing went through me and out.

So I sat in that chair with the notebook on my knees and said it to myself, very calmly, the way I would have said it to a shaking girl in the wings. It is the house. It is a hundred years old, it drops that board outside the linen cupboard, and it has been doing it since before you moved in. It is the wind. The last time you did this it was a Dalmatian.

There was no Dalmatian.

That was what went through me and took my whole stomach with it, sitting in a cold room in a locked house with my hand still flat on an open page. There was no dog. There had not been a dog in that house since Saturday evening, and there was nothing left in it that could make a floorboard go — and that house had never once in four years put its weight down carefully. That board went when the wind got up under the eaves, and it went like a gunshot, and it had frightened the life out of me a hundred times.

This was slow. This was a foot going down onto a board and finding it, and stopping halfway, and going down anyway.

Somebody was being quiet in my house.

The notebook went into my coat pocket, and I do not remember deciding that either — my hand simply did it, and the weight of it came down against my hip and stayed there. Then I looked round for something to hold, and there was nothing, because that room had been gone over with a cloth: no roll of blueprints standing on end in the corner, no biros in a mug, nothing at all. I stood up in the dark with my heart in my throat and my eyes going over my husband's stripped desk, looking for a thing I could hit somebody with.

The paperweight.

It was on the corner of the desk where it had always been — a lump of Tasmanian granite about the size of a fist, polished on one face and rough as a road on the other, that Nial had picked up off a site at Kingston in about 2011 and carried round in the back of the ute for a month before he announced to the kitchen that it was a paperweight.

I got my hand round it and it was freezing.

And I stood in the middle of my husband's office with a lump of rock in my fist and understood exactly what I was. A drama teacher of thirty-two, in a coat, in a cold house, with a stone in one hand and a notebook in my pocket. I could hold six hundred people in a hall and stop every one of them breathing at the same moment. I had never in my life hit another human being with anything at all.

I was going out there anyway.

I went to the door on the sides of my feet, and the house had gone completely silent — which was worse, and which meant that whoever was out there had heard me stop moving, and was now standing somewhere in my house doing precisely what I was doing.

The two of us. In the dark. Listening for each other.

Then it came again, and it came from the kitchen.

They had gone further in. Past the living room, past the hall, and into the room where I had made toast for my son the morning before — the room with the calendar on the fridge and my own handwriting all over it — and they were not leaving.

They were looking for something.

Part of me was screaming to go. Out of the front door, down the path, into the car, onto the road and down that mountain, and ring somebody from somewhere with the lights on. And the other part was standing at the back of the hall with its arms folded, and it said, perfectly clearly: they know something. Whoever that is knows where your husband is. Run, and it goes out of the door with them, and it never comes back.

I went out into the hallway.

There was a lamp on in the living room.

I had not put it on. I had not been in that room and I had not touched a switch, and there was a lamp burning at the far end of my own house throwing its shadows the whole length of my hall — long, and flickering, and going up the wall and across the photographs.

I got about four steps.

Then the board went underneath me. The one outside the linen cupboard — the one that had stood proud of the others since before we ever moved in, the one I had stepped over ten thousand times in the dark on my way to a crying baby without once having to think about it — and I put my whole weight straight down onto it in the middle of my own hallway with a rock in my hand, and it went off like a starter's pistol.

The house exploded.

Footsteps, fast and heavy and coming — out of the kitchen and across the boards and towards the living room — and they were not creeping any more. They were running.

So I ran at them.

I went over that afterwards, again and again, and I never understood it. I did not decide anything. I did not weigh anything up. Every functioning part of me was screaming to go the other way, and I went straight down my own hallway towards the noise with a lump of granite up over my shoulder.

"Stop!"

It came out of me at full volume — the diaphragm, the whole instrument, the voice that had filled a hall of six hundred without a microphone — and it went off in that house like something breaking.

"Who are you? What have you done with Nial?"

I came round the living-room door, and I saw them.

For about a quarter of a second, going the other way, across the far end of the room and into the kitchen doorway. A shape. A back. Dark, and low, and moving fast — and that is every single thing I have, and I have gone back into that quarter of a second more times than I could ever count, and it has never once given me anything more.

Not tall. Not short. Not a man and not a woman. Not young and not old.

A shape going through a door in my own house.

I went after it. I got across that living room and got hold of the door frame and swung myself round it into my own kitchen, and there was nobody there, and the back door was standing wide open into the dark with the cold pouring in over the floor.

"Wait!"

My voice went out into a black garden and cracked straight down the middle of it, and I went out after them.

The yard was empty.

I came out onto that deck in my socks with a rock in my hand and my chest going, and I stood there and looked at my own garden, and there was nobody in it. The gum at the back. The swing set with the rust coming up through the red. The vegetable beds gone over to weed since May. The sandpit, where my son had sat in the dark on Saturday evening and told me about a man with colours coming out of his hands.

Nothing else. Nothing moving anywhere at all — no gate, no footstep, no car starting up somewhere down the road. Gone, straight into it, the way water goes into sand.

I stood on my own deck with my heart going and made myself breathe, and I did not go down those steps, because I was not that brave, and I never was.

Then I saw it.

On the top step. Sitting there. The wind had hold of one corner of it and was lifting it and putting it down, lifting it and putting it down, and in another ten seconds it would have been out across that wet grass and gone for ever.

It had not been there when I threw that bolt on Saturday night with my son on my hip. It had not been there that morning. I would have gone straight over the top of it.

I got down onto my knees and picked it up with both hands.

A photograph.

It was old. That was what I had before anything else — the feel of it. It was soft. The edges had gone furry, there was a crease running right across one corner where it had been folded over and flattened out again, and the surface of it was dulled and thumbed and gone slightly greasy, from being taken out and looked at and put away, and taken out and looked at again, over and over, for years.

Somebody had loved that photograph. Or somebody had hated it. Either way, somebody had held it a very great many times.

I got it under the porch light.

Two people, standing outside, somewhere with trees, in what looked like the middle of an afternoon — both of them turned slightly away from the lens, not posing, not looking at it, in the middle of doing something else. Nobody had told them it was being taken.

A woman. Long dark hair, right down her back. Standing close.

And a man.

It was Nial.

I knew it before I had finished looking at it. I knew it in my hands and in my stomach and in the backs of my knees. It was the shoulders — the slope of them, the way he carried them slightly forward as though he were about to bend down and pick something up. It was the way he stood, all his weight on one leg and the other knee gone soft, which had driven me mad on station platforms for eleven years. It was the shape of the back of his head.

It was my husband. It was absolutely and completely my husband.

And I could not see his face.

He was turned away, three-quarters away, with the light behind him, and there was nothing there at all — and I stood under my own porch light in my socks with the wind coming up the steps at me and held that photograph four inches from my nose and looked at a man who was my husband and could not prove one single thing.

Because I did not trust myself.

That was what broke me, out there on that deck. Not the woman. Not how close she was standing. Not even the age of the thing. It was that I had spent two days watching myself build things out of nothing — a car with blacked-out windows out of a car with tinted glass, forty-eight hours out of twenty-four, an entire morning of a marriage out of thin air — and an hour earlier I had sat on the end of my own bed and admitted that I could not swear to what had been hanging in my own wardrobe that morning.

And here was a man with his face turned away.

I wanted it to be him. I wanted it so badly that I could feel the wanting in my hands, and I had never been more frightened of myself in my life.

I turned it over. The back was blank.

Nothing. No date, no name, no place, not one word — and I stood on my own deck in the wind and turned that photograph over and over and over, as though something might rise up out of it if I only did it enough times, and it stayed blank, and the wind kept getting hold of the corner of it and trying to take it out of my fingers.

Who was she?

And straight in behind it, walking in without knocking: when?

Because the photograph was old, and the man in it was younger — or lighter, or something, and I could not have told anybody what — and it had been carried about in somebody's wallet or somebody's drawer or somebody's coat pocket for a very long time before it ended up on the top step of my own back door.

It had not been dropped.

That was what I could not get past. It was sitting square in the middle of that step, face up, under the light. Somebody had been inside my house, and had gone out through my back door with me coming down my own hallway after them screaming — and had stopped, in the dark, on the way out, and taken the time to put a photograph down where I would find it.

Then the wind changed and came round the corner of the house, and it brought the rain that was nearly on us, and the eucalypt, and that thin metallic thing I had smelled on my own path an hour earlier and still could not name.

I went back inside and shut that door and threw the bolt across.

Then I stood with my hand on it.

Because the front door had been deadbolted when I came home. I had felt it go back under my own key. And the back door had been deadbolted since Saturday night, because I had thrown that bolt myself with my son on my hip and sand all down the front of my jumper.

Both doors were locked.

And somebody had been standing in my living room with the lamp on.

I went round that house and locked everything — every window, the laundry door, the little one in the bathroom that had not been opened since 2016 and had to be forced — and I did all of it in the dark, and I did all of it with a rock still in my fist. When I had finished I stood in the middle of my own hallway and understood that I had just locked myself into a house that locks did not work on.

I sat down on the floor of the hallway with my back against the wall, and I got my phone out, and I rang everybody.

I do not know how long it took. It was properly dark by then, and properly cold, and I never put a light on and I never got up off that floor, and I went through my own telephone from the top of it to the bottom.

Ken Chalker, who was already awake, because I had rung him at dawn. Marie, who had softened at last, and who said oh, Jenny in a way that very nearly finished me. Two men from the football. A bloke he did jobs with out at Sorell. The woman who did the books for half the tradesmen on that mountain. A cousin of his in Devonport that I had met exactly twice, at a wedding and at a funeral.

And his mother, in Ulverstone, who was seventy-eight years old, and who I finally rang at nine o'clock at night because I could not put it off for one more hour. She listened to me. She did not cry. She asked me three very short questions, and then she said that she would ring me back.

She did not ring me back.

Nobody had seen him. Nobody had spoken to him. Nobody had heard one word from him — and every last one of them was kind to me, and every last one of them was frightened for me, and not one of them had anything at all.

Then there was the other thing.

It took me until about the sixth call to hear it, because I was not listening for it. I was listening for Nial. It came in underneath, and by the ninth call it was so loud that I could not hear anything else.

Nobody knew about the job.

The job he told me about through a fogged shower screen on Saturday morning with the water still running down his back. The new client. The potential fencing work. The reason my husband put his boots on and got into his ute and drove out of my life at nine o'clock in the morning.

Not the supplier at Cambridge, who would have quoted the steel for it. Not the bloke at Sorell, who did the difficult ones with him and had done for six years. Not the woman who did his books, and who knew what was coming in before I did.

There was no job.

Or there was a job, and my husband had told nobody on this earth about it — which in eleven years of that business he had never done, not once, because he could not order a pie without telling three people about it first.

I sat on the floor of my own hallway with the phone in my lap and my back against the wall, and the last call ended, and the house went silent. It was raining now. Properly, and hard, on the roof.

And I could not get up.

I got as far as the sofa. I could not tell you how — I went part of the way along that hall on my hands — and I got into the living room and up onto the sofa and lay down on it in my coat with my knees pulled up, and the cushions took me the way a bog takes something.

Then it came.

All of it. The whole weight of it. I had been carrying that thing up a staircase one step at a time since a telephone went off on a bedside table in the middle of Friday night, and it went, and I let it go.

I cried the way I had not cried since I was a child.

Not the crying I had done in front of other people. Not the sort with a shape to it — the sort that comes to an end, and can be tidied away with a tissue and an apology. I had done that on my own doorstep in front of a girl of twenty-six. I had done it in my mother's arms in that same room, with her hands on my face. I had done it across a steel table in front of a man with a pen in his hand. Every single one of those was a performance, and I had known it while I was giving it.

This went on and on, in an empty house, in the dark, on my own furniture, with not one person left in the world to give it to.

It was the first honest thing I had done in three days.

When I could see again, I was looking at the wall.

The three of us at the lighthouse on Bruny, last summer. Nial had asked a German backpacker to take it and had then spent four minutes directing him. The wind is in my hair and I am laughing at something out of shot. Sammy is up on his father's shoulders with both hands full of Nial's hair. And Nial has his other arm the whole way round me with his hand flat on my hip, and all three of us are squinting into the sun, and every one of us is happy.

I looked from the photograph on my wall to the photograph in my hand.

The same shoulders. The same set of the head. The same weight, all on the one leg.

And a woman with long dark hair standing close enough to touch him.

And I could not tell which one of them was the lie.

That was what I was left with, lying on my own sofa in my coat with the rain coming down on the roof. Two photographs. A notebook in my pocket. A name underlined twice in my husband's handwriting. And no way on this earth of knowing which of any of it was true.

The lightning came in through the front windows and put the whole room out in white for half a second — the sofa, the toy cars under the coffee table, my own hand up in front of my face — and the thunder came in on top of it and went down through the floorboards and up the legs of the sofa and into my back.

The storm had come over the mountain.

I put my hand into my coat pocket, and my fingers went past the notebook and found the card. It had gone soft at one corner where I had been holding it all day.

Senior Detective Karl Jenkins

Tasmania Police — Major Crime

Remember — anything at all, you call me. Day or night. That's my direct number.

I lay on my sofa in the dark with that card in my hand and did the arithmetic, and it came out the same way every single time, and I did it for an hour.

Because there was a notebook in my pocket with Luke Smith underlined twice in my husband's handwriting.

And that morning I had sat six feet from that man, across a steel table, and looked him straight in the face, and told him that I had never heard the name in my life.

And I had already lied to him once. About my marriage. About my own bed. It was written down on a form in a building in Liverpool Street with my name typed across the top of it, and he might have read it, and I would never know.

So what was I going to say to him?

Detective, I have found the name. It was in a drawer in his desk. No, I did not know it this morning. No, I have never been in that drawer before. Yes, I understand exactly how that sounds.

I could hear it. I could hear precisely how it would land in that room, in that light, with the pen going. I could hear the pause before he answered me.

I have spent my whole life listening for the pause before somebody answers.

He was the only person in Tasmania who believed me. He was the only thing I had.

And if I rang him now, I would have lied to the police twice.

The rain went on the roof. The thunder went away over the top of the mountain and came back again. And I lay on my own sofa in a locked, unlocked, empty house, holding a business card with a direct number on it.

Day or night, he said.

And I did not ring him.