Drawer

"Rage is easier to carry than fear. That night, someone made very sure I chose the rage."

I went back to the house that night for clean clothes, and nothing else. That was all it was meant to be.

We had been four days at my mother's by then, Sammy and I, living out of the overnight bag I had thrown together on the Saturday, and between us we had run out of everything — his socks, my work blouses, clean underwear, the lot. I could have sent Rowena up to fetch it. She would have done it gladly, let herself in and filled a bag and asked no questions, and I did not ask her, because there were things in that house I did not want my mother's hands moving through, and because — this was the truth of it — some animal part of me still needed to walk through those rooms every evening and check them empty, the way I had never as a child been able to leave a loose tooth alone. So after I dropped Sammy back with her I drove up the mountain in the dark, and let myself into my own home, and put the lights on against the winter black in the windows, and told myself I would be twenty minutes.

My phone had not stopped since the library. Every few minutes it went again in my coat pocket — another share, another stranger I would never meet writing praying you find him or sharing from Kingston, stay strong under my husband's cropped and laughing face — and each little pulse of it against my hip was a small mercy and a small horror at once, the whole city suddenly holding the hand I had put out into the dark. I had stopped looking at it. I could not have kept up, and I did not have it in me to read one more stranger being kind.

There was a basket of clean washing on the end of the bed, dry and gone cold, that I had put through the machine on the Friday — before, when Friday had still just been Friday — and never got round to folding. Twenty minutes, I had said, and I could have grabbed what I needed and gone; but I stood and looked at that basket of ordinary washing from the last hour of my ordinary life, and I could not walk past it. So I did the thing my hands knew how to do. I sat on the edge of the bed we had shared for eleven years and folded my family's clothes in the lamplight — Sammy's little jumpers, Nial's T-shirts, my own things, matching the socks, smoothing the collars, making neat piles of a life — because for as long as my hands were busy with it I did not have to think.

Then I carried my own folded things across to the chest of drawers to put them away.

I opened the top drawer — mine, the left-hand one, the one that had been mine since we bought the chest second-hand off a young couple in Lenah Valley the month we married — and went to lay the clean things inside, and my hand stopped an inch above the drawer before the rest of me understood why.

There was something in there that was not mine.

Sitting on top of my own plain folded cotton, dead centre — arranged, that was the word my body reached for before my mind would take it, arranged, placed, set out to be found — was a pair of women's knickers. Not mine. I knew every scrap of underwear I owned, the sensible dark stuff a mother of a three-year-old wears under work trousers, and these were not that and had never been that. Black lace, and red run through it, cut to be looked at, the kind of thing I had not bought myself in a decade and would not have worn to change a nappy in. They lay there on my clothes in the lamplight like something that had crawled in and made itself at home.

I picked them up. I could not afterwards have said why I picked them up; I would give a great deal now not to have. They were not fresh from any shop and they were not clean. They were cold — cold the way cloth goes when it has been damp and then left — and when I turned them over in my fingers there was a stiffness dried into the gusset, and the smell came up off them into that quiet bedroom, and it was not mine, and it was not Nial's, and it was not soap. It was a woman. The smell of a woman's body, hours old — skin and sex and something under it gone faintly sour — and it was in my hand, in my bedroom, on my own clothes, in the drawer where I kept the things that went next to my skin.

Some cold clear part of me did ask the question. It asked it once, quietly, standing a little apart from the rest of me the way it had stood apart all week: how did this get into a locked drawer in a locked house. I heard the question, and I did not follow it — because right behind it came the other thing, the thing with heat in it, the thing that had an answer I could actually hold. Because there was a way these came to be in my drawer, a perfectly simple way, and it was that he had brought her here. Into my house. Into our bed, thirty minutes down the mountain from where I sat with our son at my mother's table, so sure of himself and so easy about it that she had left a pair of her knickers behind in my things like a cat marking what was hers.

Then the heat came up and took all of me, and took the question with it.

I could not afterwards have told anyone how I got down the stairs. There was the banister under my hand, and the cold of the kitchen lino coming up through my socks, and then I was at the pedal bin by the back door with the lid up, throwing another woman's filthy underwear into my own kitchen bin, and standing over it with my chest going like a bellows, staring down at them lying on the teabags and Sammy's scraped-out yoghurt pots. I wanted to be sick. I wanted to put a match to the house. I could not do either, so I stood there and shook.

Then I could not have them on my hands. I had touched them; I had held them up to my own face; I had breathed a stranger in, in my own bedroom. I got to the bathroom and put the tap on and did not wait for it to run warm. I pumped that stupid frangipani handwash into my palms — the one Nial bought by the four-pack because Sammy liked the smell of it — and I scrubbed under water cold enough to hurt, up past the wrists, in between the fingers, the way I had watched a hundred nurses do it, and after the first few seconds it was not about clean at all. It was just somewhere to put the shaking.

I lifted my head and there was a woman in the mirror over the basin I did not know. Hair come loose and stuck to a wet face, mouth pulled wrong, the tendons standing out down her neck. Four nights without proper sleep and a husband who had done this, and it was all there in her, every hour of it, worn on the outside now where anyone could see. I had spent my whole working life teaching girls how to set an emotion on a face so it would carry to the back row of a theatre. I could not read one single thing on this one, and it was mine.

"You bloody coward," I said to the glass, to him, to the empty house. My voice did not sound like mine either. "You had her here. In our bed. You—"

The word I wanted would not come, or there was no word made big enough, and what came out instead was not a word at all — just a sound, low and torn, that I had not known was in me.

That was when the phone went again, buzzing hard on the edge of the basin where I had set it down.

I nearly did not look. It had been going all night, the whole city sharing my husband into the dark, and I had had my fill of strangers. But I wiped my hand down my trousers and turned it over, and it was not the blue flag of another share. It was a message — a text, from a number my phone did not know, in the grey of an unsaved caller — and the first line of it sat there on the lit screen where I could not not read it.

I opened it.

Hi Mrs Triffett, it's Serena. From drama. I didn't want to say anything but I've just seen Mr Triffett getting into his ute down near the wharf with a woman, they looked pretty friendly so I thought you should know. Sorry. x

I read it once, and then I read it again, and the little bathroom went very quiet and very far away.

Nial. Alive. Down at the wharf, within the hour, getting into his own ute — his own white Hilux, the one on ten thousand phone screens by now with MISSING standing over the top of it — getting into it with a woman, friendly, easy, while I stood in the wreck of our bathroom with her still in my nose.

And this was the thing I would carry afterwards, and be least able to forgive myself for. For four days I had known, known in the marrow of me, past all sense and past anything I could ever say to a policeman, that something had been done to my husband — that he had not walked out on us, that the notebook and the names and the shape going out through the dark were the truth of it, that Nial was in trouble somewhere and wanted finding. And that knowing did not leave me. Even then, even in that second, some deep stubborn part of me held its ground and said no — not him, not like this. But I could not carry the other thing one more hour. The not-knowing. The terror. The drawer down at the police station with my whole family shut inside it. And here, held out to me in the grey of an unsaved number, was a version I could pick up and use: a living husband, a cheating husband, a man I could go white with fury at instead of sick with fear for — a man with a body somewhere in this city, and a woman on his arm, and a debt to me I could get up and go and collect.

So I put the other thing down. I put the true thing down, and I picked up the one with the heat in it, because the heat was the only part of me still on its feet.

I picked the phone up off the basin. Somewhere in the last few minutes I had cracked the screen — a single hairline run clean across her message, straight through the middle of the word husband — and it still lit when I touched it.

I did not ring the police. It did not once cross my mind to ring the police — they had wanted a runaway husband from the very first hour, and I would sooner have gone straight through the bathroom floor than ring Linda Hodgman and stand there while she turned out to be right. I did not ring my mother. I wiped my face on the hand towel, and I stood up in front of the stranger in the glass, and I noticed that my hands had gone completely still.

Then I typed a message back to the number that said it was Serena. Thank you. Did you see where they went? Anything about her at all — what she looked like, the car, anything. I read it over once, calm as a stone, and I sent it off into the dark after the first one, and the shaking did not come back.