The Drive Home

"I had never once had to decide what to tell him. I had simply told him. That was what he was for."

I did not start the car.

I got Sammy into the back and did up the buckle and pulled the strap through and checked it twice, and then I stayed where I was, bent into the doorway with the rain coming down the back of my neck, and looked at him.

He was already going. His head had gone over against the padded wing of the seat and his mouth had come open and his hands had let go of everything they had been holding. He had been awake perhaps four hours, and he had spent one of them in that room, and it had taken every last thing he had.

And I stood in the rain in a clinic car park and searched my son's face. I went over him feature by feature — the freckles, the mint dried on his chin, the small chapped patch at the corner of his mouth — looking for, I did not know what. Looking for him. Looking for the boy who had set his engine down carefully on the carpet because it was going to be needed later. Looking for some evidence that he was still the whole of what was sitting in that seat.

"Ready to go home, sweetheart?"

He did not answer. He was gone.

I got into the driver's seat and shut the door and the rain went quiet on the other side of the glass, and I sat there with the keys in my hand.

My hands were shaking. Not a tremor — shaking, properly, both of them, the way they had shaken in the wings on the night of my final performance at the Theatre Royal when I came off after the curtain and found a wall to lean on. I looked at them lying there in my lap and I let them get on with it, and I did not do the breathing, and I did not tell myself anything at all, and outside the rain came across the windscreen and made the whole car park run.

Three days.

We have a plan. That was the sentence I had been given, and I turned it over and tried to make it hold some weight. There were tests coming. There was a specialist getting onto an aeroplane. There was a man with a notepad who had said we, and had meant it, or had decided to mean it — and after six weeks of absolutely nothing there was now a date on a calendar with a person attached to it, and that was not nothing. It was not nothing.

Saturday. Sunday. Monday.

I started the car, and pulled out into a city that had gone under while we were inside it.

The cloud had come the whole way down off the mountain and laid itself over the top of Hobart like a hand over a mouth, and the light had gone to that winter grey in which nothing has a shadow and nothing has an edge and every street you know looks like a photograph of itself. The wipers went. The wipers came back. The Domain went past on one side and the water on the other with nothing at all on the far bank of it, and the tail lights ahead of me smeared out red across the glass and came back into focus and smeared again.

And somewhere on Davey Street it arrived, fully formed, and it was not the shadows, and it was not the bruises.

It was: what am I going to tell Nial.

I have turned that moment over more than almost anything else from that day and I still cannot get to the bottom of it, so I will simply set down what happened.

In eleven years I had never once had to work out what to tell that man. Not once. It had never so much as come up as a question. I came home and I put my bag down on the bench and I told him — the good and the appalling and the unbearably tedious, the girl in Year Ten who could not be got to stop crying, the mother who cornered me by the car, the evening my own mother rang — all of it, the entire freight of me, straight out onto the kitchen bench before I had my coat off. And he would stand there with the tea towel over his shoulder and let me get the whole way to the end of it. That was what he was for. That was what I had thought a husband was, for eleven years, and I had never questioned it any more than I had questioned the floor.

And on Davey Street in the rain with my son asleep behind me I found myself building a version.

Not a lie. I was not sitting behind that wheel constructing a lie, and I have never accused myself of it. I was doing something a great deal worse and a great deal more familiar, and I did not recognise it for what it was until I was most of the way through it.

I was editing.

I was going back through the last hour of my life and marking it up, the way I had marked up a hundred scripts, sitting at the kitchen table with a pencil, keeping what would play and putting a line through what would not. The tests — yes, tell him about the tests, that was safe, that was practically good news, that would land well. Dr Petrov — yes, tell him she was coming, tell him Tuesday, because he would want to know about Tuesday, because he would want to know whether he was expected to be there.

The bruises making shapes.

The gateway.

My son sitting up in a leather chair and speaking to a consultant paediatrician in a voice with none of him anywhere in it, and the doctor's eyebrows going up, and the word unsafe.

And I heard myself think, quite calmly, in the tone of a woman deciding whether a wall wanted a second coat: no. Not that. Not yet.

Why?

I put the question to myself right there, going up past the bottom of Molle Street with the indicator ticking, and I could not answer it, and it frightened me more than anything Dr Carmichael had said to me all morning.

Because I did not want to worry him. That was the first thing I reached for, and I had it in my hand for about four seconds before I saw it for what it was, because Nial had been worried for eleven weeks and I had watched him be worried and I had not lifted one finger to spare him a moment of it.

Because he would not believe me, then. Perhaps that. Because I had built a look for my husband's face and I had been rehearsing it privately for a fortnight — he had never once given it to me, I had never seen it, I had simply staged it and run it and blocked it out until I knew exactly how it would go — the look of a decent man deciding, very kindly, that his wife was not well. And a woman who had spent the last hour of her life sitting in a leather chair thinking about the precise moment at which a witness turns into a symptom was in no condition whatsoever to drive home and hand her husband the material.

Or.

Or because somewhere in the last fortnight, without ever once deciding to, without a single conscious moment of choosing it, I had stopped putting things onto the kitchen bench. Because he had begun weighing his sentences before he gave them to me — and I had noticed, and I had said nothing, and then I had begun, without knowing that I was doing it, to weigh mine. The way I had started walking round the end of the sofa after he moved it and had gone on doing it for a year.

We were doing it to each other.

That was what I understood, sitting at the lights at the top of Macquarie Street with my son asleep in the back. Neither of us had said a word about it. Neither of us had done one single thing that could be named, or accused, or apologised for. And there were now two people living in that house, both of them frightened, both of them holding something, both of them being extremely careful.

The lights went green.

And I did not go home. I went to the supermarket, because there was no milk in the house and no bread either, and not one thing that had happened to me that morning had made the slightest difference to that.

I carried him in. There was no other way to do it — I was not leaving a sleeping three-year-old alone in a car park, not that day, not any day — so I got him up out of the seat and onto my shoulder, and he came away limp and enormous and boneless, all forty pounds of him, and he put his chin down into the hollow of my collarbone and did not surface. I hooked the basket over my other arm and went in.

And the lights in there. God, the lights. I stood in that white glare with my son's whole weight down one side of me and his breath going warm and slow against my neck, and I looked at a wall of milk, and I could not remember what I had come in for. Not for a second or two. For long enough that a boy stacking yoghurt asked me twice whether I was all right, and I gave him the smile, and he went away perfectly satisfied.

I bought milk. I bought bread. I bought a great many things I did not need and have no memory of choosing, and at the checkout a woman I knew slightly from the school gate spotted me across two aisles and came the whole way over to ask about my mother — and I stood there under those lights with my sleeping child on my shoulder and I was warm, and easy, and funny, and entirely fine, and it was without any question the best work I did all week.

Sammy never woke. Not through any of it. Not through the trolley, not through the beeping, not when I lowered him back into the seat and did up the buckle with the rain coming down on the pair of us.

Then I took us up out of the city, and I could not afterwards have told you one detail of the first half of that climb.

I came back to myself somewhere past the turn where the houses give up and the bush comes down to meet the road. The cloud was coming in through the tops of the gums by then, moving across the tarmac in long slow banks, and I had the headlights on at half past twelve in the afternoon.

I checked the mirror.

There was nothing behind me. A white ute a long way back that turned off before Fern Tree. A woman in a Corolla who overtook me on the straight and was gone. No dark car, no blacked-out windows — nothing had followed us into town and nothing was following us out of it, and I sat there with my hands on the wheel and got no comfort from it at all. An empty road behind me proved nothing. I had a full morning's evidence by then that whatever had come into my family did not announce itself, and did not sit out in the open behind me where I could see it, and had been in my son's bedroom for weeks while I stood in the doorway and told myself he was having bad dreams.

Behind me, in the mirror, Sammy slept.

His head had gone right over and his cheek was squashed up against the strap and his mouth was open and there was a line of dribble going down onto his collar, and his chest went up and down, up and down, entirely regular, entirely peaceful, and his hands lay open in his lap. He was three. He looked three. He looked, in that mirror, exactly like every one of the hundred photographs I had taken of him asleep in that seat, because I had never in my life found anything so completely and so simply good to look at.

And it came up out of my stomach and into my throat so hard that I had to put both hands right round the wheel.

I loved him. That was all it was. Nothing clever about it and nothing complicated. I loved him so much, driving up that mountain in the rain, that I could not get a breath in properly — and underneath the loving there was something else with its teeth in me, and it would not let go.

"It's going to be okay," I said.

Out loud. In the car. To a sleeping child, with the wipers going.

"Mummy's here. I won't let anything happen to you. I promise."

And I heard it.

God help me, I heard it. I heard the weight I had laid across the vowel. I heard the half-beat I had left before the last three words — that small dishonest gap, the one I had stood at the back of a freezing hall and hunted out of four hundred girls, one after another, year after year, saying again, and again, and this time don't leave me the gap, because the gap is where they see you decide.

And there it was. In my own mouth, in my own car, in a promise to my own son.

I had done to him exactly what Dr Carmichael had done to me an hour earlier.

I had decided to mean it.

And I sat there with both hands on the wheel and the cloud coming across the road in front of me, and with everything I had, with the whole of what I had spent twenty years learning about how a human being sounds when they are telling the truth, I could not tell — from the inside, in my own voice — whether I had meant a single word of it.

I put the indicator on.

I turned into our street.