Fuck Off

"A locked door doesn't keep anything out. It just buys you the time to decide what kind of welcome you're going to refuse to give."

The kettle always took longer in winter. I'd noticed it in my first year at Lesdelle Street and every July since — some conspiracy of cold pipes and cold air and a cold kitchen bench that seemed determined to steal the heat before the water could claim it. Brett had explained the physics to me once, patiently, in the way he explained everything: thermal mass, ambient temperature, the particular draught that crept beneath the back door no matter how many rubber seals he fitted. I'd nodded and filed the explanation away in the drawer where I kept all the mechanical knowledge I would never quite use, and I'd gone on feeling that the kettle was simply sulking. Tonight it seemed to be sulking with particular commitment.

I warmed the pot first, the way my mother had taught me. Two spoonfuls of English Breakfast. A splash of milk already waiting in the cup. The saucer I'd bought for fifty cents at the Channel Heritage Museum fête in 2006 — mismatched to the cup but mine, which had always seemed to me the only qualification that mattered.

Rain had been falling on and off all afternoon and had stopped about half an hour ago, leaving the garden in that particular Hobart half-silence where every leaf is heavy and every downpipe has something private to say. I could hear the guttering Brett kept meaning to fix ticking against itself as it emptied. I could hear the Barkers' dog next door, who seemed to have opinions about the weather. And beneath both, almost beyond hearing, the slow settle of a house that had been holding its breath for two days.

Two days. Saturday evening felt like a week ago. Saturday evening Beatrix had stood in the hallway with a locked front door at her back and lied to me with the smooth competence of a girl who had been practising her whole life, and I had let her. That was the part that gnawed. Not that she'd lied — children lie, and my daughters had always been better at it than most — but that I had let her, and then I had sat down afterwards and poured myself a glass of white wine and pretended that the house still contained the same number of secrets it had that morning.

Cody. The name still sat on my tongue like a small stone I couldn't swallow and couldn't quite spit out.

I carried the tea through to the living room with the small-footed shuffle that had become habit since my hip had started making its feelings known. The television was murmuring about something in Canberra. Brett had reduced the volume to barely a whisper half an hour ago and promptly fallen asleep, his reading glasses sliding towards the tip of his nose, the latest Australian Wood Review folded open on his chest at an article about sustainable hardwood that he had almost certainly not finished. I watched him for a moment from the doorway. Sixty-three years old and still the same sleeping face he'd had at twenty-two, loosened rather than softened, the lines around his eyes patient and considering even in sleep. He measured twice and cut once. He always had. Apparently he did it in his dreams as well.

Thirty-eight years of marriage, and I still sometimes caught myself cataloguing him like a student I was trying to understand.

Placing the hot cup of tea on the coaster beside me, I sat down, letting my aching back nestle into the softness of the recliner. The cushion had moulded itself to me over seven winters. There was a particular hollow where my right shoulder went, and another where my lower back fitted, and the small satisfying click of the footrest lifting into position felt, on nights like this, like the closing punctuation of a long sentence.

I reached for my book. Robert Drewe, The Shark Net, for the third or fourth time. I had taught from it briefly in my last years at Claremont Primary — not the book itself but extracts, carefully chosen, the ones where childhood sat on the same page as something darker and children had to learn that adults could hold both at once. I opened it to the page I'd dog-eared the previous night and tried to settle into the sentences the way I'd settled into the chair.

The words refused to cohere.

I read a paragraph twice without taking any of it in, and then I closed the book over my finger and let my head rest back against the recliner and allowed myself, for the first time all evening, to actually think about my daughter.

Beatrix had not been home for two days. Not properly. There had been a bag left by the back door on Sunday morning that hadn't been there Saturday night, and a glass in the sink that I knew I hadn't put there, and a smell in her bedroom that was neither her perfume nor the air freshener I kept topping up out of vague wishful thinking — something colder, faintly mineral, like the air inside a cave. But the girl herself had not appeared. Her phone went to message bank within two rings, which was the particular rudeness of a daughter who had thumbed the side button rather than waiting for the thing to ring out.

And Gladys. I didn't even know how to think about Gladys any more. The wine had gone from a nightly habit to a nightly project, and in the last fortnight the lies had started — small ones at first, the sort you could pretend you hadn't caught, and then larger ones that sat on the kitchen table between us like uninvited guests. Aurora had let her go. I'd had to hear it from another mother in a supermarket queue.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it: Cody. A name Beatrix had asked about the other morning with the kind of studied casualness that I had been trained by three decades of Year Threes to recognise immediately. A name Brett had then heard in Gladys's front yard, spoken aloud by a stranger he'd found loitering near the front fence — somebody who had apparently been standing there long enough to flatten the grass before walking off without explaining himself. The two halves had come together in my head and I had not been able to pull them apart since.

I took a sip of tea. It was exactly the temperature I had been hoping for.

And then, as if on cue —

My back stiffened. An odd sense of deja vu descended on the living room as bright headlights flashed through the gap in the two fir trees that stood like sentinels, guarding the front path. The headlights arrived into the living room unfiltered, sweeping across the wall behind Brett and catching for a second on the edge of his reading glasses before they moved on.

For a moment I couldn't place the feeling. It was the same recoil I'd experienced the afternoon a parent had turned up at my classroom door demanding to know why their son had been given a C for his story about dragons — the same body-knowing that something unreasonable was about to enter the room. And beneath that, older and colder, another recognition I had been trying very hard all evening not to name: this is what the last time felt like, too.

Noting that the car had pulled to a stop, engine still lightly humming, curious to learn more, I made my way toward the front window. The tea stayed behind. My book slid from my lap onto the seat cushion, splayed open, its pages catching the lamplight. I left it.

Thirty years in front of classrooms had taught me that you always walked toward the thing that frightened you before it had time to decide you were afraid.

Nudging the blind's horizontal slats further apart, I gasped when I saw the dark car and the silhouette of a familiar man perched in the driver's seat. The gasp was small — the kind of noise I'd practised not making in front of children. But it was real, and it came from somewhere low in my chest, the place where bad news always seemed to land first before travelling upwards to the mouth.

For a single ridiculous second I'd thought: Cody. That was how far gone I was — how thoroughly I'd been steeping all evening in the soup of the last two days. I'd thought Cody before I'd thought anyone I already know, which was probably a small quiet confession about where my mind had been living.

But it wasn't Cody. Of course it wasn't.

It was Detective Karl Jenkins. Here. At my front door, on a Monday night in the middle of winter, in a car that was unmistakably the same dark sedan I'd watched park itself under these same fir trees on a different night three years ago. The memory surfaced with a completeness I hadn't invited and couldn't decline. Brett in the driveway, spittle flying from a mouth I had rarely in my life heard raise its voice — You've done enough damage! You've taken enough from this family! — and me standing just behind him with my arms crossed so tightly I'd left nail-marks in my own forearms, not saying a word because I hadn't trusted my mouth not to say something that would make things worse. Brett had done the shouting that night and I had done the watching, and the message between us, fully understood without ever being discussed, was that this was the last time any of it would happen. The last time this man would stand on our driveway. The last time his name would have permission to enter our house.

Three years. Three years of quiet. Three years of my driveway being my driveway again, of my garden being my garden, of my husband napping in his recliner with the Australian Wood Review sliding off his chest, snoring lightly, with nothing in particular to shout about any more.

And now the same car. The same silhouette. The same cold little feeling in my stomach that said this will not be the last time after all.

Face pulling tight with disdain, I pulled myself away from the window, making my way toward the hallway.

"You alright?" Brett asked. His voice came out low and roughened by the doze, but with rather more wakefulness in it than his closed eyes had been advertising.

Turning to glare at my husband for daring to challenge my motives, his closed eyes sent a shockwave of betrayal rumbling throughout my entire body. He can't even bother to look me in the eye, I huffed indignantly to myself. I knew, even as the huff formed, that I was being unfair. Brett had always listened from behind half-closed eyelids — it was how he thought, how he noticed the things other people talked over. But knowing something and feeling something have never been the same transaction, and right now I needed someone to be guilty of something, and he was the only one in the room.

Without reply, I continued pace with determination, reaching the front door mere moments after a rather timid knock sounded. Three soft raps. Timid. That was definitely the word for it — polite, almost apologetic, the rhythm you tap when you've rehearsed a careful sentence in the car and you're hoping the door opens on the second syllable.

I sucked in a gulp of anxious air.

I pulled the door wide open, making sure the tall man would clearly see my appalled face.

The cold came in with him, or rather came in around him, a draught of wet winter air that smelt of eucalyptus and exhaust fumes and the particular iron tang of recently fallen rain. He was exactly as I remembered and nothing like it. The unreasonable height was the same. The coat that had never quite fitted at the shoulders was the same. But the face inside the coat had been taken apart by something I didn't recognise and reassembled badly. Shadowed eyes. Two days of stubble. Hair sticking up at angles that no grown man chose for himself. He looked — and I registered this with the part of my brain that was still a teacher and couldn't help itself — like one of the children I used to pull aside at lunchtime to ask very gently if everything at home was alright.

Don't, I told that part of my brain, firmly. Not him. Not tonight. You don't get to be kind to this one.

"Fuck off, Karl!" I barked, the words leaving my mouth with a whoosh of hot air, as I almost simultaneously moved to slam the door shut.

I had not used that word aloud in perhaps fifteen years. I had never used it at a police officer. There was a small, scandalised part of me — the part that still belonged to Irene Cradock's Sunday morning Anglican daughter — that flinched as if slapped. The rest of me felt gloriously, shockingly clear.

"Wendy, wait!" Karl called out, stopping the door with his hand only inches before it would have closed on him.

As Karl pushed against the door, fighting to get inside, I held my ground, pushing back as hard as I could. My hip protested. My shoulder reminded me of its grievances. None of it mattered. I had pushed loaded book trolleys up the corridor at Claremont Primary on mornings I'd wanted to weep from exhaustion, and I had pushed prams up the hill on Branscombe Road with two daughters and three bags of groceries, and I could push one tall detective back out of my house without losing my composure over it.

"You don't get to call me Wendy," I growled back at him. Wendy was what my mother called me. What Brett called me. It was not, and would never be, the name I gave to the man who had turned my youngest daughter into a file. "You lost that right the night you stood on my driveway three years ago and—"

I stopped myself. Bit down on the sentence before it could finish. Not because I couldn't think of the ending — I had the ending ready; I'd had it ready for three years — but because giving it to him now, at this door, in this posture, would have been a kind of gift. He would have known what I was still angry about.

"Mrs Cramer, please. I need to speak with Beatrix," Karl begged. "It's urgent."

Hearing the desperation in his voice, I eased my pressure on the door. The battle for entry stopped. Momentarily, I stood still.

It was the please that caught me. Please had always been my weakness — any child who remembered to say it at the classroom door got a second chance at whatever they were asking for, and I had built an entire teaching career on the small civilisations created by well-placed manners. I hated that he still knew this. I hated, more, that for the briefest beat I almost considered opening the door the rest of the way. Not because I thought he deserved it. Because something in his face had already started coming loose, and some old classroom instinct was reaching for him before I could remember whose house this was.

No.

I gathered my voice back from the place it had wandered.

"She's not home," I said firmly, giving the door one more push. And then, because Beatrix had always said her mother didn't know when to stop, I planted my feet and I gave it a second push — the kind I hadn't given anything in years, the kind that used my whole body and thirty-eight years of marriage to a carpenter. Brett had taught me, somewhere in the early years, exactly where the weight went in a door. I had never expected to need the lesson.

The edge caught something solid — his shoulder, I think — and I heard him gasp. The door clicked closed. The deadbolt slid home under my hand almost before I'd decided to slide it.

In triumph, I rested my aching back against the door and for several minutes I listened to the thumping of my heart in my chest. The hallway was dim; the coat hooks held only Brett's oilskin and the green scarf Gladys had given me three Christmases ago, back when she'd still been the daughter I thought I knew. My own breath sounded louder than the television in the next room. Outside, I heard Karl's footsteps retreat down the path, unhurried, thinking. A car door. An engine. Headlights sweeping the hallway wall in a pale arc as the car reversed and left.

I did not move from the door until the sound of the car had entirely dissolved into the winter night.

Only then did I let my shoulders drop. The adrenaline that had held me upright through the encounter withdrew all at once, the way a tide withdraws, and left me aware of every small complaint my body had been politely postponing — the hip, the shoulder, the dull pulse behind my left eye that had been building since Saturday and had now, apparently, decided to introduce itself properly.

"What the hell has Beatrix got herself into now?" I mumbled at last, my finger pressing against my throbbing left temple as I massaged it.

"Bea," I said, once, aloud, to the empty hallway.

I closed my mouth around the second syllable before it could become anything else.

Then I pushed myself off the door with more effort than the gesture deserved and walked back towards the living room, where my tea would by now be cold and Brett would still be dozing and neither of those facts felt negotiable any more.

I didn't interrupt him.

I sat down in my recliner instead, in the hollow the cushion had learned for me, and I picked up the cold tea and I did not drink it.