Mr Left and Mrs Right

"My son put his shoes on the wrong feet. His father had a whole story about it, and I could not remember how it went."

"Mummy, can we go look for the big cat again?"

He was standing in the kitchen doorway with both hands on his hips, and that was Nial. That was Nial exactly — that was a man standing at the bottom of a paddock with a roll of wire at his feet, working out how he was going to get it up a slope. My three-year-old had it down to the angle of the elbows. He had never been taught it and he could not have told anybody he was doing it, and he stood in my mother's kitchen with chocolate all round his mouth and a fourth biscuit somewhere about his person, and from the shoulders down he was his father.

"Of course, sweetheart." I got hold of his curls and pushed them back off his forehead. "Why don't you go get your shoes on?"

He was gone, off down that hall at a flat gallop, and the whole house went with him.

And my mother leaned in.

She came in across the corner of the table and dropped her voice right down, and it went through me like a hand round the back of the neck, because that was the voice from the top of the stairs. That was the voice she used at half past ten at night when she came up to say goodnight and stayed a good deal longer than she had meant to, and it had not been used on me in twenty years.

"Jenny." She took her time about it. "I know we've had our differences, but no matter what's going on with Nial—whatever trouble he might be in—you know I'm here for you and Sammy, right? No matter what."

I sat there and took it in both hands.

Because we had. God, we had. Twenty years of them. The Conservatorium, which I had not applied to and which she had never quite got over. The teaching, which she had found a way to congratulate me on that left a mark. My hair. My weight after Sammy. The way I let that boy climb things.

And Nial, of course. Always Nial. Charming, she said once, in that kitchen, in 2007, with her back to me and her hands in the sink. Charming but unambitious, darling, and one has to be so terribly careful with the charming ones. I did not speak to her for eleven days, and she never once took it back, and she never once said it again either.

And there it was, sitting up on its haunches in the middle of her sentence.

Whatever trouble he might be in.

She had already decided. My mother had sat in that house all morning with my son and a plate of biscuits and gone over every syllable I gave her on that verandah — and somewhere in the middle of it she had arrived at a verdict, and the verdict was that Nial Triffett had done something. That there was trouble out there somewhere, and that my husband had gone and found it, and that it had followed him home.

And she was telling me that she would stand in front of me anyway.

That was the offer. It was love, and it was an accusation, and the two of them came out of her in the same breath and in the same voice, and I have never been able to separate them, and I do not believe she could either.

And I took it. That was the shameful part of it. I sat in my mother's kitchen and heard her imply that my husband had brought this down on us, and I did not say one word in his defence, because I could not afford to.

My eyes went. I nodded, and swallowed, and something enormous came up into my throat and would not go either way.

"I know," I said. "Thank you."

Thank you for not asking whether he left me.

Thank you for taking my son without one single question.

Thank you for saying that a mother's instinct is rarely wrong, in a kitchen, at a table, when everybody else in Tasmania has been putting a gentle hand on my arm.

Thank you for being my mother, after twenty years of my pushing that away with both hands and telling myself it was your fault.

I said none of it. Of course I said none of it. We did not do that, she and I. We never had, and we were not going to start in a kitchen with a plate of biscuits between us — and the whole enormous unsaid thing went past the two of us again, the way it had gone past us across a coffin, and across eleven months of Tuesdays with the piano lid down.

"I'm ready, Mummy!"

He came stamping back into that kitchen with his whole face lit up and stopped in the middle of the floor with his arms out, presenting himself for inspection.

And his shoes were on the wrong feet.

Left on the right. Right on the left. Both of them splayed out sideways like a duck's, and he was standing there absolutely delighted with himself, waiting for me to tell him he had done it.

And it took my legs out from underneath me.

Because Nial taught him that. Nial built an entire mythology round it — there was Mr Left and there was Mrs Right, and they were married, and they were only ever happy when they were standing on their own proper feet, and if you put them on the wrong ones they would sulk all day and might very well start an argument in the middle of the shops. He did the voices. He did a whole scene of it on the floor of our hallway with two shoes in his hands, at seven o'clock in the morning, in front of a boy who could not yet count to ten.

I stood in my mother's kitchen and looked down at my son's feet and I could not remember how it went. I could not remember which one was Mr and which was Mrs. I could not remember whether they lived in the shoe cupboard or under the bed, or what the argument in the shops had been about, or how it was ever resolved.

And I have spent my entire working life inside other people's words. I have carried six hundred lines in my head at once and given them back on cue, in a hall, in front of an audience, with the right stress on the right syllable. I could stand up now and give you the whole of the Gentlewoman's speech, and I have not looked at it since I was twenty-four.

And I could not give my son four minutes of his father's nonsense about a pair of shoes.

Because I had never learned it. I had heard it from a doorway with a tea towel over my shoulder more times than I could possibly count, and I had never once listened to it properly — because it was his, and it was theirs, and it would be there tomorrow.

And who was going to teach him now?

Not the shoes. The shoes did not matter; I could have had those shoes on the right feet in four seconds flat. But the shoes were one of a thousand things, and I did not know what the other nine hundred and ninety-nine were, because I had not been the one doing them.

Who was going to teach that boy how to swing an axe? How to back a trailer down a driveway? Which end of a spirit level to look at, and why? Who was going to be standing next to him the first time somebody bigger than him started something in a car park?

"Perfect," I said. "Come on."

And I did not fix them.

My son went out into that garden with his shoes on the wrong feet, and I let him, and I had never let him do that before in his life, and I could not have told anybody why.

The cold came at us the moment we were through the door, and it had got in under everything while we had been inside. The light was going — not gone, going, the way it went up there in the last week of July, when the sun gave up somewhere behind the mountain at about four o'clock and could not be bothered with the rest of it. Everything in that garden had lost its colour. The greens had gone to grey and the last two roses had gone to nothing at all, and the whole of it looked like a watercolour that somebody had left out in the rain.

And it was watching us.

That was precisely what it felt like, and there was no way of saying it out loud that did not sound mad, so I did not say it. That garden had been the safest place in the world to me for twenty-eight years, and I stood in the middle of it with my arms folded and did not like the fence line.

Sammy went straight back to work. He went along the beds on his toes with his shoulders up and his elbows in, freezing solid every four or five paces the way he had seen somebody do on the television, and every so often his whole body would go rigid and he would point at something. It was a shadow. Or it was a bird. Or it was nothing whatsoever except the enormous machinery of a three-year-old's imagination running at full capacity in a freezing garden.

I stood there and watched my son and could not stop taking him to pieces. The way he pushed his hair back off his forehead when he was concentrating — pure Nial. The way he hummed while he was hunting, tunelessly and continuously and entirely unaware that he was doing it — that was me, that was me at nine years old going up the back of that same garden with a jam jar, and my mother had told me so a hundred times.

And the absolute, unshakeable, cast-iron conviction that there was something magical hiding in an ordinary garden, and that if he simply kept looking he was going to find it.

That was both of us. Once.

"Sammy," I called. "We should go back inside soon. It's getting cold."

He turned round and looked at me, and his face was completely serious.

"But Mummy, the cat might be cold too. We need to find it and make sure it's okay."

I had to turn away and look very hard at one of my mother's rose bushes.

Because there it was. Right there, in the middle of a freezing garden in the last of the light. My son had been lied to twice in two hours by his own mother. His father had not come home. His dog was gone. And he was standing in a flowerbed in the cold with his shoes on the wrong feet, worrying about whether an animal that probably did not exist had somewhere warm to sleep.

I did not know where he got it. That was the truth of it. I did not know which of us had given him that, and I did not honestly think it was either.

The afternoon would not move, and then all at once it had gone.

We came back inside and did something that was supposed to look like an ordinary Sunday, and every single one of us was acting. Rowena did the grandmother. I did the mother. Sammy did the carefree child, and he did it worst of all — because he kept forgetting his part, and then he would come back to himself and look up at the two of us and check our faces, and then go back down to his blocks.

All three of us knew our lines. Not one of us believed a word of it. I sat in my chair in my mother's kitchen and watched the worst production I have ever been involved in, and I could not stop it, because I was in it.

And Sammy started to go.

He had been running on adrenaline and chocolate since eight o'clock that morning, and even those gave out in the end. His questions came further apart as the light went — but every one of them came in with more weight on it than the last, and every one of them found the gap.

"When's Daddy coming home, Mummy?"

He must have asked it a dozen times that day, and this time there was something underneath it that had not been there before.

A wobble. Right down in the middle of it.

I understood, kneeling on my mother's kitchen floor with my hands on my son's face, exactly what was happening to him, and I would have given anything on this earth to stop it.

He was learning.

He was three years old and he was learning that some questions did not have answers. That grown-ups did not always know. That he could put a question to the one person in the entire world who had never once failed him, and she would take his face in both hands and say something warm and steady — and it would not be true, and there would be nothing whatever that he could do about it.

I had been planning to keep that from him for another ten years. I had been planning to hold it off for as long as I could possibly hold it, and he got the whole of it in a weekend, off a kitchen floor, from me.

"Soon, sweetheart," I said.

And I made my voice do it. I made it do the entire thing — the weight, the warmth, the lot of it — and it came out of me steady and unhurried and beautiful.

"He's just... working late."

It went down my throat like a swallowed stone and lodged there with all the others. And he looked up at me and he believed me. He believed me completely, because I was his mother, and in the whole of his world his mother had never once told him a lie.

Rowena came in over the top of it. She came in the way she came in when a boy went to pieces in the middle of a lesson — no fuss, no comfort, no acknowledgement whatsoever that anything had happened at all — and she launched straight into the story about the piano that ended up in the Derwent River.

It was a true story, she insisted. It had been a true story for as long as I had known her, and it had been three separate true stories in that time, and every version of it involved a crane and a policeman and a spectacular misunderstanding about a whale — and by the end of it my son was up on his knees on the chair with his mouth open.

She had the most extraordinary voice for it. She never did a single silly noise and she never put a voice on anybody. She got a room full of children to lean in on nothing at all but timing, and she had been doing it for forty years, and she was doing it now for one small boy in a kitchen because she could not think of anything else to give him.

I sat and watched my mother hold my son together with a story about a piano, and I looked out of that window at a garden that had gone completely black.

And every time something moved in it, my heart went.

The wind in the rhododendrons. A bird going into the hedge. Nothing. Nothing every single time — and every single time, my whole body came up out of that chair by about an inch, and my hands went, and I had to make myself sit still and keep my eyes on my son.

A week and a half earlier I had lived in a world where there was nothing in the garden.

And I have never got back to it.

Then the need came up in me.

I had no better word for it then and I never found one. It came up my back and into my shoulders and it would not sit down again — and it was the exact thing I had felt in the last five minutes of a tech run with the whole production coming apart in front of me, sitting in the fourth row with a torch and three pages of notes and no time left in which to give a single one of them.

Do something. Do something now. Anything at all.

Because what was I doing? I was sitting in my mother's kitchen listening to a story about a crane. Somewhere out there a man in a bad suit was going to go home tonight and eat his dinner and open my husband's file in the morning. Linda was going to finish her shift and drive home to my brother. The sun was going to come up on Monday. And every single hour of all of it, my husband was going further away from me.

And I had a business card in my handbag.

That was it. That was the whole of my armoury. A business card, and a shopping pad with four names crossed off it.

They had procedures. They had databases and phone records and warrants and men with torches, and they had forty-eight hours in which to decide whether they could be bothered. And I had one thing that not a single one of them had, and I sat at my mother's table with my son's blocks going over on the floor and finally understood what it was.

I had nothing left to lose.

"Rowena," I said.

It went straight across the crane and the whale and the policeman. She turned round.

And she was not surprised. That was what stopped me. She looked at me across her own kitchen with a story half-finished in her mouth and she was not surprised in the slightest, and I understood that she had been waiting for this since the moment she heard my tyres on the gravel.

"I need to ask you a favour."

"You want me to keep Sammy for a bit longer, don't you?"

And the relief went through me like a hot drink on a cold day.

Because I did not have to say it. I did not have to build it, and pitch it, and land it, and watch her face while I did it. She simply reached over and took it off me and put it down on her own side of the table, and it was done, and it cost me nothing at all.

"Just for a day or two," I said.

Which was not true, and which both of us knew was not true, and neither of us said so.

"I need to... I need to do something. I can't sit here waiting for the police to figure things out. I need to start looking for answers myself."

She did not tell me not to. She did not tell me to be sensible. She did not tell me to leave it to the professionals. And she did not ask me what, precisely, I intended to do — which was the only question that mattered, and the one I could not have answered, and the enormous hole sitting directly underneath the whole thing.

"Of course, dear," she said.

Then she turned to my son and everything in her face went up. "Sammy and I will have a grand time, won't we, my little prince?"

He came up onto his knees on the chair. "Can we make more biscuits, Grandma?"

"As many as you like, sweetheart." She put her hand out and moved a curl back off his forehead with a tenderness I could not look at directly.

Then she turned back to me, and the entire performance came off her face in one piece.

"Just promise me you'll be careful, Jenny. And keep me updated. I worry about you, you know."

I worry about you.

My mother had never said that to me. She had said you'll catch your death. She had said that colour does nothing for you. She had stood up at a graduation in front of two hundred people and said that she supposed I had done rather well, considering. And in thirty-two years she had never once, in plain English, out loud, told me that she worried about me.

She said it twice in a day.

"I will. I promise," I said.

And by that stage of the afternoon we both knew exactly what my promises were worth.

I gathered my things, and every single one of them weighed more than it should have. My handbag. My phone — black, and silent, and turned up as far as it would go. My jacket. And the business card, which had been in the side pocket for four hours and had gone soft at one corner where I had been holding it.

Ordinary objects. And I was about to try and do something extraordinary with them, and I had not the faintest idea what.

I got down on the floor and I held my son. And I held him too long. I knew that I was holding him too long while I was doing it, and I could not make my arms open — and he did not complain, and after a while his hands came up and got hold of the back of my coat, and he held on too.

He had learned that. A week and a half earlier that boy would have been wriggling and shouting and trying to get down and go back to his blocks. He held on to me in his grandmother's kitchen because he had already found out, at three years old, that people go out through a door and do not always come back through it.

"Mummy has to go away for a little bit," I said, into the side of his head. "But I'll be back soon, and maybe I'll bring Daddy with me. Okay?"

And there it was. Another one.

Straight out of my mouth without so much as a pause in front of it. Maybe I'll bring Daddy with me — a promise about a man whose telephone did not ring, whose desk was bare, and whose name I had spent the morning screaming across a public lobby at my brother's wife.

And I gave it to my son beautifully. Warm, and easy, and light as anything.

He pulled his head back and thought about it, with his forehead right down and his whole face working, the way he thought about everything that had ever been said to him. Then he nodded. Once. Very seriously.

And it was his father's nod, and he had no idea.

"Okay, Mummy. I'll be good for Grandma."

"I know you will, sweetheart."

I pulled him back into me and put my face down into his hair and breathed him in — the biscuit, the shampoo, the warm scalp, the sandalwood — and I did it on purpose. Deliberately. Consciously. The same way I had gone round the old flat on the last night before we moved, on my own, in the dark, with my hand flat on every wall.

Because I was going out to look for something, and I did not know what it was, and I did not know where it was — and the only man in two days who had told me anything at all about it had stood with his hand on a door and told me to be careful.

I stood up.

My mother was looking at me, and there was fear in it, and there was pride in it, and there was something else that I had no name for at the time and have never entirely worked out since.

It might have been recognition.

"Go do what you need to do," she said.

There was nothing else. There was nothing else that could be said in that kitchen with a three-year-old sitting on a chair with his shoes on the wrong feet, and both of us knew it, and both of us knew precisely how much we were not saying.

So I went.

The evening had properly arrived while we were inside, and the cold had teeth in it now. The cloud had come off at last — the way it sometimes did at the very end of a day, far too late to be of any use to anybody — and there were three or four stars out over the water, small and white and entirely indifferent, and Hobart had come on below the house, all the way down the hill and round the edge of the river.

All those lights. Every one of them a kitchen with somebody in it. The ordinary Sunday evening running all the way down that hill in the dark — the world where husbands came home, and wives did not have to teach themselves to be detectives, and three-year-olds did not have to learn about absence off a kitchen floor.

My car was waiting in the drive with the frost already starting on the windscreen. I got the door open, and I turned round.

They were in the doorway. The two of them, backlit by the hall light, and I could not see their faces at all. Just the shapes of them — my mother upright with one hand on the frame, and my son standing in front of her with her other hand laid flat on the top of his head.

And they waved.

I waved back, and got into the car before I could look at them a second time.

The engine caught first turn, the way it always did, and the gravel went under the wheels — my father's gravel, the sound of coming home, the sound I had known since I was four years old — and I reversed out of my mother's driveway and left my child standing in her doorway.

I went down the hill. I got to the bottom of the street, and I put the indicator on.

And then I sat there.

The indicator went. Left, and left, and left. There was nothing behind me and nothing coming, and the whole of Hobart was lying out in front of my windscreen with all its lights on, and I sat at a give-way sign at the bottom of my mother's street with both hands on the wheel and the heater going and my breath on the glass.

Luke Smith.

That was it. That was everything I had in the world. A name that a tired man had put down on a steel table and taken straight back off it again, and a business card gone soft at one corner.

I had told my mother that I was going out to look for answers.

And I sat at the bottom of her street with the indicator going, and I did not know which way to turn.