Seen

"No one warned me the last good night would look exactly like all the others. I spent it without knowing to hold on."

By late afternoon I was hollowed right out, running on nothing, flinching at every tick and settle of the house. Sammy padded into the kitchen in his socks while I stood at the sink not really washing anything, and he took hold of the leg of my jeans and tipped his whole small serious face up at me and said, "Mummy, I'm hungry in my tummy" — and something in me simply decided. Not tonight. Tonight he was going to have a good night if it was the last thing left in me to give him — a proper one, the kind we'd let slip somewhere in the last terrible while without my ever noticing them go.

"Then let's make something good," I said, and got down to his level, and made myself really smile at him for the first time all day. "How about the jam ones? The ones you like?"

His whole face went up like a lamp. "The jammy ones?" He said it as though I'd offered him the moon. "With my thumb?"

"With your thumb."

I dragged a chair to the bench and stood him up on it and tied one of my aprons round him twice over, and it still pooled at his feet like a wizard's robe, which he decided was the funniest thing that had ever happened to anyone, ever. We made the dough together — which is to say I made the dough and he buried both hands in it to the wrist and squeezed it up between his fingers and informed me, with enormous authority, that it felt "like cold worms."

"Cold worms," I said. "Delicious."

"Not delicious, Mummy." He gave me the look he kept especially for when I'd said something profoundly stupid. "Worms are not for eating. Buffy eats worms and then she's sick on the grass."

The mention of the dog put a small ache clean through me — Buffy gone too, vanished into the same black week as his father, one more empty space in a house he hadn't stopped asking questions about. But he'd already sailed on, chattering now about whether the dinosaur would want a jam one, and I let it go and gave him the jar and a teaspoon and showed him again how to fill each little thumb-hole without eating more than he put in.

He ate more than he put in. Of course he did. By the time the tray went into the oven he had jam in his hair and flour up both arms and a red smear across one cheek like war paint, and he was so pleased with himself, so completely and uncomplicatedly happy, that I had to turn to the oven for a moment so he wouldn't catch my face doing what it was doing.

We had the sausages and mash first, at the proper table, with the good gravy he liked. I settled him in his booster seat and took my usual place, and neither of us sat in Nial's, and neither of us said a word about it — though I caught Sammy looking at the empty chair once, a long look, before he went back to flattening his peas one at a time with the back of his fork.

"When's Daddy coming home?" he asked, around a mouthful.

Over the last week I'd taught myself to keep my voice from doing anything at all when he asked that, because he asked it most days, sometimes twice. "Soon as he can, sweetheart," I said, and reached across to wipe a fleck of mash from his chin. "He misses you more than anything in the whole world. You know that."

He nodded, satisfied, the way he mostly was, and then told me a very long and very involved story about a boy at daycare named Hugo who could burp the whole alphabet, and I laughed — a real one, it caught me by surprise — and for a little while the kitchen was only a kitchen and we were only us.

The jam drops came out golden and a bit burnt down one side, which were mine, and a bit raw in the middle, which were his, and we ate two each straight off the tray while they were still too hot, standing up in the kitchen, because it felt like exactly the sort of night for eating biscuits standing up.

Then the bath, which he loved and fought in roughly equal measure. I worked the flour and the jam out of his hair while he marched the dinosaur along the rim of the tub and then launched it in with a splash that soaked the whole front of my shirt, and he laughed so hard he gave himself the hiccups, and then he had to tell me — urgently, gravely, hiccupping right through it — the entire life story of the dinosaur, who was named Dinosaur, and who was very brave, and who had once fought a shark and won.

Pyjamas, the dinosaur ones, obviously. Two books instead of one, because I couldn't make myself tell him no tonight, and then a third when he asked, because I couldn't make myself tell him no to that either. I switched off the big light and left the little one burning in the corner the way he needed it, and lay down beside him on top of the covers with my arm beneath his warm, heavy head.

"Mummy," he said, his eyes already gone heavy, his voice thick at the edge of sleep. "The shadows are quiet tonight."

Everything in me went still. "Are they, love?"

"Mm." A long, drifting pause. "The night-time friend said. She said they're only resting." His fist tightened on the dinosaur's tail for a second, then loosened. "She said not to worry."

The cold came up through me slow and complete, and I lay there in the small yellow light with my sleep-warm boy and made myself breathe, made myself not chase it — not tonight, not one more inch of it tonight. He was here. He was safe. He was mine, breathing slow and even against my arm, and that was going to have to be enough to hold on to.

I stayed a long time after his breathing had gone deep, longer than I needed to, watching the small sleeping shape of him in the half-dark and memorising it without letting myself ask why I needed to so badly. His lashes. The little frown he wore even in sleep. The way his hand stayed shut around the dinosaur's tail as if he'd never let it go.

Eventually I made myself get up, easing my arm out from under him an inch at a time, and drew the door to behind me until only a blade of hallway light lay across his floor.

Downstairs the house went back to being the house — too big, too quiet, every window a black square with the night pressed flat to the glass. Without him in front of me there was nothing left to hold the day off, and it all came back at once: Serena, the bathroom, the dark room, Nial, the silence where Sharon should have been. I couldn't settle. I made a tea I didn't want and put the television on low, only for the sound of other people's voices in the room, and I was half-heartedly wiping down the bench when something on the screen caught at the corner of my eye and stopped my hand where it was.

A photograph of a man I knew. Not well — but I knew that heavy, careful face; it had sat across a grey little interview room from me and actually listened, written things down as though they mattered, the one person in a uniform in the whole nightmare who'd made me feel even slightly less alone in it. Detective Karl Jenkins. Under the photograph, one word that turned the tea to lead in my stomach: missing.

I turned the volume up with a hand that had started, very slightly, to shake.

They gave almost nothing away. He had vanished the previous day while responding to a callout somewhere in the south of the state, and police held grave concerns for his welfare — and that, more or less, was the whole of it. No where, no how, nothing of what he'd been attending; a stone-faced senior officer at a lectern saying only that the circumstances were the subject of active investigation and that he would not be drawn any further, and would anyone with information please come forward. For a missing policeman it was a strangely airless little report, more silence than story, as though a great deal were being very carefully left unsaid. But I wasn't thinking about what they were holding back. I was thinking that the one man in the whole of it who had looked at me across that grey little table and actually listened was gone — swallowed, sometime in the last day, into the very same silence that had already taken Nial.

I should have turned it off then. Instead I stood rooted to the kitchen floor with the tea towel still in my fist, and the report changed, and the word Berriedale went through me like a live current.

A house I had stood outside only last night in the falling dark, waiting while Sharon worked the lock. They didn't show much of it — police tape strung across the driveway, the blue-and-white stutter of a patrol car, a reporter standing well back with her collar turned up against the cold — but they didn't need to show me a thing. A woman was dead. Shot, the newsreader said, by police, inside the house, on Thursday evening. They gave her name and it meant nothing to me — a woman from Moonah, forty-one, someone's mother — and then came the detail that turned me to ice: she had been the one who called it in. The emergency call. The break-in reported. The reason the sirens had come screaming past us in the dark. The woman who'd raised the alarm was the woman the police had shot, and no one on that screen could seem to say why she'd been inside the house at all, holding a knife, covered in someone else's blood.

It went on, each piece worse than the last. A man's body found inside — dead for days, they said, the death treated as suspicious. Another man taken to hospital with terrible injuries the reporter called, with a small careful pause, "consistent with an animal attack." An animal, the report went on, had been destroyed at the scene by police: a large cat of some kind, possibly exotic, possibly kept illegally, though no such creature had been reported missing anywhere in the state.

I stood there and listened to that calm, sober voice reach for a way to describe the thing I had watched with its face buried to the ears in a dead man's belly — and land on a large exotic cat, possibly kept illegally — and I could not honestly tell whether I was about to laugh or to be sick.

The house, they said, belonged to a man named Luke Smith. Not present at the time. Assisting police with their inquiries. Not considered a suspect. Luke Smith. The name Nial had underlined twice in the notebook I'd found in his office that first grey morning, the name sitting under the whole of it, spoken now in a newsreader's mouth as flat and ordinary as a traffic report.

Then came the part that stopped my heart altogether. The police were appealing for the public's help to find two women — two women seen leaving the property on foot, in a hurry, shortly before officers arrived; women who, they said, might have witnessed something crucial, women they urged, so calmly, so reasonably, to come forward. Then they described them.

A tall woman with dark hair, in a black jacket. A shorter woman with fair hair, in a red hooded jumper.

The red hooded jumper was hanging on the hook beside my own front door, not ten feet from where I stood.

Two women. On foot. In a hurry. A tall dark one and a short fair one. Me. Sharon. Us — read out to the whole of Tasmania over the evening news, our faces surely not far behind, and every quiet soul at home asked, so very politely, to help hunt us down.

The tea towel slid out of my hand. Somewhere out there, in a thousand lounge rooms, people were looking at a description of me — of me — running away from a house where a woman had been shot and a man lay days dead and a thing out of the worst kind of nightmare had been feeding in the dark room. The police weren't the ones I ran towards any more. The police were coming, and some cold, certain part of me understood they were coming for me.

I had Sharon's number up and ringing before I'd decided to do it. It rang, and rang, and rang, and went to the same dead nothing it had gone to for two days — no voicemail, no her, just the long empty tone and then the flat little click of the line giving up.

So I typed instead, my thumbs clumsy and far too fast, the words spilling out half-formed — the news, the woman, Karl Jenkins gone, the appeal, two women, they're looking for us, Sharon they are LOOKING for us, what do we do — and I sent it before the sensible part of me could get a hand up and tell me never to put a single word of any of it in writing.

The reply came inside two minutes. I felt it buzz against my palm and looked down, and every warm thing the evening had managed to put back into me went out all at once, like a light switched off at the wall.

Keep your mouth shut. We were never there.