The Shadows Are Quiet Here

"I have stood in a hundred green rooms full of frightened people. Not one of them was ever as quiet as that waiting room."

Nobody followed us down the mountain.

I made certain of it, and I want that set down plainly, because a woman who checks her mirror eleven times between Fern Tree and the city has already decided something about herself and has not yet admitted it. Nothing came up behind us on Huon Road. Nothing sat two cars back at the lights. I watched the glass the whole way into town with my face arranged into the mild unbothered expression of somebody thinking about the traffic, and by the time I turned into the car park behind the clinic the only thing following us was the drizzle, and my own reflection every time I looked up.

Which proved nothing at all, and I knew it, and I parked anyway.

The waiting room at the Hobart Paediatric Centre had been decorated by somebody who had thought very hard about children and had never, so far as I could tell, met one. Cartoon animals went romping across all four walls in colours you could hear — a giraffe with an enormous grin, a hippopotamus in a bow tie, a family of ducks going somewhere in a hurry — and every single one of them was smiling so hard, so relentlessly, so far past the point at which any animal would reasonably have stopped, that after ten minutes in that room I began to find them genuinely unpleasant to look at, and then to avoid looking at them, and then to be aware that I was avoiding it.

I sat in a hard plastic chair with the front edge of it cutting into the backs of my thighs, and I had the strap of my handbag wound twice round my fingers, and I was pulling on it. I noticed that after a while and made myself stop, and then found that I had started again.

Sammy was over in the corner on the floor with the wooden train set — the battered communal one, the tracks warped from thirty years of small hands and industrial disinfectant — and he had the carriages going round and round the loop, and round again, and round again, entirely content, entirely absorbed, humming something under his breath that was not quite a tune. Watching him do it steadied me the way almost nothing had steadied me that week. He looked exactly like a boy in a waiting room. He looked exactly like every other boy who had ever sat on that carpet and pushed that train.

Every time the door to the street opened I looked up.

I could not help it and I could not stop it and I did it perhaps eleven times in twenty minutes. A man came in shaking the rain off a golf umbrella. A woman with a baby in a sling and a toddler on a scooter she was not supposed to have brought inside. A boy of about nine on crutches, laughing at something his father had said. And every single time the hinge went, my heart got up into my throat before my head had finished the sentence, and every single time it was nobody at all, and I sat back and let my shoulders down and started again.

I could not have told you what I was watching for. That was the thing I kept coming back to and could not get round. If somebody had taken me by the arm at that moment and asked me, plainly, what exactly I expected to come through that door, I would not have had one word to give them.

Across from me there was a woman about my age, in a good coat, with her face gone entirely to pieces. Red-rimmed, swollen, the skin beneath her eyes shining and raw. She had a tissue balled up in one fist and she was working at it with her thumb, over and over, without any apparent awareness that she was doing it, and she was not crying — she had plainly done all of her crying somewhere else, out in the car probably, before she came in — and she was simply sitting there with the wreckage of it still on her, waiting to be called.

I looked at her for slightly too long, and then I looked away fast, because I understood that if I kept looking I would begin to want to know, and if I knew I would have to carry it, and I had nothing spare that morning to carry anybody else's with.

The heat pump laboured away above the door, pushing warm dry air down into the room, and underneath the noise of it there was a silence I had never come across anywhere in my working life. I have sat in a great many rooms full of frightened people. Green rooms before an opening. A hall of Year Twelves waiting to go in and be examined. There is a noise that goes with that kind of fear — a fidget, a cough, somebody's foot, somebody laughing too loudly at nothing at all. This room did not have it. Fifteen people sat in that room and were extremely quiet at one another, and not one of them moved, and I sat among them and could feel my own pulse in the palm of my hand.

I had been reading rooms for a living since I was twenty-two. I could walk into a hall and tell you inside four seconds which girls had learnt their lines, which two had fallen out over the weekend, which one would cry before the interval — and it was not a gift and I have never pretended it was. It was ten thousand hours of watching people pretend.

And I sat in that waiting room with my handbag strap wound round my knuckles and I could not read a single thing in it. Not one. And I did not know whether the room had beaten me, or whether I had simply stopped being able to do the only thing I was any good at.

In the far corner a small boy, four perhaps, had climbed the whole way into his mother's lap and buried his face in her shoulder and gone completely still. She had her arm round him and she was moving her hand in slow circles between his shoulder blades, round and round, and murmuring into his hair. She was not looking at him while she did it. She was looking at the wall.

I had done that. I had done exactly that, at three o'clock in the morning, in a sky-blue room with dinosaurs along the skirting board, holding my son against my chest while he sobbed himself out of a terror I could not see and could not name and could not get my hand into and drag him out of — telling him, over and over, in the warmest voice I own, that it was all right, that Mummy was here, that nothing could get him. And I had stared over the top of his head at the wall the entire time, because I could not have said any of it to his face.

When I looked back across the room, Sammy had stopped the train.

He was sitting quite still on the carpet with the little engine held in one hand, forgotten, and he was looking straight at me.

He had been doing that for some weeks. Not often. Twice a week, perhaps three times, always at these odd unmarked moments — in the car, at the table, once from the bath — and it was not the stare children give you, which is rude and enormous and which I had always rather enjoyed. This one was level. Considered. Patient. It went through the middle of me and out the other side and it took its time about it, and I had never once been able to work out what he was looking for, or whether he had found it.

"You okay, sweetheart?" I asked, and I put the light into my voice, because that was what the voice was for.

He nodded. Slowly. He did not look away.

"The shadows are quiet here, Mummy," he whispered.

It was not said the way children say a frightening thing. There was no relish in it, no game, none of the delicious pantomime horror that boys of three carry about with them and produce over the cereal. He said it the way he would have told me it had stopped raining. He offered it as a small, ordinary, helpful piece of information that he thought I might like to have, and then he sat there on the carpet with the engine in his hand and waited to see whether I had understood.

And I sat in a hard plastic chair beneath a smiling hippopotamus with my mouth open and nothing whatever coming out of it, and the entire room went a very long way away from me — the heat pump, the tissue, the woman staring at the wall, all of it running off to the edges like water off glass — because he had said here. He had said the shadows were quiet here. Which meant that there was a somewhere else. Which meant that he knew where it was. Which meant that my three-year-old had been carrying the difference between two places about in his head, and comparing them, all this time, the way a person compares the temperature of two rooms.

"Samuel Triffett?"

The sound of my son's whole name, said out loud into that room, brought the world back so fast that I felt it in my teeth.

A young woman was standing in the doorway with a clipboard held flat against her chest, and her scrubs were printed all over with cartoon characters — the same relentless grinning menagerie as the walls, so that for one lurching moment she did not look like a person who had come to fetch us at all, but like something that had detached itself from the paintwork and walked into the room on its own two feet.

"That's us," I said, and got up, and my legs took a moment to agree to it. "Come on, sweetheart. It's our turn to see Dr Carmichael."

I put my hand out to him.

He did not move. He stayed exactly where he was with his fingers closed hard round that little wooden engine and his whole small body gone rigid, and I stood there in the middle of a public waiting room with my hand held out and my heart going, and I thought, here it comes — and I had the entire scene in about a second and a half, fully staged and blocked, my son arched backwards over my arm with his voice going through the ceiling and fifteen frightened strangers watching me carry him out through the door.

And then he put the engine down on the carpet. Carefully, and the right way up, the way he always put a thing down when it was going to be needed again later. And he got up, and came to me.

"Okay, Mummy," he said, and slid his hand into mine.

He had done that hundreds of times and I could not have told you about a single one of them. But he did it in that waiting room with the hippopotamus behind him and the woman with the tissue watching the pair of us, and his fingers went round two of mine and closed and held on and were warm, and something came up out of my chest and left it aching and hollow, and I thought that a woman could stand in a doorway for the whole of the rest of her life with that hand in hers and want for nothing at all.

"Will you stay with me?"

His voice had gone very small.

I went down onto my heels in front of him so that our faces were level, right there on the clinic carpet, and I did not care in the least who was looking.

"Of course, darling," I said. "Every step of the way. Just like always."

And then I stood, and took his hand, and we went down the corridor after her, the three of us, her shoes squeaking on the linoleum in a rhythm that did not quite fit the fall of our feet.

They had done the corridor the same way as the waiting room and it had worked even less well. Whimsical animals gambolling along at a child's eye level, and above them the smell — antiseptic, and hand gel, and beneath it that faint sweetish chemical undertone that I had first noticed in the second week and had smelled on my own jumper that evening, standing in the kitchen, hours after we came home. The fluorescent tubes buzzed. One of them, halfway along, was going, and it flickered at an interval just long enough that I stopped expecting it before it came again.

Her name tag said Nicole. She looked about twenty-four. She glanced back over her shoulder at us with a smile I could see her deciding to produce, and I did not hold it against her for a moment, because I had produced that smile myself, in a foyer, in front of a hall full of parents, on a night when the set fell over in the second act.

"Dr Carmichael is looking forward to seeing you both again," she said. "He's been reviewing Sammy's latest test results."

I did not say anything. I did not altogether trust the voice to come out at the pitch I wanted from it.

Latest test results.

There had been so many of them. There had been a blood draw in the second week that took three people and eleven minutes, and I had held my son's head against my collarbone while he screamed himself hoarse into my neck and a nurse said almost there, darling six separate times — and afterwards I had walked out of that building and got into the car and put both hands on the wheel and howled where nobody could see me. There had been the MRI, and the great white machine, and the noise of it, and my boy in a gown made for somebody twice his size being asked by a man behind glass to lie very still. There had been an assessment in a beige room with a mirror down one wall, and they were entirely straight with me about what the mirror was, and I will give them that — and I had sat in there with my son and the toys they had chosen for him and been unable to stop thinking that on the other side of that glass somebody was watching my child and writing down what he did with a wooden horse.

Weeks and weeks and weeks of it. And at the end of every last one of them, nothing. Not one word. Every test came back and said, in effect, that my son was a perfectly healthy little boy — and then we drove home, and I sat up with him at two o'clock in the morning while he screamed at the corner of his own bedroom in a language that nobody on this earth had ever spoken.

Sammy's hand tightened round my fingers, and I looked down at the top of his head, at the curls going darker, at the cowlick at the crown of him that he got from me and not from his father.

And I wanted to stop. Right there in the corridor, under the flickering tube, halfway between the waiting room and whatever was behind that door — I wanted to go down onto my heels again and take my son by both shoulders and ask him. What shadows, Sammy. Where are they quiet. Where are they not quiet. How long have you known that there is a difference between them.

And I did not. Because the nurse was five steps ahead of us and slowing. Because he had already gone back to being a small boy in sandals with one of them still on backwards, swinging our hands between us as he walked. And because whatever else I did that morning, I was not going to be the woman who frightened her own child in a corridor.

So I said nothing at all.

Nicole stopped at the door at the end and knocked twice, softly, and pushed it open, and put her head round it.

"Dr Carmichael, the Triffetts are here."