The Audit

"If I vanished tonight, there is nobody who would know where to begin looking. That is not a complaint. It is a specification, and I wrote it myself, one year at a time."

It should have taken me fifteen minutes to walk up the hill from Bathurst Street to my flat. It took something closer to thirty, because I kept stopping.

Not for any reason. I would simply find that I had come to a halt on the footpath outside somebody's front garden with my hand on a fence post, looking at nothing whatever, and I would have no idea at all how long I had been standing there. Once it was outside a house on Colville Street where a television was going in a front room, and I stood in the dark on the far side of the fence and watched the light of it moving about on somebody's ceiling and could not make myself walk on.

The night had that Hobart cleanness to it, the cold coming down off the mountain and up off the water at the same time and meeting somewhere around my collarbones. There were possums going along the powerlines. A cat came out from under a car and looked at me and went back under it. Somewhere down the hill a fridge compressor was running in a shed and I could hear it, three streets away, because everything was still coming at me at four times its natural volume and had been doing so since I came out of the wall.

I got to my door and stood on the step and could not immediately remember which pocket my keys were in, because the pocket where my keys lived had a doorway to another world in it, and my hand kept going there and finding the wrong shape and flinching away from it.

Inside, I did not turn the lights on.

I do not know why. I came into my own kitchen at a quarter past ten at night and shut the door behind me and stood in the dark, and the streetlight came in through the window over the sink and lay across the floorboards, and I stood in it with my bag still on my shoulder and did not move for a long time.

The flat made its noises, as it had made them every night for seven years. The pipes ticked as the hot water cooled. The floorboards in the hall shifted at about eleven, the way they always shifted at about eleven, as the timber gave up the day's heat. The fridge cycled. Those sounds had been as familiar to me as my own breathing for the whole of the time I had lived there, and I had never once actually heard a single one of them.

I heard every one of them that night.

Eventually I put the bag down and turned on the light over the stove, which was the smallest light in the flat, and got the bread out and made toast, because my body had started up again with that animal insistence and would not let me be. I ate four slices standing at the bench with butter running down my wrist, and I did not taste any of it, and the moment the fourth one was gone I felt sick, exactly as I had in the office tearoom that afternoon.

Then I washed my hands.

I did not need to wash my hands. I had washed them at the office, and again in the shower, and again with a nailbrush. I washed them anyway, at the kitchen sink, in the dark, for a good deal longer than any hands require, and I watched the water go down the plughole and it was clear, and I kept going.

And then I got out a legal pad, because I am who I am, and I sat down at the kitchen table and I tried to write the day down.

This is not a coping mechanism I chose. It is the only one I have. When something is too big to hold, I put it on paper in the order in which it occurred and I number it, and once it has been numbered it stops being a thing that is happening to me and becomes a thing that I am looking at, and that is the entire difference between being able to function and not. I did it for the redundancies. I did it when Rhys left. It works.

So I wrote at the top of the page: 10 January 2018.

And underneath it I wrote:

08:04 — Arrived office. Post-it note affixed to monitor. Handwriting confirmed as S.H. Pressure of pen inconsistent with normal. Message: meet Cornerstone 12pm sharp, no questions, tell no one.

My handwriting came out small and level and it steadied me at once, exactly as it always does, and I felt something in my chest unclench by about a degree, and I kept going.

08:15 — SMS sent to S.H. Delivered: no. Single tick. Number appears to be off-network.

11:40 — Left office. Lied to V.S.

12:00 — Arrived Cornerstone, Purdy's Mart. Ordered long black.

12:05 (approx.) — White van, no markings, stops at head of laneway. Two occupants. Passenger dismounts, searches café windows systematically. Driver signals with mobile phone. Both depart at speed.

Good. That was good. That was a factual account of an observable event, written in a hand that a stranger could read, and it looked—on the page, in blue biro, under a stove light—entirely credible. Two men in a van had behaved oddly outside a café. Such things happened. Such things happened in the world all the time.

12:12 — S.H. arrives from behind. Physical condition: severe. Unslept (est. 48–72 hrs). Laceration to jaw, untreated, approx. 24 hrs old. Hands shaking. Did not sit.

12:15 — S.H. hands over padded envelope. Instruction: read alone. "Choose wisely." Departs. Does not return.

13:05 — Meeting Room 4B. Envelope contains: 5 x device (grey, 35mm, matte, anomalous mass); 1 x access card, unmarked; 1 x letter (8 paragraphs, S.H. handwriting).

And I got that far, and my pen was moving beautifully, and I was almost calm.

13:20 — Device activated. Thumb pressure to indent. Device drew blood. Wall of 4B ceased to

And I stopped.

I sat at my kitchen table in the dark with a biro in my hand and looked at the words wall of 4B ceased to, and I could not write the next one.

Because up until that line, every single entry on that page was a thing I could have said out loud in a police station. A strange note. A frightened friend. An unmarked van. A man behaving oddly in a laneway. Every one of those was an event in the world, and if I had taken that page to a constable he would have read it and taken it seriously and possibly even done something about it.

And the next word turned the entire document into a psychiatric assessment.

I could see it. I could see it with total clarity: the page in somebody else's hands. A doctor's hands, perhaps. My mother's. Sitting in a room somewhere while somebody read it out loud in a gentle voice—my own handwriting, my own numbering, my own careful little timestamps, 13:20, device activated, wall ceased to exist—and the awful, unanswerable neatness of it, because that is what they look for, isn't it. That is exactly what they look for. The organised delusion. The man who has made a filing system for it.

And I would have to sit there and say no, you don't understand, look how carefully I've documented it, and every word I said would make it worse, and the more precise I made myself the madder I would sound.

The only way to write down the truth of that afternoon was in a form that constituted proof of my own insanity.

I sat there for a very long time.

Then I tore the page off, and I tore it in half, and in half again, and I stood at the sink and burned it in the washing-up bowl with a match, all four pieces, and watched my own handwriting curl up and go brown and go black—08:04, arrived office—and I ran the tap on the ashes and rinsed them away.

And then I stood at the sink in the dark with the tap running and thought: that is the second time today you have destroyed a document in order to protect yourself from being believed by nobody.

After that I sat down with my phone and looked for Seth Holder.

I do not know what I expected. An address, I suppose. That had been the whole of the plan: find out where he lived, go there tomorrow, hammer on the door until something happened. Standing in Meeting Room 4B that afternoon it had seemed like an obvious next step that I had merely been too rattled to take.

He was not there.

I do not mean that his details were private, or that I could not find them. I mean that he was not there. Seth Holder, forty-two years old, independent consultant, resident of this city for at least a decade, had essentially no footprint on the internet at all.

No Facebook. I knew that already—he had deleted it in about 2013 with a speech about metadata that I had found extremely funny at the time. No Instagram, obviously. There was a LinkedIn: no photograph, no employment history beyond Independent Consultant, 2011–present, no connections visible to me, last updated at some point in the mists. There was a business name I half recognised, and it went to a one-page website with a contact form and a PO box in Moonah and no street address anywhere on it.

The white pages had nothing. The electoral roll wanted me to be an electoral officer. I found a Seth Holder in Adelaide who was nineteen, and a Seth Holder in Wagga who sold boats.

I sat at my kitchen table for forty minutes at eleven o'clock at night trying to find out where my friend of ten years lived, and I could not do it, and I could not even find a photograph of him.

I have one. On my phone. The Christmas in July one, the paper crown and the tinsel, taken by me, five months ago. It is the only photograph of Seth Holder in my possession, and I would be prepared to bet a good deal that it is one of very few that exist anywhere at all.

He had done this on purpose. That was what came to me, slowly, sitting there in the dark. Every deflected question about where he lived. Every joke that had turned the conversation. The PO box. The deleted accounts. The refusal of photographs, which I had always put down to vanity and which I now understood had never once been about vanity.

Ten years. He had spent ten years quietly and systematically making certain that his friend could not lead anybody to his door.

Which meant that he had been expecting somebody to come to me and ask.

I put the phone face-down on the table and did not pick it up again.

The tobacco tin was in the cutlery drawer, under the tea towels, exactly where I had put it. It had been my grandfather's, and it had a picture of a sailing ship on the lid, and it had held drawing pins for eleven years and now it held three doorways to another world, and I got it out and set it on the kitchen table and opened it.

They lay there on a bed of loose pins.

Three.

Five, minus me, minus Josh. Three Guardians left to find, and Seth's voice saying choose wisely, and no guidance whatever on what wisely was supposed to mean, or what I was choosing them for, or what it was going to cost them.

So I did the thing I would have done at work. I made a list.

Not on paper. Never again on paper. I made it in my head, at my own kitchen table, in the dark, and it took a great deal less time than I had expected.

Josh. Done. Sent. Already in a plastic tub on Elizabeth Street.

Verity. And I sat with that one for a while, because she was the obvious answer. She was the only answer. She is the sharpest instrument I have ever been in a room with and she had spent the entire day demonstrating it. But I had lied to her at twenty to twelve and lied to her again at twenty to four, and she had lied to a room of six people for me, and she had asked me for nothing at all, and she had sat in Seth's chair that night and said nothing, and I had spent something that day which I did not know how to replace.

Not yet. Not on words. Not until I could show her.

Mum and Dad. Absolutely not, and something turned over in me at the mere thought of it: my father, sixty-eight; and my mother, who worries about me on a Tuesday for no reason at all.

Bec and Gav. Good people. Genuinely good people. And I had known them four years and I could not have told you the name of Bec's sister, and they would have thought I had lost my mind, and they would have been right to.

Rhys. No. Not for eleven years, and not tonight.

And then I sat at my kitchen table and kept going, and the list simply stopped.

It was not the wall that did it to me in the end. It was not the voice, and it was not the silent sea. It was sitting in a dark kitchen at half past eleven on a Wednesday night, reaching the bottom of a list of every human being on this earth who might reasonably be asked to believe me, and finding that there were two names on it—and that one of them was my brother, to whom I had spoken for perhaps ninety minutes a year for a decade.

Thirty-three years old. Eleven years in this city. A career, a flat, a mortgage, a team at the pub, four hundred contacts in my phone.

Two.

And Seth had had one.

You were the only one I could think of. I'm sorry about that.

I had taken that as a compliment. Somewhere underneath the fear, in the part of me that keeps score, I had taken it as a compliment—that of everybody in the world, he had chosen me—and I sat in my kitchen with three Portal Keys in a tobacco tin and finally, eleven hours too late, heard what the man had actually said.

Not the best. Not the wisest, not the bravest, not the most capable.

The only one I could think of.

He had made a list too. Sitting somewhere, with men looking for him, going through every person he had ever known—and he had come to the bottom of it, exactly as I just had, and there had been one name on it. A government business analyst he had lunch with. A man who listened to his theories and did not believe a word of them.

That was what Seth Holder had had, at the end of his life on Earth. Me. And he had known it, and he had said sorry for it, and I had spent the entire day being angry with him.

I put my head in my hands at my own kitchen table and stayed like that for a while.

It was well past midnight when I stood up, and I did not put the Portal Keys back in the drawer. I put the tin in my bedside table, which was no better, and I lay down on top of the covers in the dark with my clothes on and my own Portal Key in my fist.

And I did not sleep, and at some point I got up, and I stood in front of the wall.

The bedroom wall. The long blank one opposite the window, with nothing on it—no pictures, because I have never got round to pictures—two and a half metres of plaster in the dark, and I stood in front of it at one o'clock in the morning in my socks with a doorway in my hand.

I could go.

Right then. Nobody in the world would know. I could put my thumb on the indent and open it and step through and stand on that plain in the dark—if it was dark, and I had no way whatever of knowing whether it was dark, or whether it was even the same hour there, or whether that sun was up over the silent sea at that exact moment or halfway round the other side of that world. I could go and look. I could stand on my own two thousand acres in the middle of the night and hear absolutely nothing at all.

My thumb found the indent.

And then I thought: if it doesn't come back.

If it doesn't come back, nobody will ever know.

That was the one that stopped me, standing in my socks at one in the morning, and it went through me colder than anything else that had happened in the whole of that appalling day.

Nobody knew. Nobody knew where I would be. There was no note, because I had burned the note. There was nobody I had told—Josh had a story he did not believe and a parcel that would not arrive for two days, and Verity had a red stain on a collar and a silence she had chosen not to break. If I had walked into that wall that night and it had closed behind me, then in the morning a chair would have been empty in an open-plan office in the centre of Hobart, and somebody would have said where's Nathan, and by Friday my mother would have been ringing my mobile, and within a fortnight there would have been police in that flat looking at my computer and my bank cards, and after that they would have looked at the bridge, and the mountain, and the water.

And not one of them—not one single person in the whole of the world—would have thought to look for me on a clifftop above a sea that makes no sound.

I would simply have been gone. And the manner of it would never have been known by anybody, ever, for as long as the human race lasts.

I took my thumb off the indent.

I stood there for a long time in the dark in front of a blank wall, and then I went back to the bed and sat down on the edge of it with my hands hanging between my knees.

Somewhere on the other side of that plaster—not through it, not behind it, but somewhere that plaster could reach—there was red dust with my footprints in it. There was a handprint of mine lying in glass on a cliff edge, glowing or gone dark, and I would never know which. There was a plain the size of a suburb that had been given to me by something that had said my name.

And it was, I understood, still saying it.

Not to me. Not necessarily. But somewhere out there, patient, unhurried, entirely indifferent to my terror and my exhaustion and the fact that it was one o'clock in the morning in Battery Point—something very old was aware that I existed. It had been aware of it since twenty past one that afternoon. It would be aware of it tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day for the rest of my life.

Clive sees you, Nathan Cowdrey.

I lay down.

I did not undress and I did not get under the covers and I did not turn the lamp off, and I lay on my side with my knees drawn up and my fist closed around a Portal Key, in a flat in Battery Point, in the middle of the night, on the tenth of January.

And I thought: somewhere out there, the sun is coming up over Saint Phillis.

Or it isn't.

And I own it, and I have never been more alone in my life, and tomorrow I have to go to work.