The Empty House

"For two days I had been telling people that my husband was not the sort of man this happens to. And then I opened a drawer."

The key went into the ignition on the third try.

I had sat at the bottom of my mother's street for I do not know how long with the indicator going and the heater roaring at my knees and the whole of Hobart lying out in front of me with its lights on — and in the end I turned left, and I did it for no better reason than that it was the way home. That was the entire strategy I came away with. I had stood in my mother's kitchen and told her that I was going out to look for answers, and I turned left because turning left was what I had done four thousand times before.

In the mirror her house went down and away behind me, the brick and the iron lace and the bay window with the light on in it, and it got smaller, and it went round the corner, and it was gone.

The back seat was empty.

That was the thing I could not manage. Not the driving — the back seat. Because I had driven that road with a talking three-year-old in it every single day for a year, and the noise of him was the noise of the car — Mummy, why does the moon come with us? Mummy, do kangaroos have knees? Mummy, why is that man cross? — and there was nothing in it at all, and my ears kept going back to it and waiting.

His koala was still in the seat, slumped over sideways with its head down against the buckle where it had gone when he got out of the car, both ears rubbed right down to the backing by three years of a small hand doing precisely the same thing every night without ever once knowing that it was doing it.

I put the radio on to stop myself looking at it.

"—and in local news, health officials are urging residents to remain vigilant as the flu epidemic continues to grip Hobart. Hospitals report—"

There it was. The ordinary world, running on, with a man in a warm studio somewhere down in town reading out sentences about a flu.

I got my hand out and killed it, and the silence came in behind it twice as loud, and after that there was nothing but the tyres and my own breathing and a cardboard pine tree going round and round on its string in front of my face.

The climb went past without me. Then I came round the last bend and turned into my own street, and the whole of the back of my neck went cold.

It was the same street. Nothing had happened to it. The same fences and the same neat little gardens, and Mrs Boyle's caravan still up on blocks where it had been up on blocks since 2015, and the bare trees going up out of everybody's front lawn with their branches into the last of the light — and every single house on that road had somebody inside it eating their dinner.

I drove down it at fifteen kilometres an hour with both hands on the wheel and looked at every parked car.

My own house came up on the left, and it went into me like a punch from somebody I could not see. Pale blue weatherboard, and the verandah, and the porch light that had been going since May and that neither of us had ever got round to — and it stood there in the half-dark with its curtains open and its windows black, and there was nobody in it, and it did not pretend otherwise.

The driveway was empty. Of course it was empty.

I pulled in and turned the engine off, and then I sat in my own car in my own driveway and could not make myself get out — because from in there, with the engine ticking and the frost starting to come up on the windscreen, I could still pretend.

He was in the kitchen. That was all. He was standing at the stove with his sleeves pushed up and the tea towel over his shoulder and a wooden spoon in one hand, doing the entire ridiculous performance he did with that spoon. And Sammy was up on the bench where he was absolutely not allowed to be — Nial had put him there himself, which he denied every single time — and my son had his mouth open, listening to some enormous piece of fabricated nonsense about the origins of pasta.

I sat in that car and let myself have it for about ten seconds. Then I made myself get out.

The cold came at me off the mountain, and the gravel went under my shoes, and every step of it sounded like something breaking. The wind had got up while I was driving and it came round the corner of the house at me, and it carried the rain that was still an hour off, and eucalypt, and underneath the pair of them, thin and faint and unmistakable, something metallic. I stopped on my own path with my keys in my hand and breathed it in and could not name it.

Something moved by the fence.

I came round so fast that I went over on my own ankle, and my whole body was up and braced and my keys were out between my fingers and my heart was going hard enough to hurt — and it was a cat. A neighbour's cat, going along the front of the hedge with its shoulders working, and it went under the gate and away and never once looked at me.

"Get a grip," I said.

Out loud, on my own path, to nobody. For the second time that weekend.

I went up the steps and got the key into the door and turned it. The deadbolt was still across. I felt it go back under my hand and something in my chest let go about half an inch — because I had thrown that bolt on Saturday night behind two police officers, and I had thrown it again that morning behind me on my way out with my son's bag over my shoulder, and it was exactly where I had left it.

And I have never been more wrong about anything in my life.

The house was cold.

Not cool. Cold — the dead cold of a house that had been shut up all day with nobody in it and no heat going, and it had got right down into the boards, and I stood in my own hallway with my coat on and could see my own breath.

And it smelled of lemon.

That was what undid me first, standing there in the dark with the door still open behind me. It smelled of the floor cleaner I had used on Friday afternoon, which was the last completely ordinary thing I ever did in that house — Friday afternoon, with the radio on and the back door open, doing the hall floor because Nial's boots had been up and down it all week, and I had been cross with him about it, and I had told him so.

The clock was going. His parents gave us that clock and it went up on the wall in that hallway the week we moved in, and I had not properly heard it in four years — and I stood underneath it in the dark and it was the loudest thing in the world. Every second. Every one of those seconds a second in which nobody had rung me.

I went down that hall slowly, and I did not put the lights on, and I could not have said why.

It was not my house.

I went over it and over it, standing there, and I could not say what was different — because nothing was different. The coats were on the hooks. The photographs were on the walls. My son's gumboots were lying where he had kicked them off on Friday afternoon, one of them on its side. And the whole of it was wrong: the air in it was the wrong shape and the rooms were the wrong size, and I went down my own hallway on the sides of my feet.

In the kitchen, a cupboard door was standing open about four inches.

I stood and looked at it. Then I pushed it shut with one finger, and the little magnet went, and I stood there in the dark with my hand still flat on it and could not remember whether I had left it like that.

The calendar was on the fridge where it had always been. Wildflowers, and a magnet from Port Arthur, and my own handwriting all over the last three weeks of July.

Sammy – Dr C, 9.30.

Bins.

N – Bellerive quote.

Rowena, lunch, bring the good wine.

And down at the bottom, in a square that had not arrived yet: Dr Petrov — Tuesday??

With two question marks. Because I had written it standing up, on Saturday morning, in the car park of the Paediatric Centre with my hands going and my son asleep in the back — and I had put two question marks after it because I had not quite been able to believe that anybody was actually coming.

I got my phone out and I rang my husband. In our kitchen. In the dark. With my coat still on.

It did not ring. It had not rung once since Saturday afternoon and it did not ring then — no pause, no click, no line opening up anywhere out in the world — and after nothing at all, he was in my ear.

"Hi. This is Nial Triffett. I'm busy at the moment, but if you—"

Two thousand and thirteen. A beer, a deck, four takes and the giggles.

The beep went.

"Nial." My voice went out into an empty kitchen and came straight back off the walls at me. "Please. If you're getting these messages, just… just let me know you're okay. Even if you don't want to come home. Even if—"

And it went. The whole thing went, and I had to put my hand over my mouth and hold it there until I could get another one up out of my chest.

"Just let me know you're safe. Please."

I ended the call and put the phone face down on my own bench, and the silence came back into that kitchen and filled it right up to the ceiling.

I stood at the sink with both hands on the edge of it and looked out at a garden that had gone completely black, and I let myself think it — deliberately, the way I had been pressing my thumb into the bruise on my own knee all weekend, just to feel it go.

If I stand here long enough he will come out from between those gum trees and walk up the lawn with his hands in his pockets.

Then I was in our bedroom with the lamp on, and I do not remember deciding to go there.

His side of the bed. His book on the nightstand, a paperback, some detective thing — he had been reading it for about a fortnight at the rate of four pages a night before falling asleep with the light still on and his glasses up on top of his head. The bookmark was in it, halfway through, roughly. He had put it there on Friday night and marked his place, because he was going to come back to it.

The wardrobe door was open. Not wide — six inches, perhaps eight, the way it had always stood, because the catch had never worked properly and the pair of us had stopped noticing years ago.

I went over and put my hand on it and pulled it back.

And his clothes were gone.

I stood in front of my own wardrobe in my own bedroom and looked at a rail of empty hangers.

Not all of them. That was the part of it I could not get past, and could not get round, and have never got round since. Not all. The suit was still there, in its bag, down at the far end — the one he wore to our wedding, and to my father's funeral, and to nothing else in eleven years. His good coat was there. The dinner jacket he had worn precisely twice and complained about on both occasions was there.

But the shirts had gone, and the work trousers had gone, and the jumpers — the ones I had bought him and gone on and on about the state of — the whole lot, off the rail, with the hangers still up there and nothing on them, swinging very slightly, because I had opened the door too fast.

In the corner, on the floor, where the overnight bag lived — the green canvas one that had been to Melbourne and to Launceston and on two footy trips, with a broken zip he refused to have mended because he said it built character — there was a rectangle of clean carpet.

I could not get any air in. I got hold of the door frame and went down onto the end of the bed and sat there with my hand over my mouth and the whole room going round me.

Because he had packed.

I had watched that man pack a bag a hundred times. I had stood in that doorway with a cup of tea in my hand and watched him do it, and he did it the same way every single time — shirts first, because they went in flat and everything else went on top of them, and the good shoes went in last with his socks stuffed down inside them. He took the work shirts when he was going somewhere to work. He left that suit on the rail, because the suit was for the two things in his life that had ever been worth wearing it for. And he took the green bag when he was in a hurry, because it was the one he could reach without moving anything else.

Whoever emptied that wardrobe had taken exactly what Nial Triffett would have taken.

He left us.

I sat on the end of my own bed with my husband's paperback lying on the nightstand and his bookmark still in it, and I let it into the room, and it came in and stood over me. He left us. He packed a bag and he took his clothes and he sent a message telling me not to wait up. And every single person I have screamed at in two days was right. And I am the one who was wrong.

Then, a long way underneath all of that, something turned over. And it said: you were in this room this morning.

And everything stopped.

I sat completely still on the end of that bed and made myself go back.

Six o'clock in the morning. Dark. Sammy asleep behind me with his knees pushed up into my back. My glasses on the chest of drawers, and I put them on. My dressing gown over the back of the chair — the hibiscus one — and I put that on and pulled the belt tight. I stopped at the mirror and put my fingers up onto the glass. Then I went downstairs and made four telephone calls. Then I came back up here and got dressed.

I got dressed. In this room. In front of that wardrobe. Not four feet from where I was sitting.

Did I open it?

I put both hands up into my hair and held on.

Because I could not remember. I could not remember. I had put on jeans and a jumper and I had done it in the half-dark with my head somewhere else entirely, and my jumpers were on the shelf, and my jeans had been over the back of the chair — and I did not know whether I had opened that door, and I did not know whether I had looked in, and I did not know whether my husband's shirts had been hanging on that rail at six o'clock that morning while I stood four feet away from them with my back turned, putting my glasses on.

I could not hold thirty hours.

That was what came up in me on the end of that bed, and it was worse than anything else that happened to me all day. Four hours earlier I had sat in an interview room in front of a detective and reached back for the last morning of my marriage — one morning, close enough to touch — and it had come apart in my hands like something rotten. I could not say whether the telephone rang before or after I put my hand on his shoulder.

If I could not hold that, what could I hold?

So there were two things. There were only ever two things.

Either my husband packed a bag on Saturday morning while I was in the shower with shampoo in my eyes, and walked out of this house, and left behind him his suit and his wedding coat and his son.

Or somebody came into this house today and took his clothes out of that wardrobe while I was sitting in a police station in Liverpool Street with my hands flat on a steel table, begging a stranger to believe that my husband was missing.

There was no way on God's earth for me to know which.

Because the only witness was me — and I had spent two solid days watching that woman build things out of nothing, a car with blacked-out windows out of a car with tinted glass, forty-eight hours out of twenty-four, an entire morning of a marriage out of thin air.

I did not trust her any more. And I have not trusted her since.

I sat on the end of that bed for a long time. Then I got up, and smoothed the duvet flat with both hands, and went out of that room and down the hall to my husband's office.

It was too tidy.

That was the first thing, and it went through me the moment I got the light on. Not empty — I knew about empty. I had stood in that doorway on Saturday evening and looked at a stripped desk and a clean rectangle in the dust and a cable hanging off the front edge with nothing on the end of it.

Tidy.

The chair was pushed in square to the desk. The blind was down and level. The blotter was straight. There was not one single thing in that room out of place — and Nial was an organised man and always had been, and he was not this. There were always three biros in a mug. There was always a roll of something standing on end in the corner. There was always a coffee ring somewhere and a receipt on the floor.

It looked like a room in a display home. It looked like a room that somebody had gone round with a cloth.

Then I understood what was wrong with it.

I stood in that doorway with my hand still on the switch and breathed in, and breathed in again, harder, and took the whole of that room down into my chest and held it there.

Nothing.

On Saturday evening I had come into that room in the half-dark and my husband had been all round me — the cologne, the one I had bought him every Christmas for eight years because he would never buy it for himself, the one I could pick out of a crowded foyer at forty paces — and it had been so thick in the air that I put my hand over my mouth and had to hold on to the desk.

Now there was nothing. Not a trace of him. Not one thread of it anywhere in that room.

Somebody had cleaned my husband out of his own office.

I sat down in his chair. I had sat in it perhaps four times in four years, and every one of them was to reach something down off a shelf — and I sat down in it that night and put both hands flat on the desk, and it was like putting on somebody else's coat.

How many nights had I gone past that door and seen the back of his head, and the light of the screen on the side of his face, and the frown? How many times had my son gone in there at a dead run with a drawing held up over his head, and been swung straight up onto that desk, and been listened to properly?

I put every bit of it out of the room, and I started opening drawers.

Top left. Pens. Rubber bands. A stapler. A block of sticky notes with nothing written on them. A set of car keys for a car we had sold in 2014. A birthday card Sammy had made at daycare with something orange stuck to the front of it.

Top right. Receipts. Hundreds of them, in no order whatsoever, going back years — Bunnings, and the steel place at Cambridge, and a café in Bellerive six separate times.

The middle one. Nothing at all. Manuals. A guarantee for a nail gun.

The bottom drawer stuck, the way it had always stuck, and I had to get my knee up against the desk and haul at it with both hands. Construction magazines. A great stack of them, dog-eared and going soft at the corners — the sort of thing that had gone into that drawer because it was not quite rubbish, and had never come back out of it again.

And underneath them, lying flat against the bottom of the drawer, there was a notebook.

Small. Leather. Dark, and gone soft and shiny along the edges, the way his wallet had gone soft and shiny along the edges, from years of living in a back pocket.

I had never seen it before in my life.

I sat in my husband's chair with my husband's notebook in both hands and I did not want to open it. I sat there for I do not know how long with my thumb on the edge of the cover, and some part of me — the part that had been standing at the back of the hall with its arms folded for two days — said, very quietly: put it back.

I opened it.

It was his handwriting. Straight away, on the first page: the fast slanted one, the one he used for himself and never for a customer. And my throat closed right up, because that was him. That was his hand. That was the same hand that wrote bread? on the back of an envelope and left it on the bench for me.

And I could not read a word of it.

Numbers. Pages of them, grouped up in threes and fours in some places and running the whole way across the page in others, and there was nothing about any of them that meant one single thing to me. Not telephone numbers. Not measurements. Not money — or if it was money, I could not see how.

And names. Names I had never heard in my life.

Daniel Keller.

Sara Lin.

Eric Hunter.

I sat in that chair and went through them one at a time and got nothing back at all. Nothing. Not a face, not a barbecue, not a Christmas card, not a voice on the other end of a telephone. Not one of them, anywhere, in eleven years of my life.

I turned the page.

And there it was. Underlined. Twice, and hard enough that the second line had gone through into the page underneath it.

Luke Smith.

And the room went a very long way away from me.

Because a tired man in a bad suit had put that name down on a steel table not six hours earlier and watched my face while he did it — and I had looked him straight in the eye and told him that I had never heard it in my life.

It was in my husband's handwriting, in my husband's notebook, in my husband's desk, in my house.

I told him I didn't know it.

I sat in that chair with my hand over my mouth.

He had asked me. He had put it down in front of me and given me every chance in the world to say something, and I had told him the truth as far as I knew it — and the whole time I was sitting there this had been in a drawer that stuck, twenty minutes up a mountain, in my own house.

I had already lied to that man about my marriage. He might already know it. And now there was this.

I turned the pages faster. Fragments. Half-sentences. Notes to himself in the shorthand he used when he was writing for nobody at all — and I had been reading that shorthand off the backs of envelopes for eleven years, and I had never once needed to understand it, because it had never once been about anything but timber.

Need to confirm location by Friday.

Meeting pushed. Late arrival suspicious.

Don't trust Keller.

I read them, and I read them again, and they did not open. They were English, and they were in his hand, and they were completely shut. I could not have told a living soul what he was confirming, or where, or who had been late, or what a man called Keller had done to make my husband write that down in a notebook and put the notebook underneath a stack of magazines in the one drawer in the house that never opened properly.

The hand was changing.

That, I could read. That was the one thing in the whole book that I could read — because I had marked essays for ten years, and because I had stood in that same room on Saturday afternoon with a sheet of paper in my hand and read the pressure of a pen going straight through it and asked myself whether I was looking at a frightened hand or an angry one.

Here it was again, going the same way, only slowly, page after page, over what must have been weeks. The letters getting taller. The line starting to lean. The spacing going. The pressure coming up and up and up, until the ink stood proud of the paper and I could feel it under the ball of my thumb.

My husband got frightened.

In this room. Over a period of time. He sat in this chair and wrote it down in a book and put the book in a drawer — and then he came out of this room and shut the door behind him and ate his dinner with us and did all the voices.

The last three pages were almost nothing at all.

It's done.

Smith knows.

They'll come soon.

That was where it stopped. The rest of the book was blank.

They'll come soon.

I sat in a cold room in an empty house with my husband's handwriting held in both hands and read those three words over and over and over. I did not know who they were. I did not know what he had done. I did not know whether he was frightened of them, or working for them, or one and then the other. I did not know whether he was alive.

And I do not know now.

For two days I had been standing in front of anybody who would hold still long enough and telling them that Nial Triffett was not the sort of man that things happened to. That he was a fencing contractor from Fern Tree who could not lie to me about whether he had had his lunch. I had said it to a girl of twenty-six on my own sofa with my hair wound round my finger. I had said it to my brother's wife across a counter, with my hand flat on the laminate and the whole building turning round to look at me.

And I sat in his chair with his notebook open in my lap and understood that I had spent the entire weekend defending a man I had made up.

And that was when the floorboard went.

Out in the living room. That slow, careful, deliberate sound of somebody putting their weight down very gently and having it give underneath them anyway.

And there was somebody in my house.