The Smell of Neglect

"Home is supposed to be where you feel safe. No one tells you what happens when you're the thing you need to be safe from."

I hadn't called Dawn.

Sitting in the discharge lounge with my phone in my hand, her number pulled up on the cracked screen, I'd hesitated. Thought about the conversation that would follow—the worry in her voice, the questions I didn't want to answer, the inevitable arrival at the hospital with all its attendant fuss. She would want to come inside with me, want to check the house, want to make sure I was settled. She would look at me with those eyes that saw too much, that remembered too much, that had been waiting eight years for exactly this moment.

I wasn't ready for that.

So I'd put the phone away, walked to the hospital entrance, and asked the woman at the reception desk to call me a taxi instead. Fifteen minutes later I was in the back seat of a white sedan that smelled of air freshener and old cigarettes, watching Broken Hill slide past the window as the driver navigated the familiar streets toward home.

He didn't try to make conversation. I was grateful for that. The silence let me prepare—let me construct the version of myself I would need to be when I walked through my own front door and faced whatever was waiting inside.

The taxi turned onto my street and I felt something shift in my chest. A tightening. A bracing.

The house looked exactly the same.

That was the strange thing—the thing that didn't quite make sense, even though of course it made perfect sense. The weatherboard façade with its peeling paint at the corners. The front garden I'd been meaning to weed for weeks. The letterbox slightly askew on its post, the way it had been since Mack had crashed his bike into it last summer. Everything ordinary. Everything familiar. As if the house didn't know what had happened inside it, as if the walls had no memory of the woman who'd paced its floors for hours, who'd swallowed pills in its bathroom, who'd walked out its back door barefoot into the frost.

The taxi pulled into the driveway and stopped.

"Eighteen-fifty," the driver said, glancing at me in the rearview mirror.

I fumbled in my bag for my wallet, extracted a twenty, told him to keep the change. He grunted something that might have been thanks and I climbed out, my bandaged feet protesting as they took my weight on the concrete.

The taxi reversed out of the driveway. I stood there watching it go, listening to the engine fade into the distance until the street was quiet again. Just me and the house and the cold winter air sharp in my lungs.

The path to the front door had never seemed so long.

I walked it slowly, partly because of my feet—each step sent a dull ache through the bandages—and partly because some part of me was reluctant to arrive. To cross that threshold and make this real. As long as I was outside, I could pretend. Could imagine that the inside was still the way it had been before Paul left, before everything fell apart. Could hold onto the fiction that home was still a place of safety rather than a crime scene I'd created and then fled.

My keys were in my hand. The same keys I'd fumbled with in the dark two nights ago, fingers numb and clumsy. They felt different now. Heavier. Weighted with the knowledge of everything that had happened since.

The lock turned. The door opened.

The smell hit me first.

Stale air. Closed windows. The particular mustiness of a house that had been sealed up and abandoned, its occupants gone without warning. Beneath that, something else—unwashed dishes, maybe, or food left out too long. The scent of neglect.

I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

The hallway stretched ahead of me, dim in the winter light that filtered through the windows. Everything was where I'd left it—shoes by the door, coats on the hooks. Normal. Ordinary. As if I'd just stepped out for an hour rather than been carried away in an ambulance.

I moved deeper into the house.

The living room was worse. The detritus of my unravelling spread across every surface—empty cups on the coffee table, some still holding the dregs of tea gone cold and cloudy. A blanket tangled on the couch where I'd tried and failed to sleep, its fabric twisted into shapes that spoke of restless, tormented hours. Cushions on the floor. The television remote abandoned at an odd angle, as if I'd thrown it rather than set it down.

I stood in the doorway and looked at it—really looked—and saw my own madness reflected back at me. This wasn't the home of a woman in control. This was the den of someone coming apart, someone losing their grip on all the small rituals that kept a life in order.

The kitchen was no better. Dishes piled in the sink, crusted with food I couldn't remember eating. A pot on the stove with something dried and unidentifiable at the bottom. The rubbish bin overflowing because I'd forgotten to take it out—when? Tuesday? Monday? The days had blurred together so completely that I couldn't separate them anymore.

I turned away from the kitchen and walked down the hall to the bedroom.

The bed was unmade—sheets tangled, pillows scattered. I hadn't slept in it since... when? Monday night, maybe, and even then I'd only managed a few fitful hours before the thoughts had driven me up again, sent me pacing through the dark house with my phone clutched in my hand. The doona was half on the floor. Clothes were piled on the chair in the corner—clean, dirty, I couldn't tell the difference anymore. The curtains were still drawn, filtering the daylight into something grey and oppressive.

It looked like a room where something had gone wrong.

I supposed it was.

I should call Dawn, I thought, standing in the doorway of my own bedroom like a stranger surveying the wreckage. Should check on the children. Should hear their voices, let them know that Mummy was home, that everything was going to be okay.

But the thought slid away almost as soon as it formed. Later. I would call later. Right now I couldn't face it—couldn't face the questions Mack might ask, the confusion in Rose's voice, the weight of pretending to be fine when I was standing in the middle of evidence that I was anything but. The children were safe with Dawn. They didn't know anything was wrong. A few more hours of ignorance wouldn't hurt them.

Later.

I turned away from the bedroom and walked back through the house to the kitchen, then to the back door.

The studio.

I'd been avoiding the thought of it, pushing it to the edges of my mind every time it tried to surface. But I couldn't avoid it forever. The studio was there, waiting, holding all the evidence of what I'd done. The shattered mirror. The blood on the floor. The glass I'd danced on, the glass I'd fallen into, the glass that had cut my feet to ribbons while I spun and wept in the grip of something I still didn't fully understand.

I had to see it. Had to know what I was dealing with. Had to start figuring out how to clean up the mess, repair the damage, construct whatever story I would need to tell.

Through the window beside the back door, I could see the yard. The winter grass, brown and patchy. The clothesline with its empty wires. And beyond that, the converted shed that had become my studio—the space I'd carved out for myself, the place where I'd built something that was mine alone.

From here, it looked normal. The door was closed. The windows were dark but intact. Nothing visible to suggest that anything had happened inside, that a woman had shattered her reflection and danced barefoot through the wreckage until she'd collapsed in her own blood.

I opened the back door.

The cold hit me immediately—sharper than I'd expected, the kind of cold that seeped through clothing and settled into bones. The sky was overcast, heavy grey clouds pressing down on the town, and the air had that particular stillness that came before rain or hail or some other weather that couldn't quite make up its mind.

I stepped out onto the small concrete porch and stood there, looking across the yard at the studio.

Twenty metres. Maybe less. I'd walked it a thousand times—back and forth, back and forth, the familiar path between my house and my work. But it had never felt this far before. Had never seemed to stretch and warp the way it did now, as if the distance itself was trying to warn me away.

I made myself move.

One step, then another. The grass crunching beneath my shoes, the cold seeping up through the soles to meet the bandages wrapped around my damaged feet. My breath forming small clouds in the air before me, dissipating into nothing. The studio getting closer with each step, looming larger, its ordinary walls somehow sinister now that I knew what they contained.

I reached the door and stopped.

My hand hovered over the handle, not quite touching.

I closed my eyes for a moment. Drew a breath that shook on the way in.

Then I opened the door and stepped through.