The Sound of Small Feet

"The morning gave me nothing to be frightened of. That was the worst of it."

The drizzle had come in over Fern Tree while I was upstairs, and by the time I got down to the hallway it was tapping at the window with that small restless irregular noise a house makes in the last few minutes before curtain-up, when the audience has stopped talking and has not yet decided to be quiet. I stood with my back flat against the plaster and let the cold of the wall come up through the jumper and into my shoulder blades, and I stayed there rather longer than I had any business staying, because the moment I moved the day would begin, and I was not at all sure I wanted to be the one who started it.

The house went on making its noises around me. Rain on weatherboard, arriving in gusts, unevenly. Buffy out in the back garden informing the magpies for the fourth consecutive morning that the lawn was hers and always had been, and the magpies, as ever, declining to accept the argument. And somewhere down the hall the thud and slap and scuffle of small feet on floorboards, moving at considerable speed and going nowhere at all.

I had built entire productions out of less than that. Give me those three sounds and half a lighting rig and I could have sold any audience in this city a family in perfect working order — a Saturday morning, a warm house, a dog, a child, nothing here that needs your attention, thank you, do enjoy the interval. I had spent ten years teaching that trick to girls in a draughty hall at St. Michael's, standing at the back with my arms folded, telling them that the audience had made up its mind about them before any of them opened their mouths, and that it had done so on the strength of what it could hear. It had never once occurred to me to wonder how it might feel to be standing inside one of those soundscapes myself, in my own hallway, in my own house, at nine-forty on a Saturday, knowing exactly what it was worth.

"Come on, Sammy, get a wriggle on, mate," I called down the hall.

The voice that came out of me was bright and easy and enormously reassuring, and it belonged to somebody else entirely. I had built that voice on the stage at the Theatre Royal and then spent a decade sanding it smooth in front of classrooms full of teenage girls who could smell a fake at twenty paces and would take one to pieces for the sheer entertainment of it, and it had never failed me yet, and it did not fail me now — which ought to have been a comfort and was, somehow, the opposite.

The oven clock said 9:42. Green digits, far too sharp against the grey of that kitchen. The appointment was at half past ten. The Hobart Paediatric Centre was twenty minutes down the mountain on a dry road, and the road was not dry, and had no intention of becoming dry.

Dr Carmichael noticed lateness. He had never said one word to me about it, not once in six weeks, and that was precisely the trouble — he simply looked at the clock on his consulting-room wall, and then across the desk at me, and then down at the file, and wrote. I had spent the whole of those six weeks wondering what he was writing, and whether all of it was about Sammy, or whether some small portion of it was about the mother: the drama teacher, the one who talks with her hands, the one who came apart in his rooms in the second week and had been extremely careful not to since.

"Go and find your shoes," I called, "and then you can give Buffy a treat before we leave."

"Okay, Mummy!"

He crossed the end of the hallway at a dead run, dinosaur pyjama bottoms trailing under his heels with the hems gone grey from the floor and from whatever else lived under a three-year-old's bed, and he was into his room and gone before I could get out a single word about slowing down.

In October he would be four.

I stayed where I was and let that press on me for a moment. The freckles across the bridge of his nose. The dimple that turned up in his left cheek whenever a grin got too large for his face to hold, as though the joy had to be given somewhere else to go and his cheek was where it went. And the way his eyes went dark and flat and inward whenever something was troubling him and he had decided not to say so — his father's trick, learned from nobody, arriving in him fully formed.

The man I thought I knew.

The thought arrived from entirely the wrong scene, cutting clean across a line I was still trying to hold, and I put the back of my head against the plaster and made myself be rid of it, because there was a sandal to be found and an appointment to be made and a face to be kept on, and because whatever was coming apart underneath this house, my son was not going to be the first one in it to notice.

His room helped. It always had.

Nial had painted it the weekend before Sammy was born — clouds drifting across a sky-blue wall, done slowly, done properly, four coats of it because he would not have it patchy and could not be talked out of the fourth by any argument I was able to construct. I had sat on the floor in that room at thirty-eight weeks pregnant, enormous and furious and entirely surplus to requirements, telling him about the paint fumes and about the nursery furniture still in its boxes and about the fact that the baby would not know and would not care, and he had listened to all of it and agreed with all of it and gone on painting, and it had come out perfect. Along the skirting board a parade of dinosaurs marched in single file, a stegosaurus at the head and a brachiosaurus bringing up the rear, all of them delighted with themselves, all of them going nowhere for ever. In that room the monsters were friendly and brightly coloured and lived on the walls, and they stayed there.

Sammy was perched on the edge of the racing car bed with one brown sandal gripped in his fist. The other was hanging off his right foot by three toes, staying on through what appeared to be sheer conviction and a complete indifference to the laws of physics, and he was concentrating so hard that his tongue was out.

"Good effort," I said, and got down onto the carpet in front of him.

The carpet still had last night in it. The pressed lines of toy cars. And the small pale prints of two bare feet, going from the bed to the door and back to the bed and out again, over and over — the map of a boy walking his own bedroom in the dark for reasons neither of us could explain, which was what his nights had become, and by extension mine, and by extension every hour of the days that came afterwards.

I took his foot in my hand and worked the sandal onto it and did up the strap, and then my fingers stayed there a moment longer than the job required, on the warm skin over the ankle bone, on the pulse going underneath it, quick and steady and absolutely his own, doing all of its work without the slightest assistance from me and without the faintest suspicion that there was anything anywhere in the world to be worried about.

He beamed at me. His teeth were black.

"Did Daddy give you liquorice again?"

I kept it light. I kept it playful, and I put a little theatrical sternness into it for his benefit, and the whole time I was doing it I was somewhere else entirely — standing at the kitchen bench in front of the food diary, the green spiral notebook that Dr Carmichael had asked me to keep from the second week, in which I had written down every single thing my son had eaten for six weeks, every meal and every snack and every mouthful and the time of it and what happened afterwards, in my own handwriting, every night, because nobody could tell me what was wrong with my child and until somebody could, every variable mattered, and I was not going to be the one who let a variable through. Nial knew about that notebook. He had stood at the bench with a beer in his hand and watched me filling it in.

A year ago it would have been funny. The two of them in the pantry with the door pulled half to and Sammy's whisper audible from the next room, and Nial coming out with his face perfectly straight, and me saying nothing whatever and letting them have it, because I had always wanted my son to have something with his father that I was not part of.

It was not funny now. It was one more thing he had done and had not told me.

Sammy shook his head. Fast. Far too fast.

It was the same small useless fib he had always told, and it had never meant anything at all — a boy protecting the man who gave him the liquorice, because he loved us both and could not bear either of us to be in trouble — but his eyes came off mine and went to a point somewhere past my shoulder and they stayed there, and something went through me so cold and so quick that I had to put my hand flat on the carpet, and I could not have explained to a living soul what it was or where it had come from.

"I think he did," I said, and put my hand up into his curls.

They were darkening. Month by month the baby blond was going out of them and something richer was coming in underneath, and the strands went through my fingers and were gone before I had any of them properly.

"We'd better brush those teeth before we leave."

He was off the bed before I had finished the sentence, both feet down at once and one hand still holding the second sandal, and the momentum of him was already three full steps ahead of his balance. He stumbled. He caught himself on the corner of the toy chest. He laughed — genuinely, delightedly, entirely without fear, because gravity was hilarious and had never in his life done him the slightest harm.

My hand had gone out to catch him before I knew it was going, and it stayed there afterwards, empty, in the air, and my heart was going like something that had come loose.

"Sammy!" I called after him. "Come and do your other sandal first."

"Not yet, Mummy!"

From somewhere near the linen cupboard. Cheerful, absolute, and entirely final, delivered with a confidence about his own intentions that I had never in my whole life been able to muster about anything at all.

I got up off the floor and stood there shaking my head at the empty doorway, and I was smiling, and underneath the smile I was thinking that he had his father in him and no mistake — because Nial decided upon a thing and then simply went and did it, and nothing on this earth had ever got between the man and something he had decided upon. I had loved that once. I had loved it enormously. I had watched him build a fence across the whole back of the property in one weekend because he had said on the Friday evening that he would, and I had watched him come up an aisle and onto a stage in a single movement because he had decided that I needed him to. And now I was standing in my son's bedroom with a sandal in my hand and wondering what else of him was in there, coiled up in that small body, waiting for its weather — whether my boy would grow into a man who could carry two entire lives about with him at once and not let a single thing of it show on his face.

Buffy came through the doorway like something fired out of a cannon, all spots and forward motion and a tail already knocking against the toy chest, and went straight up at my face with her tongue out and her whole ridiculous soul behind it.

I got a hand up in time. Six months of practice.

"Buffy, no licking faces!"

She dropped onto the carpet in a boneless heap, sighed at me with a theatricality I could only admire, and lay there thumping her tail against the floorboards, entirely unrepentant, having plainly understood the scolding as the second half of the game rather than any sort of correction. I looked down at her and she looked back up at me with that flat bottomless uncomplicated adoration she had never once had to think about, or ration, or earn — and I found that I could not hold her eye for very long, and I got up and went out.

The whole cup of toothbrushes hit the bathroom floor somewhere behind me. Buffy scrambled up and went after the noise with her claws skittering and sliding on the boards the entire length of the hallway.

I closed my eyes.

In through the nose. Hold it. Out. Three counts — the same three counts I had used before every opening night since I was nineteen years old, the same three I had talked a dozen shaking sixteen-year-olds through in the wings with both hands on their shoulders, telling them that the fear was only fuel and that all they had to do was breathe through it and walk out there and the rest of it would come.

They had always been very good for nerves. They did nothing whatever for this.

Because this was not nerves. It was twenty to ten on a Saturday morning, and in my handbag there was a green spiral notebook, and in the back of that notebook there was a list that I had never shown to another human being. The nights he came up out of sleep screaming — not crying, screaming — with his eyes wide open and nobody at all at home behind them. The words that came out of him on three of those nights, which I had written down phonetically, sitting on the floor of his room in the dark with a biro, because they were not words. The bruises that surfaced on his upper arms in the mornings and faded across four or five days and then came back, which nobody had put there, and which not one doctor had yet been able to account for in any way that made the smallest sense to me.

And the mornings — three of them now — when he went somewhere behind his own eyes. Sitting up on the sofa. Warm, and breathing, and entirely present in the room, and utterly out of my reach, for one minute, and then two, and then back again with no idea whatever that he had been anywhere at all.

I came round the corner into the bathroom to find him up on his step stool with the toothbrush held in his fist like a paintbrush, laying a thick white stripe of toothpaste across the middle of the mirror with all the slow, tongue-out concentration of a boy who has been thinking about a thing for some time and is now, at last, executing it — and I stood in the doorway with the word already forming in my mouth and did not say it, because he was so entirely happy, and because the room smelled of mint and wet towels and that cold which gets into a Tasmanian bathroom overnight and cannot afterwards be persuaded to leave, and because in ninety minutes a man in wire-rimmed glasses was going to sit the two of us down and begin asking me questions I could not answer.

"Oh, Sammy."

I took the washcloth down off the rail and started wiping, and the glass came clear in long grey streaks, and behind the streaks the pair of us assembled ourselves by degrees — my boy first, curls going in four directions at once, thoroughly pleased with himself and not remotely sorry, and then, arriving late and entirely unwelcome over his shoulder, me. I did not stay with my own face. I had already had that conversation upstairs and it had not gone well. I looked at his instead and I let myself have all of it, the freckles and the mint smeared across his chin and the fierce satisfied set of his jaw, and behind us both in the glass the bath was still ringed with last night's colours where the bubble bath had dried onto the porcelain in bands of pink and blue and green, one laid over another like something out of a geology textbook — and I thought about that hour, a whole hour of it, Buffy's nose jammed hard against the outside of the door the entire time, the strawberry soap, Sammy singing something with no tune in it and no words either that went on and on and on, and how for those sixty minutes I had not thought about my husband once, and how grateful I had been for it afterwards, standing out in the hallway with a wet towel over my arm like a woman who has been let out of somewhere.

"Mummy," Sammy said.

And everything went out of him at once — the play, the mischief, the entire delighted crime of the toothpaste — gone in the space between one word and the next, the way the lights change on a cue nobody has heard called, and what came up underneath it was so heavy, and so far outside anything a person that size ought ever to have been asked to carry about, that I felt my body turn to face him before I had decided anything at all.

"Is the doctor going to make the bad dreams go away?"

The washcloth stopped in my hand. A drop of grey water gathered along its edge and hung there and fell and struck the tiles between my feet, and in the enormous silence of that small cold room I heard it land.

He was not frightened. That was the thing that took the floor out from under me. He was not even particularly worried. He was simply looking up at me with the toothbrush still in his fist and the toothpaste on his chin, waiting — waiting exactly the way he waited to be told whether it was going to rain, or whether Buffy could come in the car — because his mother knew things, and his mother would tell him, and whatever his mother told him was true.

And I did not know. I did not know where the dreams came from, or what was raising bruises on my son's arms in the night while I slept twelve feet away down the hall, or where he went in those long still minutes when the lights went out behind his eyes and he sat in front of me, warm, breathing, and entirely gone. I did not know whether Dr Carmichael could tell me. I did not know whether anybody in this city could tell me, and the not-knowing had been getting into me for six weeks the way the damp had got into the back wall of that house — quietly, from underneath, doing the whole of its work a long way out of sight, so that by the time anybody saw a mark on the plaster the timber behind it had already gone.

So I lied to my son. I looked down into that small upturned trusting face and I gave him the warm voice and the crinkle at the corners of the eyes and the whole practised apparatus of a mother with everything perfectly in hand, and I lied to him.

"We're going to try, sweetheart," I said. "That's why it's so important that we're not late. Now, let's get those teeth brushed, shall we?"

I put my hand round his and helped him get the brush up to the proper angle against teeth that were still so impossibly, ludicrously small, and while I stood there doing it my mind went straight back to where it had been going all morning and had not the slightest intention of being called away from.

Nial had come in at twenty past eleven last night. Quietly. Coat off in the dark, shoes carried in one hand, every part of it done with the enormous care of a man who does not want the hall light going on — and he had smelled of cigarette smoke, which was strange in itself, because he had not touched one since we were students and had been insufferable on the subject for a decade. And underneath the smoke there had been something else. Something sharper. Something thin and chemical and wrong, and it was out of the air and gone before I could get a name anywhere near it.

I had stood in the kitchen doorway with my arms folded and asked him about his day, and I had kept my voice flat and pleasant and completely unremarkable, and he had turned round and given me that smile.

The one from the rehearsal room. The one I had spent eleven years believing was mine and nobody else's.

"Just work stuff, Jen," he said, and kissed my cheek. His lips were cold.

"Nothing for you to worry about."

But I did worry. I worried about the calls that came in the small hours and the hours he was keeping, which had nothing whatever to do with fencing. I worried about the days he could not account for and the accounts that did not cover the days. And most of all I worried about the way he had begun to look at Sammy when he believed me to be somewhere else in the house — a look I had been trying to put a name to for a fortnight and could not, except to say that there was tenderness in it, unmistakably, and that there was something else in it as well, and that the something else was not tenderness at all.

"All done, Mummy!"

He grinned up at me, scrubbed and minty and enormously proud of himself, and every last trace of the liquorice was gone.

"Well done, my little man," I said, and ruffled his hair, and left my hand there a second longer than I needed to. "Now, let's get that other sandal on and we'll be ready to go."

On the way back down the hall I stopped in front of the photograph that hangs between his bedroom door and the linen cupboard.

Our wedding. Nial had said something into my ear at the precise instant the shutter went, and I had thrown my head back laughing, and I never afterwards recovered a single word of it — not that evening, not the following morning, not in eleven years of standing in that hallway looking at the picture and trying. His arms were round my waist. The light behind us was going gold across the water, and our silhouettes had run together at the edges, which the photographer noticed and was very pleased about and mentioned to us twice.

I had felt invincible that day. Not happy — I had been happy before and I knew what that felt like. Invincible, which is a different thing altogether, and a very much stupider one, and I put my finger against the glass and the glass was cold and I took the finger away again.

"Mummy, look!"

He was standing in the middle of the hallway with the second sandal on. Backwards. Hanging off the very end of his foot, and staying there through nothing whatever except his own total conviction that it was on.

Something went through my chest so hard and so fast that I had to tip my head back and look at the cornice for a second, because the love of him in that moment was not a feeling at all, it was a physical event, it went through me like something detonating and it left me standing in my own hallway blinking at the ceiling with my eyes stinging.

"Oh, darling," I said, laughing, and went down onto my knees in front of him. "You're getting to be such a big boy."

I turned the sandal round and got his heel into it and pulled the strap through and did it up properly.

"There we go."

I stood up and took his hand, and his fingers closed round two of mine and held on. He did not look up first. He did not check. He had never once in his life had the smallest reason to check.

"Ready for our big adventure?"

He nodded so hard that his entire body went with it — and whatever it had cost him to ask me that question in the bathroom, he had already set it down somewhere behind him and walked away and left it lying there.

I had never in my life managed that once.

At the front door I went through the bag.

Keys. Purse. The red car — not one of the other cars, the red one, the one whose absence from a paediatric waiting room would occasion a performance from which neither of us would fully recover.

And in the zipped pocket at the back, lying flat against the lining where no casual hand would ever come across it, the phone.

I found it with two fingers and left them there.

Twenty-nine dollars, cash, at the Vodafone kiosk in the Elizabeth Street Mall on a Tuesday afternoon, in sunglasses, indoors, like an idiot, like a woman in a film, avoiding the eye of a boy behind the counter who was about nineteen and could not possibly have cared less. I could not have told anybody what it was for. I could not have told myself. I bought it on precisely the same wave of absolute unshakeable certainty on which I once bought a juicer at midnight off the television, and the certainty had entirely evaporated by the time I reached the car park, and I sat in the car with the thing in its packaging on my lap for a quarter of an hour, and then I drove home with it.

Twice since then I had carried it out to the wheelie bin. Twice I had brought it back into the house.

It frightened me and it steadied me and I could not have told you, on any given day of that fortnight, which of the two it was doing. It stayed in the bag. That was as far as I had got with it.

I zipped the pocket shut and opened the door.

The rain had thinned out into the fine suspended stuff that hung in the air rather than falling through it, and it was on my face before I was down the step. Wet earth coming up out of the garden beds, and eucalyptus laid over the top of it, sharp and almost medicinal. On any other morning of my life that smell had put me straight back down into my own body and told me where I was and that I belonged there. It did nothing of the sort that morning. It simply smelled cold.

I locked the deadbolt behind us and the sound of it went away off down the empty street.

The front garden had given up for the winter. Everything bowed over, everything running with water and holding on to it, and even Sammy's daisies — the pink ones, the ones he had put in himself in April with both hands right down in the soil, howling with laughter at the worms and demanding that I look at every single one of them — were face-down and soaked through and waiting for a better month than this one.

I bent to buckle him into his seat, and the back of my neck went cold.

It was not a thought. Nothing arrived through my head at all. It came up the back of my scalp from underneath and it stopped my hands exactly where they were, over the buckle, and I stayed like that for two seconds, and possibly three.

Then I straightened up and looked at the street, and I did it slowly, and I made it look like nothing at all. A mother getting up off her knees. Checking the sky. Thinking about the drive. I had been performing composure since I was seventeen years old and I had never in all that time needed it the way I needed it standing on my own kerb in the rain that morning.

There was a car parked across the road, three houses down, on the opposite side.

Dark. Clean. Nothing on it and nothing in it — no stickers, no roof rack, no child seat, nothing at all on the dashboard, not so much as a parking ticket tucked under the wiper. And the windows were tinted so black that I could not see a thing through them.

Our neighbours drove Subarus with dog hair all the way through the back of them, and muddy utes, and, three doors up, a Volvo that had not started since June and was becoming a matter of some local celebrity. Nobody in Fern Tree had windows I could not see through. And that car had been made so carefully to be nothing at all that it was the only thing on the entire road.

Something moved behind the glass.

A shift of shadow. There, and then gone, and a second later I could not have sworn to it in front of anybody. Mist on the windscreen. The gum trees reflected. The overtired eyes of a woman who had not slept properly in three weeks and was carrying a prepaid telephone about in her handbag.

I told myself it was nothing.

I did not believe myself.

"Mummy?" Sammy's voice came up out of the seat below me. "Are you okay?"

He was looking straight up into my face. And he had been looking at it, I realised far too late, for some considerable time.

"Of course, sweetheart," I said, and bent down and made a small and entirely unnecessary adjustment to the strap of his sandal, which gave my hands something to be doing and gave my face the two seconds it needed to reassemble itself. "Just checking we haven't forgotten anything."

I got into the driver's seat and turned the key. My hands were not altogether steady on it, and the engine came up far too loud for that street and that hour and that weather, and I sat there for a moment with it running, announcing the two of us to anybody at all who happened to be listening.

We pulled out. The pale blue weatherboards went by on my left. The porch, where Nial and I had sat through three whole summers with a bottle of something between us watching that boy chase butterflies up and down the length of the lawn until the light finally went out of the sky and we had to call him in.

The car did not move. Its windows gave me nothing back.

At the end of our street, for about four seconds, I thought seriously about turning round. Going home. Putting the deadbolt on and the television on and keeping him inside the house with me where I could see him and where nothing could get at him, and letting the appointment go, and letting the whole day go, and simply sitting on the floor of that sky-blue room among the dinosaurs with my son and waiting for whatever this was to come to us instead of driving out to meet it.

And then I thought about the green notebook in my handbag, and the three pages of words that were not words, and I put my foot down and kept driving.

"Ready for our adventure, Sammy?"

"Ready, Mummy!"

I checked the mirror. He was in it, kicking his feet against the base of the seat, both sandals on, one of them still backwards.

And past him, small and dark and perfectly still, the road behind us.

I checked it again at the corner, and again at the lights, and again halfway down the hill with the wipers going, and every single time I looked at my son I was looking straight through him at that empty stretch of road, and I could not make myself stop, and I could not tell whether the thing I was watching for was behind us or in the car with me already.