We Go On

"I told my mother that I was frightened of my husband. It was the first completely honest thing I had said to anybody in three days."

I did not sleep.

I stayed in that house all night, and I stayed because he might come home.

That was all of it. Somebody had stood in my living room with the lamp on and gone out through my back door while I came down the hallway screaming, and my son's clothes were at my mother's house and my son was in them, and there was not one reason on this earth to sleep in a place where a locked door had stopped meaning anything. But I lay on my own sofa in my coat with a lump of Tasmanian granite on the cushion beside me and a notebook in my pocket, and I did not close my eyes — because if Nial Triffett came up that path at four o'clock in the morning I was going to be there when he did.

The storm went over and came back and went over again. The rain stopped some time before dawn. At about half past four I got up off that sofa and went round the house and unlocked every door I had locked, and then I locked them all again, and I could not have told anybody why I did either of those things.

I left before it was light.

My mother's gravel came under my shoes and it did not sound like coming home.

The whole of Battery Point was still under. Not a light on in the street, not a car, not a dog. The cloud had come down off the mountain again in the night and taken the top of the hill with it, and there was a wind coming up off the river that had been over open water for two thousand miles and had not warmed up once.

The camellias were dripping. Everything was dripping. I stood on my mother's front step with my hand halfway up to the door, and I did not knock.

I could not make myself do it. Because I was about to walk in there and ask her for something, and I had worked out on the drive down exactly what it was going to cost me, and I had rehearsed it four times coming down the Southern Outlet with the wipers going, and not one of the four had worked. Every version came out of my mouth sounding like a woman who needed a doctor.

The door opened.

She had been standing behind it. Of course she had. She had been standing in her own hall in her dressing gown listening for a car, and she had heard mine turn into the street, and she had been waiting on the other side of that door with her hand on the latch while I stood on the step and could not knock.

"Jenny."

And she had me before I got a word out. Both arms, right round, and the hold — that same hold, one hand up flat between the shoulder blades — and I stood on my mother's doorstep in the dark and let her put me back together enough to walk into the house.

"You're here early, love," she said, and pulled back a little way to look at my face.

There was nothing in it. No judgement, no where have you been, no have you slept. She looked at me the way she looked at a piece she had heard a hundred times and was hearing again, and she took every bit of it in, and she said nothing about any of it.

I nodded. I did not trust myself with words yet.

"Come in. Sammy's still asleep. I was just about to start breakfast."

The warmth came out of that hall and hit me in the face, and underneath it the tea, and the lemon oil, and the whole enormous smell of that house — and I very nearly went down on my mother's carpet.

In the kitchen she moved about the way she always moved, and I sat down at the pine table in my chair, third from the end on the window side, and put both hands flat on the wood.

The kettle went onto the hotplate. The tin came down off the shelf. She was in her dressing gown and her hair was not done, and I do not believe I had seen my mother's hair down in ten years — and it should have made her look softer, and it did not. It made her look like a woman who had been up all night.

"How did he sleep?"

It came out of me as almost nothing.

She turned round with the tin still in her hand. "He had a bit of trouble settling," she said — and she did not dress it up, and I had never been more grateful to her for anything. "Kept asking for you and Nial. But once he drifted off, he slept soundly all through the night."

Kept asking for you and Nial.

The two of us in one sentence, side by side, both of us gone, both of us equally absent from that boy's bedroom — and my mother put it down on the bench in front of me like a plate of something, and then turned back to the kettle.

He had asked for me. And I had not been there. I had been lying on a sofa fifteen kilometres up a mountain in my coat, with a rock beside me, waiting for a man who did not come.

She put the mug down in front of me. Earl Grey, made the way she had made it since 1979, far too strong and far too hot.

"You know you're doing the right thing, don't you?" She had gone back against the counter with her arms folded. "Sammy's safe here, Jenny. You need time to... to figure things out."

There was a hesitation in the middle of that sentence, and I heard it, and I did not go anywhere near it — because what my mother nearly said was you need time to find out whether your husband has left you, and she did not say it, and it cost her something not to.

I got both hands round the mug. The ceramic was almost too hot to hold, and I held it anyway, because my hands had been cold since Saturday afternoon and I could not get them warm.

"I know," I said. It was hollow, and both of us heard that it was hollow. "It's just..."

And it caught. The whole sentence caught on something in the middle of my throat, and I had to go round it.

"It feels wrong, being apart from him. Like I'm... like I'm failing him."

I put my head down and looked at the tea. She came across that kitchen and put her hand on my shoulder.

And I looked up at her.

My mother had aged. In two days. The lines round her mouth had gone deeper and her eyes had gone back into her head and there were shadows underneath them that she had not covered — because she had not put her face on, because it was not yet six o'clock and her daughter had turned up on the doorstep in the dark. Her hand was not steady on my shoulder.

Sixty-two years old. Widowed five years. And I had driven up here on Sunday and handed her a three-year-old and a set of instructions and a lie about how long I would be, and she had taken every bit of it without one word — and she had not slept either.

She was carrying it. She had been carrying it since my verandah on Saturday night, and in two days I had not once asked her how she was.

"I have to go to work," I said.

It came out flat and sudden and the wrong shape for that kitchen, and I saw her head come up.

"I can't afford to miss it. I can't... I can't lose my job on top of everything else."

Every word of that was true, and every word of it was a performance, and I could not have told anybody where the seam was.

Because it was true. There were three weeks of term left and a musical in September and a Year Twelve cohort I had not marked, and there was a mortgage on a pale blue weatherboard in Fern Tree with one income in it now and possibly none at all. Nobody sends a letter round. The bank had rung me on the Wednesday before any of this about a payment that had gone through four days late, and the woman on the telephone had been perfectly pleasant about it, and she had rung me anyway.

And it was also the only place left in the world where I still knew exactly who I was supposed to be.

That was what I could not say to my mother across a kitchen table. In four hours I was going to walk into a hall at St. Michael's and be Mrs Triffett — who runs the drama department, who is never rattled, who gets a shaking fifteen-year-old down off the ceiling four minutes before curtain and sends her back out to do it again. I was going to do that for six hours. I was going to do it well. And it was going to be the easiest thing I had done since Saturday morning.

Because I know how to be her. I have all her lines.

The girls would be nothing. Thirty of them at a time, and every one of them entirely occupied with herself, and not one of them capable of imagining that a teacher has a life on the other side of the car park.

What I could not do was the staffroom.

Because somebody in there was going to be kind to me. Somebody was going to put a hand on my arm beside the urn and ask, in a low voice, whether everything was all right at home — and kindness was the one thing I had no defence against. Marie Chalker had softened at me down a telephone line at half past six in the morning and said oh, Jenny, and it had very nearly taken me off my feet in my own kitchen.

I could survive being disbelieved. I had been doing it for three days.

"Of course, dear," Rowena said. "You do what you need to do. Sammy will be fine here with me."

She said it so steadily, and with such complete conviction, that I got hold of it with both hands.

And that was when I heard the feet.

Small, and fast, and thundering on the hall floorboards — and my whole body came up off that chair before my head had caught up, and something went through me that was three parts love and one part terror, and I could not separate them then and I have never been able to since.

He came round the door frame in his pyjamas with his hair standing straight up on one side.

"Mummy?"

Soft. Uncertain. Checking.

He said my name to me like a question, in his grandmother's kitchen, because he had gone to sleep in a bed that was not his and woken up in a house that was not his, and he did not know whether I would be there.

Two days. That was all it had taken.

I had him up off the floor before he had finished the word, and I got my arms right round him and put my face down into his hair — soap, and sleep, and warm scalp, and the sandalwood — and I held on to my son in my mother's kitchen for a good deal longer than I should have.

"Good morning, sweetheart. Did you sleep well at Grandma's?"

He nodded into my shoulder. Then he pushed himself back with both hands flat on my collarbones so that he could get the whole of my face, and I knew what was coming before he opened his mouth, because I had watched him wind up to it.

"When are we going home, Mummy? Where's Daddy?"

Both of them. One after the other, in one breath, from a three-year-old.

And they went into me like two nails.

Because how was I supposed to tell him that home was not safe? That there was nothing wrong with our house except that somebody had walked round inside it in the dark while I was out, and that his father's clothes had gone off the rail, and that his mother had sat up all night on the sofa with a rock beside her? He was three years old. He had a bed with a racing car on it and clouds painted on the ceiling and dinosaurs going round the skirting board, and I painted those clouds myself, four coats, standing on a chair, while I was pregnant with him.

And I could not take him back there.

"We're going to stay with Grandma for a little while longer, love." I got the smile up and I got it up fast. "It'll be like a holiday. Won't that be fun?"

His forehead came down.

He did not buy it. Not for one second. He looked straight into my face and went over it feature by feature and did not buy one single word of it, and he was three years old.

"But what about Daddy? Is he on holiday too?"

And I looked at my mother.

I did it openly. I did not even try to hide it. I looked across that kitchen at her with my son in my arms and I begged her with the whole of my face, and she saw it, and she came in.

"Who wants pancakes for breakfast?" Bright as a bell, pitched exactly right, and she was already reaching for a bowl. "Sammy, why don't you help me mix the batter?"

And he went.

Straight out of my arms and up onto the chair and gone, the whole thing wiped clean out of him — and I stood in the middle of my mother's kitchen with my arms still half up and nothing in them.

I turned away and shut my eyes and got the breath all the way down to the bottom. Behind me my mother put a wooden spoon into my son's hand and told him he was doing it beautifully, and the clock on the wall went on, and I had forty minutes.

When I turned round he was giggling.

He had gone at that batter like a man digging a trench, and there was flour on his chin and up one arm and a good deal of it on my mother's floor, and Rowena had her hand over his hand on the spoon and she was laughing at him.

And I looked at the pair of them, and it went through me like ice water.

Because it was so ordinary. It was the most ordinary thing in the world — a woman and a small boy and a bowl of pancake batter in a warm kitchen in the dark of a Monday morning — and it was made of paper. That was what I could see, standing there in my coat with my keys in my hand. The whole of it was made of paper. And somebody had been standing in my living room the night before, and had gone out through a locked door, and had stopped on the way to put a photograph down on my step.

"Rowena," I said.

It came out low, and hard, and wrong, and the spoon stopped in the bowl. Sammy's laugh went out like a light. He looked at her, and then he looked at me.

"Go on, sweetheart." I made it warm. I made it easy. I did the whole thing. "Keep helping Grandma. I just need to talk to her for a minute."

He nodded and went straight back to the batter, because he was three, and because I am extremely good at my job.

Rowena put the spoon down and dried her hands and came over, and she came slowly.

"What is it, Jenny?"

I got both hands onto the edge of that counter and held on to it, because I did not entirely trust my legs — and then I opened my mouth and it came out of me in a rush, the way water comes out of a pipe that has gone.

"I need you to promise me something. Don't leave the house with Sammy. Please."

And my mother's eyes went wide.

I saw it land. I saw the whole thing go into her and I saw what it did to her — and behind it, right at the back, quick and small and gone almost before it had arrived, I saw the doubt.

She thinks I have lost my mind.

And she was entitled to. I knew exactly how it sounded and I knew exactly what it looked like: a woman who had not slept, in yesterday's coat, standing in her mother's kitchen before six in the morning telling her not to take a child to the shops.

I could have fixed it. I could have fixed the whole thing in one sentence.

Somebody was in my house last night.

Seven words. And she would have had the telephone in her hand before I got to the end of them.

I did not say them.

I went over that afterwards for a very long time, and there were reasons, and not one of them was good enough. That she would ring the police, and the police had already decided what I was. That she would ring Kevin, and Kevin would ring Linda. That she was sixty-two years old and had not slept and was holding my son together with a bowl of pancake batter, and that if I put that into her she would never sleep again.

And underneath all of it, the real one. The one I could not look at directly.

That if I said it out loud in that kitchen, in the light, in front of my mother — it would be true.

"Jenny..." she began.

"Just promise me." And my voice went. The whole of the composure I had built coming down the Southern Outlet went in one go. "I'm scared, Rowena. I'm scared Nial is planning to take him."

And there it was. Out in my mother's kitchen, with the batter going in a bowl four feet away.

I had just told my mother that I was frightened of my husband.

And I did not tell her the other one — the one that had been standing in the corner of every room I had been in since Saturday afternoon, the one that did not move and did not sleep. That I did not believe it. That I had never believed it. That I knew that man the way I knew the inside of my own mouth, and he had not gone to another woman and he had not walked out on his son, and something had been done to him — and that whatever was written in that notebook had been done to him first.

I have never been able to hold those two things at once. I have carried both of them every day since, and they have never once cancelled each other out.

So I gave my mother the one that would make her lock the door.

She did not answer me straight away. She looked at me for a long moment, and her eyes went over me the way they had gone over me on a driveway in the rain — the coat, the hands, the whole state of me — and I could not read her, and I had spent my life reading people.

She did not ask me why. She did not ask me what had happened. She did not ask me whether I had spoken to the police, or whether I had slept, or whether I had the first idea what I had just said about the father of her grandson.

She reached out and put her hand flat over mine on the counter.

"Alright, love," she said. "We'll stay in today. I'll tell Sammy we're having a special day at home."

The relief went through me so hard that the room tipped.

"Thank you," I said.

She squeezed my hand once and let it go. "We'll be fine, Jenny. You focus on what you need to do. Sammy and I will make it a day to remember."

I got my things together slowly, and every single one of them was heavier than it had been the day before. Then I went back across that kitchen and pulled my son off his chair and into me, and he came with flour on both hands and put his arms round my neck and hung on.

"Be good for Grandma." I got his hair back off his forehead. "I'll be back before you know it."

He leaned back to look at me. He did it slowly, and he did it with his whole face, and he was completely serious.

"Okay, Mummy," he said. And then: "Will you bring Daddy home?"

I got both hands up round his face.

And I looked at my son — the freckles, the chapped patch at the corner of his mouth that I still had not put anything on, the shape of his jaw, which was Nial's, and the way he was holding his mouth, which was Nial's, and the whole of him standing there in his grandmother's kitchen made out of a man I could not find.

"I'm going to try my very best, sweetheart," I said.

And it was the truth. It was the only true thing I had given anybody in three days that had not cost me something — and it was still not an answer, and my son knew it was not an answer.

He put both hands up flat on my cheeks and patted them. Twice. The way I did to him.

My three-year-old comforted me in my mother's kitchen, and then he let me go.

I kissed him, and I turned away before it took me, and I went down that hall and out through my mother's front door.

It was still dark.

They came out onto the step behind me — Rowena in her dressing gown with Sammy up on her hip, the two of them framed in the light coming out of the hall, and everything behind them warm and lit and safe.

She raised her hand. Not a wave. Just a hand, held up.

And Sammy waved with the whole of his arm, the way he always did, flapping it at me like a man landing an aircraft — and he was grinning, and his eyes were not.

I waved back and got a smile up onto my face and held it the whole way to the car.

Then I sat in it in the dark with the key in my hand and did not start the engine.

Because I had said it out loud. In a warm kitchen, to my mother, four feet from my son. I had stood at that counter and told her that I was frightened my husband was going to steal our child.

I have gone over every performance I gave that fortnight — the police on my sofa, the counter at Liverpool Street, the interview room, my own son's bedside — and I have taken every single one of them apart to see how it was made.

That one was not a performance.

That is the thing I have never been able to get out from under. I did not decide to say it. I did not weigh it. I did not pitch it. It came up out of me whole, from somewhere a long way underneath everything I had been holding down since Saturday morning — and my mother heard it, and believed it, and locked her door.

Because I meant it.