The Weight of Absence

"I woke on the Sunday morning certain that my son had gone in the night as well. One night. That was all it took."

I came up out of it like something coming up out of water.

"Sammy."

I said his name into the dark before I had any idea where I was, or what day it was, or why my heart was going the way it was going. There had been a dream and it was already gone, and it had left nothing behind it at all except the certainty — absolute, total, arriving fully assembled before the rest of me had caught up — that my son had gone in the night as well.

And I lay there. I could not move. I lay flat on my back in my own bed with my eyes open and my breath stopped somewhere in my chest, and I did not put my hand out, because for two or three seconds I could not make myself do it, and those two or three seconds went on and on and on.

And then I felt him.

Small, and warm, and pressed the whole length of my back with his knees up behind mine, breathing in the fast shallow way he breathed when he was properly under.

The relief went through me so hard that I started shaking.

I rolled over carefully — the way I had learned to roll over in a bed with a child in it, an inch at a time, so that the mattress would not tell on me — and I got my arm across him and pulled him back into me and put my face down into his hair and stayed there.

He smelled of sandalwood.

He had smelled of sandalwood since he was two and a half years old, because he stood in front of a shelf in the chemist on Elizabeth Street with his arm straight out and his finger pointing at a bottle he had never smelled in his life, and announced to the entire shop, at a volume that turned three heads, "It's my favourite smell in the whole world!" — and I bought it, of course I bought it, and it had been in every bath he had had since. Nial used to put his nose down into that boy's wet hair at bedtime and pretend to fall over sideways.

He had asked for his father last night.

He asked twice. The first time was at the basin with his toothbrush in his fist and I got past it. The second time he was already in the bed and I was doing the blanket, and he asked me why Daddy was not coming in to tuck him in — and he did not cry about it. He simply asked, and then he waited, and he was perfectly prepared to accept whatever I gave him.

Nial did the stories. Nial did the voices. There was a bear in one of them who spoke like a shearer, and Sammy would go absolutely wild for it and demand it four times running — and I read that same book to my son last night, and I did the bear, and I did it wrong. And he did not say one word about it. He lay there and let me finish.

I put my hand out into the dark and got my phone off the bedside table.

The screen came up in my face and blinded me and I turned it away and squinted at it. Nothing. No missed call, no message, nothing at all since the one that had come in during the police interview and was still sitting there at the bottom of the thread where it had always been.

I'll be home late. Don't wait up for me. Nial.

I rang him.

I had rung him eleven times since Saturday morning and I rang him again, at ten past six on a Sunday, lying on my side in the dark with my son asleep against my back. It did not ring. It had never once rung. After a second and a half it went straight to him.

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

I did not cut it off this time. I lay there and let the whole thing run.

This is Nial Triffett.

He recorded that out on the deck of the old flat in 2013 with a beer in one hand and me laughing at him from the doorway, and he did four takes of it because he kept getting the giggles, and in the end he did the whole thing in a stupid solemn voice like a man reading the six o'clock news — and that was the one he kept. He never changed it. Five years, and he never changed it.

And I had listened to it eleven times since the morning before.

"Where are you, Nial?" I said.

The beep went, and I hung up on him.

And I lay in the dark of my own bedroom with my arm round my son and the phone face down on the sheet, and I went through the whole of it again, every last piece of it, the way I had been going through it every hour since Saturday afternoon.

Was there something. Was there a thing he said. Was there some ordinary Wednesday back in June when my husband tried to tell me and I was not listening.

And I could not get away from his face in that mirror.

He had been standing at the ensuite mirror with a towel round his waist and the steam still going off the glass, and he was looking straight into his own face, and there was nothing in it. Not worry. Not fear. Nothing at all. And I had come in behind him and put my hand on his shoulder and said everything okay, honey — and I had been thinking about the appointment, and about whether there was bread — and I did not look at him properly. And I have been trying to look at him properly ever since, through a door that had already shut.

Was he unhappy?

That was the one that got into the room in the small hours and would not go out of it again.

Because I had been busy. God, I had been busy. Terms and rehearsals and marking. The musical in second term that ate every evening for six weeks. The community theatre thing I said yes to because I could not bear to say no. And I had come home from all of it and put my bag down on that bench and talked at him, and he had stood there with the tea towel over his shoulder and let me do it.

And when had I last asked that man a question and waited for the whole of the answer?

I lay in the dark with that one for a long time.

But it was not that, and I made myself hold on to it, because it was true. We watched television. We ate our dinner in front of it and complained about it afterwards. He and Sammy built a thing out of sand at Seven Mile Beach that took the pair of them two solid hours, and Buffy came through it at a flat gallop and destroyed the entire structure in about four seconds, and Nial laughed so hard that he had to sit down in the wreckage of it. That was not a marriage he walked out of on a Saturday morning without his wallet.

And it was not another woman. Everybody thought it, and one of them said it to my face on my own doorstep with her coat still on — and it was not another woman, and I did not believe it for one second, because Nial Triffett could not lie to me about whether he had had his lunch.

And there was Buffy.

That was the piece that would not go in, no matter which way I turned it. That dog was in the house before Sammy was. She came to the door when we brought him home from the Royal and stood up on her back legs to see into the bundle in my arms, and then she lay down across the bottom of his cot and stayed there for eight weeks.

Nial Triffett did not walk out of that house and take Sammy's dog with him. Not that dog. Not from that boy.

And underneath every bit of it, all night long, sitting in the corner of the room and not going anywhere, was my son's voice in a sandpit in the dark.

The man with the funny colours took Buffy.

Sammy shifted against me and made a small noise and pushed his heel into my shin, and I lay there in the dark with my arm round him and did not know one single thing.

So I got out of that bed. An inch at a time, holding my own weight up on one arm until it started to shake, and I put the blanket back over him and tucked it under, and he grabbed at the edge of it in his sleep and pulled it up under his chin and muttered something at me that had no words in it.

I envied my son so much in that moment that it was very nearly anger.

My glasses were on the chest of drawers. I put them on and the room came into focus, and I did not much want it to. My dressing gown was over the back of the chair — the hibiscus one, that Nial gave me for my thirtieth, and he was so pleased with himself about it that he could not wait until the morning and made me open it the night before. It is the most hideous garment I have ever owned and I have never worn anything so much in my life. I put it on and pulled the belt tight, and stopped at the mirror.

She was in a state. Her eyes had gone back into her head and there were two grey shadows sitting underneath them and the whites had gone pink, and her hair was doing something on one side that I could not have described to another living soul, and there was a crease across her cheek where the pillow had been. Thirty-two years old. She looked forty-five.

I put my fingers up onto the glass, on her shoulder. I had never done that before. I could not have told anybody why I did it then.

"Oh, Nial," I said. "Where are you? What's happened to you?"

The house said nothing. The house had been saying nothing since Saturday afternoon.

The stairs were louder than they had ever been. Every one of them, the whole way down, in a house with nobody awake in it.

And it was not my house any more.

I came down into my own hallway and it was the same paint and the same photographs and the same coats on the same hooks — and something had been taken out of the middle of it, and I could feel the exact shape of the hole. No claws on the boards. No Nial in the kitchen at an hour when nobody else in the world was up, putting the kettle on quietly so as not to wake anybody, and failing, and making an enormous performance out of failing.

I went into that kitchen and put both hands flat on the bench and let it hold me up.

Outside, the garden was going grey. The cloud was still down and the first of the light was getting into it from somewhere behind the mountain and turning the whole thing the colour of dishwater, and everything out there was wet and bowed over and completely silent. The rosemary he had cut back in April. The daisies Sammy had put in. All of it sitting out there in the half-dark, waiting for somebody to come out and see to it.

And on the floor by the back door, exactly where it had been lying since Friday, was Buffy's chew toy.

The green rubber ring with the bite out of one side of it, that she had had for three years and would not be parted from, and that she brought to me every single morning of her life and dropped on my foot.

And something came up in me then, and it was not sadness. It was rage — and it went through me so hard and so fast that both my hands closed on the edge of that bench, and I stood in my own kitchen in the half-dark and shook with it.

Somebody came into my house.

Somebody walked past the door of the room where my son was sleeping, and went out through my back door, and took my dog. Put a hand on her. Took hold of her collar. Walked her out of my garden. And she would have gone — that was the part I could not bear, that was the part that had me holding on to a kitchen bench with both hands — she would have gone with anybody at all who was kind to her, she would have gone with her tail going, and she would have looked back at that house on the way out and waited for me to tell her it was all right.

And I was asleep in a chair with a book on my chest.

I got my phone out of the pocket of that stupid pink dressing gown and stood in the middle of my kitchen with the screen in my hand and made myself think.

Who. Who would know.

I went through them one at a time. Nobody at the school. Nobody at the theatre. Not my brother, who had never in eleven years had a whole conversation with Nial about anything. Not Rowena — not yet, not until I had something to put in front of her that she could not take to pieces. His mother was seventy-eight and lived in Ulverstone, and I was not going to ring a seventy-eight-year-old woman before breakfast to tell her that her son had not come home.

Ken.

Ken Chalker, who was at our wedding. Who went to the football with him. Who spent two entire Saturdays in our back garden four years ago helping him put that fence in for nothing, and who rang him about nothing at all, once a week, for twenty minutes, and had been doing it for a decade.

If Nial had told anybody anything, he had told Ken.

I rang the house, and it went for a long time.

"Hello?"

Marie. Thick with sleep, and the sheets going behind her.

"Marie, hi. It's Jenny Triffett."

And it came out of me and landed like a stone dropped on a table. Far too flat, and far too fast, and I heard it land and there was nothing I could do about it.

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

"Oh, right. What can I do for you?"

Nothing in it at all. Not warm, not cold. And I stood in my kitchen with no idea on this earth what that woman was thinking, and I could see her — sitting up, putting the lamp on, the other side of the bed moving, and Ken's voice underneath it somewhere going who is it.

"I'm sorry to disturb you so early." It came out in a rush. "I was hoping I could speak to Ken for a moment. It's... it's important."

And she let it sit. Long enough that I could hear my own kitchen clock.

"Why?"

It went through me like a needle.

And it was fair. It was an entirely fair question and I would have asked it myself of anybody who rang my house at that hour — and it went through me like a needle anyway, because I have been reading rooms since I was twenty-two years old and I could not read that woman down a telephone line, and I did not know whether I was talking to a friend or to somebody who already knew something.

"I just wanted to check if he might have seen Nial yesterday." I got hold of my voice and put it back where it belonged. "Nial didn't come home last night, and I'm... I'm worried."

Another pause. Longer than the first one.

And then the phone went away from her mouth, and I stood in my own kitchen and listened to the whole of my life going on in another woman's bedroom fifteen kilometres away.

"Ken! Did you see Nial yesterday?"

I had that phone jammed so hard against my ear that it hurt. I could hear a man's voice underneath it, low, two words, three — and I could not get one of them — and I stood there in the dark with my eyes shut and my whole body listening, and I was praying. I was actually praying. Please. Please let him say something. Please let there be one single thing in this world that somebody knows.

She came back on.

"Ken says he hasn't spoken to Nial since early last week."

"Oh."

That was all I had. One syllable, out of a woman who has been trained since she was nineteen years old to fill a room with her voice.

And everything went out of me, and the phone got very heavy in my hand.

"Is everything alright?"

And there it was. She had softened. All of the sleep had gone out of her and she had heard something in that oh, and she was asking me properly now, and the door was standing wide open, and all I had to do was walk through it.

I could have said it. No, Marie. Nothing is alright. My husband has been gone since yesterday morning and his phone is dead and his desk has been stripped and my dog is gone, and my son says a man made a circle out of light in my back garden, and last night I lied to two police officers about my own marriage to stop them shutting the file.

"Yes, everything's fine," I said. "Thank you, Marie. Sorry to bother you."

"Alright, Jenny."

And I hung up on her.

I stood in my kitchen and looked at the phone in my hand.

"Shit."

Because I had not asked her. I had not asked her the one thing that actually mattered. I had rung my husband's oldest friend before it was properly light and I had not said ring me. Ring me if he calls. Ring me if anybody hears anything at all, ring me at any hour of the day or the night, I do not care what time it is. I had got an answer I did not want, and I had come apart in the middle of the call, and put the phone down like a woman apologising for the intrusion.

Twenty years of standing up in front of people. Ten years of running a room full of teenage girls. And I could not get through four minutes on a telephone without going to pieces halfway.

So I made myself do it properly.

I got the shopping pad out of the drawer, the one with the magnet on the back, and I sat down at my own kitchen table in the dark in that ridiculous pink dressing gown with my glasses on, and I made a list.

And then I rang them.

His supplier out at Cambridge, who was awake because he was always awake, and who had heard nothing from Nial about the order he was supposed to have confirmed on the Friday and was cross about it — and who went very quiet when I told him why I was asking.

The man who did his books, who I got on his mobile. He was extremely careful with me. He gave me nothing at all, and he was so careful about giving me nothing that I put the phone down and stood there with my hand still on it.

The Bellerive client, whose number I found in an email on Nial's old laptop, because the new one was gone. He had spoken to him on the Thursday, and he thought he had sounded perfectly fine.

Four calls, and they took the best part of two hours. The light came up in that kitchen while I made them and I did not notice it happening, and by the last one the room had gone the colour of milk and I could see myself reflected back out of the window over the sink, and I looked like something that had been dug up out of a bog.

Nobody had seen him. Nobody had spoken to him. Nobody knew one single thing — and every last one of them wanted to help me, and not one of them could.

The kettle went up behind me and I got up and made a cup of tea I did not want, in the Best Mum Ever mug the two of them gave me last Mother's Day. Nial had let Sammy choose it. Sammy chose it entirely on his own, off a shelf, at two years old, and Nial told me that story fourteen times and laughed at it every single time.

I stood at that bench with both hands round it.

And it came to me, standing there in the grey light of my own kitchen, and it went through me like cold water.

I had rung four people that morning and asked every one of them to help me find my husband.

And I had told every single one of them that everything was fine.