When the Door Opens Itself

"People have asked me how long it took me to understand. The answer is that I was thinking about a chicken."

The book went off my chest and hit the floor and I came up out of that chair with my heart already going.

For a second or two I did not know the room. I sat there with my hands gripped round the arms of my own recliner in my own living room and looked at a bookshelf and a mantelpiece and a rectangle of colour on the wall, and not one thing in front of me meant anything at all, and if somebody had walked in and asked me my name I could not have given it to them.

Then it came back, and the ache came with it — my neck had gone over sideways while I slept and set like that, and when I straightened it something let go in there with a crack that went off in that silent house like a knuckle in a church.

And I stopped, with my hand still up at my collarbone, and listened.

And what came back to me out of that house was nothing at all. Not the small feet. Not the talking-to-himself that went on for an hour at a time in that bedroom whether anybody was listening to it or not. Not the Mummy arriving from three rooms away a full second before he did. Not a single claw on a single floorboard — and Buffy had come to find me every afternoon of her life, every one, the instant I so much as shifted my weight in that chair, and she did not come. The house gave me nothing. And I sat in it in the dark with my heart going and told myself that this was simply what a quiet house sounded like.

"Oh dear, I must have dozed longer than I meant to," I said.

My voice came out rusty and stupid and much too loud for the room, and it did not sound like it belonged in that house.

The curtains had gone from grey to nothing at all. Whatever light there had been when I sat down was gone out of that living room entirely, and the shadows had come up out of the corners and taken the floor and changed the shape of every single thing in it — and I turned my head and looked at the clock on the far wall.

5:15.

"Crap!"

It burst out of me, in an empty room, at nobody, and I was up on my feet before the word was out of my mouth with the blood going out of my head so fast that I had to put a hand down on the back of the chair to stay upright.

"It's quarter past five—I've completely forgotten to put the chicken in the oven!"

That was what I said. Out loud, in my own living room, at quarter past five in the afternoon on the twenty-eighth of July, with my knees not properly under me yet and the blood coming back into my head — and my son was already gone, and my husband was already gone, and the dog was already gone, and what came out of my mouth was a chicken.

I have never entirely forgiven myself for that, and I have never entirely been able to condemn myself for it either. I had stood in the wings with a hundred girls two minutes out from an entrance they were frightened of, and every single one of them had found something suddenly and desperately urgent to do with her hair. Mine handed me a chicken. And I took it with both hands.

"Maybe I can convince Sammy and Nial to finish off the frozen lasagne instead," I said.

I bent down and picked the book up off the floor and put it back on the table, and I squared it against the edge, and that took me a second or two longer than it needed to take.

Then I got my phone.

The screen came up white in that dark room and threw its light back into my face, and I stood there and looked at it, and there was nothing. No missed call, no message, not one thing in eight hours.

"Hmm," I said. "Still no message from Nial."

The little voice. The same one I had used in the car outside the house that afternoon, the one for making a thing smaller than it is, and it had not worked then and it did not work standing in the dark of my own living room looking at my husband's name in a list of contacts while it sat there and told me absolutely nothing.

Eight hours. And he had said a few.

I put the phone in my pocket and went down the hall, and the photographs went past on both sides of me in the dark — the wedding, Seven Mile Beach, Sammy at eight months old lying on a rug in the sun with no clothes on and an expression of complete outrage. I hung every one of those frames myself. I could not have told you one of them from another that evening. They were shapes on a wall with faces in them, and the faces were not helping.

"Nial?"

It caught in my throat and came out cracked, and nothing came back to me.

And then I was standing outside the office, and the door was open.

Not the way it had been open at half past twelve. Wider. A good hand's span, with the room beyond it gone entirely black — and I had shut that door. I had stood in that hallway for I do not know how long moving it back and forth by half an inch at a time and hating myself the whole while, trying to put it back exactly the way I had found it, and I knew where I had left it because I had given five minutes of my life to making certain of it.

It was not where I had left it.

"Are you home?"

My hand went out to the knob and the metal was cold and I did not want to touch it.

"Nial?"

I pushed the door open and went in.

The last of the light was coming in through the window behind the desk — not light so much as the memory of it, the grey that got into that house at that hour in July when the cloud had been down since dawn and there had not been a shadow anywhere all day. It lay flat across the desk and did not reach into the corners.

And the desk was bare.

The wire tray had gone. The blueprints that had been standing on end in that corner since April had gone. The mug with the three biros in it had gone, and there was a clean rectangle in the dust where the laptop had been sitting, and the cable was hanging off the front edge of the desk with nothing whatever on the end of it — and I took in every last piece of that and not one of them touched me, not one, because from the moment I came through that door I had been looking at one thing only, and it was the blotter.

The blotter was empty.

I crossed that room with no memory of deciding to, and put both hands flat down on the desk, and looked at it. Green leather. A ring of old coffee. The corner where Sammy had once got at it with a biro and Nial had pretended not to mind.

And nothing on it at all.

I knew where I had left it. I had smoothed it flat under my palm and I could still feel the grain of the paper going under my hand, and then I had moved it a fraction to the left because I had not been entirely certain it was straight, and then I had backed out of that room like a thief in my own house — and I had done all of that, every bit of it, so that my husband would never know I had been in there.

And it was gone.

And somebody had known exactly where it was.

The room smelled of him. That was the thing that undid me, standing there with both hands on his desk in the dark. The cologne — the one I had bought him every Christmas for eight years because he would never once buy it for himself, the one I could pick out of a crowded foyer at forty paces — was all round me in that room as though he had walked out of it two minutes earlier and the door had only just stopped swinging. It was the smell of my husband's neck. And I put my hand up over my mouth and held it there.

I went to the window.

The driveway was empty, and of course it was empty. Wet concrete going black in the last of the light and a puddle standing in the dip by the letterbox, and no ute, and no headlights coming up the road, and behind all of it the mountain gone completely into the cloud.

I got the phone back out. I could not make my thumb work properly and it took me three goes to find his name.

It did not ring.

There was no ring at all. No pause, no click, no line opening up somewhere out in the world and a phone beginning to go in a coat pocket on the other end of it. It went from nothing to his voice in about a second and a half.

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

I hung up on him.

And I stood in my husband's dark office with the phone pressed flat against my chest and I could hear my own blood going, and I did the arithmetic that I had been refusing to do since about two o'clock that morning. Switched off. Or flat. Or somewhere out past the Huon with nothing on it — except that he had gone out at nine o'clock in the morning, in the ute, in a city, to look at a job. And a phone that has been switched off gives you the same silence as a phone that has been taken off a man, and there was no way on this earth for me to tell which of them I was listening to.

"Nial, where are you?" I said.

The room did not answer me and the house did not answer me, and I turned round and looked at the open door and the black hallway waiting beyond it, and something went through me then that I could not have named and did not ever want to feel a second time.

"Sammy," I called.

It came out wrong. It came out high.

"Sammy. Time for you to wake up now."

And nothing came back, and the nothing was the wrong size. I had lived in that house for four years and I knew the exact sound of my son asleep at the far end of it — the small shifts, the sigh, the particular protest the mattress made when he rolled himself over — and not one piece of it was there, and the silence standing in its place was the wrong shape entirely, and I was moving before I had finished thinking it.

I came out of that office fast.

It is eleven paces from the office door to Sammy's. I had walked it in the dark a thousand times with a sleeping child up on my shoulder. That evening it went on for a mile.

"Sam—"

I did not finish it. My hand was already on his door.

The bed was empty.

The blanket had been thrown right back off the side of it and was hanging down onto the floor, and there was a dent in the pillow the size of his head, and one sock lying in the middle of the rug on its own — and the rug was empty, and Buffy was not on it, and I stood in that doorway and could not make either of those two facts mean a single thing.

"Sammy!"

It tore out of me. I have used my voice for a living since I was twenty-two years old and I had never in my life made a sound like that, and I did not know that I could, and it went through that house like something breaking.

I came round out of the doorway and back down the hall and my foot caught the board — the one outside the linen cupboard, the one that had stood proud of the others since before we ever moved in, the one I had stepped over a thousand times in the dark without ever once thinking about it — and I went down onto both knees on the boards with the whole weight of me behind them, and the pain came straight up through my legs and into my hips, and I heard myself make a noise like an animal in a trap.

And from down there, on my hands and knees on the floor of my own hallway, I looked straight through the open laundry door.

The back door was ajar.

Standing open. Six inches, eight. The last grey of the evening coming in through the gap of it and the cold coming in behind that, and the air came the length of that hall and got to me where I was kneeling, and it was wet, and it smelled of eucalyptus and of earth that had been turned over. And somewhere a long way off down the gully a kookaburra started up, and another one answered it, and the whole ridiculous joyful racket of them went on out there in the dark exactly as it had gone on every evening of every year I had ever lived under that mountain, while I knelt on the floorboards of my own house with my son's bed empty behind me.

"Sammy!"

I got up. I do not know how. My knees would not hold me properly and I came off the wall twice getting down that hallway, and I went through the laundry and hit that door with the flat of my hand and I was out in it.

The cold took the breath out of me. There was no sunset. There had been no sun all day and there was not going to be one now, and the sky over the mountain had simply gone from grey to a darker grey and was working its way down towards black, and the whole yard was going flat and losing its edges and turning into shapes.

The gum at the back. The swing set, with the rust coming up through the red. The vegetable beds gone over to weed since May, which the pair of us had long since stopped apologising to each other about.

"Sammy!"

Nothing. The kookaburras stopped. Somewhere over the fence a car went past on the wet road and its tyres made that long tearing sound they make, and then that was gone too.

I have used my voice for a living since I was twenty-two. I have filled a hall of six hundred people from the back of a stage without a microphone and without breaking a sweat, and I have taught four hundred girls how to do it after me.

And I stood in the middle of my own back garden in my socks, with my knees bleeding through my jeans and my throat closing, and I called my son's name into the dark — and what came out of me was thin, and it went about ten feet, and the cold took it.

"Where are you?"

And my voice went up into that air and came apart in the middle, and my eyes had gone, and I could not see the fence, and I could not see the swing, and I could not see anything at all.

"I'm here, Mummy."

Small. Perfectly calm. Sing-song, almost. From the far corner of the yard, over by the sandpit.

And I did not move. I could not. I stood exactly where I was in the wet grass with my hands out at my sides and I made a sound that I had never made before in my life, and it was not a word, and there was nobody left in the world to hear it but him.