The Walls Don’t Blink

"My sister-in-law called me Mrs Triffett. I have never got over it, and I have never told her."

The doors sighed shut behind me and took the outside world with them.

The air changed. That was the first thing. The cold and the wet and the eucalypt went out like a light, and what came in instead was warm and processed and had been breathed already, and it smelled of floor polish and photocopier toner and something underneath both of them that I could not name and did not want to.

And the lights. Those lights hummed. They hummed at a frequency that got into my back teeth, and they laid everything out flat and grey-white and merciless, and there was not one person standing under them who did not look ill.

The lobby was bigger than it had looked from the road. Grey speckled tiles polished to a shine that gave back the ceiling. Walls the colour of a bandage. And somebody, at some point, in a meeting, had decided that what this room needed was a water feature — so there it was in the middle of the floor, water running down over a stack of black stones, and it did not sound like a mountain stream and it did not sound like peace. It sounded like a radio between stations.

There were plants in concrete tubs, going yellow at the edges, reaching for a light that was never going to feed them. Blue plastic chairs round the walls. A woman over in one corner with a manila folder held up against her chest with both arms, and her lips going. Not talking. Rehearsing. I know rehearsing when I see it, and that woman had been running her lines in that chair for some considerable time. A young bloke by the door in a torn jacket, taking up two seats, one leg going like a sewing machine.

They both looked at me when I came in. They looked, and they weighed me, and they put me down again, because I was not going to be any use to them with whatever they were carrying, and they had troubles of their own.

And behind the counter, up on the raised part, behind the security glass, was Linda.

My sister-in-law.

She had her hair pinned up the way she always pinned it up — that severe roll at the back that Kevin had been teasing her about since the day he met her and that she had never once altered — and she was typing with her eyes on the screen and her back absolutely straight.

And she was in uniform.

I had seen that uniform on a hook in their hallway. I had never once seen it on her with a counter and a sheet of glass in between.

And it changed her. Not what she was wearing — her. That was not the Linda who had sat at my table on Thursday week and laughed so hard at one of Nial's terrible jokes that she had to put her wine down. That was an officer of Tasmania Police, at work, and I stood in the middle of that lobby with the fountain going and could not make my feet move.

Because this was where it stopped being mine.

Once I said it at that counter it went into the family. It went to Kevin. It went round the table at Christmas. The Triffetts of Fern Tree, the stable ones, the ones with the boy and the house up the mountain — and everybody would be very kind about it, and everybody would know.

Then I thought about the shapes coming up on my son's arms, and my feet moved without me.

"Linda."

Her head came up fast. Far too fast for an ordinary morning at a counter, and I understood, watching it happen, that she had been trained to do that. For a second and a half she did not know me — I watched her not know me, I watched her run me through whatever it is they run people through and come up with nothing — and then she did, and what came into her face behind the recognition was not pleasure.

It was alarm.

"Jenny?" And her eyes went all the way down me and back up. "What are you doing here?"

And I could not answer her.

Everything I had built out in that car park — every sentence, every breath, the whole apparatus of it — went straight out of me and left nothing behind but the need. I stood at my sister-in-law's counter with both hands on the laminate and had to swallow twice before I could speak.

"I need to report a missing person."

And her face came apart.

The professional thing went off it in one piece, like a mask lifting away, and underneath it was a woman who had gone completely white, and she came forward with both hands onto the edge of that desk.

"Shit," she said. And then: "Sammy?"

Oh God. Oh God, I had done that to her. I had stood there and said the words missing person to a woman who had held my son on her knee at every birthday he had ever had, and I had let her have a whole second of it.

"No." I shook my head so hard that my hair came round into my face. "It's Nial."

I watched the relief go through her, and then I watched what came in behind it.

Because it was not a stranger now. It was Nial. It was the man who carved the roast at Easter, and got up on a chair to change the bulb in her kitchen, and shifted that appalling wardrobe with Kevin last month and did his back in and did not tell anybody for a week.

"Oh, Jenny, I'm so sorry," she said — and for a moment it was her, it was actually her, and her hands were already going to the keyboard, because her hands knew what to do even if the rest of her did not. "What happened?"

Such a small question.

"I... I don't really know," I said.

And it was like stepping off a ledge.

I got both hands onto that counter and held on to it. The laminate was cold and solid and it was the only thing in that building that was, and I tried to take the whole of the last day and turn it into something that could be said out loud, in that light, to that woman, through that glass.

Where was I supposed to start? Eleven weeks ago, with a boy who stopped sleeping? With the pen going through the paper? With my husband beginning, some time in June, to weigh every sentence before he handed it to me — and with the fact that I noticed, and said nothing?

"He got a phone call yesterday morning," I said.

It came out halting and thin and useless, and I pressed my fingers down against the edge of that counter until it hurt, because the hurt was the only thing keeping me on the rails.

"It was about work, I think. He seemed... off. Concerned, maybe. Then he left, and I haven't heard from him since."

And even as I was saying it I could hear exactly what it was.

A man went to work and did not come home.

That was all it was. That was all it sounded like. It sounded like a thousand other mornings at that counter — and I stood there and watched my sister-in-law take it and put it in the drawer it went in.

"Has he ever done anything like this before?"

Gentle. Careful. And I knew exactly what the question was for, because a young woman in my own living room had asked me the same one on Saturday night with a pen in her hand.

"No." It came out too fast and much too loud. "Never."

I looked straight at her and put everything I had into it. Six years, Linda. Six years of Christmases and christenings and that ridiculous camping trip. You have watched us. You have seen him with Sammy. You know.

"Linda, this isn't like him. He would never just... leave without telling me. Without saying something."

And I saw the doubt come into her face, and I could not blame her for it — because every woman who had ever stood at that counter had said he would never, and every one of them had believed it, and every single one of them had been standing exactly where I was standing.

Linda's forehead came down. She hesitated.

"Have you checked with the hospital?"

"Oh," I said.

And the blood came up into my face like a slap.

I had not. It had not occurred to me. It had not crossed my mind once — not in the night, not at that kitchen table with a shopping pad in front of me, not in the car. I had rung a fencing supplier out at Cambridge. I had rung an accountant on his mobile. I had rung a client in Bellerive about a job.

I had not rung a single hospital.

Because I had never once thought that he was hurt, and I have had to live with that. Somewhere in the small hours my mind had gone straight past injured and ill and off the road in the dark and landed on taken, and it had built the whole of the last day on top of that, and never once gone back down and looked at the foundations.

"No," I said, and my voice had gone very small. "But I'm sure they would've contacted me if he'd been admitted."

Which was pathetic, and which was a woman covering, and she heard every bit of it.

And then, because it was going to come out anyway, and better from me than from a phone record:

"And..." I stopped. I made myself do it. "He sent me a text message yesterday afternoon."

And her hands came off the keyboard.

They stopped in mid-air, both of them, and hung there. Then one eyebrow went up — and I had known that eyebrow for years and I had never once been on the wrong side of it, and I was on the wrong side of it now.

"He texted you?"

Sharp. And underneath the sharpness, unmistakably, relief. Because the thing had just gone into a category. It had a shape now. It had a shelf that it lived on — husband texts, husband doesn't come home, wife won't have it — and that shelf was already full.

"Yes," I said. And it stuck in my throat like a bone. "But... I don't think it was him. I don't know how to explain it, but it didn't feel right. It didn't sound like him."

And I heard it.

God help me, I heard it come out of my own mouth in that lobby with the fountain going, and I knew exactly what it sounded like. I had heard that sound before, hundreds of times, from girls who had not got the part and could not accept it — the same rising pitch, the same reaching, the same reasonable-sounding argument built on nothing at all — and it had never once persuaded me of anything.

Linda sat back. The chair went with her, a little squeak of the castors, and she put six inches of air between the two of us, and the mask came back down over her face and it made a sound when it landed.

"Jenny." My name — and it was a hand held out and a door shutting, both at once. "Are you sure you're not jumping to conclusions here? If he sent you a message, that means he's okay. Maybe he just needed some space."

Space.

"No." I was shaking my head again and my hair was in my face again and I did not care. "You don't understand. Nial wouldn't do this. He wouldn't just disappear without telling me where he was going. And he certainly wouldn't leave Sammy like this."

And my voice went on my son's name.

Because how was I supposed to get it across that counter — a woman standing in a doorway reading a bear voice wrong to a three-year-old who had asked for his father twice and then stopped asking?

Linda's mouth went into a line. I knew that line. It was the line she did at my mother's table when somebody said something she disagreed with and she was too well brought up to say so.

"Jenny, I want to help you, I really do. But if he sent you a text, that's considered a form of contact. Officially, he's not missing."

And something in me went.

Not broke. Went — the way a catch goes, the way a spring goes, all at once and completely.

"What do you mean he's not missing?"

It came out of me at full volume. Full diaphragm, full support, the whole instrument — the voice I had used to fill a hall of six hundred people without a microphone — and it went off that polished floor and off that glass and up into the ceiling and came back at me from four directions at once.

Every head in that lobby came round. The woman with the folder. The boy with the leg. A constable coming out of a side door, who stopped with his hand still on it.

I was making a scene.

And I could see myself doing it, and I could never afterwards make anybody understand that. There was a part of me standing at the back of that lobby with its arms folded, watching — and it knew exactly how this was reading to every last person in the room, and it could have written the caption underneath it.

The hysterical wife.

And I did it anyway.

"I haven't seen or spoken to my husband in over twenty-four hours, and you're telling me that a single text message is enough to dismiss my concerns?"

Twenty-four hours.

To Linda I said twenty-four. To my mother, standing on her own verandah in the cold with my son's bag held against her chest, I had said forty-eight — and I had not blinked, and I had not stumbled, and I had believed it while it was coming out of me.

I could not even keep my own lies straight any more.

My hands had come off the counter and they were going. All of it, the whole vocabulary — hands, arms, shoulders — because I directed with my body and I always had, and when the words were not enough I reached for the rest of me. And I watched Linda's eyes track those hands, and I watched her sit back another inch.

She thought I might do something.

My brother's wife, behind a security screen, moved away from me in case I did something.

"Jenny, please." Sympathy and impatience in the same breath, which was the worst thing anybody did to me in the whole of that fortnight. "I don't make the rules. If there's evidence of contact, we can't classify him as missing. Not yet."

Not yet.

I got hold of that counter again with both hands and leaned in over it, and my knuckles went white, and the edge of it cut into the heels of my palms and I was glad of it.

"Linda." I brought it right down. I made it quiet. Quiet was the only thing I had left. "This isn't like Nial. You know him."

Then I went for the last thing I had.

"He would never do this. And then there's the dog—Buffy's gone too. Sammy says a man took her."

And I watched her face.

I watched it with everything I had, with twenty years of watching faces for a living — and something went across it. Something. A flicker, right at the back of the eyes, gone inside half a second. And I never knew whether that was concern, or recognition, or simply a woman thinking oh God, she is worse than I thought.

"Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

Her fingers found a pen and started clicking it. Click. Click. Click. Her head was down and she was looking at the desk, and her mouth opened.

And I held my breath.

I stood at that counter and held my breath like a girl outside a rehearsal room waiting for a cast list, because she was going to say something. She was actually going to say something.

Then her spine came up, and her chin came up, and the whole of her settled into a shape I had never seen before.

"I'm sorry, Mrs Triffett."

Mrs Triffett.

Everything else that happened in that building happened on the other side of those two words.

Not Jenny. Not Jen, which was what she called me. Not the woman whose kitchen she had stood in a hundred times, whose son she had bathed, who sat up with her for three nights in 2015 when her father was dying.

Mrs Triffett.

She reached out and took my family off the table and put it in a drawer and shut the drawer.

"There's nothing more I can do right now. If you don't hear from him or see him within forty-eight hours, come back, and we'll reevaluate the situation."

Forty-eight hours.

Two more nights. Two more nights of a small boy asking me where his father was and getting a lie. Two more days for whatever this was to get further away from me, for whatever trail there was to go cold — and I did not know what a trail was, or how cold it could get. But I knew, standing at that counter, that time was the one thing I did not have and the only thing anybody was offering me.

"So that's it?" My voice was going all over the place. "I just... wait? Hope that he decides to come back?"

And she looked away.

My sister-in-law looked away from me. Over my shoulder. At the wall, at the door, at anything on this earth but my face. And when she spoke it was almost too quiet to hear.

"I'm sorry."

Two words.

"But that just isn't like Nial." It was coming up out of me from somewhere I did not know I still had. "He would never leave, not like this. Not without saying goodbye to little Sammy."

"Mrs Triffett, you know there's nothing I can do." And now she was tired. She had said it before, and she would say it again the week after and the week after that, and every time she said it a woman would be standing where I was standing. "The system just doesn't have the resources—"

"To hell with your system!"

And my hand came down on that counter.

Flat, and hard, and the whole of my arm behind it — and the crack of it went off in that lobby like something breaking, and the pain shot up through my wrist and into my elbow, and the water feature went on burbling, and the entire building stopped.

All of them. The woman with the folder. The boy on the seats. Two officers over by the lifts. Every last one of them looking at me — and I stood in the middle of the Hobart police station in front of the lot of them with my hand flat on a counter and my chest going and my face wet.

Let them look.

"You know me, Linda." It was coming through my teeth. I was shaking so hard that the counter was shaking. "You know my husband! You were at our house just last week for dinner. You know Nial would never abandon his family. Not like this!"

And her face gave me nothing at all.

But her eyes did. Her eyes did — I saw it, I saw the whole war going on behind them, the woman and the uniform — and her lips came apart and they were trembling, and she was going to speak.

And she hesitated.

That hesitation was worse than anything else she did to me that morning. If she had simply refused me I could have hated her cleanly, and it would have been over. But she wanted to. I saw her want to. And she did not — and I have carried that ever since, and I very much hope that she has too.

And then, from behind me:

"Mrs Triffett, was it?"

I came round so fast that I nearly went over.

He was standing about four feet away and I had not heard a thing. Not a footfall, not a door, not a breath. I had been in the middle of the largest noise of my entire adult life, and a man had come up behind me across a tiled floor and I had not known he was there.

Tall. Solid, without being heavy with it. A suit that had been good three or four years ago. Dark hair, combed, but combed by a man in a hurry. And a face that was doing nothing whatever except taking everything in — the counter, Linda's spine, my hand still flat on the laminate, the whole audience I had assembled — and putting all of it away somewhere for later.

I knew that look. It was the look I had from the back of a hall in the third week of rehearsals. It was a man watching the entire stage at once.

"Yes," I said. And it came out with the fight still in it. "Do I know you?"

"No." And he put his hand out, unhurried, as though the two of us had met at a function. "I'm Detective Karl Jenkins."

I took it. Warm, dry, brief. He did not squeeze, and he did not hold on.

And he did not look at me the way the rest of that room was looking at me. There was no pity in it — I would have gone straight back out through those doors if there had been pity in it. What there was underneath the tiredness was something I had only ever seen in people who had been doing a difficult thing for a very long time.

He had seen this before. He knew how it went.

"Why don't you come with me?" He was already half-turned towards a corridor, so it was not really a question, and both of us knew it. "You can tell me what's been going on."

I looked back at Linda.

She was not looking at me. She had her eyes down on her keyboard and her fingers moving across it, and she was not typing anything at all.

"Alright," I said.

And I picked up my handbag, and I walked away from my brother's wife.

I felt her eyes on my back the whole way across that lobby, and I did not turn round. And something went that morning, between her and me, and it never came back.

He walked half a step ahead of me and he did not hurry, and after about ten paces I understood that he was doing it on purpose. He was giving me the length of that corridor to get my face back on, and he was not going to watch me do it.

He stopped at a door marked Authorised Personnel Only and put a card against the panel, and the lock went with a clunk that sounded enormous.

"After you, ma'am," he said, and held it open.

The corridor on the other side was narrower and lower and painted a green that no human being had ever chosen for a room they intended to sit in. The lights were worse in there. Without the fountain to cover them I could hear every single one of them buzzing.

And the walls were covered in faces.

Noticeboards, both sides, the whole length of it. Wanted. Missing. Have you seen. Row after row of photographs — some of them furious, some of them empty, every one of them taken on an ordinary day by somebody who had no idea what the picture was going to end up being used for. A girl of about nineteen. A man in a high-vis vest, laughing. An old woman, with her name underneath her and the date she walked out of a nursing home in Kingston.

And I went down that corridor behind a detective and I thought: they are going to put Nial up here.

They are going to take that photograph of him at the barbecue with the tongs in his hand, laughing at somebody out of shot, and they are going to print it in black and white and staple it to a board — and people are going to walk past it for a year and never once actually look at it.

I stumbled. My foot caught on nothing at all and I stumbled anyway, and he stopped and half turned.

"Just through here," he said.

Gentler. That was all. He did not ask me whether I was all right, and if he had asked me I would have gone down on that carpet.

We went round two more corners. I tried to keep the route in my head — left, right, straight, left — and lost it almost at once, and it did not matter in the least, because I was not going to be walking out of there on my own.

He stopped at an open door at the end and put his head in first and looked round the room before he let me into it. Checking. I did not know what for, and I never found out.

"This way, please, Mrs Triffett. Please, take a seat."

And the room was exactly what I had known it would be.

A steel table, bolted to the floor. Two chairs designed by somebody with a grudge against the human spine. A light that would have made a bishop look guilty.

And down one wall, a mirror.

Not a mirror. It did not even have the decency to pretend. A long panel of glass set into the wall at head height, giving back the room, and the table, and a woman sitting down at it with her hair everywhere in a coat she had slept in.

I had sat behind one of those before. Not a police one. A beige room at the Paediatric Centre with a two-way panel down one side — and they were entirely straight with me about what it was, and I sat in there with my son and the toys they had chosen for him and thought about the person on the other side of that glass writing down what he did with a wooden horse.

Now I was on this side of it. And there was somebody behind it. And they were going to write down what I did.

The table was cold. I put both arms on it anyway, because the cold was real and almost nothing else was, and I could see myself in the steel — spread out, and broken up, and nobody I knew.

He sat down opposite me. He took a notepad out of his jacket, and a pen, and the click of that pen went off in that little room like a stone dropped down a well.

"Your full name, please?"

"Jenny Alexandra Triffett."

And I was astonished at how steadily it came out of me.

He wrote it at the top of the page in block capitals. He took his time over it. Every letter separate, and every letter upright — and I sat there and watched a stranger build my own name out of straight lines.

"Thank you," he said.

Then he moved the pen up into the corner of the page and wrote the date.

I read it upside down, the way I had read a hundred scripts upside down across a table.

Sunday, 29 July 2018.

And that was the moment. Not the doors, and not the counter, and not my hand coming down on the laminate. That. A tired man in a bad suit writing a date in the corner of a page — because from that mark onwards there was a record, and everything my husband had ever been was going to be whatever I said in the next hour, and nothing else, and nobody else was coming.

He put the pen down. He folded his hands on the table. And he looked up at me.

And he waited.

He did not prompt me. He did not lean in. He did not do one single one of the things people do to get you started — he sat back in that terrible chair and gave me the whole room, and I understood, sitting in front of him with my arms flat on cold steel, that this was the last person in Tasmania who was going to listen to me.

I had the truth. All of it. The list and the blotter and the man with the colours and the marriage and every last lie I had told since Saturday morning.

And I had the version.

I opened my mouth.

And I did not know, until the words were actually coming out of me, which one of them he was going to get.