Cold Tea and Thin Walls

"The worst arguments aren't the loud ones. They're the ones where everyone keeps their voice down because the walls are thin and the kids are sleeping."

I don't know how long I sat there. Could have been two minutes, could have been ten. The kitchen had that strange, held quality it gets late at night when the fire's dying and the house is full of people pretending to sleep. The clock ticked. A moth bumped against the window above the sink, trying to reach the light. The Metters gave a low, metallic groan as it cooled, the way old stoves do — like the house was sighing.

Janice's words sat in my chest like a stone I'd swallowed.

He watches people the way Blue watches the sheep.

I turned the mug in my hands. Round and round, the ceramic smooth and cool now, the dregs of tea a dark ring at the bottom. I tried to push the words away, file them under "things a twelve-year-old says when she's been woken up and doesn't know what she's talking about." But they wouldn't go. They had teeth.

Because she wasn't wrong. Not entirely. I'd seen it myself — at the pub, in the way Jeremiah asked questions that weren't really questions. The way he read a room. The way he deflected without it ever looking like a deflection until you replayed it later and realised you still didn't know anything about him.

But that didn't make him dangerous. It made him careful. There's a difference.

Isn't there?

I heard footsteps on the stairs — soft, unhurried, the creak of the third step that always gave people away. Mum. She appeared in the kitchen doorway still in her cardigan, glasses back on her nose now, looking at me with an expression I'd seen a hundred times but never quite like this. Not disappointed. Not angry. Something more complicated. Like she was holding several feelings at once and hadn't decided which one to lead with.

She didn't say anything at first. Just crossed to the sink, rinsed the mugs I'd left there, dried her hands on the tea towel hanging from the oven handle. Slow, deliberate movements. The kind she made when she was thinking.

"He's settled," she said. "Seemed tired. I showed him where the bathroom is and how the window latch works — it sticks in the heat."

"Thanks, Mum."

She folded the tea towel into a neat square, set it on the bench, then turned and leaned against the counter, arms crossed. Looking at me.

"You want to tell me about it?" she asked. Not a demand. An opening.

"There's not much to tell. We met at the Kingsford Smith. He was passing through with a group. We got talking. He seemed..." I searched for the word. "He seemed like someone worth knowing."

"That's a big call to make in one evening, love."

"Yeah. I know."

She watched me for a moment. Then she pushed off the counter and sat down across from me at the table, folding her hands in front of her. The lamplight caught the lines around her eyes — tiredness, yes, but something else too. The accumulated patience of a woman who'd spent almost twenty years listening to seven children explain themselves and had learned to hear what they weren't saying.

"I'm not going to tell you you've done something wrong," she said carefully. "Your father and I raised you to be generous. To help people when they need it. I'm proud of that in you, Cody. I am."

The word but hung between us, heavy as wet wool.

"But this is our home. These are our children sleeping upstairs. And you've brought someone into that — someone none of us know, someone who can't seem to give a straight answer about who he is or where he's from — and you've done it without asking. Without so much as a warning."

Each sentence landed softly. That was the thing about Mum. She could take you apart without ever raising her voice. It wasn't cruelty — it was precision. She loved you enough to be honest, and she was honest enough to make it hurt.

"I know," I said again. It was all I had.

"Do you?" She tilted her head slightly. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you've made a decision with your heart and left the rest of us to deal with the consequences."

I opened my mouth to argue — to explain the gut feeling, the conversation, the way Jeremiah had made me feel seen in a way I couldn't articulate — but before I could speak, the living room door opened and Dad walked in.

He'd put on his flannel shirt — the brown check one he wore when he was staying up whether he wanted to or not. His face had that set quality it got when he'd been thinking hard about something and had arrived at a position he wasn't planning to move from. He didn't look at Mum. Didn't look at me. Just walked to the kettle, filled it, set it on the stove, and stood there with his back to us, waiting for it to boil.

The silence was enormous. The kind of silence that has texture. You could feel it pressing against the walls, filling the corners of the room, settling into the cracks between the floorboards.

When the kettle whistled — that thin, rising scream that always sounded too loud at night — Dad poured his tea with the same care he gave everything. Measured. Unhurried. Then he brought it to the table, sat down in his chair, and looked at me.

"I'm going to ask you something," he said. "And I want a real answer. Not what you think I want to hear."

"Alright."

"What do you actually know about this man?"

I held his gaze. Tried to. "His name's Jeremiah. He's been travelling. He's—"

"His name's Jeremiah. He's been travelling." Dad repeated my words back to me, flat and unadorned, like he was reading a shopping list. "That's what you know. A first name and a hobby."

"It's more than that, Dad. We talked for hours. About the farm, about—"

"You talked about the farm. What did he talk about?"

The question stopped me. I opened my mouth, closed it. Ran back through the evening — the darts, the group, the one-on-one conversation. The dreams about Canada, about Africa, about the rice paddies. The laughter. The silence. The way Jeremiah had made me feel like my words mattered.

And I realised, with a cold twist in my stomach, that Dad was right. I'd talked. Jeremiah had listened. And listened. And asked the right questions at the right moments. But he hadn't given me anything. Not really. Not a surname, not a hometown, not a single concrete detail about his life that I could hold up and say this is who he is.

"He... he talked about travelling," I said, and heard how weak it sounded.

"Travelling where?"

"He didn't say exactly."

"Doing what?"

"Farmwork, building work — he said a bit of everything."

"And you believed him?"

"Yeah, Dad. I did."

Brian Jennings leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. The gesture was slow, deliberate — the same way he folded his arms when he was inspecting a fence line for weak points. Patient. Methodical. In no rush at all.

"I'm not saying you're wrong about him," Dad said, and his voice had dropped to that register it went to when he was being very, very careful with his words. "I'm saying you don't know if you're right. And there's a difference, Cody. A big bloody difference."

"Brian," Mum said softly.

"No, Patricia. He needs to hear this." Dad's eyes didn't leave mine. "You've invited a man into our home. Into the room where Kenneth sleeps when he’s home. Down the hall from your sisters. From Tania, who's four years old. And you've done it because of a feeling."

The word feeling sat between us like something that had been dropped and shattered.

"I trust my gut, Dad. You taught me that."

"I taught you to trust your gut about the land. About when to plant and when to hold off. About weather and livestock and whether a piece of machinery's going to hold or give. I didn't teach you to trust your gut about strangers you met in a pub three hours ago."

It hit hard. Harder than I expected. Not because it was unfair — I could see his point, could feel the logic of it pressing against my own certainty like water against a dam. But because underneath the logic, underneath the fatherly caution, I could hear something else. Fear. Brian Jennings was afraid. Not of Jeremiah, not specifically. But of the idea that his son — his nineteen-year-old son, who still left his boots muddy by the door and forgot to close the chook pen — might have made a mistake that he couldn't undo.

"Look," I said, and my voice came out rougher than I intended. "I'm not stupid. I know I don't know everything about him. But I know how he made me feel. I know he listened to me — really listened — in a way that..." I stopped. Swallowed. "In a way that nobody else does."

The words landed wrong. I could feel it the second they left my mouth. Something shifted in Dad's face — not hurt, exactly, but a flinch. Small, quickly covered. Like I'd poked a bruise he didn't know he had.

Mum's hand moved across the table and covered Dad's. Just for a second. A touch. Then it was gone.

"That's not what I meant," I said quickly. "Dad, that's not—"

"I know what you meant." His voice was even. Too even. The kind of even that costs something to maintain. "You meant that a stranger in a pub understood you better in one night than your own family does."

"That's not what I said."

"It's what you meant."

The kitchen held its breath. The moth was still tapping at the window. The Metters gave another groan. Somewhere upstairs, a pipe clicked — the hot water system cooling, a sound I'd heard every night of my life. But tonight it sounded different. Sharper. Like the house was listening too.

Mum broke the silence. She did it the way she always did — not with a grand gesture, but by standing up and doing something practical. She took Dad's mug, refilled it, set it back in front of him. Then she did the same for mine. Small acts. Ordinary. But they were her way of saying we're not done, but we're not broken either.

"Nobody's questioning your heart, Cody," she said, sitting back down. "We know who you are. We know why you did it. But your father's right that we need to be careful. We've got little ones in this house. We've got responsibilities that go beyond hospitality."

"So what are you saying? That I should tell him to leave in the morning?"

"I'm saying we keep our eyes open," Mum said. "We give him a fair go — because that's who we are — but we pay attention. If something doesn't add up, we deal with it. Together. As a family."

Dad said nothing. His jaw worked. He stared at his tea like it owed him money.

"Brian?" Mum said.

"He gets a week," Dad said. "One week. He works, he contributes, he gives us a reason to keep him. If he's who Cody says he is, we'll see it soon enough. If he's not..." He looked at me. "If he's not, then your gut was wrong, and we'll deal with that too."

It wasn't generous. It wasn't warm. But it was Brian Jennings, and it was the best he could offer — a measured, conditional opening. A gate left ajar, not swung wide. I should have been grateful for it. Should have said thank you, or nodded, or let it rest.

Instead, something in me — something young and stubborn and bruised by the feeling that I'd been put on trial in my own kitchen — pushed back.

"He's not a stray dog, Dad. He's a person. And he doesn't need a week-long audition to prove he deserves to be treated like one."

Dad's chair scraped against the floor as he stood. Not fast, not angry. Just done. He picked up his mug, drained it in one long swallow, and set it down on the bench beside the sink with a ceramic clack that was louder than it should have been.

"Five o'clock," he said. "Both of you."

He walked out of the kitchen without looking back. His footsteps were heavy down the hall, each one landing like a full stop. The bedroom door opened and closed. Not slammed. Worse. Controlled.

Mum and I sat there in the wake of it. The kitchen felt stripped bare, like a room after a bushfire — the structure still standing but everything inside it scorched.

"He'll come round," Mum said quietly.

"Will he?"

She didn't answer straight away. She reached across and straightened the sugar bowl — a completely unnecessary act, done purely because her hands needed something to do.

"Your father loves you, Cody. He loves this family more than anything on this earth. And when someone threatens that — or when he thinks they might — he becomes the man you just saw. It's not fair, sometimes. But it's who he is."

"I'm not threatening anything. I'm trying to help someone."

"I know." She looked at me. "But you need to understand something. To your father, those two things aren't as far apart as you think they are."

I didn't have an answer for that. It lodged in me the way Janice's words had earlier — sideways, uncomfortable, impossible to ignore.

Mum stood. Pushed her chair in quietly. She crossed to where I sat, and I felt her hand on the back of my head — brief, warm, her fingers running once through my hair the way she'd done since I was small. Then she bent and kissed my temple.

"Get some sleep," she said. "Tomorrow's going to be a long day."

She left. Her slippers whispered down the hall. The bedroom door opened and closed — softer than Dad's.

The kitchen settled around me. The fire in the next room had gone out — I could smell the last of the ash, grey and spent. The moth had given up on the window and was circling the lamp above the table in slow, stupid loops.

Upstairs, in Kenneth's room, a stranger was sleeping in Kenneth's bed. Surrounded by Kenneth's sheet music, Kenneth's cricket bat in the corner, the model plane he'd built with Dad hanging from the ceiling on fishing line.

I didn't move.