Displaced

"I have spent my entire working life telling other people to check. And at the end of it I put my hand on a door handle in my brother's house and opened it without once asking myself who was on the other side."

I came out of it into silence, and there was no flash and no sound and nothing whatsoever to mark the crossing, and one moment I was standing on a plain of red dust in the last of a light that belonged to nobody, and the next moment I was standing on polished concrete in Broken Hill with the afternoon coming in sideways through a window.

And I stopped where I was, and I did not move, because I had no idea where I was.

The floor had been done properly, by somebody who did floors for a living and charged accordingly for it. The cabinetry was pale timber and it went all the way up to the ceiling and there was not a handle anywhere on any of it. The benches were bare. Not tidy—bare, in the way that a bench is bare in a photograph of a bench.

And there was a couch, and there were cushions on the couch, and the cushions had been arranged. By a person. At some point. Who had put them where they were and then stood back and looked at them from a distance of about two metres and then gone in again and moved one of them an inch to the left.

There was a clock on the far wall with no numbers on its face, only two hands going round a blank white disc, and I stood there and looked at that clock and it told me nothing whatever about the time and a very great deal about my brother.

And above the sideboard there was a print of a cliff going down into a grey sea, hung dead centre, in indigo and slate and nothing else at all, and it had been chosen. That was the thing. Somebody had gone into a shop and looked at a number of pictures and had thought about it, and had come home with that one, and had got out a spirit level.

"This is your place?"

It came out of me hoarse and half-formed, as though my voice had needed a moment to remember how to operate in an atmosphere with anything in it.

Josh shrugged. "Yeah."

And I stood there in the middle of it in the clothes I had put on to go to an airport, with the red dust of another world still packed into the welt of my shoes, and looked round a house I had never seen before in my life, belonging to a man I have known since the day I was born.

"It's like a furniture catalogue had a lovechild with a sterilisation clinic."

And he grinned at me and took the whole thing as a compliment.

"Thanks."

So I went a few steps further in, and my shoes made no sound at all on that floor, and the place smelled of eucalyptus and clean linen and something expensive that had burned down some hours before I got there. And there was not a speck of dust on any surface in it. There was not one sock on the floor and there was not one mug on a bench and there was not a jacket over the back of a chair, and there was nothing anywhere in that entire room that a human being had put down without first having a small internal conversation about where it ought to go.

My brother once used a broom handle as a curtain rod for eighteen months. In a rental. That he was trying to get his bond back on. I sat in that flat and drank beer out of a jam jar because he had broken all four of his glasses and had decided that four glasses was, on reflection, an excessive number of glasses for one man.

And I stood in his beautiful, immaculate, entirely foreign house with my heart going, and what came up in me was not admiration and was not amusement.

Because I had stood on a plain in another world and looked at a photograph of this room and I had not known it.

And I had had my reasons, and every one of them had seemed sound at the time. But I was standing in it now, with both feet on the floor of it, turning round in a slow circle in the middle of it exactly the way I had once turned round in a corridor at work after coming out of the wrong lift on the wrong floor—looking for one thing that I recognised, and not finding it. There was nothing here. Not one chair. Not one mug. Not a single object in this house that I had ever laid eyes on before, because I had not been up to Broken Hill in a very long time, and I had never once asked him what any of it was like, and it had genuinely never occurred to me to wonder.

He threw his keys into a bowl by the door and rolled his shoulders out.

"Anyway. I've got an idea."

And a cold, entirely familiar feeling arrived underneath my sternum and made itself comfortable there, and I turned round very slowly.

"God help me."

He ignored that completely, which is what he has always done, and crouched down and retied a lace, and then had a quick look at the floor to see whether he had brought any of Saint Phillis into the house on his feet.

"I'm going to get my car."

"The one you left at the McDonald's. In Elizabeth."

"Yep."

"Which is five hundred kilometres from here."

"Correct." And he came up off his knee and his eyes had that light in them—that specific light, which I have been watching come on in my brother's face since he was about six years old, and which has never once in all that time been followed by anything sensible.

"Why?"

"Because I need it," he said. "And because I want to see if it works."

And he said it in exactly the tone he would have used about a microwave he had picked up cheap at a garage sale, and not remotely in the tone of somebody who is proposing to bend the laws of physics because he cannot be bothered organising a lift.

"So let me be absolutely certain that I have understood you," I said, and I could hear my own voice going into the register it goes into when I am reading a proposal back to the person who wrote it. "You are going to go to Clivilius. From Clivilius you are going to open a portal into the lavatory of a McDonald's in Elizabeth. You are then going to walk out of that lavatory, past the counter, across a carpark, get into your car, drive it back round to the front of the McDonald's—and then somehow get an entire motor vehicle through a hole in the world, and out the other side, and into your living room."

And Josh looked genuinely offended.

"Not the living room. The garage."

"The garage."

He pointed at the side door, and he did it with the untroubled confidence of somebody who had already worked the whole thing out in his head on the drive down and had simply been waiting for the opportunity to say it out loud.

"There's a slab out back."

And I sighed. It is a sigh I have been refining since about 1993 and I have never yet found anything better to do with him.

"And what if you can't bring the car back through?"

"Then I'll build a racetrack in Saint Phillis."

And he said it with no hesitation whatsoever and with no irony in it anywhere at all, and the picture of it went into my head and would not come out again—one car, going round and round on a plain of red dust under an ordinary sun, on a world where nothing has ever lived, with my brother behind the wheel and the windows down.

"Just don't park it on a cliff."

"I make no promises."

And there was the grin. Reckless and boyish and about twenty years out of date on a face that had otherwise got on with things—and for four or five seconds the whole weight of it came off him. The camp. The trail running out after fifty metres. A child asking a grown man why the portal did not like her.

Gone. Just for a moment. A bloke in a spotless kitchen, bouncing on the balls of his feet, about to do something extremely stupid.

And I let him go.

I could have stopped him. He was standing four feet away from me with one hand up on the wall and I could have said a single word to him, and I did not say it. I have gone over the reasons since—that he needed the car, that he needed twenty minutes of feeling like himself, that we were going to have to eat and sleep and travel and I could not do any of it in a shirt and a pair of office shoes—and every one of them is perfectly true, and not one of them is the reason.

The reason is that I wanted twenty minutes on my own with a bag of camping gear and a problem I could solve.

"How long will you be?"

"Hour. Maybe two." He was already turning away from me. "Depends on the traffic between dimensions."

And he gave me one last grin over his shoulder and stepped into the wall, and the colour came up and folded down and went out, and the wall was a wall again, and I was standing on my own in the middle of a stranger's living room.

And then it was quiet.

Not peaceful. Those two words get used as though they mean the same thing and they have never meant the same thing. It was the sort of quiet that gets into a person, and it had me standing in the middle of that beautiful room looking round for an appliance to switch on for no reason whatever, and I did not switch anything on, and the clock on the wall went round and round and did not tell me the time.

So in the end I went and found the laundry, because Josh kept his camping gear in the laundry and had done since he was nineteen years old, and because I could not think of one other useful thing to do with myself.

And there it was, up on the high shelf. A canvas duffel with the handles gone soft, and a zip that complained the entire way down.

And the noise of that zip in that house was the most honest sound I had heard since Melbourne.

And inside it was my brother.

The swag, rolled tight, the canvas gone soft as an old shirt from about two hundred nights of being slept on. A headlamp with the elastic fraying at one edge and a battery in it that was going to fail us at precisely the worst available moment, and which he had not replaced, and which he was never going to replace. Two steel tent pegs in a ziplock bag, rusted at the points from being driven into ground that had not wanted them.

And the billy. Blue enamel, blackened three-quarters of the way up the sides, and I got it out and turned it over in my hands and it still smelled of woodsmoke and instant coffee—and I stood in a laundry in Broken Hill and it went through me like something coming off a wall.

Because I was ten. Because I was seventeen. Because I was twenty-four and we had driven four hours out of Adelaide to a place that turned out to be shut, and we had camped in a paddock instead and drunk about six cups of terrible coffee out of that exact tin and argued for an entire evening about a film neither of us had seen.

I put it down on the floor of the laundry and had to stand there for a moment.

The rest came out after it. Half a packet of cable ties. A roll of duct tape with his own fingerprints pressed into the edge of the adhesive. A first aid kit with the lid cracked across one corner. A coil of rope that had seen an enormous amount of dust and almost no use at all. Two water bottles wedged down the side, both empty, both scratched, the plastic gone cloudy from a decade of being filled at taps.

And a tin of beef stew that had gone out of date at some point during the previous decade, which I left exactly where it was, because he has been carrying that tin around with him for years and neither of us has ever mentioned it and I was not going to start.

There was no tactical nonsense in that bag. There was no kit. There was not one item in it that had been ordered online at eleven o'clock at night in a fit of enthusiasm and worn once. It was bush gear. It was real. Every single object in it had been thrown into the back of a ute on a Friday afternoon by somebody driving up to Menindee without telling anybody where he was going, and it had all come home again, and it had gone back on the shelf.

And at the bottom of it, rolled up inside an old T-shirt from a show we went to together about fifteen years ago and have argued about ever since, was a flare gun.

It was not pristine and it had not been expensive. The orange plastic had gone pale and chalky in the sun and the metal had tarnished at the breech, and it was in that bag because out there it made sense to have one, and it was in that bag for no other reason whatever.

And I took it out and I carried it into the kitchen and I put it down on the bench, and then I stood and looked at it for a long time with my hands flat on the stone either side of it.

Because we were not going camping.

That was what arrived, standing there. My brother had bought that thing because he was worried about breaking down on a dirt road eighty kilometres from a phone. And I was about to carry it into a country with no name and no map and no edges, to look for a man and a child and a dog who had walked away from a fire in the dark—not because they were lost, but because something had come out of the dark and stood at the edge of the light and looked at them.

And a flare was a call for help. That was the entire purpose of the object, and the whole of what it had ever been designed to do: a thing to be fired up into the sky by somebody who wanted, very badly, to be found.

And I stood in my brother's kitchen and looked at it and understood, quite calmly and without any drama about it at all, that where we were going there was nobody to see it.

And then I laid the whole of it out on that bench in two piles and counted it, and sorted it, and re-sorted it, and wrote a list in my head and then revised the list.

And for perhaps twenty minutes I felt useful.

I felt focused. I felt, for the first time since a man with a cut on his jaw put an envelope into my hands in a laneway and walked away from me, that I was standing in front of a problem with edges on it, and that I was the right person to be standing in front of it, and that if I simply went at it properly and did not panic and did not skip anything, it could be done.

And then the silence started to stretch.

And it went on stretching. The clock ticked and did not tell me anything. The light coming in through the front window swung round and went long and amber across that concrete floor, and one board somewhere in the house creaked once, and then said nothing further for a very long time.

And Josh did not come back.

And I sat down on a stool at my brother's spotless kitchen bench with a flare gun in front of me, and I did the thing I do, which is that I began to model it.

What if it had not worked. What if a car could not go through, and he had spent forty minutes standing in a McDonald's carpark trying to reverse a Hilux into a hole in the air, and had been arrested. What if a car could go through, and something else had come through with it. What if he had opened that portal into the lavatory and there had been somebody standing in it—a kid, an old bloke, an entire family. What if he had come out onto that plain and it had been dark by then, and there had been lights out near the cliffs, and he had gone to have a look.

And every single one of those went round again, and came back with a slightly worse ending than the time before, and I sat on that stool and let it happen to me for I do not know how long.

And then there were three knocks at the front door.

Three of them, firm and evenly spaced, and there was nothing hurried about a single one of them.

And my whole body came up off that stool before my head had even begun to consider the matter, and my heart went straight up into my throat and stayed there—because a sound like that, arriving into a silence like that one, went off in that house like a rifle going off in a church.

And then I laughed at myself. Out loud. Alone, in an empty room, with my hand flat on my chest like an old woman.

Because of course it was Josh. Because he had got the car back and locked his keys in it. Because he had come out of the wrong wall and ended up on the wrong side of his own front door. Because he had decided, somewhere between Elizabeth and Broken Hill, that knocking on his own front door and making his brother get up and answer it would be extremely funny—and he would have been right, and he would have been unbearable about it for a week.

And I crossed that lounge room, and I put my hand on the handle, and I opened the door.

There was a window beside that door. There was a window beside that door with a clear pane in the top of it, and I walked straight past it and did not turn my head.

I did not call out. I did not ask who it was. I did not check.

I have spent eleven years of my life standing at the front of rooms full of people who did not want me there, telling them—patiently, and repeatedly, and with slides—that the failure will not be in the part of the system they are worried about. It will be in the part they stopped looking at, because they had already decided what was going to be there.

And I opened my brother's front door because I assumed.

And she was standing on the step.

The same jeans. The same denim jacket. The same dark hair pulled back hard against her skull, exactly as it had been at thirty thousand feet with a paperback in her lap. And she was not out of breath, and she was not sweating, and there was not one thing anywhere on that woman to suggest that she had crossed five hundred kilometres of desert in an afternoon to arrive at my brother's front door.

She was simply standing there in the late sun with her weight even on both feet, giving me that same flat unhurried attention she had given me from 24B, as though the entire remainder of the world existed somewhere out at the edge of her vision and had not yet done anything to earn her interest.

And I froze with my hand still on the handle. Not going forward. Not going back. Entirely incapable of either, standing in an open doorway like something that had been switched off at the wall.

And my head went round and round and round on one single thing.

How do you know where my brother lives.

Because I had never told anybody. Because Josh was not on anything and never had been. Because there was no listing and there was no name on the letterbox, and half the men he worked with could not have named the street, and I had to put it into the satnav myself the last time I drove up.

And there was exactly one document anywhere in the world with my brother's address on it in my own handwriting.

I wrote it on a yellow parcel. I stood at a counter in a post office in Hobart with a queue behind me and my ears going red, and I printed my brother's name and my brother's address onto a satchel in block capitals, and I handed it across a counter into a system.

And that parcel went into Adelaide. And then it came out of the record of the Commonwealth of Australia as though it had never existed at all.

Somebody took it out of the record.

And before they took it out, somebody read it.

Her lips parted.

"You shouldn't have taken my backpack."

And she did not say it angrily, and she did not raise her voice, and there was nothing in her face at all. She said it the way I have said things at the end of a review, when the work is finished and the finding is the finding and there is no longer anything to discuss about any of it.

And I went back half a step, and my hand went out behind the door, hunting for something. Anything. Any object at all in the whole of that house.

And the flare gun was on the kitchen bench four metres away, sitting in the middle of everything I had so carefully and so thoroughly and so uselessly prepared.

She moved.

And she did not move violently, and she did not move quickly, and she did not make a sound. She moved efficiently. Her hand went into her coat and came out of it with something in it, and the sun caught the thing once, and I never got a proper look at it.

And there was a pressure at the base of my skull.

It did not hurt. Nobody has ever believed me about that and I have long since stopped trying to make them. There was no pain in it anywhere. It was a pulse, and it came from somewhere behind my ears and went straight through the skin and the bone and into the middle of my head without troubling either of them, and my vision came apart into separate frames with gaps between them.

A tone came up in my ears, very high, and it climbed, and it went on climbing.

And the doorframe slid sideways in front of me although I had not moved. And the wood under my hand went soft, and then it went hard, and then every grain of it stood out in front of me with a clarity that was obscene—and then it was not there at all.

And my brother's beautiful house came away at the edges like wet wallpaper, and there was nothing behind it.

And my legs stopped being mine.

And she caught me.

She got both hands under my arms as I went down, and she took the whole of my weight, and she put me onto the concrete of that threshold slowly and carefully—almost, God help me, politely. She laid me down the way a nurse lays somebody down. She got my head clear of the doorframe.

And it was not kindness. And it was not cruelty either.

It was a procedure. She had done it before, and somebody had taught her how, and she was doing it correctly.

My vision came down into a tunnel and the tunnel went black around the edges, and the sound in my ears settled into a low hum that I could feel in my back teeth. And I tried to speak. I tried to ask her who she was, and what she wanted, and what she had done with Seth—and my tongue lay in my mouth and would not do one single thing that I asked of it.

Her face was the last thing in it. Entirely still, and watching me go, and reading me the whole way down.