Empty Your Pockets

"I had spent the whole night frightened of being caught. It never once occurred to me that the worse thing, by a very long way, would be getting away with it."

The taxi came at ten past six, and the driver did not say one word to me the entire way, and I have thought about that man with real gratitude ever since.

He was a big bloke in a football jumper with the radio down low, and he looked at me once in the mirror as I was getting in—one flick of the eyes, no expression in it, taking me in and filing me somewhere—and then he did not look at me again. He did not ask where I was flying. He did not ask whether I was going somewhere nice, or whether it was for work, or whether I had a big weekend on, or any of the other perfectly harmless things a man in a taxi is entitled to ask at that hour, and that I could not, at that moment, have answered without coming to pieces in the back seat of his car. He drove, with his elbow on the door and a talkback station murmuring to itself about the cricket, and he left me alone.

I sat behind him with the backpack up on my knees, holding it against my chest with both arms. It was not a comfortable way to sit and it made no sense whatever, and I could not put it down on the seat beside me, and I did not try.

The streetlights were still on and doing nothing, which has always looked faintly indecent to me. Somebody's sprinkler was going on a front lawn in the dark. And a council truck was hosing the footpath outside a bakery on Davey Street with all its lights blazing and its ovens plainly going, and the smell came in through the vents—that enormous warm floury buttery smell a bakery makes at five in the morning and does not make at any other hour of the day—and my stomach turned over so hard that I had to swallow and look down at my knees.

I had not eaten. It took the smell to tell me. Four slices of toast on Wednesday night, and a plateful into the bin on Friday, and somewhere in between, the body that had spent the entire week howling at me for food had given the thing up and gone quiet, and I had not noticed it stop. I sat in the back of that taxi at dawn with a bakery going past the window and understood that I had stopped being somebody who ate meals and become somebody who occasionally remembered to.

A man in high-vis stood at a bus stop with his arms folded and his chin down, and I looked at him and felt, unmistakably, envy.

Then we came round onto the causeway and the harbour opened out on the left, and it was flat.

I mean flat. Not a ripple anywhere on it. The whole of the Derwent lying there in the last of the dark like poured glass, with the lights of the eastern shore laid along the far edge and every single one of them repeated underneath, exactly, without a tremor, so that it was genuinely difficult to say where the water began.

I looked at it for about four seconds and then I put my head back against the seat and shut my eyes and kept them shut until we were past.

Because water that does not move is water that does not make any sound. And I had stood on a clifftop above fifty metres of the stuff and watched it break white against rock in total silence, and I had had enough of that, and I was not going to be shown it again by my own city on the way to the airport.

The bag was warm on my knees where it had been against my chest.

Somewhere out on the airport road, with my body turned away from the mirror, I unzipped the front pocket and looked in.

Three small grey objects lying loose in the bottom of it among the coins and the crumbs and a biro that had died in about 2015.

They looked like nothing. That was the trouble with them. They looked so exactly and so comprehensively like nothing—three cheap dead USB drives that had been in the bottom of a backpack for a year—that for one long lurching second I was quite calmly certain that they were nothing. That there was no other world. That there had never been a wall. That I was a thirty-three-year-old public servant in a taxi before dawn carrying three broken bits of plastic across Bass Strait, and that everybody who loved me was shortly going to find out.

So I put my hand in and touched one.

And it was too heavy. Far too heavy, in that way that had made my hand file its quiet complaint against the laws of physics on a meeting room table on Wednesday afternoon. I sat in the back of that taxi with two fingers resting on it and let that hold me up.

Then I zipped the pocket and did not open it again.

Hobart Airport was clean and bright and half empty, and it smelled of coffee and floor polish and of a building that has had the same air in it all night, and the doors opened onto all of it as though nothing whatever were happening anywhere in the world.

Over by the check-in queue there was a family with two small children and a truly heroic quantity of luggage, and one of the children—a boy of about five—had lain down full length across a suitcase, face-down, arms out, in an attitude of such total and theatrical despair that I stood and watched him for some time and felt something in my chest that was not far off love. His mother was on the phone with a boarding pass held in her teeth. His father was counting the bags. Then he counted them again. Then he put his hands on his hips and looked at the ceiling for a while and counted them a third time.

Two tradesmen with hard hats clipped to the outside of their bags. A woman asleep sitting bolt upright against a pillar with a takeaway coffee going cold beside her, chin on her chest, her handbag strap wound twice round her wrist even in sleep. Somebody's roller bag going across the tiles with one wheel out of true—tock, tock, tock—the whole length of the building and out of hearing.

Ordinary people. Ordinary hour. Ordinary Saturday. And I stood in the middle of the lot of them with four doorways to another world about my person, and understood that not one of them would ever know it, and that I would never be able to tell them, and that this was now going to be true of every room I walked into for the rest of my life.

My flight was third from the top of the board.

07:15 MELBOURNE — ON TIME

I bought a coffee I had no intention of drinking, because it gave my hands something to hold.

And then, instead of going through, I went and stood off to the side of the concourse by a rack of tourist brochures—MONA, Port Arthur, Bruny Island, See Tasmania's Wild Heart—and watched the security queue.

I told myself I was assessing it. I was not assessing anything. I was standing where I could see it from, and I was not getting into it.

It was small and it was moving briskly. Two officers on the front of it: a woman in her forties with her hair pulled back so hard that it looked painful, and a young bloke who could not have been much past twenty and who was doing the job cheerfully, which I had not expected. The trays came up out of a chute and got dragged along the rollers and loaded. Bags onto the belt. Laptops out. Liquids in the clear plastic bag. And a bin at the side with maybe thirty confiscated bottles standing in it, and I looked at that bin for longer than I should have, and my chest went tight.

The arch. And past the arch, on a stool, a man with a screen.

I had lain awake most of the night looking at that screen in my head. Density, absorption, atomic number, what a machine of that kind does and does not see. And sitting at my own kitchen bench in the dark before dawn I had arrived at a conclusion, and I had been extremely pleased with it, and I had turned it over once or twice with something close to satisfaction, and I had walked out of my own front door still pleased with myself.

And then a middle-aged bloke in a suit stepped up to the head of the queue and put his hand into his right trouser pocket and pulled out his wallet and his phone and his car keys and a fistful of loose silver, and dropped the lot into a grey plastic tray.

Pockets.

My legs stopped taking my weight properly.

Not dramatically. There was no swoon, nothing so useful as a faint, nothing that would have got me any assistance from anybody. Just a quiet withdrawal of service from the knees down, the same as had happened on the carpet of Meeting Room 4B, and I had not expected to feel it again, and certainly not in an airport before breakfast.

I put my left hand on the brochure rack. I did it slowly and I did it carefully and I do not believe anybody saw. And I stood there with a cup of coffee going cold in my other hand, reading the words Wineglass Bay off a laminated card, over and over, without one syllable of it going in.

My own Portal Key was in my right trouser pocket.

It had been in my right trouser pocket since Wednesday afternoon. It had gone to work in that pocket. It had gone to the pub in that pocket and sat there through four rounds of trivia while a forensic accountant took a room full of strangers apart. It had gone to bed in that pocket. It had been to the GPO and up the hill and out to the bin with the toast, and it had lain against my thigh for three days until I had stopped feeling it there at all.

And I had spent an entire night—a long, sleepless, careful, meticulous night, with everything I have brought to bear on it—thinking about the machine that looked at the bags.

I was going to have to take it out. In front of a woman in a uniform. And put it down in a plastic tray, in the open, where anybody at all could look at it.

Or walk into the arch with it in my trousers. And I did not know what the arch would do, because I had never known what the thing was made of, and if the arch made a noise then the woman with the painful hair was going to ask me, quite politely, in front of everybody, to take out whatever was in my pocket and show it to her, and she would be close enough to touch me when she did.

Or open the bag. Now. Here. In the queue.

I actually turned to do it. I got my hand to the strap and had begun to swing the thing off my shoulder, and then I stopped, with the bag half down and my arm across my body, because I had seen how it would look from where they were standing: a man on his own, nothing checked, no sleep in his face, grey around the mouth, who reaches the head of the security line and then, at the last available second, takes something out of his trousers and puts it in his bag.

There was nothing innocent about that gesture and there was no way to make it innocent. Not with my face, not with a shrug, not with a joke to the officer. It would have looked like exactly what it was.

So there was nowhere to put it.

That was the position, standing there with my palm flat on a photograph of Wineglass Bay. There was nowhere on my body and nowhere in that bag and nowhere in that entire building where I could put a doorway to another world such that a stranger would not, within about four minutes, be looking directly at it.

And I did not analyse it.

I have spent my whole adult life analysing things. It is what I am for. Hand me a problem and I will lay it out and take it apart and turn it into a sequence of steps, and I will do it under pressure and I will do it while people are shouting at me, and I have been paid rather well for eleven years on precisely that basis.

And I stood in an airport before seven in the morning with a cold coffee in my hand, and there was nothing left in me to do it with. The whole apparatus had gone. It was not that the problem was hard. There was simply no machinery there to work on it.

What was there instead was an animal on a polished floor, with a dry mouth and wet hands, holding on to a rack of tourist brochures.

So I put the coffee in the bin and went and stood in the queue, because I could not think of a single other thing to do with myself.

The queue smelled of feet, and of somebody's perfume, and of the hot scorched dust that comes off strip lights that have been on all night.

The tradesman in front of me had a Bunnings receipt sticking out of his back pocket, folded in half and gone soft at the crease, and I read it. Three or four times, at least. Nine metres of something. A packet of screws. A tube of adhesive with a name I did not recognise and could not have pronounced.

And he was talking to his mate about a boat. About whether it was worth putting a new motor into the boat, or whether the hull was the problem and had been the problem all along, and no motor on earth was going to fix a hull. His mate held that the hull was perfectly sound and the motor was gutless. The argument had clearly been going for months. Neither of them wanted it to end.

I stood behind those two men and listened to every word of it with a concentration I have never brought to anything in my professional life. I could have repeated it back afterwards, verbatim. I could have told you what the mate thought about outboards in general, and about a bloke called Trevor, and about what Trevor had done to his own boat and what had come of it.

I do not know what my face was doing. I know that I did not want them to stop talking, and that when the queue moved and they moved forward and their voices dropped, I moved up close enough to keep hearing, because neither of those men was ever going to be asked to explain anything to anybody, and I wanted to be near them.

I looked down at my hands at one point, holding the strap of the bag.

They were not shaking. They were not doing anything at all. Perfectly steady, perfectly ordinary hands, getting on with the job of holding a strap—and there was something obscene in it, in my body carrying on with its filing while the rest of me went down, and I looked at my own hands with something very close to hatred.

The queue moved and I moved with it.

And somewhere in there, quite calmly, I understood that I could still leave. Nobody had done anything to me. Nothing had been asked of me. I could step sideways out of that line with everything I owned still in my own pockets, and walk back out through the doors and get a taxi home and be sitting in my own kitchen with the kettle on before the sun was properly up. The aeroplane would go to Melbourne without me. Nothing at all would ever have to be explained to anybody.

I stood there and turned that over, and it was warm, and it was reasonable, and it was very probably the last exit that was ever genuinely available to me.

I did not take it. There was no good reason. I stayed in the queue because I was already in the queue.

"Morning. Laptops and liquids out, please, phones in the tray."

The woman with the hair. She said it without looking up, in the voice of somebody four hundred repetitions into a shift that had started before dawn, and she slid a grey plastic tray along the rollers with the flat of her hand and it came to rest in front of me with a small hollow rattle.

"No laptop," I said.

"Just pockets, then. Everything out, love."

And I put my hand into my right trouser pocket and took out my own Portal Key.

It came up out of my trousers into the fluorescent light with the warmth of my own leg still in it, and I stood there holding it in an open palm—in a public building, in a queue, with two trained officers within reach of me—and I have never felt so completely visible in my life.

She was not looking at it. She was reaching past me for the next tray.

I put it in. And it made a sound.

Not a loud one. A small dead click against the plastic, with nothing ringing after it. Not like a coin. Not like a key. Not like anything I have ever set down on any surface. And my ears went hot and I looked up at her much too fast.

She was watching the queue.

So I put my wallet in on top of it, which was deliberate. And my phone. And my house keys. And then I took the change out of my left pocket and let it fall from a height, so the coins scattered right across the bottom of the tray and covered the thing over—and one of them, a twenty-cent piece, came down on its edge and started to spin, and went on spinning, and would not settle, and the two of us stood there and watched it.

"Round and round," she said.

And I laughed, and it came out at entirely the wrong pitch, and she looked up at me for the first time.

I pushed the tray onto the belt with both hands and let go.

The bag went in behind it, and the rubber curtain took the pair of them, and there was nothing left for me to do about any of it.

"Through you come."

I walked into the arch.

What I remember about those two steps is how completely ordinary they were. The rubber matting under my socks. The smell of the place. A child somewhere back down the queue asking a question in a rising voice and being answered by somebody thoroughly tired of answering. My left foot going forward. My right foot going forward. And then me, standing on the far side of a metal arch in two socks that did not match, having crossed the last threshold I was ever going to be allowed to walk back over.

The arch said nothing.

"Stand there for me, thanks."

The young one had a wand in his hand and did not use it. He was not looking at me at all; he was looking past my shoulder, back down the line. I turned my head to see what he was looking at.

The belt had stopped.

My bag was inside the machine. My tray was inside the machine. And the belt was not moving.

The man on the stool had leaned in towards his screen.

I have been frightened before, and I would not want to overstate this. I have been made redundant twice and sat in the room while it was explained to me. I have watched a wall of a government office stop existing. I have stood on the edge of a cliff on another world and heard something enormous say my name inside my own head.

None of that did to me what was done to me in the four or five seconds a man in a short-sleeved shirt spent looking at a picture of my backpack.

Everything went out of me. My arms emptied and my legs emptied. There was a high thin note somewhere that took me a moment to place as coming from inside my own skull. My mouth flooded. And I understood, with a serenity I have never been able to account for, that it was finished—that I would be taken into a small room, and that somebody would put three objects on a table between us and ask me, reasonably, what they were, and that I would sit there and say I don't know, and that every further word out of me would make it worse.

I thought about Josh. I thought about my mother picking up a telephone in Morphett Vale and hearing a stranger say my name.

The belt started again.

The man on the stool sat back and rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand and said something over his shoulder to the woman without looking at her, and she laughed. And my bag came out of the machine and slid down the rollers and came to rest against the stop at the end.

And behind it came my tray, with four dollars in coins, and a wallet, and a phone, and a set of house keys, and a doorway to another world lying at the bottom of it under all of them.

"Youse right there, mate."

I picked it up. My hands did it. I dug the Portal Key out from under the coins and it was cold—properly cold, cold right through, colder than the money was—and it was the first time it had been cold since Wednesday afternoon. I put it back in my pocket and I could feel it against my leg, and it was like carrying something that had been left outside overnight.

Then I sat down on the bench to put my shoes on.

And I could not do it.

The shoes went on. That part I managed. The laces I could not do. I sat there with people stepping round me on both sides and my fingers would not make a bow—they went round each other and the loops collapsed and fell open, and I did it again, and it collapsed again, and I bent lower over my own shoes and did it again—and then my eyes went, all at once, with no warning at all, and I kept my head right down where nobody could see, and I kept trying, and the tears went onto the laces.

I got one of them done. I left the other. I stood up and walked away with it trailing behind me across the floor of Hobart Airport.

I sat down at the gate and did not move for a long time.

I had been braced for relief. Standing in that queue I had assumed, in so far as I was capable of assuming anything, that when it was over I would get the thing that had come in my bedroom on Friday evening when the lid came off the tin. The great unclenching. The whole body letting go at once. The noise I had made into my own wrist.

Nothing came.

I sat and watched the sun come up over the eastern shore and turn the runway pink and then gold. A man drove a little tractor across the tarmac towing three empty baggage trolleys. A woman in ear defenders walked slowly under the wing of the aeroplane, pointing up at things and writing on a clipboard. All of it was rather beautiful and none of it reached me. I could not feel anything. I put a hand flat on my own chest at one point, which was idiotic, as though I might find something in there if I pressed hard enough.

And then I looked back down the concourse at the screening point.

They had a bag open. It was one of the tradesmen—the boat one, the one whose receipt I had read four times—and the young officer had a bottle of soft drink out of it and was holding it up between them and shaking his head, and the tradesman had both hands in the air and was laughing, and his mate was laughing, and the officer pointed at the sign, and the bottle went into the bin with the others.

They had found it.

Of course they had found it. That is what they are there for. They would find a knife. They would find a lighter, a pair of nail scissors, a corkscrew, a bottle of lemonade a man had genuinely forgotten was in the side pocket of a bag he had not opened since Christmas. They would find it every time, without fail, for as long as that airport stood—because it was on the list. Because somebody had sat down at some point and thought about it and written it out and laminated it.

And I sat at gate three with one shoelace trailing on the carpet and a doorway to another world in my trousers, and understood that there was nothing in that machine, and nothing in that arch, and nothing on any laminated sign in any building in this country, that had the faintest idea what to do with me.

Jan's list, under the arched windows at the GPO. Explosives. Ammunition. Lithium batteries, conditions apply.

A parcel sitting in Adelaide at breakfast time that had never been lodged by the middle of the afternoon.

Nobody was coming.

That was what I could not put down, sitting at that gate with the sun coming up. Nobody was ever going to stop me. Nobody was going to ask me a difficult question, or put a hand on my arm, or take the thing off me, or say right, sir, if you'd just step over here a moment—and I had not had the smallest idea, until I sat on that seat and the relief did not arrive, how much of me had been counting on somebody doing exactly that.

I got out my phone.

I wrote to my brother, and I wrote it about nine times, and every one of them was wrong in a different way, and the one I sent was wrong too.

Josh. I'm flying to Adelaide today, going via Melbourne. Lands early afternoon. I know it's a long way and I know it's a Saturday. Any chance you could come down and get me? I'll explain everything when I see you. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important.

My ears were hot before I had finished reading it back. Because it was the most naked sentence I had ever put in front of that man—and because I knew, sending it, that I had already spent everything I had with him, and that I was asking him anyway.

Two small grey ticks came up underneath it.

And then nothing.

I watched the screen. I watched it until it went dark on me, and woke it, and watched it again. I put it face-down on my knee and made myself count to something. I picked it up. I got up and walked to the window and stood looking at the aeroplane with the phone still in my hand, and came back, and sat down, and looked at it again.

He was asleep. Obviously he was asleep. He had been out at the mine all week, and it was Saturday, and it was barely properly light, and the phone would be lying face-down on the arm of a chair somewhere in Broken Hill. He would come out to it in his own time, with a coffee, and read it, and have a think about it, and answer when he had had a minute. Which is what he has always done. Which is what anybody does. Which there has never been the smallest thing wrong with.

I sat at that gate and told myself all of it, in a great many different arrangements of words, and not one of them would stick.

Because the last time I had put a thing out into the world and stood back and watched it go, it had gone into a plastic tub with EXPRESS stencilled down the side, at the hands of a woman named Jan who did not look up, and it had got as far as Adelaide.

And then it had never been sent at all.

The gate agent picked up her microphone and said that she would like to begin boarding the service to Melbourne, and would passengers requiring assistance and those travelling with small children kindly come forward.

I stood up. My lace was still trailing and I left it.

I stood in that queue with the phone in my hand and looked at the screen until the very last moment—until the woman in front of me had gone through and the agent had her hand out for my boarding pass—and then I put it into flight mode, and everything on it went quiet, and the little white aeroplane came up in the corner where the bars had been.

And I put it in my pocket, against the Portal Key, and handed over the boarding pass, and walked out into the cold of the airbridge.