Guardian Brother

"Some reunions start with a hug. Ours started with a chip in a sundae, and ended with a Portal Key on a laminated table and my brother refusing to look at me."

The door came open with a metallic groan and January came in behind it, rolling through that restaurant in a wave and knocking the air conditioning back on its heels—and a few people looked up, and none of them looked for long.

I looked up from a half-demolished sundae, and Josh came through the door.

And there he was. Broad through the shoulders, planted, standing in a doorway exactly as he has stood in every doorway of his life—as though going backwards had never once occurred to him and he did not particularly need to check behind himself to be sure of it.

And there was something new in him. His brow was down. There was sweat all over his face and a hard flush across the cheekbones that comes off eight hours of driving through the middle of this state in a car whose air conditioning has been on its last legs since about 2014.

He came round that restaurant with his eyes and found me in about two seconds, and he did it with that clinical older-brother efficiency I have known my entire life. There was no warmth in it. There was no hello in it. There was an assessment, and a verification, and then he started walking.

"Still the same," he said, coming across the floor. And his mouth went up at one corner, and it was a great deal more tired than it was amused. "Sat there like the world's not ending. Chips in your sundae. Like it's 2005 and we're still too young to know any better."

"It's a classic pairing," I said, and dipped another one in, slowly, and with a good deal more flourish than was strictly required. "Salt and sugar. Hot and cold. It's practically elemental."

He made a noise that was half a scoff and half a sigh, and pulled out the chair opposite me and dropped into it hard enough to shake the table, and the plastic groaned underneath him and the legs went across the lino with a shriek.

And then he did not say anything for a while.

He simply leaned back, and shut his eyes, and let the cold air get to him. His shirt—white, or something that had once had ambitions in that direction—was dark under both arms and had gone limp at the collar. The heat had taken the shape out of him. It had taken the shape out of the whole way he presents himself, which is a thing he cares about a great deal more than he would ever admit to anybody, including himself.

He looked exhausted. He looked like he had been driving since first light.

I pushed the tray about an inch towards him with the corner of my spoon.

"Fancy trying one?"

The sundae had begun to give up by then and was pooling at the bottom of the cup, the chocolate and the vanilla bleeding into one another in whorls, and it had come to look considerably more like something in a gallery than something a person would put in their mouth.

Josh gave me a look that could have curdled milk. His eyebrows went up, and all the old familiar weather began gathering behind his eyes.

"Are you joking?"

He said it with the precise quantity of contempt he has always reserved for the brother who once persuaded him, at the age of fourteen, that soy sauce made an excellent mixer.

"Not in the slightest," I said. "You can't criticise it until you've tried it."

He eyed that tray as though it were harbouring something unstable. And there was a flicker behind the derision—curiosity, or possibly nothing more than that peculiar sibling arithmetic which occasionally makes one of us humour the other out of pure muscle memory.

"Revolutionary," I said, deadpan, using the exact word we had once used about mint sauce on fish fingers. "One bite and you'll be writing to Parliament demanding it be made compulsory."

"This feels wrong," he muttered.

And he reached out anyway, and took one of the longer chips out of the sleeve, and held it between his finger and his thumb at arm's length, the way somebody handles a mousetrap they have decided to disarm.

"Just bloody well do it."

He dipped it. And he did it slowly, with an absurd degree of caution, turning it through the sundae and bringing it up with a ribbon of chocolate coming off the end of it—and then he held the thing suspended in mid-air and looked at it, and I watched my brother briefly review a number of the decisions that had brought him to that point in his life.

Then he let out a long theatrical sigh, of the kind designed to establish that he was doing this entirely under duress and purely out of familial obligation.

And he ate it.

And his eyebrows went up.

Not far. Not enough for anybody else in that building to have noticed anything at all. But I noticed, because I have been watching that face for thirty-three years, and something went across it that had not been budgeted for.

He chewed. He chewed for rather a long time.

"That's… surprisingly not completely terrible," he said.

And his hand was already going back into the sleeve for another one while he was still saying it, which I noticed, and which I did not comment on, and which I have thought about with enormous satisfaction ever since.

"Told you so," I said, and sat back, and took a long pull on the Sprite. "You've always been too quick to dismiss my culinary innovations."

He shook his head—half resignation, and half something a good deal warmer than that.

"It's good to have priorities," I said.

He leaned back in the plastic chair, which complained about it, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and left a small greasy smear just above one eyebrow that he never once became aware of.

"I'm not saying it's a terrible combination," he said, gesturing at the wreckage of the tray. "But it's not exactly the image of adult responsibility, is it? Sitting here, dipping chips in ice cream, like you're still ten."

"Who needs responsibility," I said, "when you've got undeniable genius?"

And I dipped another one, with a flourish, and put it away.

He rolled his eyes with enormous theatrical disdain, and the corner of his mouth went, and he could not do a single thing about it.

"You've always been disturbingly good at justifying utter bollocks. Do you remember that time you convinced Mum to let you turn the garden shed into a scientific laboratory? Which, in practice, meant blowing things up for an entire week."

"That was legitimate experimentation," I said, and I was grinning at him properly by then, for the first time in longer than I care to think about. "And I still maintain that the water bottle rocket was a work of brilliance."

He barked out a laugh.

"Brilliance until you nearly took Mrs Peterson's cat's head off."

"A minor miscalculation," I said, and raised my plastic cup to him. "An extraordinarily rare occurrence, I'll have you know."

And he laughed properly then, and the whole of his face went with it, and the crow's feet came up round his eyes—which are our father's, and which make him look older and kinder at the same time, and which he has had since he was about twenty-six.

And for a while we simply sat there in that plastic booth, two brothers laughing quietly at the idiocies of a shared childhood, and the enormous coil that had been in my chest since a laneway in Hobart slackened off, and I let it.

The fryers went on. The tills beeped. Somebody's order was called out and not collected.

And it did not last, because it was never going to last.

I ate the last of the chips and put the empty sleeve down on the tray, and something in that booth shifted, and both of us felt it go.

The tray sat between us with the ruins of a reprieve all over it—salt, and smudged napkins, and a collapsed sundae cup with a small brown lake at the bottom of it. And it began, quietly, to come back. The weight of it. The reason I was in that building at all. The reason he had sent me eleven words and no explanation.

I put my elbows on the table and started tapping the edge of the laminate with my fingers, which is a thing I do and which I am perfectly aware that I do.

"So… Josh," I said.

And I could not find a second sentence anywhere. The strip lighting hummed over the top of us, throwing that unkind grey light down across his face, and he sat there watching me with his brow slightly down and waited.

"You look like you're about to confess to tax fraud," he said. And the smirk came back—that aggravating, entirely familiar smirk. "Let me guess. You've accidentally joined a cult and now you're here to pitch me on their three-step salvation programme. Or you need bail money for something wildly idiotic and criminal."

"No. It's not—it's not that." I put a hand on the back of my neck, which did nothing whatsoever for the pressure that had been building at the base of my skull since Adelaide Airport. "It's… complicated."

He leaned in, and the chair creaked. It was a small movement and it was entirely deliberate.

"That," he said, "is never a comforting way to start a sentence."

And underneath the sarcasm there was something I had not been braced for. It was concern. Real concern, delivered in the way that only a sibling can deliver it, with the affection and the irritation weighed out in exactly equal quantities, and it unbalanced me a great deal more than anything else that had happened to me that day.

"I just—"

And I stopped, and I could not go on.

I talk for a living. I stand up in front of rooms full of hostile people and take complicated things apart until they understand them, and I am good at it, and I have never once in eleven years failed to find the first sentence.

And I sat in a plastic booth opposite my own brother with my mouth open and nothing in it at all.

Because where does anybody begin with a thing like that? With the wall? With the woman? With a backpack under a rock on a world that has no name anybody on this earth would recognise? Every single opening sentence available to me sounded like the first line of an assessment, and I looked helplessly over towards the counter as though the answer might be written up on the board somewhere between the McNuggets and the Double Quarter Pounder.

And Josh watched me. And the amusement went out of his face by degrees, and what came up underneath it was the look he has been giving me since we were children—the triage look. The one that goes straight past all the noise a person is making and hunts for where they are actually bleeding.

And then he reached into his pocket.

It was a small movement and it was not hurried. And my eyes went to it, and everything in that restaurant slowed right down, and his hand came out closed round something.

And he put it on the table between us.

A Portal Key.

It lay there on the sticky laminate doing absolutely nothing at all. Small. Grey. Featureless. The overhead light came down onto it and did not do anything to it—no gleam, no bright spot sliding across the curve of it, nothing whatever for the eye to take hold of—and it sat there beside a smear of chocolate looking like something a man might find in a drawer and throw out without looking at it twice.

And my chest closed.

My heart forgot entirely what it was for, and then remembered, and came back in badly.

Because it was here. It was on a table. In a McDonald's. In Elizabeth.

When I finally got my eyes off it and up to my brother's face, everything that had been in it a minute earlier had gone. All of it. The humour and the exasperation and the crow's feet, gone—and what was left was cold.

He put two fingertips on the edge of the thing. Not holding it. Simply resting them there, the way you rest a hand on something you do not entirely trust to stay where it is.

"Yes," he said.

One syllable, and it went down into the middle of that table like a stone going into water.

"So," I said, and it came out at barely more than a whisper, "it actually arrived?"

He nodded.

And that should have been relief. That should have been the end of an entire chapter of horror—the tracking page, the woman on the telephone, the queue in the GPO, a parcel that had never been lodged and never existed and had gone straight out of the record of the Commonwealth of Australia as though it had never been touched by human hands.

It arrived. It got there. It was in his pocket.

And there was nothing in his face at all except tiredness.

"You've used it, then?" I said. And I could hear the hope getting into my voice and I could not keep it out. "You activated it properly?"

And his jaw moved. That was all. A small involuntary tightening just under the ear, which he has never once in his life been able to control, and which means precisely one thing.

"I have," he said.

And something came apart very quietly in the middle of my head.

Because that was not possible.

I had stood on a plain on another world that morning and I had looked into a screen that showed every location any device in our group had ever been opened in, and there had been three of them. Three. Meeting Room 4B, and a corridor at Melbourne Airport, and a room I had never in my life set foot in.

My brother was not on that screen anywhere. And I had stood at a basin at Melbourne Airport with red water going down the plughole and had built the coldest and cleanest and most solid deduction of my life on the back of it.

Josh never opened it.

And Josh had opened it.

And I sat in a plastic booth and looked at him and could not make the two facts occupy the same room. One of them was wrong. Either I had misunderstood what that screen was, or I had misunderstood what I was looking at on it, and I do not misunderstand things like that.

It is the one thing I am for.

"Where—" I started.

"And?" I said instead, because my mouth got there first and took the easier question. "What was it like?"

"Empty," he said. "Utterly desolate."

And my heart went sideways.

"That seems to be the norm," I said, far too quickly, hurrying to get something ordinary into the middle of it. "The one I saw was empty too. Just—terrain. No people. Nothing built. Just landscape."

And he did not answer me.

His eyes had gone back to the device, and his thumb was moving very slightly along the edge of it, as though he were checking at intervals that it had not gone anywhere. And his face had shut. A curtain had come across it.

And I knew that face.

I have known that face since I was old enough to know anything. Because my brother does not go quiet when nothing is the matter. He goes quiet when something is. That is the entire mechanism, and it has never once in thirty-three years failed to work exactly that way, and I have watched him do it in the back of a car and at a kitchen table and standing in a hospital corridor with his hands in his pockets saying absolutely nothing to anybody.

And I had spent the whole of that week reading his silence as absence.

As a bloke on a mine site who had not looked at his phone. As a brother who was busy. As nothing at all.

And it had never been absence. Not for one hour of it. It had been the other thing—it had been the thing it has always been—and I had been sitting on my own sofa in Battery Point in the dark telling myself that Josh was probably out of range.

"Josh," I said. And I said it carefully, and I sat back a little. "Clivilius. You've been there. Haven't you."

Even saying the word out loud in that place felt obscene—like saying something sacred in a room full of laminated menus and industrial fryers—and I heard myself drop my voice for it.

His eyes came up to mine.

And every scrap of the excitement that had been building in me since he put that thing on the table went out at once.

Because I had been waiting for it. I had been sitting there waiting for my brother to look at me the way I must have looked when I came back through that wall—stunned, and lit up, and half out of his mind with it. I had wanted him to have felt what I felt on that clifftop. I had wanted, a great deal more than I understood at the time, for one other person alive to have seen it.

"You've been to Saint Phillis," I said. "Haven't you."

And he said nothing.

His hands twitched on the table, the fingers splayed out either side of the device. He was not playing with it. He was simply keeping it where it was.

"Why aren't you more—" And I could not find the word. "I don't know. Amazed? This is insane, Josh. You and I. We've crossed between worlds. Doesn't that get to you? Doesn't that change everything?"

He did not answer straight away.

But the muscle under his ear went again. Twice.

"Nathan."

It came out low and hard and it was not shouted. It was not even loud. And it went down between us with the finality of a door being shut, and everything warm in my chest went out like a light.

I sat very still.

"What aren't you telling me?"

He looked down. He breathed out through his nose, slowly, and with a great deal of control. And the silence went on for several seconds while he sat there looking at a scratched laminate tabletop as though there might be a route through it if he only kept looking for long enough.

And when he lifted his head, I did not care for what was in his face at all.

"There's a problem," he said.

It was not dramatic. He did not need it to be.

My stomach turned over, and the sugar in my mouth went suddenly and violently cloying.

"What kind of problem?"

He did not answer. He sat back and folded his arms across his chest, and every part of the way he did it was managed—the posture, the pause, the whole arrangement of him—and I watched my brother build a wall in front of me while I was looking straight at him, and I had no idea whatever what was behind it.

"It's bigger than either of us," he said.

And he tapped the device once with a fingertip. It made almost no sound at all. It did not click and it did not ring; it made that small dead noise that thing makes, which is not the noise anything of that size and that weight has any business making, and which I have never once got used to.

"What do you mean?"

He leaned in again, elbows on the table, closer than before.

"I mean," he said, "that we have a big problem."

And I swallowed, and I could not get one single thing more out of him with my eyes, because there was nothing left in his face to get.

"Josh—"

And the rest of the sentence went nowhere at all.

The light in that restaurant had gone hard. The noise of it had gone strange and far away, as though it belonged to somebody else's afternoon entirely. Outside the window the sun went on blazing across the asphalt exactly as it had been doing all day, completely uninterested in any of it.

And my brother—who has never in his life been afraid of anything, who charges at things, who has been the first one through every door since we were children—sat across a plastic table from me with his arms folded and something behind his eyes that he had not yet decided how much of he was going to give me.

He had seen something.

And he had gone quiet about it. And I knew exactly what that meant, and I had known it my entire life, and I had spent the whole week refusing to.