The Short Way Through

"Distance was the one thing you could count on out here. Then she put it in her pocket and made it disappear."

We'd got properly into it by the time Dad found us. Beatrix was on her knees by a trolley with her sleeves shoved up, Charles had both arms sunk to the elbow in a snarl of tablecloths and fairy lights, and I had a box at my feet, sorting keep from junk. The light had gone gold and long around us. I didn't hear him coming.

Beatrix did. Her head came up a fraction, and I looked where she'd looked, and there was Dad, out across the spread with his shadow thrown ahead of him. Even at that distance I had the hurry off him — the short stride, the set of the shoulders. Sundown coming, a barbecue to light, and nothing yet to put on it.

Something in me tightened on instinct, the old reflex of a boy whose father has turned up while a job's not done. I was twenty-one and stood in another world entirely and it still went through me, quick and small, before I'd thought: we've nothing to show him.

“Have you found Luke yet?” he said. “The meat.”

“No.” I got up, knocking the dust off my knees. “Haven't seen him. She has, but not since this morning.”

His eyes went to Beatrix and stopped. He didn't say anything for a moment, and I knew that quiet of his — the one he does over a stranger, the same one he does over an engine he's not opened before, listening to it before he touches it.

“This is our dad,” I said. “Noah.”

Beatrix unfolded to her feet and put out a hand. “Beatrix.”

He shook it once and let go. “One of the two who run the Portal,” she said. “I gather I've you to thank for tonight.”

“Greta's doing. I just go where I'm put.” Something near a smile got partway up his face and didn't finish. His eyes had already left her, gone out past us to the Portals — both of them pale and shut against the flat. The screens were the only door Luke could come through, and he was looking at them the way you look at a kettle you want to hurry. “Hoped he'd have turned up by now.”

“I'll get the meat for you,” Beatrix said. “If Luke's gone to ground.”

I looked at her, and something didn't fit.

I'd stood in this same spread and asked her where Luke was, and all she'd given me was if I cross his path, I'll point him your way — the smallest coin in her purse, handed over with the air of someone who'd no intention of going to any trouble for it. I'd taken it as the measure of her. Now Dad turns up, says ten words to her, and she's offering to walk into a portal and back for a man she'd only just met. Over sausages.

“Oh — no.” Dad had his refusing voice on, the one that came out for anything that might put a soul to any trouble on his account. “That's kind, but Luke can see to it. It'd cost a fair bit, mind, enough to feed all of us. I couldn't ask you to carry that.”

And there it was.

The cost.

I had to put my eyes back down into my trolley, because the laugh was sitting right at the top of my throat and I didn't trust what it'd do if I let it up. The notes were in my pocket. I could feel exactly where they were, the way you stay aware of a stone in your shoe — folded against my hip. Stolen money, warm from my own leg, and not three feet away my father was apologising to the woman who'd stolen it about the price of snags.

I reached into my pocket and pulled a note out and held it up where he could see it.

“I don't think money's the problem.”

His eyes came down onto the hundred. His mouth opened. Closed on nothing. A bit of colour came up under his cheekbones and he looked off at the trolleys, away from the note and away from me.

“No,” Beatrix agreed, comfortable as you like. “I don't expect I'll be needing my own money again for a good while.”

Charles made a grab for the note. I knocked his hand off.

“Can I get some?”

“What do you want money for?” Dad said, and there was relief all through it — a plain small question he could stand square on, after the one he'd just stepped around.

“Everyone needs money, Dad.”

“Plenty spare,” Beatrix said. “We'll make you the first banker in Bixbus.”

Charles weighed it, dead serious, fairy lights swinging off one fist. “Nah. I'd rather be the bank.”

It got me before I could stop it, and it got Dad too — one short breath pushed out through the nose. For a second the three of us were just a family again, stood about in the muck taking the mick, and I felt how much I'd wanted that and hadn't known it. “You're an idiot,” I told Charles, and he wore it like the medal he'd been digging for.

Dad came back round to it, because none of it had got meat on a grill.

“If you really don't mind, Beatrix. We're cutting it fine.”

“No trouble.” She knocked the dust off her knees. “What do you want?”

He took longer over it than the question asked for. Feeding people wasn't a small thing to my father; he'd not give it a small answer. “Sausages, the most of it. Bit of steak if there's decent steak to be had. Enough to go round twice — folk eat when they've had a fright, and this lot have had a fright.”

“Easy enough.” Then something turned over behind her eyes and she looked round at Charles. “You and Luke came through at a supermarket. That right?”

“Yeah. Across the road from ours.”

“Anywhere round there a person could buy meat?”

Charles opened his mouth, found nothing in it, shut it again. I stepped on the gap before it could show on him. “He couldn't tell you. He only knows where they keep the lollies.”

“There's a butcher,” Dad said. “Right beside the supermarket. Both of them good.”

“That'll do.” The loose, idling thing went out of her all at once, and what came in its place had edges — a person who'd just seen the short way through a problem and meant to take it. “Give me fifteen minutes.”

That stopped all three of us where we stood.

“Fifteen minutes?” Charles said. “It's a whole other world.”

For answer she held up the Portal Key — a small dark thing I understood not one part of. I leaned in with the rest of them. I couldn't help it; none of us could.

“Near as I can tell,” she said, turning it over in her fingers, “every time Luke or I crack the Portal open somewhere on Earth, this remembers the spot. Once it's got the place, we can come out of it again. In through here. Out through there.”

Charles had it half a step ahead of me. “So because Luke opened it at the shops—”

“I step in here and come out at the shops. Buy your father's sausages. Walk back in.”

His whole face lit up with it. But my head had already gone off down its own track, somewhere none of them were looking, and my hand was up before I'd properly caught hold of the thought behind it.

“Hang on.” I moved my finger between Dad and me. “We came through at the house. So — you could go there? Our actual house?”

The want of it took me by surprise, how fast and how hard it came. Not a plan, nothing so shaped as a plan. Just my room. My desk, the bed, the back door, the whole ordinary world I'd walked out of that morning thinking I'd be back by tea — and the thing she was holding in her hand saying it wasn't gone, it was a fifteen-minute walk through a hole in the air, it had been there all along while I'd been grieving it.

“Yes.” To her it was nothing. A fact, stated and set down.

It was not nothing to Dad. Whatever had eased back into his face over the last few minutes pulled clean out of it again.

“I don't think that's wise.” Low. We all turned to him. “The police could still be there.”

And that went in where the money never had. The house. Claire's involving the police, all of the trouble that had been thickening through those last days before we crossed — I didn't have the whole shape of it, nobody had handed me the whole shape of it, but I had enough, and what I had was enough to take the floor out from under the want in one go. The door home wasn't a door home. It was a door back into the thing we'd run from. Charles's grin slid off and didn't come back. None of us had a word for a moment.

“What did you want to go back for, anyway?” Dad asked me.

I lifted a shoulder and let it fall. There was an answer somewhere down in me, but it wouldn't hold still long enough to get my mouth round it, and I wasn't sure I wanted it out in the open air in front of all of them in any case.

“I'll go and fetch the meat,” Beatrix said into the quiet, easing it shut behind her. “The shops. Not the house.”

“Thank you,” Dad said, and there was no missing that he meant it, all the way down.

She crossed to her screen, and as she came to it the dead pane woke into colour — climbing up through the screen, blue and green and that turning gold, the whole of it alive again between one breath and the next. At the edge of it she looked back at us. Whatever weight had just sat in the air over the three of us, not a grain of it had landed on her; she carried none of our trouble, and I half envied her it and half didn't trust it.

For a second her eyes were on me and not the others, and I had the same feeling I'd had over the lanterns — that she'd marked the quiet one, and filed something about him she wasn't saying.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said.

Then she stepped into the colour and it folded shut around her and wound itself down to nothing, and the screen stood dead and pale again, as if she'd never been there at all. And it was the three of us, and the dust, and our arms full of streamers.