Nothing to Declare

"The world will take the most impossible thing you own, weigh it, charge you thirty-four dollars for it, and ask who's next."

The lift took me down four floors with a woman from Procurement who was eating a mandarin, and the smell of it in that small bright box was so vivid and so ordinary that I had to look at the floor.

She peeled it in one long spiral. I watched her do it out of the corner of my eye—the practised turn of the wrist, the rind coming away unbroken—and I thought about the fact that I could smell a mandarin, that there was citrus oil in the air of a lift in Hobart, and that this morning I would not have noticed, and that a few hours earlier I had knelt in dust that had no smell at all, none, not one molecule of anything that had ever been alive.

The doors opened. She got out. I got out. She went left towards the car park and I went right, through the lobby with its sickly fluorescence and its polished marble, past the security desk where a man I have said good morning to for years said good afternoon to me, and out through the automatic doors into the day.

And the day had changed.

The lid had come off. That great grey slab of cloud that had been sitting on the city at noon—the one I had walked to Cornerstone under, the one that had swallowed the mountain to the shoulder—had broken up and blown out to the north-east while I was on the other side of a wall, and what was left behind it was one of those Hobart afternoons that people move here for. The light came in low and gold from over the water and hit the sandstone and set the whole street burning. The air had movement in it again. There was a breeze off the Derwent that smelled of salt and diesel and hot brick and the faint green rot of the docks, and it was, I thought, standing on the footpath with a backpack over one shoulder, the most extravagantly beautiful thing I had ever smelled in my life.

Rot. It smelled of rot. Something had died in that harbour and was decomposing, quietly, in the sun, and the entire city smelled faintly of it, and I stood there breathing it in like a man at a wine tasting.

Then I started walking, and Hobart came at me from every angle at once.

I do not know how else to describe what that walk was like. Everything was too loud and too bright and too much. A bus went past me on Collins Street and I could hear every individual component of it—the engine, the tyres, the hiss of the brakes, the rattle of a loose panel somewhere near the back. A gull went over, shrieking, and the shriek went into my head like a nail. Two women passed me arguing amiably about a wedding. A man in high-vis was drinking a can of something on the tailgate of a ute. Somebody's phone rang and they answered it laughing. A busker down by the corner was playing a guitar with a broken string and doing it perfectly cheerfully.

Noise. Life. The colossal, careless, deafening racket of a world that had things living in it.

I had been gone half an hour. It had felt like a fortnight. And I walked down Collins Street with red dirt under my fingernails and looked at ordinary people doing ordinary things in the late sun, and I loved them all with an intensity that would have alarmed them very much if they had known about it.

Then a white van came round the corner from Argyle Street and my whole body locked.

It was a plumber's van. It had a plumber's name down the side of it in blue vinyl lettering and a mobile number and a cartoon tap, and there was a bloke driving it with his elbow out the window, and it went past me and turned into the loading zone outside a chemist.

I stood on the footpath with my heart going and watched him get out and open the back doors and take out a length of pipe.

Four more, between the office and Elizabeth Street. I counted them without deciding to. A courier, two utes with canopies that were near enough, and a Toyota HiAce parked outside a bakery with nothing written on it at all—nothing written on it at all—and I crossed the road to walk on the other side of the street from it and did not look back at it and knew, with the tiny sane part of my brain that was still filing reports, that I was behaving like a lunatic.

But two men had searched the windows of a café for somebody at lunchtime. That had happened. That had actually happened, in front of me, in daylight, and one of them had moved like a man who had been trained to move, and they had gone at a run when the driver waved a phone at them.

And I had the thing they were looking for in a bag on my shoulder.

The strap had been cutting into me for the whole walk and I kept adjusting it, and every time I adjusted it I put my hand flat on the outside of the bag, over the place where the envelope was, the way a man checks for his wallet. I must have done it thirty times. Pat. Still there. Pat. Still there. A man patting a canvas bag on a public footpath, over and over, the whole way down Elizabeth Street.

The GPO stood on the corner of Elizabeth and Macquarie, and it had stood there since before my grandfather was born: great blocks of honeyed sandstone, a clock tower going up above the traffic, arched windows, the whole thing put up by people who believed that the sending of a letter was a serious civic act and ought to be housed accordingly. I had walked past it thousands of times. I had never once looked up at it.

I looked up at it.

Then I went in, and the ceiling was thirty feet above my head, and the light came down through those arched windows in long dusty columns, and underneath all of that grandeur there were four retractable barriers on chrome poles marking out a queue, and a stand of greeting cards, and a bin of novelty pens, and a woman with a pram, and a man returning something to eBay.

There were nine people in front of me.

I joined the end of the queue and understood immediately that I had made a terrible mistake, because a queue gives a man nothing whatever to do except think, and I had spent the entire afternoon running away from precisely that.

The queue shuffled. The air was cool. It smelled of paper and carpet and, faintly, of hot photocopier. Somewhere behind the counter a machine was printing labels with a rapid mechanical chatter, on and on, one after another, and I stood there with a device that had opened a hole in the fabric of the world hanging off my shoulder in a bag from Kathmandu that I have owned for years.

To pass the time, I read the sign.

It was mounted on the wall at the head of the queue where everybody could see it, laminated, in Australia Post red and white, and it was headed DANGEROUS AND PROHIBITED GOODS, and it set out what a person is forbidden to send through the post in this country.

Explosives. Ammunition. Fireworks. Flammable liquids and solids. Aerosols. Compressed gases. Corrosive substances. Oxidising agents. Poisons and toxic substances. Infectious substances. Radioactive material. Lithium batteries (conditions apply). Live animals. Perishable goods likely to become offensive.

I read it twice.

Then I read it a third time, standing in a queue in the Hobart GPO, and something began to rise in my chest that was not laughter but was closely related to it, and I had to look at the floor and breathe through my nose until it went back down.

Because there was nothing there. There was not one line on that sign which covered what was in my bag. A hundred and fifty years of the Commonwealth thinking very hard indeed about what a person might dangerously put inside an envelope, and the sum total of that wisdom was batteries, conditions apply. Nowhere on that laminated sheet did it say doorways. Nowhere did it say objects which take your blood. Nowhere did it say devices which, when actuated, cause a wall to stop existing and something very old and very patient to learn your name.

I was not, so far as the Commonwealth of Australia was concerned, doing anything wrong whatsoever. That was what I could not get past. By the laws and the regulations of this country I was simply a man posting a parcel.

Four ahead of me now.

A small boy in front of his mother dropped her keys on the tiles.

The clatter went off in that stone hall like a gunshot and I came about six inches out of my shoes—actually flinched, visibly, badly, my whole upper body jerking—and the woman behind me made a small startled noise of her own and then, when she saw that it was only me, and only keys, gave me a look of mild professional concern.

"Sorry," I said.

She gave me the smile that people give a stranger who has just behaved oddly, and looked at her phone.

The boy picked up the keys. His mother said thank you, darling. The queue moved.

And I stood there and understood, with a horrible clarity, that I had been jumping at noises since eight o'clock that morning, and that this was going to be my life now.

"Next, please."

She was somewhere in her fifties, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a name badge that said JAN, and she had been standing behind that counter since the doors opened, and it showed. She did not look at me. She looked at the counter, where I put the envelope down.

My palm had left a damp mark on it. I turned it slightly so that she would not see.

"Express, please. Going to Broken Hill."

She picked it up. She turned it over. My brother's name in my own handwriting, and his address, which I had needed to look up on my phone, because I have never in my life sent my brother anything.

"Express Post. Next business day's not guaranteed to there," she said, tapping at the keyboard without looking up. "It's outside the network. Two days. Could be three."

"That's fine."

She weighed it. The little grey scale gave a number. She peeled a label off a roll.

"Anything fragile, liquid or dangerous?"

And I stood in the Hobart General Post Office under a thirty-foot ceiling with the afternoon coming down through the arched windows in long gold columns, and a woman named Jan asked me whether the parcel contained anything dangerous.

She said it flat. She said it in the way she had said it four hundred times that day, and she was already reaching for the label as she said it, and she did not look up, and she had absolutely no interest whatever in my answer—and my answer was going into the hands of my brother in a demountable on the edge of a mine eight hundred kilometres away.

"No," I said.

Jan pressed the label down over the address with the heel of her hand and smoothed it flat.

"Thirty-four dollars."

I paid her with a fifty. She gave me sixteen dollars back and a receipt with a tracking number on it, and I folded the receipt and put it into my wallet, behind my driver's licence, where the Post-it note had been that morning.

And then she turned and dropped my brother's future into a plastic tub on the floor behind her.

I saw where it landed. I saw the exact spot. It went in on top of a padded bag with a shoebox shape to it and slid down against a birthday card—a proper one, hand-addressed, with a little sticker of a balloon on the back where somebody had sealed the flap—and it settled there at an angle with my handwriting face up, and the tub said EXPRESS on the side of it in stencilled black letters, and it was three-quarters full of other people's parcels.

"Next, please," said Jan.

Ninety seconds. Thirty-four dollars. A device built by somebody, somewhere, for reasons that no living person on this planet appeared to understand, capable of opening a permanent doorway into another world—into a place with a sun and a sea and a voice in it—had gone into the Australian postal system between a shoebox and a birthday card, and it had taken ninety seconds, and the woman who did it had not looked at me once.

I walked out into the light.

The heat came up off the footpath into my face and I stood at the top of the GPO steps with sixteen dollars in my hand, and I began, quite calmly and quite thoroughly, to list the ways in which I had just destroyed my brother.

The bag could split. Parcels split. I have seen split parcels; everybody has.

It could be lost. Things get lost, every single day, in every postal system on earth, and this one was going to a mining town outside the express network and it would change hands five or six times before it arrived.

It could be stolen. Somebody could lift it out of that tub tonight.

He could open it at his desk, in front of the whole office, because he is a practical man and a parcel from his brother was not the sort of thing he would carry home unopened and sit on until he had the house to himself.

He could open it with Mason sprawled on the couch behind him, which is where Mason has been sprawled every evening for about six years.

He could read nine flat lines from a brother who had not rung him properly since June, with I'm sorry at the bottom of them and no explanation attached, and he could put it down on the bench and go very quiet, and get into the car, and drive.

Or he could do exactly as he had been told. He could go into his lounge room and shut the door and point the device at a blank wall and press it with his thumb, and it would take his blood, and the wall would go, and he would step through—

—and he would be standing on a red plain forty metres from a cliff.

I stopped.

I stood on the steps of the General Post Office in the middle of Hobart with my mouth open.

I had not told him about the cliff.

Nine lines. I had written him nine lines and I had told him where to point it and how to press it and that it would hurt, and I had said nothing whatsoever about the fact that the ground on the far side ran away for a kilometre and a half and then simply stopped, fifty metres above a sea that made no sound. Nothing about the edge being soft. Nothing about the dust lying so fine over it that a man could not see where the rock ended.

And he would be frightened. Of course he would be frightened.

And I knew exactly what a frightened man did on that plain, because I had been one, four hours earlier: he walked, and he walked quickly, and he kept his eyes up and out on the horizon rather than down on his own feet, because the horizon was where he expected the answers to be.

I had done precisely that. And I had put my heel out over fifty metres of nothing and only stopped because some older part of me threw the rest of me flat on my face in the dirt.

My legs took me back through the doors before I had decided anything at all.

The queue had four people in it. I joined the end of it and stood there with my heart slamming, working out what I was going to say.

Excuse me. The express parcel I just lodged. The one to Broken Hill. Could I have it back, please.

And Jan would say, perfectly reasonably, Is there a problem with it, love?

And I would say—what, exactly? That I had forgotten to warn my brother about a cliff on another world? That there was something inside that envelope to which I now needed to add a further instruction? She would want to see it. Of course she would want to see it. I could hardly retrieve a lodged article without demonstrating that it was mine, and she would put it down on the counter in front of me, and I would have to open it, there, under the arched windows, in front of a woman with a pram and a man returning something to eBay—

—and take out a bubble-wrapped device that had no business existing, in the middle of a public building, in the middle of the afternoon, in a city where two men in a van had spent their lunch hour looking for exactly that.

Three people in front of me.

Two.

I got out of the queue.

I walked back past the greeting cards and the novelty pens and the woman with the pram, and I pushed out through the heavy door into the sun, and I did not look back, and I have never in my life felt so completely like a coward.

I stood at the bottom of the steps on Elizabeth Street with sixteen dollars in my hand and nowhere at all to be.

Behind me, in a plastic tub, under a shoebox, a doorway was waiting for a van.