One Bean at a Time

"There was a scream outside. Could have been murder. Could have been monsters. But I had scrambled eggs, and a man’s got to have priorities."

The smell got to me before Jamie did. Hot food—properly cooked food, the kind that comes off a pan and not out of a wrapper—and it filled the whole tent before he’d even ducked through the flap, Duke trotting in at his heels, a bucket of water swinging from his free hand.

The smell hit me like a freight truck.

Bacon. Eggs. Something tomatoey that made my salivary glands wake up and start screaming. My stomach, empty and eager, answered with a cranky rumble that sounded like a transmission about to drop out.

When did I last eat?

I tried to remember. The morning of the delivery. Toast and coffee at home, Mum already gone to work, me eating standing up at the kitchen counter with my phone in the other hand.

That was… two days ago? Three? Time had gone slippery since the void.

"Smells good," I got out—croaky, raw, the words dragging over the wreckage of my throat—and started the slow fight to sit up. They scraped the whole way, but they came. Progress.

"Do you think you could eat?" Jamie asked, and I watched his eyes cut sideways to Henri, who’d caught the word food and gone from asleep to electric.

It pulled a smile out of me, the first one in what felt like days. The chubby little thing had gone from sleepy lump to quivering attention in about half a second, his whole body swung towards the flap, nose twitching, tail already working up a hopeful wag.

Same, mate. Same.

Henri had been my one constant these last couple of days—a lazy one, mind, splitting his time between napping at my feet and napping in his own bed. But food trumped comfort. Food, it turned out, trumped everything.

"I could try," I said, though my voice gave away exactly how sure I wasn’t.

Eating felt like a mountain I wasn’t certain I could climb, but the smell was too much to argue with. My stomach had gone from polite suggestion to aggressive demand, and it didn’t care in the slightest that my throat was a mess, that swallowing might hurt, that I’d been dead forty-eight hours ago.

It wanted food. Now.

Jamie shut his eyes for a second and just breathed the smell in, the way you do when you’re hungry too and pretending you’re not. Then he opened them. "I’ll go and get you some."

Duke and Henri trailed out after him, ever hopeful, ever ready for scraps.

Traitors, I thought, watching Henri abandon his post at my feet. Food appears and suddenly I’m yesterday’s news.

I shifted about on the mattress, hunting for a position that didn’t pull at something. My body was weak and uncooperative and generally not on my side, but the promise of a hot breakfast was motivation enough. I dragged a couple of the firm pillows in behind my back and levered myself up to something roughly approaching vertical.

The effort left me breathing hard. Pathetic. But I was sitting up under my own power, which was more than I could have managed yesterday.

Small victories, I reminded myself. Count the small victories.

Jamie came back before long, the smell coming in thick with him, and put a plate of steaming food into my hands, piled high.

Scrambled eggs. Baked beans in that orange sauce that came out of tins. Bacon—proper bacon, not the thin American stuff, but thick rashers with actual substance. The plate was warm in my hands, almost too hot, but I didn’t care.

"Here, see how you go," he said. "You might need to leave the bacon if it’s too hard to chew or scratchy on your throat."

I nodded, eyes already locked on the plate.

Leave the bacon. Right. Sure.

The bacon looked perfect. Crispy edges, soft centres. The kind of bacon Mum made on Sunday mornings when she wasn’t working, back when I was a kid and Sundays meant cartoons and breakfast in front of the telly. Back when we could actually afford bacon.

My fingers were shaking. I concentrated on them, picked one single baked bean off the plate, and put it carefully in my mouth.

One bean. That’s all I’d managed. One small, orange, sauce-covered bean.

But it was mine. I’d picked it up and put it in my mouth like a normal human being. Like someone who wasn’t a medical anomaly being studied for lagoon-related miracles.

It was warm, and soft, and it tasted of almost nothing much—just tinned beans and tomato—and that was exactly what undid me a little. The most ordinary thing in the world, and it felt enormous.

One bean at a time, I thought. That’s how you eat an elephant. One bite at a time.

Mum used to say that when I complained about homework. Or chores. Or anything that seemed too big to get started on.

One bite at a time, Joel. You’ll get there.

The scream came out of nowhere and tore the morning clean in half.

It cut through all of it—the quiet, the warmth, the small animal contentment of eating.

A woman’s scream. High and sharp and full of something that might have been terror or might have been rage. Hard to tell from inside the tent.

Jamie moved before the sound had even finished—plate forgotten, face gone hard and pale all at once. He didn’t say a word. He just bolted, and the canvas flap cracked shut behind him. Dust lifted off the floor, and he was gone.

What the hell was that?

I should have been concerned. Should have felt alarm, curiosity, the urge to know what was happening. A scream like that back home would have had me calling triple zero, checking windows, doing something.

But here?

But here—and I’m not proud of this—my eyes had already dropped back to the plate before the scream had finished bouncing off the dunes. Whatever was going on out there, my body had cast its vote, and my body wanted beans.

Sorry, screaming lady. Whatever’s happening out there, it’s going to have to wait.

It had been a lifetime since I’d properly eaten, and every mouthful was a small revelation.

The bean sauce and the soft eggs went down together, cool and easy over the raw patch in my throat.

The eggs were soft—cooked just right, not rubbery, not runny. Whoever had made this knew what they were doing. The beans added sweetness and a bit of acid, cutting through the richness.

This is the best meal I’ve ever eaten.

It probably wasn’t, objectively. It was camp food, cooked over an open fire, served on a plate that had seen better days. But to my starving body, it was a Michelin-starred feast.

I worked the tangy tomato sauce off each finger in turn, in no hurry, unwilling to waste a drop of it.

I didn’t care how it looked. Didn’t care if anyone walked in and saw me licking my fingers like a kid who’d got into the biscuit tin. The sauce was too good to leave behind.

I moved on to the second plate, still ravenous.

Wait. Second plate?

I hadn’t even noticed Jamie leaving a second plate. Hadn’t registered eating the first one. The food had simply… disappeared. Down my throat and into my stomach like water down a drain.

And it wasn’t only food. For as long as I was eating, I wasn’t thinking about the void, or the voice, or the row of stitches in my neck. It was the first quiet my head had had in days.

"Fuck me!"

Jamie was standing in the doorway, watching me demolish the last of the eggs, his face caught halfway between shock and a laugh he was trying to hold in.

I froze mid-bite, a morsel of egg pinched between my fingers, suspended halfway to my mouth.

How long has he been standing there?

Duke, ever the opportunist, was down by my knee hoovering up every crumb that made it through my fingers. He’d positioned himself perfectly—just far enough away to avoid a stray elbow, just close enough to catch the fallout. A professional scavenger. I respected the technique.

I had eaten. Actually eaten. Two plates of food. My body had remembered how to do this—remembered that it needed fuel, remembered how to take it in and keep it down, performed a basic biological function without catastrophic failure.

Take that, death. I’m eating breakfast.

Jamie was still staring. I wanted to explain—that I was starving, that I genuinely couldn’t help myself—but my mouth was too full to shape a single word. So I gave him a sort of apologetic grimace instead, and reached for the untouched bacon.

It had been calling to me since I’d started on the eggs. Leave the bacon, Jamie had said. Too hard to chew. Scratchy on your throat.

Jamie read the move and dropped to a knee beside the mattress. "I’ll get it," he said, lifting the plate and bringing it closer to me.

I got a piece as far as my mouth, and the second that crisp edge scraped the back of my throat, everything down there clamped up in warning. Not quite pain. The promise of it. The wrecked tissue letting me know, politely but firmly, that it wasn’t ready for anything with edges. I pushed the plate away and put a hand to my neck.

Shit.

"Eating the bacon makes it sore?" Jamie asked, the concern back in his voice.

I nodded, and chased an errant bean back into my mouth with a half-smile.

Betrayed by bacon. What a way to go.

A small surrender, but a necessary one. The eggs and beans had been a victory. The bacon could wait for another day.

Jamie’s grin spread. "Suppose I can eat it then," he said, reaching for it.

Henri materialised out of nowhere—one second gone, the next right there, nose an inch off the plate, his whole fat little body vibrating with want.

Impressive speed for such a chubby little thing.

Jamie snatched the plate up out of reach. "Henri! No more!"

Henri slunk off to his bed, tail tucked, wearing what I’d have sworn on anything was a proper sulk.

I feel you, mate. Denied bacon is a tragedy.

Jamie put the last piece away himself, and around it he said, "I suppose I’d better check on Glenda."

Glenda.

Right. The scream. Something had happened out there while I’d been face-first in breakfast, ignoring the world in favour of carbohydrates.

The tent felt emptier without him. Larger and smaller at the same time, somehow. The canvas walls seemed to press in, then recede, then press in again.

You’re being dramatic, I told myself. He’s just gone to check on something. He’ll be back.

But I didn’t like being alone in here. Didn’t like the silence that crept in when people left. In the silence I could hear things I didn’t want to hear—the echo of that cold voice, the memory of the void, the whispered reminder that I belonged to something I didn’t understand.

Lying there on my own, I caught voices filtering in through the canvas. Loud ones. Animated. Voices with the wound-up energy of people who’d only just arrived somewhere they didn’t understand.

New voices. Ones I didn’t recognise. More than one—maybe three or four, tangled together in conversation or argument, hard to tell which from in here.

Who are these new arrivals? What have they dragged in here with them?

I wanted to know. But the moment I tried to lever myself up to look, every muscle I owned filed a complaint—a deep, bruised ache that ran from my shoulders to the soles of my feet, the whole of me reminding me at once of everything it had been put through.

I wanted to get up. Wanted to walk to the flap and peer outside, see what was happening, who these people were. But my legs had other ideas. My legs had declared themselves officially closed for business.

So I gave up on the idea and turned instead to the bucket of water Jamie had left by the mattress, determined to do something useful with myself.

The lagoon water. For my neck.

Glenda’s instructions came back to me. Keep the wound moist. The lagoon had healing properties—had brought me back from the dead, apparently—so dabbing some on my throat seemed like reasonable medical advice.

It took a real effort, my arms trembling the whole way, but I managed to shift myself round and get a hand to the bucket. The water was cool and welcome against my skin. I soaked a cloth and dabbed it, gently, along the worst of my neck.

The wound was still there. I could feel the ridge of it beneath my fingertips—the line where my throat had been cut open, now held together by neat stitches. Glenda’s handiwork, presumably. Done while I was floating in the void, unaware that anyone was trying to put me back together.

Stitches. Like I’m a torn delivery bag that someone’s patched up with a sewing kit.

The thread felt strange against my skin. Foreign. A row of tiny knots holding flesh together that should have stayed apart, that should have meant death. Healing, but present. A permanent reminder of what had happened at 2 Wallcrest Road.

Souvenir from Berriedale, I thought darkly. Thanks for visiting, here’s your scar.

As I worked the cloth over the stitches, my mind drifted back to the voices outside.

Everyone here had come through that Portal. Everyone here had been claimed by Clivilius, whether they knew it or not. We were all refugees from a world we couldn’t return to, thrown together by circumstances none of us had chosen.

Footsteps, coming closer. I paused with the cloth still in my hand, waiting to see who it would be this time, and what they’d bring in with them.

The footsteps were quick. Purposeful. Someone walking with intent, not casual wandering.

Jamie came back through the flap fast, already mid-sentence, and the words I caught were "Luke’s latest fuck-up." My frown deepened.

Luke’s latest fuck-up.

So there had been more than one. This was a pattern, apparently. Luke doing things that Jamie filed under fuck-ups.

There was a tiredness in the way he said it, an exasperation worn smooth by repetition, and it didn’t square at all with the father I’d spent my whole life inventing.

For nineteen years I’d built a ghost. A fantasy father who would have been kind, patient, understanding. Who would have taught me to ride a bike and helped with homework and been proud of my origami cranes.

The real Jamie was… different.

Warm with me, yes. But there was a coldness in him for nearly everyone else—a shut door where you’d expect a partner’s name to soften a man.

They’re supposed to be partners. Why does Jamie talk about him like he’s a problem to be managed?

Jamie lowered himself onto the edge of the mattress, his eyes snagging for a second on the leftover beans.

"I’m sorry," he said. "We shouldn’t be here. We should be…"

He let the sentence go somewhere around the middle, and didn’t chase after it.

Should be what? Home? Together differently? Never have met?

The sentence hung there, incomplete, like an origami crane with one wing missing. You could see what it was supposed to be, but it wasn’t quite right.

Before he could find the rest of it, Paul shouldered through the flap. "Sorry, need to get some paper," he said, cutting clean across whatever the moment had been trying to become.

Of course. Another interruption. This tent has a revolving door.

Jamie’s eyes followed Paul the whole way across the tent, sharp and unsmiling, tracking him the way you’d track something you didn’t trust to have its back to you.

The atmosphere in the tent shifted again. Cooled. The temperature seemed to drop a few degrees whenever Paul and Jamie occupied the same space.

What happened between these two?

"Oh, and I need Joel’s address too," Paul added.

My address?

Why would anyone need my address? What possible use could it be? We were in another dimension.

Jamie got there before I could, and there was an edge on it. "What for?" he demanded.

It was the father guarding the son again, bristling at something as harmless as a request for an address. I honestly couldn’t decide whether it touched me or got on my nerves.

Paul didn’t so much as blink. "So Luke can bring him some fresh clothes," he said, flat, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Fresh clothes.

Two ordinary words, and they went through me harder than they had any business doing.

Clean clothes. My clothes. From my house in Glenorchy. From my life.

I’d been wearing nothing but a blanket since Jamie had helped me out of my ruined courier uniform. The thought of proper clothes—my clothes, the ones I’d chosen, the ones that fit, the ones that smelled like home—was suddenly almost too much.

Something shifted in the tent at the mention of Luke doing me a good turn. Even Jamie’s hostility eased off a notch—because Luke might be a fuck-up, but he was a fuck-up who could cross between worlds and fetch a bloke clean underwear.

As if he’d misjudged what Paul was really after, the fight went out of Jamie’s face. He waved Paul closer, took the pen and paper Paul was carrying, and turned to me. "Do you want to do the writing?" he asked, gentler now.

Writing.

There was something almost giddy in the idea of it—of doing something so plainly, boringly normal. Writing needed fine motor control. Needed my fingers to work together, to hold a pen, to shape letters I’d been making since primary school.

I tested my fingers, curling and flexing them. They answered better than I’d feared. The splinted one still ached, but the others moved when I told them to—bent and straightened without too much complaint.

"Yeah," I croaked, rough but sure.

Jamie was gentle about it, fitting the pen into my shaky hand and holding the paper steady underneath.

The pen felt strange. Too light, somehow. Like holding a feather when I’d expected a brick.

But my fingers closed around it, and muscle memory kicked in—years of writing notes, filling out delivery forms, sketching origami fold patterns in the margins of notebooks.

14 Bowden Street, Glenorchy.

The letters came out wobbly, but they came, and it barely hurt at all. Another small victory to add to the pile.

Shaky letters. A kid’s handwriting, near enough. But legible. Readable. An address that would mean something to someone standing on the other side of the world—that would lead Luke to my door, my wardrobe, my life.

"Thanks," Paul said, taking the paper with a nod. "Should have it by the end of the day."

By the end of the day.

Less than twenty-four hours until I’d have my own clothes again. Until I’d have something that was mine in this alien place.

"Thanks," I echoed, and hoped he could see how much I meant it.

It was a small thing, a scrap of paper and a favour, but it felt like a line thrown back across the gap to a life that was drifting further off by the hour.

Mum will wonder why someone’s going through my wardrobe. Unless… does she even know I’m missing?

And that thought stopped me dead.

Mum. She’d be frantic by now. I hadn’t come home from work. Hadn’t called. Hadn’t checked in like I always did. She’d be calling hospitals, calling the police, calling Garry at the depot to ask if I’d shown up.

And no one would have a single answer for her.

"No worries," Paul said, and was gone.

When the flap dropped shut behind him, I let myself feel something I hadn’t felt in days—a small, daft flicker of accomplishment.

Eating. Writing. Sitting up.

The list of things I could do was growing. Slowly, painfully, but growing.

I let myself lie back down, and let my eyes fall shut, and gave in to how tired I was. The small tasks had taken more out of me than I’d ever have admitted out loud. But they’d added up to something, and something was more than I’d had yesterday.

One bean at a time, I thought again. One bite at a time.

The medication Glenda had given me was working. The pain had receded to a dull background hum, manageable rather than overwhelming. My stomach was full for the first time in days. I’d written my address—proof that my hands still worked, that my brain still remembered how to form letters.

Small victories.

Tomorrow I’ll try standing. Maybe walking. Maybe making it to the flap to see what’s outside.

The voices went on murmuring beyond the canvas walls. New people with new stories, new complications for a camp already tangled with tensions I didn’t understand.

But that could wait.

For now, I let sleep claim me, drifting off to the distant sounds of conversation and the comforting weight of a full stomach.