Out of Scope

"I have spent my whole life turning problems into steps. That night I had a problem, and an aeroplane, and not one single step."

I sat on the edge of the meeting table for a while after Laura rang off, and I could not have told anybody how long it was, and there was very little going on inside my head at all.

Her sentence kept coming back round, and every time it came past it seemed to have a little less air in it. There is no record of your parcel. Not just the tracking—everything. No lodgement scan. No transit events. No metadata entries. She had said the words flatly and carefully, in the manner of somebody reading out a form of words she had been handed and would very much rather not have been the one to read, and I had listened to her say them, and I had thanked her, and now I was sitting on a table.

The receipt was still in my hand. I had been holding it far too tightly and worrying at it with my thumb without noticing that I was doing it, and the thermal ink had begun to go grey in one corner where the heat of my hand had got at it—which was, of course, exactly what thermal paper did when it was handled, and I knew that, I have known that since I was a graduate and somebody explained to me why the office dockets faded in the sun, and not one particle of that knowledge was the slightest use to me, because what I saw when I looked at that corner was a document quietly beginning to unmake itself between my own fingers.

I put it down on the table. Then I picked it up again almost at once, because I found that I did not want it out of my hand, and so I sat there holding a piece of paper and being frightened of a piece of paper.

The room had begun to feel smaller. Not in any manner that I could have defended in front of a surveyor—the walls had not moved, obviously, the walls had done nothing whatsoever, and I was still perfectly capable of knowing that—but the air in there had been breathed too many times over by the same three or four thoughts going round and round, and it had gone stale and close and slightly sweet, and after a while I could not be in it any longer.

So I went back out to my desk, which was, I suppose, the single least useful place I could have taken myself.

The department was winding itself down towards the weekend in the way that everybody in an office silently agreed never to describe out loud. Somebody was carrying the last of a birthday cake round on a paper plate, offering it to people who did not want it and were going to take it anyway. Two of the graduates were making elaborate plans about a beach, and disagreeing about the beach, and enjoying the disagreement enormously. Sal was tidying her desk with the particular thoroughness of a woman who intended to leave on time and did not intend to think about anything in that building again until Monday morning, and who had earned it, and who was entirely right.

And I sat down in front of a monitor with the OneGov draft requirements still open on it, at Section 4.2.3, Authentication Protocols, where the cursor had been blinking at me since Wednesday.

The system shall support multi-factor authentication via SMS, email, and authenticator application.

I read that sentence perhaps six times. I could parse every single word in it and I could not make the sentence mean anything at all, and I understood, sitting there with my hand resting on a mouse, that I was not going to be able to go on pretending to be a person for the remainder of the afternoon.

And then, without anything I could honestly describe as a decision, I opened the airline app.

There was no weighing up. There was no case. I did not do the thing I have done before every consequential act of my adult life, which was to write the options out—actually write them out, on paper, in a column, with a pen—and eliminate them one at a time until the least objectionable of them was the only one still standing, and then do that one, slowly, with a small cold feeling of having been sensible about it.

My thumb simply went to the blue icon on the second row of my home screen. The app opened. There was a list of flights. I looked at it.

Hobart–Melbourne. 07:15. Arrives 08:45.

And the plain, dull, bureaucratic factuality of it went into me the way water goes into a man who has been three days out in the sun and has stopped expecting any. A departure time. An arrival time. A gate that would exist tomorrow, with a number on it, and a woman standing beside it with a scanner in her hand. An aircraft that would be pushed back off its stand by a tug at a particular minute of a particular morning, whether or not anybody in the world believed in it, whether or not any system had a record of it, whether or not I was on board.

Everything else in my life had spent two days quietly ceasing to be true. And here, on a screen, were some numbers that were going to hold still and let me stand on them.

There was a connection out of Melbourne through to Adelaide. If I took it I would be on the ground in Adelaide by the early afternoon, and Adelaide was five hundred kilometres from Broken Hill, and I did not look at that leg at all. I did not look at it for a second. I saw the shape of that gap and I turned my head away from it, deliberately, the way a man turns his head away from a bill he cannot pay.

I tapped Book.

The confirmation came back almost immediately with a cheerful little chime, and then my bank sent me a text about it, and then a second email arrived offering me the opportunity to select a seat in advance for an additional fee, and it was done.

And I sat there at my desk in an open-plan government office in the middle of Hobart, with a boarding pass on my phone and four hundred and ninety dollars gone out of my account, and I waited to feel better.

I did, too. For about forty seconds.

It was a real thing, that relief, and a physical one, and it went through my shoulders and down my back like something being unclenched. I had done something. After two days of standing about while things were taken away from me—the parcel, the tracking, the phone number, an entire conversation in a stairwell that my own brother appeared no longer to have had—I had put my hand out into the world and made an event occur in it, and the world had accepted the transaction, and confirmed it in writing, and charged me for it.

Then the forty seconds ran out, and the rest of my brain came back into the room and sat down opposite me and asked me a question.

And what, precisely, are you going to do when you get there?

I did not have an answer. I did not have anything that remotely resembled an answer.

Objective: unknown. Something, presumably, to do with being physically nearer to my brother, or nearer to Adelaide, or nearer to the last place on the surface of the earth at which anybody had officially observed that parcel to exist—as though proximity were a thing that could be brought to bear on the problem, as though standing closer to a sorting facility might somehow argue the record back into the database. Constraints: no idea. Dependencies: my brother, who did not know that any of this was happening and had not been consulted about a single part of it. Acceptance criteria: none. None at all, because I could not have told you what success would look like if it had walked up and introduced itself to me on the concourse.

If somebody had put me in a workshop with a whiteboard and a marker and six people watching, and asked me to explain what outcome I was seeking by flying to Adelaide, I would have stood there in front of them and I would not have been able to fill in the first box.

And I have filled in that box for other people, for money, for eleven years.

I had booked a flight the way a man grabs at the banister of a staircase that is already coming down.

I put the phone in my pocket. I put the receipt back into my wallet, behind the licence, next to the Post-it. I logged off my computer and picked up my bag and I walked out of that building without saying goodbye to one single person in it, which was not a thing I had ever done there before. Not once, in all the years I had been going in and out of those doors.

The evening would not get dark.

It was light when I came out onto Collins Street and it was still light when I got to my own front door, and somehow that made all of it a great deal worse than it needed to be. It was beautiful. It was, objectively and by any measure available, one of the most beautiful evenings of that entire summer—the sun coming in low and gold off the water and setting fire to the sandstone, the mountain standing up behind the town with the last of the light on its face, and the whole population of Hobart out on the footpaths in shorts with their sunburn and their beers, loud and easy and enormously pleased with themselves at the end of a working week.

There was a man outside the Customs House with his shirt off and a schooner in each hand, singing. Not to anybody in particular. Just singing. And two women went past me arm in arm, laughing so hard that one of them had to stop and lean on a bollard to get her breath, and I had no idea at all what it was about, and I would have given a very great deal to be told.

I walked up the hill through the middle of all of it, with a boarding pass in my pocket and my hands going in and out of those pockets over and over, like a man checking for something he has already checked for twice and does not trust himself about.

And the whole way up that hill I tried to remember one useful thing that Seth Holder had ever said to me.

Ten years. Ten years of lunches and pints and long unprofitable afternoons. Ten years of printouts pulled off forums at two in the morning; of the mining licence and the cabinet reshuffle; of fluoride and Pine Gap and the colour of the ties, and which minister had flown where in which week, and what that told you if you were paying attention, which nobody ever was. Ten years of that man leaning across a table in a laneway with his eyes lit up and his hands going, absolutely delighted with himself, telling me that the surface of a thing was never the whole of the thing.

And I went through the lot of it, street by street, all the way up that hill, hunting for one fact that I could actually use. One name. One address. One organisation. One place he had mentioned that a person could go to. One theory, out of a decade of theories, that I could have picked up on a Friday evening in January and done something with.

And there was nothing.

Not one thing. Not a single usable sentence out of ten years of the most entertaining conversation I have ever had in my life—and the moment I finally needed it to have been about something, it turned out to have been about nothing whatsoever. He had told me everything, endlessly, for years, and he had told me nothing at all. And I stopped on the corner of Hampden Road with my heart going and understood that I had loved a man for ten years and could not now have produced one true fact about him, except that he was gone.

I had not cried about Seth. It had not so much as occurred to me that there might be anything to cry about, because I had been too fully occupied with being frightened, and because there had been no room in any of the days since that laneway for anything but fear, and because I did not know whether grief was even the correct thing to be doing about a friend who might, for all I could establish, be perfectly well and sitting in a hotel room in Melbourne.

I stood on that footpath for a while. Then I got my key out and went inside.

The flat was hot and dead and shut up, and it smelled of a place that nobody had been in all day, and I did not stop to open a window or put a light on or take my shoes off.

I went straight down the hall to the bedroom and pulled open the drawer of the bedside table.

And there it was.

My grandfather's tobacco tin, with the sailing ship on the lid, worn nearly smooth across the middle where forty years of somebody's thumbs had gone, sitting exactly where I had left it that morning under a folded handkerchief. Entirely undisturbed. Entirely ordinary. Entirely there.

I got it out with both hands and sat down on the edge of the bed and worked the lid off with my thumbnail, and it came away with the small tinny complaint it has been making since before I was born.

And I looked inside.

Three grey objects, lying on a bed of loose drawing pins. Thumb-sized. Flat and dull under the light from the hall, with no gleam anywhere on any of them for the eye to catch hold of—exactly as they had been on a meeting room table on Wednesday afternoon, and exactly as they had been in my hand every time I had looked at them since.

The relief that went through me was so enormous and so entirely physical that I had to put a hand flat down on the mattress to keep myself upright. It came up from somewhere underneath my ribs and went out along both arms to the ends of my fingers and up the back of my neck into my scalp, and I sat on the edge of my own bed in a hot flat in Battery Point with a tobacco tin open in my lap, and I made a noise that was not quite a laugh and was not quite anything else either, and my eyes went, and I put my wrist up against them and held it there.

For perhaps five or six seconds I was completely and stupidly happy.

Over a tin.

And then I stopped being happy, and I stopped rather quickly, because I remembered the arithmetic.

I had done that arithmetic myself, standing in a meeting room a few hours earlier with a telephone against my ear and hold music playing. I had done it correctly. I had understood it perfectly well at the time. And then I had walked up a hill and put a key in a door and somehow contrived to forget every single part of it.

A tin that was there when I looked at it told me nothing whatever about a tin ten minutes after I stopped looking.

That parcel had been in Adelaide that morning. I had watched it be in Adelaide, standing in this kitchen with a cup of tea going cold beside me and my bag already over my shoulder. It had been sitting in a facility in Adelaide at breakfast time, and by the middle of the afternoon it had never been lodged, and there had never been a receipt, and there had never been a woman called Jan, and there had never been a plastic tub with EXPRESS stencilled down the side of it.

And whatever had done that had not needed to come here.

That was the thing I could not get round, sitting on the edge of that bed with the tin in my lap. It had not needed to break a window, or pick a lock, or bribe a neighbour, or stand in the dark on the far side of Colville Street watching my front door. It had reached into the systems of an entire country in the middle of an ordinary working day and lifted an object clean out of the record of the world, and not one human being had noticed. Not the depot. Not the drivers. Not the supervisor, or the second database, or the anomaly report. Nobody, anywhere, except one man in a meeting room who had happened to be looking at the right screen at the right minute.

So the tin was there. Good. Wonderful.

The tin was there now.

And I could sit on that bed and look at it for the whole of my natural life, and the only thing I would ever be able to establish, at any given moment, was that three Portal Keys had been inside a tin at the precise instant I was looking at them. And I would know nothing at all, ever, about the instant after that.

I put the lid back on. Then I took it off again and looked inside, which was not, even at the time, the conduct of a well man, and I knew that, and I did it anyway. Then I put the lid on properly and set the tin on the bedside table, out in plain sight, in the middle of it, where I could see it from anywhere in the room, including the doorway, including the hall.

And then I had nothing to do.

I had not seen that coming, and it turned out to be the worst part of the entire evening, and I would not have believed that if somebody had told me so an hour earlier.

There were thirteen and a half hours between me and that aeroplane. Thirteen and a half hours, in an empty flat, on a Friday night, with nothing in any of them that I could usefully do—and I stood in the middle of my own bedroom in my work clothes with my shoes still on and discovered that I did not know how to be a person in that situation. I genuinely did not know. There was no procedure. I had a procedure for very nearly everything, and I did not have one for that.

I could not pack, because there was nothing to pack. In the morning I was going to put a change of clothes and a toothbrush and a phone charger into a backpack, and it would take me four minutes at the outside, and doing it now would simply have meant sitting up all night beside a packed bag in a hallway like a man waiting to be evacuated.

I could not work. I had brought nothing home, and would not have been able to read it if I had.

And I could not ring anybody, because there were two names on my list, and a list with two names on it did not detain me for very long. Josh did not know I was coming, and did not know that there had ever been a parcel, and had spent that afternoon speaking to me in the voice he had used when I was eight years old and frightened of the space under the bed. And Verity had asked me for nothing—twice—and had lied to a room of six people on my behalf, and had put me into a car at the end of Wednesday night and told me to go home and go to bed. I had no right whatsoever to ring that woman on a Friday evening. And even if I had rung her, what precisely was I going to say to her? Verity, I have flown into a panic and bought a plane ticket to Adelaide, and I cannot tell you why, and I am not going to be able to tell you why on Monday either.

I thought about ringing my mother, and I thought about it for a while, and then I understood exactly how that conversation was going to go and I put the idea back down where I had found it. She would have heard it in my voice inside four words. She could hear it in my voice at Christmas when there was nothing whatever there to hear.

So I made toast.

I was not hungry, and that was the strangest thing about the whole evening. I had eaten almost nothing since Wednesday and I ought to have been ravenous—I had been ravenous, all week, at wildly inconvenient moments, in tearooms and meeting rooms and at my own kitchen bench—and standing in that kitchen at the end of that Friday I found that the entire apparatus had simply switched itself off. I did not want food. And some remaining functional part of me noticed the not-wanting, and filed it, and marked it as a symptom.

I made the toast anyway, because making toast was a thing that a person did in a kitchen in the evening, and I wanted very badly to be a person in a kitchen in the evening. I put two slices in. I got the butter out and stood it on the bench to soften, exactly as I always did, because cold butter tore the bread. I put both hands on the edge of the bench and waited, and listened to the fridge, and watched the streetlight coming in through the window over the sink and lying along the floorboards in one long thin bar.

Somebody two houses down was having people over. I could hear them out in the garden—that particular shapeless swell of eight or nine voices with a barbecue going, somebody's music, somebody's dog, a woman laughing at intervals of about two minutes at something I could not hear—and I stood in my dark kitchen with my toast going cold on a plate in front of me and listened to all of it for a long while.

Then I put the toast in the bin, and I went and put the television on.

There was a programme about a couple renovating a farmhouse in Gippsland. They were over budget. There was a problem with the roof timbers, and the woman was being very brave about it. I sat in front of that programme for the better part of an hour, and it went through me without touching the sides, and the following morning I could not have told anybody a single thing about it.

I got up. I walked to the window and looked out at nothing and came back and sat down again.

Some time after that I came to, standing in my kitchen, in front of the open cutlery drawer, with the drawer pulled all the way out and my hand resting on the edge of it, and no memory whatsoever of having got up, or of having walked in there, or of what it was I had gone in there to find. I stood and looked at the forks for a while. Then I closed the drawer and went back to the sofa.

At some point I opened my phone. I opened a message to my brother, and I typed:

Coming up to see you tomorrow.

And I sat and looked at it, on my own sofa, in the dark, with the television talking to itself in the corner and a party going in somebody's garden two houses down.

Because he would have answered. He always answered, straight away, whatever the hour; he has never in his life left a message sitting. And what he would have written back was Why?—one word, five seconds—and then I would have been sitting on that sofa with a telephone in my hand attempting to construct an answer to it.

And there was no answer to it. There was no sentence I could have sent that man. I had a boarding pass, and a tobacco tin, and a receipt for a parcel that had never been lodged.

So I deleted it. I deleted it one letter at a time, all the way back to an empty box, and then I put the phone face-down on the arm of the sofa and left it there.

And that was the entire content of my evening. That was all of it. A man of thirty-three, who had spent eleven years being paid to impose order upon other people's chaos and had been rather good at it, sitting alone in the dark in a hot flat with the television on and a plate of cold toast in the bin, standing up and sitting down and standing up again, opening drawers he had not meant to open and could not afterwards account for, entirely and comprehensively incapable of formulating one single next step—and doing all of it about four feet away from three objects that could put a permanent hole in the wall of the world.

The irony did not escape me. It sat with me the whole evening, in the chair opposite, with its arms folded, and it did not say anything, and it did not need to.

I went to bed late and did not sleep.

I lay on top of the covers in the dark in my clothes and listened to the floorboards in the hall giving up the last of the day's heat, one at a time, the way they had done every night for seven years without my ever once hearing them. The party ended. A car door went. Somebody called out something cheerful in the street. Then nothing at all.

At some point in the night I got up and took the tin off the bedside table and worked the lid off and looked inside it, and put the lid back on, and put the tin back where it had been, and lay down again, and closed my hand around my own Portal Key.

Then I set an alarm for half past five.

And it was, so far as I was able to establish, the only decision I had made in the whole of that day that I would have been prepared to defend to anybody.