Paul was Here First

"Some places are not places. They are people you have not met yet, and questions nobody has thought to answer."

My parents were a few metres ahead of me on the red ground, still holding hands, still not turning around. The horizon they were looking at was a horizon of nothing — no road, no fence, no tree. Ochre dust to the edge of sight, and above it a sky that had no business being that colour, and between the two of them a silence that was not the silence I knew.

And then, cutting across all of it, a voice I recognised before my head had caught up with the fact that I was recognising it.

"Dad! Mum!"

I turned.

He was jogging towards us across the dust from the direction of — I did not yet have words for what the direction was. A scatter of objects on the ground. Some trolleys. A tarpaulin. A folding chair. And a man in his mid-thirties in a dust-streaked t-shirt coming fast across the gap between his cluster of objects and ours, and my eyes knew the man a clear two seconds before my brain produced the name.

Paul.

Paul who was supposed to be in Broken Hill with his wife and kids. Paul who Mum had been telling the police about for the last week. Paul who Claire had been ringing our landline about. Paul who had been, as of an hour ago when I was sitting at the kitchen bench with a Milo, a missing person.

He was here.

He reached us and he did not slow down. He hit Dad in an embrace that lifted Dad onto his toes, and Dad made a sound that was not a word, and Mum had her arms around both of them before I had quite worked out the order of bodies. Paul's face was pressed into Dad's shoulder. Dad's hand was on the back of Paul's head. Mum's cheek was against Paul's neck. Nobody was saying anything. My own feet were bare, the way they had been since I rolled out of bed in Craigmore, and the dust had already worked its way between my toes, warm and fine, the wrong temperature for a ground I had been standing on for less than a minute.

They were still in the embrace when Mum pulled back — only slightly, only enough to get her face clear of Paul's shoulder — and said, in the voice she used for landing a joke she had decided was going to be funny whether anyone was ready for it or not,

"Claire's been looking for you."

The laugh came out of me before I had the good sense to stop it. A short, surprised sound, half nose and half throat, that I tried to pull back in and could not. Mum, standing in the red dust of a place that was not a place, in her happy Jesus face pyjamas and her Ugg boots, had opened with Claire. It was so precisely her that the absurdity of it was actually the most reassuring thing that had happened to me since I had woken up. Whatever this was, wherever we were, Mum was still Mum. Mum was still going to bring up the daughter-in-law who had been making her life difficult, at the first possible opportunity, in front of the son Claire was nominally looking for. I saw Paul's face over Dad's shoulder for a second — the flicker of a smile, then the small wince that meant his mother had said exactly the thing he knew she would — and I understood that he understood her the way I did, and I felt, for one stupid second, that we were both going to be okay.

Then Dad let go of Paul, and stepped back to adjust his dressing gown, and I remembered that we were not going to be okay, because nothing about this was okay, and my father was standing on another world in bare feet and adjusting the belt of his dressing gown.

A second voice, coming through the air behind me.

"Where's Charles?"

Luke. Through the Portal, onto the dust, easy as a man stepping off a bus.

The three of us answered at once, and the answering was automatic, the way all our choruses were — Mum's voice leading, Dad's half a beat behind, mine coming in over the top of Dad's. "Seminary!" Paul laughed at it — a short warm laugh that was Paul's, unmistakably, unchanged — and the sound of it reached something in me I had not known I was missing. Some rhythm of family that my body remembered even when my head had stopped tracking it.

The laugh died. Mum turned on Luke.

"Luke!" Her voice pitched for the full register of a maternal accusation. "What have you done!?"

Luke shrugged.

He actually shrugged. Standing in the dust of another world, with his mother in her pyjamas in front of him, he lifted his shoulders once and let them drop.

"I did what was necessary."

The absurdity of it nearly lifted me off the ground. I wanted to laugh again and I did not, because the look on Mum's face was the look that had reduced every one of us at various points to silence, and even Luke was not entirely immune to it. But before Mum could find the words that were going to come next — and she was finding them, I could see her finding them — Paul got in ahead of her, reaching for the small joke that lets a little pressure out rather than the big one that breaks everything open.

"You didn't think it was necessary to let them change out of their pyjamas first?"

I looked at my parents properly for the first time.

Dad in his dressing gown and bare feet, hair on one side flat from having slept on it, dressing gown belt re-tied at least twice since we had arrived. Mum in her flannelette pyjama bottoms with the happy Jesus faces printed all over them, and the matching top, and her Ugg boots, with bed hair starting to frizz at the temples. My parents. In their pyjamas. In the middle of a desert. Being reunited with an adult son who had been missing for a week.

I bit my tongue. Hard. Because if I laughed right now I was not going to stop.

Luke shrugged again. "It didn't really cross my mind, to be honest."

Mum's mouth opened to deliver whatever response had been building in her since I did what was necessary. But before she could get there, Dad spoke. His voice was the same voice he had used in the study this morning — the voice of a man who had been handed something he was sure about.

"And where's the New Jerusalem?"

I felt the skin on the back of my neck do a small involuntary thing.

The New Jerusalem.

So that was a thing. That was a thing Dad had been expecting to find, on the other side of the wall of colour. Not Salt Lake City. Not the house of a relative in Utah. The New Jerusalem. The actual theological article. The city from Revelation that was supposed to descend at the end of days. Dad, asking for it in the way another man might ask where the front desk was.

I watched Paul's face.

Paul had been in the middle of finding something to say to Luke about the pyjamas, and he stopped. The eyebrows went up. The mouth, which had been shaping a follow-up, changed shape into something flatter. He looked at Luke. He did not say anything. But the look said everything a look could say in the time it took for a look to cross a dusty patch of ground between two brothers, and what it said was what have you told him.

Luke was not troubled.

"It's just over the hill," he said, and he pointed, casually, at a rise in the ground in the middle distance.

Paul threw his hands up. The gesture had no particular direction — he threw them at the sky, at Luke, at the horizon, at all of it — and the breath that came out of him was not a word.

And then Luke, in the tone of a man announcing a minor logistical decision,

"Paul will take you there."

Paul's head snapped around.

"What!?"

Luke looked genuinely puzzled. "I don't know why you're getting so worked up. I told you I would bring them here."

"Yeah, but I thought—"

"Oh, plans changed. Dad wanted to go to the New Jerusalem instead."

I watched Paul understand it.

The understanding came across his face in a kind of delayed wave — the narrowing of the eyes, then the small sideways shake of the head, then the short intake of breath that was the opposite of a laugh. He understood what Luke had done. Luke had told Dad whatever Dad needed to hear to get Dad onto the red earth of Clivilius, and what Dad had needed to hear was not Salt Lake City — it was the New Jerusalem, full stop, no further questions — and Luke had given him that, and now Luke was handing Paul the bag to unpack. I could see Paul working out, in real time, what the next hour of his life was going to look like, and his face did not love the arithmetic.

And in the middle of the Smiths-arguing silence that followed, something moved in the middle distance.

A woman.

A middle-aged woman, in cargo trousers and a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of gardening gloves, pushing a shopping trolley across the red dust. The trolley was heaped — terracotta pots stacked unevenly, a couple of plastic jugs, green shoots poking out of bags of soil, a watering can wedged in sideways beneath a tangle of hessian. She walked head-down and grimly efficient, well past the point where the task should have been finished, and she was ignoring us.

"What is she doing?" I said, before I had decided to say it.

The question came out in the voice I use for things I do not actually expect to have answered — one more impossible input than I had anywhere to put it.

Paul looked at her, then at me, and there was a small quiet sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. Luke, for his part, did not seem to find anything odd about the situation at all.

"Hey, Karen!"

His voice carried across the distance. The woman stopped. She did not turn immediately. When she did, even from fifty metres away, the entire posture of her said for god's sake, what now. One hand went to her hip. The brim of the hat tilted.

"I'm busy, Luke," she called back, her voice cutting through the dust without any loss of volume.

"It'll only take a few minutes!"

She stood there for a long second. I saw her shoulders drop and then lift. I saw her take a breath. And then she left her trolley where it was, in the middle of nothing, and she started walking towards us.

Every step of the walk said I am doing this under protest. Her arms did not swing. Her mouth was set in a line. The hat shaded her face so I could not see her eyes properly, but I did not need to see her eyes to know what they were doing.

She reached us. She stopped a polite metre short of the group. She folded her arms.

Luke, as if introducing a new friend to his parents at a church picnic:

"Karen, meet my parents, Noah and Greta. And this is my younger brother, Jerome."

I had time to register exactly one thing about her, which was that she had the forearms of a person who worked outdoors and did not bother about sunscreen, before Mum — who, under pressure of any kind, reverted to hospitality the way other people reverted to fight-or-flight — stepped forward and hugged her.

"Lovely to meet you, Karen."

Karen had not agreed to be hugged, and every line of her said so. Her arms stayed at her sides. Her torso did not soften. She held herself in my mother's embrace with the rigidity of a fencepost that had been staked into the ground with a mallet, and when Mum released her — which Mum did, eventually, reading the room as Mum eventually did — Karen said, into the middle distance, "Likewise."

I glanced at Paul. Paul was looking at the ground with his mouth set against a smile. He had been here long enough to know that Karen was not a woman you hugged, and he was watching Mum find that out in real time, and enjoying it.

Dad was still adjusting his dressing gown. He had tied it tighter. Now he was smoothing the lapel flat, his hands looking for a job to do.

Luke, catching up at last to Dad's discomfort, "I suppose I'd better get you some clothes to change into."

I turned to the Portal.

The wall of colour was still there — the same swirling bands of blue and green and a gold that was not gold and a red that was not red — and it was still open, and on the other side of it was my study-in-Craigmore and my kitchen and my Milo going cold on the bench and my dog at the vet in Craigmore waiting for a phone call I was, as of approximately twelve minutes ago, not going to make.

The thought arrived with a physical edge. Millie. Still asleep in a kennel. Somewhere on the other side of that wall, Sophie was opening up the clinic and looking at her computer and wondering why the owner of the Border Collie in Kennel Three had not rung yet.

"Can't we just go home?" I said.

It came out small. Smaller than I had meant it to. I had meant it to come out as a challenge, and it had come out as something closer to a request, and I did not look at Mum when I said it because I knew that if I looked at Mum when I said it I was going to crack.

There was a short pause.

Karen used the pause to extricate herself from the group. She took a half step back and lifted her chin and said, in the bright tone of a woman who had been looking for her exit, "Well, I guess that's my cue to keep moving. These garden supplies won't move themselves."

She gestured behind her at the distant trolley, and at the other trolleys I could now see scattered across the dust beyond it — a dozen, maybe more, parked in loose formations across the red ground, each one presumably waiting for its turn. And then, without waiting for anyone to release her, she turned and walked back towards her trolley.

My question stayed where she had left it, in the air in front of me. Mum did not pick it up. Dad did not pick it up. Luke looked at the Portal and then, deliberately, away from it.

Paul broke the silence.

"It's not quite that simple," he said, and his arm came up around my shoulders. It was a brother's arm — a little heavier than I remembered, a little less casual. I let myself lean against it for half a second before I took in the weight of what he had actually said. Not quite that simple. Which was English, in my brother's voice, for we are not going home today.

"How about I explain it on our way to camp?"

Camp.

There was a camp.

Luke was quick. "Great idea, Paul," — too quick, bright and herding, wanting everyone moving the same way at once — and he was already gesturing us forward, already turning his own body to follow.

Paul did not move.

"Oh, and Luke," he said, and his voice had changed key. Still warm on the surface, but with something firmer underneath. "Bring their clothes to camp, would you? Don't leave them at the Drop Zone this time."

Drop Zone.

The phrase landed in my head and did not fit anywhere. Drop Zone was a military thing. Drop Zone was what you called the patch of ground where a helicopter let its cargo out. The fact that my older brother had just used the phrase in the tone of voice he would have used for front porch or the bottom of the driveway did more to my chest than anything else had done in the last twenty minutes. More than the colour. More than the voice in my head. People here had names for the patches of ground they used, and the names were work-names, and the work was the business of getting cargo from one world to another, and my half-brothers were the ones doing it.

Luke nodded. "Of course."

He turned back to the Portal. He lifted a hand, briefly, almost fondly, towards it. The colours seemed to lean towards him in response — or perhaps I imagined that; perhaps I wanted them to, because I needed the colour to be a thing that responded to a person. Luke stepped through. The colours folded around the shape of him. And then the Portal held for a moment longer, shimmering in the dust, before the colours began to dissipate.

"Let's go," Paul said.

His arm on my shoulders guided me around, away from the Portal, away from the bright wall that was Earth, away from the only door that led back to Millie and Charles and my thesis and my life. My parents turned with us. Mum did not look back. Dad glanced towards the trolleys in the middle distance and then away.

I looked back, once.

The colour was completely gone now. Karen, halfway back to her trolley, was tilting her wide-brimmed hat up to glance in its direction — with the expression of a woman checking a piece of equipment she did not trust — and then she bent to something in her trolley without further interest.

I faced forward.

Paul's arm stayed where it was. Dust had worked itself between my toes. The ochre ground crunched faintly under my bare feet. Ahead of us, somewhere beyond a rise I could not see past, was a thing Paul called camp, and somewhere beyond camp, apparently, was a New Jerusalem that was not a New Jerusalem, and we were walking towards both of those things in the clothes we had slept in.

My mother, quietly, to nobody in particular: "Well."

It was all she said.

It was Mum's whole review of the situation, compressed into a single Australian well, and for the second time in ten minutes it made me love her, and for the second time in ten minutes I chose not to say so.

We walked.