Satisfying Hunger

"Sometimes all it takes to survive the collapse of reality is a cold Sprite, a hot chip, and the small victory of saying no to somebody who has always expected you to say yes."

The heat came down on me with the dogged persistence of something that had taken my continued existence personally.

It was not warm and it was not even oppressive. It was punitive. It was a thick heavy pressure that pushed against my chest and got in round my ribs and settled into the marrow of me, and January in that part of Adelaide has always been brutal—I grew up here, I know exactly what it does to a person—but that afternoon it felt vindictive, as though the sun had gone through every available target and had arrived, at last, and with some deliberation, at me.

The asphalt underneath my feet shimmered and lifted. My shoes had begun to feel as though they were being taken from below, the heat coming up through the soles and along my spine and pooling between my shoulder blades, and my shirt had been stuck to my back since Melbourne.

And my stomach, which had been extraordinarily patient with me, chose that moment to make a noise.

Because I had eaten two aeroplane biscuits. That was the whole of it. Two dry sweet floury biscuits out of a foil packet somewhere over Bass Strait, and after that two glasses of white wine on the back of them, and whatever warmth that had put into me had gone out of me hours ago and had left behind a hollow gnawing thing that had begun to make itself heard from the outside.

I looked at the station again, more out of reflex than out of any expectation whatsoever.

Nothing. No car nosing into the carpark. No Josh getting out of it with that faintly exaggerated swagger he has always fallen into when he thinks somebody might be watching him, and which he has no idea that he does, and which I have never told him about and never will.

Just heat, and cracked concrete, and the enormous silence of a meeting that had begun to feel as though it had never been intended to take place at all.

The absence had taken on a quality of intention. It had stopped being an inconvenience and had become something with a shape to it—something that was being withheld—and the hairs had been standing up on the back of my neck about it for a long time.

And then I saw the McDonald's.

It was squatting behind the station precinct, low and unlovely and utterly shameless, its red and yellow signage glowing in that light with the smug familiarity of a thing that has never once in its life been anywhere it was not wanted. The arches came up over the roofline like a benediction.

And the smell got to me about a second later, as though the mere act of looking at the place had summoned it.

Salt. Oil. The fryers. That entirely specific perfume of overcooked adolescence, which I have been smelling since I was six years old and which has not changed in all that time by so much as a molecule.

And a memory came up out of it and hit me so hard that I stopped walking.

Seth and I. Years ago. Slumped in a corner booth in the Rosny Maccas at some point after midnight, two half-strangers who had bailed out of a soggy house party in Bellerive that we had both silently concluded was beyond saving. Too sober to enjoy it. Too tired to pretend otherwise. So we had walked out without saying goodbye to anybody at all and driven to a McDonald's.

The chips were limp. The cheeseburgers were suspiciously tepid. And we laughed for two hours about nothing whatsoever—about the crushing seriousness of turning twenty-five, about the philosophical implications of a frozen Coke, about a girl at that party who had informed him, at some length and with great sincerity, that he had an old soul.

Cracked phone screens lighting our faces. Balled-up napkins. The McFlurry machine grinding away behind the counter like a prophecy nobody had asked for.

That night was not supposed to be significant. Nothing whatever about it was supposed to be significant. And it was the night I stopped thinking of him as somebody I knew and started thinking of him as a friend, and neither of us ever said one word about it, because that is not a thing men say.

And that was before all of this.

I did not want to move. I did not want to stop watching that carpark. Going into that building felt like giving up—like admitting that nobody was coming, and that I had been standing out in the sun for the better part of an hour for no reason at all.

But a man's pride will not hold him upright once he has begun going into the pavement, and I had begun going into the pavement.

So I put my hands in my pockets and turned round and walked towards it, and my feet dragged the whole way, and I kicked at a stone and it did not go anywhere.

The glass front of the place threw the sun straight back at me with perfect brutal fidelity, and I saw myself coming towards it before I could look away. Squinting. Hair matted flat with sweat. Jaw set hard. Somebody about halfway to falling over and not yet aware of it.

And then the doors went apart, and the cold came out and hit me.

I stopped in the doorway and took a breath of it, and it was one of the great physical experiences of my life and I am not embarrassed about that in the slightest. The sweat began drying on my skin. The furnace shut off. Six or seven degrees of conditioned air arrived at me all at once, and I stood in the doorway of a McDonald's in Elizabeth with my eyes shut, holding the door open, until a woman with a pram had to go round me.

Inside, everything was exactly as it should have been.

Teenagers behind the counter, moving with that specific economical rhythm of people three hours into a shift and four hours from the end of it. Fryers hissing. Trays being stacked. Plastic fittings in vaguely futuristic shapes that had been vaguely futuristic in about 1994. The booths were that particular red. The floor had that particular shine.

And there was no portal in it. There was no woman in a denim jacket. There was no backpack under a rock on another world, and no letter, and no parcel that had never been lodged, and no voice saying my name inside my own skull.

There was a drink machine that had almost certainly not been cleaned in a month, and a man mopping, and a queue.

And I stood just inside the door and let the whole of it come over me, and for the first time since a chair went under a door handle in Meeting Room 4B, something in my chest came loose.

I went up to the counter with the automatic detachment of somebody following a procedure, and looked up at the boards without reading a word of them.

All round me, ordinary life. A young mother negotiating with two small children who had entered the sugar phase and were testing its outer limits. Two teenage boys sharing one set of earbuds and nodding at slightly different times. An elderly gentleman at a corner table working his way with enormous seriousness through a soft-serve that had begun to lose structural integrity.

People inside their own afternoons. Not one of them touched by any of it. Not one of them with the faintest idea.

"What can I get for you today?"

The girl behind the counter said it with textbook intonation, in the way it gets said after enough repetitions that it stops being a question and becomes a piece of machinery. Her badge said Fiona. Her eyes had gone somewhere else at about eleven that morning and had not yet come back.

"Erm," I said, and my voice came out scratched and unused. "I'll have a Quarter Pounder meal, please."

Her fingers were already going across the register.

"Large Sprite, thanks."

She waited.

And I hesitated, and then I said: "And a large chocolate sundae as well, please."

Her eyebrow went up. Not much. Perhaps a millimetre. Just enough to register the peculiarity of a grown man on his own ordering a full meal and a dessert at the same time in the middle of the afternoon—and she said nothing at all about it, and keyed it in, and I put my card against the reader and stepped aside, and I have never in my life been so grateful for the absolute indifference of a transaction.

The ice cream machine churned away behind the counter and I stood and listened to it and let it have my whole attention, because it was the only thing in the building making a noise that meant anything.

My phone did not move in my pocket.

When the tray came I took it with both hands, the way a thing is taken in a church, and I went and found a booth by the front window—one with a clear view of the carpark, and the road, and the entrance to the station—and the vinyl gave a low reluctant groan as I got into it, and stuck slightly to the backs of my legs through my trousers.

I did not care. I had gone well past caring about anything that could be solved by sitting down.

Outside, the sun was coming off the roofs of the parked cars in flat white sheets and going through the glass into my eyes, and I put a hand up and looked out across that carpark one more time.

Nothing. No car. No brother. Nothing at all except heat and cracked asphalt and time going on without any explanation.

And then I turned round and looked at the tray.

The burger was sitting there with the steam still coming up through the crinkled paper, and it smelled of grease and salt and bread and the whole of my childhood, and I picked it up and took a bite of it.

And I tasted something that was not fear.

That was the thing. That was the entire thing. Everything that had gone into my mouth since a man with a cut on his jaw put an envelope into my hands had tasted of adrenaline and of the inside of my own head—the coffee, the wine, the biscuits, the water out of a tap in a corridor. And I sat in a plastic booth in a McDonald's in Elizabeth and bit into a Quarter Pounder, and my body said yes so loudly that it very nearly took me off the seat.

Warm beef. Melted cheese. The sting of the pickles. Every single element of it landing precisely where it had been engineered to land, going straight past my overworked and entirely useless mind and into the parts of me that still remembered what comfort was.

I ate that burger with no ceremony whatsoever. I ate it the way an animal eats. There was no pausing, and no savouring, and no considered appreciation of anything at all—just hunger, honest and enormous and a great deal older than the afternoon—and I put the whole of it away in about ninety seconds and sat back and felt the hollow place in my middle close over.

And something in my head cleared. Not much. But some of it.

I sat back against the vinyl and picked up the Sprite, and it was so cold that it hurt, and I drank a third of it in one go and felt it go the whole way down. It cut through everything. It took the dust and the disinfectant and the cheap wine off the back of my throat, and I put the cup down on the table and let out a breath I had been holding, at a conservative estimate, since Melbourne.

All round me the restaurant carried on being a restaurant. Fryers beeping. A timer going somewhere. Orders being called and half-heard. Somebody's child laughing at the counter, high and unreasonable and entirely unbothered. It is the same sound in every one of those buildings on this earth, and it has never once in its history cared what has happened to anybody, and that afternoon it was the kindest thing I had ever heard.

And then I reached into the red cardboard sleeve and selected a chip.

Not any chip. There are rules about this and I have them. The longest one. The crispest one. The one that has gone slightly too dark at one end.

And I dipped it into the sundae.

Right in. Down through the chocolate and into the vanilla and turned, so that it came out with the whole thing hanging off it, already softening against the heat of the chip—and I put it in my mouth.

Hot and cold. Salt and sugar. Crisp and smooth.

It is a combination that has no business working. There is no defensible reason for it. I have tried to explain it to people and I have been laughed at by better men than I am, and it works, and it has always worked, and it went into my nervous system somewhere around the age of nine and has never once been dislodged.

And for about forty seconds I was nowhere at all.

Not in Elizabeth. Not on the run. Not hunted, and not watched, and not carrying anything. Not thinking about my brother, or a backpack under a rock on another world, or a woman with a face that did not forget things.

Just a man in a booth eating chips out of an ice cream. That was all. That was the whole of me.

And then the phone went off against the tabletop.

My entire body came up off the seat. The chip stopped halfway to my mouth and the adrenaline came back into me like a bucket of water, and I was fumbling at the thing and wiping my hands on a napkin and getting grease across the screen all at the same time.

"Hello?"

It came out thin and uneven and with far too much breath behind it.

"Nathan, it's me."

And it was Josh.

It was Josh's voice, coming down a bad line out of the north, tight and a little hoarse—and underneath it, unmistakably, that faint accusatory edge that has been in his voice since he was eleven years old and which means, without any possibility of ambiguity whatever, that he is annoyed with me.

The relief went through me like a wave breaking. He was alive. He was here. All that silence I had been quietly building coffins out of, and here he was, and he was fine.

And straight in behind the relief, so fast that the two of them very nearly arrived together, came the anger.

Because he was annoyed. Because of course he was annoyed. Because after everything—after not answering a single message, and after one instruction with no explanation attached to it, and after reading a question of mine and deciding not to reply to it—my brother was ringing me up to be put out.

"Where are you?" I said, and sat forward, and the booth squeaked.

"I'm here." Clipped. "In the station carpark. Where the bloody hell are you?"

And I could see him. I could see the whole thing without any effort at all—the set of his jaw, his fingers going on the top of the wheel, his eyes coming round that carpark and not finding me and getting angrier about it with every pass.

"I'm at the McDonald's," I said. "Near the station."

I meant it to sound neutral. It came out defensive.

There was a pause. It went on long enough for me to hear him deciding what to say.

"Why on earth didn't you just wait at the station like I told you to?"

Like I told you to.

And something in me, which had been very patient for a very long time, quietly finished.

"Because it's absolutely boiling out there," I said. "And I haven't eaten a proper meal since Hobart. I was starving."

He let out a long theatrical sigh that came down the line as static, and I could hear the effort inside it. I could hear precisely how much it was costing him not to shout at me.

"Fine," he said. "Just come outside, then."

And I looked down at the tray.

At a sundae with a chip standing up in it. At half a Sprite. At the first food I had wanted, and asked for, and been given, in longer than I could account for.

"No."

It came out of me clean and flat and without one second of hesitation, and I heard it happen, and I could not have been more surprised if somebody else had said it.

"I haven't finished eating," I said. "You can come inside."

"Are you being serious right now?"

His voice went up in that particular way it goes up, riding the line between disbelief and outright fury, and I could see his face without the slightest difficulty—the eyebrows, the jaw, the colour coming into his neck.

"Yes," I said.

And I picked up another chip and put it into the sundae, and swirled it, and took my time about it.

"I'm sat in air-conditioned comfort, eating sugar and salt, and I have no intention whatever of marching back out into that godforsaken heat just to soothe your sense of punctuality. Come in and find me."

And there was a silence on that line that I would not have traded for a very great deal of money.

It was not a long silence. It was perhaps two seconds. And there were thirty-three years in it—every argument we have ever had in the back of a car, every time he has told me what we were doing and I have gone along with it, every single occasion on which one of us has issued an instruction and the other one has, without ever properly examining why, simply complied.

And then I heard, quite distinctly, the muffled thud of a fist going into a steering wheel.

"Fine," he said.

And he hung up.

And I sat in a plastic booth in a McDonald's in Elizabeth with a dead phone in my hand and a chip dripping chocolate onto a paper tray liner, and I smiled.

It was not a smug smile. It was not triumph. It was something a great deal smaller and a great deal more necessary than that. Because I had been carried, and dragged, and chased, and lied to, and moved about the country by forces I could not name and could not stop—and I had just taken one small piece of an afternoon and made it mine.

I put the chip in my mouth and chewed it slowly, and I watched the carpark through the window.