Something I Could Do

"When you can’t do the thing that matters, you’ll throw yourself at anything that has an ending."

The lane behind the station ran between a brick wall and a row of wheelie bins and ended at nothing, which was the only thing I’d wanted from it. I’d walked its length once to be sure. No camera I could find. No window angled down into it. One of those forgotten gaps a town keeps at its edges and never thinks about again — mine for as long as I needed it.

The Portal Key was already in my hand. It had been since the train.

I turned it over once and didn’t press it. The train was still in my legs — that hollow rocking left behind by an hour spent travelling toward something I hadn’t wanted to reach.

The lane wasn’t what stopped me. The lane was perfect. What stopped me was on the other side of it. Paul. He would ask; he always found the one question I’d spent the whole day building myself around not answering.

I kept seeing the closet. The dark of it, the bite of cleaning chemicals, his hands coming up against my shirt and then not pushing. The shove. The colours taking him mid-fall, and the bundle of his clothes going through after as though a bundle of clothes put anything right.

Paul would have it sorted by now. He’d have a name for the man, a caravan, a place in the rough order of the camp. That was what Paul did — he took the people I tore loose and found them somewhere to stand. The man would be in Bixbus by now under someone’s spare blanket, holding a story he couldn’t get the shape of, shaken, going quiet, starting the slow work of settling in. People settled. I’d watched it take, again and again, until it had stopped seeming like a thing worth marking.

Probably.

I put the word where I put the rest of them, and I pressed the key.

Colour climbed the brick in front of me, purple and blue and green folding over each other, and I stepped through before the part of me that had stayed in its seat through every station could think better of it.

I came through already looking.

The cold of the lane went out of the air between one step and the next. Then the dust soft under my shoes, the sun warm on the back of my neck, the silence that always had size to it — Clivilius, again. The patch of ground where I’d put him was empty. No man. No bundle of clothes. The track ran off over the dunes toward camp and lost itself, and whatever had become of him had gone the same way, out past anywhere I could see.

I was still standing over it when Paul’s voice reached me.

"There you are." He crossed the Drop Zone in a hurry. "I was starting to think you’d changed your mind about coming back at all."

Cold went through me, low and total. I heard the man in it before Paul had finished the sentence — the closet, the airport, what did you do, Luke. A denial assembled itself behind my teeth, half-made, ready; I’d been carrying it since Gawler without knowing I’d picked it up.

Paul’s hand closed on my arm. He leaned in and dropped his voice.

"We’re going shopping."

"Shopping." The answer I’d built for the other question sat in my mouth with nowhere to go. I was too tired to take the word apart — too tired for any of it. I’d been awake inside this one endless day since a Hobart dawn, and somewhere along it I’d stopped being able to feel the edges of things.

"There’s a Big W out at Elizabeth. Once it shuts for the night, you and Beatrix go in and take what the camp needs straight off the floor — food, clothes, tools, whatever’s worth having — and send it through. We’ve been feeding people out of whatever you can carry through by hand. One good night in a shop that size and we’d stop scraping."

"You mean rob it."

"I mean feed people." He held my eye. "There’s a difference, and you know there is."

I didn’t, not really. Earlier today I’d collected a stranger’s clothes off a closet floor and thrown them through a hole in the world after him, and a shut shop full of tinned food didn’t come within reach of that. But Paul still lived somewhere with a line drawn down the middle of it — feed on one side, steal on the other — and which side we stood on mattered to him. I didn’t tell him the line had quietly stopped meaning anything to me. I couldn’t have said when it went. I only knew I’d gone looking for it lately and not found it.

"Is there." It came out flat. I wasn’t arguing — I didn’t have the arguing in me. "How do we even get in, though? There’s nowhere registered inside a shut Big W."

"There is now." He had the next part ready. "That was Beatrix. She went over this morning for clothes and opened a spot inside one of the change rooms. So you don’t go near the doors — you come up on the floor, already past every lock in the place."

"And we carry it back into the change room to send it through." I had it now, and I didn’t like how cleanly it sat in my head. "So they never see where any of it went."

"Nothing out a door, nothing past a till. All the footage shows is two people carrying stock into a change room, and none of it comes back out." He almost smiled. "Let them make sense of that."

None of it comes back out. The phrase turned over in me and turned into the closet — the colours closing, the man going backward into them with his mouth still open. Everything turned into the closet today. I put it down where I’d put the rest of it, and walked on before it could be felt, and I was getting good at that. It should have frightened me more than it did.

I could have picked at it. There were always questions — where the night crew was, what the cameras caught, how much two people could carry before morning came — but Paul talked as though he’d already asked every one of them and put it to bed, and Beatrix would have walked that floor in daylight and seen what I couldn’t. I let myself believe it. The alternative was carrying the whole thing myself, and I had nothing left to carry it with.

Standing in the dust with the whole ruined day still heavy in my legs, what pulled at me wasn’t the shop. It was the cleanness of it — a thing with a start and a finish, a thing I could actually do. I’d crossed a country to knock on a door, and I’d sat on a train and watched the door go past the window. This I could do.

"Tonight, then," I said. "We can talk about it more over dinner."

He nodded, still half inside the plan, already further into it than the words had got.

I turned towards the portal. I wanted to be gone before the day found anything else to ask of me.

"Luke."

I stopped.

"Where are you off to? You only just got here." A beat. "What were you back for, anyway?"

There it was — his gift for the one question. And I didn’t have an answer. Not a hidden one, not a truth I was keeping back. I genuinely didn’t know what I’d come back for. Hadn’t known on the train, hadn’t known in the lane with the Portal Key warming in my fist. I’d crossed to Adelaide to do the one thing that mattered and I hadn’t done it.

"Have you—" He stopped. Started again, smaller. "Have you spoken to them yet? Mum and Dad."

And there was the door, handed back to me across the dust. The whole reason I’d gone. My father’s face waiting at the end of a sentence I still hadn’t worked out how to begin.

"Not yet." I made it light — a shrug, my eyes going off over the dunes as though the answer might be out there. "Later today. I’ll get to them later today."

There was nothing in me that meant it. The lie came out smooth and easy, the way they all came out smooth and easy now, and I felt for the old snag where the guilt used to catch and felt it not catch.

"Right," he said. "Later today." He didn’t believe me. He let it stand.

I turned towards the Portal and the screen woke, purple and blue and green.