The Fencer of Bixbus

"Back home, a fence kept a dog off the roses. Out here, it was the only thing between us and the dark."

The driver's door opened, and Luke got out of my ute.

Of course it was Luke. Some part of me had known it from the shape behind the wheel, and the rest of me had gone on hoping it might be anyone else. He came out quick and businesslike and pushed the door to behind him, and the dust his tyres had thrown up was still coming down around him in slow lazy turns, catching the light. The engine ticked over, idling. An ordinary ute, idling on ordinary ground, that had just driven out through a wall of colour that had thrown my own hands back at me — I couldn't get the two halves of it to sit in the one place.

His eye went straight to us, to Kain and me, stood maybe twenty metres off, and his face was flushed, whether from the work of driving that thing through or from something else I couldn't tell. There was the same look on him I'd seen on the Owens' verandah — that mix of push and something underneath it, guilt or fear or the both of them run together.

"Luke!" Kain's voice went up beside me, and there was relief in it, plain relief, and it put a cold thought in me I'd not had room for yet: that Luke coming through at all had been a thing worth being relieved about. That he might not have. That he could have driven my ute off the far side of that wall and left me standing here in the dust, and gone home to a world that still made sense.

"Nial owns a fence construction business," Luke said to Kain as he came towards us, easy, offhand — introducing me like it was another morning on another job site, as if that were a normal thing to be doing, in a normal place, and not whatever this was.

The words came at me from a long way off and landed nowhere. My business. What earthly good was my business here — a failing fencing outfit that belonged back on the other side of that wall, in the world where I belonged, where Jenny was waiting on me to come home from a job I'd told her would take a couple of hours.

He stopped in front of me, close enough now to see the sweat stood out on his forehead and the small shake in his hand as he held something out to me.

My keys.

House keys, office keys, ute keys, all of them hanging off the keyring Sammy had made me at daycare — a lump of fired clay meant to be a dog, that might have been Buffy or might have been any dog at all, painted brown, one ear bigger than the other. It had lived in my pocket the best part of a year. And here it was, swinging off Luke's finger in the red dust of nowhere, and the sight of it did something to me that the wall and the dust and the whole impossible morning hadn't quite managed. My boy's clay dog. Out here.

"Do these include your office keys?" Luke asked, and the question was so ordinary and so pointed at once that it cut clean through the fog.

Office keys. They'd been in the ute's ignition where I'd left them, because I'd only been going to be a few minutes — just long enough to look at some plans, just long enough to hear about the job that was going to save everything.

"Yeah," I said. The word came out on its own.

"Where's your office?" he pressed.

Why did he want to know that? And then, cold and sudden: he was going back. Back through the wall that wouldn't let me through. And if he was going back —

"It's a home office. Why?" And under the question was a thing I couldn't keep out of my voice, because if Luke could get to my office then Luke could get to Jenny, could carry word to her, tell her something, anything.

"Great!" Luke said.

And then he was turning away, walking back to the wall, and the rest of what he said came to me in bits that wouldn't land — something about the key. "The key is still in the ignition," he said, over his shoulder, and I heard it and didn't hold it, my throat full of a thousand things I wanted to say and not one of them getting out. Take a message to my wife. Tell her where I am. Tell me how to get home.

He walked into the wall. That same wall that had shoved my own hands back at me like I was nothing took him through easy as a screen door, the colours folding over him, the surface rippling and sparking, and then he was gone. Back to the world I'd been torn out of. And the colours vanished with him.

And that was when it started to come down on me for real — that this place, this red ground and this hard sun, wasn't a thing I was passing through. That I might not be going anywhere at all. Not for a visit, not for a job. Maybe not ever, if what the kid had told me was true, if that wall only opened the one way for the likes of me.

The dust was in my teeth and on my skin and worked into the creases of my hands. The sun sat straight overhead and beat down like midday, though my body still swore it was morning — a grey Fern Tree morning with the heater off and frost on the grass. I'd stopped being able to tell what the time was. I'd stopped being able to tell much of anything.

"You've just missed Luke," Kain said — not to me, to someone past me.

I turned, slow, my body answering late, and saw a bloke coming towards us across the dust, up from the direction of a cluster of shapes I'd half-seen and not taken in: low structures, or the makings of them, swimming in the heat off the ground, too far to make out.

He was maybe mid-thirties, lean, and tanned dark, and lined past his years, with the ground-in weariness of long days worked out under a hard sun — though there was something about him that didn't quite square with the tradesmen I knew, some other thing under the dust I couldn't put a name to. Sweat had cut clean tracks through the grime on his forehead and he took no notice of it. He crossed that ground like he'd walked it a hundred times, no wasted step in him, certain of exactly where he was and what wanted doing, and it steadied me a little just to see it, that certainty, in a place that had knocked every certainty I owned clean out of me.

"But this is Nial," Kain said, waving a hand at me, easy as making introductions at a barbecue. And then, to me: "Paul is our camp leader. He's the one who keeps us all organised and safe."

Camp leader. The words had a shape I could hold — structure, somebody in charge, an order of things. It meant this wasn't just people flung down in the dirt and left. It meant a settlement, of a kind. Which should have been a comfort, and mostly it just laid more weight on: that people had been here long enough to need a leader. Long enough to work out what safe meant in a place like this, and what it didn't.

Paul put his hand out — an ordinary thing to do, and mad for it, out here — and when I took it the hand surprised me. Hard-used, the palm rough and raw in places, but not the deep, settled calluses that twenty years on the tools had worked into my own hands. Something newer than that, as though the hard work had come on him lately and all at once. Clean, too, cleaner than it had any right to be in all that dust. Warm, and firm, and real.

"Nice to meet you, Nial," he said. "I'm sorry you got caught up in all of this."

The sorry was the thing I hadn't braced for. I'd have taken indifference, or the forced brightness Luke wore. Not this — plain, and meant, and a bit sad with it. And somehow it made everything worse, because the sorry meant it was real — real, and bad, and not a thing anyone was going to undo.

"Yeah, me too," I said, and the words were nowhere near the size of what they had to carry, the fear and the anger and the flat disbelief all shoving at each other in my chest, but they were what came, and I held his hand a moment, and the grip of it was one more small solid real thing to hold in a morning that had none.

And there, with a stranger's hand in mine in the dust of nowhere, the whole of my ordinary life went past me in a rush and out of reach: Fern Tree, Jenny, Sammy, Buffy, the ute payment due next month, the supplier invoice I'd been meaning to go in and argue down. All of it on the far side of that wall now, behind a thing I couldn't get through and couldn't understand, and getting further off by the minute.

Paul's eye shifted, and I followed it down, and saw the thing I'd been too far gone to take in. Kain's leg. A grubby bandage round the calf, and under it and through it a stain gone dark and stiff in places and wet red in others, fresh blood over old. It had been bleeding again, and not for the first time.

The sight of it put a hard fact down in the middle of all the strangeness. Whatever this place was, it wasn't a picture, and it wasn't a dream. It had done that to him — torn him open, made him bleed — and it could do the same to me, or worse. This was somewhere that could hurt you.

"Kain, let's load Nial's ute with the remaining camping supplies to take back to camp," Paul said, and the practical of it, the flat ordinariness, was its own strange thing out there. "The three of us can return to camp together."

Camp. Supplies. More words that meant people had been here long enough to have a way of staying alive. And it took me a beat to wonder how Paul knew the ute was mine — I'd not said so, not claimed it — and then I looked round at the empty red run of the place and had my answer. My name was down the side of it, for one. And there was nothing else out here it could have belonged to. Nothing out here at all, bar the wall, and the scatter of gear in the sand, and the far-off shapes he'd walked in from.

"Yeah, that's a good idea," Kain said, and shifted his weight and couldn't keep the wince off his face. "My leg is getting too painful to walk."

It cost him to say it — I could see it, the jaw setting hard after the words, the colour coming up in his face at having been made to say them at all. I knew it from every site I'd ever run: the bloke who'd work a sprained wrist all day sooner than say the word, who reckoned owning the hurt was worse than the hurt. Same breed, this kid. Even here.

"You need to rest your leg," Paul told him, and there was a care in it, near enough fatherly, that said the two of them went back further than a day or two. "And you really should consider going to the river or lagoon to put some water on your wound." He turned it back to the practical. "I'll return to the Portal because I need to speak with Luke, and I promise you that I will ask Luke to get you some crutches."

River. Lagoon. Water. The first words since I'd landed that pointed to there being more to this place than red dirt and that wall — and where there was water there was the chance of something, I didn't even know what. But the rest of it landed harder. Luke could come back. Luke could cross that wall whenever he pleased, fetch and carry, while I stood on this side of it and couldn't. The unfairness of it got in under my ribs and settled there next to the fear, and began, slowly, to turn into something with an edge on it.

Kain got himself into the front of the ute, and it was a slow, careful business, his face shut tight against it, lifting the bad leg in with both hands and settling it across the seat in a way that looked no better but was maybe the least bad going.

That left Paul and me to load the tray.

It was nothing — moving bags and boxes off the ground and into the back of a ute, work I'd done a thousand times, could do half asleep. And that was the strangeness of it. My hands knew exactly what they were about, falling into the old rhythm of it, lift and turn and stack and lash, while the rest of me came apart quietly at the seams. Tents, sleeping bags, water containers, food sealed up in tubs, rope, tarps, a couple of camp stoves — the ordinary kit of getting by somewhere with nothing, loaded into my ute under a sun that had no business being in my sky.

Paul worked quick and sure, no lost motion in him — he'd plainly done this before. I worked slow, and somewhere in it I started to talk.

I hadn't meant to. It came out of me on its own, half to Paul and half to the air between us — I couldn't keep it shut inside my own skull a moment longer. I told him about the phone call, and the hundred thousand dollars, and the cash, and the drive up into the hills to a cottage that looked like nothing at all. I heard the regret drag through my own voice as I said it — every red flag I'd counted and stepped straight over, laid out now for the fool's errand it had been. I told him about the great wash of colour on the hallway wall, the thing I'd taken for a painting and stood there admiring while it waited to swallow me, and about Luke's shoulder coming into my ribs, and the floor going out from under the whole world.

What I didn't tell him was the rest of it. How far under the business had gone. The wrong figure two years back and the debt that had come pouring in behind it, the letters I couldn't bring myself to open, Bill Henderson carrying me on nothing but trust. Even here — even now, with everything I owned gone to the far side of a wall — I couldn't make myself lay that down in front of a stranger. Some failures a man keeps, wherever he ends up.

Now and then, without deciding to, I'd give my own arm a pinch through my shirt. Sharp, and real, every time. Not a dream. I knew it wasn't a dream. The pinching didn't change it. It just gave my hands something to do while my head went round and round.

Paul let me talk. He worked, and he listened, and every so often he'd put in a low word — go on, or what happened then — enough to keep me going, to keep pulling the next of it out of me. He didn't tell me it would be all right. I marked that, even then. He didn't reach for any of the easy things.

And somewhere in the loading of it, God help me, I prayed. I'd not prayed in twenty years — I was Anglican the way half of Hobart is Anglican, carols at Christmas and a decent shirt at Easter and not much in between. But I stood there with a water container in my arms and I prayed, hard and wordless, that I'd wake up. That Jenny would shake me and laugh at the state of me. That the dust under my boots would turn out to be a dream after all. The dust stayed dust. The container stayed heavy. Paul stayed real beside me. Nobody woke me up.

When there was a lull — me stood there holding a water can like I'd forgotten what it was for — Paul spoke up, quiet — no order in it, just the plain handing-over of a thing I needed.

"This place," he said, swinging a heavy tarp up into the tray, "it's called Clivilius."

Clivilius. The third time now — the voice in the falling, the kid with his arms flung wide, and now this steady man saying it plain over the side of my ute. Every time it got said it got more solid, harder to pretend around.

"And the small settlement we're part of," he went on, with a nod towards the far-off distance, "it's called Bixbus."

Bixbus. A daft-sounding word, a made-up-sounding word, and there was nothing in the way he said it that let me take it for anything but real. Names on things. And a thing with a name is a thing that's going to go on being there, whether you ever make your peace with it or not.

We got the last of it lashed down and Paul waved us aboard. I climbed in careful of Kain's leg, and Paul folded himself in on my other side, the three of us jammed into a cab built for two, close enough to feel the heat coming off each other, the smell of dust and sweat and the blood off Kain's leg thick in the shut air.

"Everything will be okay," Paul said, and turned the key.

The engine caught first go, that steady note I'd heard ten thousand times, and for the length of one breath I could have shut my eyes and been back in Tasmania, heading out to some ordinary job with ordinary troubles, an invoice to chase and a client gone quiet. Then I opened them, and the red ground ran out ahead of us to the end of the world, and that was that.

Paul drove, half-turned, steering one-handed, and whether it was the motion of the ute or just the need to fill the air, I went on talking. About the business this time — though again I kept to the top of it, the shape of the thing and not the rot underneath. Enough, I think, for him to understand why Luke had come for me and not some other bloke. Fences. That was the whole of it. Somebody who could put a barrier between a thing and the people it wanted to get at.

Because Paul, when he talked, talked about the dangers — low and level, no more heat in it than if he'd been telling me it might rain, which was somehow worse than if he'd made a show of it. Things that came in the dark. He said a name for them and I didn't hold it, some name for creatures I had no place to put — the things, I understood, that had opened Kain's leg to the bone the night before. That was the why of the fences. That was the why of me. Canvas and hope hadn't been enough to keep this lot breathing after sundown, and so Luke had reached across a wall into another world and taken the first fencer he could lay hands on.

He asked me straight out if I'd build for Bixbus. Put a line round it. Use the one thing I knew how to do to keep the dark on the outside of it.

And there it was — the joke of it, the bitter heart of the whole rotten business, and it near made me laugh out loud in that cab. Back home my fences couldn't keep me afloat. Couldn't compete, couldn't pay a wage, couldn't keep my own family off the rocks. And here, in hell or another world or wherever in God's name I'd fetched up, the same trade and the same two hands were suddenly the thing that might keep a camp of strangers alive. A dying skill on one side of that wall. Life and death on the other.

I didn't say yes. I didn't say no. I sat there with my knuckles gone white on my own knees and watched the shapes ahead of us harden up out of the shimmer.

The ute pitched and ground over the rough of it, the suspension complaining under the weight of three men and a loaded tray, and the far-off shapes came on and came clear — a cluster of structures firming up out of the heat-haze into something I could believe in, tents and rough walls and the smoke of a fire, set down in the red waste like it had grown there out of the ground.

Bixbus.

Home, apparently. Whether I'd have it or not.