The Grassy Knoll

"The most dangerous place to take a secret is somewhere you're happy."

I stood in my own shower for a long time with the water as hot as I could stand it, and watched Clivilius come off me and go down the drain of a flat in Battery Point.

It was extraordinary how much of it there was. It came out of my hair in rust-coloured rivulets that ran down my chest and my legs and gathered around my feet, and the water in the base of the shower went orange, properly orange, and swirled away, and I scrubbed my scalp and it kept coming. I got a nailbrush from under the sink—a nailbrush I had bought for cleaning something else entirely and had never once used—and went at my hands with it until the skin was raw and shining, and the beds of my nails went from black to brown to a faint stubborn ochre and then stopped, and would not go any further, whatever I did.

It was in me. It had got into the whorls and the cuticles and the fine cracks of my knuckles and it had no intention of leaving, and I stood in the steam with my hands held up in front of my face like a surgeon and understood that I would be finding it for weeks.

The shirt was on the bathroom floor where I had dropped it.

I picked it up when I got out, and stood there with a towel round my waist and the shirt in both hands, and could not decide what to do with it.

It was ruined. That was not in question. A hundred and forty dollars of pale blue cotton with a red stain across the entire front of it, ground into the weave, and no laundry on earth was going to lift it. In any ordinary week it would have gone straight into the bin.

But it was the only proof.

That was what stopped me. Standing in a steamed-up bathroom holding a shirt, I understood that this filthy garment was the sole piece of physical evidence anywhere on this planet that I had not lost my mind. Everything else was in my head or in my pocket. The dust in the carpet of Meeting Room 4B was gone, flushed and blotted and hidden under two chairs. My hands were nearly clean. The devices proved nothing at all to anybody who had not seen a wall come apart.

But there was soil in that shirt from a world with a silent sea, and if it ever came to a room with a doctor in it and my mother sitting in the corner with her hands in her lap, then somebody could put the cotton under a microscope and find something on it that does not occur on Earth.

I did not put it in the wash. I found a plastic bag and folded the shirt into it and tied the handles and put it in the bottom of my wardrobe behind the suitcase, and then stood there looking at the wardrobe and thought: this is what a madman does. A madman hides the evidence that will vindicate him. That is textbook. That is precisely and exactly what they do.

I left it there anyway.

The three remaining Portal Keys went into an old tobacco tin that had belonged to my grandfather and had held drawing pins for eleven years, and the tin went into the back of the cutlery drawer under the tea towels, which is the least imaginative hiding place in the entire history of human anxiety, and I knew that while I was doing it, and I did it anyway. My own Portal Key went into my trouser pocket, where it sat against my thigh, warm, the way it had sat all afternoon.

And then I stood in my kitchen in a towel, with nothing whatever to do, and the evening opened up in front of me like a hole in the floor.

Which was when I remembered what day it was.

Wednesday. It went through me like a light coming on.

Wednesday meant the Prince of Wales. It had meant the Prince of Wales for four years—half seven, the table at the front by the window, a gold coin in the tin on the bar, a photocopied answer sheet and a biro that did not work, and Tony wheeling his little speaker out of the storeroom at about ten past and taking his time about it, because Tony had never hurried at anything in his life.

I loathe pub trivia.

Of everything I have ever done, it is the least characteristic and the least explicable. I do not enjoy competitive recall. I do not enjoy being asked, by a man with a microphone, to produce the capital of Burkina Faso in ninety seconds in front of strangers. I do not enjoy the artificial jeopardy, or the tables with printed T-shirts, or the way a roomful of grown adults will boo a correct answer. There is a laminated certificate on the wall by the toilets from the one night we came first, and I could not tell you a single question that was on it, and I had never in four years cared for one second whether we won.

I go because Seth goes.

That was the whole of the arrangement, and I had never once bothered to examine it, because it had never needed examining. One night a week, for four years, my friend had sat at that table with a beer in front of him and been completely and uncomplicatedly happy—arguing with the answers, disputing the geography round on principle, producing from somewhere the name of a nineteenth-century pope or an obscure mining disaster in Wales, delighted with himself and with all of us. And I had sat next to him bored out of my skull and would not have missed it for anything.

He named the team. He called it The Grassy Knoll, in the first week, and would not be talked out of it, and he wrote it at the top of the sheet in block capitals every Wednesday; and when Tony read it out at the end—and in fourth place, The Grassy Knoll—Seth made the same joke about the official version of events, every single week, and it had not been funny since 2015, and I laughed every single time.

He also, every single week, without fail, insisted on playing the joker on the geography round.

The joker doubled the score on one round. Each team got one, and it had to be handed in before round three, and the sensible thing to do with it—the thing any reasonable person would have done—was to hold it back and spend it on whichever round the team was strongest in, which for us was music, because Bec knew every song ever recorded.

Seth had never once permitted this. Seth believed that the geography round was a personal insult constructed specifically to humiliate him, and that to withhold the joker from it would constitute a form of surrender. We had wasted the joker on geography one hundred and ninety times, and every week Gav said mate, we could just—, and every week Seth said this is the year, and it never was.

He had never missed one. Not for a birthday. Not for a funeral. Not for the week he had shingles so badly he could not get a shirt on, when he came anyway in a T-shirt with a face like a boiled ham and won us the music round.

He would be there tonight.

I did not examine that thought at all. I let it in, and it was warm, and it was the first warm thing that had happened to me since eight o'clock that morning. He had been in a laneway in this city at lunchtime. He had been alive at lunchtime, standing over me with his hands shaking. And whatever else was happening to Seth Holder, Seth Holder did not miss Wednesday.

I got dressed with my hands shaking slightly and went to catch a bus into town.

The Prince of Wales on a January Wednesday was a working pub doing its ordinary work.

The bistro was still going when I got there and half the room was eating—parmas the size of hubcaps, a family of four at the long table, two blokes at the bar with their plates on the bar because they could not be bothered sitting down. The specials were up on the chalkboard in somebody's cheerful handwriting. There was a raffle drum on the end of the counter with a hand-lettered sign about a meat tray. The air was warm and beery and smelled of hot fryer oil, and everybody who came in had been outside all day and had the pink shoulders to prove it.

Tony was over by the corner with his speaker and a laptop, taking his time.

I put a gold coin in the tin, got a beer, and took it to our table.

It was the one at the front by the window, and it had been ours for four years by the sort of unspoken pub arrangement that nobody had ever put into words. I sat down in my usual chair, which had its back to the room, and then got straight up again and moved round to the other side.

Because from that side I could see the front door.

I knew what I was doing while I was doing it. I sat down in the wrong chair with a beer I did not want and put my phone face-up on the table, and every single time that door opened—every time somebody came in, or went out for a smoke, or held it for a mate—my head came up.

Bec and Gav arrived just before half past. They had been on the team since before I was; they are married, and they are the kind of people who are genuinely and unforcedly kind, which is rarer than anybody admits. Bec does something in allied health and knows every song ever recorded. Gav is a sparky and reads history books about the Pacific and is worth two rounds a week on his own.

"Nate." Gav set a jug down. "You look shocking."

"Long day."

"Yeah?" He was already pouring. "Where's Seth?"

"He'll be along."

Tony tapped the microphone twice, and the feedback squealed, and the pub half-quietened in the way that a pub quietens, which is not very much at all.

"Righto," said Tony. "Evening everyone. Six rounds. Jokers in before round three, please, and I'm not taking them after, Deborah, I don't care what you say."

The room laughed. Somebody at the back said something and Tony said "you certainly did not," and the sheets went round.

I wrote THE GRASSY KNOLL at the top of ours in block capitals, because somebody had to.

Round one was general knowledge. Round one was always general knowledge. Tony read out each question twice in that flat unbothered voice of his, and then there was a minute or so of every table in the pub hunching in and muttering at one another, and then he moved on whether we were ready or not.

I contributed almost nothing.

I was there in body. I picked up the biro and put it down again. Gav asked me twice what I thought and I said something both times and I could not tell you now what either answer was. Bec got a song title before Tony had finished saying it. A woman two tables over stood up and shouted an answer at her own husband and the whole pub jeered her. The raffle drum went round and a bloke in a fishing shirt won the meat tray and held it above his head like a cup.

Seth did not come in.

By the end of round one he was not there, and the chair beside me was still empty, and Bec had her phone up.

"He's not answering. Just does that disconnected thing."

"Typical," said Gav, writing. "He'd have got question eight, too. Popes. That's his bread and butter, popes."

It was. He would have had it in a second and been insufferable about it and made Tony read the whole thing again so that he could argue about the wording, and I sat at that table with a beer I had not touched and felt something coming for me from a long way off.

Because Seth was not late. Seth had never in four years been late.

And then I did something that I did not plan, and did not weigh, and did not think about for one single second.

I picked up my phone and opened a message to Verity Sloane and typed:

Are you still in town?

Sent it.

I'm at trivia at the Prince of Wales. Come.

Sent that too.

Then I put the phone face-down on the beer mat and looked at the back of it and thought, with a clarity that arrived approximately four seconds too late: what have you just done.

Because what I had done was invite a forensic accountant to come and sit two feet away from me and look at me for the rest of the evening. A woman who had that morning laid the arithmetic of my movements out on a carpet between us like a set of accounts. Who had lied to a room full of people for me that afternoon. Who had told me there was red dirt on my collar and then said nothing whatever about it.

I had a doorway to another world in my trouser pocket, three more in a tin in a cutlery drawer, half a jug of beer in front of me, and a long night ahead of that.

I picked the phone up. I was going to send another one. Ignore that. Long day. Another time.

The three dots appeared.

Still at the office. Fifteen minutes.

I put the phone down and drank about a third of a beer in one go, which is a thing I never do, and Tony said, "Righto, round two, and this one's sport, so I don't want to hear it," and the pub groaned at him, and I sat there with my ears ringing.

She came in during the sport round.

The door opened and my head came up the way it had been coming up all night, and for one absolutely appalling half-second my whole body thought Seth—

—and it was Verity, in the doorway, in the clothes she had been wearing since half past seven that morning. Charcoal trousers, the same blouse, her work bag over her shoulder. She had come straight from the building. She stood just inside the door and read the room in about a second and a half—she did that; she had always done that; she came into a space and took an inventory of it before she took a step—and then she found me and came over.

"Verity, this is Bec, that's Gav. Verity's from work."

"Sit down, love," said Bec, delighted, shoving the jug across. "We are being absolutely slaughtered."

And Verity sat down in Seth's chair.

She did it without a flicker, because it was the empty one, and because it was there, and because there was no reason on earth for her not to. She put her bag on the floor and pulled the chair in and reached across for the sheet to see what we had.

Nobody at that table thought anything of it whatsoever. I sat eighteen inches away and could not get a breath past whatever was in my chest.

"What are we?"

"Nineteen," said Gav. "Out of thirty. It's grim."

"Right," said Verity, and picked up the biro.

"Question four," said Tony. "In which year was the Franklin Dam blockade—"

"Eighty-two," said Gav.

"—concluded."

Verity's head came up.

"Not eighty-two."

"It's eighty-two. That's when it started—"

"He said concluded. He's changed the verb." She was already writing. "He did the same thing in round one, with the moons. You all fell for it."

Gav opened his mouth and closed it again.

It was eighty-three.

What she did over the next hour was not what people assume when I have tried to describe it afterwards, which is that she must have been some sort of walking encyclopaedia. She was not. There were whole questions she simply did not know, and when she did not know she said "no idea" instantly, flatly, with no embarrassment at all, and moved on—which is a thing I have never in my life been able to do.

What she was doing was listening to Tony.

"He's giving us four and three of them are European," she said in the middle of the geography round, tapping the end of the biro against the table. "He never does that. He's a fair man. He doesn't stack it three-to-one unless the odd one out is the answer and he thinks he's being clever."

"So it's the Peruvian one."

"It's the Peruvian one."

It was the Peruvian one.

Two questions later she put the biro down and said, "Get him to read it again."

"What?"

"Bec. Ask him to read it again."

Bec, who would do absolutely anything, shouted "Tony! Give us it again, love!"—and Tony, entirely unhurried, read it again, and Verity sat perfectly still with her eyes on the middle distance and listened to a man in a polo shirt read out a question about mining royalties, and when he had finished she said, quietly:

"He slowed down. Did you hear him slow down? He always slows down on the one he thinks is hard."

And she gave us an answer, and a small dry aside about the Tasmanian Government's procurement practices, and Gav laughed so hard he had to put his glass down.

And then, before round three, Tony came round for the jokers.

Bec pushed our sheet at me. "Go on, then. Geography, is it."

Because it was always geography. Because for four years it had been geography, every single week, because Seth would not have it any other way—and I sat there with the biro over the box and something went through me so hard that I had to put my hand flat on the table.

Verity was watching me.

"What are the rounds?" she said.

"What?"

"The remaining rounds. What are they?"

Gav counted them off. "Geography's this one. Then it's music, then the picture round, then current events."

"Who's your best?"

"Bec. Music, easily. She's frightening."

"Then why would you play it on geography," said Verity, not really as a question, and reached across and took the biro out of my hand and wrote MUSIC in the box, and handed the sheet to Tony, and picked up her drink.

Nobody argued with her. Gav made a noise like a man who has been waiting four years for somebody to say that out loud.

Bec got nine out of ten in the music round, and Tony doubled it, and we finished second by a margin that made Gav so happy he bought a jug we did not need and Bec so happy she put her arm round the back of Verity's chair for the rest of the night.

In four years we had never come second.

And I sat in the middle of all of it, and I drank, and I watched my own mouth.

That was my evening, if I am being honest about it. Not the quiz. Not the delight of my friends. I sat at that table with a Portal Key in my pocket and three beers in me and ran a continuous, exhausting, second-by-second guard on every single thing that came out of my face.

Because it wanted out. That was what I had not anticipated. I had spent the whole day fighting to keep it in against fear—and now I was warm, and fed, and among people who liked me, and slightly drunk, and the thing had turned round in my chest and started pushing the other way. It wanted out. I had a story. I had the best story anybody at that table would ever hear in their lives, and Gav was pulling his sceptical face about something and Bec was laughing and Verity was eighteen inches away with her chin on her hand, and every social instinct I possess stood up and said tell them. Go on. Tell them.

I caught myself starting a sentence. Twice.

The first time it was You know what's mad—and I heard it leave me and turned it, in mid-air, into something about the photocopier, and Gav said "riveting, mate," and the moment went past.

The second time was worse.

Verity said something about Tony's questions being written by a man who secretly wanted to be caught, and I said, "That's exactly what Seth—"

And stopped. Dead. Mid-word. In front of all three of them.

"Seth what?" said Bec.

"Nothing. He'd have liked that. That's all."

And Bec smiled and turned to Verity, in the friendliest possible way, and said, "Do you know Seth? Nate's mate. He's normally here. Bit of a conspiracy nut, lovely bloke."

"No," said Verity. "I don't think we've met."

And then she looked at me. She did not turn her head. She simply moved her eyes, and they came across the table and landed on me, and she looked at me for perhaps a second and a half.

"He couldn't make it," I said.

"Yeah, that's not like him," said Gav cheerfully, refilling. "Never misses. Came with shingles one year. Sat right there looking like death."

"He's away. Work thing. Came up suddenly."

Nobody blinked. Bec said she had once had a client with shingles and it was no laughing matter, and Gav agreed that it certainly wasn't, and the conversation went off somewhere else entirely, and the whole thing took about nine seconds.

Verity did not say anything at all. She picked up her glass and drank from it and looked out of the window at the street.

I got up and went to the bar and came back with a glass of water and drank the whole thing standing up, and then I got another one, and I did not touch beer again for the rest of the night.

Gav asked if I was all right. I said I had a headache.

That one, at least, was true.

They turned the lights up at the end and put us out onto the footpath, and the noise of the place came out with me and stayed in my ears for a minute or so, and then the night took it off me.

It was cold, in the way that Hobart gets cold even in January once the sun has finally gone—that clean edge coming down off the mountain and up off the water at the same time—and the four of us stood on the footpath doing the long Australian business of saying goodbye, which took about eleven minutes and involved saying goodbye roughly six times.

Bec hugged everybody, including Verity, who submitted to it with the stiff good grace of a woman who is not hugged very often. Gav told me to eat something. They went off up the street arguing amiably about whether they could be bothered with chips.

Verity stood at the kerb with her phone out, waiting for the car she had booked, and I stood next to her because it would have been strange not to.

The street did its thing around us. A taxi went past with its light on. Somebody's music, somewhere. The smell of the harbour coming up the hill.

"Four minutes," she said, without looking up.

"Right."

She put the phone away and pushed her hair back off her face, and I saw, properly, for the first time all night, how tired she was. She had been at that desk before I got in that morning. She had covered a meeting for me. She had lied to six people and then come out to a pub, in the clothes she had been wearing for fourteen hours, because a man who would not tell her anything had sent her two lines at half past seven at night.

"Thank you for asking me," Verity said.

I looked at her.

"That was fun. I haven't done anything on a Wednesday in about two years." She was watching the traffic. "They're nice, your friends."

And that was all of it. There was no edge in it and no test in it and nothing underneath it at all, and it went into me like a knife going into something soft—because I had not invited her out of friendship, or kindness, or any decent motive whatsoever. I had invited her because I was coming apart in a pub on my own and I needed a body in a chair, and I had sat next to her all evening carrying my own mouth like a full cup across a moving train.

"Any time," I said.

A white Camry came up the street with its indicator going.

"That's me." She picked up her bag. And then she stopped with her hand on the door and looked back at me over the roof of the car.

"Nathan."

"Yeah."

She looked at me for a moment.

"Go home," Verity said. "You look like you've been hit by a bus."

Then she got in, and the door shut, and the car pulled out and went up the street and turned, and I was standing on the footpath outside the Prince of Wales on my own.

I did not get the bus. I walked.

And somewhere on the hill, about halfway up, with the harbour going black below me and my legs aching and the whole city put away for the night, I stopped dead in the middle of the footpath.

Because for about two hours—from somewhere in the geography round until they turned the lights up—I had not thought about it.

Not once. Not the wall, not the dust, not the sea, not the voice. Two entire hours of my life in which I had simply been a man in a pub with his friends, being beaten at a quiz by a woman from work.

It was the first mercy of the whole day.

And standing there with my hand on somebody's fence, I felt it come back. All of it, in one piece, all at once, the way water comes back into a footprint.

I put my hand in my pocket and closed it round the Portal Key, and it was warm, and I walked the rest of the way home.