The Voice Called Him Jerome

"Some choices are not choices at the time. They only become choices later, when you realise you could have not made them."

I gave the hallway another few seconds after the study door had clicked shut. Nothing came back through. No voices loud enough to reach my bedroom. Just the sound of Mum in the kitchen — a cupboard door, a tap running, the rhythmic clink of cutlery being put back where it lived.

If anyone in the house knew why Luke had come, it was going to be Mum. She might not tell me. She might not know, entirely. But she was the softest target I had. Dad was behind a closed door with the man I had questions about, Charles had already left for Seminary, and Luke was the question. Mum was the one I could walk up to.

Mum was at the bench in her pyjamas and dressing gown when I came in, her back to the doorway, working through the sequence of her breakfast with the particular efficiency of a woman who was not making breakfast so much as using breakfast as cover for something else. "Do you want one too?" she asked without turning, and I said, "Yes, please," already reaching for a mug from the cupboard on the left side of the sink.

The Milo tin was in its usual place. Three heaped tablespoons, then a fourth because this morning was a four kind of morning. Mum reached past me to the kettle and flicked it on without looking at me, and as she stepped back to the bench she asked, over her shoulder, "Is Millie coming home today?"

"She should be," I said. "I'll call the vet in a few hours to find out."

She nodded, still not turning, her hands having moved on to the granola — the blend with the cherries and almonds that she kept on the top shelf and that none of the rest of us touched. She nudged me sideways with her hip to get to the pantry, and I took a half-step aside without comment.

"Are you eating now?"

I shook my head, though she could not see me. "No thanks. My tummy is feeling a bit queasy."

"Millie will be fine," she said, measuring granola into her bowl with the wooden scoop.

The kettle was working toward the boil. I watched her hands. Whatever she had absorbed from the front door was sitting in her body in a way she was not concealing especially well — every movement half a degree too forceful, each small task done as if it had personally wronged her.

The kettle clicked. Mum poured the water into her mug first, stepped aside to let me at it, and I tilted the kettle over my Milo. The dark powder turned to slurry and then lifted into the water, and the smell was the smell of every morning of my life from about the age of seven.

I waited until I had the spoon in my hand before I asked.

"What's Luke doing here?"

"No idea." Too fast, the answer, and she had said it to the bench rather than to me.

I kept stirring. "How long is he staying for?"

"I don't know." The wooden scoop went back in the container too hard, hard enough that the container rattled against the bench, and without looking at me she added, "I didn't even know that he was coming."

That was something. Mum not knowing Luke was coming was not the same as Mum not knowing why he was here, but it was a piece of information I had not been holding a minute ago, and I filed it and reached for the next question.

"Did Dad know?"

She paused. Her shoulders lowered half an inch and then lifted again. For a second I thought she might turn around.

"I don't know what your father knows."

The words landed on the bench between us like something that had been left there by accident. Mum did not pick them back up. She picked up her mug instead, and her bowl, and she did not look at me, and I understood — in the particular wordless way a son understands his mother — that I had reached the edge of what she was going to give me this morning. I stirred my Milo one more time and set the spoon on the bench and picked up the mug with both hands the way I had held mugs since I was a boy who needed both to manage them.

Mum stood for a moment at the threshold between the kitchen and the dining area with the mug in one hand and the bowl in the other, and her shoulders did the thing they did when she was about to decide something.

"That's enough time."

She set the mug and the bowl down on the dining table with two small clatters and went. Her Ugg boots crossed the tile, and then the loud squeak of the study door being pushed open, and my mother's voice pitched for the audience she had just given herself.

"Are you two done with your secret man's business yet?"

And then nothing.

I stood at the bench with the Milo already too hot to drink, listening for something that did not come. No raised voices. No storm back up the hall. Just three adults in a room without me.

I took a sip. Still too hot.

Another minute. Maybe two. They were all talking without me, and I was standing in the kitchen with a mug of Milo and a brother in my father's study who I had not seen in close to two years, and I wanted answers.

My feet took me past the threshold into the hallway, and I kept walking.

The study door was open.

Luke was alone in the middle of the room, and the wall behind Dad's desk was not the wall behind Dad's desk. Where the wall had been was filled with colour — blues and greens and a gold that was not gold and a red that was not red, moving against each other in swirling, mesmerising rotations. I stopped in the doorway. My brain did a thing brains do when asked to process an input they have no compartment for — it simply failed to compartmentalise, and the failure sat in my chest as a kind of quiet panic.

"Where are Mum and Dad?" I asked, when I saw they were not in the room.

Luke turned at the sound. "Jerome — quick," and his hand was already at my elbow before I had worked out he had crossed the room, "they're just on the other side, quick, you'd better follow them," and he was steering me past the desk toward the colour, not pushing but not letting me stop.

The colour filled my field of view.

"Go."

I went.

The colour closed behind me.

I was standing on red earth.

The sky above me was a blue I had never seen over Adelaide. The air was clean and fresh. There was a new silence, not the suburban silence I had left behind but a silence that went all the way to the horizon, and the horizon was a long way away, and there was nothing between me and it except ochre ground.

My parents were a few metres ahead of me. They were still holding hands. They were not looking at me. They were looking at the horizon, or at something in it, or at nothing.

I took a step forward. My feet felt the ground through the tracksuit pants — the wrong ground, not tile, not the carpet of the study, something dry and fine and warm.

And then the voice.

It was not a voice I heard with my ears. It was in my head the way a thought was in my head — present, articulate, entirely not something I had put there myself. It was not loud. It was not soft either. It was just itself.

Welcome to Clivilius, Jerome Smith.

My name.

The voice knew my name.