Under My Breath

Some things you say out loud. Some things you only ever say under your breath — and that second list, I'm learning, is the longer one.

The smell of the cooking reached us before the camp did — fat catching, smoke, the particular sweetness of meat over an open flame — and my stomach answered it before the rest of me had caught up. We came down the last of the dunes with the trolleys fighting us the whole way, the bottles going like a badly played percussion section over every turn, and there it was, assembling itself out of the dust: the camp, the cook fires, the whole welcome I'd talked Paul into that afternoon.

Dad had the big fire. He stood over it with a length of tongs, turning the meat with the slow attention he gives a thing he's decided to do properly, and beside him Chris worked a second grill, the two of them side by side and saying nothing, which a fire lets you get away with. Through the caravan window I could see Mum and Karen moving quick and busy behind the glass, the clatter of pots carrying out across the open ground.

There was a tempo to the camp I hadn't seen in it before. Dad worked the fire at his usual even pace, except there was a clock behind it now, and the whole camp was keeping to the same one. I'd been in this world less than a day and didn't know the half of what it asked of a person yet; but I'd already gathered, from how often their eyes went to the dropping sun, that the dark out here was a thing you got in front of, not one you let catch you in the open.

For a few steps it was all right. Then the trolleys came in over the harder ground by the fire, the bottles found their voice again, and Dad's head came round.

I watched it land on him. His eyes went to the trolleys, to the glass stacked in them catching the low sun, and his face did a small thing — a tightening at the jaw, there and gone — before he looked back down at the grill and turned a piece of meat that did not need turning. He didn't say a word. That was the worst of it. My father has a whole language of not saying things, and I've been fluent in it my entire life, and what he said now, in the turn of a chop he'd already cooked through, was that he had seen exactly what we'd wheeled into his camp, and knew exactly whose hands had wheeled it, and was not going to give it the dignity of a scene.

The heat went up the back of my neck that had nothing to do with the fire.

Chris had no such language. He straightened off his grill, clocked the trolleys, and was into one before I'd thought to brace for it — came up with a brown bottle, knocked the cap off on the steel edge of the grill frame with ease, and took a pull. "Well," he said, to nobody, to the evening. "That's a turn-up." Whatever it was that held my father's hand to the tongs had never once been laid on Chris, and he drank his beer by the fire as though he'd earned it, which I suppose he had.

"Relax." Charles had come up at my shoulder with the second trolley and was watching me watch Dad. "They know what beer is, Jerome. It's not going to corrupt them on sight."

I couldn't, though. Charles has never once in his life felt a thing land the way it lands on me, and standing there I envied him it — the lightness of him, that he could roll a trolley of contraband into our father's welcome and feel nothing but the fun of it.

They came round the far side of the camp then, the three of them, in off the sheds — Adrian, Nial, and the other one, Kain, that I knew least. A day's work was all over them, dust gone to mud in the creases of their necks, shirts stuck dark down the spine. I'd met Adrian and Nial properly only that afternoon, over the barrels, which in this place already felt a week back; and short as that was, I'd learned the main thing there was to learn about the pair of them, which was that they hadn't asked to be here, that the asking had been done to them by somebody, and that they carried it differently.

Nial wore it out front, in the warmth that kept arriving a half-second late, like it had a distance to travel. Adrian kept his where you couldn't get at it — that banked watchfulness, a man counting the exits of a place that had no doors. The graze on his cheekbone had darkened to a proper bruise since the morning. Neither of them, I'd have put money on it, had slept.

Adrian saw the glass and something in him eased by a single notch — not a smile, he didn't seem to deal in those, but the nearest his face would come to one. He lifted a beer off the trolley of his own accord, asking nobody for the leave of it. "Wherever this came from," he said, working the cap, "it's the first sensible thing that's happened since I got here." Not warm. Just a fact set down at the end of a long day. He drank.

Nial came after him and took one too, and tipped it an inch Beatrix's way — a tired salute — before he drank. Kain's came last, and quietest, and the three of them stood a little apart from the fire with their bottles, just come from a day of building walls they'd had no say in, and for a moment nobody asked anything of them and they asked nothing back.

"Help yourselves," Beatrix said, unnecessarily, since they had, and propped herself against the end of a trolley with her wine, comfortable as a publican behind a full bar.

Adrian's eyes went to her when she spoke and stayed a beat past where they needed to — not unfriendly, just weighing her: setting a face he half knew against a thing he couldn't yet put a name to. Then it was gone and he was looking at his bottle again, and I filed it with the other things about him I couldn't read.

The drink loosened something across the camp — the men easier on their feet, Chris saying a thing to Dad that got half a laugh out of him — but it wound me tighter, not looser. Dad's quiet pressed down between my shoulders, and I wanted, badly, to be somewhere that wasn't here.

Beatrix handed me the way out without knowing she had. "We're not done," she said, pushing off the trolley. "There's the tables and the chairs still down at the Drop Zone — a fair few of them. That's two trips at least, and not on foot. We'll want a ute. Two would be better." She threw a look at the sky as she said it, quick and unsmiling, the same glance the others kept stealing. "And we'll want to be quick about it."

Adrian lowered his beer. "You said nothing about tables."

"I'm improving the place." She lifted one shoulder. "Somebody has to. They're sitting in the dirt out there doing nobody any good."

He looked at her a moment longer — that weighing look again — then reached into his pocket and came out with a set of keys, turning them once over his knuckles. "I've a ute," he said. "Came through with me." There was a whole history folded into those three words, and he didn't unfold it, and I didn't reach for it. If his ute had come through, then he'd come through with it — in it, near enough — and that wasn't a road I'd walk him down on the strength of one afternoon's acquaintance.

"So've I." Nial drained the last of his and set the bottle on the trolley. "Might as well make a job of it. Be something to do." That last part he said mostly to himself, and I understood it better than he'd have guessed — the next task being a place to stand where the rest of it couldn't reach him.

"We'll walk it down," I said, too quickly, before anyone could think to send me up to the camp instead of out of it. Charles caught my eye and read the whole of it in a blink — the booze, Dad, the wanting-gone — and backed me without a word. "Beatrix knows the way. We'll meet you there."

We were turning to go when Mum came out of the caravan, wiping her hands down a tea towel, and her eyes went over the camp the way they do — the quick headcount, every child placed — and snagged on the trolleys. On the glass in them. I watched the sum do itself behind her face, the same sum that had done itself behind Dad's, and her brow drew in, and her mouth opened on the front of a question.

I didn't stay for the end of it. I put my back to my mother for the second time that day and went up the first dune after Beatrix with my heart going, and by the time I'd have had to find an answer we were over the top of it and down the far side and gone.

The far side of the dune took the camp's noise with it, as it always did, and for a while there was only the three of us and the shift of the ground underfoot. There was good light in the country still, but Beatrix walked into it quicker than she'd come the other way, and I was new enough that I couldn't read what she read in the lie of the sun — only that watching it so close was a habit of the ones who'd lasted out here, and that I'd do well to learn it. The walk had sobered me a little — enough to feel the size of what I'd done, not yet enough to be sorry for it.

She walked a few steps ahead with the wine bottle swinging loose from two fingers, and after a while the watcher in me couldn't leave it be.

"Why bring that?" I said. "You've a whole trolley of it back there."

She turned just enough to show me the side of a grin. "Sometimes a thing's just necessary." She tipped a mouthful out of it, unhurried, and walked on. "Anyway. I'm not the only one carrying."

"Meaning what?"

"Ask your brother."

I looked back at Charles. He'd dropped a few steps behind, and he was wearing the face — the specific, insufferable face he's worn since he was four years old and got away with a thing, the one that's begging you to ask. So I didn't ask. I just looked. And he cracked anyway, because getting away with it is no fun to Charles unless there's a witness to the getting.

He hooked a thumb into his jacket and held it open. Stood up in a row against the lining were two of the little flavoured bottles, the bright labels winking out at me like they were in on it.

"Charles." It came out of me halfway to a laugh, which finished it as a telling-off. "You did not."

"I wasn't leaving the good stuff for Paul." He let the jacket fall shut. "Be reasonable."

Beatrix laughed properly at that and lifted her bottle to him. "Resourceful," she said. "That's the word Luke uses about you lot. I'm starting to see it."

I shook my head at the two of them and couldn't get the smile off my face doing it. Charles was not supposed to be a boy who smuggled drink inside his coat. I was not supposed to be a boy who'd grin at him for it. This time yesterday I could have told you the exact shape of the both of us, and the shape had a wall down the middle of it marked things we do not do, and I'd watched that wall come down all afternoon, brick by brick, and the strange part — the part I'd have to sit with later, alone, when there was nobody to perform anything for — was how little the coming-down had hurt.

Charles worked the two bottles out of his jacket and passed me one with the cap already broken loose; he'd thought of that, the little planner. He held his own up.

"We're going to be in so much trouble," I said. I heard the whisper in it, the under-the-breath of it, and this time I didn't hate the sound. I touched my bottle to his.

It was sweet and bright and went down easy, that low warmth opening out behind my ribs that I was already, God help me, learning the shape of. Charles took two swallows and was grinning at me over the neck of it. Ahead of us Beatrix walked on with her wine and didn't look back, leaving the two of us to it.

"Lightweights," she called, not as a question.

"Maybe." Charles said it happily, to the whole empty country. "Best fun I've had since we got dragged to the end of the world, though."

And the thing of it was — walking out there with a stolen bottle in my hand and my father's silence still cooling on the back of my neck and a secret about a detective I wasn't allowed to say sitting underneath all of it — the thing of it was, I couldn't find it in me to tell him he was wrong.