What Life Does

"The first person who asks you a real question in a new place is the one you remember longest."

"What are you, about twenty?"

She asked it without turning round, the words coming back to me over her shoulder, her pace not breaking for them. The gate and the fence and the head on the post had dropped out of sight behind the rises; ahead there was nothing but more of the same red ground, Karen's back, and the brim of her hat tilted down against the sun.

"Twenty-one."

"Hm."

She walked on. I waited for the follow-up. There was none. The hm had been the whole of it — the noise a woman makes when she has taken in a piece of information and is deciding whether to do anything with it, and has decided, for now, that she is not. I found I was not offended. The hm had been a kind of small courtesy, if anything. She had asked me a question. She had listened to the answer. She had not pretended the answer interested her more than it did.

She had not once looked back at me, and I was beginning to understand that the not-looking-back was not unkindness so much as the way she moved through a task — shoulders set, arms not swinging — a woman who had decided how far she was going to walk and would not be turned from it by whoever was walking behind. The ground passed under us in the slow way of red earth. I kept up; it was not difficult. My bare feet were caked to the ankle, and the arm under the dressing had begun to ache the way it had been aching all morning, a low reminder that the rest of my body was still there too, and the sun had climbed far enough that I felt it now on the crown of my head.

Another stretch of silence.

"Your mum," she said, still without turning, "is she always like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like — all of it."

I thought about that. It was the first time anyone had asked me that question in exactly that way, and the way Karen had asked it — the flatness of it, no judgement in it, the way a new neighbour might ask you whether the dog next door always barked at six in the morning — made it easier to answer honestly than the question deserved.

"Most of the time, yeah. She's always been like that. The pyjamas are new."

Karen made a sound that might have been a laugh. It was the first laugh I had heard out of her since she had arrived in our lives, and it was not a big one — a small exhale through the nose, more acknowledgement than mirth — but it was a laugh.

"The pyjamas are new," she repeated, to herself. "Alright."

We walked on.

After another minute she slowed, waited for me to draw level with her, and then matched her pace to mine. It was done without announcement — she had evidently decided that walking beside someone she had something to say to beat making them talk to her back.

"What's the thing on your arm," she said.

"It's a dressing."

"I can see it's a dressing. What's under the dressing."

I glanced at her. Her eyes were not on me; they were on the ground ahead of us. But there was a small alert quality to the set of her head, the way a person listens when they have asked a question because the answer might tell them something they need to know rather than because they are making conversation. I could feel, without entirely wanting to, that Karen was assessing me. For what I could not immediately say. But there was a job-interview quality to the question that I did not have the energy to resent.

"Laceration. About four inches. Raptor got me."

She stopped walking.

Her hat tilted towards me properly for the first time since we had started. Her eyes narrowed. And her face did a thing I did not understand immediately but which I would spend the next minute working back through in embarrassment. It was a small careful shift. A brief re-assessment. A recalculation in which the Jerome in front of her had just dropped, slightly, in whatever column she had been tallying him in.

I did not understand the shift for about two seconds. And then I did. Handling a raptor — without further context, in a clothing-still-on-pyjamas, parents-in-tow, been-in-Clivilius-an-hour version of this conversation — sounded, to an experienced field scientist with her own working scars, like a story about a student volunteer who had got himself hurt doing a thing he should not have been doing. Which was the opposite of what I wanted her thinking about me right now.

I corrected before the silence stretched.

"Wedge-tailed eagle. Tangled in barbed wire on a property fence out past Williamstown. Six hours before the owner called it in. My senior and I went out to do the rescue."

The hat tilted back a degree.

"How long ago."

"Six days."

"And the eagle?"

I paused.

This was the part I was not ready for. Not because it was complicated — because it was not. It was simple. I genuinely did not know. I had meant to ask, but had forgotten.

I scrunched my face. I had not meant to. The face did it before I had decided.

"I don't know," I said. "I — I haven't. Other things — there's been —" I cut myself off. The sentence was going to finish as a list of excuses and Karen was not a woman who needed a list. "I don't know. I don't know what happened to it."

Karen looked at me properly for the first time. She held the look for a second longer than the moment required.

Then she said, "Do you know what happens to a wedge-tail that takes six hours of fighting wire?"

"Usually the wing goes."

"Usually the wing goes," she agreed, and she said it in the voice of a person who had watched a lot of birds come off wire and knew exactly what the arithmetic of it was, "and usually you don't walk away with a four-inch laceration and a finished rescue. So whoever your senior was, they did the work properly, and they kept you in good enough shape for the day after, and you kept the blanket on. Which is the part most people don't do. They let go. They see blood, they drop the blanket, and then the bird gets a second chance to take a piece out of them."

I did not say anything.

"I'm not asking if the eagle made it." Her voice had not softened exactly, but it had changed register. The interview quality was gone. "I'm asking whether you are the kind of person who does the work. And it sounds like you are."

She started walking again.

I caught up with her after a second. My throat had gone slightly narrow. Not because she had praised me — I had been praised more, and more effusively, by Margaret six days ago, and the praise six days ago had not done this to my throat. The thing that did it was that Karen had not been praising me. She had been assessing me, and the assessment had come back with a result she had quietly filed, and I understood, walking beside her on the red ground without looking at her, that I had just been evaluated for something and had apparently passed.

For what, I did not yet know.

"What were you studying," she said. "Back home."

"Zoology. Third year. University of Adelaide."

"Where's your field work."

"The Adelaide Hills Wildlife Haven. Been volunteering there two years. The last six months I've been in more than weekends — three or four days a week, most weeks."

She nodded without turning. The nod had a quality of I thought so.

"The eagle was through them."

"Yeah. Haven does rescue callouts for the region. They get about — I don't know, two, three big ones a week. Macropods mostly. Raptors less often."

"You rehab?"

"Mostly cleaning, feeding, monitoring. I've done some of the trickier cases. Overnight observations. A joey wombat with respiratory issues, last Monday." I hesitated, then added, because it was true, "I've got the patience for it. I don't have the background some of the staff have. But I don't flinch at the work."

"No," Karen said. "I can see that."

She said it plainly. No inflection. Just a statement of a thing she had noticed and was placing on the shelf.

We crested a low rise. The ground dropped away into a shallow pan of flatter earth, and across the pan, maybe two hundred metres ahead, I could see what resolved a half-second later into the Drop Zone — the scattered cluster of trolleys we had left behind an hour ago, the tarpaulin, the folding chair. And beyond it, about fifty metres further on, the Portal.

It was still bright.

Luke had left it open. The screen stood in the middle of nothing, maybe three metres tall and three metres wide, and the swirling bands of colour that had swallowed my parents and me ninety minutes ago were still moving inside it the same way they had been moving inside it then — blue and green and a gold that was not gold and a red that was not red, slow rotations, the whole aperture unreasonably beautiful in a landscape that was otherwise the colour of the back of a brick.

On the other side of it was Adelaide.

I knew that. I could not see through the screen — the colour was as impenetrable from this side as the gate was from its inside, you looked at it rather than into it — but I knew. Somewhere just beyond the surface of what I was looking at was the wall of my father's study, with his framed certificate and his bookshelf and his filing cabinet, and beyond his study was the hallway, and beyond the hallway was my bedroom, and in my bedroom my phone was probably still on the mattress, and in Craigmore my dog was probably still —

I cut the thought off. I had cut it off three times already this morning. It did not get easier with practice.

Karen had kept walking. I followed.

"Right." Karen was at the first of the trolleys now, assessing them the way she assessed everything, hat tilted, hands in her pockets. "Portal's still active and he's not standing in front of it, so he's taken some empties through already. He'll be on the Earth side loading them. Our job is to get more empties across to the Portal before he comes back, so he never has to wait. When he comes back with fulls, he hands them to us and he goes straight back through with the next empties. We park the fulls near the Portal, out of his way. Some of the men will bring a ute later to shift the fulls back to Bixbus."

I nodded. It was the first clean piece of logistics anyone had given me all morning.

I took hold of one of the empties. The wheel spun. It was a shopping trolley, a supermarket one, with a small Big W logo faded into the blue plastic of the handlebar. I did not know whether to take this as funny or as desperately sad. I settled on funny.

"A Big W trolley," I said.

"Mm."

"In a desert."

"Mm."

"In another world."

"Luke," Karen said, without elaboration, and the single word was the whole explanation, and we both smiled a very small smile at the same time, and I felt, for the first time since I had crossed the Portal, something that was not quite lightness but was adjacent to it.

I pulled the first trolley free. The wheels caught immediately — the loose red dust pulled at the castors the way sand pulls at a pram — and I had to shove harder than I had expected. Karen was already pushing a second one ahead of me, her hat tilted forward, her body leaned into the work.

For the first hundred metres we did not talk. The labour was enough. The trolleys bucked on every patch of softer ground. My shoulders, which had been reminding me of the arm since I had woken up, started reminding me of the shoulders too. But there was a clean quality to the effort that I had not realised I had been wanting. A task I could push against. A weight in front of my hands. The whole morning had been a series of things happening to me, one after another, and the trolley was the first thing in six hours that I was happening to.

Karen broke the silence at about the halfway mark.

"What do you want to do with it."

"With what."

"With the zoology. Third year. You're about to finish. What's the plan."

I pushed the trolley over a patch of compacted ground where the castors had a moment of relief, and then into softer dust where they caught again. I had not been asked that question by anyone except Margaret, six days ago, and my answer to Margaret had been I don't know. My answer to most people had always been a version of conservation work of some kind, we'll see how honours goes. I did not have a better answer today.

"I was going to apply for Honours next year. There's a position at the Haven for a research student, doing something on the wombat joey rehabilitation program — it's a good program, they've got high survival rates, and Margaret — she runs the Haven — said she'd support my application. I was going to do that. And then —" I gestured, vaguely, at the red ground around us, at the Portal ahead of us, at the whole morning. "And then this."

"And now?"

"I don't know."

"That's an honest answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

She pushed her trolley up a small rise. I followed. We drew level again. I could hear her breathing — not laboured, but audible.

"I've been in Clivilius five days," she said.

I glanced at her. She did not glance back.

"Came through with my husband. Chris. He's — somewhere. You'll meet him at some point. He ventured along the river, probably still digging more holes in the dirt."

"Right."

"Before that, I was at the University of Tasmania. Thirty-four years. Entomologist, environmental science, associate professor. I had a department, a research programme, a house in Collinsvale with Chris and a permaculture garden I had been building for fifteen years. I had an idea of how the next five years were going to go. Some of it was going to be field work. Some of it was going to be seeing my sister Emily's grandchildren grow up. Some of it was going to be spending the summer on Bruny. None of that is going to happen now."

She said it without inflection. The facts, flat. The tone of a woman describing the weather in a place she no longer lived in.

"I'm sorry."

"Yes. Well." She pushed over a ridge. Her trolley bucked. "The thing I've been doing for the last five days — when I'm not pushing these bloody shopping trolleys — is working out what parts of what I used to do still apply here. And the answer turns out to be: more of it than I would have thought. A dead world needs an ecologist more than a living one does. An ecosystem that has not yet been built needs people who know how ecosystems work. It turns out the skills I had spent thirty years building are not wasted just because the address changed."

I kept pushing.

I did not say anything.

I did not need to say anything. Because what she was saying was not about her. Or — it was about her, but only in the way that a thing told to you in confidence is about the person telling it. The real direction of it was aimed at me. At a third-year zoology student who had just walked out of his old life with nothing on his feet and no idea what he was for. She was saying: I know what you are feeling. I felt it five days ago. It is not as final as you think it is. The work follows you.

I did not know what to say to that.

I pushed the trolley.

The Portal was close now — maybe thirty metres ahead, the colour of it impossibly bright in the dusty air, the surface moving with its slow rotations. The ground had firmed up on the approach, the castors catching less, and the last push was almost easy.

Karen parked her trolley. I parked mine next to it. My arms felt longer than they had been at the start of the walk. The dressing under my sleeve had gone warm. I would check it later.

"Right." Karen surveyed the two empties. Then the Portal. "Now we wait."

We waited.

And then, in the middle of the waiting, the Portal changed.

Nothing visible changed. The colours kept turning. But there was a small displacement of air in the landscape — the kind of pressure change you feel in your ears just before a door closes in a house — and then the colours parted, and Luke stepped out backwards, pulling a trolley behind him. A second trolley followed. Both of them, I could see at a glance, were heaped.

Tins. Boxes. Plastic bottles. I could see the corner of a five-kilogram bag of flour, and the top of a rack of what looked like SPC peaches, and what appeared to be the word Vegemite under a strap. Luke had pulled both trolleys through one behind the other, and he was grinning. He let go of the handles the moment he cleared the Portal and stepped aside, already eyeing the two empties Karen and I had brought down.

"Got there," he said.

Karen took the handles of the first full trolley he had abandoned and began rolling it clear of the Portal, parking it on the flat patch of harder ground a few metres to the side. "Right. Grab those two." She nodded at the empties she and I had just parked.

Luke put a hand up. "Hold on. Where are the rest of them."

Karen stopped. "The rest of what?"

"The rest of the trolleys. Four isn't going to be anywhere near enough. I've only just started, Karen."

Karen stared at him. "You are joking."

"I'm not joking."

"Luke, you're emptying a pantry."

Luke began to laugh. "Karen. It is not a pantry. It is a room. An entire bedroom-sized room, floor to ceiling, shelves three deep, with everything rotated and labelled, and the whole thing stacked so carefully it's a pyramid. I've got a corner done. I've got a corner done. We are going to need every trolley in the Drop Zone, and then we are going to need a plan for where to store all of this once it is through."

Karen's mouth had fallen open very slightly.

"You're serious."

"Karen, my mother has been preparing for the end of the world since 1994. You do not want to know how serious I am."

I could not help it. I laughed.

It was not a big laugh. It came out of my chest like something that had been held down for about eight hours and was now grateful to be let out. And Karen looked at me, and Karen's face did the small tightening-at-the-corner thing, and then Karen laughed too — a proper laugh this time, short and rough, and her hat tilted back so I could see her face properly, and for one second the two of us were laughing at my mother in the middle of a desert in front of a wall of moving colour, and Luke was laughing too, and the three of us were briefly and unreasonably a kind of together in a way we had not been five minutes ago.

"She's prepared for everything," I said, when the laugh began to settle. "Floods, fires, economic collapse —"

"Jesus's return," Luke said.

"The Rapture. The tribulation. The general second coming of whatever." I was still smiling. "You name it."

Karen wiped one eye with the back of her hand, under the brim of the hat. "Well. I will say this for your mother, Jerome. Her paranoia is about to be the reason nobody in this settlement starves for the next three months."

"Six months," Luke said. "Minimum."

"Six months," Karen corrected herself. She finished wheeling the second full trolley clear of the Portal, parked it beside the first, then turned back to Luke and gestured at the two empties. "Alright. Take these two through. We'll bring more from the Drop Zone."

"Your wish," Luke said, taking one handle.

"Don't get too comfortable on the Earth side."

"I am a Guardian of two worlds, Karen. I am not comfortable."

"Walk through a door, Luke."

He grinned, pushed the first empty trolley ahead of him and pulled the second one behind, and walked into the Portal without looking back. The colours folded around the shape of him and the trolleys.

Karen watched the Portal for a second. Then she turned to me.

"Back to the Drop Zone?"

"Back to the Drop Zone."

My arms did not love the idea. But my chest felt — for the first time since I had crossed the Portal — lighter than my arms. Which was not a thing I had expected.

We turned and walked.

The sun was high. The dust was fine. Karen did not look back at me for the first hundred metres, but I did not mind, because now I knew what the not-looking-back was.

After about twenty paces, she said, "Next time I'm asking for specifics before I agree to anything."

I laughed. Properly. The second time in ten minutes.

"Good luck," I said. "Luke's not exactly a man of details."

Her hat tilted. Her mouth did the tight-corner thing.

"No," she said. "He is not. But apparently his family is."