A Count, Not a Hope

"Waiting is its own kind of work. The trick is to find the other kind, and do that instead."

"He's ready," I said, and turned to call it across to Mum and Dad. "He's coming. He's —"

Luke's face came back into the frame before I'd finished, close and serious, and whatever was in it stopped the rest of the sentence in my mouth.

"Hang on. I need Charles to help me first."

"Help with what?" It came out sharper than I meant. I'd just told the two people behind me that the long day was about to give them their son back, and the words were still hanging in the hot air, and now they weren't true.

Luke had already turned away from the camera to deal with something I couldn't see. I looked round at Mum and Dad — Mum already half a step toward the crate, her hands lifted, her whole face open — and I had to put it away again.

"Oh. Wait." I held a hand up at her. "No. He's — not yet."

Mum's hands came down. "What do you mean, not yet." Not a question, the way she says it. "You said he was ready. You said —"

"I know what I said, Mum."

"Then why is he not —"

Luke came back, and I caught his voice over the top of hers, fast and pleased with itself. "Right — Jerome. Do me a favour. Go and grab some empty trolleys and bring them to the Portal. I'll run them through to Charles's end, and the two of us'll get the rest of that food storage across before the day's out."

Behind him, smaller, tinnier through the laptop speaker, Charles: "You're making me do work? I've been a Clivilian for thirty seconds."

"You're not a Clivilian yet, mate, you're still on the wrong side of the wall." Luke's arm came across the frame and rumpled Charles's hair, and Charles batted at it, and the picture jumped — all of it coming to me rough and a half-second behind itself, the way they always did over a call, faces going to squares when anybody moved too fast. "Better get used to it, little brother."

The screen went black.

It just went, the way a call goes — there and then a dark rectangle with my own face ghosted faint in it — and that was the thing that got me, not the trolleys, not the delay. One second my brother's voice was coming out of the speaker and the next there was nothing on the other side of the glass but my own reflection and a lot of red ground behind it. While the call was live I could see him. The moment it dropped, the Portal was just colour again, and the house and Charles and the whole of Earth were behind it where I couldn't reach.

I stayed crouched over the dark laptop a second longer than I needed to.

"Well?" Mum, behind me. "What did he say."

I stood and turned round. "Charles is fine. He's helping Luke bring the food storage over first. Then he comes through."

"Helping." She said it like I'd made it up. "He's sixteen, Jerome, he's not a removalist, he's just lost his —" She stopped. Whatever the end of that was, she put it down before it got out, and folded her arms instead. "And how long is that going to take."

"I don't know, Mum."

"Because every time someone tells me soon in this place, it turns out to mean something else." She looked at the Portal, the big quiet wash of it, like it had personally wronged her. "I just want to see my son walk out of that thing. Is that —"

"Yeah." Dad, quiet, beside her. He hadn't said anything through the whole of it; he'd just come to stand at her shoulder, and the one word landed softer than anything I could have said. "We know, Greta. We all do."

Mum's mouth worked. She didn't say the next thing.

The Portal rippled, and Luke stepped back through it into the Clivilius light, dusting his hands off, easy as anything, like he'd nipped out to the bins. He looked round at the three of us.

"Right. Who's giving me a hand with these trolleys?"

For a second nobody moved, and I thought — selfishly, fast, before I could stop it — that if I went now I'd be away from the waiting and the held breath and Mum's face, and that the trolleys ran back and forth through a door that, it turned out, opened both ways for the things that needed carrying. Whatever went into that Portal could come back out the other side. I filed it the way I'd been filing everything all day, somewhere underneath, and didn't look at it too hard.

"Off you go, then, Jerome." Mum flapped a hand at me, already turning back to the Portal to resume her vigil. "Make yourself useful."

I almost laughed. Some things crossed worlds intact.

I got to my feet. Before I'd taken a step Dad moved off the spot he'd been rooted to, and put a hand on my shoulder.

"I'll come with you."

"You don't have to —"

"I know." He was already walking. "There are some empty ones at the Drop Zone, aren't there."

"A few. Or near enough."

We set off across the red ground together, and after a few paces Dad's arm came up across my shoulders and stayed there, heavy and certain. He isn't a man who reaches for you often.

"I'm proud of you, son."

My throat did something. I kept my eyes on the Drop Zone ahead. "Thanks, Dad."

The trolleys came through on their own, more or less.

That was the part I couldn't get my head round, stacking the seventh or eighth of them clear of the Portal with Dad. We'd wheel the empties up to the colour and let go, and they'd go in and not come out, and five minutes later a full one would come rolling out of the same wall of light — tins and packets and bags of our own storage room, the labels we'd grown up reading, arriving in a dead country through a hole in the air. I couldn't see Luke doing it. I couldn't see Charles loading them on the other side. The Portal showed me nothing but its slow turn of colour, and everything I knew about what was happening over there I knew because a trolley I'd sent in empty came back full. I'd send the proof in and the proof would come back. That was the whole of my information.

I lined the latest one up beside the others and straightened, my back letting me know about it.

"Dad."

He was a few feet off, both hands flat on the rim of a trolley, not pushing it anywhere, just standing with it and looking at nothing. He'd gone somewhere behind his eyes. I said it again, softer, and he came back and looked at me to go on.

"What is it?" Mum was there before I'd got a word out, quick, her whole face turning up like a plant to a light. "Is it Charles? Is he ready? Is he coming through?"

"Not yet, Mum."

I watched it land and watched her face do what her face did with it, and I felt the old familiar tiredness of being the one holding the bad small news. She'd asked me a version of the same question every few minutes since the Drop Zone, and the answer hadn't changed, and the not-changing of it was wearing a groove in all three of us.

"Wheat and rice next," I said, to Dad, because Dad was easier to say things to. "Luke reckons there's a few of the big barrels in the garage. Those come through after the trolleys."

Dad nodded slowly, taking it in the way he took everything in, turning it over for the weight of it. "Those barrels are heavy, son. Two-man job, the full ones." A flicker of something went over his face — the maths of it, how you roll a sealed drum of wheat through a wall when only one of the two men doing the lifting can cross the wall.

Mum had no interest in barrels. "Why are they doing food." She said food like it was the most useless word in either language. "He can carry food through later, can't he, once he's here. Why can't he just come now."

"Because once he's here, he's here, Mum." It came out flatter than I meant. "Same as us. He doesn't get to nip back for the rest. So they send it first."

That stopped her, but only for a second, and only because it was the wrong thing to have said — I watched it go in and turn over and come out the other side as something worse, because once he's here he's here, same as us was the whole shape of the day she didn't want to look at, and I'd just held it up in front of her.

Dad stepped into it before she could get going. "Greta. Why don't you head back to the camp." Even, unhurried. "I'll bring Charles over the moment he's through. You'll be the first I tell."

She didn't like it. I watched her not like it — the small shift of weight, the hands finding each other.

"It's the best thing, Mum, honestly." I kept my voice level, reasonable, the voice you use on a spooked animal you don't want to bolt. "There's nothing to do here but stand and wait, and you'll wear yourself out doing it."

"And what am I meant to do at a camp." Sharp. "With strangers."

I had it before I'd decided to say it. "That tall, lanky, Karen woman. The one who was running everyone round earlier." I kept my face straight. "She'll have a job for you inside two minutes, I'd put money on it."

The look Mum gave me said she knew exactly what I was doing and exactly what I thought of the tall woman, and that she'd file both away for later. "I don't even know where the camp is," she said, which wasn't a no. It was the noise she made on the way to a yes.

"Over the rise there." Dad lifted his chin at the low hills. "Ten minutes."

She looked at the hills, and then she looked at Dad, and she didn't have to say the thing because the whole of her said it for her. Come with me. She has never in her life liked walking into a room of strangers on her own, and she wasn't about to start in another world.

Dad breathed out through his nose and let go of the trolley rim. "I'll walk you over."

He caught my eye doing it. I gave him what I could.

"Don't be long, though, Dad." I was already turning back to the Portal. "Those barrels'll want two of us, and I can't roll one off Luke on my own."

"I won't be long." He didn't believe it and neither did I. None of us had ever known Mum to be walked anywhere quickly, and a strange camp full of people to meet was a slow walk by any measure.

They went. Mum got her arm through his and pulled it in tight against her side, the way she does, and the two of them set off across the red ground toward the hills, getting smaller, Dad's head bent a little toward her the whole way. He'd spend the next hour smoothing something he hadn't broken. He always did.

I turned back to the Portal and the waiting trolleys and the work that didn't argue with you, and was glad of it.

Paul came to find me at the Portal not long after, sleeves shoved up, the dust of the day greyed into the creases of his arms.

"Luke's gone for the first barrel." I nodded at the colour. "Wheat, I think. Or the rice. He didn't say which."

Paul stood in beside me and we watched the wall do its nothing. The heat sat on the back of my neck the way it had all afternoon, and the light off the Portal had that faint wrongness to it that I still hadn't got used to.

"Reckon they'll get it through?" Paul wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. "A full drum. That's a different thing to a trolley."

"I don't know." I didn't. "But if it can be done, those two'll do it." I said it and found I meant it — Luke who crossed the wall like a doorway, Charles on the far side with his quick hands and his quicker head. "Between the pair of them."

Paul made a sound that was half agreement and we left it there. There wasn't much to say that the waiting wasn't already saying. The Portal turned its colours over and gave us nothing back, the way it had given me nothing back all afternoon, and I'd stopped expecting it to and started just watching it the way you watch a kettle that's taking its time.

Then the surface of it moved.

My heart was up in my throat before my head had caught up. Paul's hand closed on my shoulder. Neither of us said anything.

The barrel came through nose-first and heavy, a white drum the height of my hip, and the red dust of home was ground into every seam of it. It hit the Clivilius ground with a thud I felt through my boots and rolled a half-turn and stopped, throwing up a low cloud of ochre that hung and then drifted.

It sat there. A barrel from our garage, in the dirt of a world with no name I trusted, and I looked at it and something came up out of my chest that I didn't plan.

"They did it." It came out loud, cracked, half a laugh. "Paul. They actually did it."

Paul was laughing — properly, the first time I'd heard it all day, a sound I'd half forgotten he had. "'Course they did," he said, gripping my shoulder, shaking it. "'Course they bloody did."

The colour heaved again and Luke came through on the barrel's heels, on foot, blowing hard, sweat cutting clean lines down the dust on his face. He saw the two of us standing there grinning at a drum of wheat and he grinned back, hands on his knees, getting his breath.

"One down." He straightened, pressed a fist into the small of his back. "Five to go."

"How'd you even move it?" I went and put a hand on the thing, the white of it warm and gritty under my palm, real, here. "These are dead weight full."

"Tipped it on its rim and walked it. Charles steers, I shove." Luke rolled the kinks out of one shoulder. "He's on the other side lining the next one up now. Won't be a minute." He said it like that settled it, like Charles is on the other side was a plain fact about where a person was and not a thing I'd been turning over in my chest since the call dropped — Charles, on the other side, where I couldn't see him and couldn't reach him, sending wheat through a wall to a brother who could only stand here and catch it.

"Right." I cleared whatever was in my throat. "Tell us where to stand."

"Clear of the mouth. They’ll roll through with a bit of pace." Luke was already stepping back toward the colour. "Get ready."

He went in. Paul and I stepped wide of the Portal's mouth, one to each side, and we didn't have long to wait — the next barrel came through lower and faster than the first, and Paul and I caught the line of it and put our backs into turning it, the two of us leaning the dead weight of it round and away from the mouth, boots churning the dust, until it was clear and steady and ours.

I straightened up, blowing, my arms singing, and looked at the two white drums sitting side by side in the Clivilius dirt with our family's name as good as stamped on them. Two of them. Then six. Then whatever came after that. Enough food coming through that wall to keep us all standing while we worked out how to stand on our own.

It wasn't hope, exactly. I'd run out of room for hope somewhere around the third time Mum asked me if Charles was coming. It was something flatter and better than hope. It was a count. Two barrels I could put my hands on, where an hour ago there'd been none. You could build on a count. You couldn't build on much else out here yet.

"Next one's coming," Paul said.

I set my feet. "Yeah. I've got it."