A Man Now

Some things are too heavy to lift on your own. That's not weakness. That's just the weight.

Dad came back over the rise alone, which told me the camp had swallowed Mum for the time being. He came down the slope toward the Portal and then he stopped, and I watched him take in what had landed in his absence — the barrels, four of them now, white and dust-streaked, sitting in the red dirt where the colour kept turning.

"They've been rolling them through," I said.

He didn't say anything for a moment. He went to the nearest one and put a flat hand on the lid of it, the way he'd test a fence post, and looked from it to the Portal and back.

"Rolling them." He shook his head slowly. "Through that."

"Tipped on the rim. Luke shoves, Charles steers, near as I can work out." I'd worked it out the only way I could, which was from this side, from the evidence that kept arriving. "I haven't actually seen it. I just keep getting barrels."

That got the corner of his mouth. We stood a second longer than we needed to, and then, because there's no good reason two men stand looking at a barrel, we tried to lift one.

It was a mistake and we knew it was a mistake about a second in. The thing had no purchase to it — round and sealed and heavier than it had any right to be, and all our heaving did was set it turning under our hands, so that we ended up shuffling round in a slow circle with it like a pair of idiots dancing with a drum. I got a grip, lost it, barked my knuckles on the rim. Dad let go and stepped back, breathing.

"I'm even more impressed they got one of these here at all," he said.

"They're easier tipped over." I sucked the side of my hand where the skin had gone. "Standing them up's the hard part. We've got that backwards."

He huffed something that was almost a laugh, and that was when the ute came over the rise.

It came down hard, throwing dust, and pulled up short of the barrels, and Paul swung out of the driver's side before it had properly settled. Two men got out of the other doors. I knew them, just — the way you know a face you've seen once, in passing, on the worst day of your life, when you weren't taking names. The morning we'd arrived, Paul had walked us up to the camp and these two had been heading the other way with a third, out to put up a shed, and we'd done the nod you do. That was the whole of our acquaintance.

The bigger of them, the dark-haired one, came round the front of the ute without hurrying and stood looking at the barrels with his arms folded. He had a graze healing along one cheekbone and the still, flat watchfulness of a man working out the exits of every room he walks into. He didn't look at me or Dad. He looked at the barrels, and at the Portal, and his face gave away exactly nothing.

The other one — fairer, broader, a bloke who'd have been all easy warmth on a different day — lifted a hand at us in a sort of half-wave and let it drop.

"Adrian. Nial." Paul did the introductions on the move, already walking the line of the barrels. "My dad, Noah. And Jerome, my brother."

"We met," Adrian said. Two words, flat, not unfriendly and not friendly either. A statement of fact closing a door.

"Briefly," Nial said, and tried for a smile, and most of one arrived. "G'day." His voice had the warmth in it but worn thin, like a coat that had been good once. He put his hand out to Dad and Dad shook it, and then he put it out to me, and his grip was solid and his eyes were somewhere a long way back behind them. "Nial."

"Jerome." I shook. Up close he hadn't slept and had stopped expecting to.

I'm not much for new people at the best of times. With my studies and the Haven and Millie I'd never had the spare hours for it, and I'd long since stopped pretending I minded. So I can't say the cool of the two of them stung. If anything I read it and understood it before I understood why — these were not men pleased to meet us. We were five Smiths now, wandering through a Portal into a place they'd been dropped into first, and nobody had asked them whether they wanted the company. I clocked it the way I'd clock a dog that wanted the far corner of the yard: not aggression, just a thing that didn't want to be approached, and had its reasons.

"Right." Paul clapped his hands once. "Let's work out how we're getting these up onto the tray."

I watched Dad's shoulders come down half an inch. Small talk wasn't his sport either, and a problem with a clear edge to it was a mercy to all of us.

We stood round the first barrel, the five of us, and looked at it.

"Roll it up a ramp, if we had a ramp," Nial said. He crouched, sighted along the tray height with a builder's eye, the warmth in him giving way to something more like competence — the one place, I'd guess, he still felt like himself. "Plank, a couple of lengths of something solid. We haven't got it, though. Not out here."

"We could put a rope round it and drag the lot back to camp," Adrian said. "Save the lifting."

A couple of us half-laughed. He didn't. He'd meant it — or he'd meant it enough that the laugh was the wrong response, and I felt the small cold drop of having got a man wrong in front of him. He just looked at the barrel, unbothered, a man who'd offered the practical answer and didn't much care whether it flattered anyone. And the truth was, looking at the weight of the things, I reckoned he might be right, and that we'd all of us know it in about ten minutes.

"Let's try lifting first," Paul said. "One barrel. If it's a no, it's a no, and we drag them."

Adrian's jaw moved, the smallest concession. "Your ute," he said, which wasn't agreement so much as the withholding of an argument.

We got round it. Five sets of hands, fingers hunting under the curve of the thing for anything to hold. The sun came down on the back of my neck and the thick plastic was hot through my palms and gritty with the dust of two worlds.

"On three," Paul said. "One. Two — three."

We lifted. Or we started to. The barrel came up off the dirt an inch, two, on a chorus of grunting, my arms going to water almost at once, and beside me Nial had his whole weight under it and his teeth bared and Adrian lifted in a kind of grim economy, no sound out of him at all, just the work. We walked it — three shuffling, agonising steps, the tray edge coming closer by nothing — and then with a last heave that I felt go all the way up into my back we got the rim onto the lip of the tray and shoved, and it went up and over and landed with a boom that rocked the whole ute on its springs.

We stood back, blowing.

"One down," Nial managed, wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist and leaving a smear of dust there. Five more sat in the dirt behind us.

Dad wasn't celebrating. He'd crouched by the rear wheel, and I followed his eye and saw what he saw — the tyre pressed down into the soft red ground, sunk to the rim of it, the weight settling it deeper while we watched.

Adrian saw it too. He didn't crouch. He just looked at the wheel, then at the five barrels still on the ground, then out at the open country between us and the camp, and something went through his face that wasn't quite a smile.

"That's not driving anywhere full," he said. To no one. To all of us. And went to stand by the next barrel.

We'd got two barrels onto the tray and were arguing about the third when I saw Luke and Charles coming over from the Portal.

Charles first, the way it always is — I'd pick his walk out of a crowd in the dark, that loose unbothered roll like the ground owed him nothing. He'd come through. He was on this side now, in the red and the heat, properly here, and something in my chest that had been holding itself tight all afternoon let go all at once.

I left the barrel to the others.

"There he is." I got to him and put my hand on the back of his neck and shook him, once, the way you do. "Took your time."

"There was a queue." He was grinning, but his eyes were going past me, over my shoulder, doing the thing I'd watched them do through the laptop — taking the measure of it, the barrels, the strangers, the dead bright nothing stretching off in every direction. Working out where he'd landed. "This is — Jerome, this is mental."

"Yeah." There wasn't a better word and I didn't try for one.

Dad came over wiping his hands, and his whole face had gone to the thing it does with Charles, the softness he doesn't bother hiding with the youngest. He took Charles by the shoulders and looked at him, and Charles braced for the hug and got, instead, the other thing.

"Well." Dad's mouth twitched. "Stuck together as a family. Forever. In this." He let it sit a second, dry as the ground. "Just like we were promised."

It went into me sideways, that one, the way his jokes do — because he meant it as a joke and it wasn't one, not all the way down. Forever family. The whole architecture of everything he'd ever knelt and prayed for, the eternal household, sealed and kept — and here it was delivered, the five of us roped together in a place with no name and no God in it that any of us had been told about. Charles and I rolled our eyes at the same moment, the old reflex, and I think we both did it so we wouldn't have to do anything else with it.

"Right." Paul clapped the dust off his hands. "Let's break. Ten minutes. Drink something."

Nobody argued. Adrian went and sat on the tray of the ute with his back to us, looking out at the open country, drinking from a bottle and saying nothing to anyone. Nial lowered himself down where he stood, forearms on his knees, head hanging a moment before he scrubbed a hand over his face and made himself sit up. The warmth in him had a way of arriving late, like it had to travel a distance to get to his face. He nodded at Charles, friendly enough. He didn't get up.

Dad pulled Charles in under his arm and ruffled the mop of his hair, and Charles bore it with the dignity of a martyr.

"You've cut yourself." Paul, to Luke, nodding at his elbow — a graze there, beaded dark. Luke looked at it like it belonged to someone else and said nothing.

I watched Dad with Charles. I knew what was coming before he said it, because I knew the promise he'd made Mum, and I knew my father — there was work still in the dirt all around us, barrels and food storage and a ute sunk to its rims, and none of it was going to outweigh the thing he'd told his wife he'd do.

"Come on." Dad squeezed the back of Charles's neck. "Let's get you up to the camp before your mother sends a search party. She'll want to — " he searched for it " — inspect you. Count your fingers."

Charles groaned, but he went. Dad looked at me over the top of his head, a question.

I waved him off. I wanted to stay.

He held my eye a second — there's old reflex in him too, the one that still files me with Charles, the boys, the ones who get walked places — and then something passed over it and he let it go, and gave me the smallest nod instead. Man to man, near enough. He turned Charles toward the rise with an arm across his shoulders and the two of them set off, Charles already talking, his hands going, and I stood and watched my little brother walk up out of sight toward our mother and didn't follow.

The minute they were gone, something changed in Luke.

I felt it before I understood it — the way the air changes before weather. He'd been loose all afternoon, easy, the bus-driver calm. Now he came in close to Paul and dropped his voice, and his eyes went, once, to Adrian on the tailgate and Nial on the ground, checking the distance.

"We need to talk. In private."

Paul glanced at the two newcomers, then at me. I'd already started to step back — it wasn't mine, whatever this was, and I knew the shape of being the kid sent out of the room.

"It's alright." Paul's hand caught my arm. "Stay." He said it to me but he was looking at Luke when he said the rest. "Everyone out here's going to have to carry more than their share if we're going to last. No sense him learning that later." Then, back to me, with a weight on it I felt land: "That makes you a man now, bro."

I didn't say anything. I didn't trust what would come out. It was the thing I'd wanted, said plainly, dropped on me — and it turned out the wanting and the getting were different weights, and I stood there holding the difference.

Luke didn't waste the privacy he'd asked for.

"We had to leave the house in a hurry," he said, low. "It's not safe there. Not now."

Paul's face went still. "Meaning."

"The police turned up. Out of nowhere." Luke let a breath go. "And it wasn't a constable doing the rounds. There's a detective on it. Santos."

The names meant nothing to me — Santos was just a sound — but I watched what they did to Paul, and that I could read. His brow came down, and something moved behind his eyes, fast, a man running back through a thing looking for the loose thread.

"A detective." He said it like the word cost something. "That's not a missing-bins call, Luke. What were they doing at the house?"

"I don't know." Luke held his eye. "And I can't go back to find out. Not yet. The whole thing's got a smell to it."

I watched Paul work. I've spent my life watching things work out what to do next — animals mostly, the moment where instinct turns into a decision — and Paul in that moment had the same economy to him, no wasted motion, just the click of a mind arriving somewhere. And then it arrived, and it landed on his face like a shadow.

"Claire."

The name I knew. Paul's wife. I'd sat across Christmas tables from Claire, watched her run a room with a smile and a hand on your forearm, watched the particular careful way she and Paul moved around each other when they thought no one was clocking it — two people managing a thing rather than living in it, Mack and Rose orbiting the pair of them with no idea. If you wanted a person on Earth who'd take a husband going missing and make it into exactly the trouble it could be made into, you'd want Claire.

Luke's head came up. "You think Claire went to the police?"

"I've been gone the better part of ten days." Paul said it flat, like the answer was a child's. "Of course she has."

"Has it been ten days?" It was out of me before I'd thought about it — the time of this place had come loose on me somewhere around the second barrel, and I genuinely didn't know any more.

"Near enough." Paul didn't look at me. "I've stopped counting."

"But a detective." Luke wasn't letting it go, turning it over, sceptical. "For a grown man ten days gone? They don't put a detective on that. Not unless someone's made them. Would anyone take Claire seriously enough to spend a detective on her?"

Paul almost laughed, and there was no warmth in it. "You've met Claire." He shook his head. "She's the most persuasive person I've ever stood in a room with. She could talk the paint off a wall and have it thank her. If she wanted a detective, she's got a detective."

"Lucky you married her." Luke tried for the joke. It didn't land; it just sat there in the heat between them, and Paul let it.

"So what's the plan." All business now, the mirth gone like it had never been.

"For now, I stay clear of the house. Full stop."

"No." Paul shook his head. "You dig. Carefully. I want to know how bad it's getting — how much they know, how close it's running." He paused. "Can you do that?"

Something flickered at the corner of Luke's mouth — not quite a smile, the cousin of one. "Oh, it's getting messy," he said. "I'll tell you that for free."

And he didn't say more, and I stood there wanting him to, wanting the rest of it the way you want the next page — what was messy, how messy, messy for who. He knew things he wasn't laying down, and I could see Paul see it too, and neither of them opened it, and the not-opening of it was its own kind of information. There were three or four other stories running underneath this one and I'd been let just close enough to know they were there.

The thing to do with a heaviness like that, I'd learned, in the few hours I'd been learning it, was to put something lighter on top.

"We should have a bonfire tonight." It came out of me into the gap. They both looked round. "A proper one. Welcome the rest of us over — Mum, Dad, Charles. Make it a thing. There's enough food come through now to actually feed people."

For a second I thought it was a stupid thing to have said into a conversation about detectives. Then Paul's face cracked open into the first real smile I'd had off him all day.

"That," he said, "is a bloody good idea." He turned it over and liked it more. "Yeah. We could all do with it. Something that isn't this."

"There's plenty for it," Luke said, the weather in him lifting too, glad of the turn. "Between what Beatrix and Jarod pulled in last night and the storage I've run through today, we're not short."

"And I'll square it with Beatrix." He clapped Paul on the shoulder, already stepping back toward the Portal, the meeting over the way Luke ends things — abruptly, on his own clock.

"And Jarod?" Paul said it lightly, but there was a needle in it, and a gleam — he knew exactly what he was doing.

Luke's face soured a notch. "Sure," he said, like the word had a stone in it. "Him too. I suppose."

He went into the colour and was gone, and Paul looked at me, and for the first time all day I felt less like the available son and more like someone who'd been left standing in the right place. Behind us Adrian got down off the tailgate without being asked and put his hand back on the next barrel, and Nial got up, and the work was still there waiting, and somewhere over the rise Mum was counting Charles's fingers — but there was going to be a fire tonight, and that was a thing to stand on.