Not the Chapel

"A locked door is only locked to the people without the key. We were fast learning which side of that we were on."

With Beatrix gone, the screen dead and pale behind her, we turned to showing Dad what we'd dug out of the spread. Charles had the good of it over both arms — a fistful of stainless tongs and turners, the bright tablecloths, napkins to match. A small haul, but there was a party in it somewhere, and we were pleased with ourselves.

Dad turned a tablecloth over in his hands. “We've no tables to put any of it on,” he said. “Nor chairs.”

That stopped me. I'd thought as far as the finding and no further — not to the sitting down, the eating, the where of it. Charles's face did the same drop mine must have.

“We'll keep it simple,” Dad said, seeing it land on us both. “Like a potluck after church. Everyone stands about with a plate. Nobody minds.”

And there it was. He'd no sooner said the word than it was in both of us, off the same breath, and I felt the grin start on my own face the same moment it broke on Charles's.

“The chapel,” Charles said.

Dad's face shut. He'd heard where we were headed before we'd got there, and he didn't care for the look of it.

I knew the cupboard he was thinking of without being told, because I was thinking of it too — the long store off the chapel hall, the fold-up trestle tables stacked on their ends, the grey plastic chairs in towers of a dozen, the whole lot of it sat in the dark a step away from a hole in the air. There was a wrongness to the thought that I felt before I could name it. You didn't take the chapel's things. The chapel was where you put on a clean shirt and minded your manners. But the wrongness and the wanting came up together, tangled, and the wanting had the longer arms.

“They've rows of them,” I said. “The trestle tables. And the stacking chairs, in that store off the hall.”

“I don't have my keys.” Flat. A door shut before we'd a foot in it.

“Beatrix could get your keys,” Charles said.

“Not tonight, Charles.”

“Come on.” I didn't often push him. I pushed him now. “It's a poor welcome if everyone's sat in the dirt to eat off their knees.”

“We don't need tables.” His jaw had set, and that was usually the end of a thing.

It wasn't the end of it for us. We went back into the spread to keep digging — there was no sense standing about arguing when there was a haul to build — and Charles kept the chapel going the whole time, over his shoulder, while he worked.

“Think of the tables, though.” He had his head in a trolley, flinging things over his shoulder to land where they would. “A proper top to put the food on. Mum could lay it all out the way she likes it.”

I wasn't really listening. I'd found a trolley wedged behind two others, and it took me a minute of hauling to drag it clear, the wheels gone sideways and digging furrows in the dirt. When I got into it there was a run of solar lanterns in the bottom, the garden kind, a dozen of them on little spikes. I laid them up in a row along a flat-topped box. They'd be something after dark.

Charles had moved on to a fresh argument with himself about whether you could call it a barbecue at all without somewhere to sit, and answered it, and moved on again. He'd dragged a length of artificial turf out from somewhere and laid it down like a rug, and set two folding camp stools on it, and was building what I slowly understood to be a pretend lounge room in the middle of the Drop Zone. He sat himself in one of the stools and crossed his legs and looked at me like a man surveying his estate.

“See, this is civilised,” he said. “This is what I'm talking about. You can't have people perched on gas bottles.”

“Get up, you idiot.” But I was half laughing, and I'd already clocked the stools for the keep pile.

We worked on. I filled the trolley I'd cleared with the things worth keeping — the lanterns, the stools, a box of those squat glass jars you put tea-lights in, a roll of the bunting from before. Charles found a carton of paper cups with cartoon dinosaurs on them and declared them the finest cups in two worlds, and I didn't argue, because they were cups and we had none. The pile got slowly less like junk and more like the makings of something. My arms had gone gritty to the elbow. The light was coming off the worst of its glare. Somewhere behind it I'd half stopped searching the dead screen, the way you stop hearing a clock.

So when it woke I felt it before I saw it — the change in the light off the colour climbing the screen — and turned to find Beatrix already stepping out of it, both hands hanging with bags, butcher's paper and plastic, the weight pulling her arms straight.

It had been no time and it had been a fair while, the way both can be true when your hands are busy. She crossed and handed the bags to Dad.

“That ought to do you,” she said.

Dad looked into the top of one and the set went out of his shoulders. “This is plenty. Thank you, Beatrix. Really.”

Charles got to his feet off his ridiculous stool, and he and I caught each other's eye, and we weren't quick enough to hide that we'd both thought the same thing at once. Dad saw it coming and got his mouth open first.

“Can you two help carry—”

“Beatrix, could you get Dad's keys from our house?” Charles ran straight over the top of him.

“Charles.” Dad's neck went red. “I said no.”

Charles didn't even look at him. He kept his eyes on Beatrix, and Beatrix looked between the two of them, working out she'd walked back into the middle of an argument.

“I could,” she said slowly. “What are they for?”

I got in before Dad could head it off. “There's a key to the chapel on his ring. The hall's full of fold-up tables and stacking chairs. Enough for everyone, easy.”

Something cleared in her face. “Right. Now I'm with you.”

“The police,” Dad tried.

Beatrix waved it off. “They're not after me. If anyone's there, I'm a church woman who's come to check on her friends. Nobody looks twice.” I wasn't sure that held — a stranger in our empty house being nobody's business — but it was carrying us towards the chairs, so I kept my doubts behind my teeth.

Dad let a long breath go, and his shoulders came down with it. “Top drawer of my bedside table. That's where they'll be.”

“Yes,” Charles said under his breath, and pulled his fist down through the air.

Beatrix had her phone out, thumb ready over it. “What's the address?”

I frowned. “I thought you could go straight to our house through the Portal?”

Charles laughed at me. “The chapel, you idiot. She means the chapel.”

The heat went up my face before I could stop it. The Portal would put her in our house — that spot it knew. But the chapel was nowhere it had ever been; she'd get the keys, then have to find her own way to a building it held no record of. Of course she needed the address. I'd had the whole of how it worked sat in my head and still asked the daft version of the question.

“He's right,” Beatrix said, which didn't help.

Dad gave her the address and she thumbed it in. “I can't promise there'll be nobody about,” he said, “but the keys'll get you into the grounds and the building both.” He paused. “I still don't think this is a good idea.”

“It'll be fun,” Beatrix said, and there was a glint in it.

Dad's mouth pulled sideways. He liked a hard walk to nowhere as much as any man, but he liked the rules kept while he took it, and you could see the two of those grinding against each other behind his face.

Charles had gone quiet beside me, and when he spoke there was a real droop in it. “Wish we had Portal Keys.”

And there, under the joking, was the thing I'd been carrying all afternoon and not setting down. She stepped between worlds with a flick of her thumb. I dug through shopping trolleys for tea-light jars. The same hole in the air that put my own back door mere seconds away put it infinitely out of my reach, because the walking through was hers to do and not mine. I knew it was a child's thing to want. I wanted it anyway.

Beatrix looked round at Charles. “What you're doing here matters just as much,” she said, and the teasing had gone out of her. “There's adventure enough in it, if you want it.”

Charles folded his arms and didn't buy a word. I didn't blame him. From where we stood, the one holding the key to the worlds plainly had the better end of it.

“We need this meat back to camp,” Dad said. “I've to get the fire going.”

I turned to Beatrix. “Meet you back here, then?”

“Deal.” She gave us a little half-salute, two fingers off the brow, and walked to her screen. It woke as she reached it, and she stepped into the turning colour and was gone.

“Come on, you two.” Dad was already moving, the bags swinging from his fists, set on the rise and the fire he had to light.

We loaded ourselves up — the full trolley wouldn't come over the rough ground, so we left it and took what we could carry, the tablecloths and the napkins and the dinosaur cups, the stools under Charles's arm. He looked back at his turf lounge room with real regret, like a man leaving a house he'd lived in for years.

“It was nice while it lasted,” he said.

“It lasted four minutes.”

“Good four minutes.”

I got my own armful settled and went after Dad, up towards the camp and the smoke that would soon be on it. The thing we'd come down for an hour ago — the meat, the party, all of it — was, piece by piece, starting to look like it might actually happen. I didn't look back at the screen. I'd learned by now that it didn't help.