The Demotion

No promotion out here is so fresh it can't be undone by supper.

The tables and chairs were where Beatrix and I had stacked them, by the Portals — though a fair number of the chairs already weren't, because Adrian and Nial hadn't waited.

The walk hadn't burned off as much of the drink as I'd have liked. The ground kept a faint tilt that wasn't the ground's fault, and a step behind me Charles was humming something he'd never have hummed sober. The two utes stood nose-to-tail at the edge of the stacks where the men had brought them round the long way, and they were already loading — had been a while, by the state of the trays — so that the three of us coming over the rise with a wine bottle and a hum were, even to my drink-slowed eye, precisely the help nobody had asked for.

Adrian looked up from a strap he was hauling tight, took in the bottle and the rest of us in a single pass, and went back to the strap. "Stand over there," he said, tipping his head at a clear patch of dirt. "Where there's nothing to knock."

Beatrix went there gladly and settled against a drum with the bottle on her knee, every inch of her content to be told her one job was to watch other people do theirs. "Somebody has to oversee," she said, to nobody, and drank. I didn't go. Some idiot piece of me — fed on the afternoon, on Paul's hand on my shoulder and the word he'd handed me with it — wouldn't be parked off to the side like a child while men did the lifting. I was a man now. Someone had said so, only hours ago. I bent and took up a tower of chairs before anybody could tell me twice to leave them.

They were the moulded plastic sort, six or seven to a tower, and a skin of dust had got onto them so they slid in the hands and didn't want holding. The first one I managed. I carried it the few yards to Adrian's ute, lifted it up over the side, and set it down on the tray near where he was working — and felt, doing it, a small pride out of all proportion to the act, the pride of having done one ordinary thing with drink in me and not disgraced myself. That feeling, I know now, is the one that walks just ahead of a fall. I went back for another.

The second was the one that did for me. I'd got careless on the back of the first, and I came at the tray too fast, still moving when I should have been set, and went up onto my toes to clear the side — and the drink chose that exact moment to tip the whole world a half-inch to the left and hold it there. My shoulder went into the stack Adrian had built. I felt it before it moved: the small give as the weight of me leaned onto it, and the certainty, in the half-second the body gets ahead of the rest of you, that all of it was going to go. Then it went — not chair by chair but all at once, the whole squared stack leaning past the point of return and letting itself down into the dust with the awful completeness a thing has when it's been balanced by someone who knew his trade and then shoved by someone with none. I grabbed for it. Of course I did. I came away with a fistful of grit off the top seat and nothing else, and the rest of it went over the side.

The noise was something. Plastic on hard ground keeps no dignity at all, and there was a great deal of plastic, and it went on and on — a long bright racket spilling out across the open and finding nothing to come back off, then a scatter of smaller knocks, and then one last chair that had come down on its edge and stood there rocking, unhurried, tock, tock, tock, in no apparent rush to join the others. Not one of us said anything the whole time. There was only the chair, rocking, and the four of us listening to it do it. Over on her drum Beatrix took a slow mouthful of wine and declined to look surprised.

Adrian didn't shout. I half wished he would have. He looked at the chairs lying in the dirt, and then he looked up — not at me, at the sky, at the light thinning off the top of it — and I watched him run the sum I wasn't yet sober enough to run myself: how much of the day this had cost, how much less of it was left to get the whole lot loaded and gone before the dark came down. Then he crouched and started gathering chairs, one in each hand, saying nothing, and the nothing was worse than any words he might have picked. I knew that silence. I'd been raised under a master of it; my own father couldn't have built a cleaner one.

"Sorry," I said. "The ground—" and stopped, because the ground had nothing to do with it and we both knew what did, and finishing the lie would only have made me smaller than I already was. It was the drink. I wanted it to be the drink — wanted the bottle to carry the fault and not the hand that kept lifting it — and even wanting that, I knew it wouldn't hold.

Charles thought it the finest thing that had happened all day. He didn't laugh outright — even he could read the air — but when I caught his eye he'd gone down behind the far ute with his shoulders going, fighting it and losing, and the sight of him nearly took me with him, which would have got the both of us buried out there in the dunes.

I got down into the dirt and gathered them, and this time Adrian let me — which was a sentence of its own. Not forgiveness. Arithmetic: the quickest way back to a square load was to let the boy who'd put it on the ground pick it up off the ground and hand it across, one chair at a time, into the hands that would do the actual stacking. So that was the shape of it. He built; I fed him chairs; he never once told me I was holding them wrong, though he could have, three or four times over. It was the whole of what I'd be trusted with now, and I'd found a way to earn the demotion inside a single afternoon of being told I was a man.

We finished in a quiet that had edges to it. Nial had roped his tables down long before — he'd kept his head bent over his own ute through the whole performance, never once lifting it to look at the spilled chairs or the fool who'd spilled them, the work keeping its hold on him as it had all evening — and he stood by his cab now, waiting on us, well past the point of having opinions about how long a thing took.

Beatrix pushed up off her drum and took a read of the sky. There was noticeably less day left in it than when we'd come, and she'd been letting it drain the whole time without once seeming to watch. "Right," she said. "Before we lose the rest of it."

Adrian was already in his cab. He'd offered no one a seat and nobody had been fool enough to ask; whatever room there was in there beside him, it plainly wasn't for us, and I had the sense it was the one thing left out here still entirely his. The engine caught. He took his loaded ute out across the flat without a word or a backward look, the chairs I'd spilled riding square and silent behind him.

That left Nial's, and Charles already loitering at the door of it, and Nial looking at my brother across the bonnet with something I couldn't name. Then he dug the keys out of his own pocket and lobbed them across the roof, and Charles caught them one-handed, delighted and not quite believing it.

"You right to drive?" Nial said, though it wasn't really a question — he was already coming round to the passenger side.

"Driven heaps," Charles said, which was true in the sense a learner's permit is true and no truer, and which left the afternoon's drinking out of the account entirely; and Nial either didn't think of it or had stopped letting himself be the one who thought of things like that.

And there it was again — the thing about this place I kept half-catching and never quite getting my hand to in time. Not a rule broken; nobody out here had the spare strength to break anything. A rule simply set down, quietly, by a man too emptied-out to keep hold of it, while a sixteen-year-old with drink in him swung up behind the wheel of a near-stranger's ute and not one hand in the place lifted to stop him. At home it would have been the end of the world. Out here it was a Tuesday — except I'd lost my grip on whether it was a Tuesday — out here it was only the next thing that happened.

I waited to feel about it what I knew I was meant to feel. Some alarm. Some older-brother reflex reaching for the keys. I stood there in the dropping light and went looking for it in myself and turned up almost nothing, and set that aside with the rest of the day's findings I'd have to be frightened of later, when there was room to be.

"Room for two, if you sit close," Nial said through the window — the offer automatic, his heart nowhere near it.

"We'll walk," Beatrix said, before I'd worked out whether I wanted to. She didn't explain it and Nial didn't ask. He nodded. That was the end of the talking.

Charles took them out in a wide, over-careful arc — too careful by half, the carefulness of the guilty — and the tables swayed once and held. The ute climbed the first rise, dropped down the far side, and the sound of the engine went with it, thinning across the open until the country swallowed it whole.

Then it was quiet — the enormous quiet of that place that arrived the instant any human noise quit — and the dust the utes had thrown up hung in the low light and came down slowly, settling on my shoulders, on the bottle in Beatrix's hand, on the bare square of dirt where the stacks had stood. Beatrix and I stood in it and watched it come down, and for a little while neither of us said a thing.