The Other Sort

I have never been the one a room remembers. I'm the one who remembers the room.

It was a fair walk out to the Drop Zone, back over the dunes and down the far side, far enough that the camp dropped out of sight behind us and took its racket with it. By the time Charles and I came down the last slope it was just us and the heaps and Mum's list.

"Right." Charles came to a stop at the edge of the spread and turned a slow circle, weighing the job and plainly not loving the weight of it. "What are we actually after?"

I unfolded Mum's list. It ran the whole length of the paper and carried on down the back of it — flour and sugar at the top, and below them a long column of everything else she'd thought to want: rice, tinned fruit, baking soda, salt, custard, a dozen small things and the substitutes to fall back on if the first thing wasn't there. I read him the top few and turned it over so he could see what we were in for.

His face came down by stages. "That's not a list. That's a fortnight's shop."

"Then we'd best make a start."

"For a barbecue."

"For Mum." He knew what that was worth as well as I did, and I didn't spend more on it. It didn't want it.

There was no order to the place to lend us a hand — nothing sat where it should, and getting at one named thing meant lifting nine others off it first and finding homes for none of them. We split the spread between us and worked inwards from the edges. It went slowly. I crossed the flour off early, three bags of it bricked in under a carton of something heavier, and felt for a moment like I was getting somewhere; then I read the next line down and wasn't.

Charles held out about ten minutes before the running commentary started.

"This is the worst treasure hunt I've ever been on."

"It's the only treasure hunt you've ever been on."

"And it's the worst one." He turned over a bag of rice, read the side of it without any interest at all, and dropped it back where it would help nobody. "We could just tell her the shop was out of half of it."

"You could tell her that."

He did not tell her that. He kept on digging, complaining the whole while.

We worked a good while at it. Some of what she wanted wasn't there to be found, however I turned the spread over — no powdered milk anywhere in it — and some of it had come through doubled and tripled, three tins of the one soup nested together and not a single one of the next thing down the page. But the box filled, slowly. The flour, two sorts of sugar, a tin of cocoa, rice, a sack of red lentils nobody had asked for that I took anyway. And then, right at the death, with the box near full, Charles came up out of the bottom of a trolley with a packet of custard powder held over his head as though he'd dug it out of a riverbed in the gold-rush days.

"Pudding," he announced. "Tell me I'm not a genius."

"You're not a genius. But that's the pudding."

"I'm a bit of a genius."

"You're a bit of a genius."

It wasn't all of the list, not by half. It was enough to put in Mum's hands and make the evening look fed.

I packed it down into the one sound box I could turn up and built the box up into Charles's arms. "Take this up. I'll be along."

He didn't take the weight so much as let me load it onto him, and looked at me over the top of it. "You're not coming?"

"In a minute. I want a poke round."

"At what? We've got what she'll let us get away with."

I didn't have a tidy answer, and I didn't try to make one up. I've never in my life managed to leave a place like this and walk away from it clean — all that ordinary Earth come to rest somewhere it had no business being, and me wanting, the whole time, to know how each piece of it had got here and what it had been before. Charles was free of the affliction entirely. He'd have walked past the lot of it without a second glance if there wasn't a meal in it, or an audience.

"Suit yourself." He shifted the box and got it sitting right. "If Mum sends out a search party, I never saw you."

"Appreciated."

He started up the slope, picking his footing with the box held high and the custard riding the top of it, threatening to go over the side the whole way up. I watched him to the rise, and over it, and then I turned back to the spread on my own.

It went quieter still with him gone, and I'll own that I was glad of it. I work better with no one at my shoulder, and there's a peace in a job that asks nothing of you but to put your hands to one thing after another and decide what each one is. I went along the heaps at my own pace now the errand was met — a jar of olives, a snarl of phone chargers nobody out here had the first use for, a box of foil I had no earthly need of and kept hold of anyway. I was crouched over a row of tins, reading the labels off a world I'd been standing in that same morning, when the near screen woke.

It came up slow — the dead pane clouding, then turning over into that swirl of moving colour, a soft pull of air drawn towards it as the thing opened. Then Beatrix came through it backwards, hauling one of the chapel's folding tables after her by its edge and swearing at it under her breath.

She got herself and the table clear and let the screen fall dark behind her. There was a thing I felt, watching her come through, that I had no name for and didn't go hunting one.

"Don't just stand there decorating the place," she said, not bothering to look up from the table. "Grab an end."

I grabbed an end. With two of us under it the table came up like nothing, and we carried it over to a flat patch and set it down.

"Where's the loud one?"

"Took the food up. He doesn't do work he can get out of."

"Sensible boy." She put a boot to the leg of the table and toed it level, then stood off a step to see that it sat true. "You'll be the other sort. Can't leave a thing in a heap."

"Something like that."

She straightened and held a look on me a beat longer than the answer had asked for — not unkindly, only thorough, the same head-to-foot read I give to everything that crosses my path, turned round and handed back to me for once. Then she was off to the screen. "Stay there. There's a stack of chairs down there with your name on it."

We fell into a rhythm without saying a word about it. She'd back through the screen and come out dragging chairs — the grey stacking kind, a half-dozen of them welded into a tower — and I'd meet her at the Portal and take the weight off her, and run them over to the line we were building while she went back for the next. It was honest, heavy work, the sort that empties your head out through your arms, and after the first few runs we gave up filling the quiet with talk and let the quiet alone. What we did say came in the gaps, between one load and the next, neither of us breaking stride to say it.

"You're handier than you look," she said on one of the passes, dropping a stack into my arms. "No offence meant by it. You've the build of a coat-rack."

"I used to shift feed sacks twice this heavy, all day, every day," I said. "And carry wallabies that didn't care to be carried. A stack of chairs is a holiday."

That one landed somewhere different. She stopped, half a stack still in her hands, and the teasing went out of her face and left something genuinely interested behind it. "Wallabies."

"Wildlife place, back home. Orphans, mostly. Roos, possums. The odd wombat that'd take the hand off you and look pleased with itself after."

"Wombats are vicious," she said, and the relish in it wasn't put on for me. "Everyone thinks they're little barrels on legs. They're all muscle and bad temper." She stood the stack beside the others and went back for more, talking over her shoulder now. "I kept beetles, when I was a girl. The husks of them, mostly — things I turned up in the garden, under bricks, down the back of the shed. Lined them up in a drawer. Drove my mother to distraction."

And there it was, for just a moment — not the sharp front she wore for the world, but the thing underneath it. The kid who kept dead beetles in a drawer because they were hers, and they were interesting, and that was the whole of the reason anybody needed. I knew that kid. I'd been a quieter version of him my whole life.

She went back through the screen for another load — into the colour and gone, easy as stepping from one room of a house into the next. I'd watched her do it the better part of a dozen times by now, and it hadn't once stopped doing something to me.

Charles came back over the rise just as Beatrix brought another collapsible table through, and I watched him take in the squared-off ranks of tables and chairs, and the two of us standing among them, and run a quick sum behind his eyes. Whatever it came to, it delighted him.

"You've been busy," he said to me — far too mild, far too innocent, the run-up plain in it to anyone who'd known him longer than a minute.

"Beatrix has been busy. I've been carrying."

"He's been first-rate company," Beatrix said. "For a coat-rack."

"Oh, he's wonderful company." Charles lowered himself onto the top chair of the nearest stack and laced his hands behind his head, settling in, and I knew the voice before he was a word into it — I'd known it sixteen years — the one he put on half a second before he pushed you off the edge of something. "Jerome doesn't say much. But he watches. Don't you, Jerome. You're a tremendous watcher."

"Leave it, Charles."

"He watches ever so closely," he confided to Beatrix, properly warming to the work now. "Terribly attentive. Misses nothing at all, our Jerome."

Beatrix looked from him to me, and the corner of her mouth gave way. "Does he, now."

And there I was — heat going up the back of my neck, no clear idea how he'd walked me onto that exact spot, only that he'd done it on purpose, the little grub, and that I'd followed him onto it the same as I always do, because I never once see the shape of the trap until I'm standing dead in the middle of it with the jaws already shut on my ankle.

Beatrix let me hang there a moment, then took pity — or got bored, which on her I couldn't yet tell apart. She straightened from the table she'd just set down and wiped her palms on her thighs. "I've a few more of these to fetch through before we're done," she said, with a tip of her head at the dead screen. "Don't wander off on me. I won't be long."

She caught my eye on her way past — the briefest beat of it, and none of the teasing in it she'd just been party to. Something nearer to plain recognition. One watcher passing it across to another. Here's the other one that doesn't miss much. Then she stepped into the colour, and it was just me and Charles and the furniture and whatever he'd been building up to on that chair.

He let her get well clear of it first. He had that much craft in him.

"You like her."

"Don't be daft."

"I'm not being daft. I'm being observant." He cocked his head and did an impression of a man paying close attention — doing me, I worked out after a second, and not kindly with it. "You went all..." He hunted for the word, found it, looked thrilled. "...soft. You don't go soft. You went soft."

"I was carrying chairs."

"You were grinning at her over a stack of chairs." He let it sit, admiring the shape of the thing. "You fancy her."

And here was the trouble of it — the part I'd not have handed Charles for any money — that I couldn't tell him he was wrong. Not with any weight under it. There was the something I'd felt when she came through the screen, and it had no name on it I'd ever managed to find, and fancy was not a word I'd had honest cause to use about myself in all my life. I went and looked, quickly, in the place where everyone else seemed to keep that particular feeling — and found there what I always find, which is a clean and empty room. So it wasn't that. I was fairly sure it wasn't that. But fairly sure is a poor place to be standing while your little brother grins at you, and he saw the gap open under me and went straight through it.

"You can't even say it properly," he crowed. "Look at you."

"I'm saying it fine. You're just not listening, which isn't the same thing." I turned and looked at the spread instead, grateful past telling for an honest problem to put my eyes on. The tables and chairs had mounted up on us while we worked — far more of it now than two of us and Beatrix could carry back over the dunes by hand, and her still fetching more. "Look at this lot. We're not getting the half of it up on foot."

Charles followed my eye, and the sum arrived on his face. "That's a convoy's worth."

"It's a ute's worth, if a ute can be got over the dunes. Or enough hands to make a chain of it." I nodded him towards the rise. "Go up and get Dad. Tell him what's down here and let him work out the how of it."

"Why me?"

"Because you'll have it out of him in two minutes flat, and I'd still be explaining myself at ten. And you're quicker over the sand than I am."

"And you'll be doing what, exactly?"

"Staying. Someone has to take the loads off Beatrix as she brings them."

He didn't care for it, but he couldn't find the flaw in it, which is the only kind of losing Charles will stand for. He levered himself up off the chair and stretched as though the afternoon had taken something out of him it hadn't. "If something with too many legs comes at me out there," he said, "it's on your head."

"Noted."

He went up the slope grumbling, and over it, and the grumbling thinned out behind him until there was none of it left.

And then it was only me. The furniture stood in its squared ranks, going nowhere without help. The screen sat waiting on her. I took a chair down off the nearest stack, set it facing the place where she'd come back through, and sat myself down in the quiet to wait — for Beatrix, and for whatever it was I'd be carrying home from down here that I still hadn't a name for, and wasn't certain, even now, that I wanted one.