The Part of Me That Answered

"You do not have to know the words. You only have to be the kind of person who answers."

The trouble started before he'd finished the sentence. I knew where it was going the way you know the first roll of thunder — Charles up on his feet with his plate held out like a prop, the whole fire turned up at him, that particular light in his face — and somewhere under my ribs a small voice said, very clearly, no, don't, not this one, not in front of everyone.

"Speaking of toilet rolls," he went on, and there it was.

"Uh oh," Luke murmured, a few seats down. He said it lightly, half to himself, but I caught it, and I caught the grin he was trying to keep off his face, and for a second the years folded over and he was just my brother again, the one who knew exactly which story was coming.

Paul got there before any of us. "Is this the one with the Clarkes? Broken Hill?"

"That one," Charles said.

"Oh, no." Mum had gone still over her plate. "Is this one I actually want to hear?"

"You have to tell us now," Kain said. He'd shifted his bad leg round to face the storyteller, settling in. Half the table had.

I tried to think of a way to head it off and came up with nothing, because there was no heading off Charles once a fire had given him an audience. He let the quiet stretch, the little showman, until it was his.

"So we're living in Broken Hill," he began. "I'm only a few months old for this one — asleep in my cot, no use to anybody — so it's all hearsay, but it's gospel in our house. This is the boys" — he tipped his plate at Paul, at Luke — "back when they were young and stupid instead of just old. And one night they decide they're going to teepee the Clarkes' place down the road."

"He's already getting it wrong," Paul said comfortably. "It wasn't a decision. It was a calling."

"Jerome was there, though," Luke put in. "That's the part that matters. Jerome was —" he looked at me, and something warm and rueful crossed his face — "what, four? Nearly five?"

"Nearly five," I agreed, before I could decide not to be in it.

"Hang on." This was Nial, frowning. "What's teepee-ing?"

A small silence, the table turning to him, and then to us — the Smiths, who apparently did things nobody else had heard of.

"You chuck toilet paper all over someone's house in the dark," Mum said, before she could stop herself sounding like she knew. "Streamers of it. Over the trees, the gutters, the cars. It's a — it's a thing children do." She caught the look I was giving her. "So I'm told."

"Right," said Nial, delighted. "That actually sounds all right, that."

"It is deeply all right," said Paul.

"So they take me," I said — and there it was, I was telling it now, the fire had me the same as it had Charles. "Because I'm small and I'm quiet and I won't be heard. Those were the qualifications. Paul made me swear I wouldn't get us caught."

"And he swore," Paul said. "Hand on heart. Looked me dead in the eye."

"I bet they got caught," Karen said.

"We did the house first," Luke said, ignoring her, leaning in. "Whole front of it. Rolls going up over the carport, hanging off the lemon tree — it looked beautiful, honestly, it looked like snow —"

"It looked like a crime scene," said Paul.

"— and then these two geniuses," I said, "decide the job isn't finished. It needs a flourish. So they send me — not even five — up to the front door to knock. And run. While they hide behind the little garden fence."

"Tactical," Charles murmured.

"So I go up." I could feel it coming back, the cold concrete of the step under my bare feet, the door huge in front of me. "And I knock. Good and loud. And then —" I had to stop, because the giggle was coming up and I couldn't get round it. The whole table was leaning in.

"And then he just stood there," Paul said, and the table cracked.

"I forgot the running part!" I got out. "Nobody told me — they said knock and run and I heard knock —"

"We thought we were dead," Luke said, wiping his eyes. "Porch light comes on. And there's our little brother, just standing on the mat, having a lovely look at the door —"

"I had to sprint out from behind the fence," Paul said, "grab him by the collar, and drag him back across the lawn. He nearly took my legs out from under me on the way."

"And the door opens," Charles said, reeling them back in, because it was his story and he wanted the landing, "and the whole Clarke family comes out onto the step. And there's their house. Draped. Glowing in the porch light. And they have no idea — none — who'd do such a thing to them."

"We're flat behind the fence," Luke said. "Not breathing. They're right there. Close enough to touch."

"And then," I said, and I had to giggle again, because this was the part, "one of the Clarke kids goes quiet, and then he goes — dead certain — I know who it was."

I let it sit the way Charles would have.

"And he says: 'It's the Smiths.'" I looked round the fire. "'They use home brand.'"

It took a half-second, and then the fire went up — Nial barking, Kain with his head back, Karen helpless, even Sarah laughing into her hand at the quiet end. And Mum — Mum lost it, the whole stern front of her caving at last, one hand pressed to her mouth and her shoulders going, and that set Charles off, and Paul, and for a moment we were just a family that had got away with something over a decade ago and lived to tell it badly.

"Greta." Karen wiped her eyes, twisting round on the bench. "Tell me you didn't know about all this."

Mum took her time. She set her fork down, folded her hands, and let a silence settle that any one of her sons would have recognised as dangerous.

"Fiona Clarke," she said, "telephoned me the next morning." The straight face was immaculate. "To thank me. She wanted me to know she'd had the children out at first light, taking every last sheet down off the trees and the gutters and rolling it all back up — carefully, mind, so it could still be used. Waste not." A flicker at the corner of her mouth, ruthlessly held. "And she asked me — as a kindness, one mother to another — that the next time the Smiths felt minded to donate them a year's toilet paper, perhaps we might simply leave an unopened packet on the step. Rather than send her family on a treasure hunt for it at dawn."

The table lost itself. And the thing that undid me wasn't the story — it was Mum, holding that level voice one beat past what anyone could bear, before her own face finally went and she laughed with the rest of us, helpless, a hand flat to the table.

I looked at Luke, laughing with his brothers across a fire on another world, and I thought: this is what the church took from us. And then I made myself stop thinking it, because it was too big for a night like this, and I let the laughing carry me instead.

The fire popped. The laughter eased itself down the way it does, into sighs and somebody catching their breath and Kain saying "home brand" once more, quietly, to set off a last ripple.

Then Paul stood up.

He didn't make a thing of it. He just rose, and the firelight came up the side of him, and the easiness went out of his face and left something quieter and more certain. He lifted his right hand to his temple — three fingers laid flat against the skin — and he held it there.

"Light the fire," he said.

I didn't know what it was. Neither did most of the circle — I felt the not-knowing go round, the small shift of people glancing at one another, a couple of half-smiles waiting to find out whether this was a joke. It wasn't a joke. Paul stood with his fingers at his temple and waited, and the waiting had a weight to it.

Then Luke rose. And across the fire Beatrix rose with him, the firelight in her silver hair, and the two of them lifted three fingers to their left temples, mirror to Paul, and answered him together.

"Share the light."

The hush that came down then wasn't an empty one. It had the texture of the moment in a chapel before everyone says the thing they all know to say — except nobody here knew it, nobody but those three, and still you could feel the circle leaning toward it, wanting in.

"Light the fire," Paul said again, stronger.

And Luke and Beatrix turned to the rest of us — not explaining, never explaining, only opening their hands to us, drawing us in the way you draw in the next voice of a song — and people went. Chris first, fingers to his temple, a little unsure, then surer. Then Karen. Then Nial and Kain and Grant and Sarah, a ragged wave of hands rising to temples round the whole ring of firelight, none of them knowing what the words meant and all of them saying them anyway, because these were their people and this was their fire and that, in the end, was the whole of what the words were for.

"Share the light!"

My hand was already at my temple.

That was the thing. I didn't decide it. My fingers were against the skin and the words were in my mouth and out of it before any part of me that weighs and worries got a vote — share the light — pulled up out of me the same as the laughter had been, on a current that ran underneath all the careful machinery I'd spent twenty-one years building. The heat of the fire was on my face and the voices were all around me, my brothers' among them, and for the length of that shout I wasn't on the edge of anything. I was in it. In the middle of it, with all of them, and it felt — there's no honest word for it but the one I'd been taught to keep for somewhere else — it felt holy.

And then it was over, and the shout broke apart into grins and someone whooping and the ordinary noise rushing back in, and I stood there with my hand coming down off my temple and looked at it as if it belonged to somebody else.

Because what had I just done. I didn't know the words or where they'd come from or what I'd pledged by saying them. I only knew that something in me had reached for it before I could, and that the reaching had felt less like being swept away and more like being recognised — as though the part of me that said the words had been waiting a long time for something to say them to. Twenty-one years old and no mission, no certainty, a head full of questions I'd never once said aloud at my father's table — and here I'd found my fingers at my temple in the dark of another world, meaning it, before I'd even asked myself whether I was allowed to.

In the moment it had been the clearest thing all day. Now, a breath later, turning it over, it was as confusing as everything else — maybe more, because it had felt so little like confusion while it was happening.

I looked for my parents without meaning to. Dad had his hands at his sides. Mum had both of hers in her lap, folded, still — the only stillness left in that whole bright circle — and her eyes were on Paul, and on Luke, and there was something in her face that was not wonder. The laughter was gone from her as if it had never been. She had felt the same pull I had, I think. The difference was she'd known exactly what it was, and had held herself back from the edge of it with both hands.

The fire cracked and threw its sparks up into the dark, and the warmth of it sat on all of us, and I stood in the middle of the only crowd I'd ever felt held by, not knowing whether what had just happened to me was a coming-home or a leaving — and not, that night, wanting to decide.