“Was it make-believe?”

“It was,” says Callum.

“It wasn’t,” says Liam. “It was real. We had superpowers.”

“If we had superpowers, where did they go?” Callum stretches, peeling nylon creaking underneath him. We are sitting on camp chairs in the backyard, everything else packed up or dumped.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Liam says, as a dry breeze blows across us. “Last night, my powers came back.”

Liam’s beer is untouched, dripping condensation on the tiles, so I lean forward to swipe it up, and the movement catches his eye.

“Laura,” Liam turns to me. “You remember, don’t you? We saved the world. Twice.”

We always fought when we came home. The three of us, mid-twenties, sharing space we’d long outgrown. Usually, it was over who took the last of the chocolate from the fridge or who was the greatest burden to Mum. But we can’t argue about the usual things now so Liam is gnawing at the old bone of our childhood games, dead-set on starting something new.

I shrug and sip the stolen beer, doing a double-take to check the label.

 “You always buy shitty bespoke stuff,” I say, turning to Callum.

“Zero calories, Laurie,” Callum grins around his own bottle.

“Laura,” Liam insists. “I’ll drive to the servo right now and buy you a six-pack of real calorie beer if you answer me.”

I sigh and roll my neck on my shoulders to look up at the sky, squinting because the afternoon light is sharp and the air is ashy enough to sting.

“We didn’t save the world, not this world. We saved the other realm,” I say. “That was how the game went.” I let my eyes travel over the backyard. The garden bed is all concrete and weeds now. The tall trellis where the tomato plants grew is rusted thin and red.  

I point to the charred skeleton of the arch. “We went through there sometimes. I can’t remember it very well.” I blink, try to shake the filmy layer from my vision. “Maybe-” I stop. Once, when we were little, Liam convinced me to eat a live worm and sometimes teased that I’d never stopped taking the bait since.  “Obviously it wasn’t real real though.”

“Did you guys rehearse this?” Callum’s voice was flat. “Mum’s actually dead and you’re still doing this. You two are fucked.”

Callum was a sucker for the worm scam – he'd eaten three before Liam and I ended the scene.

“Listen,” Liam says. He stands and turns to face us like he’s preparing for a TED Talk. From this angle I am struck by his broad chest, his military posture. He’s changed and he hasn’t – as a child, his family nickname was Smeagol; skinny and tricksy.

“Last night, I was up in the old spare room and I cracked open the window to climb onto the roof. She never wanted us up there but I figured she’s dead now, so how about I experience the roof just once, before we give the place over to the landlords?”

“Fuck yeah,” Callum says, lifting his beer to toast. I do the same.

“To the roof,” I say.

As kids, we thought about the roof a lot. There was a section that stretched out level with the second storey of the house; the Holy Grail of hideouts. High, easily accessible, partially hidden from the street. Mum must have known we had designs on the roof because shortly after we moved-in, she sealed up the spare room windows with wax and tape. It was for the best, I guess. Jackass was in vogue, and we’d only just brought home that old trampoline from the dump.

“I climbed out there and it was just like we always thought it would be.” Liam kisses the tips of his fingers and lifts them up to the sky. Callum and I nod in unison, because yeah, we always thought it would be like that, too.

 “So, I’m on the roof and I’m walking around, thinking, this is pretty good. But then things got better. Because when the moonlight hit me, suddenly, I started flying. Fucking. Flying.” He meets our stares with an earnest, almost forceful gaze.

“But you were drunk, yeah?” Callum says. “Lucky you didn’t fly off and break your neck.”

“I told you someone cracked into Mum’s stash of tiny airport vodkas last night,” I say, vindicated. Mum was never much of a drinker, but she used to stock-up on all kinds of tiny spirits when she travelled. “There was a bunch of empty bottles in the kitchen sink.”

“I might have drunk the tiny airport vodkas,” Liam says, raising his voice over mine. “But guys. It felt just like it did back then. Powerful.”

“Watch out. Laura will take your flying license,” Callum says.

“That’s not how it works,” I say. “We’d need to call the flying police first and then he can engage me to defend him in his flying-under-the-influence case.”

There is a beat of silence. The neighbour’s sprinklers sputter and then shut off, leaving us alone with the breeze. Callum and I are quiet because we know Liam is marshalling his next argument, and whoever speaks next will really have it out with him. I swallow the last of my beer and draw a smiley face in the dirt with my toe. The shadows on the ground are sharpening, getting longer.

“I had the worst fucking powers in that game anyway,” Callum says, finally. Liam immediately sits straighter in his camp chair, eyes brightening.  “I never got a good role, in any of the games we played.”

Callum is dead serious, and I know I should be sensitive about it, but I’m grinning instead. We were ruthless type-casters as children. Reliably, Liam was the leading man: Spiderman or Superman or Action Man. I was the “girl character” – Lois Lane or Mary Jane; if I was lucky, Elizabeth Swan; some variation of a careful foil to the leading man’s recklessness. Callum was a more versatile background character – the dog when we played families (even though we had a real dog); the Green Goblin when we played Spiderman; nearly always injured in some way. We were big into dramatic deaths, and it wasn’t so hard to manoeuvre the linen couch so it appeared to be crushing him to death.

“When we saved the world,” Liam emphasises, “you had a pretty good role.”

“Your powers made you the most powerful,” I say. For a moment, the familiarity of the exchange gives me vertigo. Like hearing an echo of a conversation from twenty years ago.

“Fuck off, Laura,” Callum shakes his head. “The ability to speak to ladybugs is not a real superpower.”

“You can’t speak to your sister like that,” Liam says.

“I remember the day we had the battle at the tennis courts,” I say, raising my voice. Mum used to say if the boys wanted to fight, they could do it outside. But I’m way over the limit, I can’t drive anyone to emergency. “Do you remember the day we had to close the portal? How weird we must have looked, standing back-to-back, lifting our hands to the sky.” I lean forward, skin sizzling, getting into the story. I’m thinking of the cracked green of the courts, tinderbox leaflitter that choked the gutters in suburban Wangaratta. “I remember we brought the dog, and she was barking, hackles raised. Neighbours probably thought we were crazy.” I finish with a tiny smile that immediately fades, because both of my brothers are still staring at each other. “Anyway. Anybody for pizza?”

The same neighbours who probably thought we were crazy left us a lasagne yesterday, but the boys finished it off in one-go, so we’ll have to find out own food tonight. Pizza is as good as any for our last meal here.

“My powers were shit,” Callum continues, as though I hadn’t spoken. Yeah, forget pizza. Callum wants to be in the mud with Liam, eating worms.

 “How was it that you could fly,” he pointed to Liam, “and you could control the weather, and I was Mr King Ladybug? You two were bullies.”

I pause, a bit miffed by this accusation, because Callum’s relationship with the ladybugs had been entirely independent of our bullying. There had been lots of ladybugs on the tomato patch, tiny and orange and dressed in foul smelling perfume. He used to collect them.

“But the ladybugs were the key to your super strength,” I say, unable to help myself. “That was like, the whole point? Don’t you remember?”

“Your actual title,” Liam says, “was His Royal Highness Sir Ludo Ladybug of the Seven Realms-”

Callum lunges out of his camp chair and there’s a brief scuffle before Liam dances out of his reach, a feral look in his eyes.

“If I see a ladybug, I’ll kill it.” Callum says. “I stepped on one last week.”

I step between them. “Do you see any fucking ladybugs here? The garden is dead.”

Both boys straighten and look at me, spooked by my tone and something on my face.

“Chill out, my god.”

“They’ve gone somewhere else, Cal.” I gesture at the little apocalypse that has befallen the garden.  “They had to go because she got sick and there was no one left to turn over the soil.”

We all look away from each other, then. I try to swallow, eyes on the dead trellis. There’s a tomato-sized lump in my throat and if I could just choke it up then we could plant it and let the vines weave everything back together again. People talk about their grief like it’s something separate from them, something delicate that they prune and nurture to keep in shape. But it is still early for us, our grief has thick roots and strangling vines, and we can’t see ourselves for the branches.

Mum loved our games. She cheered us on our quests in Wangaratta and cheered us when we left to fill our type-cast roles in real cities. Soldier, lawyer, doctor. Cal’s makes sense if you think about it. He already knew so much about crush injuries when he began his degree. 

Liam is the first to recover.

“So,” he says slowly, and when I turn back, he is tenting his fingers in front of him. “Do you guys want to get on the roof or not?”

We trudge up the carpeted staircase. Each step is faded right in the middle, that fake paisley design worn so thin it’s just an impression on threads. There are perfect squares of preserved wall-paper along the bannisters where our family photographs used to hang. The funny thing about a rental is that it’s not yours but you can’t help making a mark on it. Every inspection, Mum tried to wipe our existence from the place, but the house didn’t know the rules. It moulded itself around us anyway.

The setting sun has crept across the skylight. It cuts the landing in half – a triangle of grey, a triangle of pale yellow. I spread my fingertips as we walk through it and imagine tipping the scales until the bushfire sun becomes a cool heat, the type that comes on clear winter mornings and gentles tomato buds into small, round fruits.

The spare room is empty now but the carpet is pressed into the shapes of the missing furniture. Mum used to have it done up neat for visitors – a quilt on the bed, a pink crocheted throw on the armchair. When we walk in, the first thing I notice is the mess.

Liam has peeled away the sealing wax on the edges of the windows with a knife, methodically, but drunkenly, so that a lot of the white paint has been stripped haphazardly away too. The window must have been heavy, because it screeches now as he heaves it open with a ruthless kind of force. I wince, thinking of the bill if we snap the hinges, but they remain solidly attached.

Wordlessly, we climb out onto the roof, one by one. Outside, the air is cooler, but only for a moment. The dry wind picks up; it smells like a bonfire. We split up automatically, walking to different corners of the flat square. I stand and look out over the tops of the other houses, the dead grass and faded swing-set of the local park. A Biblical scene is playing out on the horizon: fire reigning down on the Earth. The dark shadow of the Grampians hangs like furnace, spewing heavy black clouds.

“That might reach us,” I say, gesturing loosely. Both boys shrug. This place was never ours. Tomorrow we’ll flee back to our respective cities and watch from afar as it burns down.

From the opposite side of the roof, Callum heaves a sigh. I follow his gaze down to the backyard as he points with his beer bottle. “The real tragedy,” he says, “is that we never could have done that trampoline trick from here. Angle’s wrong.” Liam walks to stand beside him and inspect.

“Go on then,” Callum says.

            Liam shakes his head. “Not yet. Sun’s gotta set.”

I stretch, spread my hands so that my palms are outwards, feeling the shape of the air. The movement shakes loose an old memory. Standing in the path of the wind as it snapped around our house like a hot towel, straight out of the dryer. Sending it back up into the sky as an icy vortex, trees raging overhead.

We watch the sun slip under the bank of black clouds, standing quiet. I can tell that the boys don’t want to be the first to break the silence, not even Liam. Instead, he digs into his pocket and deals out three elf-sized bottles of Jim Bean. I crack mine and we cheers’ wordlessly. None of us say it, but we’re all thinking the same thing.

Mum, we’re still little. Come back.

And.

The roof is as good as I expected.

I look over at Callum just as an orange ladybug descends quietly to crawl on the back of his hand. I freeze, and in the corner of my eye, so does Liam. But Cal just lifts his hand to nudge it gently onto his shoulder, where it crawls obediently and then pauses. He lifts his eyes to meet ours and then rolls them. “Shut the fuck up.”

We make our way through another of the tiny airport spirits, and then another. Time flexes a little, warps in and out. It does not get as dark as I expect. The moon is peaking out somewhere over our heads. We are in a spotlight of cool white, darkness limned with a red glow lapping at the edges. We are sitting at the edge of a furnace.

Eventually, Liam walks to the edge of the roof and looks out. I know what he’s going to do but I don’t make a move to stop him. In the corner of my eye, Callum sits unmoving. He’s covered in those ladybugs now, they look like a cape on his back.

When Liam steps off the edge of the roof, he doesn’t fall.