Friday in Summer

After my father and Jasper disappeared, I stood looking at the pile of clothes for a good minute or so. Douglass came and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Come on, we have to follow them.’

But I shook him off. He didn’t understand the implications of time travel. ‘I don’t think it’s going to work this time. If my dad was coming back, he would have already come back here. He should have come back immediately after he left. That’s the thing about time travel. You come back to the same time and place that you left from.’

He joined me in looking at the spot in our overgrown driveway, where the clothes my father had been wearing were untidily heaped on the ground. This was where the gateway opened. Always had. And always, when I returned from the Valley, I returned to this same spot moments after I had left.

Douglass was thinking about the problem. I was worrying about my father. Thinking came up with an answer first: ‘It could be that he’s come back at the same time, but not the same place.’ I looked at him. ‘After you left us in the cave and the lights went out, the three of us, Coles, Janice and me, had to sit in the dark until the light returned. Coles had a go at grabbing each of us, but after he fell back into the water a couple of times, he sat and waited too. In the morning Janice and I were pretty quick off the mark to traverse out, but Coles didn’t arrive at the hill-top after us as we thought he would. The Valley said he’d been ‘diverted’. That’s what the Valley called it. She said his own shepherd over-rode the gateway.’

I looked vacant, so he continued: ‘She said the cave gateway was the original portal. The rules there are fluid.’ I gave a short laugh, but Douglass was not making some sort of lame pun. He continued: ‘That was her word, or at least her meaning. It’s the legitimate connection between our world and the Valley. It was how McKenzie and Mossman first got in, so the exit will be in New Zealand.’ He turned up one side of his mouth, an attempt at a smile I think, as he said: ‘There may very well be a naked Australian wandering around somewhere in the middle of the Southern Alps as we speak.’ I joined him in a chortle. ‘What I’m saying is that maybe the others have been diverted too. Your father, Janice and Jasper must be at another gateway.’ This was the most I had heard the Dodger say, ever, and I had to concede, it was possible.

I had never tried to understand the gateways. They seemed simple to me. This gateway in my driveway was open, so this was the gateway that we always entered and left by. I knew the others were closed to our world, but you could use them to traverse in the Valley. But that was the extent of what I knew. For the first time I wondered what else I did or didn’t know about the passage from here to there. I wondered even more when we discovered that this most predictable of gateways no longer allowed either of us access to the Valley. We tried it a couple of times, but there was nothing there.

We were standing around metaphorically scratching our heads when I heard the unmistakable sound of Coles’s Kubota turning into our street. Douglass tore off towards the back of the house as I headed for the tractor roaring into our drive. As soon as it was switched off a voice began yelling from the foot of my driveway. Mr Browne’s eyesight was a lot better than many men’s.
‘Hamish, where the hell is Trevor?’

I had to think for a moment who Trevor was: Coles. Douglass was out of sight, so I waited as Mr Browne came stomping up the drive. He stopped carefully, on the other side of where we were used to finding the gateway, as I answered: ‘I don’t know where Mr Coles is. Didn’t he come back with you?’

‘No, he came into the Valley after us. He was a good few minutes later. I think he had a word with your father before he came in.’ He looked momentarily uncomfortable about what may have been involved in the talk with my father. He continued nevertheless. ‘He told us not to wait for him after we got back here, but to get the crop back to the farm. So we didn’t hang around.’ You could see him running through the events of the day and puzzling over the lesser problem now. ‘Who did you have with you in there today? Rod says it was the Douglass boy, but there was a girl too.’

I tried for the shamefaced look. ‘I don’t know about Douglass, but I took Alice in for a bit of … privacy.’

It seemed to work. ‘That who it was? Hah. You better not let Coles catch you with girls in the Valley. I don’t think he’d take to it much.’ He laughed a ‘boys all in together’ laugh. But then he remembered his original question. ‘So where’s Coles?’

I went from shamefaced to thoughtful. ‘I wonder if he went off through another gateway.’

‘Thought we had all three of them covered. There’s the hilltop that exits here at your place. And the other two are both closed. Or they were last time we checked.’ We were both thoughtful for a moment. I wasn’t going to help anymore than was necessary to get him off the property. Browne’s face cleared as some pennies dropped. ‘Maybe the Rhodes’ gateway has reopened. We thought the old man’s death closed the gate completely, but maybe it followed his son into town. I’ll go and check at the Rhodes’ place to see if Coles’s found a way through that gateway. Tell you what; they’ll get a bloody shock seeing Trevor Coles in his birthday suit in their backyard.’ I laughed with him at the idea and, skirting the absent gateway, walked with him back to the tractor. He reversed it and headed off towards Janice’s place.

Douglass had been listening. Browne was not a quiet man. I asked him what he thought of there being a gateway at Janice’s as I took him inside for a soft drink and some much-needed reflection. ‘Janice would have found her way in before now if there’d been a gateway on her property. Where are the three gateways?’

I drew a line in the water condensing off the 1.25L bottle on our Formica bench. ‘This is the river. Our gateway, the bottle, goes to the grassy hill. I think the Rhodes’ entry, my glass, must be the one at the cairn. So I suppose the other one, your glass, would be to the village.’ I absentmindedly took my keys out and put them at the other end of the line. ‘That’ll be the cave gateway to New Zealand.’ We examined the glasses quietly as the clock on the microwave flashed time passing. Douglass had a drink from the Village gateway. Three gateways: Mine was closed. The Rhodes’ gateway was probably closed. I looked at the Dodger.

‘Where was your dad when he died?’ Douglass blinked at me, eyes unfocussed, glasses broken. His face was carefully non-committal. I continued. ‘That’s the other gateway. The one into the Village. Your father said that he was going to die protecting a gateway.’

Neither of us wanted to think about the altercation between my father and his a year ago, but we were going to have to face it. ‘I think we should have a look at that one, because, well, it’s probably the only one we can get to. Probably.’ He didn’t look convinced. ‘I admit I don’t know as much about the gateways as I thought I did, but we really don’t have any options.’ I hardly dared verbalise the one thing that we did know about the gateways. ‘I only know of one way for a gateway to suddenly become inactive. That’s if the heir dies on our side of the gateway. That’s why your dad died. Our gateway is gone, so either my dad is dead or I am dead.’ I didn’t know whether I was convincing him or not. I shook my head to clear it. ‘Where did your dad die?’

‘The shed. My grand-father’s shed. Out the back of our place.’

It wasn’t far to his place, but I took the car anyway. It was good to have an excuse to think and talk about something so essentially of this world. I hadn’t long had my Ps and I had to focus still on driving the car. We talked about the Victorian driver’s licensing fiasco. It was better than talking about his father’s suicide, or my father’s disappearance, or Janice. Infinitely better than talking about Janice.

Pulling into the Douglass’ driveway, we could see the Kubota parked at the top of the street. The Rhodes’ house was only five blocks away from Douglass’s. We couldn’t see anybody out the front, but there seemed to be some yelling going on in the back-yard. Douglass opened the garage and I parked my royal blue Toyota Corolla beside the old Camry inside.

‘It’ll be ok here until my mum gets home from work.’ Douglass said as he pulled the roller-door down behind my car. I wasn’t sure if Browne knew my car, but it wasn’t worth the risk.

We continued to talk about inconsequential stuff as we went through the house. Outside Douglass was silent until we reached the tumbledown shed at the far end of his deep section. After he unlocked the door, he turned to me, his face dispassionate: ‘Last time I came in here, I discovered my father’s naked body hanging from the rafters. You go first.’

I lifted the door on its broken hinges and stepped into the gloom. Inside there were no dead bodies. There were spiders, rusty tools, a wheelbarrow, but nothing out of the ordinary. Douglass followed me in and stopped in the doorway as I stood in the middle of the dirt floor, looking all around. ‘Sorry to ask you this, Dodger, but where exactly was your father when you discovered him?’

He came further in with his face carefully blank. He looked around, gently touching a tall wooden walking stick hanging on the back of the door as he closed it. Then he walked over towards the bench on the back wall of the shed. Without warning, he disappeared, only to reappear almost immediately, his clothes in a puddle at his feet. I’d never seen the time travel thing happen from outside before. It was creepy. He turned to face me. There were tears streaming down his face.