Friday in Summer

You know that feeling you get when you’re at the end of a satisfyingly good book and you don’t want it to end. You want to stay in the book forever because it’s exciting and you can feel it and smell it and understand the way life works in there. Well, go back a couple of pages to when you know you are going to feel this. You live with the denouement of the story on one level, and regret at leaving with another part. That was the first thing I noticed: a feeling of regret because something was ending.

The next thing was the naked man standing in front of me. Nice butt, pale skin, hairy legs. Of course, when he turned around and looked at me, I eventually noticed that it was the Dodger.

‘Nice.’ he said, looking slowly from my head to my feet.

This is how I became aware that all I had on was my jade necklace, which didn’t cover anything of importance. There was far too much of me to cover with two hands, so I turned my back on him.

It was then that I screamed, because we were not in the ‘hood anymore. Not in a town. Not anywhere that I recognized. It was like the quintessential middle of nowhere. My scream died away to an inelegant squeak as I looked left and right, then turned, hoping to see something familiar.

We were standing on a hill in grass of the way past hay-making kind. This was the only raised bit of land in a wide valley surrounded by forest and, on the horizon, snow-tipped mountains. A river in the distance wound its way out of sight amongst trees. It reminded me of the land we had travelled through on our family trip to Mt Cook last winter. The big difference was that the wind was warm. Just as well, really. Underfoot the ground was warm too. I’d done a full circle by now and came back to the sight of my childhood friend also gazing at the scenery. Not.

‘Don’t look at me, Dodger!’ There was one part of me that had appreciated the compliment implicit in his look, but that part was way, way down below the panic level now in full control. My voice continued its climb up the scale: ‘Where are we, and how do we get out of here? And why haven’t we got any clothes on?’

‘That’s one of the effects of the Gateway. You can’t bring anything with you when you come through. Put these on.’ That was not the Dodger. There was someone else here.

Sure enough, this guy with clothes on, carrying a couple of brownish-greenish dressing gowns over his arm, was clambering up the steepest part of the hill. I’d never seen him before, so I chose the lesser of two evils and put the Dodger between me and him. There was nowhere near enough of him to screen all of me, though. The Dodger was silent. It was up to me to say all that was expected: ‘Who the hell are you? Where are we? Where are my clothes?’ then after a little thought. ‘And why is my dog here?’
Because there was Jasper, trotting along beside the dude with the bathrobes, which, thank goodness, finally found their way from the stranger’s arm to my body. And the Dodger’s. I continued to ask the requisite questions as I tied my belt, enjoying the feel of the fuzzy terry cotton next to my skin. I squatted down to scratch behind the dog’s ear, glad of something familiar. He was too heavy to pick up, so it was from a position closer to the ground than I liked, that I got my first appraising look at this other person.

He and the Dodger were looking eye to eye, so the new dude must have been a good six foot tall. He was blond and good-looking in a Paul Hunter way. Ok, snooker wasn’t my sport of choice, but Dad made me watch it with him sometimes. The stranger didn’t have Paul Hunter’s cleft in his chin, but his hair was a dishevelled blond and he had an intensity around his eyes that could ‘put the red ball in the side pocket’. I would analyse that later at my leisure, I decided. At the moment, my residual embarrassment nullified the awkwardness at meeting a spunky guy.

Finally the Dodger spoke: ‘G’day Hamish.’

‘Jonathan. Don’t see you much around here.’

‘And where is here?’ My contribution to this surprising reunion. The stranger continued to look the Dodger in the eye, but answered my question.

‘This is the Valley. In one sense we haven’t left Russell St… In another sense we are somewhere completely different.’

I was delighted that this new guy appeared to know where we were, but the rest of his explanation was surprisingly unsatisfactory. I won’t even go into what I thought about the fact that the Dodger knew him, or that he had called him by his first and despised name. The stranger didn’t add anything else, so I cued him to the rest of the questions: ‘So how did we get here and, more importantly, how do we get home? Do you have a car or …?’

He looked down at me. So did the Dodger. There was something going on that my presence had recalled them from. ‘Ah yes. Well, your dog found his way through the Gateway because he’s a border collie, and then I think you got through because you belong to him. Getting home could be problematic.’