Friday in Summer

When I touched the stone at the village, my experience of travelling between gateways led me to expect an instantaneous disappearance in one place: the village, and reappearance in another: the Source. But when I left the village, this did not happen.

There was no sound or light or smell. At first what I sensed was heaviness and oppression and … I was not alone. Then there was a familiar voice behind me: my father seemed to be saying: ‘You took your time, Jonno.’

I really didn’t want to turn around, but I found I already had. The sight that greeted my eyes was as bad as I thought it would be. My father’s voice had issued from the mouth of every sight I had ever had of him. The last view of him: naked, face swollen, dead, was superimposed on my views of him opening the scholarship letter and watching a solo performance and an unremembered view of him young and bare-faced. ‘You get used to it.’ The apparition misguidedly told me. ‘No, you’re right. You don’t. But you won’t be here long enough to worry about it. Just turn your back while you’re here.’

Small mercies I thought, as I obeyed.

‘Small mercies.’ he said from behind me. ‘There are two things. Shortly you will exit into my tool shed. When you come back, I’ll put you straight through to where the Rhodes girl is. This gate, and my vigil, will disappear when she returns the stone. The Source’s exit will put you down in Lake Tekapo. In Lake Tekapo. You can see Friday’s monument from there. You need to arrange for someone to meet you at Tekapo.’

I started thinking what would be needed: passports, mine and Janice’s; clothes, same; money, transport … My father touched my shoulder momentarily with a dead hand. I jumped. He continued speaking, so I focussed on his voice, which like his appearance was all the voices I had ever heard him use. This was a lot easier to take. ‘That’s the first thing. The second is … I’m holding Coles here. He is in the gate. The company here is rather … select. He may not be completely sane when he finally gets back. I think he’ll get back.’ There was a pause. I wondered if he had finished and I could go, but he continued. ‘He killed me, you know. Came back from the Valley to this portal. Strung me up as soon as I arrived, then left through the gateway just before I died. I think he’ll confess when he gets back, but if he doesn’t he used the shepherd’s crook to get the rope over the rafter. His fingerprints will be on it.’

‘You didn’t kill yourself?’ That’s when I started crying. Me: Dodger Douglass. I had lived for a year with the knowledge that my dad had chosen to die for a fictitious people rather than live for the real ones who needed him. I had seen my mum change from the wife and mother of eccentric geniuses to the pitiable widow and distracted guardian of a loser and a loser’s son.

‘No. I had too much to live for.’ I forgot everything: his appearance, the place, my duty and my mask which slipped with a clang to the metaphorical floor. I turned to face my father, and there was Hamish in my father’s shed.