When he parks above Lakes Entrance harbour’s haze, windy now, burn-off fires greedy for more smouldering like a war zone scene, he releases his car door that gusts open as though a terrified creature had escaped. Climbing out heavily he reviews his grown daughter’s recent visit again, things said. Aware of mimesis, he watches an echidna waddle away from him. It starts to burrow, sere leaves scudding past, its golden spines splendid, quivering, in danger of becoming collateral damage.
Watching him, eyes glittering, his daughter had tapped her fingers. You turn away from your own blood, she said. His disappearing days drain him, weather unpredictable, air smoky, salt. Lyrics from the blues he had been listening to …lying down on a cold black table… earworm him as he turns faded pages of family memory. You were our hero, was another thing she said, and, Guilt trip. Twice. On three separate occasions the girl he had left behind said, She adored you, softening these accusations with smiles.
He pictures a tall wooden building close to a narrow beach like a three-storied coastal beacon, honeycombed widows facing Old Europe, a Dutch ferry wallowing through North Sea chop. Gulls had circled them, wheedling overhead when he thought he would remember this rapture in the future but had no premonition of what else lay ahead. They had already come across gypsies, alerted by their bells, and a Punch and Judy pantomime, eaten roasted chestnuts, loving the discoveries of each new day’s adventure travelling in Britain.
The years galloping, he watched a televised play about a middle-class boy’s annual holidays with his family in a guesthouse on that east coast. Its Victorian dining-room catered to regular clientele at separate tables in the years before affordable air travel. The characters’ repressed mannerisms reminded him of his own relations whose history of bickering boredom stabs the way insightful drama always does.
He imagines its writer, Michael Palin, as a boy pausing in a desultory game of ludo to form an absurd joke, stilling those guests’ movements forever like creatures in a taxidermist’s shop, his canny humour bittersweet, echoing. Before seeing this play, their travels over, utterly, before splitting, he, or she, had said, Remember that strange house? breaking the pulsing silence that often followed his disgruntled outbursts. He recalls this as if it were a disturbing dream. From loneliness become familiar, the twisted ribbons of youthful lives filled with light, that time as unreachable as the horizon, he peers closely. The echidna has almost buried itself, the tips of its spines, its existence, still exposed.
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