Two echoes - one from inside the house, behind me; the other more distant, a hundred metres away perhaps, behind the house among the trees. Two dogs, emitting short, sharp, expectant noises; almost as articulate as the human small talk had been, over the Christmas table slung beneath the spreading canopies of full-leafed European trees.
The bark from inside the house had the harsh, brittle sound echo of the four walls from which it had emerged; the more distant one had carried its landscape with it, softened by hedging, plantings, damp earth, and muffled slightly by the tree trunks it had to bounce around to carry.
The barking had woken me out of a sunlit doze, or daze. I lay on a poolside chaise longue, one of those wicker things with cushions enveloped in magically-weatherproofed material. Easy to fall asleep on, at mid-afternoon on a warm eucalypt-fringed Christmas afternoon, as far from snow and pictures of red Santas as Pluto is from the sun. The journey from the northern suburbs to this semi-rural idyll nudging the early hills of Gippsland had been a reverse procession of that red and green iconography on houses, front doors, trees, fences, shopfronts, in all its manifestations: Santas, reindeers, giant bows, sleighs (for the abundant local snow), sacks, bells, tinsel-draped trees, a multitude of emblematic redness that seemed to have only recently (or was it a whole month?) replaced the orange of an earlier public obsession.
One of the dogs emerged into the scene. My eyes were still closed so that when it gave me its customary greeting I tried to guess whose wet tongue it had been; light, friendly, not overstaying its slobberiness. It was the Irish terrier. A bit like a smaller Airedale. Apparently they can board public transport in search of their owner, or was that just an anecdote turned into quasi-fact, assisted by the sheer desirability of its truth? I opened my eyes and he walked away. Dogs in fiction always bound for some reason, but this dog picked its way carefully around lounge-bound post-lunching adults and motor-driven children.
*
The tables, spread beneath the trees, had been more compact than in recent years. Something of a family diaspora, a perfectly natural phenomenon that always brings a sense of melancholy, had occurred. Boats had sailed, aeroplanes had flown, new alliances had drawn mirror-image right angles on family trees. No-one had died (this was the in-law side of the family). The meal had therefore been tailored to the smaller attendance and to the weather. There was sliced roast pork with that almost-jellied texture of meat that goes like a dream with cold apple sauce, crusty bread and red cabbage slaw. There was cold chicken, cold turkey, cold lamb with mint. And salmon, au naturel, of course. ‘Of course’, because once in a faraway kingdom called ‘the 1970s’ salmon never entered people’s mouths as itself; instead it was industrially combined, cement-mixer-style, with coagulating substances and poured, or even pressed, into brass moulds in the shape of … a fish. ‘We had to destroy the fish to save it!’ it might have been said. Sometimes the turned-out faux-fish, made of fish, was redecorated with scales made out of small edible items such as carefully sliced arcs of cherry peppers. In fact, kitsch cuisine reached its apogee around 1978 amidst a sea of brass kitchenware, television-induced appliances, flower-powered tea towels, tablecloths and oven mitts, and bottles of Boronia Marsala, complete with rococo horse-and-cart label, sitting warming in the sun alongside the Coolabah. I almost miss it.
Back to the present: there were cold boiled potatoes dressed in apple cider vinegar, dill, and olive oil; a Japanese-style rice salad dense with garlic and spring onions and sesame oil and turbo-charged with tamari; a Greek salad, sweet-acid tomato ameliorated by salty olives, salt-creamy feta cheese underpinned by unclassifiable onion, and all clad in lemon juice, olive oil and flecks of oregano. The king of salads, surely. There were leaf salads, and watermelon and mango salads, and big wicker baskets of crunchy fresh bread rolls and cold bottles of Sauvignon Blanc swimming, like glass fishes, in iced water in an old oval laundry tin, and soft drinks, and beer; while blurry sunshine specks activated by a slight breeze sequinned the scene. Who needs tinsel: this was God’s gold, fleeting but unforgettable. Later there were desserts, as if you could even look at them; but that didn’t stop the older members of the gathering pairing home-made butter shortbread, finely sugar-dusted, made by Tracy, with their glasses of Scotch.
*
Then, later, that pool scene where this post began: on a lounge overlooking the downward sward to the distant boundary, west; to where the sun was slowly proceeding, relentlessly, mercilessly, inexorably. The march of time in clear sight: it couldn’t be better demonstrated that time never stops.
We are fools to expect it to. The Irish Terrier didn’t. Lick, lick.
*
And it’s time, time, time that you love/And it’s time, time, time
- Tom Waits, ‘Time’ (1985)
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