“I can swim laps, watch me swim laps.” Rob looked out to sea uncertainly. “I can do it any time I like.”
“I already swum laps when you weren’t looking”, said Timothy.
“You can’t swim laps in the sea”, said Eddie. He could hear them arguing all the way from the rocks.
“Yeah?” said Timothy. “Well it’s opposite day.”
“No such thing, there’s no such thing as opposite day.” Rob stopped digging his hole in the sand. It quickly began to fill with underground water and the walls started to subside. He’d heard this again and again, but what if, by some horrible chance, it really was...?
“Shows what you know”, said Timothy. “It’s opposite day in America. I’ve been there, they have opposite day there, and it’s opposite day now.”
The squishy things that lived in the rocks glistened in the afternoon. Eddie dragged his finger through a warm pool of water, then snatched it back quickly. He let it linger again, wiggled it like a worm and then pulled back. Where were all the blue-ringed octopuses? When they went on the school excursion Miss Sorenson said there were octopuses in all these rockpools. You weren’t supposed to put your hand where you couldn’t see it because of all the poisonous things.
Rob was looking suspiciously at Tim. “What’s it like in America?”
“They have cinnamon-flavoured bubblegum. And it says on Mars Bars they’re allowed to have 5% cockroach. It’s the law.”
Rob’s face was looking more and more distant. “What else?”
Timothy thought for a moment. “Kids can smoke.”
Rob and Timothy forgot about America when they heard a great splash behind them. They looked over to the rocks and saw Eddie wasn’t there any more. A slight thrashing noise reached them, but they never saw Eddie fall. In the dead Summer air they couldn’t be sure anything had happened at all. They ran over to the rocks and found only the empty rockpools. Timothy pushed his toe into one of the mysterious limpet-like things, half plant and half animal, and watched it squirt a little jet of water into the air.
They heard wheels crunching in the gravel up by the road. A patrol car stopped by the beach and a blue figure rose into view. Even from this distance Rob and Timothy had a churn in their stomachs. They could see the policeman was not happy.
“Hey, kids! The beach is closed.”
“We can’t go”, said Rob, “our friend’s got lost.”
The policeman came down the side of the beach avoiding the sand and water. They could hear his shoes scuffing against the salty rocks. “Okay, you’re not in trouble”, he said. “I want you to tell me exactly what happened.”
Rob told the whole story, being sure to leave out the important things he knew about the Americans. Timothy stayed quiet, but Rob said enough to worry the policeman. He strolled up and down the rocks, looking down to the surf and into the small caves. He couldn’t see any sign of a missing boy.
“Maybe he’s caught in a rip,” said Timothy.
Rob frowned. “He can’t be, he was on the rocks.”
“That’s where they get you from. You’d have to be stupid to walk into one.”
“But that’s what people do!” said Rob. “Didn’t you hear what Miss Sorenson said about that prime minister who went swimming one day and never came back?”
“Harold Holt?” the policeman said with a frown. “Your friend is not dead.”
“Not dead”, said Rob. “Reincarnated as a zombie in a parallel dimension. Tim reckons that’s what happened to Harold Holt.”
***
“Are you a zombie?” Eddie asked.
“Not quite”, said undead Harold Holt. “We are stuck in time like photographs, but we will age normally whenever we return to our own dimensions. I’ve only aged two weeks in the past fifty years.”
Holt took the boy on a walk through their town, a little Empire perched on an never-ending beach. The glassy sun shone over this outpost at the end of the world. They could hear the surf washing up and down, though the water was dead still. Holt showed Eddie the palaces of driftwood and the castles of sand, and how the locals marked time by drawing huge, ephemeral pictures in the sand.
He took a piece of paper in one hand and a fountain pen in the other. He began to sketch the corner of a cube, labelling the sides with a tiny, intricate x, y and z.
“We exist in four dimensions”, said Holt. “There are the three sides of the cube, the dimensions we readily perceive. And then there is the fourth, which governs the passage of time. Here in our own dimensions we have stepped out of that fourth axis to a point where time does not progress in the same way. We are in the same place as our home dimensions, only offset slightly, bumped over to one side.”
“Yeah yeah. So why do I have a tail?” Eddie asked.
Around them were the inhabitants of the town on the edge of dimensions. Men and women with animal tails going about their business as if their spines had not undergone major reconstruction. Eddie felt his own hairless, whip-like tail bob behind him and catch breezes as they brushed past. He grabbed it and held it between his hands.
“These are normal people from all over. People who vanished swimming, people who got lost in the bush, even some we thought died in the desert. But something about transcending the fourth dimension transforms them. We suspect the animal was within them all along, merely dormant until some catalyst could bring it to the surface. I am a lemming”, said Holt, brushing back his hair with one hand.
And now he mentioned it, Eddie thought he saw parts of the lemming in Holt’s features. He was a pear-shaped man who had eyes much blacker than usual. His ears were unnaturally small, his hands nervous and his nose seemed to twitch, as if hunting out a scent. When he patted his hair back Eddie caught a glimpse of mottled fur on the back of his hand.
“I used to go back on occasion. I’d cover myself well and act normal. You may think it a great risk, but the Ashes are the Ashes and I am only human. But in the end I stopped going. It was too difficult, and we have everything we need here. Look at this place. We are unique. We have the chance to be free from the world, to be immortal in our own Empire. What more do we need?
“Of course if necessary we can go back any time, but we must be cautious. We cannot be bombarded by the world at large, all pushing and shoving to get at our small Empire. I have learnt that much about human nature. We cannot be kept as pets or subjects.”
Holt rested a hand on Eddie’s shoulder and showed him how to shift back into the fourth dimension. The strangest sensation overwhelmed him, and he suddenly realised his heart was beating again. He began to feel dizzy until he remembered to start breathing. He blinked for the first time since he left his home dimensions.
They were on a beach, on the same beach where Eddie got lost. He hid his tail behind him and kept to one side of the sandy gulf, but there was no sign of Timothy or Rob.
“Looking for someone? They are long gone. Time stopped for us, but it kept going here. It must be a month or more since you left. An empty beach where our friends once played – this is the closest we can come to the real world. This is the closest we can come to being home.”
“You mean I can’t go home?” asked Eddie.
“Oh no, my boy, oh never. Your parents would never accept you. You would be considered a freak. Your school would not let you attend, and no employer would hire a fantatic who wore an animal tail.”
“I will!” screamed Eddie. “I can! They’re my parents, they’ll take me back.”
“It’s your choice, of course”, said Holt. “But then you will go to school. And when you get a job you will work even longer hours every day of the week. You will come home on the weekend and still be thinking about your work. Then without you even realising it your life will have passed you by. All that’s left is to wait until the day you expire.
“Ours is not such a bad place. It is full of good people and good things. You can do as you please, live as long as you like, and all day you’ll have before you the endless golden beach of an endless golden eternity. It’s worth sneaking back every now and then for the odd test match, but can you truly prefer reality?”
“Where are my friends? I want to go home.”
Holt smiled down at him. “You can. Any time you like. Or you can make new friends.”
“Can’t I have both?”
He shook his head sadly. “It’s a nice thought, Edward, but do you really want to alert the world to our presence? Could this place withstand the weight of six thousand million bearing down upon it?”
Holt rested a hand on Eddie’s shoulder again and slid out of the fourth dimension. The beach was still there and so was the glorious sun, but all frozen like a frame from a silent film. Inside the town Eddie saw sweet shops and children playing on the street corners, and there beside him a rockpool that reflected the sun in huge, lazy patches.
“I want to remember it this way forever”, said Eddie.
“This is the way it is forever”, said Harold Holt. “You don’t need to remember. You will always have the real thing.”
“Let me think”, said Eddie. “Let me think.”
Eddie sat down by the silent rockpool and dragged his finger through the water. Then, very slowly, a bright blue jellyfish bobbed into sight. Eddie snatched his finger back and gazed down at the jellyfish in awe, its blue light rippling to and fro against the golden sand.