One

by Andrew Hutchinson

  I rushed up the road, past the houses along the street. The place where the young guys who never say anything to me live. The place with the big garden. I ran past the cobblestone laneway entrance, the vacant building, and when I looked back I saw that I was still outside my house.

  Up ahead there were the houses, the stone laneway.

  I’d moved nowhere.

  I quick-stepped along the footpath again, ran along the concrete, and when I looked back it was the same.

  It was like running in a dream, where you’re moving your legs, pumping them with all your strength, but you never get anywhere.

  And up in the driveway, in front of the empty car, the woman was still there. Waiting in the brightness of the headlights.

  Like a movie actor lit up for her scene.

  I kneeled down beside the woman, watched her as she slept. She was resting peacefully, the colour shone out of her skin in the brightness. Her face looked soft, gentle, a peaceful expression across her features. There were slight lines worn into her forehead, wisps of dark hair in twirls up near her ears. You could see her teeth just behind her open lips. Her smeared lipstick. Her fingers touched gently onto the concrete.

  A surge shivered through me, a flicker of recognition.

  They’d said there could be problems. The doctors. This was after the accident. They said there could be impacts, unusual behaviours.

  Maybe something wasn’t right. With me. But this seemed beyond that.

  I reached forward to touch her, fingered the edge of her blue dress, and she burst back into life, blinking and gasping. Squinting into the brightness.

  ‘Oh my God,’ the woman said. She raised a hand to block the light. ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’

  I sat watching her, seeing her go through the process, the same actions playing out. She pushed her hands forward, trying to see me through the light. Bright palms casting dark shadows streaking across, and I stood up and walked back to the car, round behind the open door, and I switched off the lights, dropping us into darkness. The woman let her hands fall away. She stuttered as she inhaled.

  ‘I’m very sorry about this,’ she said.

  I didn’t respond, just waited. Watched it unfold.

  The woman cried, her shoulders bouncing. She pushed at her face, rubbing away tears, then she stood up, her dark figure rising from the concrete.

  I waited beside the car in the cold morning and I watched her. Watched her stagger slightly, then pat down her blue dress. Watched her straighten herself up.

  She wavered in the morning breeze, her body weighing on her slight frame.

  She lifted her face to me. Her eyes worn black circles.

  The two of us alone in the first touches of daylight.

  I decided to let things play out, to go through the same motions and see what came. The same cars rushed by in the morning light, the same people behind the wheels, staring on. I watched the woman as she shifted and moved in her seat. The mud across the back of her dress.

  She asked about my work and I answered the same as I already had, and just like before she turned away, watched out the window as the morning passed by.

  There was something about the suburbs that triggered a recollection, a familiarity that I couldn’t place, more than just having been here to drive her home. There was the kid with the space helmet, the businessman with the toast. The garbage bins lined in twos beside the road. I tried to take in every element as we rolled along, as if there might be something, some code to be cracked in the details. The faces of the houses watching on as we drifted by.

  ‘Thank you for this,’ the woman said. We were stopped outside her house now, me already watching the rear-view mirror, waiting. She looked over the shoulder of her seat then back to me and I turned to her, smiled.

  The woman stepped out of the car, her face up out of my view, and I gripped my seatbelt, eyes trained on the rear-view. I could see her duck back down in my peripheral vision, then stand up, walk away. My jaw was shivering, my ribs felt hollow as I watched, waiting for the dark car to swing round the corner, accelerate along.

  Waiting for it to come.

  She walked up the path towards her door and I could see the other car now, rushing towards us, growing in the distance. I watched it closing in.

  I closed my eyes.

  I held on tight as the car smashed into mine, but it made little difference. My head flung forward, slamming into the hard plastic of the steering wheel, and it felt split, hot, and I gripped tighter round the seatbelt, folded it together as I flung back, my skull bouncing off the seat. The car stuttered and shook, and I grabbed at the back of my head. I touched my lips, looked at my fingers for blood, could taste it filling my mouth like warm seawater.

  I looked up to the rear-view, through the smashed glass of the back window, the pieces still in place. The driver was rushing with his seatbelt and the woman came into view at the side, hitting the passenger door and yelling, and I looked around the streets, looked for anyone else who might’ve seen. For anything. There was no one around. No movement any place. The strip of houses and front yards abandoned, vacant in the overcast light.

  I looked at my fingers. There was no blood.

  I stood out of the car and the driver was already rushing, scratching back across the bitumen, and he swung back into his car and the woman was yelling at me, telling me to go, and I watched him. I was mouthing the word ‘hammer’ over and over.

  The driver stood back out from his car and he slammed his door shut. The hammer in his fist. I got back into the driver’s seat and started the engine, the woman screaming beside me, and the driver was up at the window now, pushing the head of the hammer against the glass.

  I caught onto his eyes. Blank, black holes, staring back.

  I accelerated, took off down the street, the man’s fingers screeching along the metal as we went.

  There was no change to how the woman acted in the shopping centre car park. It was like watching a film, the same scene playing out, the same movements.

  She got out of the car and squeezed between the car beside and mine, sliding sideways through, met me at the back. She asked if I had a pen and I hesitated a moment, looked in through the smashed window, then I told her I didn’t. I watched her walk to my side of the car. She opened the door and leaned in, picked out the pen from the centre console. Her silhouette behind the cracked patterns. She came back, thanked me again. Then she walked away.

  I watched as this happened, watched every moment, waiting. For something. A hidden answer, a key.

  The tyre sounds screeching, the smell of concrete dust and exhaust fumes. The supermarket shining bright, way over on the other side.

  The woman walked through the automatic doors, past the security guard, and she touched him, or didn’t, then he walked away.

  The woman stared up into the light, rising towards it on the escalator slope. Then I followed after, into the brightness of the shopping centre.

  When she looked back over my shoulder, I turned quick. I wanted to see him this time, see the driver rushing along the white-tiled tunnel of the shopping centre. But I couldn’t make him out. Empty food-court tables, and black-and-white-dressed shop assistants drifting through. There was no one coming towards us, no one pushing through.

  The woman was quick-stepping away and I rushed after her, told her I’d take her, get her away from him, and we dropped back into the car and drove out of the car park, back out into the streams of morning traffic, and she was puffing, hyperventilating beside me. Her fingers trembled along the shimmering blue fabric stretched over her leg.

  We pulled into the playground car park and the woman threw up like before, splashed vomit onto the bitumen. I looked out to the playground as she sat hunched over at my side. I looked to the houses looming over us across the way. They seemed known. Close. The brickwork patterns, the white columns around the balcony.

  The woman sat up, looked across to me. Then she got out, slammed the door behind her, swaying the c
ar in her wake.

  ‘Wait.’ I got up behind her. ‘Where are you going?’

  The woman turned around and she stared. She smiled with her mouth closed. A tear broke from the edge of her eye.

  ‘I know you,’ she told me. ‘I wasn’t at your house by accident.’

  I didn’t respond, tried to hold eye contact. The grey clouds crowded across the sky.

  ‘I was at the hospital after you had your accident. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I remember you.’

  The woman’s face shrank. ‘You remember me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told her.

  She took a moment, let it settle in.

  ‘Well, I came,’ the woman said. ‘I came for you.’

  ‘Okay.’ I put a hand up, nodded. ‘Okay,’ I said.

  II

  I woke up, my head cradled into the seatbelt, vibrating against the cold glass of the passenger window.

  Outside I could see.

  Flat yellow grass paddocks rushing by in the sunlight, stretching off into the distance. Piles of rocks fashioned into jagged fences slotted in between.

  I sat up.

  ‘Woah.’ The woman was driving and she put a hand to her chest, kept the other on the wheel. ‘You scared me.’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘We’re on the freeway?’

  ‘What freeway?’

  ‘What do you mean? The freeway.’

  All round was yellow grassland, dried stiff beneath the beating sun. The grey road streaming out in front, rising and curving towards the horizon. No end in sight.

  ‘How did we get here?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, how did we get here, how are we here?’

  The woman lifted a hand, a stop signal.

  ‘I don’t …’ She looked at my face, then the road, then back to me again. ‘I mean, we drove. We drove here.’

  ‘Pull the car over.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes, here.’

  The woman slowed down, rattled the car along the reflectors, the gravel at the roadside. A dust cloud puffed over us as we pulled up, came to a halt.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, then I waited a moment, tried to straighten my thoughts. ‘Can you explain to me exactly how we got here?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what you –’

  ‘Just,’ I snapped back, ‘can you go over exactly what happened, every step that led to us being here?’

  The woman stared for a moment, her mouth open.

  ‘Um, we … we drove. We drove from the city.’ She paused, looking for recognition on my face. ‘You drove me home and –’

  ‘Yes, I took you home and we drove away, I remember that. I remember driving you there and then some guy crashed into me and then we drove to a shopping centre. I know all that.’ I could feel my brain shifting, dragging it through. I thought back to the white tiles of the shopping centre walkway, the vacant shopping strip with the steel shutters. The houses looming over the playground.

  ‘The playground,’ I said. ‘There was a car park by a playground and we stopped there, I remember that.’

  The woman nodded slow. She looked concerned, hesitant.

  ‘Then you threw up, and you walked away. And I came after you.’

  She watched me sift through my memory.

  ‘Then what happened?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What happened after the playground?’

  The woman made a vowel sound in her throat, then stopped herself from talking. She looked out the window, at the bright yellow day, then back to me.

  ‘Then we got in the car and drove. You said you needed to sleep, because you work nights, so we switched at the petrol station.’

  My brain felt hot behind my eyes, fizzing inside my skull. There was nothing, no memory of leaving, of a petrol station. Of the woman driving. Nothing.

  A complete blank.

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  I looked out the window, the yellow grass paddocks in the sun. They stretched over the mountains, way into the distant grey hills. The wind rippled across the waving fields.

  I touched my fingers to the pain at the side of my head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I just …’

  ‘No, it’s …’ And I could feel the emotion building, hollowing in my chest. The tears crowding round my eyes. ‘Something’s not right,’ I said.

  My teeth chattered as my mouth rested.

  Outside the car the day was yellow, heat waves withering up from the grey bitumen and the insect buzz scraping the air all around. A deep gutter was cut along the roadside, sprouts of green grass peeking out from the shallow water in the ruts. The sunlight heated my arms, my legs. Working nights, I didn’t get out much, and the light felt welcome, warm like a blanket. I looked up to the sun, between the clouds. I squinted at its pulsing shape.

  I could feel the heat of the dirt at the roadside through the rubber of my shoes and I kneeled down and dragged my finger along the dust, dragged a line through the granules of rock, glass. The earth was hot, burning at the edges of my finger.

  Loose fragments of blacktop were strung from the edge of the freeway like melted toffee, disintegrating in the heat. The insides of them shone, reflecting the sunlight.

  The woman was waiting, standing beside the car, leaning on the open door, and she had a hand over her eyes to see as she looked across.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t …’ I gritted my teeth, flexed the muscles in my head. ‘I don’t know how to explain it.’

  ‘Explain what?’

  I looked down at the pieces coming away from the edge of the road again, stretched-out streaks of tar shining in the sunlight, crumbling off. I looked at my hands, etched with crisscrossed lines worn into the skin. The scar tracking down my wrist. I touched each finger to my thumb.

  They’d said there could be problems.

  The doctors. The experts.

  They’d said there could be challenges.

  ‘Did you ever think that maybe something’s not right?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like, odd things happening.’

  The woman laughed slightly.

  ‘Yeah, sometimes,’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’

  I looked back to the sky, the blue all across, darker right above us then lightening at the edges. The sunlight burned, blurred in my view, and when I looked back to the road again it was too bright, took a moment to readjust. It was intact. There were no pieces coming away from the edge. The bitumen surface formed one solid strip.

  The insect buzz screeched louder, ringing in my head.

  The shape of the woman loomed at the edge of my vision, stood up behind the open door, her hand visored over her eyes. Her image wavered like a mirage.

  ‘I think there’s something wrong. I don’t feel right.’

  ‘Like you’re gonna be sick?’

  ‘No, it’s …’ I studied the make-up of the road surface, the rock patterns worn in. ‘I’m not sure.’

  Then a surge of pain swelled through my head, rose up, and I clenched through it, shut my eyes tight.

  And when I opened them again I was in the car, my head cradled into the seatbelt. The touch of the cold glass against my forehead.

  Yellow grass paddocks rushing by in the sunlight.

  I sat up.

  ‘Woah.’ The woman was driving, put a hand to her chest. ‘You scared me.’

  It must have been the accident. The shock of it mixing up the chemicals inside my brain.

  It must have been the trauma, shaking round my head.

  Residual effects. There’s no way of knowing for sure how these things work. Maybe you experience unusual feelings. Maybe even behaviours.

  Some people, when they’re overstressed, they conv
ince themselves that they’re having a heart attack, and they believe it, one hundred per cent, cannot be convinced otherwise. They’ll do tests and heart monitors and ECGs, all for nothing. Plugged into machines. Feeling for their pulse on their wrists. All because their brain tricks them into thinking something that’s not true, because their mind’s confused, misinterpreting signals.

  Some people, they can actually make themselves have a heart attack because they’re so attached to the belief it’s happening.

  Your brain can work against you, just like that.

  They’d said there could be problems, the doctors. I thought I’d be okay to go back to work.

  But something clearly wasn’t right.

  I thought back to the hospital, the white sheets. The sharp smell of antiseptic. I thought of veins branching out, splitting, blood spreading.

  But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t remember why I was there. What had happened.

  Why I was in the hospital in the first place.

  I remember there was an accident. There was an accident and something was wrong, and it was serious. But what the accident was, I didn’t know.

  It was gone. Blank.

  I couldn’t remember anything.

  It’s like.

  I understood that things had happened, I had a sense of them having occurred. But I couldn’t recall. Anything. A chasm in my mind, dropping off a memory cliff.

  There was simply nothing there.

  ‘The hospital,’ I said, and I looked to her. She was driving, her blue dress shining in the sun. ‘You met me in the hospital.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  ‘What was I in hospital for?’

  The woman looked at me and her eyebrows pushed in towards each other. ‘What?’

  ‘Why was I in hospital – what happened?’

  She hesitated a moment.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, why was I in hospital?’

  ‘Because of your accident.’

  ‘What accident?’