‘I don’t understand.’
‘What accident? Why was I in hospital – what had caused me to be in a hospital bed?’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘You don’t remember?’
‘No, I don’t.’
The woman stared straight ahead, the road coming towards her. She looked concerned. Maybe frightened.
‘You’d had an accident at your work. I’m not sure how it happened, but you’d hurt your hand pretty badly.’
I looked at my hand, the scar melted along the skin. The blue veins crisscrossing.
‘You had to learn how to use your hand again. You were in the hospital for some time. You don’t remember?’
I stared at my hand, my fidgeting fingers.
‘I don’t remember.’
The hum of the road, the wheels rolling along like conveyor belts.
There were flashes, moments that felt distinct. Blood rushing to my head, the cogs of a machine turning. Something orange and red and sticky across my skin. There were images, but they were scattered, their full presence just beyond my reach, like the smell of something you can’t place, the remnants of a dream. It all felt close but slightly further than I could recollect. Waiting just beyond the edge.
I could sense the images. I just couldn’t put them into place.
It was like.
Someone else’s memory, something that happened to someone else, which you saw, which you could feel when it happened. When you see a needle go into someone’s skin. Someone’s skull bouncing off the ground.
It was like a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces were the same colour. I could form the outline, the straight edges framed round the scene, but the middle was stark, absent. A jagged void glaring back.
And the harder I thought, the deeper the hole felt.
There was a sound, rattling against plastic, and I jumped, sat up in the seat.
‘What was that?’
The sound buzzed again, and I looked down and saw the screen of my phone beaming near my feet. I’d thought it was out of battery, but it was ringing. ‘No Caller ID’ on the screen.
I pressed the green button and put the phone to my ear. ‘Hello.’
‘Hi. It’s me.’ It was a woman’s voice. She didn’t sound familiar.
‘Who is this?’
The voice on the phone let out a breath. ‘Okay.’
‘Wait, who is this?’
‘It’s me,’ the woman said.
‘Me who?’
The line went silent, but the woman was still there. The sound of an engine of some kind thumping in the background.
‘Okay.’ Then she hung up.
‘Wait, wait.’ I pulled the phone away, looked at the screen.
‘Who was on the phone?’ the woman asked.
‘I don’t …’ I went through the call log, found the number. No Caller ID. Then I looked at the list of numbers I’d dialled. None of them were saved contacts. All listed as numbers. I scrolled down the list and tried to remember who I was calling, who these people were. There were no names.
I switched to the contacts list, but there was nothing there either, totally blank, then I remembered the video, the shapes of her breath.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Have a look at this.’ And I switched to the camera and the screen blinked bright then faded, the battery dead.
I stared at the dark screen. The shape of my reflection looking back.
‘Who was it?’ the woman asked.
‘I don’t know. There were no contacts.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean the contacts were blank, I had nothing listed, and all the numbers made no sense.’
‘That’s weird.’
I could see the concern in my eyes, the outlines of them defined in the small screen.
I tried to think back to other details I might have available, points of reference.
There was.
The envelope the woman had written on, when she wrote the driver’s details. I had a letter in the car. Maybe that would tell me something, help me remember what was happening. But I couldn’t find it.
‘Where’s that letter?’ I asked.
‘The which?’
‘The letter, the paper you wrote on.’ Me reaching behind my back, sliding my fingers into the crevice of the seat. The wire framework of the seat crushing my knuckles as I pushed my fingers through.
‘I don’t know,’ the woman said.
‘You had that letter, you wrote his details on it.’
And the feel of my fingers squeezed between the metal made me think of machinery, of my hand being crushed, and a surge of pain pulsed through, shocked into my head, and I pulled my hand out quick. I looked at my fingers.
‘Are you okay?’ the woman asked.
‘I just … I don’t know.’ There was nothing there, no source of the pain. ‘I thought my hand was being crushed.’
I flipped my hand over, looked over it, and then I could see.
Blood all across my skin, my arm gaping open, my hand flopping off my wrist. The dark colours of veins, shapes like porridge poking through the red liquid, my fingers bent like claws, pointing the wrong way, and the pain rushed, solid white, blinding, then it stopped.
‘Are you okay?’ The woman was looking at me, concerned. Me gripping onto my wrist. It was fine. Intact.
There was nothing there.
‘I don’t know,’ I told her. I was puffing, breathing too heavy. ‘There was a cut on my wrist.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yeah, it was bad. But it’s healed now.’
I turned my hand over in the sunlight. The scar shining.
‘I don’t understand,’ I told her. ‘I could feel it.’
The woman shrugged her shoulders, a sympathetic look across her features.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
I gripped the seatbelt, watched the muscles contracting through my hand. I tried to calm my breathing.
‘What is happening?’ I whispered.
Something was clearly broken, misplaced inside my head. Could this be brain damage? The after-effects of the accident?
I moved my fingers along the fabric of the car seat, the bumps across the plastic of the upholstery. The touch of the sunlight. It all felt real. It’s not possible this was only in my head.
I watched the woman driving, unaware of my fractured state. She stared on ahead. She leaned up on the windowsill of the door at her side. Her blue dress shining. The one she’d been wearing at my house.
It all felt real.
Maybe it was. Maybe my head just couldn’t process it, gaps, remnants fusing and disconnecting. Crumbling away without solidifying into complete sequences.
And yet I didn’t feel panicked by this. It felt right. Comfortable.
It felt like.
I should be here.
I watched the woman, driving in the sunlight.
She looked across to me. ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ And I turned away. The streams of the paddock fence-line rising and falling as we passed. ‘Don’t you think it’s weird?’ I asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘Me and you, driving along the freeway.’ Then: ‘We hardly know each other.’
The woman smiled.
‘I know you,’ she told me. ‘I know you. Better than you think.’
The shadows of the clouds curved across her skin, the white lines of the road flashing.
Maybe she was right, I thought.
Had we met before?
Did she know me?
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
The woman opened her eyes wide, as if I’d just broken her out of a daydream. ‘I need to get out of town for a bit, get away.’
‘Because of that guy.’ I thought of his dark figure behind the wheel, standing in the road as we accelerated away. ‘The one who hit my car.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded slowly.
‘Who was he?’
‘Oh,’ the woman’s voice sagged. ‘It’s a
long story.’
Something about him felt tangible, close.
‘You said he’d been outside your house at night, watching you.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is he your boyfriend?’
‘No.’
‘Why was he following you?’
The woman opened her mouth to speak, then stopped.
The hum of the road beneath us.
‘Okay,’ she said. She took a deep breath, blew it out in a long stream. ‘I’ll tell you what it is.
It goes like this.
‘So, I’m a nurse, okay? And I take care of people with terminal conditions, people who are dying.’
‘I know what terminal means.’
The woman looked across to me, then back at the road.
‘Okay. Well, I work with terminal patients.’ She let out a breath. ‘And it’s hard, you know? I work with terminal patients, and what happened is …’
The woman stopped again, lifted a hand from the steering wheel. ‘This is gonna sound terrible no matter how I say it.’ She shook her head. ‘I work with terminal patients as a kind of a companion.’
‘A what?’
‘A companion.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s …’ She bounced her head, thinking. ‘You make sure people aren’t sad and lonely in their last days.’
I thought it over, tried to imagine how this worked.
‘So, when someone’s dying,’ the woman continued, ‘when a family member’s dying, it’s obviously very difficult to deal with. No one knows how to deal with it. No one wants to know. Why would you? You don’t ever plan to be in that situation. And sometimes these people don’t have partners or anything either, so their families and friends are juggling visits between their day-to-day stuff, managing kids, jobs. It’s too much for kids to take in. It’s too much for most adults.’
The woman paused.
‘It’s a lot to deal with, for sure, and sometimes these people, they’re just left alone most of the time. Just dying by themselves. Not through anyone’s fault or anything. It’s just …’ She was getting emotional, had to pause a moment to hold it in. ‘Sometimes we’re the ones who hear the last words they’ll ever say, you know?’
The inside of the car felt empty, huge, as if a great space had opened around us.
The woman made a tick sound with her tongue, then continued.
‘So what happens, when you start working with terminal patients, is that sometimes the families wanna help, you know? But they can’t do it themselves, they can’t be around,’ she said. ‘The family just wants them to be happy in their last days. So they ask you to spend more time with them.’
The woman let out a breath, pushed at her eye.
‘It sounds horrible, but the family might pay you extra to …’ She rolled her hand in the air. ‘Form a relationship, more than just a nurse–patient type, you know?’
Her words collapsed into the empty space, the road humming beneath.
‘You take care of them, you spend time with them. Then you overstep the bounds a little. Maybe you touch them, you hug them.’ The woman paused. ‘You kiss them.’ She seemed hesitant as she recounted the details. ‘It’s wrong. I know it’s wrong.’ She nodded, looked over in my direction, but not at me, her eyes just off meeting mine. ‘But they don’t have anyone – they’re just these lonely shells of people, you know? They’re just fading away. You don’t wanna just leave them like that.’
I tried to make sense of what she was saying.
‘One time a patient took a liking to me, you know?’ the woman continued. ‘And I took him outside and showed him things. He’d never spent time with a girl, with anyone. He was happy, just for a moment. He had something,’ she explained. ‘That’s how it started.’
The woman stopped, bit her bottom lip as she watched the road ahead. ‘You hold hands with them, their frail fingers. You tell them things like you’ll always be there. How you’ll always be waiting for them. “You’re the love of my life”, “You’re my one”, you say.’ She stopped again, stared straight ahead as she spoke. ‘You give them hope in their last days. That’s all. So they don’t die sad and alone. That’s not such a bad thing.’
The woman held her focus on the road coming towards us, the dry horizon rolling by. The sun glinting along the peaks of the distant mountains.
‘So, that guy,’ the woman continued. ‘I took care of him.’ She paused. ‘I was with him and I took care of him. But he didn’t die. That’s why he’s angry, that’s why he’s been following me. He found out what was happening. That it wasn’t real, you know?’ She looked to me. ‘That’s why.’
‘And he’s been watching you?’
‘Yes.’
‘For a long time?’
Tears gathered along the edge of her eyelids, spiking her lashes.
‘He won’t leave me alone.’
I watched the landscape rushing by, the fields and paddocks, as the details dragged and scraped inside my mind.
The images forming and falling away, just as quickly as they came.
We turned off the freeway in the afternoon and came into an old town, a lonely strip of shops that rose from the endless yellow paddocks. There were five shops in total, a playground in the middle. There was a wooden picnic table at the end, and a monument of some kind beyond that, a bronze figure high on a pedestal, watching over the street. There was a train station further down the way, a small wooden building with high wire-mesh fences round the sides, the black-and-white crossing signals lying in wait at the roadside. The road bubbled up where it crossed over the tracks.
The main street of the town was huge, with wide gaps for parking spots which angled into the kerb. Over the other side, opposite the shops, you could see a church hidden behind green trees, a belltower on the top, peeking above the canopy. An old wooden cross spiked up from its peak.
There was no one else on the street, clear straight down. All the shops looked closed for the day, dark behind the windows. The footpaths sat waiting, lonely in the breeze.
‘I’ve gotta stop,’ the woman said. She turned in, eased into a spot near the shops. There was a public toilet just behind them, a brown-brick building with a ‘male’ figure on one side and a ‘female’ figure on the other.
‘I’ll be back in just one sec,’ she told me, and she pushed open the door and got out, slammed it shut behind her. She walked in, disappeared into a walled-off path indented in the brick, left me alone in the street.
It was like a ghost town in the daylight, no sound, no movement. The wind rocked the car as it pushed by, gathering momentum through the clearing.
There was a store right next to the toilet block that seemed to sell everything, all sorts of plastic cups and tools set up on white shelves in the window. In the front display there was a stack of white T-shirts folded into rectangle shapes, the top one flipped up to put it on show. There was a red price sticker that said ‘$7.99’ and, next to that, a yellow starburst with a red border which announced ‘Sale’ in red writing. There was a mannequin beside that, in a white T-shirt. Its right hand was frozen in a wave.
Waving.
I realised I was waving back, out of instinct, out of memory, and I focused on the mannequin and tried to get it back, tried to think back, to link it through.
Waving.
Then out of the corner of my eye there was movement, a couple walking away, arm in arm, along the concrete in the shadows of the buildings, then something started ringing. The train crossing was going off, the bell tapping over and over and the red lights flashing bright. There was no boom gate at the junction, just the lights and the noise, nothing between you and the train rushing by. Nothing to stop you from stepping out in front of it. Then I could see the train coming in, see the lights of it moving through the gaps in the buildings.
I watched it coming.
Right now, if you drove out, you could still make it across the tracks in time, even with the lights. There’s no boom
gate, so you could rush through and you’d still get past in time before the train cleaned you up, the way they do in the movies. You could still go right now.
If you pulled out now, the train would see you and jam on its brakes, and you’d probably still make it. If you stand out in front of a train and it hits you at full speed you’re in trouble, but if it puts on its brakes far enough out it’ll either stop in time or hit you flat. It might hurt, but you’d be okay. You wouldn’t die. Unless you go under the wheels.
But then again, maybe the driver doesn’t see you and he doesn’t hit the brakes in time. That’s the risk.
It was getting close now, too close. At this point you couldn’t go. You’d never get across in time, never make it. The train would smash through your car like glass, shred you to pieces. Instant death. No more.
The train rushed through the intersection, severing the connection between one side of the road and the other, a streaming wall of noise and movement broken up by thin gaps of light between the carriages. I watched the wheels and metal cogs rolling by, screeching along the shining metal tracks.
Right now, you’d be caught up underneath, your bones grinding, snapping between the steel, cutting through.
I watched the wheels rolling, slicing, the crossing bell dinging over and over and over, and then someone knocked at the driver’s door, tapped on the window. Someone was trying to get in, a dark shape, and I pulled back, gripped round the seatbelt. The woman was behind the glass, waving. She pointed to the door lock. I reached over and pulled it up and she opened the door, the sound from outside bursting in, then shut out again as she sat.
‘Okay,’ the woman said, settling back into the seat, and she started the car and then she looked at me and she pulled her head back. ‘Are you okay?’
I could still hear the metal of the train screaming, the crossing bell dinging. The sound made my teeth hurt, my head.
‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘I just … I was just watching the train.’
The woman looked over at the crossing. The lights had stopped now, the noise. The train had passed, the street empty and silent again. The crossing lights black, waiting in the afternoon light.
One Page 5