There was no one else around, no sign of the couple I’d seen walking away. There was nothing.
The woman reversed onto the road and we drove through the abandoned town, back towards the freeway. Country houses dotted along the paddocks, the remnants of corrugated iron from a treehouse bent up into a tree’s branches. I watched it drift by as we rolled out onto the freeway. The long, straight line of the road leading into the fading distance.
The train had unnerved me. Something about the metal, the shining steel slicing along the tracks. There was a sense, a smell to it, something that felt close, too close, made me feel nauseous, sick.
It reminded me of.
Cold wind in the night, how the air changes before a train arrives. It made me think of the rocks, the sound those concrete rocks between the tracks make when they scrape together, shift beneath your feet.
There was something about it that glinted in my mind, brought it back, but again it didn’t fit. Why the train, the lights of it sliding through the night?
And the couple walking. They stuck in my head.
Were they really there?
I tried to make it fit into place.
It was like broken fragments poking inside my head, all of them grinding against each other, but nothing coming together, solidifying. Everything was fractured, messed up. I couldn’t collect them into a complete image.
I touched my fingers onto my closed eyes, pushed on them to stop the pulsing pain, then I slid my fingers to the sides, dragging my eyelids. I combed my fingers up into my hair, along the sides of my head, and then it felt like they were sinking in. My skull, soft like a stress ball. I pushed my fingertips in harder and the sounds of the world sucked away and everything went black and I jolted my head back from my fingers and it all came back. The car tyres humming, the fading light of the day. I stayed as still as I could for a moment, took in the details. The smell of the car seats in the afternoon sun. The warmth of the rays on my leg. Outside, there was a lake at the end of the paddocks, stretching off into the distance, reflecting the sky as far as you could see. Sticks of trees leaned out of the water. The ripples glistening, quivering in the sunlight.
‘Are you okay?’ the woman asked.
‘Something just happened.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know.’
I looked at my hands, my fingertips. There was nothing on them, no sign of anything different. I turned them over, palms down, then palms up again. I pushed on the side of my head again and it felt soft, and my fingers sank right in and everything went black, and I pulled my hand away. I stared at my fingers. They trembled in the light.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about the thing.’
Me watching my hands. Shaking. I touched my fingers gently along the side of my head again, fingered through my hair.
‘What I was saying about the companion thing. It was wrong.’
My fingers shaking, touching across, feeling for a gap, a hole.
‘I can tell you were a bit freaked out. It’s …’ The woman paused. Me breathing faster, my teeth shaking. ‘You kind of get desensitised to it over time, you know.’
There was no hole. I could feel the line of my skull, the wall of it. But I dared not push.
‘Sometimes it feels like I’m getting more and more detached, you know?’ she continued. ‘The nerve endings dying out with each one. I mean, you have to, I guess, to deal with it. The downside is that it makes you more closed off. It makes it harder to let things in. You know what I mean?’
‘Something just happened,’ I told her. ‘There’s something. I can’t explain it. Something’s not right.’
The woman looked across at me, smiled. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
‘I don’t … I don’t know …’
The woman nodded, slow, her eyebrows arched in concern.
‘Sometimes you just need to get away from it all, you know?’ She refocused on the road ahead. ‘Otherwise it all gets too much.’
I stared at my hands, my fingers vibrating like the tyres on the road. The scar snaking down the edge of my wrist.
I shook them across the side of my head again, trembling along the curve of my skull.
The daylight faded into shadows and shapes, and the road shrank down to what was visible in the head lights, the white lines slipping beneath us. Trucks came towards us, lit up like digital dragons roaring through the night, then gone into the distance. The grassland alongside us looked blue as the sunlight shrank away, as if it was underwater. As if we were under the sea.
As the night took over, the woman pulled into a rest stop at the side of the freeway, slowing as we came off the road and into the siding.
The rest stop was mostly parking spaces, a scattering of streetlights watching over the empty white-line boxes painted across the bitumen. There was a wooden information stand and a public toilet, both shadowed beneath the beams, waiting in the darkness. There was no one else around that I could see. A couple of semitrailers were parked further along, curtains pulled across their tiny windows.
The woman eased the car round into a parking spot facing the gutter and she flicked the engine off and the head lights, dropping us into half-darkness, beneath the shadows from the lights overhead. She turned the interior light on.
‘We can stop here for the night,’ the woman said. She was looking around, scanning the inside of the car. She held her hair back as she went. I looked out across the lonely concrete, the spaces waiting in the night. The trickle of lights flashing by on the freeway, beyond the perimeter trees.
‘It’s weird,’ I told her. The woman still searching, checking what she could. ‘It doesn’t feel like we’ve been driving that long.’
Up above I could see.
Stars poking through the night sky, glimmering across it. The night well and truly settled in.
‘One minute it’s daylight and we’re in a country town, and the next we’re here. Nothing in between.’
The woman didn’t respond. She was looking into the back seat.
‘It’s like they don’t connect up. Nothing matches. Hours just gone.’
‘I need to sleep.’ The woman shook her head as she spoke. ‘You should get some rest too.’
The moon was out, half-shaded, above the streetlamps. I watched it through the window. The glass was cold, freezing on my forehead, my nose.
‘I don’t sleep at night so much,’ I told her.
‘Well, maybe you should try, you need rest. It’s been a crazy day.’
The woman reached up and turned off the interior light, switched us back into the blue and shadows. And in the touches of lamps and the moon, I watched her twist round in the driver’s seat, her blue dress shuffling. She curled to fit her body between the seat and the wheel, wriggled in, then she stopped and settled.
The depth of her breaths changed in the darkness.
I got out of the car carefully, lifted the door handle to close it behind, and I looked back in to make sure she was still asleep. I could only see her legs, her waist in the light. Outside the air was cold, a breeze pushing across the concrete. The sounds of cars zipping along the road. I looked in on her again, then I scanned all around where I could see, made sure no one else was nearby. I walked along the bitumen surface, across the painted lines. I looked for some detail in the night, something that might explain what was going on, something that might help.
In the darkness I could see.
Giant walls of black mountains that loomed over us on the other side of the road, reaching into the night sky, so high that I couldn’t understand how I’d missed them in the day. Their black shapes rising like cliffs, almost flat, watching on. You could see their jagged edges contrasted with the stars.
On the other side, stretching out from the rest stop, there was a huge stretch of flat, blank land with barely any grass, an empty plain waiting beneath the stars. It looked dry, like a lake, a waterway, that had dried up. In the blue of the night, I could see it reaching into
the distance.
There were no insect noises or bird sounds. Everything else sat still, frozen in place. The gentle gusts swept through at a steady cadence.
Then there was a beeping, a repeated sound dotted through the darkness, and I tried to hone in on it, but the noise was distant, way off. I couldn’t quite make it out. I leaned forward to hear, to tune in through the wind. The noise faded and grew with each breeze, high pitched, faint. I couldn’t hold it, couldn’t work out its direction.
I walked over to the information stand, a decaying wooden canopy that arched over an old map. There were pictures stapled to a pinboard beneath a dirty plastic casing, images of snakes and other animals, graffiti burned into the surface. I tried to read the documents beneath, but the words were blurred by the plastic.
I read the graffiti, the names melted in. ‘Carl was ere 89’. ‘MM 4 HA’. I scanned the messages as if there might be some code, something to be gleaned from them. But there was nothing. Nothing stood out, awakened any memory. It all felt removed, like I was viewing it through another layer of reality. Like I was walking in a spacesuit.
I looked out into the flat distance, the huge stretch of land. Mountains rising, way off by the moon. Blank fields of nothing between here and there.
The plains were illuminated in the white moonlight. Waiting in the night.
I made my way down onto the flat land, edging down a grass slope then over a wire fence. The earth on the other side of the fence was dry, crumbling underfoot. Cracks were patterned into the surface as far as the dim light could show.
My shoes.
Crunched in with every step. It felt as if I was sinking, the dry earth crumbling beneath my weight, and I kneeled down and put a hand on the dirt crust, felt the warmth underneath. It pulsed against my skin, like a heartbeat. I stayed there for some time, feeling the earth, listening to it crackle all round. The warmth surging against my palm.
A breath. Something broke me out of it, blowing warm air on my neck, and I turned around and a huge shining black nose was right up in my face, glistening in the moonlight. It was a cow, sniffing at me, its big head contrasted with the stars. It was craning its neck forward, reaching, twitching its nose towards my skin, and I put a hand up and it dropped back, rumbled the ground as it went.
But it wasn’t a cow. It was a buffalo. Dark coloured, horns poking out from the sides of its head. The buffalo kept its distance, kept watch from a few steps back, and I leaned forward to see through the darkness, to get a better look at it.
And there were more of them.
I could see more buffalo moving through the shadows behind, dozens of them shuffling, biting at what was left of the sun-dried tufts of grass, stomping along the surface. Their black shapes crowded across the distance.
I stood up slowly, my hands raised in surrender, and all of the buffalo lifted their heads in time, the shadows of their horns pointed towards me in dark mass. Mumbles and huffs poked through the gaps in the night all round, rising louder, grumbling, then everything stopped. Dropped into silence.
The sentry, his horns angling in the touches of moonlight, he shifted. He tilted his head towards me.
I kept my hands up as I stepped backwards, slow. I moved step by step, crunched along the earth, edging further away from the gathered herd. The sentry watched, remained still, set in the darkness.
He watched till I couldn’t see him anymore, till his dark shape faded into the night, then my legs pushed against the wire of the fence and I grabbed onto it and pulled myself over quick, stumbled into the poking grass on the other side.
I couldn’t see them, the buffalo. The herd had merged into the dark ness. I squinted forward to look through the wire, strained my eyes trying to pick out their shapes in the black. The baked dirt cracked, peeling up in the night.
Then a rumble of thunder resonated across the dry basin, the stars shrouded behind a layer of cloud.
Then the rain hissed through the darkness.
‘It’s gonna leak,’ I told her. The woman jolted out of her sleep as I opened the car door, the interior light making her squint.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked.
‘There’s a leak at the back window.’
There’d been a leak in the window seal for some time, and now, with the crash damage and the shatter marks like spider webs all through the glass, it would only be worse, and then the thunder rolled again. Rain rattled across the metal. I climbed into the back seat and grabbed a stiffened old towel, which I’d left in the car for this purpose, and I pushed it into the corner of the glass. I could feel the chill of the water leaking through. I pushed harder into the edges and I looked out at the back of the car as the lightning burst. The glass was clear, intact. Brown demister lines across it like notepad paper.
I looked to the woman.
‘There’s no damage,’ I said.
‘What?’ the woman yelled over the sound of the hammering rain.
‘There’s no damage,’ I yelled back. ‘From the accident.’
I got out into the rain and looked over the dripping metal. The storm was getting heavy now, the cold soaking through, and I angled round to see the back and another flash of lightning opened up. There was no sign of the crash, nothing at all. The rear of the car was fine, the water spilling across it.
My fingers touched along the side of my head.
The woman stood out of the car as the thunder rolled over again. A flash of lightning lit up her face, her long hair wet, clumping together like tentacles.
‘What are you doing?’ she yelled.
‘There’s nothing.’
‘What?’
‘From the crash.’ I kneeled down to look more closely. The rain drumming across the metal, the water streaming down my face, into my mouth, sinking through my clothes. ‘There’s nothing at all.’
‘Get back in the car, it’s pouring,’ the woman yelled, and she ducked back into the cabin and shut the door, disappeared from view.
I stood looking at the back of the car for a moment, the lightning again flashing white. It looked fine. I looked across to the plains, looked for the buffalo shuffling in the distance.
I got into the back seat, the rain rushing across the roof.
‘There’s no damage,’ I told the woman. She was looking down at the floor in the front, scanning for something. She handed an old jumper to me.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Use this.’ And she motioned towards the leak at the back window. A tiny stream quivering down the glass inside, lit up in another lightning flash. The glass. Solid. Perfect.
‘There’s no damage,’ I told her again.
She shook the jumper at me again and I took it, pushed it into the corner of the glass.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ I asked. The woman was looking across to the leak, then she looked to me.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
My clothes were heavy, wet, shivering on my skin. The rain roared across the metal now. Waves of it sifted through the streetlights. The woman handed me her jacket.
‘Here,’ she yelled over the rain.
‘It’s too cold.’ I pushed it back to her. ‘You’ll need it.’
‘But the leak’s gonna get worse.’
I looked at the other side of the back window. Another stream of water broke in, trickled down the glass. The water pooled across the parcel shelf.
‘There’s another one,’ I told her. I pulled the jumper away, watched the water sliding in on both sides.
The woman watched over the shoulder of the passenger seat. A flash of lightning revealed a dark cloud of water filling through the fabric of the back seat.
‘It’s an old car,’ I told her. ‘I couldn’t fix it.’
‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘We’ll just wind the windows down in the sun.’
She put a hand on my shoulder.
I leaned in to her ear to speak over the rain. ‘There’s no damage outside.’
She watched my face as I leaned back.
<
br /> ‘It’ll be fine.’ She nodded.
Her smile flashed to life in the lightning, then vanished into the darkness.
We sat waiting in the downpour, watching the shaky streams quiver down the glass.
‘Do you remember what you said to me?’
The soft edges of her whispers woke me up, reaching through the silence.
‘Do you remember what you said?’
The rain had stopped now, the car rested in silence. We both must have crashed out, me twisted into the driver’s seat, legs stretched down beneath the dashboard, and I arched up. I leaned forward to see the woman.
Her head was laid back against the shoulder of the passenger seat and the door, and I craned further across to try and see her through the darkness, to see if her eyes were open. She was still sleeping from what I could make out, the blue light of the digital clock touching across her resting features.
Outside the car there was nothing. The streetlights at the rest stop were gone, the trucks. There were no stars in the sky, and I sat up in the seat, got closer to the window to peek out. I squinted through, tried to make out. Something.
I cupped my hands over the cold glass to look out the side, strained to see.
There was nothing.
It was as if the car was suspended in darkness, no indication of where the air ended and the earth began. I couldn’t trace any markers on the horizon, and I focused harder, tried to zone in. I concentrated on the blackness, tried to find something, anything.
Then I thought.
That I could see a red light way out in the gloom, distant. The light was faint, muffled, so much so that I thought it could be a trick of my eyes and I had to look away from it, focus on it just to the side of my main line of vision to keep it steady.
The faint light pulsed at a steady beat. It was hard to keep in my sight.
‘Do you remember what you said to me?’ the woman whispered again, and she shuffled in the seat, turned.
‘Let me go,’ she whimpered.
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