One
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‘Let’s stop here tonight,’ the woman said. ‘We’re not gonna make it all the way today.’
‘All the way to where?’
The woman smiled back.
‘I really don’t know where we’re going,’ I told her.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll get there soon,’ she said.
We passed by a beachside carnival, the walls of colourful tents flapping in the wind. Crowds of people moving along, plastic bags hanging from their fingers, parked cars lining the streets as far as you could see. The metal arms and lights of the amusement rides rising above, voices screaming into the sky. Fibreglass clowns turned, open mouthed. The tails of escaped balloons twirling towards the clouds.
A plastic unicorn, shining in the sunlight, as it shrank and shrank till it was a tiny speck, disappearing into the blue.
The woman arched the car into the driveway of a motel, crackling along the white pebbles between a set of old brown-brick buildings.
‘This’ll do,’ she said.
The woman opened the door to our room and twirled in, let herself fall back onto the bed. The room was painted brown, and had a double bed in the main room, a TV attached to a black metal arm on the wall right in front of that. There was a bathroom further back, a couch over in the corner. A grey ceiling fan spinning up above. The woman turned over on the covers and scrambled across, grabbed the TV remote and the local newspaper from the bedside table, and she turned the TV on, sparked it into life. She opened up the newspaper, spread it out on the bed. There was some soap opera on, daytime shows.
‘Did you see the carnival back in town?’ she asked. I sat down beside her on the bed and peeled my shoes off and my socks, and dropped them to the floor. I tapped my toes on the hardened fibres of the carpet. I looked at the woman’s back, her body on the bed beside me, the zip along the spine of her blue dress, and I wanted to touch her, as if it was something I should do, something natural. I wanted to unzip her. I closed my hand and moved across to the couch, lay down across the cold cushions.
‘Are you okay?’ the woman asked.
‘I don’t even know.’
There was a glint of familiarity as my skin touched the cushions. Above me I could see.
The old fan poking out of the roof, the grey blades turning, the stained ceiling beyond. It all felt close, known. My bare feet slid between the cushions, the cigarette history melted into the fabric.
The woman stood over me, looked down at my face.
‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ I told her. She narrowed her eyes, looked across to the TV. Something that sounded like a cartoon.
‘It’s like being in a dream where nothing connects, where logic and meaning isn’t clear, but everything feels possible, feels real. It all makes sense as it happens. And everything just blends into the next.’
The woman didn’t look back down, kept watching the TV, pressing the channels on the remote.
Outside, raindrops tapped against the windows, a gentle applause celebrating nothing, ringing in my ear, and I touched along the side of my head, tickled through my hair. Then I pushed, felt my fingers sinking in. I pushed harder and, like disconnecting the power cord, everything went black.
The carnival was all too-bright colours and screaming kids roaring through the night, a tide of people shuffling along the grass and dust. Smoke sizzling from black-coloured barbecue grills. The music rose and faded all around.
The woman had bought blue fairy floss and she tore some away, pushed it towards me.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Lighten up.’
She was wearing different clothes now, a summer dress.
‘How did we get here?’ I asked. The woman smiled, danced across the sounds, barefoot.
‘C’mon,’ she said, and she held a hand out for me to take. I shook my head.
‘How did we get here?’ I asked again.
The woman shrugged, turned back to the music.
In the distance I could see a lighthouse, turning and pulsing in time. Up above us there were strings of lights trailing between trees, sagging in the middle, and again everything fell into place, became clear. I waved the woman over, leaned in to her ear.
‘I’ve been here,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she yelled over the music. ‘You told me already.’
‘No, I mean here, right here. This has already happened.’
The woman screwed up her face and danced away, clapped at the air. That clapping, so distinct. That dress. I felt dizzy, the carnival rides spinning too fast beside me, the lights swirling through the darkness, the kids’ screaming fading in and out, in and out.
The woman came back to me. She was drinking something from a bottle and bouncing. She handed the bottle to me.
‘Relax,’ she said. ‘Just let go.’
I took her hand and she led me through the lights, the crushed-grass pathways littered with flattened aluminium cans, dropped napkins and promotional flyers, all smeared with dirt.
‘Come here,’ she said, and she ducked behind a tent, hidden in the shadows.
‘Here.’ She handed me a dark brown bottle, a longneck. ‘Drink it.’ She nodded. It tasted warm and fizzy, stuck in the back of my throat.
‘You like it?’ she asked.
‘What is it?’
‘That’s for me to know,’ she told me. A flash from the lighthouse showed her drinking, tilting the bottle up into the air.
Like teenagers, we hid behind the tent and raced each other to see who could drink the most, then we skipped back into the crowd. Music pulsed against the air, deep bass sounds rumbling the ground beneath, and people were laughing, filling every gap with sound. Too-young girls, tough guys in tight T-shirts and gel-spiked hair. The smells of grass and mud and cooked meat.
‘Thank you,’ the woman yelled across to me, and the alcohol on her breath was strong. She pulled my face up to hers, our noses touching. ‘Seriously, thank you.’ Then she let go, twirled back through the drops of light falling from waving sparklers. The rising screams from the edges of the night, fake plastic fighter planes spinning through, blurring into rapid shapes. And through the crowd I noticed someone. Someone I knew. I saw someone I recognised.
‘Hey,’ I yelled at the woman as she spun and spun, her bare feet tiptoeing across the flattened grass, hair stretching away. ‘Hey, that’s him,’ I said, and I couldn’t focus, widened my eyes to clear them. ‘That’s the guy, that’s the one who was watching you.’ And I pointed in his direction, but the woman didn’t hear, smiled back. She closed her eyes.
I dropped the bottle and went after him, filtering through the mumbling crowd.
I spied through the gaps between the dodgem cars and the soft-toy prizes strung up along the walls, watched him moving along. There was a woman with him and he had his hands in his pockets, and I could feel myself wavering as I watched, ready to overflow. This guy, I thought. This guy. I followed him through the crowd and up onto a concrete footpath, lights all along the trail to guide the way through the night. I followed him, stayed three people back, till I got the nerve to make my move and I got right up onto him quick, his dark hair, his jacket. The woman at his side had her arm linked over his, and I got up to his back and I tried to tap on his shoulder but ended up pushing him, shoving him forward. People turned and looked.
‘What the fuck are you doing, huh?’ I said. My fist at the ready, my heart racing. The man whipped around quick, a surprised look on his face, and he looked me up and down. His expression switched. He straightened up, stood over me.
‘What’s your problem?’ the man said, and he stepped towards me and the woman at his side held his arm, tried to pull him back. She was saying something, and I studied his face, the scarred folds in his chin. The tiny hairs poking from his pores. My fists quivered at my sides like the wheels on a broken shopping trolley.
‘I’ve made a mistake,’ I told him.
‘You what?’ the man said, louder this time, and he stepped right up over me, right up in my face, his b
reath against my lips. And I couldn’t help it, but I couldn’t keep standing. My knees buckled and gave way, thumping into the grass next to the path. My closed fists slid down the front of the man’s shirt.
‘You’re not the right one,’ I told him, and he shoved me away, kicked dust at me while the woman at his side screamed at him, pulled on his arm. The woman looked at me. Her face was distorted and strange.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told her.
The man stood over me a moment, his fists clenched, then the woman yanked at his arm again and he turned away. She curled her arm back over his, guided him down the walkway. She looked back at me as they went.
‘I made a mistake,’ I said. Then the crowd closed in around him. ‘I’m sorry.’
I collapsed back onto the grass, let my head hit the ground, and I closed my eyes to stop the lights from spinning, the stars, and I held my hand up in the air.
And I waited.
I waited for the woman to come find me.
My hand floating in the night.
Waiting.
I felt her fingers curl between mine and she pulled me to my feet.
‘It’s okay,’ she told me.
‘I made a mistake.’
‘It’s okay.’
The woman led me away from the sounds and the lights and the noise, held on to my hands with both of hers. She walked in front of me, stepping backwards in the moonlight.
‘Come this way,’ she said.
She guided me across the grass and concrete, away from the crowds. She helped me take my shoes off at the edge of the sand and I could hear the ocean but I couldn’t see it any place, hidden in the darkness.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I made a mistake.’
The woman had guided me to a playground, a bordered box of beach sand away from everything. The streetlight above casting long shadows from the slides and swings. The ocean beyond rushed in again.
The woman led me over to an old boat, a small wooden ship mounted on blocks of wood for kids to play in. The boat was painted red and blue, and covered in black scribbles of graffiti. There was rubbish inside it, plastic containers and broken bottles. Tiny green shards of glass.
The woman climbed the stairs up into the boat, threw wrappers and empty cans overboard and swept away the glass, then she took my hand, invited me to climb in. We sat down on the cold wooden floor inside the boat, and she was looking at me now. She was sitting opposite me, staring in the reaches of the light. Her hair blew in the ocean breeze.
‘I used to come here, when I was a kid,’ the woman told me. ‘I used to play in this boat.’
The ocean washed in again.
‘Where’s the water?’ I asked. The woman pointed across to the side.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘This is what you do.’
She lay back into the boat, stretched out along one side.
‘You do it too,’ she said. ‘You lie right here.’ She tapped on the floor at her side.
The two of us lay next to each other on the wood of the marooned vessel, me moving carefully, feeling the crunch of broken glass as I went. We stared upwards, our heads next to each other. The wooden sides framing the night sky.
The sky was mostly clear above, a few shreds of wandering clouds creeping across the stars. The white edges beamed in the moonlight. The constellations and clusters gathered together, billions of them watching on. The wind creaked through the wood all around us.
‘Now, watch the sky,’ the woman said. ‘Watch the sky, and pretend that they’re not moving.’ She pointed. ‘The clouds, I mean. Pretend that they’re not moving. We are.’
The waves crashed in and fizzed up the sand across the way.
‘Pretend,’ the woman said, ‘that the sounds you’re hearing are the waves washing against the sides of the boat as we drift.’ She waved her hand above us. Back and forth. The clouds in the sky above, the boat moving. ‘We’re floating.’
I imagined seeing the land getting further and further away, fading into the distance.
‘Floating away,’ the woman whispered up next to my ear. I felt her hand rested onto my stomach.
She moved her finger in tiny circles on my shirt.
And for a moment, everything fell away. It was just us, floating along the ocean in the night. Nothing else.
‘The world getting more distant as we go.’ Her lips tickled my ear as she spoke.
‘Beautiful,’ I whispered. I closed my eyes.
Her hand slid up to my chest.
‘I’ve drunk too much,’ she said.
The gentle pops of her lips as she kissed along my neck.
I opened my eyes.
‘That’s it.’
I sat up on the bed. We were in the motel room again, and it took me a moment to catch up. The woman was lying beside me, the room grey and silent in the shadows. There was a halo of yellow light from the bathroom round the edge of the closed door.
‘What are you doing?’ the woman mumbled. She was naked beneath the sheet, her back to me. I could see the indent of her spine curving down her back. Her pale skin. I refocused my thoughts.
‘You told me I said something to you.’
‘What?’
‘When we met in the hospital, I said something to you, right? That’s what you told me, back in the car park.’
The woman hesitated a moment.
‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘What did I say?’
She rolled over to face me, her naked breasts sliding in the reaches of moonlight. Eyes barely open in the gloom. ‘You told me about how you were waiting.’
‘Waiting for what?’
The woman let out a breath.
‘You told me about how you used to go and wait for her in the city, at the train station.’ I thought back to the city streets, the white concrete in the morning. The rush of the office workers flowing out of the electronic doors. ‘You said how you used to go there when you’d finished your shift and you’d wait to see her on her way to work.’
It all flooded back, the detail shivering through. Me standing. Trying to pose right, ready for her to see me.
‘You told me how she worked nearby and she caught the morning train, and you’d wait for her and you’d try to talk to her.’
‘Because she wouldn’t speak to me anymore,’ I whispered.
‘Because she wouldn’t speak to you anymore. You said that eventually you stopped trying to talk to her, but you still went to the station. How you’d stay at a distance and watch. Every day.’
I mimed the words as she said them.
‘One time I asked you about what had happened, at work, how the accident happened, and you told me it wasn’t an accident, though everyone thought it was.’ She paused. ‘You did it to yourself.’
The pieces were falling into place, shifting and merging.
I could see.
My fingers shivering above the conveyor belt. I could feel the air from it.
‘You said you knew it wouldn’t kill you. But you had to do something. You said you weren’t trying to end it. But you just wanted her to see you. To talk to you again. And if you were in the hospital, she’d come.’
I knew the words before they left her lips, knew what she was going to say before she spoke. My breaths flickered in my chest.
‘You told me how people are always trying to find the meaning in their life, why they exist, but you already knew yours. It was in that moment, that time when you’ve met that one, that person who makes everything complete. And the rest of the world just falls away. There’s no other people, no other places to be or things to do. It’s just the two of you. And for just a tiny fraction, that moment in time, everything’s clear. Then it’s gone. It’s gone so quick you don’t even know it. You can’t hold on to it, you can’t understand it. All you know is that you want it back. So you’re always chasing it. You’re always trying to feel that moment again. It’s always there, in the back of your mind.’
These were my words. I knew this.
‘Yes,’ I whispered. ‘I remember.’
It was silent when I opened my eyes again, the room in grey and blue shades. The woman was sleeping beside me. She crumpled across the local newspaper as she stirred. Somewhere outside, I could hear waves crashing in. And then there was a sound, faint. Beeping in the distance.
I sat up and I watched the woman for a moment. I wondered, did we even have that conversation?
Did that really happen?
I looked over at the couch in the corner of the room, the ceiling fan, then I looked at my fingers on my left hand. I touched my thumb to each one. I shivered them along the side of my head.
I left the woman sleeping in the room, edged the door open just enough to squeeze through, then eased it shut behind, held the handle up as I went. Outside, the air was cold, skimming off the top of the ocean. Cars were parked in front of each motel room, shaded in the blue of the moonlight. There were no lights on any place, it was quiet all around. You could hear the detail of the waves across the way, the water curving over and splashing in.
And that sound. Still beeping.
I crushed along the tiny pebbles of the driveway and I tried to be quiet so as not to wake anyone. I pretended I was a spy trying to sneak across, stepping and shifting my weight, one foot at a time. I came through the entrance, past the reception desk. There was no one inside. No lights, no movement.
The street outside was empty, no engine sounds in the distance, no headlights way off. The streetlights bent over like water birds along the way, their bright heads illuminating the bitumen. The road was a giant footpath opening to the world, and I wandered along the puffed white lines in the centre, balanced on them. My footsteps echoed into the cold night.