One

by Andrew Hutchinson

‘So what is it?’

  The woman turned to look ahead through the windscreen. She started moving her lips, the way people do when they mime the words as they read. The red light still loomed overhead.

  ‘In fact.’ Another burst of recognition flowed through. ‘What’s your name?’

  The woman looked to me, her head tilted forward.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I said to her. ‘You’ve never mentioned your name. I don’t know it.’ My mind was rushing now, working to fill the gaps. ‘And you don’t know it, either.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ The woman kept looking straight ahead as she spoke.

  ‘I mean …’ I stopped, the pieces in my brain shifting, grinding against each other, hurting behind my eyes as they dragged through. I touched onto my closed eyelids.

  ‘What do you mean?’ the woman repeated, same tone, still staring ahead.

  ‘I remembered her name. It was Sarah.’

  The woman said nothing.

  ‘I don’t think this is really happening,’ I told her.

  The realisation felt solid, clicking into place in my mind.

  ‘I think this is all in my head. That’s why you don’t know who he is or what happened in the accident. You don’t know these things. Because I don’t.’

  I thought for a moment, trying to put it all together.

  ‘You don’t even know your name.’

  The woman didn’t move, stayed focused on the road ahead.

  ‘I think this is it,’ I told her.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ the woman said.

  I looked back in the side mirror again, checked the scene. The driver wasn’t coming. No one was. Nothing else was moving, other than the flag flapping further down the street. A remnant of a past memory.

  I watched the traffic light set, kept my eyes locked onto it as I spoke. The one red light at the top, beaming. The crisscross pattern across the glass.

  ‘Okay,’ I told her. ‘Let’s go.’

  The light blinked off, the green flicking on below it, and the woman pulled away, still staring straight ahead. I watched the roadway in the mirror as it stretched further and further behind. The flag expanding and collapsing as it shrank into the distance.

  This had already happened. These scenes, these fragments, had already occurred.

  That’s why the window wasn’t broken, why the motel room felt like I’d been there before. Because I had, I’d already done these things.

  But they were all mixed up, my recollections, pieces jumbled together. Yet they still felt comfortable, like home. Because they were.

  These were my memories.

  As we passed the houses, the green trees, I knew them, I knew every turn, every crack in the aged bitumen. The scene mapped out before me in subconscious replay.

  But the full context was no clearer, no closer to solidifying.

  I watched out alongside as the road curved upwards into forest trees and hanging bark, rising over the towns below.

  I knew it. I’d seen it.

  The memory reimagined in perfect detail.

  We pulled over at a clifftop lookout, me watching down on the ocean as it smashed into the rock face then settled back. A foam of white residue wobbling along the water’s surface.

  The wind whistled through my clothes up at the peak, thumped my ears.

  The woman was over in an orange-topped phone booth, leaning against the glass. She played with the cord as she spoke into the receiver. She turned away when she noticed me watching.

  I sat on the concrete footpath and looked over the ocean through the gaps in the wire fence that kept you from falling over the edge. The water surging and fading, tumbling into its depth.

  The woman walked back to me, arms crossed in the chill. Her long hair flicking out in the gusts.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  She stood up beside me, her legs up close, then she bent down to look at me, her face aligned with mine.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked again.

  ‘Yeah,’ I told her. ‘I feel like I’m getting close to working it all out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like, every place we’ve been is familiar. I’ve seen them before. And it’s not just the place, but the details, the smell of the motel couch, things like that. I know them.’

  The woman looked out onto the ocean as the wind whipped by again. I waited for it to pass before continuing.

  ‘It’s like these are all things I’ve done, but I can’t remember doing them, and I can’t think of how they connect.’

  ‘What about him?’ she asked.

  ‘Him? Because you don’t know his name?’

  The woman didn’t respond.

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t put it together,’ I told her. I looked over to the orange-topped phone box, a glass cabinet standing alone on the concrete. ‘I haven’t seen a phone box like that in years – have you?’

  The woman looked back to it, then to me. Her hair flickering across her features.

  ‘What do we do now?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The woman smoothed her hair along the sides of her head with both hands, held it in place. ‘I just wanna go to my beach house. That’s all I want to do.’

  I looked up to her and I noticed that she was looking at the ocean, her eyes shifting. I looked across to see what she’d caught onto and there was a small boat out on the blue, floating out on its own. Drifting across the ripples.

  ‘Sometimes I used to go watch the ships and boats in the bay on the weekends,’ she told me. ‘My dad loved boats. He always wanted to take us out on his sailboat – it was only a little one, but he loved it.’ She paused. ‘I never did go out on the water with him though. I was too afraid of falling in, the darkness beneath the surface, you know?’

  Another gust pushed through.

  ‘Dad would sit with me and explain the differences between all the ships and boats. I tried to impress him by reading books on sailing. Did you know that a boat becomes a ship when it’s considered big enough to carry boats of its own on board?’ The woman smiled down to me. ‘I used to think about how one day I would go out with him and I’d show him how much I knew about the boats, show him how much I’d learned.’ The woman watched out on the ocean, eyes squinted in the sunlight.

  ‘What kind of boat is that one?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She laughed. ‘I’ve forgotten it all now.’

  She reached across and touched my cheek, and the wind whipped by again, rattling her cold fingers against my skin.

  ‘Something happened.’

  I sat up in my seat. The freeway was drifting by outside. Yellow grass plains and stacked-stone fences, crumbling away with every passing moment.

  It felt like we’d driven by these paddocks before.

  A bent frame of a memory had lodged inside my head, of lights blurred through drops of water scattered across a pane of glass in the night. The lights were multiplied, glinting through every splash, like tiny stars flickering across the surface.

  ‘That’s what it is,’ I said. ‘There was something that happened before I met you, an accident or something.’

  ‘You mean your accident?’ the woman asked.

  ‘No, another one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was driving home and I was tired and I fell asleep, and then I woke up and you were there. But you weren’t, were you?’

  The woman lifted her eyebrows, then squinted as she looked ahead.

  ‘You weren’t really there. This isn’t really here. Something happened in between.’

  The woman said nothing, kept her eyes on the road.

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why you’re not saying anything.’

  The woman stayed silent.

  ‘That is it. It’s starting to make sense.’ A feeling of clarity settled through me. ‘I remember I was driving home and I was looking up into the trees, the leaves fallin
g in the streetlight, and the car drifted across the lane. That’s it.’

  I could feel the elements snapping into place, like bones popping into joints. Like train wheels on tracks.

  ‘Something happened. That’s why you’re not answering.’

  The woman stayed focused on the road ahead, her expression distant. Detached. The road humming underneath.

  This was it.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Do you wanna stop and get something to eat?’

  I looked at her face, her blank expression. The road rolling across her blue eyes.

  ‘Yeah, there’s one up here a bit further,’ she continued. ‘I think we stopped there once.’

  And the recognition dropped through me, the connections sparking in my brain. She wasn’t speaking to me. At least, not now.

  The woman looked over to me then back at the road. Then she did the same again. She smiled.

  ‘No, not always,’ she said.

  I leaned forward in my seat, well forward, out of her eyeline, and the woman kept looking over to where I’d just been. Not looking at me, but where I should have been, back in the seat.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘But you’re the one making the call.’

  ‘This isn’t happening,’ I whispered.

  The woman settled her gaze back on the road ahead, then she reached over and twisted the volume on the stereo. Static scratched out of the speakers. The woman bobbed her shoulders, her head, mimed lyrics to a song that wasn’t playing.

  I sat back into my seat and I watched her singing along to nothing, watched her as she looked over to me, smiling. Laughing.

  The details clicking in, slotting through my mind. A sense of displacement, of removal overwhelming, like a hallucination, a fever dream, where the scale of things suddenly felt incorrect.

  I looked over the landscape outside, a lake passing by, quivering in the sunlight. Sticks of trees poking out of the water like wooden veins.

  We’d driven past this before.

  ‘Don’t pretend like you don’t know the words,’ the woman said.

  She was dancing, smiling, making exaggerated motions on the steering wheel. Off in another time, another place. Me, lost. Alone. Trapped inside my own head.

  ‘That’s you,’ the woman said, still bouncing to the beat, and she pointed to me.

  ‘Yeah.’ She clapped.

  The static scratched through the air all around, scraped along the inside of my brain.

  I thought back over all the conversations I’d had with the woman, all the things she’d said.

  Was it possible that we weren’t interacting?

  Definitely, that made some sense. There were times when her answers seemed off, where it seemed like we were having different conversations. Maybe we were.

  I watched her driving, drifting through the daylight.

  ‘Are we communicating?’ I asked.

  The woman didn’t respond, didn’t react in any way. Watched the road as the car drifted onwards.

  ‘Are you hearing me?’

  The woman started humming, that same tune again. Her voice bounced along the notes.

  ‘What is that song?’

  The woman looked across to me, smiling out the notes.

  ‘Why are you humming that song?’ I asked.

  The woman turned back to the road again.

  ‘Why are you …?’ And behind the woman, out the side window, I could see.

  Buildings.

  Double-storey houses, wrought-iron fences poking past.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked, and I sat up, the woman still humming through. We were on a suburban street, narrow, buildings rising up at either side. There were rows of cars parked along the gutters, one by one, and the woman looked to me, still humming.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked again. She smiled, bounced her head. And the car was drifting, fading, edging towards the parked vehicles on her side.

  ‘You’re getting too close,’ I told her. ‘Are you watching what you’re doing?’

  The woman turned to me again, humming. Smiling. As the side mirrors on the parked cars started to batter by, clapping in, bursting into the air, I reached across for the wheel, got a hand onto it.

  ‘We’re gonna crash.’

  But my pulling at the wheel had no effect, the woman’s voice sailing through her tune as the car careened forward, grinding, sparking. Rushing straight into the solid metal tailgate of an unloading truck.

  In my head there was a memory. Of traffic rushing by in the night.

  The cars were coming towards me, the lights streaming in. I could feel the warmth of them as they zipped alongside.

  And then it’s like.

  I was flying, the scene shifted.

  I was above the traffic, watching over, seeing the headlights flash beneath. Looking down on the road, the footpaths.

  I remember I felt calm, relaxed, like nothing else mattered, and the cars streamed through beneath me, flashing through the night breeze.

  The rows of streetlights stretching along the distance.

  Me, floating above, watching on.

  I closed my eyes to feel the rush.

  Then someone touched inside my hand.

  The car was stopped when I woke up, the driver’s seat empty, the driver’s door hanging open. The sky outside was slashed with streams of orange-coloured clouds. The hush of waves crashing, way off in the distance.

  I sat up in my seat. The car was parked on a dirt road, angled upwards on a slope, and we were stopped on a hillside, overlooking the distance.

  I could see.

  Houses and streets lining the valleys below, expanding across the flat plains at the base. The ocean beyond that, out at the edge. The dark, flat waterline on the horizon.

  The woman was standing out in front of the car, her back to me, looking across the hills to the ocean. She shadowed her eyes with her hand in the afternoon light.

  I got out of the car and behind us was a house, an old white wooden building with a balcony on the second level that watched out over the landscape. The dirt road we were on was actually a driveway, a long stretch of worn-in gravel and dust that lined back up to the street, a metal gate at the entry. The paint along the outside of the house was all cracked and flaking, exposing the grey wood underneath. There was an old vegetable garden alongside, a wooden box filled with dirt. Dead tomato plants trussed up and withered away. Long strands of dry grass leaned in the wind all around.

  An old boat, half-covered in a silver tarp, sat rested on a metal trailer in a basic framework garage next to the house. The boat had a blue design painted on the back, stylised lines that implied speed.

  ‘It’s nice, huh?’ the woman said. Her eyes were still locked onto the curve of the earth, where the sea met the sky. More clusters of buildings were littered along the coast, up and down from where we were. You could see the bitumen streets crisscrossing through the structures of the main town, the tiny traffic lights. The cars sliding along. There was a lighthouse out on the edge of the land.

  We were up high enough to see everything, yet close enough to feel the sea breeze.

  ‘My parents used to bring me here every summer when I was a kid,’ the woman said. ‘It’s nice, right?’

  The woman walked round the perimeter of the house, scanning up and down the walls, and the light was fading, the sun settling into the waterline. The yellow air of the afternoon was crisp, fresh. The cicada buzz hummed like electricity.

  All of the other houses along the hills were dark, silent. One, way off, with its outside lamp illuminating the front step. Nothing else.

  The woman stepped up to one of the windows at the side of the building and she pushed on it. She kept her hands flat on the glass as she slid it up, then got her fingers underneath the frame. She lifted the window open, pushed it up. She hopped up onto the window ledge and climbed in, disappeared into the darkness inside. Then a light switched on behind the front windows and the front door swung open, the woman standing
inside, smiling.

  ‘My beach house,’ she said.

  ‘I know this place,’ I told her.

  The woman smiled as she turned, skipped back inside.

  The setting sun taking the brightness from the world all around, the heads of the trees reduced to swaying silhouettes.

  I could see.

  Two stars had already woken up, ready for night.

  The streetlights opened their eyes along the pathways and roads across the hills, flickering to life in neat streams.

  There was nothing else moving anywhere around. No cars, no boats out on the water. Like we were the only two people left in the world.

  ‘You coming in?’ the woman called.

  Inside the beach house it was basic, bare, all white and grey colours. Huge windows watched over the horizon. An L-shaped couch corralled a TV into the corner of the main room. There was a kitchen bench and seats across the way, a small hallway leading to the back door beyond that.

  The stairs up to the next level were wooden, with gold hand railings. The house smelled like fresh paint.

  ‘I remember this place,’ I told her.

  The woman was in the kitchen now, looking through the fridge. She crashed the door shut.

  ‘They’ve got nothing.’

  The woman peeled her shoes off and dropped them, sat down onto the couch. She scanned through the drawers of the coffee table.

  ‘Well, they’re not using it, are they?’ she said to no one.

  I wandered upstairs, the wood creaking under my weight. There were three bedrooms off the hallway and the beds were all stripped, just mattresses waiting in the last reaches of sunlight.

  The woman was talking downstairs, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  The main bedroom had floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the front of the wardrobe and I jumped when I saw myself. My worn eyes, my messed-up hair. I touched my fingers to the side of my head. I pushed.

  The woman came into the bedroom, rushing by, and she flung a sheet out over the empty pink mattress, seemed oblivious to my presence. She moved around the bed in quick precision, tucking in the corners.