One

by Andrew Hutchinson

  ‘What?’ she yelled, then she rushed back out of the room, back down the stairs.

  Back in the lounge room, on the couch in front of the TV, I sat down next to the woman. She was reading a local paper, nodding her head. Maybe to music that I couldn’t hear.

  ‘Hey,’ I said to her. ‘Hello?’

  No response.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ I asked. The woman lifted her head, looked straight at me.

  ‘Sorry?’ she asked.

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said, and she tilted her head forward, smiled.

  I lay down by her side at night, the woman lying on her back, staring up at the roof.

  ‘It’s so nice here,’ she said.

  The room was dark, slivers of moonlight reaching in between the curtains. She put her fingers up into the beams.

  ‘Don’t you think?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  I didn’t know if she could hear me or not.

  The woman dropped her hand onto mine, locked our fingers together. Her touch felt so real.

  ‘I don’t know what this is,’ I told her.

  ‘What?’ she whispered up by my neck.

  ‘I don’t know …’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘We’re here now.’

  ‘I don’t even know where we are.’

  ‘We’re at our beach house. Just you and me.’

  ‘I don’t … I know this place. I’ve been here.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Her hand let go of mine, slid onto my leg, rubbed along my thigh.

  ‘It all feels familiar, the house, the smells. Even the boat outside – I remember seeing it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she whispered.

  ‘When I saw it, it reminded me of the boat my dad had when I was a kid. How he used to go out on the water and I’d never go with him because I was …’ I sat up, the realisation jolting through. ‘That wasn’t you.’

  The woman put a hand on my back.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she told me.

  ‘It wasn’t you who wouldn’t go out in the boat, that was me. That was my memory.’ My head pulsed with pain, the pieces scraping. The woman ran her fingers up and down along my spine.

  ‘Come back,’ she said. ‘Come back to me.’

  I looked at the woman, resting in the moonlight. The thin sheet hanging over her naked body. She smiled. She held up the sheet, opened it to me. I lay back down beside her and she wrapped her arms round me, pulled me in.

  Her skin felt warm. Safe.

  She lined her face up with mine on the mattress, so that our noses were almost touching, and she looked into my eyes.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she whispered.

  ‘I don’t know what this is,’ I told her.

  ‘It’s okay.’

  I felt my fingers along her thigh. The feel of her skin communicating with me like braille. But the details remained evasive.

  ‘I don’t remember you,’ I told her.

  Then the room sparked to life, a flash of lightning.

  ‘Did you see that?’ the woman asked, and she sat up. Another flash burst through, lit up the room. ‘Quick, let’s go downstairs and watch it.’

  We rushed back down to the lounge room and looked out over the hillside through the windows. Each pulse of lightning lit up everything across the distance, then it was gone, just like that. Forks of it slithered down towards the ocean way off, the cracks shivering across the ripples. We stood up by the glass and watched out, listening to the storm.

  The rain rattled across the tin roof, sprayed across our view. The specks on the window reminded me of the same memory I’d had earlier, of light shining through water on glass in the night. My head hurt trying to force the connection.

  The woman was wrapped in the bedsheet beside me, her face lit up in the night, then dark again.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ she said, eyes fixed on the distance. I could see the electric shapes of the bolts in her blue eyes.

  ‘Amazing.’ I smiled to her.

  Her face lit up again, eyes looking up in wonder as the rain rushed louder and the winds creaked the joints of the wooden building.

  And we watched the flashes burst all through the night.

  I woke up, the warmth of the sunlight beaming in through the bedroom window, directly above my head.

  I could see.

  Tiny motes of dust floating in the stream.

  Through the glass, I could see white blotches of clouds lurching across the bright blue sky. A plane inching by, way off in the heavens.

  The woman was lying beside me, her back to me, covered beneath the sheet, and she shuffled, then she rolled over. She opened her eyes onto me.

  Perfect blue, reflecting the day.

  ‘Hello.’ She smiled.

  ‘Hello.’

  The woman held the sheet to her chest as she sat up and looked out the window, taking in the day. Her hair messed up, eyes squinting in the light. She stretched her arms, then she lay back down and pulled the sheet up to cover her mouth. Her eyes shifted to me.

  ‘Well, here we are then,’ she said.

  Outside, the air was full, awake. In the morning light you could see all across the distance, the houses dotted along the hills, the streets looping in between. Lush green grass paddocks led further up the hill behind the house, the chill of the morning dew settled all across. There was the boat, waiting, the blue decal peeling from its angles. There was a worn dirt path leading down the hillside and towards the ocean. You could hear the waves whispering, way down at the edge.

  We walked along the path, which twisted through rows of pine trees, their brown needles piled and spread all across the ground, the smell filling through the air. The heads of the trees swayed way up, glinting through the sunlight, their poking shapes waving across.

  The sounds of the wooden giants leaning with the breeze. The breeze filtering through. I closed my eyes to feel it.

  We rushed across the road and down onto the next part of the pathway, which led towards the beach. Thin-limbed trees lined the way, all twisted and wrapped round each other like snakes. The path turned into a wooden walkway, turned into stairs, and we dropped down, one by one, the sound of the waves rushing louder and louder, till we got to the end of the trail and the ocean stretched out before us, the breadth of it spanning all across the distance.

  The sea breeze felt comforting, as if it had been waiting just for us. The waves rising and curving in crisp blue, crashing into white. The water stretched up onto the sand, then slid back, moving closer with every push.

  The woman danced along the edge of the sea, tiptoed through the clear water.

  ‘It’s so cold,’ she said, huddling in her arms. Her hair playing across her features like ribbons.

  There was no one else around, vacant as far as you could see along the arching coast. Patterns of dog paw prints etched along the way.

  The sand tinkled against my cheek in the breeze.

  The woman stepped deeper into the shallows, her bare feet splashing in, then she rushed back to shore ahead of the waves, the frothing water advancing at her heels. She looked to me. Smiling.

  We sat down on the cold sand and watched out, looked for.

  Whales on the horizon.

  The ocean looked completely still out in the distance, a static platform that reached way off beyond the breakers. I wondered what it must be like, out there. Where there’s nothing else.

  Flat water stretching to the edge of the world.

  ‘We used to come here when we were kids,’ the woman said. ‘There was me and my brother and we’d walk along and race the waves, then we’d sit and make sandcastles for hours.’ A rush of wind flapped across my clothes, sprayed white water off the top of the waves. ‘We’d be over here, and my parents would be over there. Both of them at first. Then just my mum.’ She squinted towards where her parents would have been. ‘They were good times, you know?’

  She pulled a strand of hair away from her mouth, looked out to
the distance.

  ‘For a long time I couldn’t come down here afterwards, you know? Just, like, too much.’

  I didn’t know what she meant, but it felt close, like how a smell reminds you of something you felt when you were a kid.

  ‘I didn’t really know what to do for a long time.’ She dropped her head. Another rush of wind pushed through, sprayed across the distance. ‘Thank you for bringing me here,’ the woman said, and she looked at me, stared at my face. Her eyes drifted a moment, then came back to meet mine, narrowed in the sharp sunlight. ‘Thank you for staying with me,’ she said.

  The woman nuzzled into me in the cold, leaned her head onto my shoulder. Her cold hair against my cheek. She wrapped her arm over mine.

  And out on the distance, I could see a boat, a tiny faint rectangle waiting on the horizon. Its red light flashed, pulsed from the other side.

  ‘Hey,’ the woman said, and I looked to her. ‘Really, thank you.’

  I watched the light flashing. Felt the warmth of her body on mine.

  We walked along the main street of the beach town. There was no one around. All the shops were closed.

  Empty car parks and vacant picnic tables lined the way.

  We walked by the glass shopfronts, looking in at the clothes and plastic toys and books on display. Bucket-and-spade combos in plastic mesh bags. Newspaper front pages encased in wire holders. And at one shop, there was a pile of white T-shirts folded into squares and stacked on top of each other. A red price sticker that said ‘$7.99’, a ‘Sale’ sign next to that. A faceless mannequin stood alongside, wearing one of the T-shirts. Its arm raised in a waving motion.

  The pieces in my head ground together.

  ‘Hey,’ the woman yelled. ‘Come on.’

  There was one store open, though no one was inside it. It was a video store, brightly lit. Covers of movies lined along the shelves, rows and rows of them stretching across the carpeted floor.

  ‘We should get something to watch,’ the woman said.

  The newer films were along the outside walls, and they had multiple copies of them, all lined up, shining. Perfect-looking people staring out. Their tanned skin. Holding guns, standing in poses. I could smell the plastic of the containers.

  The entire store seemed abandoned, fans spinning on the ceiling for nobody.

  ‘They don’t even have these anymore,’ I said, looking at the covers, and the woman was moving along the aisles, humming. That same tune. ‘These stores have all shut down,’ I told her.

  As I looked through, I noticed that the pictures were all the same. The same videos from the front of the store were at the back, and they were repeated again in the aisles. There were only maybe ten different videos, repeated over and over, hundreds of copies.

  A feeling of dizziness came over me. The memory wasn’t right.

  It was as if I couldn’t find the detail, the edges fraying, and when I looked further into the store, further down the aisle, I noticed that it seemed smaller, the back wall much closer than I’d thought. The back wall was blank, white posters with nothing on them, and it hurt my head to look at it, my recollection failing.

  The image incomplete.

  ‘So, what should we get?’ the woman asked. She held up two copies of the same thing.

  The daylight was fading as we wandered back along the path, back up through the leaning pines, the worn track between the cracked bark trunks and dried needles. The impatient stars shone way up, beyond the reach of the trees’ heads. The peaks like skyscrapers, dragging across the sky.

  The woman locked her arm round mine as we walked, our shoes hanging from our fingertips.

  ‘I love being here,’ the woman said.

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know where here is.’

  ‘Oh c’mon,’ she said. ‘It’ll be fine. This is our house.’ She was still in another conversation, answering a question that no one had asked. I watched the moon peeking out and hiding behind the pines as they swayed.

  ‘This is where we always used to come. It was ours before it was theirs,’ the woman continued, her head down, watching her steps.

  ‘Doesn’t matter, they won’t ever know. It’ll be fine,’ she said. I wondered what she was responding to, how the other side of the conversation went.

  ‘It’s my house,’ the woman said. Steely eyed, looking ahead.

  At the top of the hill, on the driveway of the beach house, we looked back over the distance. The houses were lit up across the hillside, as if reflecting the stars in the blue night.

  As if.

  The stars had fallen from the sky.

  The moon shone bright above the ocean, highlighting the edges of the waves way out.

  The woman slid her hand down my arm and her fingers curled between mine, then she stepped round in front of me. She wrapped her arms around my waist.

  ‘Maybe we could stay here,’ the woman said.

  And her scent caught on the breeze. I breathed it in.

  ‘Maybe we don’t have to go back,’ she said.

  She rolled her eyes up onto me. ‘We could stay here.’

  The glimmer of dusk across her features.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  The woman closed her eyes. She lifted up onto her toes, touched her forehead to mine.

  ‘Just you and me,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes.’

  I lay beside her on the mattress at night, looking out at the stars. Her fingers locked over mine at my side.

  I lay there, by the woman, and nothing felt wrong or out of place, nothing felt confused or misaligned.

  And although I knew it wasn’t real, though I knew it was a fragment of memory, it felt as if it could be. As if we didn’t need anything else.

  Soon, I’d wake up. I knew it. Soon, I’d wake and be somewhere else. Rattling along the freeway, past those same dry grass paddocks. Drifting through some strange town. I knew that when I closed my eyes this would all be gone, rested back into my subconscious, and I tried to hold on to it, kept with it as long as I could.

  I took in the details. The warmth of her hand. The touch of her fingernails. The feel of the sheet across my legs. The dust settled across the outside of the glass. The black of the sky. The glimmer of the stars and planets. The sound of the ocean breeze in the night.

  It was amazing, the details, the things you remember. The beauty of them. Even the simplest element framed in my mind. I’d remembered this. For a reason.

  And as I felt myself fading, as the stars blurred and spread, I tried to fight it, tried to stay with this, to stay with her just a little longer. Just a little more.

  The sound of a seagull woke me up in the morning, calling out. I could see it out the window, its wings curving and flickering on the breeze, sailing on the blue sky. The woman was lying beside me on the mattress, resting in the blank room. She was already awake. She was looking up, watching out the window too.

  ‘You’re still here,’ she said.

  The woman smiled to me. She leaned over and kissed me, then she laid back. She was looking at my face, nodding.

  ‘We’re going to the beach,’ the woman told me. ‘Yes.’ She nodded harder. ‘Every day, like you said.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ I told her.

  ‘Beach every day,’ the woman said, and she sat up and threw her legs over the side of the bed, stretched her arms above her head. ‘Every day.’ Her voice was stretching too, straining through the words.

  We stepped outside and the woman looked all around before she pulled the door closed. There was no one on the street, the houses down the way dormant, quiet. The roads in the valley looked empty.

  The woman twisted the handle to make sure the door wasn’t locked, then pulled it shut, the impact resonating through the wood.

  ‘It took me ages to get to sleep last night,’ she told me. ‘You know when you’ve almost drifted off and your dream is coming to life and you’re getting caught up in it, carried away, and then you question it? Like, something doesn
’t make sense, and your logical brain kicks in and it stops your imagination from taking over.’ Her words settled in, sifted through the circuits of my mind. Weighed with a sense of recognition. ‘Then you’re just wide awake again. I kept doing that.’

  The woman walked out onto the driveway and looked across the hills. The town below, static. The sounds of the waves washing in. The woman turned round, visored her eyes to look up the hill.

  ‘I haven’t taken you up that way yet, have I?’ And she pointed up the hill, towards the green grass paddocks.

  ‘There’s a lookout, you can see right across,’ she continued. ‘It’s not that far.’ She started walking up the path, looked back to me. ‘C’mon.’

  The paddocks were empty, mostly green, tufts of yellow grass poking through. There were dried clumps of cow shit squashed between but no sign of any cows, and I thought back to the buffalo, the sentry. The image lurched through my brain.

  ‘Do you ever think about what you want in the future?’ the woman asked. And the question sparked a memory. The sounds, the smells. The woman stomping at my side. I knew this. She was watching her footsteps crunch through the grass because, I remember, she didn’t want to step in anything.

  ‘Like, not a new car or a new job or something, but what you want, what you really want, in the bigger picture, what makes you happy.’

  The words rolled out in my mind as she said them. I could’ve mimed them if I’d wanted. I knew this.

  ‘I do,’ the woman said.

  ‘Not all the time,’ I whispered.

  ‘Not all the time, but just, when you consider things and where you’re at, what you really need.’

  The conversation replayed like a recording. I knew every word before she spoke.

  ‘I think people get too caught up in it, you know? They overthink it. They think if they had this, that would be it, that would make them happy, or if they had more money or whatever.’ She looked across to the ocean. ‘You have to consider what you’ve got, you know? Like, things aren’t that bad.’