The conversation expanded in my brain, unfurled like a yo-yo, and I moved my hand up to the side of my head, fingered along my hair.
‘I guess I just want to be happy,’ I whispered, remembering what I’d said, how the conversation went. ‘Live quietly. Raise kids.’
‘Oh yeah?’ The woman turned to me, smiling. She couldn’t possibly have heard my voice. ‘How many kids you gonna have?’
I said nothing but I thought of my answer. Four, maybe five.
The woman opened her eyes wide, smiled.
‘Five,’ she said. ‘I hope you’re the one pushing them out then.’
In the memory, I could picture a future, with babies crying and kids playing, and seeing them grow up. I thought back to driving home, the night shift, my house with the concrete driveway. How it didn’t end up like that.
‘Do you remember when you came here?’ the woman asked, still stepping up the hill at my side, breaking me out of my thought.
‘Do you remember when you came, the other time?’
I looked at her face, her blue eyes waiting.
I shook my head.
The woman stopped, looked out across the distance. We were at the peak now, above everything, the wind whistling through. The scope of the world spread all around us. On one side, the ocean reached right out to the edge of existence, as far as you could see, tracing along the shape of the world. On the other, you were looking over farmland, green fields and dams and houses dotted through, waiting in the widening sunlight.
The wind flapped across, whipping my clothes, my hair.
The woman slid her fingers into mine.
We stepped along the edges of the rockpools, looking in, checking for sea life. Clouds had shifted across the sky now, grey patterns and shapes lumbering above the ocean, their colours reflected in the folds of the sea. The woman held my hand as she skipped across each gap, the edges of rocks digging into the bottoms of my feet. The cold, clear water sloshing over the sides.
‘This is what we can do,’ the woman said. ‘We can come down here and get fish, take crabs right out of the ocean.’ She smiled. ‘We don’t need jobs or cars, we’ll just stay here.’
The spill of the ocean washed over the top of the brown rocks.
‘We can grow vegetables in the garden by the house. It’ll be perfect.’
I could see a vision of it, of the tiny garden sprouting in green and red. The cold dirt on my hands, pushed into my fingernails.
‘We’ll just stay here. We don’t need to go back,’ she said.
Across the way, beyond the rocks, there was another beach, empty and waiting. Its perfect sand shining.
I looked over to the woman. ‘Hey, we should go check that out.’
The woman stood up, legs either side of a pool, sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Some kind of seaweed dangling from her fist. She looked concerned.
I made my way over to the other beach, stepping carefully across each edge. I got to the side of the rock formation, which sloped towards the beach, and I skipped down, dropped onto the wet sand, and when I looked up I was behind the woman. I was on the other side, where we’d started. The memory had restarted.
‘You coming?’ the woman yelled, her sleeves down, dry, stepping across the brown rocks. Our footsteps fresh along the path behind me.
I noticed.
When I looked across to the other beach the details seemed blurry, unclear. The sand the same colour all along. Nothing in the distance. A flat line of beach trailing off.
The grass on the dunes was still, even when I could feel the gusts.
We watched the overcast day from the beach, watched the waves rising and crashing. The sounds of them tumbling over, kicking back. There was no one else along the way. There were no boats on the distance.
The woman sat beside me, pushing patterns into the sand.
‘I don’t think about it that much,’ she said. ‘I mean I do, and it’s sad. But there’s not much you can do.’ She paused. ‘She obviously loved him very much, you know? She loved him a lot. But they just didn’t work anymore.’
The woman looked at me, eyes narrowed in the sand-littered gusts.
‘He took it hard, yeah. He moved away. I went and saw him a few times and his house was a mess, just stuff everywhere, and it stank too. He wasn’t taking care of himself and I was like, “What are you doing?”, “What do you do with your time?” And he’d put on this front and pretend it was all fine. But it wasn’t. He was lonely.’ The woman leaned her head onto her knee, looked down at the sand. ‘I mean, they’d been together for twenty-something years. It’d be hard.’ I watched her finger sliding along the tiny grains, slicing through them. Her expression was distant, detached. Staring but not really looking.
‘I didn’t really know my dad,’ I whispered, my responses coming back to me again. ‘He was always working, he wasn’t really around much. I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with him.’
The words felt cold, hard. The woman looked to me, smiled with her mouth closed.
I watched her drag patterns and shapes into the sand for what felt like hours.
We walked back along the pine trees, the crowds of dry needles across the grass, and the woman held my arm. I felt her leaning in.
The sunlight was fading when we got back to the house, draining into orange light, and we sat on the front step and watched out. We watched the water flowing into the darkness, trailing away from the setting sun, the world erasing into shadows and shapes.
The town below was harder to make out now, the separation between the houses more difficult. Black roads and streetlights. It was changing, I could tell. The recollection was slipping.
The woman held my hand, put her head onto my shoulder. The touch of her hair against my cheek.
‘I don’t want to leave,’ I told her. ‘I don’t want to forget this. But I feel like it’s going. Like I’m losing the memory.’
She had her eyes closed, the gentle touch of the dusk soft across her features.
‘I feel like,’ I told her, ‘it’s coming to an end.’
She slid her finger along my arm, dragged patterns, just as she’d done with the beach sand.
As the day closed, retiring into night.
A sound woke me in the night. Rattling, scraping.
Like.
Metal being dragged across concrete, and I sat up.
I was in the bedroom, the sheet draped over in the moonlight. The woman was gone, a wrinkled space where she’d been.
I got up from the bed and squinted round the dark and the noise scraped again, digging in, outside somewhere. I looked out the window and the hillside houses were dark, silent, and in the distance there was something different. I leaned in closer to the glass to see. There was no water, no moon, no stars. Everything beyond was just black.
The sound scraped through again.
I rushed down the stairs and looked for the woman. The house was empty, curtains all closed. The furniture waiting in the shadows.
The metal sound dragged again and I got over to the window and peeled up the edge of the curtain to peek out.
There was.
Someone outside.
A person out at the end of the drive way. There was a streetlight on the corner next to the driveway entrance and right beneath it, waiting outside the metal gate, someone was there.
He was there. His car rested, parked behind him.
You could see the shapes of the steering wheel and the seats through the windscreen.
The man was just standing there, right up next to the gate, his hands in his pockets. His dark shape didn’t move. He just stood there. Waiting. Watching.
I moved away from the window and went looking for the woman, in the rooms, in the shower. She was gone.
The sound scraped again and I could feel myself breathing harder, my heart rushing, and I got back to the window and pinched up the edge of the curtain.
The man hadn’t moved.
I wondered how he’d f
ound us again, what he was going to do, and my fingers were white, shaking on the edge of the fabric.
The sound scraped again and my teeth tingled in my mouth and my arms felt hot, filled with electricity. I looked at my rattling fingernails in the moonlight, then back out to the man. His dark shape waiting, watching.
There was a phone, an old wall phone over near the kitchen, and I rushed over to it and picked up the receiver and put it to my ear and went to press the buttons and then I stopped. I couldn’t call anyone. We’d broken into this house. If I called, they’d send the police and they’d find out. But, then again, if this wasn’t real.
If this wasn’t real, maybe I should call. Maybe, in reality, I was lying unconscious and, somehow, I could dial out.
I stood there with the receiver to my ear, my hand floating above the buttons on the wall device, and then I heard something. Someone was already on the line.
A breath crunched through the speaker.
‘I know, I know …’ It was a woman’s voice. Maybe the woman. Maybe she was still in the house somewhere.
‘I know you have to,’ the voice continued. ‘I just …’ It wasn’t her, it was an older voice, an older woman. I tried to tune in to it, to remember it. The words fell through me in waves. ‘I’m just lonely, you know? And you have to live your life, I get it …’
Then the noise scraped again and I dropped the receiver to the floor, rushed back to the window. He was still there, his black silhouette. Waiting.
I could feel sweat creeping along my skin, my hands tingling, and I kept watching and hoping he’d get in his car and go, hoping he’d leave. Hoping the woman would come back. Then my vision blurred. I was struggling to get enough air and I dropped down, sat onto the floor. I could see the receiver across the way, rested on the tiles, and I could hear the tinny pitch of the voice coming through, still speaking. I thought back to the house, the trampoline. The older woman in the chair, staring out.
The sound scraped again.
I kept a hold of the edge of the curtain and I watched out. My head fuzzed, my mouth warm with spit. The man just stood there, waiting in the streetlight. His image pulsed, shook in my view. I couldn’t keep him in focus.
What was he doing?
What did he want?
My arms felt numb, sweat slithered down my spine, gathered along my hairline, and the driver just stood there in the darkness. Watching. My chest tightened, my teeth ground against each other till they felt like they’d snap off inside my mouth, then my throat stiffened, and my eyes rolled back and everything stopped.
I could hear the woman talking downstairs when I woke up. It was daylight, and I sat up quick, panicked by where I was. The sheet was covering my legs on top of the pink mattress in the blank bedroom.
Outside, the sunlight glinted across the ripples of the ocean, flowing by. Wandering.
I could hear the woman talking and I stood up and got to the window, looked out for the man. I leaned into the glass to see to the end of the driveway. He was gone, no trace of him under the streetlight. I looked around the roads, what I could see of them. There was no sign of his car any place. Then I noticed a police car, rolling slowly along the road. The police car turned into the driveway of the house.
I rushed downstairs to the woman, who was still speaking on the phone in the kitchen, and she smiled at me and I pointed outside. The police car was pulling up behind mine in the driveway. The woman hung up, ducked down. She scrambled across on her hands and knees, flicked the lock on the front door.
‘Get behind the couch,’ the woman whispered, and we shuffled across the hardwood floor, kneeled down on hands and knees. We peeked back round the edge of the furniture, watched what we could through the windows.
The policeman stood up out of his car, arched up slow. He looked around, then he wrote notes onto something. He leaned back into his car and picked up his hat, then he stood up and put it on. He threw his door shut. He walked over to my car. He walked all around it, looking in the windows. He put a hand over his eyes to see in. The policeman stood up, looked around again, then he walked up the front steps to the house and we ducked in, further behind the couch. Then he knocked.
The woman’s fingers slid into mine.
The policeman knocked again. Then the doorknob squeaked round.
We listened as the policeman stepped back down, then he walked around the perimeter of the house.
The policeman’s footsteps crunched along the dirt and the grass, and my heart was racing, trembling through my bones.
The policeman wandered back into view on the other side of the house, studying the exterior, looking up to the roof. He walked back to his car. He opened the door. He leaned onto it as he spoke into his radio.
‘What are we gonna do?’ I whispered, and the woman looked back to me, put a finger over her lips.
The policeman looked over at my car again, then he looked down the road. The policeman sat back into his car and shut the door. He started the engine.
The wheels of the police car crackled slowly back out of the driveway, back towards the road. The police car drifted, walking pace, along the street, away from us. I could hear every rock popping under its wheels as it went.
Once he was at a safe distance, the woman got up from behind the couch, moved to the window to watch. She turned to me.
‘We have to go, now,’ she said, and she rushed up the stairs, out of sight.
‘Hey, where were you last night?’ I asked, but the woman didn’t respond, was already quick-stepping back down the stairs and out the door.
‘We have to go, we have to go,’ she said.
We got into the car and I started it up.
‘Don’t burn it out of here,’ the woman told me. ‘Just try and relax till we get to the main road.’
We eased out of the driveway, turned the opposite direction to the police car. Me resisting the urge to push my foot to the floor as hard as I could. We got to the intersection to turn onto the main street and I switched the indicator on, and the police car was there again. Or a police car, another one. The police car was coming towards us, approaching from the right, the clouds sliding across its windscreen.
‘It’s okay,’ the woman said. ‘Just relax.’
The police car turned in alongside us, slid by. An officer in the passenger seat glared out as he went.
I edged out onto the street and tried to calm my breathing, slow my heartbeat.
‘We’re fine,’ the woman told me. She was looking out the windows, scanning every direction, watching the streets. ‘We’re fine – just keep going.’
And we kept rolling along the main road, the hum of the bitumen rising as we picked up the pace.
The chill of my breath cooling through, filling into my lungs.
‘Where are we going now?’ I asked.
The woman didn’t respond. She was staring out at the passing landscape from the passenger seat. Dead-grass paddocks and fields etched across the distance. Jagged piles of stone fences trailing between.
‘We’ve passed this way already, you know? We’ve come past these same paddocks, like, four times.’
Again, no response. The woman just stared out. And I could feel myself cracking, quivering beneath my skin.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ I asked. The woman didn’t respond, kept facing away. ‘Don’t ignore me, I know you know what this is.’
The woman turned to look out the windscreen at the road ahead.
‘Don’t ignore me. You’re fucking …’ I stopped myself, tried to keep myself in check. ‘Don’t pretend you can’t hear me.’
The woman’s face remained blank, vacant.
‘Why are you ignoring me?’ I yelled. ‘Why is this happening?’ Louder this time.
The woman lifted her foot up onto the seat, leaned her head onto her knee. She kept staring straight ahead.
‘I don’t understand,’ I told her. ‘I don’t understand what’s going on. It makes no sense.’ I could feel the warmth o
f tears building around my eyes, tickling at the edges. ‘I don’t know why any of this is happening.’
The woman reached for the fan knob on the dashboard, twisted it. She held her hand up to the vent.
I watched this, watched her fingers move in the gentle stream. Oblivious to my words.
‘Where are we going?’ I whispered.
The woman’s fingers fell away.
‘I don’t even know who you are,’ I said.
Then the inertia of the car around me shifted, swung like a carnival ride. It felt like the ground was slipping away beneath us, as if the car was sinking, and my fingers gripped round the steering wheel and I could hear a noise, like industrial fans, machines, and when I looked out the side window there was nothing, no paddocks, no road. Then the same through the windscreen, the car was drifting in blank space. Black. Empty.
I looked to the woman, still oblivious. Still leaning on her raised knee.
My brain scraped and shifted and I tried to get a hold of my mind.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ I told her, but the woman didn’t respond. ‘Do you hear me?’ The panic rising. Me yelling across the car now and outside there was nothing, just blank air, sinking further into the black, the shadows swallowing us in, the fan sounds grinding, rising.
‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ I yelled.
And the woman was moving away from me, getting smaller, the distance between the seats growing. She was leaning on her knee, sliding further, shrinking and shrinking in my view, and then I could hear waves in the distance and I turned around and saw the moon reflected across the ripples in the darkness. Nothing else. The black water waiting.
The salty taste of tears, the rock grind inside my head. The metal sounds dragging and I watched the water lapping and rolling in the moonlight, a tiny boat way, way out, its red light pulsing, calling to me. The red light was bright, beaming, and then it stopped.
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