One

by Andrew Hutchinson

  I watched what I could see of her in the darkness, what I could make out in the digital light. I listened to the pattern of her breaths, then I looked back out to the night, tried to find the red light again. I searched, my hands up on the glass, framed over my eyes, strained to see. But there was nothing.

  A deep, unnerving black that went on without end.

  Nothing else.

  ‘Do you remember what you said to me?’ the woman whispered again.

  From the blankness in my head, forming from the darkness, there was.

  A memory.

  Of freezing in the winter.

  I was standing on cold concrete, crisp white, the footpath beneath my feet. There were patterns along it, flat edges sloping into the seams, the lines between the concrete panels, and I was standing in the overcast day.

  And I didn’t know how I should stand, how to carry my feet or my arms. Because I wanted to look just right. I was trying to look like. Something.

  I was standing, and I was waiting, and there were doors. Large electronic doors, like the kind you see at a shop ping centre, embedded into the shadow of a building. The ground sloped down towards them, yellow lines along the walls. Then the doors opened and people came flowing out, a crowd of them rushing towards me. The people were all dressed in business suits and ties and grey skirts, and they were surging straight ahead, jostling for position. The workers spilled out around me and more kept coming, all dressed in suits, all pushing. All looking straight ahead. None of them looked my way.

  They were pushing up against me, walls of them closing in, and I flailed against the human tide, and the crowd grew and flashed by, the smells of their clothes, their shoes, stale coffee and cigarettes, and their elbows were connecting, the corners of their bags, their briefcases, and they were all looking straight ahead and I stood in between, leaning away, contorting myself out of their paths. Their blank faces advancing, and then they passed.

  I watched them move on, flowing down the street, and all around was concrete. Cold and white.

  Alone. Detached.

  The business people drifting down the footpath, rushing. None of them looked back, kept moving on. Then I heard a noise, like a bell ringing, and I turned back around and the doors opened again, sliding away to reveal the next surge.

  The woman was driving in the morning light, condensation still fresh across the windows, quivering trails along the glass, and she looked to me and smiled.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hello.’

  Outside the sunlight was sharp, orange streams glinting through the trees as they slotted by.

  ‘We’re making good time,’ the woman said. ‘We might be able to make it all the way today.’

  I sat up in my seat, looked out over the landscape. Everything was there, the ground, the road. The paddocks stretching out towards the edge of the world. I looked across to the woman, at her legs going up into her dress in the driver’s seat.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  The woman didn’t respond.

  ‘You were talking in your sleep last night,’ I told her.

  The woman ignored me, started humming as she drove.

  The first light of day was opening across the farmhouses and sheds, orange and yellow streams shading colours across valleys that dipped below the roadside. There were no animals in the paddocks that I could see, and I remembered the buffalo, the herd watching. The fear that shivered through me at their gaze.

  Both of the back windows were wound down slightly, the breeze whistling in.

  ‘It’ll dry out in the sun,’ the woman said.

  The back seat already looked dry in the orange flashes of the morning light.

  ‘It’s so strange,’ I told her. ‘One moment we’re at a truck stop hiding from the rain, then the next we’re here.’

  The woman kept humming, moving through her tune.

  ‘Like, I don’t even remember changing seats.’

  The woman smiled, kept humming, and the notes came through, sparked in my memory.

  ‘Hey,’ I said to her. ‘I know that tune.’

  The woman looked across to me, still humming, smiling out the sounds.

  A flash of white came to me, of fabric, flapping.

  ‘Hey, I know this. What is this?’

  The woman kept humming, smiling. She bounced her head with the rhythm and the same image played out, white, like clouds. The reminder felt warm, safe. But I couldn’t place it. It was like losing a thought mid-sentence. You know you had something to say, something to add, and it’s so close but it’s gone. But it’s so close.

  It was right there, the white. Floating. The ripples moving along the fabric.

  The woman watched the road ahead, kept humming. The orange sunlight across the lower part of her face, where the visor shade didn’t reach.

  The pitch of her voice teasing answers, tingling through my head.

  ‘This won’t take long,’ the woman told me.

  She pulled off the freeway, up an exit ramp, and we slowed to turn onto a road leading out into the paddocks, the trees. The woman was sitting up, more alert. She kept checking the rear-view mirror as we went.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘I just need to stop by for a second and grab some things,’ she told me. Her eyes switching back to the mirror, head angled forward. I could see the side of her cheek moving, grinding her teeth.

  We drove down the narrow road, paddocks of vegetable plants lined up in neat rows alongside, rows of thick pines dividing the lands, and then houses started cropping up close to the road, a few at first, then more, till we were driving in suburban streets, curving through roundabouts.

  The woman navigated the route, looking steady, serious, and we turned into a dirt driveway leading towards an old house rested beneath a perimeter of large white and grey trees. The driveway looped round on itself near the house, so you could drive right up to the door then straight back out, and there was a dead-looking tree out the front, with a tyre swing hanging from it. A half-constructed tin shed on one side, firewood piled along the wall, a trampoline frame with a shredded mat flopping down in the backyard.

  There was a pond filled with dark water out the front. The house was dirty, a sort of ring of grime around its outside, like you get in a bathtub.

  The woman pulled up alongside the house and turned the engine off, and she was arching up in her seat, looking in through the house’s windows. She settled back, looked to me.

  ‘I’ll only be one second. I just need to grab some things.’

  ‘Whose house is this?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it – I’ll just run in and grab what I need and we’re gone, yeah?’

  I nodded in response.

  The woman nodded her head once, then got out and walked round the back of the car and up the front steps, went into the house without knocking. She left the door open as she went.

  I could see.

  The dark wooden legs of a table and chair set inside, the grey fabric of a couch.

  I sat in the car and waited, looking at the country house. There was a silver water tank round the side, up by the shed. An axe rested against a block of wood, bark remnants scattered all round. There were no cars in the driveway, and I assumed that meant there was no one around, that the woman had been checking this in the windows when we pulled up.

  After a while I got nervous that something might happen, that I might fade out and everything could change, or I might push on the side of my head till it did, and I got out of the car and went into the house, up the wooden steps. In through the open front door.

  The house looked smaller on the inside, all mismatched colours and old furniture. I moved through the front room, looking at photos in picture frames set up on the dressing table, hung up on the walls.

  There were people smiling, at the beach, standing in posed lines, but there were so many different people it was impossible to tell who lived here. Some of the pictures were black a
nd white, taken long ago.

  There was a string of cards hung over the window, tied up on either side of the frame and drooping down in the middle, and the cards had Christmas symbols on the front, snowmen and candy canes. I couldn’t remember it being close to Christmas.

  I moved through the house, looking for the woman. There was a wood-panelled hallway with rooms jutting off either side, more photos hung between, and I moved through slowly, taking in the images.

  The first was of a man with a moustache, wearing a hat. He looked young, confident. He wasn’t smiling and he had short dark hair. His eyes looked certain, dedicated, and then I heard a voice.

  I leaned around the doorframe of the first room, looking in, and there was a woman inside, an older woman with brown-and-grey hair, sitting on a chair next to a bed. The woman was wearing black tracksuit pants, a blue jumper and black socks. She was facing forward, with a large window behind her letting in the sunlight. She was twisting sideways to look outside, her face side-on to me.

  I came further round into the doorway. The woman didn’t move, didn’t respond to my presence. She sat in her chair, looking out. Watching the day beyond the glass.

  There was a shadow, a presence in my peripheral vision, something moving further down the hall, and I turned to it quick but there was nothing. Then I heard a noise, like a tap turning on and off again, and I stepped further inside the house. I could see a shadow moving, spreading across the wooden floor, large, dark. I moved closer to see.

  Then the younger woman came out of a room on the other side of the hall, rushed past. ‘Come on,’ she said. She was carrying a garbage bag over her shoulder and she moved back along the hall, lumbering between the photos, the faces staring out.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Whose house is this?’

  ‘No one’s. Come on,’ the woman said, and she turned the corner, kept moving towards the front door and outside to the car. I followed after her and I stopped by the first room again, looked in on the older woman. Sitting in her grey fabric chair with wooden armrests, staring out the window. She pinched at her nose, her nostrils, and I looked back down the hall. Looked for movement.

  ‘Pretty muggy today,’ the older woman said. She didn’t look at me. Just stayed staring. Then the car horn blared.

  I got back into the passenger seat, the younger woman waiting, engine running. She stared at my face for a moment, her expression serious.

  ‘Who was that lady?’ I asked.

  ‘Nobody.’

  The woman kept her eyes fixed on mine a moment, then she sat back in the seat and put the car into gear. The wheels scratched across the dirt as she took off and I watched the old house shrink away, disappear from view. The woodshed, the trampoline. The old woman. Till they were gone.

  ‘I know her,’ I said.

  The woman didn’t respond, the car rushing back through the suburban streets, towards the freeway. The vegetable paddocks slotting by.

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ I looked to her, driving in the sunlight. ‘I know her, don’t I?’

  The woman watched the road ahead, focused.

  ‘I think we’ve met before,’ I said.

  ‘We won’t have to go back there ever again,’ the woman told me.

  She accelerated down the on-ramp, back into the freeway rush.

  I could feel myself fading as we drifted along the blank road, the sunlight heating through my clothes, and I jolted out of it, sat up in the seat.

  The woman smiled at me as she drove, both hands on the wheel.

  ‘You falling asleep?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ I pinched at both my eyes with my whole hand, rubbed them.

  ‘It’s okay. You work nights, you can sleep.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I told her. ‘I mean, I don’t want to.’

  The woman watched the road, still with a slight smile.

  ‘Everything’s not normal – I don’t want to miss it. I don’t wanna miss what happens, how it happens.’ I watched the landscape as I spoke, the passing paddocks. ‘Everything’s shifting too fast, switching up. I don’t even know how. And if I sleep …’ I looked to her. ‘If I sleep, it all slides out again. Everything changes.’

  The woman pursed her lips, nodded. She looked to me. ‘There’s nothing to miss, just blank road ahead.’

  The hum of the tyres beneath us, sailing. Lulling me in. The warmth.

  I shook out of it again.

  I thought back to the older woman sitting in her chair, the house. I’d been in that house before. I knew it. But I couldn’t make the memory fall into place. The photos watching from the walls. The wood blocks lined along the shed. I knew it, I’d seen it before, it all felt familiar, and I thought of the trampoline at the back of the house, the clothesline turning in the wind. I hadn’t seen the clothesline, I hadn’t gone around the back, but I knew it and I could remember sitting on the dark mat of the trampoline, the springs creaking. I could remember looking through the back window to the kitchen, and I could see the older woman under the light inside. She was yelling, arguing with a man, and I was fading out again, the smell of sawdust drifting into my dream, and I opened my eyes wide.

  I scratched at the skin on my arm, felt the sharp twitches.

  Through the windscreen I could see.

  Rows of ornamental trees along either side of the road, leading us into a town, the freeway narrowing in, slowing.

  Decaying wooden houses and concrete shopfronts appeared, an old-style pub with a balcony overlooking the street. A rusted water tank, wilted over, folded in on one side, sat next to an assortment of weathered machinery, equally rusted and poking up in different shapes and shades. And then, out on its own, in the middle of a green grass park, there was a submarine, a huge black vessel rested, beached, stranded by the street.

  The submarine looked enormous, stood out behind the road signs.

  ‘Why is there a submarine here?’ the woman asked. The submarine was propped up on concrete, a bronze plaque beside it. A flag waving above.

  ‘Some kind of monument,’ I said.

  As we drifted by you could see the detail of the landlocked ship, the bumps and lines etched into the black paint. The dirt and rust gathered into the corners.

  ‘The ocean’s miles away,’ the woman said. She was leaning forward, her head almost on the steering wheel to get a better view as we passed. ‘I wonder how they even got it here.’

  The woman kept looking back in the rear-view mirror as we passed, her eyebrows furrowed in exaggerated confusion.

  I watched her face. There was something there, a warmth, a familiarity. I knew her face. Maybe.

  Maybe I did remember her.

  ‘Why do they have a submarine here?’ the woman asked again.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The calm blue of her eyes. The way she moved her lips.

  Her expressions made me smile.

  She kept looking back in the mirror.

  Me, leaned right back into the seat now, nuzzled down. The seatbelt up at my chin. Drifting.

  I watched her face as she looked back in the mirror, and she looked to me and went to speak, then she stopped. Seeing me.

  Fading out.

  The humming wheels alluring.

  There was.

  Another sliver of a memory. A fragment that came through.

  It was night and I was out in the city streets, or not in the city, but on the outskirts. You could see the lights of the buildings towering up nearby, rising into the darkness, looming overhead.

  I was out on the footpath and everything was shaded orange beneath the streetlights. Parked cars lined along the gutters, voices echoing.

  There was no one around that I could see, the night abandoned, and I was standing beneath the lights, looking up at them. The stars beyond the brightness.

  There was a house in front of me, directly across the street. A house that I knew but didn’t recognise, dark in the shadows, and then there was a voice again, shoes tapping along the concrete, and I l
ooked further down the way and there was a couple, a man and woman walking along the footpath, wandering beneath the lights. The woman had blonde hair and a dark jacket, and she had her arm around his. They were coming towards me, or more, towards the house. The shapes of her words bounced off the gutters, then they both laughed. The throbbing bass of the man’s voice.

  The woman leaned into him as they walked, slow, and I looked more closely and she was carrying.

  A garbage bag over her shoulder.

  I woke up, the sun beaming in, glinting through the glass, the rays of it piercing hot, and I sat up. The car was drifting through the streets of a town, rows of shops on either side with brown-tiled walkways in front and red clay street crossings every so often. Kids carrying surfboards and wearing peeled-down wetsuits. They stepped barefoot along the concrete, on the tips of their feet, rushing across. There was sand all through the grain of the road, gathered in the gutters.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked.

  ‘I used to come here when I was a kid.’ The woman smiled at me.

  Her window was down and a smell wafted in, curled into a memory.

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. The beach is over that way, right?’

  ‘The surf beach is over there.’ She pointed.

  ‘Yeah, and there’s a bridge that goes over the waterway, and an ice-cream shop on the corner. I’ve been here before.’

  It felt right, as if everything was about to make sense. But nothing else clicked, the other pieces still jarring, grinding. I touched along the side of my head.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I just … none of this makes much sense,’ I told her. ‘Like, I know this, I feel like this all fits. But again, I don’t remember driving here.’ I watched the colours passing, the fish-and-chip shops, the clothing stores. ‘One minute we’re looking at a submarine in the middle of nowhere, and the next …’

  Rows of caravans behind mesh fences flashed by, playgrounds and pine trees rested into the sand, and then the view opened up and I could see the ocean, the blue of it stretching into the distance. The flat line at the edge of the world. Me watching on, the sights, the smells poking into my mind.