One

by Andrew Hutchinson

  I floated along the footpaths on the ends of her fingertips as she rushed ahead. It was cold out, and she was wearing a pink scarf that flailed out from her jacket, and jeans that made her legs look small, skinny. She led me past the houses and parked cars, past the lonely lights of dormant shopping strips, the lit-up displays beaming out from the wide windows.

  ‘Look,’ she said, pointing to the mannequins in one store. ‘They’re waving.’

  She guided me to a footbridge that arched over four lanes of incoming and outgoing traffic, a huge concrete curve covered in soot and graffiti. She pulled me up to the peak so we could see the lights of the cars trailing off into the distance, the late-night roads reduced to a steady flow drifting by, flashing underneath.

  The walkway of the bridge was caged in to stop people jumping over, but there were bars along the lower section, as if they’d started with the bars but then wired in the rest for extra safety. We sat down on the concrete pathway and put our legs through the gaps, so they were dangling out over the traffic. The breeze from the cars and trucks felt warm as they hummed beneath.

  She leaned in closer. ‘I’m so glad to have met you,’ she said. Her breath tingling my ear.

  We linked our fingers together on the cold surface.

  ‘Now,’ Sarah said, and she sat up straight. She pointed to her eyes. ‘Close your eyes.’ Then her ears. ‘And listen.’ I did as she asked. ‘Now pretend the sounds of the cars are not cars. They’re not cars at all,’ Sarah said. ‘Pretend they’re waves. The sound of the ocean hushing by and on into the distance.’

  I leaned my head back as I imagined it, the cars fading into waves at a steady beat. The breeze trailing past with each set.

  ‘Now pretend we’re in a boat, and we’re floating,’ she said. ‘Away.’

  The blank ocean all around us. The water curling beneath. I imagined her by my side, her face in the sunlight. Leaning back. Taking it in.

  Her fingers gripped over mine.

  ‘Can you see it?’ she said. I nodded with my eyes closed.

  ‘You can only do it when there’s not much traffic,’ she said. ‘That’s the only time you can hear it like this.’

  The slow waves rose and flowed beneath, drifting and fading into the cool of the evening.

  ‘I like to come up here late at night,’ she said. ‘When the tide is just right.’

  We slow-danced to hummed soundtracks beneath the streetlights and balanced along the white lines of the abandoned roads in the night. She took me to her home, led me tiptoeing along creaking floorboards through to her room. Old books for teenagers and the button eyes of teddy bears stared out from the shelves. The scent of her perfume hanging on the air.

  The head of her bed was directly beneath a large window and we held on to each other under the blankets and stared up at the night, watched the earth rolling towards daylight.

  I remember.

  Her woollen blanket scratching at my cheek. Her kisses leaving invisible tracks across my skin. Across my chest. Across my stomach. Down my arms. I remember each point on my body that had been touched by her lips.

  I remember she cried that night, but she didn’t look sad. She closed her eyes to let me run my finger along the path of her tears.

  The sun came up before we’d expected it to, but I didn’t feel tired. She touched her forehead to my cheek as she curled into my arms, and her breathing relaxed as she slipped into dream.

  She moved in with me a short time after. She’d had an argument with her mother and I already had a place, so she came and stayed with me. This was before she was working, and we had hardly any money but we got by. Wandering night excursions and borrowed music. Random road trips in my broken old car. She was studying to be a nurse and when my housemate moved out I started working nights to cover the rent, the extra pay for night rates. Just till she could make it up. Just for a bit.

  And it was fine. It was good. Her smell on the pillows to greet me home. Her clothes next to mine in front of the heater.

  When she started working, she took a job in the cancer ward, working with terminal patients, and I remember how we talked about how sad it was. How some people just wilted away. Alone, watching out the windows. How some families hardly came by, caught up with other things. Struggling to deal with it. These patients would be isolated. Waiting. Each breath closer to their last.

  Sarah told me how one mother offered to pay her more if she’d give her son extra attention.

  ‘He likes you,’ the mother told her. ‘We just want him to be happy.’

  Sarah liked the work at first. She enjoyed doing what she could, helping, but the cancer ward started to take its toll.

  Sometimes she’d just sit by herself outside, staring up into the trees. Sometimes she wouldn’t talk to me for days.

  Things got worse in the winter. Sarah wasn’t coming home. I didn’t know where she was. She’d turn up in the afternoon, her clothes wet, staggering down the middle of the street. She’d never tell me what had happened.

  Sometimes she’d tell me she was leaving and never coming back. Me trailing along after her up the footpath, crying, pleading. Neighbours peek ing through the gaps in their curtains.

  And then there was the time I found her unconscious, stacked on top of herself on the footpath in the night. Streams of her breath curling up through the streetlight. I carried her home, kicking, fighting me with all she could.

  ‘I don’t even know you,’ she was saying. ‘I don’t live here.’

  ‘I used to live here,’ she said.

  Her yelling woke the neighbours, lights flicking on in the other houses, doors opening as we moved along.

  ‘I used to live here,’ she screamed. ‘I don’t live here anymore.’

  I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, I didn’t know what had changed. But I remember there was a time when I knew that it was over, that there’d come a day when she wouldn’t come home. And that would be it.

  On the day she was gone I didn’t know what to do. Her clothes were missing. There were dust outlines in the bathroom where her things had been. She didn’t speak to either of her parents or her brother anymore so I couldn’t call them, and I didn’t know anyone she worked with. So I stayed home and waited.

  I walked from room to room, looking at what she’d taken, what she’d left. I lay on the couch with the phone beside my cheek, waiting for her to call.

  I watched the street as the daylight faded and it turned to darkness, the abandoned concrete waiting under the gaze of the streetlights.

  The night traffic reducing to ripples along the distance.

  I didn’t go to work. I didn’t call anyone. I just waited. The pillowcase stuck to the side of my face from the tears.

  I fixed up the house, cleaned everything, put it all back in place. How she’d like it.

  And I waited for her to come home.

  My worn face reflected in the dark phone screen.

  I had to look her up to find her. She’d changed jobs but her name was listed on the new hospital’s website and I went there and I waited outside. This was months afterwards, months of waiting, trying to call. Checking to see if she’d been online. Eventually I found where she was, and I waited outside, before I started work and after I’d finished, every day. Till I saw her come out. It was an autumn night, the leaves bunched along the gutters and swept to the sides of the footpaths, falling through the streetlights, and there she was. She stepped out of the automatic doors, headed towards the city. She whipped her pink scarf back over herself in the breeze.

  I watched her from inside my car at first, then I got out and followed, kept a safe distance. I weaved between the parked cars by the roadside, the trees embedded in the footpath. I kept her in view as she rushed along the concrete in the cold, her shoes tapping, echoing through the darkness. She crossed the street without pressing the button. She bounced down steps into the train station and I trailed behind, watching down on her. I stayed outside the ticket barrier as she went in.
I watched through the gate as the train pulled up and she stepped through the beeping doors, then they closed and it slid away into the darkness.

  My hands shivering on the railing.

  I worked out her schedule, where she would be, and I figured out that I’d be able to meet her straight after I finished my shift, in the early hours. She’d be on her way in to start the day as I was driving home and I drove across when I’d finished and found a car park in the city, right near the train station. It was easy, being so early, none of the stores open yet. I parked the car and walked across and I found a spot to stand just outside the exit gate, where she’d see me.

  I tried to stand in the right position, tried to pose for when she would come out, for how she’d see me, and then there she was, bustling through the morning rush. The tide of people flowing out, shirts and suits and leather cases. And she was right there, in between. Her blue eyes locked onto mine.

  She told me she didn’t want to talk, and how did I find her anyway? I kept pace beside her through the jostling crowds, people dressed in grey and black, all facing straight ahead. I shuffled along at her side and I asked her to speak to me, just to hear me out, just to listen for one second, and she stopped. She looked to me.

  I asked her to come home and she turned away, quickened her pace along the concrete. Please, I said. I asked her to stop and when she got to the hospital she rushed inside, the electronic doors closing over her, swallowing her in.

  I tried again the next day, and the next, but she wouldn’t speak to me. She said that there was nothing to talk about, that I needed to move on and I asked her what happened, why, what did I do wrong? The electronic doors shut behind her.

  One time I saw her talking to the security guard just inside after she’d gone through. She pointed in my direction as she spoke.

  I stopped trying to talk to her after that but I still came by in the mornings, I still watched her from a distance. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I couldn’t move on.

  Then it got worse.

  I figured out where she was living, a house on the edge of the city, and I went by a few times just to see, just to check if she was okay. It was an old house with flaking paint. Too-long grass in the front that swayed in the wind. I waited outside till she got home to make sure I had the right place, and I watched her walk up beneath the orange streetlamps, the lights of the train flashing by through the crossing behind her. The red crossing lights dinging. I watched her walk along the concrete path to her door. Watched her step up to it, open it. The lights switched on inside the house, room by room, as she moved through.

  One time she came home with a man, their arms linked as they wandered through the night. She had her hair tied back and she was smiling. She swayed into him as they went. The man was tall, thin, had black hair, and they disappeared inside the front door. I stayed there watching, imagining every detail of what was happening inside. I watched him as he left in the early morning.

  I knew it wasn’t true, but I told myself it wasn’t really happening, that she wasn’t really seeing another man. She left me because she couldn’t handle a relationship, so she definitely couldn’t handle another one.

  This wasn’t real, I told myself. This was pretend.

  I imagined that the skinny man with the dark hair was dying, that he was alone and she’d been paid by the family to be with him. To make him smile in his last days. Every time I saw him I saw something else that confirmed it, a bruise on his arm, dark rings beneath his eyes. He was dying, and he thought she loved him.

  But it wasn’t real.

  One time another man came home with her, a big guy with tattoos and short hair, and they got out of a taxi and rushed inside and into the bedroom. This wasn’t real. She was being paid for this.

  These were terminal men.

  I’d sit outside in my car, watching, the train crossing bursting into life at regular intervals, flashing red into my car and ringing. I thought about driving in front of it, going round the edge of the boom gate and parking right in front. Waiting for the train to come through. The flat metal face of it rushing out of the darkness, its eyes beaming forward then smashing in, the metal bending, glass bursting. The wheels cutting through. I thought about it.

  Standing on the tracks in the night, the rocks between the rails slipping beneath my feet. The wind rushing along the sleepers.

  I thought about.

  Just standing in front.

  It was already morning when she came home another time, the sunlight opening across the backs of the buildings, and she was staggering when she got out of the car. Her clothes were wet, like she used to be when she came back to me. She stood shakily out of the car and some other guy got out from the driver’s seat and came round, put a hand out to help her onto the footpath. He walked alongside her to the door, kissed her, then he rushed back, got into his car, and I’d seen enough.

  I pulled my car out from the gutter and pushed the accelerator, rushed towards them. I’d stomped on the brakes before I made contact but it was too late. My wheels screeched across the bitumen and I rammed straight into the back of the other guy’s car, bouncing it up, shoving it forward.

  The rear of his car was smashed in, the lights twisted and pointing in the wrong directions, and then the driver got out, stood up by his car. Then I got out too.

  Sarah was screaming at me from the concrete and the other driver was looking at me, all perfect hair and blond eyelashes and blue eyes.

  ‘Is this another one?’ I was asking her. ‘Is this another one?’

  The driver made a move towards me and I ducked back into my car. I grabbed a hammer from the back seat. Sarah was yelling, screaming, then she saw the hammer and she rushed back, stumbling away from me on the other side of the car.

  I remember.

  Catching onto her frightened eyes as she looked over her shoulder, as she pulled open the passenger door of his car and dropped into the seat.

  He was already back in his car now, and I got up to the glass on his side before he could pull away. I pushed the face of the hammer up against it, crunched it round. I threw the hammer after him as they went, after her. I watched the shattered red brakelight of his car as he turned the corner, the white bulb beaming. Me standing, puffing in the street. Watching.

  There was another time too, when I followed them to a shopping centre. And there were other times after that.

  Sarah called me after an especially horrible incident.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi. It’s me.’

  I pretended not to know her, to play. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘No, wait, wait …’

  Sarah was silent for a moment. The sound of an engine of some kind droning down the line.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  I’d been injured by her boyfriend. Or whatever he was.

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I’m fine.’

  Sarah sighed. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Why are you following me?’

  ‘I just …’ The question was confronting, blunt. ‘I just miss you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry, just …’ She let out a breath. ‘You can’t keep doing this.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, just …’ Frustration in her voice, then her tone switched. ‘Do you remember what you said to me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You told me that you would do anything for me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sarah paused a moment, the engine still rumbling in the back ground. ‘Well, now I want you to go.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said you would do anything. This is all I want. I want you to leave me alone.’

  The words froze through me, choked in my throat, and I went to speak and my voice stalled, then I started again.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Please. You said you would do anything. Just leave me alone.’


  I thought it through a moment. ‘But then you’re gone. Then I don’t have you.’

  ‘You don’t have me now,’ she said. ‘Let me go.’

  She hung up and I kept the phone to my ear. Just waiting. Just listening. The hum of the dial tone resonating inside my head.

  The police explained why I couldn’t talk to her. That I couldn’t go near her anymore. That she was afraid. Because of the hammer. I told them that I would never have used it and I explained what had happened, but they weren’t interested. One of them was looking around as the other spoke.

  I remember watching them leave, watching the police car rolling slowly up the street. Two of the young guys who lived next door were looking at me and I got back inside and shut the door and sat against it, the cold draught whispering beneath. I remember looking around the house, the home where we used to live. And feeling totally alone. Adrift.

  I cleaned the house, neatened everything up, put everything back in place, just how she’d like it, just how she wanted it to be. I told myself she was still coming back.

  She was coming home. Someday.

  I still went by and watched her some mornings after work. I didn’t go up to her anymore, but I could still see her. Then she stopped coming. The crowds of empty faces gathered and rushed through the city streets and faded out. The footpaths and walkways abandoned in the early light.

  One day, an ambulance came by while I was waiting for her, one of the days she’d never come, and I watched the ambulance cut through the traffic, pulsing colours against the grey tones of the morning, across the blank faces of the workers. It sliced through the traffic, angled round the stopped cars and it pulled into the hospital across the way. That was how I came up with it.

  The warmth of the machine hum. The heat of the metal against the ends of my fingernails.

  I remembered what they told me on the first day of work. ‘It won’t kill you, but it’ll hurt.’