One

by Andrew Hutchinson

  I put my hand onto the conveyor belt, felt it suck into the machine, then my fingers bent back. Then the pain.

  Warm blood on the painted metal. Leaking out.

  Sticky on my skin.

  I thought she’d have to see me if I came in.

  I was wrong.

  There were other things too.

  Like.

  The time I was at the beach when I was a kid and there was a girl who danced along the lights of the carnival and stole alcohol from her parents. She was trying to get some other guy’s attention and he had some other girl with him, and I confronted him in a misguided attempt to prove my worth. My fists looked tiny on his chest.

  There was the time we were out at night, looking for a pregnant cow on my uncle’s farm, flashlights poking through the darkness. And then we found it. The baby shining, wet with blood in the light. It was dead. Its curved brown eye that had never seen, glinting. A herd of black cattle watched from the paddock nearby. Huffing in the shadows.

  I don’t know why I’d translated them into buffalo.

  Things are always worse in your mind.

  There was my dad’s boat, slicing along the ocean in the sunlight. Me dragging patterns through the sand as I watched. How he used to wake me up to go fishing with him in the dawn light. Me stumbling along the sand dunes. The sharp chill of the fishing hook popping through the worm’s body, poking into my skin.

  There was the tune my mother used to hum, the one she used to sing in the other room, when I was waking. When she’d fling the sheet out over my mattress as she made my bed, the white falling down.

  My mother. Frightened in her own house.

  After my dad left, it was just me and her, then I had to leave too. I had to move on, the opportunities in the city. And I left her alone.

  She understood, Mum. She was okay. But she was lonely. She wanted me to come back. After I met Sarah, though, I was done. There was no leaving for me. Then Mum started seeing another man. He was a drinker. He hit her.

  I remember her calling, telling me. Asking me if I could come home. Me driving to find Sarah. I remember my mother saying goodbye, then waiting on the line. Waiting. She wouldn’t hang up. The dark shadow of another man in her home.

  And there was the time I went away alone to the beach, to the place Sarah and I used to go. The motel with the pebble-stone driveway, the worn couches. I remember walking along in the darkness, unable to sleep because I worked nights. Watching the lights of the boats pulse out on the distance.

  But there were things that didn’t fit. Things that were familiar but different, things that I knew but remembered in a different way. I’ve since rationalised that this was the world from another perspective, something like an out-of-body experience.

  I saw myself outside in the night, watching from the footpath. But I saw this from Sarah’s perspective, inside the house. I felt what she felt, looking out, trapped.

  I felt the panic and fear from inside the car as I crashed into it, the confusion that blond guy must have felt.

  My body shivered and I felt sick every time I saw the driver. Because this is what Sarah felt.

  Whenever she had to confront me.

  This is what I made her feel.

  On later reflection, I believe that this was my life, my impact on the world. This is what I’d done, both in terms of what was important to me and how that affected others.

  I’ve heard people say how they saw their life flash before their eyes in those final moments, how they got a glimpse of everything they’d done.

  But that wasn’t what I experienced.

  It wasn’t just my life I saw, it was how I made other people feel. And I felt that too. It was Sarah’s fear, her pain. Pain that I caused. It was how her life had been affected by me.

  And it hurt.

  Confronted with your own actions.

  There was also the wet glass, the accident, glimpses of what had happened. I don’t know for sure, but I believe I drifted across the lanes and ended up smashed onto the bitumen, crashing into the back of an unloading truck. That was the damage I felt in the car, the ripped muscles and blood.

  The red light from the heart monitor in the hospital, calling me back into consciousness, beeping.

  I can’t explain how I know this. At some stage it just makes sense.

  It’s like.

  Your brain knows when it’s dying and it triggers this response, this realisation. It’s not heaven or the afterlife. It’s who you are. Your life. Your impact. The highs and lows. It’s the knowledge you’ve always wanted, the meaning of life, and it all becomes clear.

  All too late.

  And I remembered the times we went driving, away from all the noises and voices of the city. When it was just us.

  Sarah reaching her arm out the open window in the afternoon sunlight. Dancing to whatever song the radio delivered.

  Walking beneath the pine trees in the sunlight. These were the times when nothing else mattered, where it was just us, alone and away from everything. This, I believe, would have been my heaven, if that’s what you could call it. The moments when I felt truly complete.

  Before everything.

  My brain spooling them up and rolling them into a narrative as it ran through its last motions, the neurons firing, aware of their impending fate.

  I remember. It all made sense.

  Sarah was standing in front of me on the bitumen in the night, the car rested by the roadside, the interior light still on, door hanging open. She was staring at me.

  A tear broke from the edge of her eye, spilled down her cheek.

  ‘Sarah,’ I whispered.

  She said nothing in response, her wilted eyes locked onto mine.

  ‘I’m so sorry for everything,’ I told her.

  ‘It’s not his fault,’ she said. ‘It’s mine. I left him. He didn’t deserve it. I left him alone. He doesn’t have anyone else.’

  I didn’t remember this. This wasn’t me. This was a discussion she’d had with somebody else.

  ‘It was my fault,’ I told her. ‘It was all my fault. I hurt you.’

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I hurt him. I was confused and struggling with work and when I saw his face it brought it all back. I just needed to get out, you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I didn’t mean for … I didn’t want him to be upset. I just changed.’

  The words sliced in, hurt to hear.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  She narrowed her eyes as the wind pushed through, stringing her hair across her face. Another tear slipped down her skin.

  ‘I love him. I’ll always love him, you know?’

  My breath caught in my throat.

  ‘I don’t know that I’ll ever love anyone the same,’ she said.

  I reached up to her face, pushed the tear away. I rested my fingers onto her cheek. She closed her eyes, leaned into my touch.

  ‘I love you,’ I whispered.

  Sarah smiled, nestled into my palm.

  Then I heard a wave crash in the distance, the ocean washing in, and I looked for where it was coming from. It was black as far as you could see. A single red light pulsed way off, on the horizon.

  ‘Sarah,’ I whispered. ‘I have to go.’

  She scrunched her face, kept her eyes shut.

  ‘I’m sorry for everything,’ I told her. ‘You were my one.’

  She lifted her head, stood up in the darkness.

  She watched me as I stepped back from her, as I stepped further and further away. Her figure getting smaller in the night, the headlights bright behind her, the car waiting at the roadside.

  She watched.

  As I receded into the black.

  For a long time there was nothing in the blackness, just a faint red light pulsing in the distance. Tiny, so small you could hardly see it, I had to focus to keep it in view. I walked towards it, unsure of what came next. Sarah was gone, the road, the car. There was nothing left.

  Then the gro
und softened. I couldn’t see it, but my feet were nestling in with each step, and I kneeled down to feel it. It was sand, warm and smooth, sliding between my fingers. Then the breeze pushed by and I looked up and I could see.

  The ocean, the sunlight in the distance.

  It was early morning, and the light, behind a wall of grey cloud, was so crisp that it made the colours all round stand out. The lush green of the grass on the hillside, flickering in the wind. The blue of the water rolling through. The sand was white and yellow, glistening beneath the tideline, and I looked back and there was no one there. Sarah was gone. No road. A lighthouse sitting out on a distant cliff edge.

  I took my shoes off as I walked along the sand, strained to look ahead and see what would come next. There was no change in sight, the coastline leading straight into the distance, no rock formations breaking the beach. Behind me it was the same, and the hillside was almost flat at my side, reaching up, tufts of grass spilling over the top. There were no paths or wooden stairs leading up to it, and it was too high to climb.

  There was nowhere else to go.

  The waves rushed in and retreated, tumbling over the edge of the world, getting louder as I walked.

  As soon as I saw it I knew what it was, what I was supposed to do next. It sat at the water’s edge, leaning slightly to one side. The front of it rose and fell as the water washed in.

  It was my father’s boat, white with blue patterns. The mast was bent down on the top, the sail folded over. The ropes tangled across it. Like it used to be, rested in our shed.

  I stood for a moment and looked onto it and, from somewhere, dried leaves rained down, floated onto the sand. There were no trees nearby, but leaves came twirling, wandering down. I watched them come towards me, reached out to them.

  I ran my hand along the wood of the boat, felt along the splinters, the cold sections of metal. There was nothing inside, it was just an empty shell, waiting, and I looked out to the horizon, the sky white at the edge of the world. There was nothing out there. The ocean rippling in the breeze. I looked at the ropes and remembered what I’d read about how to sail. How to hoist the mainsail and the jib and angle into the wind. I remembered it by heart, for the day that I would go out and show my dad. But I never did.

  And in the overcast morning, I pushed the boat off the sandbank and floated it into the shallows, the front bobbing up and cutting through the water, the cold chilling my feet, my ankles, my knees.

  I crashed the boat through the waves, then hoisted myself in. And I rode the surging water out onto the blue.

  The water wasn’t as harsh as I’d expected, the tide carrying me out, and I went to work on the ropes, angling into the gusts, feeling the pull of the wind. The white sail flapped out, whipping in the breeze. The spray of the ocean across my skin.

  I tied the mast and lay back down into the boat and I waited for the ocean to take me. Waited for the sea to wash me out over the horizon. Till I was a grey-blue mark at the edge of the world. Till I was nothing.

  I sat up and looked back at the world as it shrank. There was more in the distance now, houses stacked along the coastline, other buildings. Places I’d known were gathered all across. They seemed to change every time I blinked.

  Then I saw her, right out at the edge of the world. Right up at the side of the ocean. Sarah was watching, her arms gathered up around her in the cold. Her long hair blowing in the wind.

  She raised a hand, opened it.

  I did the same.

  She watched on, fading into the distance.

  When I couldn’t make her out anymore, I lay back onto the wooden floor of the boat, the white sail puffing and expanding above. I closed my eyes and imagined it, imagined the water flowing unsteady beneath. The waves like cars drifting through the sleeping suburbs. The blue stretching forever into the distance. I imagined her there with me, lying at my side, looking up at the shifting sky. Her head on the creaking wood floor. She looked to me. Her ice-blue eyes. She smiled.

  I opened my eyes and looked up at the clouds moving overhead. I wondered if it was actually me moving. Or the world.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Jo for being my one, and to Jack and Amelia for the constant inspiration. Thanks to my family for always supporting whatever I do, and to Mum, especially, for my writing abilities. Thanks to Simon Best for honest feedback, and to James Phelan for keeping me connected. Thanks to Christos Tsiolkas for timeless advice, and to Meredith Curnow for ceaseless understanding and patience. And thanks to Tom Langshaw for helping me get the story into shape.

  Andrew Hutchinson lives in Canberra. His first novel, Rohypnol, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript and was commended for the Kathleen Mitchell Award.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Penguin Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  One

  ePub ISBN – 9780143789123

  First published by Vintage Australia in 2018

  Copyright © Andrew Hutchinson, 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A Vintage Australia book

  Published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  penguin.com.au

  Addresses for the Penguin Random House group of companies can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com/offices.

  Cover images: view from car (front cover) © plainpicture/Cultura/ElkeMeitzel; woman © Dmitry A/Shutterstock; view from car (back cover) © BABAROGA/Shutterstock

  Cover design by Adam Laszczuk © Penguin Random House Pty Ltd

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