by Hugh Breakey
‘Wear a ring long enough,’ she repeated. ‘And it wears the flesh itself.’
There it was. Just below the knuckle on my fourth finger, the flesh curved inward. Little wonder I’d never noticed it. Just the smallest indentation. A missing piece of me.
‘No,’ I whispered, denying the mark, denying its history, denying what it might mean.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s impossible. I would know.’
‘You do know. You kissed me.’
My head kept shaking. I didn’t know what to believe. Except that I needed some space to think this through. ‘You have to go.’ My voice trembled on the final word. It sounded weak. Pathetic. ‘Please.’
Julie took a step backward, as if unnerved by the desperation in my voice. The anger left her face. Her hand went to her mouth. ‘I’m sorry. You’re upset. This wasn’t at all how I’d planned it. I know this must be hard.’
‘Hard?’
‘You’re right. It’s not your fault, and it’s not fair to you. I should have prepared better for this possibility.’
This possibility? Me kissing her? Me throwing her out? Both?
‘Can you please just go?’ I wasn’t thinking of the future, or that I needed time to get my head around this. I just needed a moment to breathe.
Her eyes searched mine. ‘I’ll go. If that’s what you want.’
‘Yes. It is what I want.’ My voice stammered in relief. ‘That’s exactly what I want.’
‘Okay, then.’ Slowly, she nodded. ‘But this isn’t over, Robbie. It won’t be over until all of this is finally fixed.’ She waved expansively with her hand as she spoke. The gesture seemed to encompass everything. Me. Her. The room. The dominoes.
My mouth stayed shut. She had agreed to leave. Nothing else mattered. I summoned up all my strength just to meet her gaze. Her eyes glinted with determination. All I had was desperation.
A sigh escaped her in one loud huff of breath. ‘Fuck.’
Before I had a chance to gather myself, she turned away and strode towards the door.
‘Wait.’ As much as I wanted this to end, I had to know. Julie looked back, and my question blurted out. ‘Why did you lie to me? Why not just tell me the truth from the very beginning?’
Her face darkened. ‘Right.’ She scoffed. ‘Like last time.’
She gave a final shake of her head and left, slamming the door behind her.
In one last effort, my legs carried me to the central pathway, and then to the door. I slammed the locks back one after the other.
Alone at last, safe at last, I made it out of the dominoes room and slumped down at the kitchen table. All the while, her final words bounced around inside my head like a pinball.
Last time?
Breathe.
I was shaking as I sucked in air and buried my head in my hands.
Married.
My gut instinct was to recoil from the very thought, but it burrowed into my mind like a screw twisting into soft wood. Julie’s claim wasn’t impossible. The fact was I didn’t know that much about my past life before I moved to this apartment a year ago, except that I’d come from Melbourne, where my doctor still was. Julie had said she came from down south, so maybe I had lived with her back then. Been married to her, even. It would explain why she knew about me and my condition.
And it would explain the mark on my ring finger. I sat up in my chair and forced myself to look at it. The indentation looked ugly and unnatural, like a tree-trunk grown around a loop of fence-wire. Years later, the wire long since rusted and snapped, the tree still bore the marks of its captivity. I glared at the thing, as if it had betrayed me. The one piece of really tangible evidence that Julie had been able to provide.
No; there had to be some other explanation. Julie’s story had too many loose ends. If we had been married, why weren’t we still together? Why had I moved thousands of kilometres away from her and set up on my own? And then, if she had followed me up here—‘last time’, like she’d said—then why wouldn’t I have accepted her claim? Why the need for this elaborate ruse to inveigle herself into my life?
And, come to think of it, why hadn’t any of this information been passed down to me? There was no wedding ring matching Julie’s in my collection of mementoes. No matter what I thought of her, no matter how it might have ended, I surely couldn’t have just thrown such a thing away. Not in my state. Marriage is about as important as it gets, and I didn’t have enough links to my history to be casting any aside like that.
What’s more, the letter hadn’t mentioned her. To make sure I hadn’t missed anything, I went to the records box and pulled it out. I pored through every sentence, word by word, though I knew the thing almost off by heart.
There was nothing. Maybe the bits stressing the importance of solitude and keeping to myself alluded to a past where I hadn’t done that. Where I had tried being with someone through it all. But, equally, those sentences might have been meant to warn me about strangers trying to insinuate themselves into my life. Either way, there was no direct reference to being married, which is hardly the sort of thing you’d forget to mention.
My mouth felt like parchment. Something like a lifetime had passed in the last moments of Julie’s visit. I forced my way to the fridge and got myself a glass of water; pressed the cold glass up to the side of my temple. Slowly, clarity returned, seeping through my skull with the chill. I didn’t know what game she was playing, or how she knew what she knew, but Julie’s story just didn’t add up.
The outside chair was still in here, beside the table. I carried it back out to the veranda. The mid-afternoon heat radiated up from the street below and prickled at my shirt. I looked out at the city, and for the first time it felt like the city might be looking back. Was it possible Julie had been spying on me? Could she still be spying on me now? From what I’d learnt in the last hour, I couldn’t put it past her.
I went back inside and shut the door to the balcony. The lock mechanism felt rusty as I turned the bolt. Up here on the fifth floor there was usually no need to lock it, but now it felt like I needed every barricade I could get my hands on. I checked the front-door locks again, unnecessarily. No reason to feel afraid. This place was home. I was safe.
Whatever Julie’s game was, she was locked outside. With the dominoes work proceeding well, everything was on track. Nothing else mattered. The forgetting still lay five days away. The letter’s warnings against others endured, more relevant now than ever.
So be it. I set my jaw in determination and shut it all out: Julie, the ring, her crazy story, everything. I would focus on the dominoes.
But even there, in the dominoes themselves, it seemed to me that Julie’s touch ran through it all, like a gold vein through dark rock. Everywhere I looked some mark of hers seemed to blaze out at me, from the barriers carving up the room into neat symmetrical lines to the platforms arching above it. Even the whirling patterns I’d invented now looked stained by her appreciation. I may have got Julie out of the apartment, but she’d left traces everywhere.
No matter. I pushed myself mercilessly back to the task, starting with the two little rectangles of dominoes I’d clattered over earlier as I backed my way into the corner. With each new phalanx of tiles set upright, each piece set straight, I felt like I could erase her touch. Holding on to that thought, I worked my way tile by tile through the rest of the day.
But by the time evening came around, it became harder to discipline my thoughts. They kept drifting back to Julie. I gave up on the dominoes, fixed myself a sandwich as an early dinner and ate it at the kitchen table. I didn’t want to go outside, given the possibility of prying eyes.
The phone sat next to my plate. Idle fingers reached out to press the home button: a pair of smiling friends stared back at me.
Not friends. Nothing but a ruse. A lie.
Anger swelled in my gut. She didn’t deserve to be in my life, and certainly not smiling her way into it, her innocent-seeming grin beaming out into my world
. I stabbed at the phone until I’d deleted the offending picture from the home screen. An urge to get rid of it entirely flashed through the back of my mind, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have enough history to let any of it go.
I folded the letter back up and returned it to its place. If its aim had been to warn me about Julie, it had only done so indirectly. I could do better for my future self. I opened the journal at the next blank page and began to write. Forewarned would be forearmed.
As the shadows deepened, I used the phone’s home screen to shed a little pool of light. Its bland blue face shone out in the evening’s dimness.
Vanilla once more.
But inside it, filed away, the photo of Julie and me remained. That memory, at least, would pass through my hands and into the future.
Day Five
Five days to go, and for the first time in ages, no morning exercises. Freedom from Julie should have left me feeling released. Instead, I felt lethargic. I dragged myself to the kitchen table and ate some toast. I couldn’t even muster the willpower to feel bad about slacking off.
IT WAS almost as if I missed her. As if the promise of Julie had bounced me out of bed these last few mornings. And now that she was gone, all motivation had fled my body.
All I could do was focus on getting through the day; getting the dominoes done. I gave up on breakfast, binning the last of the flavourless toast. Despite my listlessness, things had to be done. Decisions made.
For one thing, I’d need to deal with the issue of supplies—namely food. My future self needed to get through his first few days on his own without any intrusions into his crucial formative period. So I needed to sort out my deliveries. I’d have to ring the supermarket, something I’d never done before, and organise a new delivery person, at least until Mr Lester returned. I thought briefly that this would all be easier with the internet on, then found the number, set it down on the table and reached for the apartment’s old landline handset.
As I did so, it started to ring.
I snapped my hand away from it as if it were a live thing. It was so long since the phone had rung, I’d almost forgotten the sound now crashing around the quiet apartment. Julie. It had to be. No one else had any reason to call. And she’d said it wasn’t over.
The phone rang on. I stood my ground. It could scream all it wanted, but it couldn’t make me answer. At last—after an eternity—the ringing stopped. Then, with barely a pause to let me gather my thoughts, it started up again. She was determined, if nothing else. And if her story was true, and I really was her lost love, why wouldn’t she be?
I couldn’t deny that part of me was drawn to the idea that it might be true. And not just because she was so attractive. Given the last twenty-four hours, I could probably add resourceful and determined as well. I shut my eyes, and for a moment I surrendered to the fantasy that she knew me—really knew me—and could be trusted completely.
It would be such a perfect solution to my condition. Julie would know all my hopes and dreams. All my work and plans. We would build a life together, and when the forgetting struck that life would still be there, and I could just fall back into it. It would be like pressing soft clay into a hard mould. Everything that I used to try and push myself beyond the forgetting—the exercises, the dominoes, the journal—she could be all of that and more.
If it was all true. And if she could be trusted.
The phone stopped ringing, then started up again. I opened my eyes and looked at it. I had to concentrate on evidence, and not on what I wanted to be true. The stakes were too high to fall for that mistake. There was no new evidence here. She had said it wasn’t over, and now she had tried again.
I pulled the phone out of its socket. The ring cut off, mid-peal. Done. Hopefully now she’d start to realise how pointless her efforts were: that I would defend myself against her.
I pushed all my wishful thinking away and got on with the work. Soon enough, I was engrossed in the job and the hours passed quickly. I started to attack the remaining unpopulated area of floor. This called for some creative decision-making, the perfect thing to take my mind off—
Rat-tat-tat!
The room echoed with the knock. Her knock. Panic gripped my insides. Idiot! I should have foreseen this possibility. I couldn’t let her in, that much was clear. The memory of being trapped in my own room yesterday when she refused to leave still burned in my brain.
Rat-tat-tat-tat.
‘Hey.’ Julie’s voice carried through into the room, as dangerous as a siren’s call. ‘It’s me.’
I went to answer, just to tell her I knew she was lying and to order her away, but my voice caught in my throat.
Julie’s voice broke the silence. ‘Come on, open up. I want to apologise for yesterday. It was wrong to spring it all on you. I owe you an explanation.’
My mouth clamped shut. A pulse ran through my jaw, grinding my teeth together. I stared at the door in a stupid panic, unmoving and wordless. Maybe it was better this way. If I didn’t speak, then we wouldn’t be able to communicate. She wouldn’t be able to talk me into opening the door, and then to letting her into the apartment. Give her an inch and she’d take a mile.
‘Look, I’ve got your grocery order out here,’ she said. ‘It’s Tuesday, in case you’ve forgotten. You’ll have to come out and get it eventually or it’ll spoil.’
Damn, she was right. My legs freed up enough to move, and I made it over to the door.
The knock came again, louder this time, and I could almost feel it quiver through me physically, from my feet welded to the floor all the way to the rigid neck at the top of my spine.
‘I know you’re in there, Robbie.’ Her voice sounded frustrated. ‘Please open up.’
Absolutely not. I didn’t trust her around me. I didn’t trust myself around her much, either. Eventually she would have to give up and go away.
‘Are you seriously doing this?’ Now her voice bore an edge of annoyance. ‘Are you actually going to just cower in there in silence?’
I crossed my arms on my chest. Not cowering at all.
Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat. ‘Robbie?’ Despair was replacing frustration.
I reached out to the door. Maybe part of me still wanted to see her. Despite everything. What would it feel like to just give in? I didn’t have to ask. I knew exactly how it would feel. As sweet as a kiss. I planted my palm against the door, my weight holding it there, safely away from the locks.
‘Okay, fine,’ came Julie’s voice. ‘I’m talking to the door. I’ll just stand here and talk to the bloody door. Like an idiot. Hope your neighbours don’t mind.’
A pause followed. Maybe seeing whether I would have mercy on her.
She sighed. I could barely hear it through the door. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t just tell you the truth about everything. Or about anything. But I had no choice.’
I wished I could see her. Whatever emotion was on her face, whatever thoughts were visible in those eyes, they were lost to me. I stood my ground, listening to a voice through the door.
Like an idiot.
‘I’d lost you, the third time it happened,’ she continued. ‘The forgetting.’
She used my term for it. The forgetting. Was that evidence of our past together? Or just evidence that she’d read my journal, or the letter?
‘You were left out on your own. That was how we were separated. It took months before I finally tracked you down and found you living here, all alone. I was so excited. I knew it must’ve been hard on you, being lost and alone. But I didn’t realise how hard. It hadn’t occurred to me how you’d react when I just appeared out of nowhere. I threw myself at you, so happy and stupid.’
I turned my back to the door and slumped against it. My weight slid down its smooth surface until I was left with my butt on the floor. Maybe I’d been wrong to not believe her.
‘You threw me out,’ she went on. ‘You were scared and angry. You didn’t want anything to do with me. You even…’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Anyw
ay, I should have been smarter about it. You didn’t want to know me, so I had to try a different approach.’
I shook my head, rolling it back against the door. Every answer she gave just opened up a dozen more questions I didn’t have the strength to ask. I just sat there, silent and pathetic.
‘I’m sorry for lying to you. But I’d tried the truth. This isn’t the first time I’ve been left hammering on this door. When the last forgetting happened, I knew that you’d forget my face, and that I could use that opportunity.’ Her voice quickened. ‘I knew there would still be a piece of you in there that would remember us together, if only we’d give it a chance. And there is. I saw how you looked at me. I felt how you kissed me, Robbie.’
I shut my eyes tight against her words. I’d felt it too.
‘Don’t leave me without choices, Robbie.’ Her voice dropped and I needed to strain to hear her words. ‘I know you’re lost and alone, but you are my responsibility. That’s what we agreed. Us. Together. Don’t leave me with no other option.’
No other option apart from what?
‘You do believe me, don’t you?’ she said. ‘I’ve got all the photos of us on my phone. I can show you, if you just open up.’
A pause, and then Julie hammered on the door again. The shudders quivered down the wood and into my shoulders.
The hammering stopped abruptly. Maybe she’d worked out that my body was pressed up against the door.
‘Robbie?’
After a moment, the door shifted behind my back. A subtle movement, as if Julie had seated herself down on the opposite side, directly behind me. So there we sat, back to back, facing out in opposite directions. Little more than a couple of inches of timber between us.
Silence.
I could feel time passing, measured through the beat of blood pulsing through my neck. But I didn’t want to move. This was as close as I could be to her and still feel safe.
I don’t know how long we sat there. It may have been minutes or hours. Then she spoke. ‘Well, starving you out wasn’t really my plan. I’ll unload your food out here and leave it for you. I’m going to leave my licence here too, in case this is all a bit hard to believe. I faked the name on the business card, but my licence has my real name. You’ll see.’ There was a pause, and then her voice came through softly. Barely audible. ‘Don’t keep your back against the wall too long, babe. You never know what some crazy bitch might resort to doing.’
