The Empty Space.

The Empty Space.

Mar 19, 2021

She eases her thigh away from the vinyl seat and it peels away like orange rind.

She can’t be in this car anymore.

The sun is relentless, shearing across the windscreen which is now covered in dead insects and dust. The glass is dulled by the smokiness of age but that just makes the heat more oppressive, as if its trapped and slowly broiling them alive. There’s a tear in the backrest that presses between her shoulder blades, through the damp curtain of her hair, scraping at her skin whenever she leans back. After two hours she wants to scream at it; that small tear, worrying at her. But she can’t make any sound that gives away her tension. She can’t alert him to any shift in her. Instead she must speak her regular lines, and now they’ve reached the scene where he’s in a bad mood and she tries to cajole him out of it. He’ll reject her attempts, of course, until a time of his own choosing, but she must try anyway. If she doesn’t, if she allows herself to become distracted or sullen or argumentative, he’ll turn the car around, just for the spite of it. And she’s so close now.

He stopped talking to her half an hour ago. Whether from boredom or some unnamed irritation, she can’t be sure. She talks into the empty space between them, about the countryside and the heat. She makes a self-deprecating remark about the dryness of her skin. Her left hand is down alongside her thigh, hidden from him and clenched into a fist. She can’t sound too excited, too enthusiastic, because this weekend was her idea. Two days in a seaside town. It would be good, she told him, to get away. To feel the saltwater soak into their skin after being surrounded by dust and dry heat for so long. She told him she’d bought a new bikini, and some of the suspicion faded from his eyes. But the temptation to take it away from her is always there. 

Its lunchtime when they reach the ocean. She catches a glimpse of its deep, endless blue before they pull into the nearest service station. There’s a line-up at the pumps and they wait behind a jeep with a kayak strapped to the roof. She stops talking, stops trying to draw him into conversation, and instead she uncurls her fist and feels the relief of it; the cramp in her arm and fingers as the blood begins to flow again. When they pull up at the pump he gets out and slams the door behind him, just to let her know he’s pissed off. 

The key the cashier hands her is attached to a stress ball, bright orange and dusty. She has no desire to touch it, let alone squeeze. As she turns, she walks right past him. He’s opening the door to the drinks’ fridge, his back to her, close enough to touch. She reaches the automatic doors and they hum but don’t move. She’s stealing herself for the hand on her arm, the grip of his fingers, when they open with a surprised jerk before rolling back. She steps into the bright heat and makes her way to the public toilet with the shoulder bag she packed so carefully. Most of what she has is left behind in the old farmhouse they moved into six months ago, a house large and cumbersome in its emptiness. Sand blows in under the back door when the summer winds kick up. The wooden floors are dull and scratched, the lino in the kitchen torn. The owner is elderly. While he walked them through the place he told them it once housed station hands, and shearers and feral goat shooters. He kept saying his sons were coming back to manage the place.

She splashes her face with cold water from the sink, then slides her wet hands up her bare arms, dampens the back of her neck. She tips her head back and closes her eyes in the dim, brick-walled space, stretching, easing out the gaps between her bones. But only for a moment, because he’ll be somewhere in that line of people that are waiting to pay for their fuel, fidgeting with their keys and wallets and drinks and bags of chips and newspapers and ice-creams, his eyes seeking her out in an automatic, predatory compulsion. She gathers her bag, leaves the key and the stress ball in the sink and slips out, the door banging behind her.

The town is forty-five minutes from the city. It’s kind of shabby. She suspects its quiet during the cooler months, when the tourists aren’t flocking to its café’s and beaches. The rents are cheap here. She hopes to get a job, so she can one day move out of the spare room that’s waiting for her. She walks past the ice freezer and a couple arguing about something she can’t make out because her heart is a drum in her ears, her back stippled in gooseflesh. She reaches a street lined with houses, some quiet, others busy with barbeque smells and music and kids playing. She walks quickly as she dials for the local taxi. Everything has been memorised, phone numbers, street numbers. She pictures him going back to the car, noting her absence, waiting for her to come out as the anger he so freely allows himself rises. 

She won’t be in his car anymore. 

She rounds a corner

and disappears.

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