I’m doing eighty and thinking about other things when the roo jumps into my headlights.
The speed limit is a hundred, but I don’t know these roads and it’s raining gently. I’ve been sitting twenty k’s under the limit and pissing off the locals. As the huge grey shape bounds across the road, the consequences of every action play in my mind. My hands grip the wheel, my right foot tenses to press the brake, but in the adrenaline slow-motion, I’m thinking, don’t swerve and don’t brake and you’ll die. But it leaps out of the beam of light in the moment between reaction and action, and there’s a small sound as my car clips the tip of its tail.
My heart is climbing up my throat, and then it’s gone.
My cheeks bulge as my mouth fills with vomit. Pulling over, I open the car door and hurl it out onto the verge.
Since lockdown, my stomach lurches at the slightest inconvenience. Stress makes me throw up. Everything makes me gag.
I close the door and pull back onto the road. The map tells me to take the next left and I do.
*
I’m thinking about the roo. I’m thinking about the road. I’m thinking about my tyres and how they’re too shit for this kind of driving. I’m thinking about how the part of a tyre that actually touches the ground is called a ‘contact patch’, and it’s only about the size of my hand. How it doesn’t feel like enough. I’m thinking about what my psychiatrist said. I’m thinking about the little pink pills in their box in my bag in the backseat and how I’m afraid they’ll dull me out to the point where I will never be able to write, and how I’m still getting used to them, and how they still make me tired at night. I think about how tired I am now. I think about driving tired, about crashing, about dying. I think about what I want to happen with my body when I die. About Covid and how I smoked for twenty-three years, and about dying while gasping for air. I’m thinking about how my cousin told me that my grandmother, who I do not speak to, had died and I think about how I don’t know if that’s true or not because my cousin is a bit of a psycho who says shit like that all the time. And then I think, aren’t YOU the one who just got prescribed anti-psychotics?
I try and shake the thoughts out of my head, physically shaking it back and forth, but only a little because I’m driving. They keep cascading, endless and so loud. I’m thinking, STOP. I’m thinking, ENOUGH. I’m thinking, BE NORMAL BE NORMAL BE NORMAL.
My heartbeat echoes all around my chest as I turn into the driveway. It runs along a ridge and the house nestles into the land that rolls down and away. The owner, Laurel, has left some of the lights on. The house looks small in the dark, a beacon between the twin blacks of land and sky.
Big windows let the light out and let me see right in and through. The kitchen, dining table and lounge are all empty, all waiting for me to fill them. I can see myself in there, laptop gleaming from the table, pots bubbling on the stove, TV on and muted just to fill up the space. I can see me making fires in the wood stove here, see me pouring myself out onto the page. I hope.
I’m here to start again, or to try.
Soft rain is lit up by the porch light as I pull up. I hear the dog barking and his claws scrabbling on the window as I unlock the door to the mudroom. He bounds out and wriggles all around me, so excited to see anyone after a few hours locked in here that he doesn’t mind that he doesn’t know me. He’s a deep-red kelpie with clever green eyes, and he lets me pat him as he bounces around my legs.
‘Hi Finn, hello. Hi there, good guy,’ I say as he presses his nose into my palm. He jostles me as I unlock the door, where two cats wait for me to enter—a tiny, ancient calico whose name, Laurel told me, is Pepper. The other is a strapping young ginger fella called Gansey. As I come in, Finn trotting around my feet, they peel off. Pepper jumps onto the kitchen bench and Gansey runs away, then turns to peer at me from the middle of the lounge room. I’m all bags and noise, Finn circling me, and I heave everything I’m holding onto the bench. Pepper leaps away, her wizened little face all perturbed.
The house feels big and empty, even with the animals here. I can sense the rooms behind all the doors, all that space, all dark. Before I do anything else I switch on the rest of the lights. I always need all the lights on. I am a heavy electricity user. Everything needs to be bright. My imagination is too vivid for the dark—it paints itself over the black in sharp colour relief. So I switch on all the lights, and it helps. The lights buzz in my brain, and it feels nice, fills in a space that needs filling.
A friend linked me to the post about the farm. I’m keen, I wrote to the woman who posted the callout. Would you have me? I want to write a book there, well, not a whole book, but as much of a book as I can write in two weeks, which could be a lot—or none.
Do you like cats? Laurel asked. Yes. Do you like dogs? Yes. Do you like horses? I’m not sure, but I’m happy to care for one if you tell me how. She typed out a ‘hahaha’ and told me that the horse mostly took care of itself, I’d just need to check on it now and then to make sure it was okay. I thought of horse lips moving over my hand, snuffling up apple and that felt good. What else would I need to do? I asked and she said, watch the house. Feed the cats and the chickens and the dog and take him for a walk twice a day. Write your book. I can do that, I said again. Well, I can maybe do the last one, and she typed ‘hahaha’ again.
Can I, though? The place in my brain where fiction once lived is a field where nothing grows. My imagination has no space for stories, unless those stories are me telling myself:
I’ve got the space for intrusive thoughts, rushing imagery, cyclic paranoia, but not much else.
I haven’t written in two years.
*
Building a fire in the wood-burning stove keeps me busy for a while. It’s not long before the fire is roaring and I shut the door feeling accomplished and wondering if this is the first or the last sense of satisfaction I’ll feel on this trip. Finn scratches at the door and I let him out to take a piss, slipping my bare feet into a pair of boots and following along behind him. Next door to the house is a hall where the farm sometimes hosts weddings or events. I notice the door isn’t closed properly and I almost jump out of my skin when I hear something moving inside. Even though I’m terrified and I’ve castigated every person in a horror film who has opened a door to investigate a strange noise, I open the door to investigate the strange noise.
I scare the bird as much as it scares me, and it takes off, flying directly through the window, glass breaking and clattering on the gravel driveway outside. It’s a large bird, I’m not sure what kind. I race outside, turning on my phone torch and thinking that I’ll come across it lying neck-broken on the ground among broken glass, but I don’t. All I see are shards and slivers and a lone dark feather.
Back inside, I ready for bedtime. The mattress is too soft, the pillows too high, and even with the meds, I can’t fall asleep. I pad out into the living room, watching the animals stare at me in the dim light from the embers in the wood-burning stove. Gansey is lolling, stretched out in a dog-sized bed, and Finn has stuffed his kelpie proportions into the cat’s bed and is curled tightly around himself. Pepper is nowhere to be seen.
The dog and the cat both eye me as I throw a few small split logs into the fire and watch them take flame, but when I sit at the table and open my laptop, they go back to sleep. I’m not doing anything that interests them. I’m not sure if what I’m doing even interests me anymore. But I type.
Author’s note: This is a work of autofiction, in that everything that is in the piece actually happened, but not all at the same time. Memoir is always something of a piece of autofiction—it’s rare that real life falls into a neat narrative, and often we carve our lives into slightly different shapes in order to give it meaning.
