The wet scape of the windshield wipers draws her attention too long and she blinks herself back into the moment. Flat thuds as sheets of rain drum along the car. Ahead, the motorway is dissolved into a fine mist by the bouncing upsurge of the downpour. A sign runs overhead but she doesn’t have time to see what it says. It occurs to her she isn’t quite sure where she is. A few, scraggly bushes blur past now and then, and the flat land beyond is a slurry of cold hues. The road itself has a slow curve to it, that comes round onto a straight. Unlit street lights zip by. The other side of the motorway is empty. So to, is hers.
The soft vibration of the steering wheel numbs her fingers. The low hum of the engine fills the space between the relentless pound of the rain. What time is it? The greyness outside could easily be early morning, or dusk, or midday. Not dark enough for night. There’s a digital clock on the plastic dash that reads 03:04. She watches it for a while, at least a few minutes. It doesn’t change. Must be broken. Time, then, is as indistinct as place.
A mild panic begins to well up in her throat. Bile. Where is she going? What was she doing? She can’t remember. But she’s travelling at seventy miles an hour. A strange comfort, but that’s what you do on motorways, drive at seventy miles an hour. The window buzzes in its holdings as she cruises to the right with the curve of the road. She finds herself wondering if she’s going north or south, east or west. Even the slightest orientation would go some ways to anchoring her to this moment, but she finds none.
Perhaps this happens often. A problem with memory. There must be context, somewhere in the car. She takes a moment to scan the passenger seat and the backseats. Just a hoodie, it looks like, sitting next to her. She leans over and opens the glovebox. A few CDs, an ice scraper and a few crumpled receipts. With one hand, she unwraps one. From McDonalds, a plain double cheeseburger and a banana shake. No name, not that there would be. A date: 18th November, 2016. Doesn’t mean much to her. She knows it isn’t 2016 now, but she can’t recall how many years ago it was. Two? Three?
Her pockets. She fishes around pulls out a creased fiver from one pocket, a cracked smartphone from the other. Flicking her attention from the screen to the road, one hand on the wheel, she thinks; this is illegal. But these are exceptional circumstances, right? Or is she overreacting? Anyway. The phone.
Contacts. Names she doesn’t recognise. Aaron. Alex. Bryony. Charlie. Chris. About a hundred or so, as far as she can tell. Messages. Top conversation is with Mum.
Are you ready? Asked Mum.
Yes. She had replied.
There’s no context for the question. The above messages are the meaningless exchanges that fill our days. Complaints. Plans. Observations. Nothing that shatters the course of their lives. No indicator of calamity. Just dribble. The other messages from other people are much the same. Friends from home. Friends from work. A boyfriend maybe? A girlfriend maybe? It’s hard to tell. She doesn’t recognise these names, or faces. She doesn’t remember these conversations. But from it all, she does gather a name for herself. Attia.
Right, so, she’s Attia and she’s driving at seventy miles an hour. She doesn’t know where. She doesn’t know when. So why is she driving? A good question. She frowns and leans back in the seat. Slowly, she eases speed down. It takes a moment, fighting the inertia and the slip of the road, but she comes to a stop in the middle of the motorway with a slight lurch.
This is alien. This place of constant motion is disrupted by her stillness. Motorways are ever-charging veins and she is clogging it. Or she would be, if there was anything to clog. Where are the other cars? The other people? This is wrong. A dark feeling shoots through the marrow of her bones, infecting her thoughts. Her breath gets heavier. Her vision blurs at the edges. A spinning sensation makes the static car lurch clockwise.
She turns off the engine and exhales. Closing her eyes, she tries to center the myriad voices in her head. Pull her fraying emotions back together. Nothing’s happened. You’re okay. But that fragile logic does little against the incessant instinct, drumming against her exterior. Something is wrong. Deeply wrong.
She calls her Mum. The phone rings. A woman with warmth in her voice answers. A bright chemical relief flushes her blood. Thank God. Attia begins to talk but stops when she realises its a voicemail. Okay, well, there are others. The brightness stalls its passage. She calls the next person, in the conversation below. Emily. It rings. And rings. Another voicemail, this one without personalisation. Just a prerecorded voice from some company. She looks at the home screen. 03.04 the time reads. She gets through another fifteen contacts before she gives up. All of them disconnect or go to voicemail. Shit. Perhaps it's early morning and they’re all asleep. Don’t justify this strangeness with fantasy. Don’t give in. Embrace it. Go on what you know. Explanations do nothing.
Attia drums her fingers on the dash. She has more than she started with. She has a name. She has a phone full of contacts. She has this car, that hoodie and the road. And the rain. Endless rain, washing over the car in driving sheets. The clatter might be soothing in normal circumstances. A shiver. That’s the worst thought yet; what if this is normal circumstances?
The longer she sits, the longer she thinks, the worse it gets. This blankness, this nothingness, is pressing in on her from all sides. There’s nothing distinct about road, ahead or behind. A wet sameness that merges into the grey horizon all around her. A spark of rage. She grabs the hoodie and steps out of the car.
She’s drenched before she can even pull it over her head. Looking around, it’s plain there are no answers out here. It’s all the same. But she stalks over to the barricade at the side of the road, determined to make this decision work.
A hedgerow, and beyond it, a sodden field. Hay bales covered with black coatings dot the flat expanse. Ridges, where crops have been harvested, run parallel to her vision. At the edge of the haze, a thin line of trees.
She didn’t know what she expected. A village. Town. City. Another road. A service station. Something, anything, with people. But she is alone and soaking wet. Attia starts to cry.
After going back and pulling the car into the hard shoulder, she does her best to sleep. Though she’s cold from her damp clothes, the amniotic shell of the car, suspended in the heavy downpour, lulls her towards sleep after only a few minutes. Her exhausted thoughts have run themselves in circles. Now there is only a weakening fear to keep her awake and it soon buckles under the weight of fatigue.
She dreams, lightly, of a warmer place with familiar faces.
A knock at the window. She starts awake.
When she looks around, she sees that she is alone. An overhanging branch taps against the window in the breeze.
Well, what else is there to do?
The light is more or less the same as it was before. The time on the dash reads 03.04. She pulls from the hard shoulder and starts to drive. Seventy miles an hour.
The motorway goes on and on. No hard turns. No junctions. No signs. It annoys her that she didn’t catch what that first one said. Maybe she should go back for it?
But for now, she keeps going. In her boredom, at the relentless monotony of the road ahead, her eyes are drawn to the hypnotic sway of the windshield wipers.
Paddy Dobson
4th October 2020