Girl, Reflected
You wake up with terror surging through your veins and you don’t know why. There was a dream: something to do with high school friends and how you lost them, one by one. You’ve erased most of it from your mind. You had to cut yourself off — you hated who you were and you knew they’d never let you be anyone else. You’d always be their fool. They needed you for that. At least, that’s how it seemed at the time.
The train crosses the river. You keep an eye on the water. The boats and their reflections, the derelict boat yards, an occasional dolphin cruising the murky waters of the Port River for prey, slumming it with the lead-addled bream.
You’re still reeling from the news.
She stands in the aisle of the train and light reflects from her in every direction. Visual messages encoded in photons, streaming away. Some of them shoot out into the dark huddle of early morning. They hit the window of the train at exactly the right angle and reflect back at you and there she is, projected against a dark factory wall, now ghost-like against the grey sky, now bright against a row of pines. Bright … ghostly … bright … the train rushes on.
You pretend you’re looking out at the wasteland hurtling by but your eyes are fixed on her face. She’s staring out as well, and it’s as if she’s looking right back at you. You know you’ll see her again in the evening on the 5.13 from Adelaide to Glanville.
Two rows behind you, Bill sits among his fellow citizens, wearing the six-hundred-dollar suit he treated himself to when he was promoted to Manager, Customer Services. The public service has been good to him. He’s looking at the girl standing in the aisle. He takes her into his mind, slowly undresses her, turns and bends her this way and that. After a while he tires of it, lets her go, opens a book.
Three rows behind you sits Bronwyn. Twelve months ago she lost her husband and her only child, her son. Her husband took him too far out in the surf one vile, chaotic day at Goolwa and couldn’t get him back in before all the air in his thirteen-year-old lungs had been replaced by salt water. He killed himself three days later. You know nothing of this.
At the terminal, your fellow passengers spill from the train like blood cells, surging through the turnstiles and into the city, transfusing the day.
The connecting bus is late. You wait, urgently, wanting to talk to the girl in the op-shop cardie and bright purple trousers standing beside you. You want to tell her to be careful about who she talks to. But you don’t. How could you?
When the bus comes you sit two rows behind her. At the lights on Pulteney Street an electrician’s van pulls up alongside, large tinted windows running down the side. The photons do their work and the girl in the cardie is cast into the back of the van. She sits just two rows away from you while her doppelganger slouches among cables, ties and rolls of tape.
Last night you found out that your best friend’s daughter has gone missing. The world has changed during the night. You no longer recognise it.
