Signal
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Dan can’t be certain the flashing light he first noticed two nights ago and has just noticed again isn’t a distress signal, can’t quite let it go because it might be and if he does let it go and someone dies, well, can he really live with that? Finds himself playing out in his mind, to the end, the whole idea and eventually over a second glass of scotch invents a dead woman found tied up next to a window in a neighbour’s basement, a torch at her side with its pale light still flickering. Pictures a solemn funeral and headlines in the news: former swimsuit model murdered. Reads on to discover she was also the head of an international pharmaceutical company, youngest CEO and a Rhodes scholar. Then, he’s imagining a distant relative asking how nobody noticed and in hushed tones someone asks him about the torch. You did know about it, right? they whisper. About this he feels a real pang which he thinks is guilt but then notices it subside after a few minutes and puts it down instead to the sauerkraut he ate for breakfast, a thing he would never have eaten before but was recommended to him by a girl in a grocery store as the only way to start the day. Not until later does he pose to himself the question: why does he imagine it is a woman bound in the basement and not a man? He’s not au fait with the actual meaning behind his tendency to ascribe the brutal death to a woman and counts perhaps a law of probability as reason, if any of it can be about reason.
By the time it is 10pm and the lights have once again stopped flashing he tells himself he isn’t the kind of person who knows dits from dahs because that was his father’s domain and he’s not got a clue how to unravel it all. Plus he’s not obligated to report it because as far as he knows it’s not anything, yet. Down the track if someone disappears or is broken into or is missing their 1934 Derby Hooper Bentley Cabriolet then he will have to report it. But for now. Besides he could have it all wrong, as is often his way, and is pretty sure the police will add the call, if he is to make one, to his other calls about cars speeding down the usually quiet lane and doing burn-outs or doughnuts or skidders or skiddies or whatever they call it now when they turn in circles making that nauseating sound. And he’s almost forgotten about the time he called because a man, who moved in briefly next door, wouldn’t stop singing the Toreador Song at the crack of dawn and when he complained, all it elicited were more renditions and an expansion of the repertoire, and to his distress when the police did turn up they joined in because how was he to know they were all Bizet fanciers.
So he doesn’t call or do anything but later when he’s brushing his teeth the imaginary torch by the dead woman’s side pesters him and then seeps into his dreams and when he sees, unusually, the neighbour’s cat in his garden the next morning, stalking a bird, he wonders if this woman is now dead. And the pang in his stomach returns.
To distract himself he thinks there must be a book on codes or signals or signs somewhere in his father’s house, almost definitely in the library downstairs, his father being a military man and all. Perhaps if he can make it out he’ll know then if there’s anything he needs to do. If a rescue is warranted, if he is capable of that and if someone is truly in dire straights, a phrase his mother once used to describe his own situation, the situation that brought him home to his childhood bedroom, to under his parent’s roof until they divorced and kicked him out only for him to return to his father’s house upon the old man’s death. His mother, on the other hand, leaves no belongings for him and her house, being somewhere by the sea, which makes him ill, belongs now to his sisters, whom he also never sees.
He begins searching his father’s library for a book of codes, a book about signals, but finds instead a volume about the Secret Language of Fans and suspects it belonged to the great aunt who raised his father, and left her collection of antique fans to them both, he just a small boy at the time and wanting nothing to do with lacy fans, except now it takes his fancy that his father, presumably his father, has underlined that placing a fan on the left ear signals you want to get rid of someone. In the end, he doesn’t find what he is looking for and returns instead to watch a sitcom about nothing and then a movie about a young couple who meet in high school and carry out a romance for decades, falling in and out of love with each other. He eventually grows bored and turns instead to a documentary about Blue Footed Boobies and is enamoured with the colour of their feet and wishes he knew which colour he could wear that would make him instantly more attractive to women.
For eight years he imagined a woman loving him, who didn’t.
By the time the documentary is over and he is half way through a second about Plants that Kill and is musing over the names Oleander, Castor Bean, White Snakeroot and Deadly Nightshade, he is almost certain the pulsating flashes are intended. Someone is reaching out to him, someone he doesn’t know, and he starts to like the idea he might meet someone new. He hasn’t met anyone new for years. Although, based on his past experiences, perhaps the flashing light is not just for him. Perhaps it is a message for everyone. And there is also the possibility there is no light. It wasn’t like it hadn’t happened before, imagining things, that is. For eight years he imagined a woman loving him, who didn’t. For her, he had even worn cowboy boots believing, as she had told him, they gave him a certain edge that moved her in all the right places and if he played his cards right, as if he was a some kind of poker player, he might just get lucky. So he wore them until a distant relative, at another distant relative’s wedding, told him he looked more ridiculous than usual and that everyone knew the woman was sleeping with at least four other men that they knew of.
For the rest of the day he focuses on a sign the woman with the cat is alive, a window opening, a car rolling down the drive, though not until late in the afternoon does he hear the mechanism on her front gates whir and he sees the woman, briefly through the hedges, driving out. From where he is sitting in his living room he can see both neighbours’ driveways and make out the rooftop of the bungalow directly adjacent that has, to his knowledge, been vacant for years and because he is soon bored with watching the wrens in the denuded maples, which he thinks have been poisoned by the woman with the cat, he turns on the TV. He scrolls one streaming service to the other, stopping eventually on a vacation channel which gets him excited about holidaying until he remembers he is still travelling alone and the desire for a manor on a moor or an achingly romantic castle disappears.
After that he moves on to the culinary channel which sends him to the pantry, a distant voice on the TV talking about key lime pie, and he cooks along, pausing and singing a little Otis Redding, sipping the bottle of red he opens for the occasion. In the end, he makes a cock-up of the pie and goes back to the couch and makes one last change to the sports channel where the Tour de France is still playing. It isn’t long before he is picturing himself in the race and his memories soon hark back to the time when he had been particularly alone and someone suggested he join a team. So he’d taken up cycling and set a goal to ride with his new crew the local charity bike-a-thon but he gave that up after he realised it was the sitting in the café eating after the ride that was the real attraction. He soon began to skip the ride, meeting the rest of the team at the café, telling them he’d pulled a calf muscle. For a while it seemed to be enough for them to keep him on but then, once he’d passed on the six and seven week marks, still taping his ankle but showing no signs of getting back on the bike, the President of the club took him aside quietly. He sold the bike but sometimes still sits at the café and watches the team, wishing to join them and be jollied along by their laughter and reminiscing.
Suddenly infuriated with his recollecting, his misguided penchant and subsequently embarrassing interest in cycling, he turns off the TV and goes out into the garden to water. The summer has been hot as hell and his wife’s hydrangeas are wearing it. He’s almost decided it is time to let them go because it had been eleven years and he was never the gardener. Flooding the roots, he hears it, inside his head, her voice, a little seasoned with red wine, snipping at him. You’d be better off ripping them out than doing that. And just to spite her, he defiantly turns the hose off and takes the barrow to get some more soil and a bit of mulch and tries to tidy up what he’s started. He’s bent over with a pair of tiny red eyes, a badger or fox, staring at him from the other corner of the garden when he notices the flashing again, clean between his legs. He spins and turns to where it is coming from. The hedge buts up against an old chain fence and he’s not keen on getting into the bramble but some desire has come over him, some need for resolve right now and he doesn’t want to lose the light by heading up to the gate. He starts in on the hedge and gets a foothold in the wire and begins to climb, the light breaking up as he gets caught in the branches. By the time he reaches the top of the fence and begins to try and pull a leg over, the sky is dark again.
He thinks, in that moment, about knocking on the neighbour’s doors to ask if they’ve seen it too, wants some affirmation but has so little to go on and soon pictures himself standing in front of the neighbour’s doors mouth agape, stumbling through the words – well there’s this light, a flashing light, maybe a signal or code. The moment he thinks it, he is instantly afraid one or all of them will look at him blankly or worse call the police thinking he is an intruder because he is fairly certain in a line up it would turn out a blinding surprise to them to find out they all lived side by side. So he doesn’t knock and goes inside and keeps the light to himself.
By the fourth night he sits at the window and waits. It is exactly 10pm when he notices the first flash and then a fast succession of flashes, frantic even. He thinks maybe it is just kids after all but the regularity and persistence bothers him, and deep down he wants it not to be one of the neighbours having a joke. He doesn’t think they have anything against him and he doesn’t completely dislike the neighbours, after all, he doesn’t even know them. There are the Billing’s two blocks down who have a teenage daughter and run a small B&B with an achingly English cottage garden that is sprayed so heavily with aphid repellent he is surprised the roses even survive. He knows this because he watches the gardeners sometimes as he runs by and stops to tie a non-existent lose shoelace. Also he has kept quite a bit of their mail, accidentally delivered to his. There are Christmas cards from distant family who report on the births and deaths of other distant loved ones. He’s contemplated passing those ones on but concurs that if they are only hearing of the births and deaths in a Christmas shout out, they aren’t really close. He concluded it was unlikely they’d shed a tear or give the news more than a passing glance. The bank statements he peruses with interest, noting just how often Mr Billing is out of town and his cash withdrawals while away, nothing paid for by card. He starts underlining those transactions; thinks about dropping those pages back in a fresh envelope marked to Mrs Billing’s attention but then doesn’t.
There are also the students at the end of the cul-de-sac, how many live there he has lost count but is somewhat certain the two originals are still there, although he hasn’t seen the girl for a while. He remembers her vividly, remembers stopping close to her, possibly too close, when she was once standing on the footpath waiting for a ride, standing a little too long so he could see her adjust her pony tail and look once on her phone perhaps to check for messages or start a new playlist. Later he imagined running with her to the nearby reserve, taking the path to the top of the hill and standing side by side, nothing happening between them, not then but just looking out, at the same view at the same time.
It is by the end of the third week he starts to think light isn’t real. He even imagines he is the one creating it, a signal to someone that he is flailing but that seems so introspective, so self-centred he lets it go but, before he does, gets a strong whiff of memory, of a man so caught up in himself he never noticed his wife leaving him, long before the locks were changed.
.
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A. E. Macleod is from Meanjin in Australia. Their writing appears in The Marrow International Poetry Issue 2, The Cormorant, New Australian Fiction and Island Magazine. They were a finalist in the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize and winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Pacific Region). They are working on a novel.
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