The Scar by Matt Halton

The Scar

The small triangular scar on the back of her neck. A smoke-blackened dent in her flesh like something precious had been scooped out of her. She grew her hair long to hide it. Once I knew I could see the way her hand flew to it, unconsciously, in times of stress. When she was talking to our landlord or worrying about the leak in the rain tank. We were trying to be self-sufficient.

We grew lemon trees in the backyard. Too many for just us but you can’t live on lemons. So we sold some, pickled others, gave them away to all our friends. Our friends started calling us the lemon people and we worried that they would resent us for foisting too many lemons on them. We had tomato vines and a few scrawny sunflowers that we knew hated us because they wouldn’t grow, just wrinkle up and die. Fat conical caterpillars the length of your little finger, green as avocado pulp, we’d flick across the fence so they’d bother the neighbour. I had a car that wouldn’t always start and then we’d have to catch a lift to town.

It was maybe three, four months after I’d moved in that she told me about the scar. We were friends by then. I don’t know how that works. For a year in my early twenties I shared a flat in Marrickville with a young ex-cop who smoked durries and played Call Of Duty all day, and now I can’t even remember his name. I’m not always a social person and there have been places I lived where I’ve just holed up in my room. But her I could be friends with. We weren’t perfectly attuned but we liked enough of the same things.

We were sitting on the deck after a party and cuddling in a completely platonic way and she twisted around in the dim orange light and told me to take a look. There were bottles stacked in a milk crate by my feet and a guy with straw-coloured dreadlocks snoring in a deckchair on the lawn. It was raining just enough that I was glad of the cover of the house. A little worried that the dreadlock guy was going to catch the flu. I peered at her neck and saw the angles of the scar and she said, “That’s where they put the chip in.”

“Who?”

“It happened a few years ago,” she said. “I was out walking on the beach late at night and I saw these blue lights in the sky. It’s all I remember. They found me next morning asleep on the sand with the tide-foam eating up my ankles. Everyone was worried but I wasn’t. I knew what had happened.”

So then we got to talking and she told me about all the different types. Flying knives and discs like burning crowns. Cigar-shaped objects with windows in them and you can see them peeping out at you. Meteors and blurred patches on radar, but you know it’s a cosmic entity because of the way it moves. The Annunaki from Planet Eight and the ultraterrestrials from below the earth, who had contacted a lady from Wisconsin to explain that Stanley Kubrick was a fraud. Greys and reptilians who lick their own eyeballs, and blonde Nordics who look almost like you and me. She said she didn’t believe all of it. She was just searching for a rational explanation.

She let me touch the scar.

We didn’t have much money. I’d been giving art classes and letting people pay however they could. Once a woman in a kaftan and a pair of earrings made from chunky seaglass let me have a jar of homemade chutney in exchange for an hour of my time. It tasted like grass and I found out afterwards she owned three investment properties in Byron, close to the beach. I was beginning to learn the area. I’d met kids who wouldn’t eat anything but vegetable curry out of a tinfoil packet, with their fingers, because plastic spoons were only good for choking seals. I knew there were cults up in the hills. For me it wasn’t something I felt like I needed to be worried about. But I said to her, “Look, if you had a chip in your neck, wouldn’t the doctors be able to find it?”

It was the wrong thing to say. It got her thinking.

-

Since that day, she told me, she’d been abducted six or seven times. She didn’t know the exact number because of the way the hole in time worked. Afterwards the scar would tingle and she would get a burning sensation in her veins. She thought they were injecting her with something. There were questions in her mind about what their ultimate purpose was.

“I like you,” she told me, “because you’re one of the real people. I get the sense sometimes that most of the humans in the world are just paper dolls blowing around. Like there’s nothing going on inside them.”

“We all feel like that.” I remember she’d just come home from work and I was in the kitchen, feeling more unemployed than usual, trying to make a chicken tagine out of the lemons and fucking the whole thing up. “We think they’re the only real people. It’s because we’re not in anybody’s heads but our own.”

“But some of the conversations you have, when you know the other person’s not even listening, just arguing with themselves in their head, and it’s like, maybe they can’t listen.”

“I think people have depths you don’t see.”

“For me it’s like the whole world is just a puppet show,” she said, dumping her bag on the couch. She worked on boats and she had to bring home a whole sackful of tools every day. “Like it’s not even really here or there’s some other world out there more real than it is. We’re just bugs gliding over the surface of a pond. And sometimes things come out of the pond to snap us up.”

“You sound angry.”

“Doesn’t it make you angry?”

“I just think we have to live in the world we’ve got.”

“But we don’t have a world. We just have this little cardboard prison. It’s all falling apart but we’re not brave enough to punch through the walls so we pretend like they’re made of stone.”

“You want to try this,” I said, handing her a steaming bowl of chicken. “Tell me it’s not as bad as I think.”

And as the winter wore on she became kind of monomaniacal about it. Got to the point where it bugged me. She was abducted again one night while I wasn’t home and in the morning with me hungover and frying up our last three slices of haloumi she came downstairs in her pajamas to talk about her experiences. They’d taken her up in the air and flown her across the sea to watch the whales in their migrations. They were trying to elevate her consciousness. She was getting excited about it.

“I think all the stuff with the tubes,” she said, “and the needles, right, was preparing me for something. Like a test to see if I could handle having my boundaries challenged. I just think they’re more than us in some way.”

I wasn’t getting any shifts anywhere that week and I didn’t know what I was going to do about it. We’d had conversations like this before and it always felt like it would be stupid somehow to tell her it was just a dream. She was rolling up her sleeves to show me her bruises.

“See the patterns,” she said. And there were patterns. What could have been interlocking black and yellow squares, something that might resemble an eye. A few weird blisters. To me it looked like she’d rolled out of bed in the night and banged herself on a cast-iron grill. I didn’t really get it. My haloumi was burning while I looked and I had to jump back on it in a hurry.

“I guess what I think,” she said, “is they’re selecting the few people who might be worth saving. Like they’re monitoring our serotonin levels so they know who’s going to be the most capable of appreciating the other side of the surface. I think they’ve seen what we’ve done with the place and it’s all falling apart and they want to save the few of us they can. Or maybe they’re just collecting the prettiest bugs.”

“You’re a pretty bug.”

“Can I have some haloumi?” She took a piece without asking. She’d been doing that more and more often lately.

-

It wasn’t any one thing that brought the house down. I got a job in a gallery up at Murwillumbah and by the time it fell through the other housemates had already promised my room to someone else. So I had to move all my stuff around and sleep on the couch for a while and my paints got stepped on and it led to a lot of bad feelings. And I found she wasn’t cleaning up after herself. Rotting lemons rolled under the sofa.

She wanted to go to America and meditate on a mesa there and see if she could break into Area 51. I told her she was full of shit. I was trying to be funny. She said she was disappointed in me. She said I never took her seriously. Like it was my job to believe everything she said. After that we didn’t speak for a few days. And we always spoke. We made up afterwards and I said I didn’t realise how much I would miss her.

But she kept getting up and making noises in the night and sometimes I’d hear her down there, clanking around in the dark.

And the new guy smoked too much weed and wouldn’t share and didn’t pay his rent on time, and called us social fascists when we tried to get rid of him. And there was mold in the floorboards. And the landlord got weird and drove by the house to take pictures of us. And sometimes she would act like I wasn’t in the room, even when I talked to her directly.

“I think you have to decide if you’re real or not,” she said. “You have to decide very soon.”

“Why?”

“I just want to know,” she said. And then she started talking about the boat she was working on and how the owner didn’t look after it properly but it was a really interesting, old-fashioned design, something about the shape of the keel, and how important it was to work with your hands. Most of our conversations weren’t about aliens. I don’t want you to think she was this absolutely fixated person.

A lot of the time she’d just be normal and we’d watch our shows together and have fun. I liked Futurama. She liked it too but I think for different reasons.

After I moved out I only saw her once. I didn’t even move that far. Closer into town so I didn’t have a backyard any more, or a lemon tree, but I could walk to the shops and I didn’t have to go without anything on days when the car wouldn’t start. Except for lemons. I promised her we’d keep in touch and I meant it and she knew I meant it and then it didn’t happen anyway. We got a single beer together and she left before I wanted her to.

But she looked good. Didn’t touch her scar once.

I wasn’t even busy. Just preoccupied. I was going to call her up again. The last time anyone saw her she was walking down the road towards the paddock north of the house. She was going to hunt for mushrooms beneath this big shady tree up on the hill. They grew well there because of the shit from the cows. Nobody told me what had happened until a few days afterwards.

I went up that night and looked up at the sky but it was overcast. If there were any lights I didn’t see them.

I talked to her uncle and aunt when they came down to visit. They didn’t seem too concerned.

Find more from Matt on Flood Media and follow him over on Twitter.

Executive Producers

Daniel Henson

Sue White