Unsettled Places – The Policeman in the Back Seat

You are driving through the suburbs where your parents live, the familiar streets passing beneath you with that peculiar neutrality of places that belong to an earlier life. Nothing seems to have changed, although you are no longer quite sure what it means for a place to remain the same when the people who gave it its meaning are no longer there in quite the same way.

There is a police car behind you.

You notice it without alarm. Its lights are not flashing, and you have no sense that you are being pursued. Nevertheless, you check your speed and look again for the school zone, making certain that you are doing what you are supposed to be doing. You become attentive to the possibility of an error that you cannot find.

Then you look into the rear-view mirror.

The policeman is sitting in the back seat.

There is no moment of entry, no opening of a door, no explanation for how he has crossed the distance between the road behind you and the interior of the car. He is simply there, occupying the space that until now had been empty, and the ordinary geometry of the journey has been quietly rearranged.

You pull over and apologise.

This is perhaps the strangest part, because you still do not know what you have done.

He does not seem satisfied. There is something in his expression that suggests irritation, even anger, as though the apology has failed to reach the offence that he has not yet named. You can feel his displeasure before you can locate its cause, and for a moment the distinction between having done something wrong and being regarded as someone who has done something wrong begins to dissolve.

Then you wake.

The accusation never arrives.

The suburbs remain outside the window, the road continuing somewhere beyond the dream, while the policeman sits in the back seat as though he has always been there.

You have apologised to someone who has not told you what you have done.

Perhaps the dream ends precisely there: not with a charge, but with the silence before one.

You look forward.

The road is waiting.

Behind you, in the mirror, he remains.

NOTITIA

Unsettled Places explores the places where the familiar becomes strange, where memory inhabits landscape, and where the psyche leaves things unfinished.