Andy’s been gone all day. I thought I saw him a little while back, standing by the side of the road, but it turned out to be someone else. Just some man.

Even though he’s no longer here, I can still feel him. It’s like he’s living inside me now. It’s a lot harder to dump somebody than you might think. You figure they’re out of your life for good but they’re not. I keep expecting to turn a corner and bump into him. Maybe I’m driving through a town and I catch sight of somebody on the pavement, about to cross the road, and I think ’That’s him.’ But it’s not, except for that one instant when you can’t help yourself, and you kick yourself for thinking that, but you want it too.

And now I can’t help thinking I’m being followed. It’s probably just my imagination but every time I look in the rear view mirror I catch a glimpse of the same car disappearing below the rim of the horizon. I try slowing down and speeding up, avoiding the highway and sticking to the lonely back roads, but it makes no difference. I know it’s there. I can feel it.

By mid-afternoon, I’ve had enough. I pull off the road and sit on the edge with the motor idling, trying to figure out what to do. Fuck, fuck, fuck, I shout, and beat the steering wheel with my fists. That doesn’t help. I don’t know who I’m angry with or why. I tell myself that it’s the car or whoever is following me, but it’s easier to be angry with myself for allowing this to happen, for being here, for being me. This wouldn’t have happened otherwise, would it?

But that’s not me talking. That’s Andy. That’s what he would say. I switch on the radio, searching for some company, and a voice says,

Police are concerned about the whereabouts of a woman last seen leaving...

But what if there is no car? It doesn’t bear thinking about. I’d hate to think that it was all a fantasy, a fiction, and that I was imagining it all. No, the best thing to do is to find it, to track it down and face up to whatever it is that’s out there, prove to myself that there really is something following me wherever I go. That’s the only thing I can do.

I pull hard at the steering wheel and jump on the gas, spinning the car on to the road to face the opposite direction. Soon the needle is climbing around the speedometer and I’m hunched over the steering wheel as if to reduce wind resistance. This is it, I say to myself, this is where we make up lost ground, cover the distance, put it all behind us.

Up ahead, I see black clouds and flickers of lightning, almost too fast to catch.

At one point, I reach down to look for the lighter and when I look back, the car is right in front of me. It is too late to avoid it now, there’s no time to react. At the last moment, I catch myself thinking about the man and the woman in the city and, like waking from an unfinished dream, I realise that I’ll never know what happened to them in the end.