The Hitchhiker Who Looked Like Amy

Before today, I had never picked up a hitchhiker. I guess I never had the courage, but also you don’t see them too often nowadays, at least not in the city or the suburbs. When I was young, there seemed to be a few more around, but that could just be my memory playing tricks on me. It’s easy to get nostalgic about silly things like the number of hitchhikers. But there’s really no reason to be sentimental about something like that.

I do have one clear childhood memory of a hitchhiker, though. My Dad was driving, we were leaving Byron Bay, taking me back to my mother’s place in Brisbane, and on the edge of town, just before the Pacific Highway, I saw a man on the other side of the road with his thumb in the air. Curious, I began to nag my father around the roundabout, begging he take the third exit back to pick him up. Maybe Dad wanted to look cool in front of me, maybe he was just feeling guilty about everything, but whatever the reason, he agreed. We pulled up beside this man, a scruffy hippie of middling age, and quite politely, my father told him we were travelling north.

“I’m on this side of the road for a reason, mate,” the hitchhiker said. He was like an unworldly force of negative charisma. “I’m looking for a ride into town.”

“No worries,” Dad said. “I thought as much. My son wanted to offer you a ride. But we are on our way to Brisbane and don’t have time to drive back into town.”

I looked down at my shoes to avoid eye contact with the man, then my father did a U-turn to get back onto the roundabout and the Pacific Highway.

Sometime later that drive, Dad said to me, “You know, I used to hitchhike up and down the coast in my twenties. It was much more common back then.”

Forty is a strange age to do anything for the first time, but that’s what I did today when I picked up a hitchhiker outside Byron Bay. It was just before the Pacific Highway, and although the roads must have been upgraded since I was a kid, there was still a roundabout with the options to go north, south, or back into town.

I was heading north, back home to Brisbane, after spending a week alone in the house I inherited from my father when he died a little over a year ago. When I told my wife that was how I wanted to spend the first week of this year, she said it was OK, she understood. She thought the ocean might help to clear my head, perhaps the sun would clear up my psoriasis, and her mother was happy to help her with the kids. But I’m not sure that my week alone in Byron Bay achieved very much.

The hitchhiker I picked up was female. She was more than just female, though. She was also young and attractive, and she looked remarkably like my first girlfriend, the only woman I’ve ever dated for an extended period besides my wife. I took three laps around the roundabout before I decided to go back and pick her up. She was on the same side of the road that I was originally on, the side leaving town, so I had to make a U-turn to get back to her.

“Where are you headed?” I said when I pulled over. My window was down, and I was doing my best to sound normal, not creepy. I also hoped she would be reassured by the BMW SUV.

“North,” she said. She was just as pretty up close. Her cheeks were plump and clear-skinned, her hair clumped together from the salt water and humidity. She was wearing a faded denim skirt and a top that didn’t make it down to her belly button. Her tummy was flat and toned. “Just to Kingscliff, if you can,” she continued. “I’m happy to get off at the service station at the exit.”

“I can drive you right into Kingy,” I said, picking some stuff up off the front seat and throwing it onto the child booster in the back. “It’s not a problem at all.”

Devoid of fear or hesitation, the young girl opened the door and said, “Thank you.” She really did look just like Amy.

Amy, my first girlfriend, was the most devoted person I’ve ever known. I can’t tell you why she loved me so much. And as the years went by, as we grew together, I can’t tell you why that kind of devotion began to disturb me, to turn me off. In the beginning, everything was wonderful. We were nineteen, skinny, happy just to take refuge in our room in a share house. We could spend days inside that room, alternating between watching Peep Show and making love, only coming out to eat or drink. But by twenty-two, we were hardly having sex, and Amy was desperately hanging on to the crumbs of love that I was offering.

“You have kids?” the attractive young hitchhiker asked, as I picked up speed to merge onto the highway.

“Two. I’m heading back home to them now.”

“What were you doing in Byron?”

“Ah, having some time to myself,” I said, embarrassed. “How about you?”

“Seeing friends. I used to live there, but it’s too expensive now all the Sydney and Melbourne money has come to town. There’s nowhere affordable to live. Besides, Byron isn’t what it used to be. The vibes are off.”

I half-heartedly agreed with her, then turned up the music to fill the break in conversation.

“Is it normal to go on a holiday without your wife and kids?” the pretty hitchhiker then asked.

“I guess not. My wife is quite an accommodating person.”

We fell silent again. Springsteen’s “The River” was playing on the car’s sound system from the Spotify playlist on my phone.

“My father died,” I said, desperately. “Last year. Well, technically the year before last, now that it’s the new year.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. If it helps, my dad is dead too.”

We both laughed softly.

Amy would never talk to me now. I’ve tried to reach out to her a couple times over the years, my wife gave me her blessing to do so, but only to apologise. Amy never texted back. After all, I was responsible for the annihilation of her personhood, and I heard from female friends that it took years for her to put herself back together. I can understand why she didn’t want to hear from me.

“Be honest, would you have picked me up if I was a dude?” the pretty hitchhiker asked, as I indicated left to exit at Chinderah.

“Probably not,” I said, honouring her request for honesty.

“Did you think I might fall in love with you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“When you picked me up,” she said, smirking. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you fit a certain mould. The unhappily married guy in a Beemer. You must’ve picked me up on the off chance I might fall in love with you on the thirty-minute drive.”

“I hope I’m not that stupid.”

“It’s OK. It’s kind of sweet. I can tell you’re not dangerous.”

“You do look like an old girlfriend, if you must know. But I’ve also just never picked up a hitchhiker before. I thought I’d live a little.”

“Do you miss her?”

“I don’t know,” I said, realising that my guard was down, scrambling to put it back up. “Don’t we all romanticise the past?”

“Sure. But I think the worst loneliness is the loneliness of being with the wrong person.”

“I’m not sure there is any such thing as the right person. Not in the long run. It always becomes something like a business partnership.”

There was a lull in conversation once again. I turned the music right down for directions. Then the pretty hitchhiker said, “Anywhere here is fine,” and I pulled over on Marine Parade, just outside the Kingscliff Beach Hotel.

I thought momentarily about asking for her name, but ultimately decided it was futile. There was no world in which she or Amy would see me again. But she left her scent on the centre console, she must’ve had something sprayed on her wrists, and I wallowed in its melancholic beauty all the way back to my family in Brisbane.

Jack Hutchinson is a Brisbane-based writer of poetry and short fiction. His story “The Police Knocked on My Door at 7 a.m.” appeared in the June 2021 issue.