His demeanour was unnerving, but I tried to remain composed in the face of it, reasoning that if my confidence faltered, this would disturb him and leave me all the more unnerved.

He was slim – not to the point of emaciation, or self-starvation, but blubberless, proportionally not quite perfect; overlong, though not a beanpole.  His hair was wild from the sea, tangled both in itself and bits of seaweed.  His face was blue-grey with the cold, as drained of warmth as the concrete beach defences in the pearly morning light.  He was forbidding in every way – strange, unexpected, unpredictable.  But when I asked him questions in the surest tone I could muster, he was so genuinely puzzled by his inability to answer that I no longer felt intimidated.  The blue-grey face cracked, and through the cracks something vulnerable seeped out.  Something human.  Streaks of warmth began to colour the icy visage.

I picked the seaweed out of his hair as I felt his scalp for bumps or cuts.  His head was a weird shape – in one place it was as though a slice had been taken across the sphere of his skull, as you might pare an apple of a bruise to its skin.  But there was no blood.

He must have been knocked out by his board while surfing in the dark, a foolish practice that only someone who believed himself immortal would undertake.  He was extremely lucky not to have drowned, and I told him so.  By rights I should have found a body during my morning walk, and the consciousness that I had not turned my relief into exhilaration, as if it was I who had narrowly escaped death.  And so I ended up offering help and taking temporary responsibility for this lost antipodean soul.  How could I not?  He was helpless with amnesia and I was the one who found him.  I would at least get him to a hospital, despite his protestations that he didn’t need to go.

He was also a mystery and any that my life might once have possessed was long gone.

‘You’d better come with me.’

Tremors coursed across his face.  A tic from the cold, or frayed nerves, or both.

‘Not to a hospital, just to my house.  Have a cup of coffee and get yourself warm.  Here, take my jacket.’

Whatever sense was left in that battered skull gradually came to him now.  It barely fitted him, lending his frame a look of the scarecrow.  He got the fleece on, after first inserting the wrong arms into each sleeve, straightjacket-style.  I wasn’t sure if he would be able to walk, but I wasn’t going to risk having to support him all the way uphill or allow him to nuzzle me again.  So I set off for the gap in the dunes, and he followed.  Once we were on the narrow thread of sandy path, I checked again.  He had lagged behind, but he was still coming, concentrating on the path as if it were a particularly abstruse line of philosophical argument.  On the road up to the house I let him draw level.

 ‘You think I’m Australian?’ he said.

I wasn’t sure if I was healthy and well, or sick and hurt.  I wasn’t sure what or who I was.  I wasn’t sure of my body, or how I came to be in it.  How I came to be here, standing on unsteady legs on a beach in what I somehow knew was dawn light.  So I reached for certainty, for the being – the woman, my brain prompted – before me who had been concerned enough to stop and check on my well-being.  That must mean that she knew who she was, where she had come from, and where she was going.  She must know that she was human, and be unafflicted by a sense that she was not quite familiar with this planet.

The woman’s hair was not unlike mine, except that it was dry.  Without questioning the logic of how I knew it, I was aware that she was one sex of this species, and I was encased within the body of the other.  I found I was immediately attracted to her face.  It caught and reflected the morning light.  It suggested openness even as I guessed that my own face, of which I still had no clear physical conception, was one which had the air of being closed off, craggy like a rock.

‘I – I don’t know how I got here.  Or who I am.  Where I am, even.  In fact – this is going to sound strange – I don’t even know how it is possible for me to talk to you.’

I must have mumbled the last sentence, because the woman ignored it.  Perhaps she had understood nothing at all of what I said – it sounded strange enough to my ears.

‘You’re dangling a leash from your ankle.  You must have taken a knock – to the head, from your surfboard.  Don’t you know you shouldn’t go out on the waves late at night with no-one else around?  Let me have a look.  You’ll have to drop down a bit for me to see.’

I dropped to my… haunches and the woman took a step forward, taking a handful of my hair and checking the scalp underneath.  Her hands moved through my hair swiftly, methodically.  When her fingers touched the shell of my skull, I could feel their warmth.  Unconsciously I pitched forward, my face meeting more warmth in the form of the soft clothing she wore.  Unhurriedly she moved to the side, evading further moments of contact.

‘See anything?’ I said, knowing as I did that I was able to corrupt this language, abbreviate it, and be understood.

Her hands kept exploring a while longer before she said ‘No’.  One or two more unmethodical back-trackings followed before she stepped back and looked me over.

‘You don’t remember anything about yourself, or how you got here?’

I rose, considered the question, and said no.  ‘Nothing.’

‘What’s your name?’

No name that might be mine came to me.  The woman pursed her lips and moved hair from her eyes.

‘I can’t see a cut or a bump, but you must have amnesia or something.  We should get you to a hospital.’

‘I don’t want to go to a hospital,’ I said hastily, as images rolled through my mind of my body on an operating table subject to the examining whim of some clumsy human doctor equipped with the crude implements of a backward medicine, universally-speaking.

‘You must be from down under to judge from your accent.’

Down under?

My brain’s linguistic prompting process had so far provided me with every verbal eventuality, thought or spoken.  I must have spent many years studying this language to the degree that I could speak it without arousing suspicion of my… extraterrestrial nature.  But ‘down under’ had me stumped.