I look down through the branches of the swooping willow at a woman. Sitting here, at the peak of the sloping hill as I rest my hands in my chin, she seems very far away.

A gust wind explodes through the branches, and my hair is blown in a frenzy of black across my face. Pushing it aside, I see the woman is no longer there.

I look over my right shoulder. Standing there is a man, pale as bone china, with a gold mask obscuring the upper half of his face. His mouth and hands are smeared with something thick and black, as always, and he sighs deeply. "When will you stop watching?"

"When can I?" I reply quietly, my right hand playing idly with a daisy that has emerged from the grass of the hill.

The man stays quiet at first, and just gazes about the grey, washed-out scenery. Finally he says, callously, "When you remember."

Although I am not looking down, I can feel the water approaching again. It flows past the blackened willow and around the man's feet like a gentle tide, and I can feel my clothes and shoes getting saturated with it.

I desperately to look down the hill at the woman again, but she isn't there, and the water is building up faster now. I know what's going to happen next. I brace myself, flinching like a reflex as a huge tidal wave of water bursts over me and shatters the scene I'm looking at. I screw my eyes shut and hold my breath as the pressure builds around me and my hair whips round my face.

Silence.

x

It feels like waking after a deep sleep.

I give a groan as I straighten up, still in the same position under the willow tree. The ground is dry, and the man stands silently next to me. Gazing down, it appears the landscape has yet again repaired itself, just like every time before. The willow tree is upright again, undamaged by the crashing wave, and delicate birds circle the skies above us.

I feel this place is doomed to repeat itself like a tape stuck on loop, and I turn to the man and say, "How many more times will this happen? When will it stop?"

"When you remember," he replies, and he turns back to the scene in front of us.

A glass building towers in front of us, as always, and the woman in the sharp suit talking intently to her colleagues by the door.

I dig my fingers into the wilted grass, determined not to look away this time. My eyes sting from not blinking. It will be the same as always, I knew. The wind would come, and then the water, and the woman would disappear. 

"Goodbye, then," the woman says to her friends. Her voice sounds muted to me, as though through thick glass.

But then the branches explode in the chaos of the wind, and the water flows quickly over my hands. I tell myself not to look away – to keep watching despite anything. The water is up to the man's knees now, and nearly above my chin. But I do not look away. I watch the woman reach the door and –

"I'm sorry."

The white wave bursts forward and my eyes are forced shut.

x

Everything is the same again. The air is cold and cloudy, and those birds are circling the tops of the tree, screaming from above. But I notice something is different, and I try and search my head for what it was.

"You apologised," I tell the man. The surprise shakes my voice a little, forming it into an uncertain stutter.

He doesn't speak. He just watches the scene before us. For the first time, instead of watching the woman, I focus on him.

And then I notice: he is watching just as intently as I am. Just as desperately. I can see from the way he won't tear his eyes from what's in front of us – how they water so slightly as he gazes forwards.

"You can see her too?" I ask slowly.

"Her?" For the first time, he looks at me. "I see a man. A young man."

But when I look back at the building, I see the same woman. I concentrate hard on the scene, but all I see is the glass building.

"Where is he?"

"Waiting in a restaurant," the man describes wistfully. "He's waiting for someone. He's been waiting for an hour now. The sky's gone dark."

The woman is tucking her bag under her arm and saying goodbye to her friends. I feel the wind beginning to stir in the branches, but I pushed on. "What's he going to do?"

"He's getting up to leave. He apologises to the woman he just bumped into, and stumbles out of the door."

The man next to me is staring so intently his eyes have glazed over, and his nails are cutting crescents into his palms, unconsciously smearing the black substance over his ivory hands.

The woman steps out of the door of the ground floor and onto the street. She squints and puts up an umbrella, despite the clear skies.

"What next?" I demand, torn between concentrating on him or on the woman.

"It's raining," he says.

The sky gives a deafening crash and water begins to cascade from it with a raging ferocity. The rain pelts down on the woman's umbrella, and my senses seem to heighten with each drop that hammers onto it.

"It's raining," he repeats, "and he sees another man across the road and he shouts."

The woman steps onto the pavement and checks to her right for oncoming traffic.

"He's furious," he goes on as the rain thunders down. "The other guy was late. He made him wait for an hour. He can barely see him on the other side of the road for all the traffic and the rain. The sky's dark now, and he wants to go home. There's a streetlight near the bus shelter he should be at."

Suddenly an inky blue shoots through the sky, spreading fast like dye in water. Streetlights flicker on the empty street the woman stands on, and an empty bus shelter materialises on the other side of the road.

The water falling from the sky is building up around us. It covers my feet and his ankles, and rises slowly, but this time it's from above, not from the tide. All that time, the memory of the water had been there, but it had been jumbled with other things.

"Tell me more!" I beg. I'm further now than ever before.

The woman crosses the road when she's sure there's no traffic.

"No," he says certainly. "I'm about to forget."

The water is now building at an unnatural rate, and I'm scared he's going to be right, so I say quickly, "A woman has just crossed the road."

I check his face. A muscle twitches and I know I've struck something important.

"She's wearing a brown coat," I continue hurriedly, "and her umbrella's red. Bright red. She has dark skin, like mine, and her hair's up in a pony tail."

His eyes widen as he watches. "Oh my god," he says, "she's coming to the bus stop. But the young man's too angry to really see her face properly."

"Remember!" I cry out. My fingers, which had been dug into the wet earth, clench into a fist with my frustration. My voice is barely audible now the rain is slamming down onto every surface I can see.

"She...she's not looking at him, she's looking at the bus schedule. It makes him angry because he's just spent a good hour being ignored." His voice is beginning to take on the emotion of the man he's been watching for so long. "But then she looks."

It hits me like a jolt of electricity.

The mask falls from his face.

In the bus stop, where once I could only see a shadow, now stands a young man with a face identical to the previously masked man beside me. The golden mask floats uselessly on the water.

"Rough day, huh?" the woman says to the stranger in the bus stop. I mouth the words silently in exact synchronisation. The rain is streaming down my face, and my hair and clothes feel soggy with it.

"I guess you could say that." I can't tell which version of the man that the voice came from.

The rain is diluting the black substance smeared across the masked man's mouth and fingers, and it drips down his chin and fingertips.

A truck is speeding through the busy road, and horns are screaming in protest. The woman's eyes widen and, in a second's reflex, she digs her nails into his arm and shoves the young man behind her. He stumbles back just as the truck's driver loses control.

I can hear pedestrians scream, and there are two blinding yellow lights and the shriek of the truck's horn.

Silence.

x

Somewhere in London, a woman will wake up in a hospital bed. Her friends and family will be surrounding her, and she will be confused, and wonder very loudly how she got there, and will question the nurses and doctors quite extensively about it.

They, of course, will explain to her about the accident she had on the way from work. She was waiting for her bus when a speeding truck lost control and hurtled into her and another victim. The doctors will explain how she fell into a brief state of unconsciousness. She had hurt her legs too, but they're expected to recover.

She will look over to the bed on her right, where a young man will have just woken. The doctors will tell her that he's the other victim. Although he suffered different injuries to her – his were mainly to the face and hands – they will both be expected to make a full recovery.

But of course, even when their eyes will meet and in a flash they will know they've met before, they will not be able to remember where. Nor afterwards, when they have coffee in the hospital's ground floor, nor really ever. They will never think back to the hilltop and the willow tree and the tide.

They will forget.