The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories

by Eugen Bacon

  He understood that Caesar was not there to grant pardon and otherworldly amnesty to his once beloved, as he had forgiven him when Brutus made enemy alliance in that civil war between Pompey and Caesar, the Battle of Pharsalus. With Pompey crushed and Brutus cornered, Caesar gave notice to his officers not to harm Brutus. Not only did the emperor immediately forgive Brutus’s perfidy: he invited him into his inner circle and made him governor of Gaul, and then praetor. Never before had Rome seen such affection. But the face that Caesar covered with a toga as Brutus and his cohorts committed murder was now intolerant.

  “I believed you with all my heart . . .” His voice trailed off. “Who rinsed the blood off my cloak?” He smiled sadly. “Not you, Brutus.”

  He stood there dazzling, as he had that last Saturnalia festival before his death when drunken crowds paraded the streets of Rome, and there was feasting fit to burst. Wild fruit. Suckling porcius-pocus. Cress, mallows, ducks and pigeons . . . fresh heart, liver and lungs from calves at the sacrificial altar—all poppy seed-, anise-, mustard- and fennel-marinated, of course. Cranes, grouse, partridge, snipe and woodcock. New fruits too: apricots, pomegranates, peaches and cherries. Wheat bread, rye rice, ewe’s cheese and curds! Mulsum wine, apple cider . . . So much wine, new and old. An orgy of dining. Caesar had sat with members of the senate in their crisp white toga virilis and purple sashes, sprawled in the raised area, partaking in jollity, inebriated eyes shining like pearls. And Rome was exposed in all its glory . . .

  But on the day of Brutus’s judgment, Caesar came without scroll or senate to declare verdict.

  “You demean yourself, dear Brutus,” he said almost gently, “attempting suicide like this. But death for you, my friend, is not an option. You will live forever,” eyes sad, “in the shadow of my name.”

  And Brutus did live forever. He found himself not dead but filled with youth and eternity. Ashamed of his past, he traveled the worlds as Marcus, boundless centuries of world after world, from one galaxy to another, finding no peace.

  A shadow . . . If anyone spoke his name, it was in the same sentence as Caesar. Never just Brutus. They came up with ways to remember the emperor: Caesar salad, cesarean operations. Brutusean? Unheard of. Brutus salad? Laughable. Even the Germans had their Kaiser, never a Brutuser. Men spoke great things of Caesar; of Brutus they studied only his shameful betrayal. Shakespeare wrote a play; it was not about Brutus. Master novelist, Dante, wrote a book; the only Brutus it portrayed was one being chewed by Satan at the vilest point of Hell. Along with Judas Iscariot. Never consumed, no—that was too light a sentence. Eternally chewed . . . Caesar’s right-hand man: that gent was forgotten. History forgot the real Brutus, the soldier who fought alongside Caesar to transform a Republic into an empire: great battles fought and won from Alexandria to Tiber to Ponstus to Thapsus.

  Fifty-seven times, tired of wandering aimless, a half-damned soul, Marcus plummeted down to Earth, shed his wings and pulled out his feet.

  He lived simply, settled. Picked up women and saw them blossom. But none of those women possessed the beauty and quiet strength of Portia, his wife in the days of the Empire, the one who would have breathed her last for him but didn’t. Couldn’t, because he was a renegade on a woodland hill when he came face-to-face with dying. Not that death took him.

  Afterward, plagued by the curse of timeless living, he knew that he could never go back to Portia. That going back would mean adoring her freely and without fear, and then suddenly watch her age, wither and die. Frankly, he didn’t want to bring himself to experience that. He loved her, Portia. Too much. Fifty-seven times, when he succumbed to coupling need, he had no difficulty finding it. A lovely woman opened up like a lily to his charm, letting him love her, a handful of years of bliss. He always ended up watching her, and then one by one her offspring, grow old and die. Each instance of a loved one’s demise brought with it a new, sharp dagger to penetrate the cusp of his heart, the ache infinite. So he vowed solitude. To never get close to a woman because she would die and leave him clasping in two hands the wreckage of his heart.

  Although he was astute about commerce, the means by which he amassed wealth in Cyprus before returning to the Empire to join the senate in those days long past, he understood that one cannot teach an old dog new tricks. He was nostalgic for the wealth of the Empire: the gold, the pearls, the amethysts on walls, furnishings, togas and Flavian-styled hair. Patrician antiquity and luxury that, next to birthright, defined people and their place in society.

  Now he trains people to fight their demons. For most of them it is weight. But others simply need balance and stability. For the lonely, he suggests yoga, a team sport. Or fitness boxing, a contact sport. He is Spartan in weight resistance training, body shaping regimes. Faultless in the diets he prescribes; rigid in the discipline he enforces. He doesn’t know how long he will stay in this world until his mind sets roaming way before his feet, and wanderlust yet again takes hold of him. But right now, he makes soldiers of people.

  A young female comes to the counter holding an exercise mat. He remembers her name. Jade. Matches her eyes.

  “Hi,” she smiles. Sea green eyes, calm. Amber hair, dyed. There’s a softness in her poise, the way she tilts her chin for him.

  “Early today,” he says. “Yoga class starts in ten.”

  “I’ll just warm up,” she says.

  She is dressed in tank top and hot shorts, not the ballet chemise and three-quarter flare pants of yesterday. Her body is feminine, toned: belly six-pack, tiered. He imagines her in a silk tunica. A plunging neckline caressing her breasts, running downward to meet a waist sash; Venus hair finely woven with gold wire; chandelier earrings, gold anklets, pearl brooches merrily singing as she walks; slaves fanning her with peacock feathers . . .

  How stunning she would have been in the days of the Empire.

  Yesterday during yoga, she sank on her knees and spread her palms. Her toes turned and her heels gradually lifted away from the floor. Watching her, Marcus felt a shadow of the urge, the yen to be with a woman again. To feel once more like a man, to swell and spread until he swallowed her cry of pleasure with his lips. He thought about it, how he might make her soft and receptive; slip in and out of her in ways to tease her, heighten her pleasure; impregnate her even.

  He’s been with other women before, so why not now? he questioned himself, as she reposed on her mat, right leg parallel to the line of her torso.

  He is a superior lover, he knows. But he also knows that, while he can elicit response, he can never himself feel that expansion, that conflagration of the loins that explodes into a musical fugue of the senses. He is, after all, not real flesh. He is immortal. Cursed to forever be a fragment of the man he once was, a shadow of the hero he loved.

  Now Jade shifts, ready to leave the counter. Pauses. Faces him again. “You . . . er . . .” she hesitates. “Wanna do dinner sometime?”

  He regards the tremor in the periphery of her lower lip, her uncertainty of his reciprocation of her interest. She is, to him, simply a whim. A new ballad before he is once again thrust into lone vigil, the permanent kind. Drifting unnoticed, powerless to pry himself from undying odyssey. Moving in and out of worlds, beyond lands of different shape, color, light. Some dull as a swallow’s nest; others more radiant than the tail plume of a peacock at the height of courtship.

  “Sure,” he says. “Dinner. Why not.”

  SCARS OF GRIEF

  The story starts here. This is a work of fiction. The author is struggling, he finds his story rigid. He wants to write about a thing he once read in the paper, an article about a bad tabloid that gained from victims of murder, hacked into their phone lines. Anything for a juicy caption, right? Wrong. The tabloid marched into trouble. Frankly it was shut down.

  The author wants to build a set of events. Not around the tabloid and its shutdown, but around the families that were harmed. He makes the choice to write about the
families because he understands his talent. He has a knack for people stories, no aptitude for institutions. He wants to be true to his learnings on the art of suspense. He wants to make sure that all is not revealed at the start. He worries. If he manages the use of suspense well, what if the reveal comes too late? He is nervous. What if he runs out of story? He is restless. What if the reader gets unhooked?

  He looks at his cast.

  ***

  Ralph.

  Ralph Patton avoids their eyes. His wife Trinity sits haggard, listless. Withdrawn into herself. Marble Norman handles it best. Her husband Dane cradles a tempest. Time leaks perilously, frightening and consoling.

  It is a common grief, reborn. It unites two couples who lost two little girls nine years ago to a murderer. Trinity finds her question. “Why?” There is a dead twig in her voice.

  “Because journalists are knobheads,” snaps Dane.

  “Cookie . . .” Marble reaches across the table to calm his fists. Despite her composure, Ralph knows, her anguish is undiminished. Her grief is the kind that spills inward.

  It seems minutes since Detective Vera Downs came to see them, first the Normans, then the Pattons. To alert them to the phone-hacking, to stress again her regret at finding the girls too late. Yesterday. The detective came yesterday; brought them a day that opened up grief, that awakened the one thing that stirred the Normans, the Pattons, to seek each other out. Now they sit together at the Norman house in Halls Gap, Victoria. Same way they sat those many years ago when tragedy snatched their children.

  Trinity lets out a sob, rises from her chair, flees the room. Marble chases behind.

  “Bleeding freaks,” Dane Norman says.

  ***

  The author pauses at this stage, feels like he is scratching an itch. Should he dump the Normans? He notices that, with this story, he asks himself a lot of questions. Regarding the Normans it’s . . . it’s not that he is insensitive to Dane’s rage, his despair. But he . . . he wonders if the story is better served focusing on a single family. A typical short story has a small cast at a single point in time. The author feels he can achieve more fleshing out the characters of Ralph and Trinity Patton.

  Undecided, he continues typing.

  ***

  Ralph understands the freaks. They are monsters bold as gold but septic inside. That same tabloid, a glimpse of hell, already once prospered on a story, the Patton and Norman story: two six-year-old girls curled ten-foot deep in a ditch at the mouth of Mount William ranges. How the press bled it.

  The curtain flaps. Slowly, Ralph understands it is raining outside. A determined drizzle grows into slanting rain. He has never set foot near that bushwalk in the Grampians again. Neither has Trinity; they both want to forget. But Marble visits it annually like a shrine. Ralph never thought he could feel a knife so deep, so twisted in his breast.

  He doesn’t know why the news scandal has thrown him into the pit again, why so bottomless. But it has. Each word the detective said curved the blade deeper. “I am sorry they targeted you,” she said. “There may be more families.”

  The press stopped at nothing, disregarded whose privacy they breached. Just the ready money a hot yarn cashed. The tabloid’s ugliness is personal. Stolen conversations of trauma, of gloom, distorted on front pages. Intimate words shouted to the world, vilifying everything, sparing nothing. Ralph wants to climb to an edge and leap from the world.

  ***

  At this stage the author pauses. He has hinted about the tabloid, about the children’s murder, more than hinted. He has unveiled that a grief almost healed is now again torn open. But he is not sure . . . Is he indicating well what exactly is doing the tearing? So the press hacked the parents’ phones, nosed into their grief. All for back story. But the coppers just found out now titbits of press data. Leaks, like how Trinity wanted to down a palmful of pills. Like how Dane was going to quit the marriage. It was all too thorny for them, barbed enough without the press. The author wants to show, not tell. He wonders how much detail to contain, how much to tell. Should he spell out what the tabloid did with the conversations it stole?

  Less is more, he decides.

  ***

  Ralph.

  With the phone-hacking scandal, Hot off the Press! has slashed open scars that began to heal after that trial in August 2005 at the Magistrate’s Court. Ralph thought the torment was abridged when Chief Magistrate Gray handed the monster two life terms. But what he feels now is wolfing him alive.

  Even so, those same shock-and-awe tactics that saw the tabloid thrive since 1901 have proved the tabloid’s own undoing. 113 years of scandal flushed down their rotten drain. That infected ink will never hurt anyone again. Not after one week today, the publication date of their last edition ever.

  The end.

  ***

  But—wait. The author sees how this ending moves away from the parents to the tabloid, how it is rather rigid. How can the story be over?

  The phone tapping is part of Trinity’s sorrow. The author wants to build on this, make it her recovery. So he deletes “The end”.

  ***

  But the tabloid’s disgrace, and then closure, cannot patch what has happened.

  It cannot fix open scars. The Normans and Pattons part yet again as they did years before, no longer allies, no longer able to feed as one the grief that joined them in the first place. It is as if they can no more bear looking at each other, being together.

  Weeks after that parting, fog remains in Trinity’s eyes.

  Ralph takes to writing. He sits at his desk by the window. Trinity pours herself into works of charity: baking, resourcing, fundraising, publicizing . . . Now with the Salvos, the Vinnies, the Givewells. Philanthropy. Bugger that. Ralph types, types, types into his computer. Ideas jotted down on a shoddy notepad in the dead of the night, in that stretch between midnight and dawn when sleep eludes him the most.

  He writes about Apple and the swell in his heart the first time his eyes set upon her. As he writes, the child invades his dreams. She is so tiny, so rosy, her face scrunched like an old woman’s. Now it’s a strong little mouth, she smiles. She is so vivid, her baby smell, still now, apricot and honey soap. She doesn’t say a word, but chuckles when he ruffles her furious curls . . . a tangle right there on the crown of her head, an island of red.

  Sometimes, gazing at windswept grass in the fields beyond the gate—it needs new paint—he thinks about what to write. Other times, he presses his nose against the window and an eye toward the horizon and can’t think because his mind has slipped off. Just as well. He gets stuck in his head too much. But often, words swirl like waves and he cannot type fast enough.

  His writing this morning is charged, stimulated. A whiff of melting butter, lime rind and fresh blueberries fills his nostrils. Trinity is baking. The waft of cookery is like a therapeutic balm. The smell stirs fond memories. Apple loved cookies, macaroons, turnovers, brownies . . . gobbled chunks whole without chewing.

  Now and then, on difficult days, a sting of tears escorts his writing. Other times like now, memory massages his heart, lifts something inside him. Elation swells his being. He feels merry, surreal even.

  Apple, always a scrawny thing, no matter what. Always wandering, investigating her world full of butterfly, ladybird and garden snail surprises. He watches her dazed expression at each find . . .

  “Look Papa! I gots a new friend.” The trapdoor spider escapes but Apple finds a Goliath stick insect to replace it. “She hungry, Papa. I ask Mama for a cookie.”

  “Why not, kiddo.”

  The moment her eyes, and then hands, lock on Jojo Norman, their love is instant. Without question, as if destined, Jojo reciprocates. She follows Apple everywhere. They toddle with hitched up skirts in grasslands near home, run—their delight giddy as summer rain.

  “Me and Jojo see a wolfie near the park, Papa.” Ralph experienc
es again the fork of fear in his gut, but it’s a neighbor’s European Wolfdog—completely tame—on a run.

  The girls’ lust for adventure steers them into trouble.

  ***

  The author pauses. Is there a better story out of building the characters of Jojo and Apple? Then bringing in murder? Or maybe . . . How about looking individually at Ralph, Trinity, Marble and Dane now? How each responds in a different way to news that their privacy has been breached. Maybe exploring if that breach is as important to them as the way their daughters were treated in the original news reports. Yes, emotions directed at themselves, at their feelings of exposure, instead of at their daughters loss.

  Still . . . he questions the angle, understands that this kind of feeling may not be true of Dane. Or Marble. Or Trinity. Or Ralph. After all Ralph has been writing, a cathartic way to deal with loss.

  The author asks himself why he cannot put away “The scars of grief” for three months, give it another look then. It is too raw right now, he knows. But, then again . . . He is in a hurry to bed it down. He likes where he is going with Ralph.

  Look behind you, Ralph, he says. Forget the blinking cursor on my screen.

  Thanks.

  ***

  “Do you remember when Apple made toast in your brand-new stereo?” his wife speaks quietly to his hair. She is right behind him. “How you lost it and scolded her to tears but stopped short because Jojo bawled so loud?”

  Ralph looks up from the computer, startled and then awed. Fog has lifted from Trinity’s eyes. What brings about her change? Is it reading his writings?