The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories

by Eugen Bacon

  “I don’t want to have sex tonight,” she said.

  “Someone’s in a mood.”

  She didn’t take the dirty glass to the dishwasher. Buried the urge to vacuum. Oblivious, the aircon hummed.

  “Shall I leave?” He ran a hand through his hair.

  “You can go if you like. I just don’t want sex tonight.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Not the boss. Just no sex.”

  He stared like she was a new person. “So what time are you going to bed?”

  “In a minute. I’ll have a soak first.”

  “You want help with something?”

  “Not really.”

  He blinked. “Okay.” The sigh again. He looked troubled but didn’t leave the unit for the pad he shared with his mates out east.

  Outside, a murmur of cars washed down the street.

  She wasn’t angry or anything, just a little exhausted. She ran a bath and soaked in it for an hour. The calcium in the salts calmed her like the church.

  Amos was waiting in the bed. He was naked inside the covers, checking his phone when she entered. Put it away, looked expectantly at her. She climbed between the sheets, pecked him on the forehead, closed her eyes.

  He shook the bed with his foot. He was breathing hard. “What about a hug?”

  “Just sleep, darling.”

  He didn’t. She lifted away his roving hands from her body, over and over. Now they faced off like warriors, lying side by side toward each other. Her arms and knees were crossed.

  Suddenly, the baby angel was with them, blowing Amos’s fringe into his face. So was the tattoo girl: there too. She was smiling at Amos, who was flicking the fringe from his face. He didn’t seem to notice any of the angels. Bruce Willis Snipes gave Flare a wink. Music like sunshine and rain floated the bed from the floor. Flare felt wistful and sacred. She hesitated. Put out a hand and touched Amos on the chest. He went off like a light, smiling.

  Flare drifted off to sleep.

  ***

  Somewhere into the night, she opened her eyes. The angels were gone. Amos was softly purring. The room was black as poltergeist, no streetlight through the window. Her throat burned with incredible thirst. She took quietly to the kitchen but was startled by a breeze. The main door was open.

  She stepped out into darkness, to an odd stillness. No garage doors creaking, or late-night cars stealing home. She stood, arms wrapped, by her doorstep staring at nothingness.

  She smelled him before she saw him. It was the smell of the chemistry lab those many years ago when a prankster toyed with sulfur and something like sewer gas invaded the room. It was the smell of roadkill—she was six and in a school bus with loads of kids, they’d come from the zoo somewhere southwest of the city and it was night when she was sick with her asthma. Her coughing fit stopped the bus and Rebecca, the sub, helped her out—for what reason? Perhaps it was to administer her Ventolin in private. The bus was purring, pupils peering out windows, some putting tongues to the glass. Flare wanted something to swallow her away from the attention and was quietly fretting when she saw the dead animal. Its face a paste on the ground. A pink intestine trailed on the road. Even without a face, she knew it was a koala—who wouldn’t? But it was the smell she remembered.

  He wore torn jeans and a T-shirt that said Omega. The kind of lips you might see on a male model. She remembered him from outside the church.

  “You followed me,” she said.

  “Stalked like a limpet.” Soft words. Dream eyes.

  “Why me?”

  “You’re the favorite,” he said. “But you missed a bit of training.”

  He spoke near, like he wanted to kiss her.

  He looked like he should smell good. Athletic shoulders, neat jaw. Fine nose, box cut. He was elegant and upright. But he reeked like his mouth and insides were festered with rot.

  “You’re the strangler.” It wasn’t a question.

  They eyed each other.

  And then she lifted her hand and touched him.

  In hindsight—and she went over this many times—what really happened was that a version of herself stepped back. Another version levitated forward, finger pointed, and touched Omega on the forehead.

  The energy of the touch bounced Flare off her feet to up yonder where she watched him burst into flame. He screamed and flailed as he charred. But there was no sound.

  He collapsed to the ground, burning, burning and she wafted back to bed.

  HE REFUSED TO NAME IT

  Winter. His toes always felt cold even with socks. But they had never frosted this much. He understood it was a haunting. Not the kind of a low chuckle, doors closing and opening when no one was there. This one took the form of ice in his feet. And he knew she was there. Right there in the darkness, as he lay in his bed.

  Something else too: a sweet antiseptic smell seeped into the room. Not so much a hospital smell. This was more like the sanitizing, disinfecting smell that accompanied death.

  The smell of a morgue.

  ***

  “She what?” They were standing at the reception, Calder and the bloke from Diggers Rest with torn jeans and a checkered shirt.

  “Childbirth, mate. These things happen,” said the bloke, his voice like a drum.

  “Never seen you in my life before,” said Calder. “You come all this way from Sunbury Hospital. Track me to my workplace in the city. All to tell me that my ex—not wife, not fiancée—my ex-girl is dead?”

  “That’s right,” said the bloke.

  “I haven’t seen M in months.”

  “There’s a baby.”

  “It’s alive?”

  “It’s yours.”

  The receptionist with a weak smile and wearing dog glasses looked up from her typing.

  “Twinx,” said Calder. “We’ll take a meeting room.”

  He took the man’s arm. Bear, his name. Dragged him into the privacy of a thirty-six-seater boardroom—that’s all that was available—sat him at the head of the table.

  “Listen Hussle,” Calder said in a gentle voice. He leaned toward the man. “You want some water?”

  “I’m good.”

  “How about coffee? A latte or a long black—what type are you?”

  Bear shook his head.

  “Twinx can get you some. It’s no drama.”

  “I’m good.” Bear looked at Calder like he was stupid.

  They were both stupid.

  “This is a predicament, mate,” said Calder. “How come I don’t know you? M never mentioned a brother.”

  Bear shrugged and said in his boom voice, “All this nonsense, right?”

  Calder put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Boss man. As you say, these things happen. Your sister’s dead. Why do you think it’ll give you peace of mind to go enforcing baby daddies? For all I know—”

  “Please don’t. She said you’d be like this.”

  “Like what?!”

  ***

  That’s how it started.

  Bear’s visit ended with an address scribbled on a tear—seriously a scrap—in bloodshot ink. “Those are the digits to my pad.” Bear said, voice inside a drum. “There’s a wake tonight.” His tone did not indicate an option for Calder. “You can find Sunbury Hospital yourself. Ask for the baby ward. It’s the only newborn today.”

  ***

  You know how things happen and it feels like a dream you’re witnessing? But, somehow, you’re also in the dream that is most thoroughly a nightmare? Calder looked at the sleeping baby wrapped in linen like a mummy in its sterile cot, the hospital’s white walls soaked in iodoform.

  “Such a tiny gorgeous,” cooed a nurse or a nun in a tunic the color of summer sky and a cape imprinted from the crisp white of forbidden ivory.

  There was nothing spectacular a
bout the baby. Oval face. Even symmetry between onyx eyes, button nose, plum mouth.

  Calder walked out of the room without a word.

  He caught an Uber because he had not thought to drive—who does when things like this happen? But he didn’t return to work. His Monday to Friday suit smelled sweet and sterile like the hospital.

  It was windy and cold outside, the streets all gray.

  His unit in Blackwattle was a spartan place that looked like the kind you get when Ma and Pa Kettle rented a spare room. But that wasn’t even the owner’s name. Calder had never met the landlord. He rented through a property agent. Each unit had its own backyard, fenced. Out the front, a communal car park. As for the neighbors . . . he didn’t give a toss about them. Sometimes he saw them. Sometimes he didn’t. There was a fresh-faced chap, the jogging type. He wore tight trackies and white tennis shoes. He also had a wedding band, but Calder had never seen the wife. There was a girl with hat hair—all coned with brimmed-out edges. Mauve. She lived with a bald teen who wore a mo and gumboots that, rain or shine, never came off. There was an old man with a walking cane and a beanie. He was always dragging a shopping trolley—it had to be empty, the easy way he pulled it.

  Calder sat in the unit and thought about shopping. Not like that. You know how you go shopping and there’s one thing you forget, remember it when you get home? Toilet paper. Washing up liquid. Cling wrap. M was like that—this is what Calder thought about. After they broke up, he forgot her and then remembered. In spurts. The workplace became his castaway island: he immersed himself in paperwork. Strategy and planning. Stakeholder engagement. He didn’t go through denial and all the shit that comes with grief. He just occasionally forgot and remembered. But he certainly did isolate. Feelings. Sure, there was anger at the time of the argument. Then came a black hole and dust that filled it up. Heartache was too much of a gorge to consider. He refused to name it.

  Now he felt a deep sense of aloneness. It was like grief attacking him in reverse. Something warm and wet snailed down his face. He realized it was a tear.

  Before M, he’d never been the boy with the cool girl. Then pouty M came along with her spectacular cheekbones that contoured her face and evened the angle between her big eyes and thin jaw. She was a cool girl, stern but all pretty. She was his. Sure, sometimes she was a bit dizzy. Silly things came out of her mouth and got his goat. But not for long: who stayed cross when a woman that was a million stars lit your world?

  She was more than a curtain raiser. She looked like a creature from another world, another time. She was a goddess from a temple far away who took him on a stroll along a hanging garden. It lasted only three months, but it was enough. She was the Milky Way, a sprawl of stars twinkling around his Sagittarius. She was the gravity that held him together. In her own right his nebula—bright and visible to his naked need.

  There are people who’re receptors. They open to an experience and find immersion in it. Calder was a receptor. There are people who’re givers. They have power and sometimes power comes with love but is often devoid of it. M was a giver. Calder didn’t think he was both a receptor and a giver; his touch never transported anyone. And M was never both—she was incapable of receiving. But she was most definitely a giver.

  She had a key that gave him access to an invisible palace. When she kissed him, he tasted authority on her tongue. Each touch was like creation. She molded his clay, lifted him to unseen glory. Enlightenment. Their intercourse was edification: he opened to her tutelage. It wasn’t a choice, it just happened. She molded. He was malleable.

  He sat on his bed thinking about all this until night fell. And then the house talked to him. Usually it was silent, other than outdoor sounds of starting up cars or revving motorbikes. But tonight, it talked. First it was like a beating heart in the wind. And then a sway of dry leaves. He was astonished when he lifted his head from his hands to find a scatter of gum leaves on the floor.

  He took a dustpan and hand broom. Chucked the leaves into rashes of grass in the backyard.

  ***

  He caught an Uber because he didn’t want to search for Diggers Rest. The car pulled outside a gray townhouse with a cerulean roof and a wooden garage door. Calder checked the address scribbled on a tear. He put the scrap back into the pocket of his shirt.

  The door opened before Calder finished knocking.

  It was Bear, still in the checkered shirt. In his arms he rocked the baby from the hospital, still wrapped like something from ancient Egypt.

  “They discharged it?” Calder made conversation.

  Bear did not answer.

  He led them into a lounge room full of character. Polished wood on the floor. A painting of roses on an ebony backdrop hung on a big white wall. A plush three-seater, all black, complemented the white and silver house. Every wall was white. Every fitting was silver. There was a modern kitchen with silver-top benches and matching toaster, microwave and refrigerator.

  Calder dug out a bottle of beer.

  Bear and the infant didn’t seem to mind. They were rocking by the fireplace.

  “Boss man. This is a goddamned wake. Where’s everybody?”

  “Just us, mate.” Bear continued rocking. So charcoal, his eyes. “No murder of crows. That’s the rest of them. Nobody gives a shit.”

  Calder studied a silver-framed photo of a small boy and his younger sister standing on the golden salt of some Bondi Beach. You could see resemblance. He was charcoal-eyed with a thatch of hair on his crown. Nothing like the full-haired bear he was now, fur crawling all over his face. The girl was stern and pretty, full of authority. She used her body beautifully. She was like an albatross in a swimsuit. Looking beyond the camera at something else.

  Calder sank in the three-seater. “Well I’m here. So, tell me.”

  “It’s about routine,” said Bear in his boom voice. “Warm the bottle. Change the nappy. Repeat.”

  “I can’t just take the baby.”

  “Yes. You can. It’s yours.”

  “Give it a rest one minute.”

  For the first time, an emotion flickered across Bear’s bearded face. An emotion like hatred. “Did you think for a moment about the consequences of leaving?”

  Calder drained the beer and stood. “I think I’ll just go.”

  “Yes, run. Like you always do.”

  Calder reached Bear in quick strides. He hauled the baby from the big bushy arms and nuzzled it against his shoulder. Slammed the door to the fuckwit from hell.

  He stumbled into a shout of wind.

  ***

  He couldn’t sleep, the baby by his side.

  The house still talked. This time it was an endless flutter of bird wings. It sounded like a peep of chickens. Calder tried distracting himself with thoughts, but he couldn’t shake the frost from his feet.

  The pleasure of thinking about M came along with ice swords to his core. Would it have been easier had she been murdered? A bloodied body found in the bottom of a ditch? This was rough: childbirth. She’d carried a baby to term. Never thought to tell him. She was always secretive.

  He remembered the mountains, a pulse of time. It was heart memory. Who forgot a getaway like that? He did. But now he remembered. The Briars cottage with bird-nest lamps. Waking to the sight of snow through the windows. M curled into the pillow that wintry morn. Rubbing against his leg like a cat. Her breathing soft on his skin. He remembered everything. Her spectacular cheekbones. Tousled hair on her stern, pretty face lost in sleep. Her taste of toothpaste in the morning. Her lusty gulp of freshly squeezed orange juice from Black Forest Café. An intensity in her scowl at the skinny flat white topped with a heart. But she thawed with the double-ladled pot of mulled wine at the Pig and Whistle where they stopped for lunch. The food tasted washed. But it was a glorious day despite the cold, not a single brow in the horizon. The sky was a giant blue lake. The boy who served them whistled a
ll the time, a sound of birds from his lips.

  Calder remembered the fight—how M let slip she had to get back to the city for a shift.

  “You’ve got a job?”

  “The odd hand here and there.”

  “Like where?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “The Fifteen? That’s top notch.”

  “You know I can cook.”

  “Then why have you been temping as a typist?”

  “Because I went to culinary school, it doesn’t mean people immediately see my potential.”

  “So now they do at Fifteen?”

  “Geoff said—”

  “Geoff?”

  “He’s a sous chef there. Sometimes you need connections.”

  “That kind of history?”

  “Feels like a grudge match. Why are you so angry?”

  Things tumbled from there pretty much.

  As they drove back under the big lake sky, Calder tried to mend things. “Move in with me. It’ll be closer to your work.”

  “Move in?” she spat. “Blackwattle is a shoebox.”

  “You could fit a whole army in there, still have room.”

  “An army of idiots.”

  He said it then: “You’re cold in the heart. Incapable of loving anyone but you.”

  “I don’t hate you,” she said.

  ***

  He woke from a fitful sleep to a smell of bird. The window was open. A trail of fresh droppings led out of his bedroom to the backyard. He swept the droppings, sprayed the floor with antibacterial kitchen cleaner.

  He warmed a bottle, changed the baby’s nappy.

  Only later, he frowned. He didn’t remember taking a bottle, baby formula or nappies from Bear. He didn’t remember buying them. Such was his rage he must have blacked out.

  ***

  He was straight about the break-up, pragmatic. Same way he was pragmatic now about the baby in his shoebox. He warmed the bottle. Changed the nappy.

  The baby strangely followed him with its eyes, sometimes intensive, sometimes drowsy.

  Now it was asleep.

  Already it was dark outside, and the house started talking. A sound like rusty pipes. And his feet, so cold.