The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories
Page 21
“She wasn’t.”
“Then life insurance. Was she? Life insurance to you, Liam?”
“Hell no.” Texture came back to his voice. “Never.”
Sugar laughed. A tickling, prickling whooper laugh that spread enough to make him smile.
“Then she was a fine cigar,” she said when she stopped laughing. “Or beautiful music you couldn’t dance to.”
“Or a cab,” he said. “I thought she would drive me someplace in this world. Didn’t know where. Didn’t care how. I just wanted her there with me.”
“How about that heartfelt! Never spoke more candid.”
Tinkling laughter again, merry as a clarinet.
“Come here,” he said. He reached to pull her down to the floor, but she dodged his fingers, until they were both helpless with mirth. He smiled into her eyes.
And then it was too cozy. The simplicity of it brought with it a complication that first surprised him and then confounded him. He felt under pressure. Pressure rising from his toes. What the . . . He lost his heartbeat. Something hauled him to his feet. Suddenly the carpet on the floor with its salmon color sprigged with magentas didn’t look right. The moment . . . He didn’t like it. He wanted to be forty-light-years away, traveling faster than light.
In the silence that followed, he reached for words to fill the awkwardness. Tiny talk, thoughts, distractions . . . They eluded him in the bracket of that moment, perhaps because the candy-eyes were serious. They sucked him in with something finer, something that frightened him. Warm stars in her eyes told him something. They were eyes saturated with fondness. He realized with dismay she had broken her rule. The agreement was simple: no absolutes. But she had fallen in love. Sugar was in love with him. He couldn’t herald it, allow her to express it. Had he guessed of this turn at the start of their liaison, there would have been more trepidation in his bite. He didn’t know how to improvise. Or be adventurous. Was Sugar for life? He simply couldn’t love.
He wondered how something this perfect could go so wrong. He pondered the rot that had fouled him and Audrey—how by the time he noticed, it was all too putrid to salvage. Putrid as the war of ages that nearly destroyed Bathox, but didn’t. Enemies that fanned out with flashers and gliders from all over the galaxy. But now gliders were no more machines of war. They were vessels of peace, of interspace travel that landed into acorns.
He blinked once. Twice. Huge silence. A raging headache drummed a beat in his head. A flutter in his heart, and Sugar dropped her gaze. A great deal of hesitancy and sadness lingered in her smile.
“Get up,” she said. “You look like a medically induced coma. Get out of here before the night lets out.”
She understood. Though her candy-eyes now looked like tired woman eyes, flat eyes like Saturday after Good Friday, she understood. Liam’s headache dissolved. And for the first time since he started seeing her, he took her in his arms and made love to her with the intensity of a man about to go away on a journey to Waggu Waggu, Woy Woy or Woop Woop—the end of the world.
Nestled in his arms, Sugar wept.
“If you start at a hundred,” she said, “then you’ve got no more place to go.” Her eyes were no longer flat. They were deep, almost calm. Her voice was sad as an oboe.
“Don’t be a stranger, hey champ,” she said at the door, clinging to his chest.
***
Inside the nearly deserted aqua center with its vexed attendant, Liam stripped to his jocks. He climbed on the block. He bent down and forward from the hips, knees bent, head low. He raised his head quickly, pushed away hands stretched and threw himself forward. He speared clean into the cool waters and glided back and forth, breathing every fifth stroke, until the peering of the attendant into his line of vision nudged him out of the crystal blue pool.
11
Meredith
He found her in the mauve pages of the services directory under “G”: Gentleman’s escort.
“It’s called displacement,” said Nero.
Meredith lived in a beachcomber in Affleck Boulevard. She took only pre-bookings. She accepted bite-size chocolates and vintage bubbly. She asked no questions and demanded that none be asked of her. All was well if Liam did not succumb to a terrible impulse to reminisce, to talk about or prompt personal history. When he took her, she lay unruffled and wore a cool face of iridescent beauty.
He never guided Meredith into the positions he desired. He never angled her into poses he had achieved with Sugar: the rider—him on his back as she straddled and rode him. The spooner—both on their sides, rocking to orgasm. The chainer—reverse missionary, legs entwined. The cowgirl—her atop him, facing his feet. Oh, the visual stimulation of watching her buttocks. The tactile stimulation of stroking Sugar’s neck, back, breasts . . . The erotic stoking of her hands on his body, her easy access to all important parts of him . . . The acute artistry of her hands. Fully aroused in this position, his holdback—the one he had practiced and practiced so many times with Sugar—dissolved. Liam barely lasted minutes before the whorl. A prolonged epiphany that left his entire body singing. The flair of his orgasms, it came complete with a rain of crisp white octagonal starlets floating in his vision.
Being with Sugar was nothing like the fumbled bum lifter—the one he tried with Audrey the last time they had sex. This recollection of Audrey was not an effort. It was flitting, a distant thought. A comparison: with Sugar he was etched with magic, and she delivered him to a sweet, impossible place. It was a place that was fantasy compared to moments with Audrey, or Meredith.
Unlike Sugar to whom it was nurture, to Meredith sex was . . . a burden? She held her hand delicately to the small of his back, as though they were dancing to a waltz at a Queen’s ball. Once or twice a fair-feathered bird perched on the ledge, cocked its head and stared at them through the window.
Meredith glanced at her watch when time was up or nearly up. She calmly said, “Three more minutes.”
Sometimes, when she said it, Liam was too close to the edge to be distracted. Sometimes his desire ebbed, and he coiled.
Later, if Liam floated naked in her marble bathtub or laid hands at the back of his head on a braided mattress, brooding into space, she let him. She only glanced at her watch when extra time was up or nearly up. Liam soon learned to pre-empt the clock: There goes the hootie, he would think, moments before her eyes sought the dial.
She wore sleek black skirts and fluffed windswept hair around a powdered face; always looked like she was going to the Oscars. The villa had a fire crackling hearth, natural light, a granite kitchen, marble bench tops . . . An ivory carpet, dovetail drawers, Holland blinds, English brass handles, jade ornaments, Dutch masters wall replicas in seamless spacing, swathed drapery. Class and finery.
One day, it dawned upon him: he had thumbed the mauve pages and found a whore who looked like Audrey. Who dressed like Audrey. Who moved like Audrey. Who had genetically harvested timber Venetians. Who spoke in a china-cup fragile way. Who fucked like a Queen’s waltz.
Meredith was so like Audrey, and that made her safe—unlike Sugar who had dared love him. Liam paused with that thought, holding a red box chocolate selection (bite-size) in his hands. Turmoil and yearning filled every space of him, right there, in the middle of Meredith’s open living room that spilled into a deep terrace with a curling swimming pool. A kind of realization opened in him. He was in love with Sugar. Madly, madly in love. And though it frightened him no longer, he tried distracting himself from it. Glanced at a famous portrait (Meredith said) of a medieval sprite named Aquila, Degilla or Godilla. He couldn’t tell, from the way she said it in her china-cup fragile way, what was correct.
“That you, darling?” she said from somewhere upstairs.
He heard her climbing delicately down the spiraling staircase, pictured her autumn eyes and velvet skin, replayed her engineered ten-carat smile. Before hint of her wildflower scent
reached him, before her trophy smile—poised for effect, bestowed as reward, held perfectly on a five-star face with movie caliber immortality—before all that could infect him, he was gone.
12
The water at the aqua center felt crisp to his skin. He built speed on his approach to the wall, faster and faster and tucked his nose to the knees, heels to the hips. He kicked off the wall and, with swift dolphin kicks, he fluttered away, away.
The attendant was waiting for him when he climbed out.
“Clear the head?” she said.
“Full of dunes,” he said. “But they are singing.”
13
The Dying
He died five minutes from Automat Station on the way to Sugar. The blonde woman in a jumbo Roaditor yapped on her mobile as he crossed the road with the ribboned chocolate box selection. Last thing he remembered before lifting off the ground a bit dazed was a splash of rainbow, his blood leaving a flowering pattern that closely resembled a Persian carpet filled with red.
Past noon now, fat blue-black flies soaked, almost drowned, in dead body fluids in the purple grass by the roadside. Heat lazed. It charred foreheads and split callused hands. Those who napped in their houses, Liam thought, would feel sickened waking up two hours later in that heat. Those without a nap in their eyelids would slog, trying to find middle ground in and out of the heat. Perhaps fans or small leafed trees offered a little solace. Even butterflies dropped. Given the absence of cool winds to calm their feelers, they struggled anxiously, flickering one second or two, and then they simply collapsed. Drowsy bees fluttered around the heady scent of sun, wind, blood, and a little pollen caught between spring and summer.
A siren rose from the distance. It drew nearer.
Liam looked ahead, at the blocks bunched like little fists two streets away. A sign on one wall said: We Have Moved. Gray smoke curled skyward from Hoochi Mama’s chimney where waves of oven fire made crisp cinnamon bread. He blinked. The sun’s weight in his eyes was becoming unbearable. A bird cried in the sky, a glassy, wilderness sound.
“Loof!” said a cheerful dog struggling on his leash. The owner pulled him away, distracting him from the rusty smell of clotting blood on the road.
Something drew Liam’s gaze past a yellow and black billboard announcing a fledgling singer with knockout booty. His eye settled on Level Three, Block 517, where he and Sugar had lain side by side with touching toes on a fuchsia carpet.
White-as-white hair flew wild in warm winds at the window. Charcoal candy-eyes beckoned him, gazing at him with such wonder. She was waving at someone behind him. As he turned and saw no one there, Nero’s words flashed in his head: “She was a tarot card reader.”
Tarot . . . tarot card reader . . .
Sudden elation gripped him. Sugar could see him. Not his body—meat, bone, blood—splattered under glass and metal. She could see him. Liam smiled. He waved. Sugar waved back. He started running toward her. Rock-a-tee. Rock-a-tee.
He crossed the road to busy Satsuma Road. Wheels of a tram groaned like a grinder’s stone. They squealed. A door gleaming like a sword in the sun burst open. Liam didn’t look back. He steered clear of the road, away from ticking traffic lights, away from rolling cars, grunting cars, purring cars, buses, bicycles, trams. His feet silently moved past Hoochi Mama’s toward soft beckoning eyes filled with wonderment, toward a love older than sunset, younger than dew.
Rock-a-tee. Rock-a-tee-tee-rock-a-tee.
***
A twilight cloud forms in the topaz sky, a wispy cloud which, if you look closely, you could begin to make out the ghost of its face: two eyes, the space of a nose, a set of smiling lips and sometimes, if your eye is kind and steady, you just might see some hands and feet. As the moonlit sky glimmers with morning stars that have eaten a lot of silver, pearls or diamonds, Sugar Sweetman speaks.
“You are together now,” she says to Liam, perfectly reading his silence.
“Now, more than ever,” he agrees. “I was some bit of a hazard back then.”
“The heart is a complex thing, sometimes improbable to comprehend.”
“But you are a maverick, the juror of my heart.”
“Guilty,” she whispers happily, “guilty as charged.”
“And Nero?”
“In time you will connect. I will help you.”
They savor the wind-kissed crest where they stand arm in arm, where they can see all, share all, be all one more time, before they would take their great happy feet down the hill to poinsettias and azaleas and huckleberry petals in full bloom; to baby breath, fairy tickle and a home sweet home aroma of Hoochi Mama’s cinnamon cookies as they turn golden; to a wide-open place full of grace.
A place called home.
It no longer matters it is not Bathox.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Toni Morrison—you’re inside my head whispering language that is curious, playful, provocative. Poetic.
To Seb Doubinsky whose insightful foreword is like a sweet-tempered dream into myself.
To publisher Tricia Reeks of Meerkat Press for seeing more in my stories—complex, unsettling, distorted in their fulness. You were the first publisher to take me seriously. Truly, madly, savagely. Seriously.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eugen Bacon is African Australian, a computer scientist mentally re-engineered into creative writing. She’s the author of Claiming T-Mo by Meerkat Press and Writing Speculative Fiction by Red Globe Press, Macmillan. Eugen’s work has won, been shortlisted, longlisted or commended in national and international awards, including the Bridport Prize, Copyright Agency Prize, Australian Shadows Awards, Ditmar Awards and Nommo Award for Speculative Fiction by Africans.
Website: www.eugenbacon.com Twitter: @EugenBacon
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Contents
FOREWORD
THE ROAD TO WOOP WOOP
SWIMMING WITH DADDY
A NURSERY RHYME
THE ONE WHO SEES
BEATITUDES
SNOW METAL
A MAJI MAJI CHRONICLE
A GOOD BALL
A CASE OF SEEING
THE ENDURING
FIVE-SECOND BUTTON
DIMINY: CONCEPTION, ARTICULATION AND SUBSEQUENT DEVELOPMENT
MAHUIKA
BEING MARCUS
SCARS OF GRIEF
THE ANIMAL I AM
ACE ZONE
A PINING
DYING
WOLFMOTHER
TOUCHED
HE REFUSED TO NAME IT
A MAN FULL OF SHADOWS
PLAYBACK, JURY OF THE HEART
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Landmarks
Cover