by Paul Haines
'—that I—'
The line clicked and another voice came on, still female, but huskier. 'Hello, my name is Ju. I'll be—'
'—love you.'
'—taking over this call,' Ju continued. 'I believe you're wanting to adopt a baby. With whom am I speaking?'
Jimbo sat there, the phone pressed to his ear, listening to his breath echo in the receiver. His mother slumped against the wall, blood still leaking from her nose. Kylie had managed to make it to the doorway, and was using it to help pull herself through into the lounge. The smell of ozone drifted in through the open window, as another peal of thunder shook the sky.
'It's White. James White. I want to adopt a baby boy.'
After he had made the arrangements, he called Dave and told him they needed a doctor, but to keep Khalid out of it. He grabbed a beer from the fridge, stepped over his mother's prone legs and followed the trail of blood through the lounge to the front door. Kylie couldn't reach the door handle and lay on her stomach sobbing. He opened the door, stepped over her and walked out onto his verandah. Lightning forked the sky over on the horizon and the clouds swum overhead, pushed and harried by the winds. He sat down in the Old Man's recliner, popped the top of the beer, and took a swig. Jimbo grimaced, took another gulp, let it cool the burn in his gut. He felt light-headed. He hoped Dave got here soon; maybe he'd lost a little too much blood.
He put his feet up, let his eyes close for a second, just a second, and waited for the rains.
***
Afterword: Wives
The original idea for "Wives" came from a sidenote in a travel guide to China, and I envisaged a perfect little 2,500-word horror story, but when I went to write it, I ended up with a 38,000-word novella. It took me over four years to write, written in three separate sittings with each sitting taking roughly a week. It was the easiest and yet the hardest thing I have ever written. Easiest, because whenever I sat down to write, I was in the zone, that magical place as a writer you hope to inhabit and very rarely do. Every time, in the zone, everything unfolding perfectly. I would finish what I had written for that sitting, look back and think: "This is amazing! I'm nailing it! It is the best thing I have ever written!" And then 24-hours later follow with: "What the hell am I thinking? I can't put this out there! No one would want to touch this. It's just nasty, nasty indulgent nasty." And I'd lose faith in it completely and question myself as a writer.
I showed Act One to my inner core of writer buddies with the synopsis of what I intended for Acts Two and Three, and the feedback that came back was more than encouraging, it reinvigorated my faith in what I was doing and allowed me to finish Act Two.
But when I had finished writing Act Two, I lost faith again.
This story had reached a point where I didn't want to stay in that world any longer, where I did not want to write the scenes that had to be written, that needed to be shown. I got scared of what I was doing, and feared I might be crucified in some way for putting this out there. I put it away again.
At this point, Keith Stevenson, a member of that inner core, dangled a carrot in front of my nose. He was going to edit a novella anthology called X6 and asked whether I would like "Wives" to be a part of it. In some ways, I cannot help but feel that Keith was putting X6 together in the pretence of getting me to finish the story, to give me a vehicle and a deadline to help me work through this piece that I was scared would see me crucified as a misogynist racist.
Especially as I was stagnating with my writing, coming out of chemotherapy and struggling to get my head back together. And what better place to go than back into the hell that is "Wives"?
Without Keith, there is no way I would have finished this story.
Thanks also go to Brendan Duffy for science I needed to consider in my post-apocalyptic world and Adam Browne for helping furnish the extra special punches to the gut that unfold during Act Three.
"Wives" won the 2009 Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story, the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novella, and the 2010 Ditmar Award for Best Novella. It was nominated for the 2009 Australian Shadows Award for Best Long Fiction, earned a 2009 Locus Recommended Reading notch, and made the Honours listing for the 2009 James Tiptree Junior Award.
***
The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt
1
I'm doing the speed limit in the inside lane on the West Gate Bridge. My rear view mirror reflects a bug-splattered chrome grill. The truck's so close I can't see its number plate. He's speeding up to teach me a lesson. I turn up the radio. The blaring music drowns out the roar of the engine behind me.
Melbourne's cityscape lies under a haze. If it was winter, it'd be romantic: a fog, a morning mist smothering the buildings, hugging tight as it edges out over the bay. But it's summer: bushfire season has just begun and smoke chokes the city. The car's thermometer hits 30 degrees before the clock hits 9am. Today is going to burn.
Four lanes of traffic head towards the city, bumper to bumper, going too fast—four lanes heading out. If I touch the brakes, the truck behind will collect me.
What lesson?
I wonder how long it will take me to cross to the far lane, the outside lane, the lane nearest the water; to stop the car, get out, climb over the barriers, and jump.
2
My head is filled with numbers. Inputs equal outputs. Balances, statistics, line counts, record counts, the debits and credits of business, worthless business.
I hate numbers. They're doing my head in.
3
I tell my wife about the incident on the bridge.
It's late, almost midnight, and we're lying in bed, almost too tired to talk.
'You okay?' Her eyes are wide in the lamp light. 'Don't tell me things like that. You're scaring me.'
I tell her not to worry, that it was just an impulse, one of those strange things firing around my head. A crazy thought, that's all.
'Good.' She rolls over and flicks off the lamp. 'Because you have to look after the baby on the weekends—that's my time off.'
Soon, she starts to snore. I lie awake in the dark, trying not to think.
#
This is not a cry for help. I'm fine.
I just need to tell someone.
Anyone.
You.
4
I used to work with a guy called Matt Hanrahan. He lived near me and crossed the West Gate Bridge twice a day for two years. Matt, being an engineer, had an interest in the construction of the bridge and he filled me in on a few things I should know.
And you should know, too.
Completed in 1978, after ten years of construction, and at a cost of 202 million dollars, the West Gate Bridge is the second largest bridge in Australia, and is twice as long as the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It boasts eight lanes with a total length of 2,582.6 metres. The river span at its longest being 336 metres, having a maximum width of 37.3 metres, and most importantly, has a height of 58 metres above the water that spills from the mouth of the muddy Yarra River into the Port Phillip Bay below. You can work out for yourself how long it would take to fall 58 metres.
Popular opinion claims that any construction worth its salt needs its share of blood spilled, and the West Gate is no exception. In 1970, two years into the project, the 112 metre span between piers 10 and 11 collapsed, killing thirty-five construction workers. Though it may only be the second longest bridge in Australia, it has the highest body count.
All of this can be found in the public domain.
What you won't find, Matt told me, is that the bridge was originally designed for six lanes, not eight, and that he never drives in the outside lanes, the lanes nearest the water.
5
The last vestiges of winter blanket the jutting hills, softening the hidden nooks and crannies.
I'm driving, and I hate it.
The road winds treacherously along the Taieri Gorge ...
6
I'm Paul Haines. Born thirty-six years ago in New Zealand. Now living i
n Melbourne, Australia, married to Jules, and have a five-month old daughter we named Isla. I own a house in Yarraville that requires a $2,600 monthly mortgage payment. I work as an I.T. consultant netting $4,000 a month; insurance eats up at least $400 per month, and I don't even know what bills are coming in. Are you doing the sums yet? Dropping to a single income is a killer.
On the side, I pretend to be an SF writer. I've won several awards for my short fiction, and my first short story collection, Doorways for the Dispossessed, came out in 2006. It received some good reviews ... some bad reviews. I'm achieving success, right?
On paper, I guess it can look that way.
Did I mention there is blood in my stool? No? Maybe I'm just not thinking clearly anymore. Are you?
Let's test that. You think this is part of the story? That this is a story? Wrong. Not this time.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, thirty percent of all suicides in the last recorded year were males aged between 30 and 34 years old.
I love my daughter more than anything else in this world.
7
Traffic on the Monash freeway heading south out of the Burnley tunnel eases, and I hit 100kmh after weaving through to the fast lane. I'm late for work, and the music is so loud the doors are vibrating. Loud enough to drown out the noise, to bring me back to nothing. The car is the only haven I have to bury myself in sound, to lose myself in music, to make me feel like me, a younger me.
The median barriers are smudged in black tyre skids, and remnants of torn rubber litter the side of the freeway for kilometres. Trucks thunder in the opposite direction, dozens of them, bullying along the road, spouting greasy black bursts of diesel into the air. They blur past, again and again, and in the cab approaching, I see Peter Little behind the wheel. We stare at each as we pass, him heading north, me south. It can only be a matter of a second, but his face is clear, framed and focused. It's him. He no longer has a short blond crew cut, the hair now longer, down around his ears, like mine used to be. A light fuzz of stubble carpets his cheeks. His blue eyes catch mine.
I haven't seen Peter Little for almost twenty years, and except for the hair, he looks exactly the same as when I last saw him.
It's not possible.
He looks like he's still twenty-one years old.
8
The West Gate Bridge should be haunted.
Sometimes, in the afternoon glare, I see them, migrant workers with crushed limbs and jutting bones, standing on the edge, waiting.
Other times, as the traffic crawls across hot tarseal towards the sunset, I think about what the government calls Soft Targets. I imagine the truck ahead stalling, stalled, waiting for the detonator to ignite the fertilizer bomb in the back.
Brake lights flare red on a truck several cars in front of me. Traffic grinds to a halt.
We wait.
The petrochemical compounds and decrepit factories that make up the western shoreline cast long shadows out over the water. You could buy everything you'd need down there, then take a five minute drive out onto the bridge.
I wonder how long it would take to get out of the car, walk between bonnets and bumpers, past the No Pedestrian signs and the number for drivers to call should they see someone on the bridge, and climb over the barrier.
Over one hundred people have jumped since 1990. Seven have survived. Seventy-four per cent of those who jumped from the bridge were male, with an average age of thirty-three. More than seventy per cent were suffering from mental illness.
But not in rush hour.
I'm thirty-six. I've always considered myself, if anything, to be above average.
I don't know why I am thinking this way.
9
I've fallen in love with four women in my lifetime. The first two broke my heart, so I broke the hearts of the last two. I still love the last three and hate the first. I married the third after both our hearts healed because I love her differently and maybe for the way she loves me. Love can be a confusing thing.
I love my daughter more than I love all those women put together. It's not even comparable. When I'm with her, I don't want to be anywhere else. I want to stay in that moment, locked in stasis forever, like a work of art.
I will never get to see what she looks like as an old woman.
10
The last vestiges of winter blanket the jutting hills, softening the hidden nooks and crannies.
I'm driving, and I hate it.
The road winds treacherously along the Taieri Gorge, and I constantly brake and shift between gears. I'm a shit driver; I know it and so does everyone in this car ...
11
I installed an automatic sprinkler system for the front yard before the heat of summer kicked in, while we still had a double income. Now that summer's kicking, I can't use the sprinkler due to water restrictions. We use the water from Isla's daily bath for either the front decorative garden or the back herb garden. The bathtub is too small to contain enough water for both gardens.
I thought of buying inflatable water bladders or perhaps a water tank, but even with the rebates offered by the government, I can no longer afford to do it. The government is now talking about taxing people for recycling water as it is impacting on the industrial recycling plants.
I regret spending the money on the automatic sprinkler.
At least, I'm not a farmer. The shotgun is getting a lot more use these days.
12
Matt, my engineer friend, married a couple of years ago and had a son. With these new found responsibilities, he moved his family to Brisbane, where he no longer has to cross a bridge on his way to work.
13
I lie awake in the dark and wonder how I lost myself. When did it happen? Can I pinpoint the year? The week? The event?
After an hour of sleeplessness, I stand in the doorway of Isla's bedroom listening to her soft breathing.
14
My in-laws cannot believe I haven't yet made a will. They also believe that the government gets everything you own when you die if you don't have one. They believe in a lot of things that aren't necessarily true.
I have a life insurance policy, though.
15
To tell you about Little, I need to tell you about Baxter first, and that means I need to tell you about Otago University.
I chose to attend that university based on three things:
1. It was the furthest university from home;
2. My friend David had gone the year before me, and I regaled in his wild tales;
3. A girl I thought I was in love with was going there, and I thought I could still win her heart.
The third choice made up 70% of my mind—and made it up on the spot. A weighty decision based primarily on impulse.
The day I stepped off the plane, that cold remote Scottish-built town wrapped me up and swept me away. I forgot about the girl I thought I loved, and she dropped out a year later. I'd see her around occasionally, and we'd laugh about old times, but there was never anything there between us. She's unhappily married now to a nice man who drains her personality, moulding her into who they think she should be.
David's wild tales were true. He was struggling to make the grades to enter law school at the time, but he always held sage wisdom for me.
'You learn three things here,' David told me one afternoon as I flipped through his record collection. 'You learn to drink, to take drugs, and to fuck women.'
And in these three things, Baxter was my preferred partner in crime.
David's a recluse now, living with a much younger woman with two kids from a previous partner, and has ostracised himself from his parents and siblings. He works the late night shift in a bottle shop. I heard he put on weight and shaved his head. When I try to picture his face, I confuse him with Marlon Brando lost in the Vietnamese jungle, sitting in a dark, wet hut, waiting for someone to come and finish him.
16
I stare at a computer screen watching processes push and massage data
from one database table to another. I check transaction volumes and amounts, making sure things tally, that everything adds up; so that when the executive reports are run, everything will be in its place.
I find it easy, and it bores me.
The project is going badly; behind schedule, computer servers falling over—people stressed, very stressed, putting in long hours, working weekends. Jobs are on the line, media gags, court cases; everything is breaking down including the people around me. The project manager has already been offered as the sacrificial goat, and my manager is resigning in a month's time before his throat is cut, too. He's taking a year off to travel around Australia with his wife and two young sons in their 4WD. I admire him; in a time of crisis when other people are losing themselves, he knows who he is and where he wants to be.
Me? I arrive half an hour late to work each morning and go home early.
17
Kane Morris was my best friend between the ages of ten and fourteen. We shared a love of Mad Magazine, music, rugby, and his father's Playboys and Penthouses. We used to read the stick mags in the treehut outside the house they rented—if Wes knew we had them, he didn't seem to care. Eventually, we worked up the courage to actually leave our favourites inside the hut.
That winter wasn't kind. The treehut leaked, and Wes's magazines got soaked and grew mould. By the time summer came around, we were too big to be playing in treehuts anymore.
When Kane was in his early twenties and had returned home to save some money, he noticed his father would slip out after tea but never took the car. By this stage, the Morris's had finally bought their home and Wes—jack of all trades and a poor jack at that—had himself a steady job waterblasting Venetian blinds. Wes had made a decision he intended to live by and stepped up to take on those responsibilities.