by Paul Haines
'Get the fuck up,' whispers a voice carried on a wave of spent beer fumes and burnt marijuana.
'Little?'
Something cold and sharp presses into my temple. 'We've got some unfinished business. All of us.'
I slide out of bed and quickly pull on the clothes I'd left on the floor. Jules doesn't move, dead to the world. She inhales a shuddering snort as I leave the room and enter the hallway. Little already has the front door open, letting in the balmy night, his partially uncovered brain glistening in the near dark. Under the street light, sits a 1978 red-orange Ford Falcon, its engine growling. Baxter peers from the driver's window, his face a mess of burning, weeping skin, his hair singed. He lights a cigarette and winks at me. Little ushers me into the back of the car, and Baxter floors the pedal. The engine roars as the tyres squeal in anguish, and we're off.
The streets are empty, and Baxter accelerates hard, running the red lights all the way, until we're racing up the onramp onto the West Gate Bridge. I can't wind up my window, and the temperature in the car is dropping fast though the air outside feels warm. I pull the blanket on the back seat over my legs and shoulders and huddle into myself, shivering. Baxter and Little are laughing to each other, their words lost beneath the roar of the engine.
At this hour of the morning, the city is awash with light, the neon of banks and accountants and lawyers announcing the skyline. Beneath the bridge, oily swirls of the Yarra River leak out into the bay, the barbed wire lights of petrol refineries guiding the way.
The Ford is rocketing now, we're doing the tonne, and I'm screaming and screaming and screaming. Baxter laughs and Little laughs, and there is nothing I can do as the world stretches by in one elongated blur but scream louder and longer than they ever can.
The car stops, engine idling.
Rust has eaten away at the doors. The leather seats are worn and ripped, faded to weakness by a thousand dull hot days. The windows are a web of shattered glass.
'We're here,' says Little.
Baxter throws the gearshift into neutral and kills the motor. His skin smells like frying pork. They get out of the car, cross the road, and go into her house. I wait in the car, in a frozen South Island winter, and rest my head on the seat in front of me.
I start to cry.
Later, as the sun rises into the morning sky, I'm aware of her sitting next to me in the back seat. My eyes are closed, I'm afraid to look, break the spell. Her fingers stroke my hair back, folding it over my ear, and then she caresses my face.
'I loved you.' She kisses my cheek, her lips warm and soft, melting the ice inside me. 'I always loved you.'
I turn my head slowly, seeking to touch her lips with mine, wanting to hold this moment forever, to not lose her this time. 'Amy ... I'm sorry ...'
But I'm gone, so far gone. I'm sitting in an abandoned car outside a stranger's apartment while the ones I love sleep in my home on the other side of town.
I get out of the car—it's an old Toyota, burnt out and on blocks—and hail a cab.
46
It's a beautiful summer morning, the blue sky finally showing its hand, the smoke from the bushfires a smudge hovering near the horizon. The cab cruises through the traffic heading west out onto the bridge, while in the opposite direction, rush hour snarls and stalls its way across the West Gate into the city. The sun's stark in the commuters' eyes and warm on my back.
Below, on the Yarra, boats glide out into the bay, and fishermen can be glimpsed on the river banks casting their lines.
It's a good day. It's the best day I've had in a while. I'm weighing it in my hand, and it has an equivalence of my wedding day, a measurement comparable to the weight of my daughter in my arms only a few minutes old. Yes, the clouds are lifting, the ghosts are passing.
I smile and look out on the city, my city, my home.
The cab slows as it reaches the apex of the bridge, indicates as it pulls over into the left outer lane, and eventually, stops. I get out of the car. Over to the right of the bridge, somewhere in Yarraville, plumes of fresh black smoke rise into the air. Sirens blare in the distance. I take a crumpled pack of B&H Gold from my pocket, remove a cigarette, and light it. I throw the pack into the open window of the cab, and it roars off in a rush of V8 fumes, a red-orange blur weaving amongst the traffic and disappears from view.
I climb the barrier. The hot wind whistles through my head as I take a drag on the cigarette and prepare to jump. This is it. Letting go, it's all about letting go.
A leap of faith.
48
Numbers.
'Paul! Come here, listen to this!'
Jules yelling from Isla's bedroom. Our baby is nine months old.
'Everything okay?'
'Yes!' Jules's voice bubbles with excitement. 'She's saying her first words.'
My heart pitter patters, and I'm trying not to run to the bedroom, the coffee I was making left unattended on the bench. I'm hoping, as fathers do, that Isla's first words will be 'Dada', as it often is. It seems to be easier for babies to mouth than 'Mama', but it will be 'Mama', it has to be. Jules is here every day with her, for better or worse. Not that we're competing.
In the bedroom, Jules holds Isla in her arms, near the Mother Goose calendar that is set to her date of birth. More numbers. Isla knows she's done good, and her gummy grin dribbles enthusiasm. Her pudgy fingers point at the duck on the calendar, amongst the snowman, apple, and skipping girl.
'Duck, duck, duck.'
We grin, we hug, we kiss.
We are one.
50
Did you hear me? No? It takes less than a minute.
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Afterword: The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt
This is a story about a man having a mid-life crisis who is haunted by his past. I was at a point in my life where I was extremely bored with my I.T. job. My daughter had just been born, and I was struggling to find the time or the energy to continue with my writing. Even worse, there was a definite lull in my area of the I.T. industry, so money was getting hard to come by. I really started to question what I was doing with my life and where I wanted to go.
Many of my stories are obviously autobiographical, to a point. Most of the time, that point is so blurry and confused, readers—particularly those that know me—are wondering what parts are true. Paul Haines features in many of them. Usually, he is a nasty, egocentric sociopath. Sometimes, just an idiot. For this piece, I decided to really lay it on the line. This story would really be about me. In the first draft, I even had URLs that related to sections of my blog that I had tied into the story. (I cut them). Halfway through writing the story, I lost whatever energy I had left as a writer and went into dormancy. Six months later, I was diagnosed with bowel cancer. Mid-life crisis? Yeah, I was in one.
Looking back at the start of my story where I mention the problems with my bowel, it reads like I knew I had cancer and was in denial about it. Ignoring the alarm bells and not seeing a doctor. It's not true, though. That part of the story read worse than it was, and I had been suffering what I was led to believe by my doctors from constipation and haemorrhoids. Hindsight tells me that it was probably those two and bowel cancer, but of course, I was far too young and healthy to have that sort of cancer. Or so said my doctors.
One and a half years later, while on a retreat at The Gawler Foundation to learn to cope with cancer through meditation, diet, and support, I resumed working on this story in the evenings. About a year after I had submitted the story to Brimstone Press with the previously published pieces, a man drove across the West Gate Bridge with his son and daughter in the car. He stopped and threw his daughter over the side of the bridge, killing her. I remember the footage of the man in the back of the police car, his head buried in his hands, snot and tears and dribble pouring from his face. It was, I knew, the perfect ending to this story, but I could not bring myself to write that into it. That particular piece of madness haunts me to this day, making my stomach flutter and bringing tears to my eyes
.
"The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt" is original to this collection.
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Acknowledgements
“Doorways for the Dispossessed” (Agog! Fantastic Fiction, Agog! Press, 2002)
“Malik Rising” (Shadowed Realms #7, Brimstone Press, 2005)
“Her Collection of Intimacy” (Black: Australian Dark Culture Magazine #2, Brimstone Press, 2008)
“The Light in Autumn’s Leaves” (Borderlands #5, 2005)
“The Festival of Colour” (Aurealis #40, 2008)
“Burning from the Inside” (Doorways For The Dispossessed, Prime Books, 2006)
“The Punjab’s Gift” (StoryHouse, 2004)
“Hamlyn” (Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #11, 2004)
“I’ve Seen The Man” (Scenes From The Second Storey, Morrigan Books, 2010)
“High Tide at Hot Water Beach” (A Foreign Country, Random Static, 2010)
“The Last Days of Kali Yuga” (NFG #4, 2004)
“Taniwha, Swim With Me” (Midnight Echo #1, 2008)
“Father Father” (c0ck, Couer De Lion, 2006)
“The Sky is Turning Black” (Heist!, 2002)
“The Feastive Season” (NFG #2, 2003)
“They Say it’s Other People” (Agog! Smashing Stories, Agog! Press, 2004)
“Yum Cha” (Antipodean SF #48, 2002)
“Her Gallant Needs” (Sprawl, Twelfth Planet Press, 2010)
“Wives” (X6, Couer De Lion, 2009)
“The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt”, previously unpublished.
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Other Brimstone Press titles:
Anthologies
Macabre: A Journey through Australia’s Darkest Fears
Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror Volume Three
Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror Volume Two (2007)
Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror Volume One (2006)
Book of Shadows Volume One
Collections
Shards, by Shane Jiraiya Cummings
CD-ROM anthologies
Shadow Box
Black Box (Shadow Box 2)
Magazines/e-zines
Black: Australian Dark Culture
HorrorScope
Shadowed Realms
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