The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010 (volume 1)

by Paul Haines

  (we)

  lacked in life. She was the culmination of my years under the Yarra; the end of my journey through the stories of the West Gate suicides. I always knew they had wonders to share with me. I knew I was there for a reason. I knew I was special, because they were special.

  All of them.

  I knew, and I was right. About that, and about other things, too.

  Like what it would feel like to climb the West Gate and stand balancing on a ledge, the air expansive and shimmering around me, the water surging up greedily at me from far below.

  It feels awful, and exhilarating, and terrifying, and wonderful, and primal, and all-encompassing. Just like I thought, and not at all like I thought. Perfect.

  I’m naked; but not only that, I’m hairless. I’ve waxed everywhere—head, body, even my eyebrows. Pulling out my eyelashes (one by one with tweezers, slowing down to wait for the tears to clear each time) was the hardest part, but I wanted to be as aerodynamic as possible. No clothes. No hair. I’d remove my skin, if I could. I realised why she—my darling under the Yarra—was naked, you see. It was to make her travel further, faster. To get deeper under the mud.

  But I’ve got an edge that she, poor angel, didn’t have: my diving weights. I’ve lugged them all up here, to the top of the West Gate, in 20kg lots. I’ve got rather a lot of them, you see, over the years. Easily my own body weight. And I’ve gotten strong, diving under the Yarra and digging up its human treasures. I’ve put all the weights on the ledge I plan to leap from, and I’m confident that I can strap them all onto me and still be able to propel myself off the bridge with enough force to make my jump count. Even just falling with style will be enough, with all that weight on board.

  The interesting thing is that it’s taken me the better part of several hours to climb up and down the West Gate, naked, hairless, carrying weights and arranging them on a jutting platform. And do you think anyone has stopped their car, hung their head out their window, asked me if I’m ok? No. Of course they haven’t. They haven’t so much as slowed down, honked their horn, or flashed their lights; I’m not sure if they’ve even seen me. And it’s midday; I’m noticeable. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want anyone to stop me; I don’t need their help.

  But it just says a lot to me that they haven’t offered.

  Sooner or later, someone will call the Police, and I don’t want that interference, so I know I need to act now. Enough musing about man’s inhumanity to man—it’s not as if it’s news to me. I’ve seen the riverbed. I know how this gig—life—works. It stinks.

  I’ve worked out the spot she would have jumped from, and that’s where I am now. She came the closest out of all of them—all the jumpers I’ve seen—to getting right under that mud; getting all the way in, getting through. I’m heavier than she was. I’m streamlined. I’ve got my weights.

  And the riverbed and I . . . we understand each other. I think it has wanted me for a long time. I know I’ve wanted it.

  It feels like time is stretching, slowing, stopping; as I stand and look down at the river so far below me. My body feels pain from the burden of the weights and the chill wind on my naked skin, but it’s a distant sensation to me; like a dream someone else is having in the next room. I can’t hear the cars anymore; I can’t feel the bridge platform under my bare feet. There’s only me and the riverbed. The frothing water looks like a thin sheen of smoke over the mud that I know lies beneath, and I take a moment to calculate the exact angle I should fall at; the best way to shoot myself into the boggy target and hit it dead on. To penetrate and transcend.

  Well, what do you know? Some people have stopped their cars after all, clogging up the flow of traffic on the bridge. I can see them in my peripherals, intruding only slightly on my holy communion with the Yarra. A woman is waving her arms above her head and screaming at me. Nice of her. She thinks she’s trying to save me. You and I know better, don’t we? I’m bound for shiny, beautiful things in that mud. Preventing me from reaching it would be a travesty.

  Ah. See that man, to our far right? He’s gotten out of his car, too, but he’s not looking at you and I. He’s peering over the edge of the bridge, down at the water, at the mud. He’s wearing reflective sunglasses, and in the lenses . . . can you see that? Silvery tendrils of pure light, undulating and pulsing in a constant thready rhythm from their riverbed home. He sees it. He hears it, singing and cooing and whispering. He’s already taking off his jacket and reaching down to untie his shoes. He shoots me a dark look. Knowing. Jealous. Sly.

  I can’t let him beat me. I was here first. And I’ve got weights.

  I’m the happiest I’ve ever been as I shuffle forward and prepare to take my final steps this side of the mud. I can hear a murmur in my ear; my Yarra darling, singing me home this time.

  And where is that home—where will I actually go, when I break through the mud, get all the way in at last?

  Maybe it’s the same marshy flesh that we all sprang from, as embryos implanted in our mother’s wombs. Maybe the river is that same life-giving amniotic fluid we all swam in, once upon an unremembered time. Maybe it’s an eventual rebirth I’m headed for, but not into this broken world; somewhere new, better, somewhere good.

  Look, I’ll be honest. I don’t know. But I will know.

  After the jump.

  In the seconds when my feet leave the bridge and the air starts to tear at my skin like the razor-sharp tines of a thousand pitchforks, it occurs to me to wonder why that radiant something that I want so badly would also want me. Hell, it even wanted Berko, a man who freely admits to slipping his three year old granddaughter laxative-laced lollies for the joy of watching her face crumple and her legs pump as she runs for the toilet.

  As I near the water—so quickly!—and those beckoning silver swirls solidify into something immense and hungry and suddenly not at all shiny, I ponder the fact that even now, the Yarra’s next lover is parting the air only metres above my head, matching my own sacrifice with every pound of his falling flesh. How quickly he was hooked. How easily my own offering was bettered, before it was even complete.

  In the very final second, my blonde riverbed angel reaches up from the water. She’s going to grab me and pull me under, wrap me in her arms and share eternity on the other side of the mud with me. She’ll answer all my questions, quell all my foolish doubts. But . . . no, she’s trying to push me away! Her ethereal hands grasp my ankles, but they slide through my skin like smoke through mesh.

  Her savaged mouth is open in a perfect O. It closes and opens, closes and opens again, and I can see what she’s saying:

  nononononononononononono

  Then a gargantuan column of writhing mud shoves her aside, and she’s gone, leaving a seared after-image on the back of my eyes.

  I’m hitting it it’s hitting me we’re together

  I know now

  I’ve made it

  the mud is dirty silver

  Oh, God! It’s so col—

  L’esprit de L’escalier

  Peter M Ball

  Rat opens the double doors and the stairwell smells of baking, the air thick with dull warmth and the smell of yeasty dough. He wrinkles his long nose and wonders if it will be like this for the entire way down, or if the doughy stink will gradually transform itself into the aroma of fresh-baked. He hopes not. Rat worked in a bakery one summer, and he hasn’t enjoyed the smell of bread since. It reminds him of the finger burns and the thick coats of lard painted into hot bread trays to keep the dough from sticking as it cooked.

  He flexes his fingers. The big backpack is so heavy it’s cutting off the circulation to his arms, so he has to remember to keep his fingers moving.

  Someone has bolted a sign to the mahogany balustrade, warning people not to throw coins or pebbles down the centre of the stairwell. The guidebook says this is for the safety of fellow climbers. Every year someone is struck on the head when they’re 130 flights below, and there’s no chance of getting help in time when you’re that fa
r down.

  There’s another sign that warns people not to jump. Rat’s guidebook says this isn’t, in fact, the warning to the habitually stupid that it appears to be on the surface. Originally it was posted as a warning to the suicides that come to contemplate the twisting drop of the stairwell’s core. It is easy to assume the stairwell has an end because that’s what stairwells do, but the fact that no-one has ever reached the bottom leaves the question open. No-one ever thinks of stairwells as being bottomless, not even the people who stand on top of big buildings like the Empire State where the ground is a distant and hazy memory over 1,800 steps below. There’s a hierarchy to such things determining what truly can go on forever. Wells? Yes. Pits? Yes. Trenches in the seabed where giant squid may live? Sure. But stairwells? No. Never. Hence there’s a sign, a warning, to make the suicides rethink before leaping.

  Rat isn’t thinking about jumping over the railing. He turns around and looks at the first step. It’s a foot high and four feet wide, a lump of grey marble that’s cracked and covered with a random assortment of tags and graffiti. Rat looks at some of the things people have written and snorts. It’s easy to write graffiti on the first step; it’s the lower ones that require commitment. He wonders how far he’ll need to descend before he reaches virgin territory.

  The guidebook says that the lowest step anyone has reached is 120,828 steps down. People have probably gone lower, but they haven’t come back. It’s assumed that the suicides make it to the bottom.

  If there is one.

  If they were lucky.

  The stairwell requires a lot of assumptions. The guidebook tells you to get used to that.

  Rat figures the guy that hit the low-point 120,828 steps down probably had better things on his mind than leaving graffiti. He shrugs off the backpack and starts searching for his sharpie. It’s a big backpack full of cunning pockets and hidey-holes for passports. The sharpie is in one of the cunning pockets Rat never uses, right next to the outer pocket that contains the plastic baggie filled with Marlo’s ashes.

  The smell of the uncapped sharpie is soothing. Its mentholated tang cuts through the yeasty heat. Rat chews on the cap for a few minutes, thinking, then leans over and writes But I love you on a blank patch of the first step. His handwriting is awkward, full of childish loops and a tendency to curve without the benefit of a ruled line.

  Rat wishes he had something better to write; But I love you seems trite, and it probably didn’t need to be said. He’d lost arguments with it before, with Marlo and others. He could have skipped the first step and used the first 500 to think of something better. He could have used the time to think of something poetic and elegant.

  “No,” he says, and his voice echoes down the stairwell. “No poetry.”

  Poetry would defeat the object. Just because something is trite, possibly even expected, doesn’t make it any less true. He hasn’t spent the last month preparing just so he could sacrifice truth for elegance. Marlo deserves better than that. So does he.

  Rat puts the lid back on the sharpie and returns it to the backpack. He snaps everything shut and makes sure it’s secure, twice. He’s only packed three sharpies. It wouldn’t do to lose them; he may need all of them before his descent is done.

  He pulls the backpack onto his shoulders again, sagging with the weight. His hands are slippery. The air’s not that hot; the guidebook says it’ll get hotter, but Rat sweats easily. He spent a whole week planning ways he can stay hydrated. One hand rests against the railing, holding him steady. Rat places his left foot on the next step and lowers himself down.

  “Two,” he says, thumb hitting the click-counter at his belt. He keeps clicking away as the descent begins in earnest. “Three, four, five, six . . .”

  * * *

  The guidebook is small enough to fit in Rat’s pocket, but he keeps it tucked into the backpack. Just in case.

  They found the guidebook together, Rat and Marlo. It was hiding in the bottom of a used book bin, out the front of a Salvation Army store. Marlo found it; Rat has never been a big reader. The guidebook is the only book he’s ever read all the way through. It’s the only book he’s ever attempted to read more than once.

  “Check it out,” Marlo said. “A book about the Endless Stairwell.”

  “What?” Rat said.

  “The Stairwell. You know about the Stairwell, right?”

  Rat shook his head. He’d never heard of the Stairwell before Marlo found the guidebook. That wasn’t unusual. Rat rarely knew about the things Marlo knew about. Marlo was smart. Rat was smart, too, but he didn’t think on his feet. Marlo said his talent lay in cunning, and Rat was okay with that.

  “We should go one day,” Marlo said. “Promise me we’ll go.”

  Rat didn’t promise. He thought an endless stairwell sounded stupid.

  Rat meets six young couples coming up the stairs, all before he reaches step 500. The couples are young and giddy, with young men dressed with understated elegance. They are men dressed in casual clothes that are meant to look impressive. One of the couples has a camera.

  Another couple, the second-last couple Rat passes, looks dour. They stand on separate sides of the steps, maximizing the space between them. Rat is forced to cut between, muttering an “excuse me” between clicks of his click-counter.

  Rat’s surprised by the number of couples he passes, but he shouldn’t be. The guidebook says that step 657 is a popular place to propose, a landmark right up there with Niagara Falls and New Year’s Eve fireworks.

  When he reaches step 500, Rat uncaps a sharpie and thinks about the dour couple, unhappy in their long climb back to the surface. He leans over the step and writes That would have been us, I think, if only things had gone differently. He stands up and looks at his scrawl. Better, but still not great. Rat wonders if this really needs to be said.

  “Five hundred and one,” he says, “Five hundred and two.”

  He descends. There are no more couples. He has a smooth run between step 500 and step 657.

  The romance step; the step where proposals happen. The guidebook gushes about its ambiance.

  Rat schedules a rest stop on step 658. He drinks his water and looks up the stairwell, trying to work out what makes the step just above him so special. The step smells of old prophylactics. When Rat peers over the banister, he can see used condoms stuck to the side of the stairs. The stink mingles with the dough smell, turning Rat’s stomach. There’s nothing special here; grey marble with a worn patch on the centre; endless graffiti that links two sets of initials with a crude heart around the outside and the number “4” between the names.

  Rat digs Marlo out of the backpack, cradles the plastic against his cheek.

  “Will you marry me,” he says. “You should say yes, you know. It’s traditional to say yes when you love the person who asks you.”

  The baggie says nothing. It’s cool against his cheek, but he feels cold talking to it.

  It’s hard to have a conversation with Marlo these days. Somehow, it just doesn’t seem right.

  Rat digs the ring out of a pocket in his jeans. There’s only one diamond, small and flawed. It should have been better. Rat was going to propose to Marlo outside a cinema after a really good film, but the moment slipped away before he got the chance. He puts the ring on the romance step, the proposing step, right in the corner where step meets wall. Its yellow band is pale, hard to see against the darkness and the marble’s whorls.

  “Last chance, babe. You should have said something if you wanted the ring.” Rat takes a long sip of water and shoulders the pack. “Six hundred and fifty-nine . . .”

  At step 1,000 he writes out the lyrics to a Leonard Cohen song and underlines the refrain. He stops 500 steps later and writes out the number of times he thinks Marlo faked orgasm during their time together. He stares at the number, unsure of its accuracy, then adds a question mark. At 2,000 steps he admits in writing that Marlo was right, that he did sometimes fantasise about dating her sister.

 
There is a plaque on step 2,109. It tells Rat that he’s climbed the length of the Sears tower. Rat doesn’t look at the plaque; he knows what it says because he’s read the guidebook.

  He stops again at step 2,500. He writes: I wish you were here. I’d like to kiss you right now.

  Rat stops when he reaches step 3,000. According the guidebook, most people turn before they reach step 3,000. A lot of people lie about reaching it. Rat takes out a sharpie and writes: I wasn’t sure if I would cry for you, but it appears that I can.

  It’s a lie; Rat hasn’t cried yet. Rat isn’t a crier, not really.

  He stops and camps on step 5,418. He drinks water and pecks at trail mix for dinner, saving the substantial fare in his pack for further down. Nights are cold on the Stair; the guidebook has warned him of this. He unpacks a green sleeping bag and nestles against his pack, using it as a pillow. He listens to the wind echo as it slides down the stairwell.

  A Rastafarian is there when Rat wakes up, lounging against the balustrade while Rat struggles to open his eyes. Rat looks up, noting the long line of the Rastafarian’s body, the black dreadlocks that brush against the marble step.

  “Your hair must weigh a lot,” Rat says. The Rastafarian grins, and his teeth are a flash of white amid his face. Marlo dated a Rastafarian once. She used to tell Rat stories about kissing him, letting her hands get lost in the tangled chords of his hair.

  “It’s light,” she said. “So much lighter than you’d expect hair like that to be.”

  Rat wonders whether it was this Rastafarian. It seems unlikely, but so does an endless stairwell. Rat is prepared to embrace the unlikely at present.

  “Good morning,” the Rastafarian says. He has an English accent, upper crust. Rat keeps waiting for him to say “Mon”, but he doesn’t. The silence seems awkward.