He clicked his tongue and Stuart thought the sucking stopped. He felt light-headed and nauseous. The man plucked a beetle off Stuart’s shoulder and ate it. Crunched it like it was a nut and took the next. Two more and he was smacking his lips. Stuart couldn’t move. He felt so cold he felt like he’d been buried in snow. Or was back in the cave. But it was light in here. Very bright.
“Look at me.” The man’s cheeks were pink, his eyes bright. He looked younger. Happy.
“Thank you, Stuart. Have a good life.”
He tapped Stuart on the head and Stuart slept.
He awoke on the filthy toilet floor. Someone had dropped a wad of shitty toilet paper and he could smell that.
He felt little compunction to rise, to lift himself. It was like this was the only moment and there was nothing beyond.
Another man came in and helped him up. “Home time for you, mate? Wait here while I take a piss and I’ll get you to a taxi.”
“Do I know you?” Stuart said. Things seemed blurred and he couldn’t remember much.
“Nah, but you’ll always help someone in trouble, right? Specially a survivor like you.”
I am a survivor Stuart thought as the stranger helped him to a taxi. That’s what I did.
But he felt as if he could never do it again.
* * *
He woke up on his lounge room floor, his shirt stiff with dried blood.
“Big night was it?” Cheryl said, poking him with her toe.
Sarah stood over him, ready for school, her shoes all shined, her white socks folded neatly.
He shivered, feeling cold. “The long man pinched my nose.” His face felt swollen and he knew he must look awful.
“Get off the floor,” Sarah said. “You’re shivering.”
“I will soon.” He felt a deep sense of pure lethargy.
Cheryl helped him up onto the couch and brought him a cup of tea. “You’re too old to drink like that anymore.”
“Wasn’t the drink. Well, I did give it a bit of a hiding, but it was this guy. This long gray guy who gave me a bloody nose and then did something to me. I’m tired. I’m so tired. And cold.”
She brought him a fluffy pink blanket and covered his knees with it. “The TV producers sent over a copy of your interview. Sarah and I have already watched it twice! Want to have a look? You come across really well.”
She didn’t wait for his answer but played the DVD anyway.
He watched the interview over and over that day, wondering at the person talking. “Jeez, I’m a smart-arse, aren’t I?” he said, smiling at his Cheryl. She kissed his forehead.
“You always were.” The lightness of her tone warmed him slightly. She had suffered postnatal depression and he was terrified every day it would come on again. He saw it behind her eyes sometimes, in the droop of her mouth. A wash of sadness. Those were the times he tried harder lift her up. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw a bug climbing the wall and he curled up, pulling his blanket up over his eyes. “We need to get the rentakill guys in here. Get rid of the cockroaches,” he said.
She nodded. “Ants, too. All over the kitchen, rotten little things.” She sat beside him, laying her head on his shoulder. “I still can’t believe you’re back,” she said. His little bird, his sparrow, but a tower of strength at the same time.
Usually sitting beside her he felt something. Irritation, often, when she went on about small domestic details, none of which interested him. Boredom, talking about her family. Affection, when they sat together watching TV. Love, when they laughed together at a joke he’d made, when her eyes crinkled up and little tears formed. He loved those little tears.
She held his hand. He let it lay loose.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“I just can’t really feel anything. It’s all gone numb.”
She stared at him. “We have to tell the doctor. Something’s wrong. You shouldn’t feel like that.”
“I don’t feel anything, love. That’s the thing. Nothing at all. Just cold. Like I’ve got an iceblock inside my stomach.” He didn’t tell her he meant emotionally as well, that looking at her left him cold.
To cover it up, he kissed her. Usually they’d do this stuff at night, with the door closed, but he kissed her with passion and moved his hands around her body, touching all his favourite bits.
* * *
The weeks passed. He ate meals he had no real desire to eat, had conversations and many, many interviews. Sponsorships brought money in. Newspaper reports listed everything he’d eaten underground and those people approached him. It was Vegemite, Tip Top bread, Milo chocolate bars, apples (the local fruit shop took on that one), and the local butcher had a go, too. The watch company put him on TV, talking about how he’d never need another watch, that one was so good. So at least he didn’t have to work. People kept asking him if he was going back underground and he’d bluff at them, give them the real man answer, the hero stuff, but he wasn’t going back.
He spent a lot of time reading the paper. He started cutting out stories of other survivors, especially the ones who talked about the cold, about the deep bone chill they felt after a few days.
“Dad, let me hook you up with an online forum. You can meet other survivors. Talk to them. Most of them are probably feeling what you’re feeling,” Sarah said. He sat at the computer for a while but it only made sense when she talked him through it and he didn’t want her to know it all.
She asked him about the long man. “The one you said pinched your nose. We should try to track him down and make sure he doesn’t do it again. People can’t go round pinching my dad’s nose like that.”
“Willy nilly,” he said. It was an old joke. “I don’t know if we’ll find him. I don’t think he’s at the pub much, or if he’s got a job. I saw him when I was buried, you know. He sent his ghost in to find me.”
Others had talked about seeing visions. Buried in the snow, or caught in a car for two days on a country road. They said, more than one of them, that a long man had visited them. “It’s not just me,” he told Sarah. “No one knows why he doesn’t help. He just looks.”
“Did he pinch their noses? This is the stuff we can find online, Dad.”
“Yeah, maybe. Maybe. What about stuff about cockroaches? How to get rid of them? I saw a huge one in the bathroom. They say they’ll survive nuclear war. That’s what they reckon.” He shivered. “I hate them.”
He felt like a fraud. Life exhausted him, all the people wanting what he had. And Cheryl and Sarah got nothing but harassment. Lucky your dad’s alive, your husband, people said to them. Imagine what life would have been like without him, how sad, how hard. Making them think about it. All those people wanting to talk to him, but they paid him at least and it kept them in beer and roast beef. Always the same questions.
“What is it you think you were kept alive for?” they asked, putting the onus on him to make something of his life. As if he’d been given a second chance and he’d be a fool to waste it.
“Dunno what I was kept alive for, but mostly I’m enjoying every extra minute with my daughter and my wife,” was his stock answer.
But he no longer really cared.
They asked him, “Are you scared of anything? Seems like you’re not.” It was a stupid question, he thought. Who wasn’t scared?
“Cockroaches. I really hate cockroaches.” The interviewer sighed in agreement.
Another question they always asked him was, “Put in the same situation, would or could you do it again?”
“Well, I won’t mate, will I? Just not going to happen.”
They always ended with, “If only you could bottle it.” His standard joke was to hold out his wrists.
“Ya wanna take a litre or two? Go for it! I can spare it!”
It was all an act and he was good at it.
* * *
He was waiting in the queue to buy fish and chips (“Aren’t you that guy? That miner guy?”) when he smelt sour cherries. It took him s
traight back to the cave and the smell of the long man. He felt cold through his layers of clothing and did not want to turn around. He felt someone behind him, close, but people did that. They seemed to think if they got physically close to him they could absorb some of him, that they could be like him.
He took his package of food and left the shop, eyes down. Climbed into the car some sponsor had given him, sat there to eat it.
The long man opened the passenger door and climbed in.
Stuart dropped the food on his lap where it sat, greasy and hot. He barely felt it. He scrabbled for the doorhandle but the long man took his wrist. Pressed hard and Stuart couldn’t move. Just like last time.
“You seem to be enjoying that fish, Stuart. You know what that tells me? That I didn’t take it all. The fact that you want to eat tells me that.”
Stuart tried to shake his head, to say, “I’m faking it, it’s all fake, I can’t feel a fucking thing,” but the cockroaches were out, skittering and sucking and if he thought he was cold before, that was nothing. His eyelids felt frozen open, his nostrils frozen shut, breathing was so painful he wanted to stop doing it.
“That’s it now,” the long man said, picking cockroach feelers out of his teeth. “You’re done.”
Stuart sat slumped in the seat for a while, then started the car. A tape was playing; one of his interviews. He liked listening to himself, hearing his own voice.
“I’ll do anything to stay alive, anything to keep my family alive,” he heard himself say. “You know I got stuck in a pipe once when I was a kid. Fat kid, I was. I sang songs from TV shows to keep me occupied.” Listening from his car, chilled to the bone and tired, Stuart wondered if he’d seen the long man then. If the long man had waited, and waited, until he was good and strong.
He pulled out of the carpark. It was only his sense of duty making him do it, long-instilled. He had to go to a school visit someone had organised for him. Some school where there was a survivor kid, a young girl recently rescued. It took him a while to get there; wrong turns, bad traffic. Angry traffic. He thought there was more road rage than usual but then wondered if it was his driving? If all that stuff about driving carefully did make sense, because he didn’t care now, didn’t care how he drove or what he hit.
* * *
“We’d like to welcome Stuart Parker to the school. He’s taken time out of his busy day to talk to us and to talk to Claire, our own hero.”
The children clapped quietly. Stuart guessed they were tired of hearing about Claire.
She’d been trapped in the basement of a building. A game of hide and seek gone wrong; no one knew she was playing. No one knew where she was. It took six days for them to find her.
“Tell us how you coped, Claire,” the teacher said.
“I pretended I was at school doing boring work and that’s why it was so boring. Sometimes I thought about this nice man from the mine. He said he kept thinking of nice things and that’s what I did, too.”
The children shuffled, started to talk, bored. Claire looked at them wide-eyed. “I ate bugs. Lots of bugs. Like he did. And I had some chips I took from the cupboard but I didn’t want to tell Mum and Dad cos I didn’t want to get in trouble.”
She had their attention, but not completely. “And then there was the creepy guy.”
“You were alone in the basement, Claire, weren’t you?” the teacher said, passive-aggressive. “No one there.”
“Who did you see?” Stuart said. He hadn’t had a chance to speak before then. “What did he look like?”
The audience were rapt. They didn’t often get to see adults this way, all het up and loud.
“I was all by myself but then this creepy long guy was there. I never seen him before but I thought he might help me to get out. But he didn’t, he just stared at me. I told him he should go away but the only thing I think he said was, ‘See you soon, Claire.’ That’s why I’m scared. I really don’t want to see him again.”
Stuart wanted to care. He wanted to save her but there was nothing left in him. Only the memory of the man who would have killed to save that girl. Would have ripped the arms off any man who tried to hurt her.
Just a memory though.
“Stuart, we haven’t heard from you. What can you tell the children?”
“That there is no purpose in life. We all die and rot and none of it is worth anything. You’re only taking up space. And that the long man is real. You need to keep her safe from him because he’ll destroy her.”
The principal, stunned and speechless, took a moment to answer. The children were silent and he wondered if he’d laid seeds of sadness and emptiness in them all. He didn’t mean to. But he was too tired and cold to lie anymore.
“But… but Mr. Parker, you’re a role model. We asked you here to lift the children. Inspire them.”
“I’m nothing. Nothing at all,” he said.
* * *
Claire. Claire was in the news and so was he, with his awful statements, his cruelty to the children. He had the media at his door again but they hated him now for turning on the children, you don’t do that to the kiddies, do you? He watched Claire; she didn’t look chilled to the bone, so he thought perhaps the long man hadn’t come to her yet.
His house was full of his sponsors’ food and friends came over to eat it because he wouldn’t. Some of the rescuers too, looking at him as if they’d wasted their time. Sitting there in front of the television, warm rug, warm slippers, all skinny and pale.
He couldn’t even fake a smile anymore. His famous watch had slipped off his wrist and sat in the dust under the couch.
“We shoulda bottled it. We could give him a taste of his own self,” one of the rescuers said. He knew they were disappointed in him, that he wasn’t doing what they wanted him to do.
“Three days of my life, I gave to save him,” he heard one say in the kitchen.
“Now look at him.”
They left him alone.
And he didn’t care.
Kaaron Warren
Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji, She’s sold many short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree and Mistification) and four short story collections. Two of her collections have won the ACT Publishers’ and Writers’ Award for fiction, and her most recent collection, Through Splintered Walls, won a Canberra Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Australia, the US, the UK and elsewhere in Europe, and have been selected for both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Anthologies.
She was shortlisted for a Bram Stoker Award for “All You Can Do is Breathe”, and is Special Guest at the Australian National Science Fiction Convention in Canberra 2013.
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