“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 straight 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.