Chapter 5.04 – Noodle

April looked down along the track, watching the rapidly vanishing train, hearing Wyatt groan behind her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered automatically.

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Wyatt muttered, sounding like he was trying to convince himself. “What else was in your pocket, Apes?”

“The tickets for the train and for the musical. And maybe a tissue? I don’t know.”

“So, no ID or anything?”

“No. I’ve left my ID and credit card at home.”

Wyatt let out a big breath and rocked on his heels. “Good, that’s good. Could’ve been worse. Well, that’s that then.”

April’s heart sank, but hope reigned, thinking there must be a way to get there – between Wyatt’s magic and her own… “You could transportalate us into the musical,” she said brightly.

Wyatt shook his head. “No way. I can’t just materialise in the foyer, Apes – what the heck would people think? Plus, we don’t have any tickets—”

“We don’t need tickets! I can mesmerise the ushers!”

“Wha—?” Wyatt looked at her like she’d grown a new head. “No, we’re not doing that.”

“I’ve done it before! When me and Caleb went on our first date—”

“No! Geez, I feel like I should be teaching you a lesson here about right and wrong or something.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered again. “I just really want to go.”

“I know,” Wyatt said, his voice softening. “Hey, come on now, chin up. We’ll go to another musical at some point.”

“OK,” April agreed, suppressing a sob. “So, can you transportalate us home?”

“Sure, I’ll ‘port us back to the apartment. C’mere.” He wrapped one arm around his daughter and threw the other into the air with a shower of sparks. April closed her eyes and braced herself for the whoosh!, the floaty feeling, and the sensation of every atom of her body pulling themselves back together.

Only when she felt solid ground beneath her feet again, did she open her eyes.

“We’re back where we started!” she exclaimed.

“Huh. Weird.” Wyatt flexed his fingers. “Let me try again.”

Whoosh!

This time, April kept her eyes open, watching the world around her turn to jelly and become bathed in a bright, white light. She kept her eyes open until it was too bright to see, until the whiteness burned hot into her retinas, forcing her eyelids to close.

She was only momentarily surprised when she once again felt solid ground and saw the overgrown platform appear around her.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“I dunno.” Wyatt looked at his hands, which were glowing with all sorts of pretty lights. “Maybe it’s the energy of this place. Maybe my use of forbidden magic is being punished. Maybe your lawless nature is rubbing off on me. Hopefully it’s the first one…”

“Does that mean we have to walk?” April asked, eyeing up the shadows nervously.

“Maybe.” He cracked his knuckles, dispersing some of the sparkly lights into the night sky. “OK. I think I’ve got one attempt left in me, but I might not be able to get us all the way home.”

April took hold of him and crossed her fingers.

April looked around the space with wonder plastered all over her face. The kind of wonder Wyatt had the first time he had walked into this room, all those years prior.

And a few times over the years when he was trollied and forgot where he was.

She walked slowly to the centre of the room and turned a slow circle like she was surveying a fine work of art and not a waster’s basement in Windenburg.

“What is this place?” she asked, as she commenced oohing and aahing over an illuminated snowman.

“This is Becky’s basement. It’s about a thirty minute walk from the apartment, so let’s get going.”

“Who’s Becky?”

“A friend of mine,” Wyatt said non-committedly. He had brought them here because he knew that even if he materialised into a room full of people, those people would be way too trashed to believe what they were seeing. But no one seemed to be around, not even Becky herself who practically lived in her basement. Not that he could blame her – the rest of her house was a shithole.

He took April’s hand. “Come on, there’s a window next to the sauna we can sneak out of.”

“It has a sauna?”

“Yeah.” Wyatt had a flash of intrusive, technicolour memories of being naked in there with his various friends over the years when they were blasted, most notably with Alan (or was it Adam?) – that dude was wild when he’d had a bit of spiked punch.

Damn. He hoped that April wasn’t ‘listening’. He’d never really considered how smutty his thoughts were before he’d had a mind-reading daughter.

“This way.”

“Wait, this place looks really fun! Can I look around a bit first?”

“Bar’s there, TV’s there, game machine there, and that’s the bubble blower. Nothing much to see—”

“A bubble blower?” April’s eyes lit up. “What does that do?”

“Uh, you load in flavoured mixtures and blow bubbles with it.”

“…Can I try it?”

“Apes, the bubbles have, uh, mind altering substances in…”

“Oh. Like the strawberry tea?”

Wyatt could hear footsteps on the basement stairs. He was surprised April couldn’t. “Kinda.”

“I really enjoyed the strawberry tea, and all the things it made me see that night – apart from Caleb’s limp noodle, of course.”

Wyatt got another flash of memory of also seeing Caleb’s ‘limp noodle’ as he lifted him into the air, watching the vampire’s pale but perfect body twist and writhe on the knife edge of his magic, hissing and spitting like a rabid animal. He recalled the beat of panic on Caleb’s face in the moments he was soaring moonwards, before being blown to pieces. That memory dominoed into the next, everything he tried so hard not to think about. The hot, sticky blood on his fingers as his charge drowned him. The look on his mum’s face as she approached him and brought him into her arms… all that horror because of a pot of fucking tea.

Maybe April wasn’t reading his mind; she seemed oblivious to his inner torment. “Can I please try the bubble blower? Will Becky mind?”

“She won’t,” came the cool reply of Wyatt’s green-haired buddy from behind him.

Wyatt sighed and turned to face her. “Hey Becky.”

“Hey Wy, long time no see. How’d you get in?”

“We magically teleported.”

April’s mouth fell open but Becky just rolled her eyes, as he’d expected.

“He’s always gotta claim to be a magician. You came in my back door again, didn’t you?” She asked with a cheeky smirk.

Wyatt nodded towards his daughter, subtly telling Becky that he had company and that she should behave herself.

“Ah,” Becky said, cottoning on to Wyatt’s cues. “So, who’s the chick?”

“She’s my little sister, Amy.”

“Awesome! Didn’t know you had a sister. Great to meet you Amy. Any friend of Wy’s is a friend of mine. Hey, take a pew and I’ll get this set up. What’s your poison?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” April said sweetly.

“Which flavour would you like? I’ve got Fairy Fizz on at the moment. Saul was feeling girly.” She added to Wyatt.

“Fairy fizz sounds awesome! I love fairies! Do you think I’ll see any?”

“She’s cute!” Becky grinned and took a seat. “I like her. Are you on the bubbles too, Wy? Or do you want something harder?”

Wyatt hesitated. It had been a good while since he’d had anything stronger than a coffee and even longer since he’d visited Becky. She was such a bad influence on him, always had been, with her hedonism house and bottomless supply of substances.

“I dunno,” he muttered. “We should probably get back, Amy.”

April pouted. “But I haven’t had any fun tonight.”

“You’ve had loads of fun—”

“My girlfriend ditched me, then I got robbed and thrown off a train in Shiteville.”

“Shiteville? Oof,” Becky took a nozzle. “That’s a pretty rough area, lucky that you didn’t get murdered. Or catch something. Ick.” She prompted April to pick up the nearest nozzle. “You can’t tell me that you’ve walked all the way from Shiteville, Wy, and you’re not even gonna stop for a pop.”

Wyatt dragged a hand through his hair and looked at his feet. “Look, truth is – I’ve been trying to get clean, and Amy here has never really had anything.”

“I’ve had your tea.”

“Woah. If you’ve handled Wyatt’s tea, you can definitely handle some bubbles.” Becky brought the nozzle to her lips and took a big breath, releasing it gently and blowing a cloud of iridescent bubbles in April’s direction.

“Ooh!” April gushed.

“I’ll turn it down to the lowest setting for you,” she said to April. “And,” she turned to Wyatt, “I won’t offer you anything stronger,” Becky promised. “But come on, the night you’ve had? You deserve to kick back and take the edge off.”

“Please Wy?” April pleaded. “Can we stay and blow some bubbles? Just for a bit?”

Wyatt looked at her hopeful little (magically adjusted) face and suddenly got the overwhelming feeling that he was forgetting something. But April was right – it had been a crap night so far – and it was only a few bubbles.

“Yeah, sure,” he conceded. “Why not? Let’s blow off some steam.”

Lilith flicked through the channels on the television.

Advert for deodorant she didn’t need, soap opera, advert for holidays she’d never take, naked people on a beach, advert for board games she’d never play, show about plastic surgery gone wrong… okay, that one looked interesting. She cradled her drink and tuned in, just in time to see a woman who had had what looked to be failed rhinoplasty, if her blackened nasal tip was anything to go by. Lilith was immediately hooked, mentally going through the procedure in her head and tutting as the poor, vain woman moaned and whined because she’d chosen a cheap surgeon.

She’d not really thought about how much she missed her surgery before that moment, but goddamn, did she miss her surgery. As she rued her wasted existence, to the tune of a teenager complaining about her botched self-done lip fillers, she became aware of a knocking in the distance.

It sounded like it was coming from the door to the flower shop, which was shut up. The lights were off, the door was locked, the ‘closed’ sign was facing outwards. Even the stupid girl from the show who’d injected herself with gelatine could’ve figured out that the shop was not operational for the evening.

She turned up the volume on the TV but, the joy of vampiric powers, she could still hear the knocking, growing evermore persistent.

With a resigned sigh, Lilith – now a little tipsy and little pissed off, staggered to her feet and made her way to the flower shop to tell whoever it was to ‘bugger off’.

She didn’t have to reach the door to tell it was Jessica; the officer’s brain went ten miles a minute.

Lilith undid the latch and opened up the door to the frigid evening. “Jessica? What are you doing here?”

Jessica stepped inside and closed the door behind her. “I’m meeting with Wyatt. He said he wanted to pick his mother’s brain about a plant concoction? Although I hope it’s not too dry a subject because, my gosh, can their conversations be boring! Not that I’m complaining that I’m helping a man reunite with his mum, but what even is ‘datura’?” she shrugged. “He also said that he needed to tell me something important.”

The idiot. Lilith blinked, trying to sober up and simultaneously remind herself what Jessica knew. She knew that Lilith was a vampire and that Broof was a witch. They hadn’t yet disclosed that Wyatt was also a witch and that the ‘unusual bathtub’ that Jessica had once spied on her waddle from the flower shop to the apartment was actually a cauldron housing various failed stages of part-made vampire cure, so he was probably going to tell her that.

Jessica was still talking. “How is Broof doing? We’re still trying to figure out what became of Rose’s daughter, Jenny.”

Lilith had already figured this out, of course, way back at the start of this whole mess. Jessica and her metal-headed cohorts had been researching Jenny’s fate for three months, and Lilith had cracked it in an afternoon. She felt pretty smug about that. Maybe for her next venture, she’d be a cop.

Of course, she couldn’t tell Jessica that Broof’s granddaughter was the missing friend of the famous April Moss and was living as a vampire under that very roof. So she just shrugged.

“You’ll figure it out, one day,” Lilith said with certainty.

“So,” Jessica said brightly after an awkward, but very brief, silence. “Wyatt?”

“Oh right, yeah, He’s not here, he’s out at a musical with A – a friend.”

“Will he be long?” Jessica frowned. “I’ve had to take two buses to get here, and on the second one no one would give me a seat, so I was falling about like a deflating blimp. My feet are killing me.”

“He’s already been gone a couple of hours, so maybe another hour or so?”

“Can I wait downstairs in the snug, please? If I don’t sit soon, I think my feet might actually fall off.”

Lilith looked Jessica up and down and felt the first pangs of pity that had started to override her desire to go back to the basement apartment and guzzle down some more of Sage’s booze cabinet.

She and Jessica had nothing in common. The swollen young woman would not be a good drinking buddy, weighed down as she was with a germinating child, and Sage would probably make an appearance to berate Lilith from beyond the grave, the old hag. She should just send her away. But watching Jessica shift her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot was pulling on Lilith’s un-beating heartstrings.

“Sure, you can join me. Are you into medical TV?”

“Is ‘Oh God, My Poor Face!’ on? That’s my guilty pleasure. Did you see the one where the pensioner tried to give herself a facelift with a staple gun?”

Aha, so they did have something in common. Lilith grinned and led Jessica towards the stairs.

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