We'll Stand In That Place and other stories

by Michelle Cahill

  At last, here are our seats. I double-check my boarding pass. Row 27. I have the window and Percy has the middle, the aisle: both. I edge into my seat, pull the seatbelt across. Click the shiny buckle, tighten it. I coax Percy with a gentle tug on his harness. Come on.

  This is our first flight together, almost thwarted. A fuss: first at check in, again at the security scan. I unfolded the letter, showed them. The men in uniform just shrugged. The short, doughy one: I’ve bloody seen everything now. Picked up my bag from the conveyer belt, slung it over my shoulder and marched on with Percy, all eyes fixed on us. Expected another hurdle at the boarding gate but the stewardess—a fog of make-up, a fug of musk, roses, (a hint of vanilla?)—waved us through, no questions.

  Good morning, ma’am: the foggy-fuggy stewardess leans in from the aisle, pencilled-in eyebrows arched in permanent surprise. Do you need any assistance here? Looks from me to Percy, back again. Is hers a grimace or a smile? Skin pulled so tight, no lines, no creases. I inspect the edges of her face for a splitting seam, pulling stitches, will it to peel away completely from her scalp. No thank you, we’re fine. Just make sure you fasten . . . scans the passenger list . . . Percy’s seatbelt. I nod, compliant.

  Have a nice flight. She gathers Percy in from the aisle. Wouldn’t want anyone to trip. Turns on her heel, a spinning top, a whirling dervish. Gone. I twist and pull; no matter which way I bend it, the belt will not fit Percy. His body does not make sense here. I feel my pulse quicken; beads of sweat collect across my brow. I tuck it under him, hide it. Hope the dervish will not notice it. Percy adjusts his sitting position, the cold metal intrusion against his warm body.

  Let’s not worry about it; I worry about it. Percy blinks, unruffled. He does not seem to mind his safety compromised. Where is my phone, interrogate my handbag, fish in its leathery interior, a leather-jacket, a fish out of water. Where is it? I find it. A selfie with Percy. Stretch my arm to its limit; fit us both in the frame, faces close together. Five photos, scroll through my camera roll, delete all but one: Percy looking directly at the camera. Upload the photo to Facebook, post a status update: Mile high club. Switch the phone to airplane mode, drop it in my bag.

  A safety message on the tiny television screen hung from the ceiling: In the case of an emergency, always fit your own oxygen mask before helping others. I pause, both hands kid-glove deep in my handbag, look up at Percy. His eyelids are drooping, gently closing. I try to imagine it, his narrow face too narrow for the mask. How would he breathe? A panic; a panic for Percy and his tiny burning airless lungs collapsing. My brain is frantic-electric, synapses pop-pop bursting light bulbs, shattered glass shards pierce my skull. My shallow breathing, shallow breathing. Pass the oxygen mask.

  Life jackets are stored under your seat. The dervish again; the yellow vest, her wild-wide, melodramatic gestures. She tugs at the fasteners with Christmas beetle fingernails, hard metallic casings, exoskeletons; lifts the little whistle to her bottle-brush red lips, pouting, blowing suggestively. I look away. Feel the place under my seat for the life jacket; throw me a life-line.

  Familiarise yourself with the brace position.

  Percy’s eyes now completely closed. He is breathing, easing into the rhythm of sleep. I pull out mints and a novel. Pop a mint into my mouth, the feeling of flavour-heat bursting, tingling, my taste buds conspiring with my skin. Shove my bag back under the seat, open my novel, the dog-eared page from the airport bar. Drinking, too much thinking, more drinking. Fingers slick with hot chip grease, turning the oiled pages of fiction.

  The plane’s engines start up, a lurch in my stomach, a churn and a surge of adrenalin. Heart beats faster. Flying: an anxiety heightened since Olivia died. Twenty years together: half my life, my other half. My heart split open and spilt out thick and black like squid ink, blank like a seamless night sky stripped of stars. Last summer was her last season. A purple bed of jacaranda flowers, evenings alive with crickets vibrating, her final crash through ocean emerging with salt-crust skin. She abandoned me to summer and my treasonous mind, curled up like a brown snake ready to strike out from the tinderbox grass. Panic attacks in toilet cubicles, the graffiti speaking evil things, sharp as knives. Trouble sleeping; the void nights, hours stretched out membrane-thin, the no-sound of no other body breathing, the house echoing with her absence.

  Come to visit—my sister—it will be good for you. But the flying. Ask the doctor for something. Small white pills washed down in the airport bar with too many glasses of white wine. And Percy—well not Percy specifically—a quiet companion for your flight, to make you less flighty (pun intended); for emotional support, he said. The doctor’s unorthodox prescription and a neatly folded letter to flash when needed.

  I did not want a hamster, not after hearing about Pebbles. Poor Pebbles, water-logged fur, rushing bubbles: flushed down an airport toilet. What monsters, that airline. I decided on Percy: calm and very handsome, he does not eat or shit too much, and too large to push under water into a porcelain grave.

  Do you mind an extra houseguest, sister?

  Is he house-trained?

  Now here is Percy sleeping, oblivious to my jittering nerves, the rising drone of engines short-circuiting my thoughts. As the plane taxies away from the terminal, I stare out the oval window; men wearing hi-vis vests and headphones, semaphoring neon-orange flags and LED light wands. May the force be with me.

  Between the window’s perspex layers trapped moisture scatters into droplets. Spread the open novel on my lap, crack the spine, and pull the window shade down to block the view. I close my eyes, hand on Percy tentatively, not wanting to wake him.

  The shade snaps up with a bang; the shock of sunlight wakes Percy and makes me jump. My novel falls to the floor, words spill into upturned sentences, broken syntax.

  Sorry, ma’am, window shades need to be raised during take-off for safety reasons. It is the dervish again, spinning the air. Her arm brushes Percy; he stays calm against the wake of my eyes rolling in my skull sockets.

  The plane lines up at the start of the runway, time to split from the black tarmac. I take a final earthbound look out of the window, watch the lift of an aircraft; the weight dips momentarily, then becomes buoyant. I trace its trajectory. Another descends to land, flattening its gradient to ground from oblique to parallel. The two planes’ intersecting choreography; the elegant geometry of crossing hemispheres, while everything about me is at right angles, bent triangular, fears laid out acutely and leaning hypotenuse. Jaw clenches and teeth grind. Just try to stay between the lines: focus on the black tracks of swimming lanes, the white lanes painted on freeways, imagine the flight tracing a landscape of ley lines laid out by standing stones and causeways. My animal fear of being launched into the earth’s atmosphere.

  Fight or flight.

  I reach again for Percy—he has settled back to sleeping, rhythmic breathing—I close my eyes. The engines rev. We pick up speed along the runway. Hair prickles on end; a thousand needles stabbing into my skin, or a bed of nails and my back bled, restless like a princess with a pea hidden under my mattress. My body presses into the seat, clammy hand bearing down on Percy’s flank. We peel away from the ground. Try to slow my in-and-out breath, my rising heart rate. Trick my body, a free diver conjuring aquatic ancestors. Blood-shift into lungs, contract and release my spleen and flood my body with oxygen, red blood cells. Trapped in a net, dorsal fin twisting to be freed. Eyes shut tight, air pressure ears pop.

  Flash back to the last plane trip with Olivia; the release of tears, a relief. I feel the plane relax into equilibrium and open my eyes. My heart reduces its canter and an anvil weight eases off my chest. I take my hand off Percy, brush my sweaty palm against my skirt; it is moulting season.

  An announcement from the captain: something about our altitude, or is it attitude? Fine weather at our destination. The seatbelt light switches off but I keep mine fastened. I look out of the window and across the curve of the juddering wing; ordered rivets and layered panels. Scatte
red clouds spread out beneath us, break apart into a tessellated view of the city, its tentacle suburbs. Then open swathes of green, interrupted by rising and falling hills. Twisting roads and rivers sever the landscape. The vast blue dome of sky embraces us. I fizz: with the bird’s-eye view of the planet, pills and wine, and a lurking predator; its shadow spilling over me, teeth bared and waiting to swallow me.

  Special meal for Mister, ah, Percy? A steward holds out a tray covered in foil; his face fixed with foundation, eyes cut out with black liner. Together with the dervish, they make a fine burlesque act.

  Thank you, yes. Unlatch the table, place the food in front of Percy, peel back the foil. Reel at the bain-marie drift, inspect the contents. Rice, a vegetable-dice, and mystery protein; a container of granola and a tiny bread-brick lolling on the tray. Go on. Percy tastes the rice, the roll, picks at the granola.

  White wine—anything but sauvignon blanc—I tell the steward when he hands me my tray. I leave the meal wrapped in foil, bite-size the chocolate bar, untwist the bottle cap and pour the wine into the plastic cup, gulp it down. Another?

  * * *

  I must have slept; my tray-table cleared away and lifted back into place. It takes some blurred moments to understa+nd the sound. Percy: standing with one foot on the armrest, the other foot gripping the dervish. He is stretched out, all neck and limbs, and the noise: somewhere between a car horn and the strangle-meow of a cat.

  Get this creature off me the dervish screams. Her male sidekick with his mouth fixed in a mute o-shape, hands clutched against his chest in pantomime. Her scream scales my spine.

  Percy crashes against seats, wallops heads of passengers, scatters refuse. His unleashed yowling racks me. Unhook Percy and jerk him back into the seat. Everyone watching us.

  He attacked me. He tried to kill me. The dervish sobs, whirling down the aisle.

  A downy quiet falls, a formless spectre all around me.

  * * *

  A doppelganger takes the place of the dervish. This new one trundles past row 27, wine bottles rattling on the trolley. I am invisible, banished.

  Please return your seats to the upright position and make sure your seatbelts are fastened and your tray tables stowed.

  Out of the window, fields contract to suburban sprawl, shrink to an urban grid. The plane takes a wide sweep over the coast. The blue of ocean, white waves push up against yellow sand, row after row of sandstone cliff faces fall away from land.

  Wheels lower with a jolt; we reacquaint with the estranged earth; a gentle bump, a long exhale.

  We are amongst the last passengers to leave the plane, along with a couple wrestling a bucking horse-child and an old man propped up with a walking stick.

  * * *

  A woman sinks into the wide embrace of her sister in an airport terminal; a slack leather harness hangs from her hand.

  A cleaner picks through a plane cabin wearing latex gloves. He scoops up a dog-eared paperback from the floor and drops it into his garbage bag. On the seat, he finds the tail feather of a peacock and turns it over, admiring the kaleidoscope colours.

  Thirty Sacks

  Audrey Molloy

  ‘I ’m just taking the dog out for a walk,’ she said, pulling on a black puffer jacket and grabbing her keys. She strode along the pavement, past low fences lined with shaved hedges. Behind tidy gardens, leadlight windows reflected a hundred winter suns. The dog pulled her off the path to sniff intently at specific trees—identical in all respects as far as she could see, but special, somehow, to the dog, who ignored so many, then made a bee-line for the chosen ones. She let him sniff his fill. For dogs, smell is the strongest sense. You couldn’t rush it. As soon as she was past the houses she unclipped the lead from his collar and the dog was gone, padding his way down the railway sleeper steps to the park below.

  She loved it down here in the evening. Just when she thought her nerves must surely fray, she would use this excuse to get away for half an hour. It was a lifeline. She sat on a bench and stared at the water for some time while the dog investigated the sloping bank. Mostly her mind drifted aimlessly, but occasionally she thought of him.

  She took a different route on the return journey, strolling now, aware of what lay ahead. Arsenic hour—that time of day when it all unraveled with the kids. And then, once they were asleep? Perhaps that was what she dreaded more. The dog was tired now and plodded beside her, tongue flapping from his joker’s smile.

  The woman turned the last corner onto their street and that’s when she saw them; dozens of black garbage sacks, neatly lined up like a colony of emperor penguins on pack ice. They completely covered the nature strip, each one full to the top, which was tied with a piece of garden twine. Her neighbour was bending over one, retying it. Another was ripped, soft toys and kids’ books spilling from it.

  ‘The eyes have been picked out of this lot already,’ he said to the woman, a jerk of his head referring to the line of sacks. ‘A couple came through with a van and ripped open a whole bunch of them and took heaps of stuff. God only knows what they would want it for—it’s just rubbish,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing what they take. Last time we had a household waste collection someone took a broken ironing board. Honestly!’

  ‘That’s quite a spring clean you’ve done there, George,’ said the woman, flustered at the last moment in case she had his name wrong—she’d only spoken to him a couple of times in the years she had lived there. She knew his kids’ names, although she had never spoken to them. He lived several houses down and on the opposite side. His kids were about ten years older than hers. She was on a different timetable to him, a different circuit of sports, music lessons, play-dates.

  She could still recall meeting him the week they had moved in. He’d come into the garden when the guys were unpacking the truck.

  ‘Welcome to the neighbourhood,’ he’d said, and shook her hand hard. ‘It’s a great street—you’ll be happy here.’ There was a kid on a skateboard; skinny calves above converse sneakers, fair hair falling in his eyes. ‘That’s Rich,’ he’d said. ‘He’s our eldest. You’ll always remember my kids’ names because they’re R-P-A, just like the Royal Prince Alfred hospital where they were born. Rich, Pete and Annabel.’ He’d smiled a train-spotter’s smile.

  That was nearly ten years ago now. She’d rarely spoken to him since. She was sure he was George. He finished retying the last bag and surveyed his work.

  ‘Thirty sacks,’ he announced.

  ‘Thirty? That’s really impressive,’ said the woman. ‘We could do with a clear-out like that but my husband’s a hoarder. Throws out nothing.’

  ‘Well, you know my wife left me?’ George said then, staring at his polished shoes for a moment. The dog looked up at the woman, then sat down, panting heavily.

  ‘No, I’m sorry to hear that. I had no idea,’ said the woman, as she searched her memory banks for the face of his former wife. Ah, now she could picture her—younger than him, girlish-looking, ponytail hair. She was a quiet woman. They had nodded to each other when they happened to pass on the street.

  ‘Sarah? Isn’t it? What a shame. I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Sa-ra.’ He emphasised the ‘ah’ of the first syllable. ‘A year ago today,’ he said. ‘I could apply for a divorce today, you know, but she’s being impossible about the settlement.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘She was having an affair, you know. For five years. Five years! Her work colleague—some history professor at her school.’ The woman remembered now that George had once mentioned that Sara lectured part-time at the university; that she’d published a book before they had kids.

  ‘And now she’s trying to clear me out,’ said George. ‘Can you believe that? She was the unfaithful one. I have to take her to court now. She’s forcing me to spend tens of thousands of dollars in useless legal fees.’ He was getting into his stride.

  ‘He’s sixty, for God’s sake,’ he said, spitting the words out. ‘She’s only forty-four.’ The woma
n stared at him now, taking in every word. This was possible.

  ‘And he’s fat! Just sits around drinking beer all the time,’ he went on. ‘A total slob! The kids hate him. Rich doesn’t talk to her anymore. He’s over eighteen now. He can choose where he wants to live, and guess what? He lives right here with me. The other two still go to school here. And, the stupid thing is, when they’re with her they have to travel all the way across the city. It’s ridiculous!’

  ‘Poor things . . .’ the woman began, but he wasn’t finished.

  ‘I mean, they’re only kids—they need their sleep. I’m up at five-thirty every day anyway. To go the gym.’ He threw his shoulders back slightly and sucked in his belly, his striped shirt peeling away from his chinos.

  The dog stood and stretched. He cocked his leg against one of the black sacks. The corners of George’s mouth curled in disgust. The woman pulled the dog back and instructed him to sit again. She could see George’s daughter, Annabel, loitering near the gate, just within earshot. She was about thirteen years old. She looked like her mother. Same face. Same ponytail. Same coltish limbs. A brunette in skinny jeans and a cream sweater came out of the house with a laundry basket in her arms, glossed lips parting over perfect teeth as she approached.

  ‘This is my girlfriend, Monique,’ said George. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, ‘this is . . .’ he frowned uncomfortably, then added, ‘our neighbour.’ Monique leaned her head sideways towards him like a cat looking to be stroked. She had long silky hair, the colour of mahogany, tied in a loose knot at the back of her head. Her face looked as if it had been carved out of timber, if timber could glow like that. She nodded and placed the basket of old crockery on the nature strip next to the black sacks, then wandered back towards the house. She touched Annabel lightly, affectionately, on the head as she passed her but the girl just flinched and stayed where she was.