We'll Stand In That Place and other stories

by Michelle Cahill

  ‘She’s moving in,’ said George. He had his hands in his pockets and his small eyes followed Monique into the house. The woman looked at him again, more closely, scanning his stippled face, his crowded teeth, the smudge of hair in the cleft of his chin.

  ‘She’s great,’ she said, and after a pause, ‘How did you guys get together?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s fantastic,’ he said. ‘Internet dating. Can you believe that? We’ve been together six months now. The kids love her. It’s been good.’ He rocked back and forth on his heels, a smile plastered across his face.

  The woman touched a loose strand of blonde hair on her cheek and tucked it behind her ear. She glanced up the street towards her house. He would be wondering where she was, would probably call her to check. ‘So, do you still see Sara?’ she said, quietly now, acutely aware of the listening child. ‘Do you meet for lunch or a coffee now and then?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said George, the smile sliding off his face. ‘Monique is very much against that. My wife did an unforgivable thing. Think about it. I’m out running around, looking after the kids, working, and she’s off every weekend, seeing this guy. Doing the business.’ He stopped rocking and sighed. ‘Same thing happened to poor Monique. She gets it.’

  ‘That’s just so sad,’ said the woman. Her phone vibrated in her vest pocket, close to her heart. ‘How long were you together?’

  ‘I’ve known her thirty years,’ said George, surveying the line of sacks along the grassy strip. Thirty years.

  ‘She came around last week to collect her wedding dress,’ he said. ‘I told her I was getting rid of the whole lot and she’d better come and get what she wanted. But that was all she took.’ He stared at the sacks again. The woman was silent.

  ‘Know what she said to me?’ said George. ‘I made her feel bad. I made her feel bad! I mean, I did everything. I looked after everyone. I worked my ass off, looked after the kids, coached soccer, cooked the meals, kept the house in order so she could work. And it made her feel bad!’ His voice was rising now. Annabel could surely hear him. ‘Now she does all these things for her lover—cooks, cleans, shops—and she says she feels like a real woman. He makes her feel good about herself! I mean, seriously, is she mad?’ He was laughing now, his lips twisted in an ugly sneer. He shook his head.

  ‘All the same, this must be cathartic—clearing out all this stuff,’ said the woman, switching off the phone in her pocket.

  ‘Cathartic!’ He almost shouted, raising his hands in a magician’s flourish. ‘That’s the word to describe it. That’s exactly what it is.’

  The woman studied Annabel in the failing light. She was only about five years older than her own daughter. She couldn’t imagine how her daughter would cope without her mother at that age. Or her father. ‘Well George, I am sorry to hear that story. I hope it all works out for you,’ she said and she crossed the street with the dog straining at the lead.

  The woman walked past the picket fences, backed with lilly pillies and magnolias. When she reached her own gate, she dawdled for as long as she could, emptying the mailbox, pondering each piece of junk mail before disposing of it, unread, into the garbage bin. She spotted a weed in her garden bed and spent some time pulling it carefully, trying to get the whole root system out. There were a few more weeds that beckoned. She could stay outside here for longer; gather her thoughts. From inside the house she could hear the wails that dominated this part of each day before the silence took over.

  She turned the key in the front door and walked down the hall. She passed her bedroom door and glanced inside. Up on top of the wardrobe she could spy the edge of the white box that contained her wedding dress. Best to get that out soon, and a few other things that were hers, while the going was good. There was no guarantee that he would ever let her back in to get it.

  A Moveable Farce

  Emily Paull

  M ichael had been living in Paris for almost three months at the time of the attacks. He still thought of Cottesloe as home, even though he’d sold his bed and his PlayStation and his car in order to move away from it. He was the uncouth Aussie, the foreigner. He was only just learning not to flinch at the sound of his own nasal vowel sounds when he spoke, to enjoy hot, bitter coffee with lots of sugar, and to exist on a diet of toast and boiled eggs in order to pay his rent each month. Michael had pictured an apartment with white curtains that looked out over the Seine, where he could sit in his window seat and write pages of inspired prose as the sun came up, but what he had ended up with didn’t even have a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower. It looked onto a damp, grey alley filled with metal bins, where tom cats fought in the night unless one of the neighbours thought to get up and empty a bucket of water onto them. He wasn’t getting any writing done. Instead, he was working in a café in a street popular with tourists. The café was owned by a Tasmanian named John—so he had come half way around the world to do something he could have done at home—and what few French customers there were thought their accents were amusing. Michael had introduced some of them to the concept of the flat white, but they found it a poor substitute for a latte.

  It was late one night when he sat down in front of his laptop, staring down the cursor. He’d thrown open the doors to the small balconette, despite the alley outside smelling like a mixture of human and feline piss. Through headphones, he was listening to a radio station half the world away, where it was the next morning. At the top of the hour, a news bulletin sounded. The sullen, sombre voice of the newscaster broke through his procrastination.

  ‘Breaking news out of Paris, where we are hearing reports of a mass shooting inside the Bataclan Theatre . . .’

  Michael had the sensation of having been ripped out of his own timeline, and he pulled the headphones out of his ears. Outside, sirens were wailing, but far away. He felt suddenly exposed, like there was a person standing behind him, but when he turned, there was no one there. He ran to the balconette and hurried to close the windows. As he yanked at the curtains, he glanced at the building across the alleyway and locked eyes with the woman who lived there, doing the same thing. She had a small child in her arms. She was whispering to it, rocking him back and forth and trying to make him sleep. She looked terrified. She wrenched the curtains shut and closed Michael out.

  His mobile phone was almost out of battery, rattling with so many text messages and missed calls that it had spun its way across the kitchen table and was perilously close to the edge. Nineteen missed calls from his mother; two and a text from his Dad in Sydney. As he picked it up, it began to ring again and the ID on the screen brought up a smiling photograph of his mother in her gardening gloves, holding a pile of mulch out to the camera to show a wriggling earthworm in the middle of her palms. He answered before the first ring was complete.

  ‘Mum, hi,’ he said, breathless. ‘I was writing. I only just heard.’

  She was crying. ‘Thank God,’ she managed to say. ‘Oh, thank God.’ Michael was filled with heavy guilt. Her only son was on the other side of the world, where something terrible was happening, and he couldn’t even do something as simple as answer his phone. It wasn’t even like he had been doing something important. For all she knew, he’d been at that concert.

  ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t pick up.’ He wanted to cry too, so he kept his voice soft, sneaking the words around the lump in his throat.

  They spoke for a while, or rather, he listened while she sobbed and told him all the awful things that they were saying on the news. The stadium, where the French President had been watching a soccer match, had been targeted by a suicide bomber. On the Rue Alibert, men with semi-automatic rifles had forced bars and nightclubs to close their customers inside. Fifteen people eating dinner at a Cambodian restaurant had been killed. Five more were killed a few streets south. It was around midnight when three gunmen had entered the Bataclan Theatre and fired indiscriminately on the crowd gathered there watching the Eagles of Death Metal. The death toll there was still in flux.

  After a while,
Michael moved onto his threadbare couch and turned on the television without sound. The city was in lockdown. People were being urged to stay in their homes. All over the internet, French strangers were posting messages—If you have nowhere to go, come here—#porteouverte. Pray for Paris, they were saying. It was like someone had reached down Michael’s throat and was twisting his heart, easing it back up his oesophagus.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ said his mother in Cottesloe.

  ‘Me either,’ said Michael, in Paris.

  He went to bed that night but not before he checked that the doors and windows were locked and pushed the couch against the balconette doors. Climbing under the sheets, his ears tingled with the pressure of straining to hear what was going on outside. Were the sirens getting closer or farther away? Around 4 a.m. he pressed a pillow to his head and finally drifted off into a kind of sleep. When he woke, his shoulders were so sore from being hunched that he could hardly move.

  He did not go to the café that day, and no one rang to ask him why.

  The next day, when he did go back, John was not there. Claudine, the day manager, took his hand and looked into his eyes in a way that made him uncomfortable. ‘He was there, Michael. A man two rows in front of him was killed. I am thinking he will not come to work for some time.’ He could tell that she was trying not to cry. He wanted to tell her that it was okay to cry if she wanted to, because something sad had happened, and yet, he also understood. The two of them were both unharmed and did not know anyone who had been killed. It would be selfish to cry, when the worst they had suffered was a night of broken sleep, a case of the jitters, a certain chink in the trust that they felt in the goodness of the world.

  Claudine was a capable manager, small but well muscled and with a tattoo of the cat in the hat on one of her forearms. She had dyed blonde hair and very dark eyebrows. Michael had no idea how old she was, but he knew it was older than him. The way she spoke to him had the same incredulous, pitying tone that some of his teachers had used on him at the private school he used to go to. It was like she couldn’t believe that someone as naïve as him was still walking around. She was kind to him, of course, but she didn’t take him seriously. No one did.

  John came back to work looking like a reflection of himself. He’d lost colour and seemed blurry around the edges. His hands shook when he carried the cups of coffee and he spilled hot liquid into the saucers. Customers looked at him and pursed their lips in the same sympathetic way. He stayed long enough each day to prove that he could, then went home at midday, leaving Claudine with the keys. After a month of this, he called a staff meeting and announced that he was returning to Tasmania.

  Claudine was angry, but Michael was almost relieved. ‘You are letting the terrorists win,’ she spat, then let loose a stream of angry French. John listened without trying to defend himself but hung his head a little lower.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ John said. ‘I’ve already sold the café. I want to be with my family. My brother and his family are back in Hobart and I’ve never even met my smallest nephew. Maybe the new owner will keep you on—do you want me to ask him?’

  She shook her head and tapped a cigarette out of her packet, wiping away a tear.

  They stacked the chairs in silence and headed out onto the dark street. There were puddles all over the road and the air smelled thick and dusty. Under the amber glow of a streetlight, John placed his hand on Michael’s shoulder. ‘What about you, Mike? Where will you go?’

  Michael shrugged and reached his hands into his pockets. It wasn’t quite cold enough to snow. He thought of Cottesloe Beach this time of year, and almost willed his skin to sunburn with longing. John patted him on the arm again and turned for home.

  What would he do? He’d come here to write, to live in the city that had inspired Ernest Hemingway and his lost generation. Instead, he’d spent every moment with a sensation like he was waiting for a train that had been cancelled.

  Behind him, he heard running footsteps, and when he turned, Claudine was calling to him from the corner. Her bottle-blonde hair was squashed under a knitted raspberry hat. ‘Michael, don’t go home yet. Come to a party with me. An end of the world party.’ She laughed, and on the silent street it was almost inappropriately loud.

  ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘You don’t have a job anymore,’ she said. ‘You may as well drink!’

  The party was held at the apartment of a couple Claudine had known since she was a child. No one could tell him for sure if Edgar and Raquel were married. Edgar was in his late fifties and had a look about him like Pete Townsend from The Who, with his shoulder length hair artfully cut so as to look like it had not been cut in years. He wore a mustard coloured corduroy jacket with a black t-shirt underneath, both of which smelt of camphor. Raquel was tall and tanned with curly blond hair falling around her face like leaves. She was dressed in a man’s white business shirt tied with a scarf at the waist and Michael could see the fine, fair hairs on her legs. She was smoking as she greeted Claudine at the door, a trail of smoke seeking the ceiling while the women kissed one another on both cheeks. Their voices alternated between anger and amusement, but he had no idea what either one of them was saying. Eventually, Raquel put her arm around Michael and led him into the kitchenette, where she handed him a bottle of red wine and a child’s tumbler with Tintin on it.

  ‘So, Michael, Claudine tells me you are from Australia.’

  Michael nodded. ‘Perth. It’s on the western side.’

  ‘Yes, I have been there many years ago. It was very . . . warm.’

  ‘Michael is a writer,’ said Claudine, using the hob on the stove to light a cigarette and levering it into her mouth. She took off her beret and stuffed it into the pocket of her coat.

  Raquel smiled but to Michael’s relief she did not ask him what he was writing about. She didn’t seem to care. Already, she was rifling through the pantry and pulling out cans of butter beans, creamed corn and asparagus.

  They were going to eat anything they had, pretend they were in a bunker, living off rations.

  The end of the world. Michael couldn’t even begin to imagine it. He’d always assumed that it would be someone else’s problem. Where he was from, most people didn’t even believe in climate change.

  Edgar joined them, and taking the wine from Michael, he poured first into his own cup and then into Michael’s.

  ‘You should drink. This bottle is older than Claudine. Luckily, for wine, this is a good thing.’

  Michael obediently took a sip. He laughed to himself, suddenly remembering the last party his mother had hosted: a fundraiser to build a well in a Cambodian village. She’d invited everyone— co-workers, the school P and C, members of her tennis club—and Michael had been obliged to ferry around a plate of stuffed olives, smiling at these women as they, one after the other, commented on how grown up he was. The drunkest of them all was Sheera, who worked in real estate. She had begun to dance around 9 p.m., and invited Michael to join her, but he declined when she ducked to the floor and flicked her hair like she was in a music video. His mother, possibly the only person there for the sake of the Cambodian villagers, mercifully had not seen.

  Michael looked around. Edgar and Raquel’s place was a studio apartment, a bench separating the kitchen from the bedroom. There was a toilet shared by all the apartments on the floor and every time someone flushed it sounded like the water was rushing through the walls right past them. It was a huge place, but it made Michael’s look fancy. The carpet was the colour of cigarette ash, the curtains were unhemmed and didn’t match. There was no television, no bookshelves and a stack of old Mademoiselle magazines on the coffee table. The other guests were crowded around a laptop, watching clips from the news. One woman was crying, and wiped her eyes on the hem of her long skirt. He moved behind them to sit on the couch and stared dumbly at the screen, though he could not understand what the newswoman was saying. Paris, he kept hearing. Paris, Paris. Paris je t’taime. Paris je suis. Pa
ris, when it rains, when it rains it pours. Michael shook himself—what was in that wine? He was falling asleep. Over by the bed, hastily made up with a pink crochet rug, Claudine found a record player and fit the needle onto whatever had been left on it. David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ bled through the speakers and she swayed drunkenly back over to Michael, sat beside him and put her head on his shoulder.

  Her head was heavy. She smelled of coffee beans and smoke, and something candy-sweet. He let her lean there, but realised that if this were one of his stories, he probably would have made the woman put her hand on the man’s thigh, and that this moment would lead to the two of them having sad, meaningless sex. He had written about girls like Claudine before—and very poorly, he now realised—always making them out to be manipulative and sexually liberated, just trying to keep the people they loved close to them any way they could. It was yet another thing to feel guilty about.

  Edgar was watching the two of them and smiling, swilling his wine around and then drinking it.

  ‘She always makes the most interesting friends,’ he said. ‘A writer. We haven’t had one of those for a while.’

  Michael surprised himself by replying straight away. ‘I’m not a writer. I haven’t written a word since I got to Paris.’

  ‘That’s because this city swallows them up. Too many words have been written about Paris already. It’s not even a real city anymore. It’s fiction, a fairy tale. That’s why those fuckers know that to hurt Paris is to make the world hurt. You don’t even have to have been here to have a Paris in your mind. It’s like chucking a grenade into Snow fucking White.’

  Michael took a deep gulp of his wine. It tasted too thick to him now, soupy, bloody, clotted even.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘My Paris is not Hemingway’s Paris.’