We'll Stand In That Place and other stories

by Michelle Cahill

Edgar pointed a finger at him, the end of it calloused by guitar strings. ‘Don’t get me started on fucking Hemingway.’

  Michael woke up the next morning tucked up in Raquel and Edgar’s bed, the pink crochet rug wrapped around him. He felt more rested than he had ever felt. The weak-tea sunlight was streaming through the divide in the curtains and warming up the room. There were bowls of leftover mush in a variety of browns all over the coffee table, and the wine bottle had overturned next to the couch where it had fallen, empty, out of Claudine’s hand. Edgar was asleep in one of the swivel stools at the kitchen bench. The stripes of his corduroy jacket had stretched tight over the hump of his bent back. Michael could see no sign of Raquel. Everyone else had left. He wiped his eyes and drew the rug around him so that he could shuffle over to the window. Once there, he stuck his head around the side of the curtain and pressed his nose against the brittle glass. Out to his right, he could just see the Eiffel Tower, a monstrous black symbol, evoking now and forever more the events that had taken place. But life went on. It was early, but still there were people out walking. A couple of ladies in high stiletto boots were walking a Dalmatian, a florist was laying out his bouquets on a cart. A small child in a pink parka ran ahead of her parents, pointing at something Michael could not yet see.

  He would stay, he realised, at least for a little while longer. If only to try and discover his own Paris on the page and escape the thousands of words that had made him believe that he knew the city already.

  The Children

  Andrew Sutherland

  W e were about ten years old, on some uncle or grandparent’s farm property on a long weekend—a pasted-together bunch of forgettable private-school ten-year-old boys on a farm overnighter. Some parent’s grand idea, though the memory of which parent, and whose property, and why, are all buried in south-west soil now.

  Nearing sunset, one of the other boys and I found ourselves on a dirt track. He and I, as chance would have it, shared the same name—first and last, with only the middle hanging distinct between us. That was enough, in primary school, to be linked, like best friends without the agency of choice, associated together always. At ten we practically looked the same, too, though he was probably already taller, a sports boy, ready to be lean and fit, the kind who’d doubtless grow to be a B-team rower in year twelve.

  Perhaps we were waiting for the day to end, suspended, standing on the dirt track, worn wooden fences running along each side. From one end of the path, a great mass of sheep appeared. Dozens, I suppose. Hundreds, to a child’s eyes. Unmoving, as suspended in the dipping sun as we tried to be, as if they’d dropped from the sky to stand still. The sheep faced us, all eyes being one.

  Hooves began to beat in place, listlessly tapping the earth. I wondered how many skulls of sheep had been stepped over and half-dug into the dirt below. Cushion our feet on fragments of bone; and deep beneath, a ram-skull of tremendous size, an unlikely, unnatural father to them all.

  My other half must have startled them. My twin-not-twin. Maybe he kicked up a rock or threw his arms out with a shout; a jump-scare for sheep, the patented behaviour of the more cool ten-year-old of two. The mass began to move. The sheep, as one, ran—not away, but towards. Like a stampede of clouds; near-ridiculous, but for the frightening tangibility of their approach, trampling the ground and imminently upon us. We bolted, jumped the leaning fences and out of their path—and it was their path—laughing and sweaty. The sheep ran by, seemingly endless; though soon enough, of course, they had passed us, leaving only the downtrodden dirt, un-settled by their tracks. Hooves that sprint to nowhere.

  * * *

  That night we were housed in a tent. Six or so of us, sleeping bags unrolled in a huge tent, fresh from the camping store. Trees dotted around us, as though they’d been placed solely for games of Spotto in the unwavering dark. The torchlight etched pathetic, disappearing streaks into the night. Bedtime slipped in, and out again, wrapped heavy, awake and un-awake in pieces. There, in some pitch black moment—all the other boys, I realised, out playing some game or on a ‘raid’ to the house—my namesake and I lay, eyes alert and unseeing, lurking next to one another.

  His hips cluttered onto me. Hips even before hands—and where were they? Steadying his weight on the immovable plane of sleeping bag and dirt-tent-floor, perhaps. Hipbones clanking into place, groin to groin locking, hesitant for a second and then pressing down with chest to follow. My eyes burst bright into the darkness. What were we doing? ‘Trying something,’ he said. A bash of pelvis, thermal pyjama pant against pant. I knew what we were trying. Hands snaked around his back. Juvenile rhythms began to find their grinding gyre.

  I thought about the herded sheep, stamping lightly and ready to race. I thought about all the boys outside—and all the boys at school, stamping just as gently. I thought about the clip-art pumas I’d pasted onto Microsoft Word print-outs, proclaiming whatever day it was as SATAN DAY in Times New Roman and scoring out a jolly G-major theme tune to accompany my silly private pamphlet. I’d gotten into trouble at school for that—the private never being private for a child, after all.

  His shirt came off. He grappled mine off too, the fabric squeezing my throat as it dragged along my chin. Our skin so smooth, never so smooth as when chest suctioned onto chest. I could smell him, boy-sweat, the insufficient, superior doppelganger I wanted to consume, and scent more man than still I’ll ever be. ‘We’re practising,’ he said, little humping whisper, ‘we’re practising for later.’ And on he practised, hammering me into the earth. He could bury me deep and I would make a sleeping bag cocoon for me and the soil.

  The other boys returned. Their sound announced them: words made yawns and the crack of dead leaves right up to the tent’s entrance. The other one named me removed his body, slid himself back into his place. They crawled back inside, one after the other, chattering in decrescendos as they draped themselves in rest. Too dangerous to do any more practice, but my heart continued to beat. A constantly ageing muscle, knocking itself senseless against a rib. The whole set of others, flopping into sleep like leftovers in zip lock bags, cluttering around us. It would be too easy for ears to open up and hear; and that’s the breathless end of it.

  A long and violent future crept quietly across the ceiling of the tent, smiling gently in my line of sight.

  * * *

  He rattled onto my frame again. Whispering, little voice; enough time had passed, they were all asleep. Didn’t matter; noises and boys and night, who cares? His breath formed words. ‘We should try kissing,’ he exhaled. ‘So we know for when it’s with girls.’

  Of course. Girls—that was the later we were practising for. I almost shattered into laughter, a laugh to knock back the dead stillness surrounding us. Or perhaps it’s me now that wants to impose that impulse—if I were to shoot back in time, possess my half-made body with a grating, adult-voiced joke. I could have brayed until eardrums bled. But the sound never entered me—it was silence that I kept. Only the dull sounds of breath; his, into me, returned. His smaller, feminine mirror. I was girl enough.

  He kissed me. My first (our first). On the cheek. Then again. Then I kissed his. Then the mouth. And again—a sharp attack of encouragement to set him loose upon my face. Rough little pecks, like naughty emus feeding in the scrub. Our beaks nothing if not dry.

  I felt us begin to turn, like a screw winding ever-tighter. Rolling into a new and frightening place, me on top of him. I wasn’t sure whether I had initiated this reversal or he had made it happen. I didn’t think that I would be the one to move, be anything but of use, but there my body’s weight floated above him. My bones held aloft over his. They may as well have been hollow.

  I searched for weight. I pressed my crotch against his, a strangling friction between the fabric of our clothes. I scraped my body across his. Slowly; closing in. Whatever might have been beneath pyjama trousers—alive or unalive—lacking relevance. After all, who is thinking about what lives underneath a ten-year-old’s clothes? I don’t
believe I was aware of my penis as anything other than an adjunct, or in certain circumstances an untouchability. I normally just looked confused when other year five boys made snorting jokes about joining the ‘Pen-15’ club. It seemed like a pretty shit club to join, the terms of entry ill-defined but rudimentary. Probably a late bloomer. Imaginative, but with no sense of what a body was for. Of course, extreme innocence often mani-fests itself in ways that might be considered cruel.

  His chest laid out below, like a flat earth. I could trace shapes, anti-carvings, upon it with my fingers while my lower body moved; my time to set what limits to be crossed. My fingertips considered what shapes to mark. I wrote a globe with narrow mountains pushing at its wall. My brain searched for the word: a pentagram. Pen-tagram. Yes, Microsoft Word had clip art for that, too—sitting proudly next to the pumas on my pamphlets. Charmed was probably on television by that year, too, though who knew if I was allowed to watch.

  I tickled the shapes across him, ever more serious than the action called for. Maybe if I did it right—or wrong enough—the perfect shape, the perfect grinding, sublime experimentation, something would leap from the shallow smoothness of his chest and enter me. Some demon (more demonic even than me), like only a child could draw. Anything. I pressed harder. Something would rise inside my body and then I would be different. I would be changed, irretrievably. I would inhale him.

  Silence—purer even than the hanging stillness we’d constructed. Not so palpable as the brittle mass of wool on our dirt track at sunset, but just as ready. I waited for my next breath.

  His hands, over-long fingers vice-like on the curve of my ribs. Down like burrowing spiders; they dug into my hip-bones. He flipped me back over. My breath exploded out, threatening to wake the lifeless sacs around us. He wanted more speed. What I had tried wasn’t practice, wasn’t anything. I was best when I was landscape. His pelvis raised and fell. His sternum filled my vision; a world unto itself. Still a canvas, if I wanted it. If I could get away with it.

  It occurred to me that my nails could cut a design into a giving skin. The sides were sharp—‘queen of the harpies’, he’d once called me in school, and I don’t know, as a pre-pubescent something in me obviously liked the thought of long nails with serrated corners, or at least liked that fantastic title. I could slice the pentagram light into his skin, let the blood drip on me with every hump and mashing, chest to chest . . .

  How would that limit look, once crossed? And what might its crossing call forth in me?

  I should say that I didn’t want to be violent. Sometime later during basketball practice, I accidentally slashed a tiny wound into another classmate’s neck while trying to get the ball, and from then on I cut them blunt, as men are supposed to. I was ashamed of causing injury (however minor); but of that particular composition, strangely proud.

  I pricked minutely at a developing pectoral; just a tiny trace of blood. He’d never notice. I don’t know if he noticed. He continued, still time for games, with just a microscopic pool of red to make it real.

  Somewhere out there, in the three o’clock chill, the sheep were watching. Probably still are watching. Steady and suspended, practising their gaze, until it’s time to amble away.

  A speck of blood smudged my skin, a memento of too-closeness. And one from distance, a momentary droplet, fell gently onto me. And then it stopped. Nothing flowed. This night was an act of clotting.

  I looked at the diminishing spot of red. I felt up his arms, his back. I rested my sight once more upon the ceiling of the tent, what it promised me. I saw it stretch out. I didn’t want to grow up to be gay, though that may have been what I saw, without seeing. I wanted to be a witch.

  * * *

  The up and down began to slow. Where next to go, what more, at this age, in this moment? Games need parameters—endings. One of the hallmarks, perhaps, of traversing the space from childhood to ‘adult’ is discovering that repetition, repetition without growth, may not in fact be particularly interesting. And suddenly—though probably inevitably—there was the possibility that it might all have become incredibly boring.

  There’s going to be a time when, in some daylight hour in a western suburbs home, the ten-going-on-eleven boy will sit me in his bedroom and ask me if I remember, ask me if I want to try again. And I’ll say no, it isn’t what I want or what I want to be, and wasn’t it—you know—wrong?

  But that will be an aberration; a blip off-course for the cross-country run of fate.

  And a time, adjacent, on the school oval when the other boys will crowd around us as we fight, wrestle and kick on the grass in a hastily-scheduled coliseum display of pre-teen dominance, which I would like to win but truthfully will be more eager to lose. And that will be more like it. The school-assembly version of the night’s reality. When everything after this will be cast in tent’s shadow.

  We detached from one another. The parameters restored themselves—temporarily. With barely a flicker of a thought, I fell asleep. I woke to stars and a fading moon. A pre-dawn shimmer had begun to brighten the night, though still there was little to see. The vague outlines of scattered trees leaned over me. The tent had gone from my sight—only the night sky. The slight corners of fear gripped me. So everything had finished—it had all disappeared. I was alone, or it had never happened at all.

  I writhed my body to its side; saw the tent there, square and foolish in my vision. Something like a smile twisted my mouth. Nothing had left me. The tent was there, the boys probably still inside, and I had rolled out. Rolled under, somehow, sleeping bag and all. A subconscious escape artist. I slowly extricated myself from my sleeping bag and crawled back inside, quiet as a centipede. None of the others had woken. My counterpart lay on his back, sleeping still. I settled my place next to his again. Waited for the dawn. Eyes slipped back towards orienting that imagined trajectory, sluggishly groping its way along the tent’s confines—and Andrew. My other Andrew. The future entered me.

  * * *

  It is true that devils never come, but he will—down my hand when we are fourteen at a sleepover at my house, and again, and again, and in my mouth a month or few later, and maybe in the shattering glass on the wall behind my head at age sixteen when he called me a faggot and threatened to bottle me, and certainly in the white knuckles of my memory at twenty-five when I ran into him at a gay bar with his, ‘I’m happy, no, I’m totally straight, here with my friends, I don’t know what to say about all that experimentation back then?’ Nothing apparently demonic there. Nothing to be summoned, juvenile fantasies of the occult notwithstanding. After all, there’s no point imbuing these things with an unreasonable level of grandiosity. Let the kids experiment. I’d done nothing, learnt nothing—and we can accept that children fail all the time. But still, I suppose if what you seek to call forth is a disquiet, it might always remain.

  The Monster in The Lake

  Jem Tyley-Miller

  I tried to take small things. Things that needed saving. Items that wouldn’t be missed. A soft downy possum with an injured leg. The one-eyed dog with a shaved underside who strayed after being beaten. For a while we were family, hidden beneath the gum-filled giants, protected by boulders and bracken. But then the girl stepped onto the crumbling bank.

  The water was dark that day. Humid and oily, as though the gums were bleeding on purpose. Ducks skidded across the surface, rippling the water. Only they disturbed the girl’s image, for there was no breeze. The heat held fast in surrounding trunks, rebounding from one another before seeping into the ground to warm that too. I guess that’s why the boys went swimming.

  From underneath, their skinny legs looked like tentacles thrashing in the murky depths. I sensed fear in their limbs. Imagined their faces as they splashed about on the surface, pretending not to be scared. Soon they would have no choice but to let that fear course through their bodies.

  There were four of them. Three sets of skinny legs and one plump. I’d watched them through the trees earlier, before the girl distracted
me. They were teasing the fat kid for slowing them down. Pushing him to jump off the rocks into the water to prove he was one of them. He peered over the edge, shaking, while he tried to ascertain if the black pool below would cushion his fall. I smelled urine right before he jumped, forgave his compulsion to do anything that would mean he could belong.

  Those boys would never let him into their group—I knew their type. They came here all the time with their families, laughing at stumbling tourists or snickering at the children who came with their individual carers from the nearby special school. No. Those boys would keep him only until another plaything came along—a more amusing child to torment.

  From beneath, I considered the fat boy’s legs. They were meaty and kicked less than the others, his movements a slower beat of the egg. They were also more luminescent. The boys inched towards him, one by one. Included him in their circle before pushing him under and holding him there. I watched his blond hair drifting. Stared into his wide, panicked eyes while bubbles forced their way upwards through the water. His cheeks quavered, as he struggled. Then his face receded above the waterline.

  He stroked backwards from the boys’ laughter, which could be heard even through the waxy filter of water, along with his own gasping coughs. I could taste his disappointment, his heartbreak. The adrenaline that told him to swim as far away as he could.

  I should have taken him because he would have understood, but it was the mean skinny legs of the closest boy that compelled me to act. He ventured deep enough, out farther where the water is ice-cold. Calling for the others to join him. He was showboating as he stroked my way. Legs fluttering, beautiful and brown, hairs shimmering in the sunlight until they plunged into the dark to flitter between the swaying reeds. I couldn’t resist reaching out and touching them.

  ‘Shit!’ he said, squealing like the pig I knew he was. ‘There are eels out here.’