We'll Stand In That Place and other stories

by Michelle Cahill

  Reaching out again, I wrapped my black fingers around those beautiful legs and took hold. He had no time to shriek as I yanked him under. The face of an angel, not dissimilar to the fat boy he himself had made squirm.

  * * *

  Through the thick broken skin of the blackwoods, I watched the hubbub at the lake. Police cars with flashing lights. Ambulances. Men and women in waders with sticks, scouring the banks. Three boys stood on the small stretch of sand beneath the towering pines, as far back from the water as they could. They were wrapped in colourful towels secured by their now-attentive parents’ arms. The fat kid’s mother was sobbing so hard she almost choked him. Another woman, nearer the bank, stared out into the water. Silent as she probed the black depths with her hands clasped like she was holding a rosary. A heeled detective in a suit with white whispering hair frowned next to her.

  ‘You should have been paying attention,’ I whispered to the mother from where I now hid amongst the trees.

  The dinghies came with the divers. They flicked backwards into the water, casting their nets. The day turned over twice as they kept the lake closed. Examined my cave near the southside. Dog walkers returned to enquire of their progress. Had they found the boy? No, not yet. They stood with corrugated brows, rubbing their heads, as they swept the lake again while speaking of icy currents beneath the surface. Killer currents, the passers-by said. Three days later, an enthusiastic red setter took all the glory. He found the boy face up in the shallow inlet where the ivy-choked branches stretch into the water. Where the mosquitos fly low over the surface, zip-zapping from side to side.

  Yellow signs warning of dangerous currents were erected the very next day.

  * * *

  It took me nine months to get up the courage to take a second child. A sweltering spring day, where the fire danger urged the arrow well up into the red. Families sought refuge beneath the ancient eucalypts with their tinsel-like regrowth, or under the canopy of the more aggressive radiata pines whose scent dominated the air. Bare-bottomed toddlers paddled in the shallows with their dutiful parents, while older children exhausted their legs on paddle boats. More blended into the shadows, around the edges where I sometimes lurk. One even fell in. Shrieks and screams followed laughter, as her father pulled her from the tangled branches, dripping and encased in mud.

  But I was patient. Someone always swims out far enough. Going deeper and farther to prove themselves worthy of god-knows-what, just like she did—the same girl from the crumbling bank. Her father sat on his esky, swilling beer and barking his orders whenever he remembered she was there.

  At first her slender, glowing legs jerked about. Then they rose as she floated, her long hair sweeping back into the water and spreading across the surface in tendrils. From beneath she looked like a porcelain starfish. Peaceful, she drew me closer to the surface than ever before. Someone must have called out to her because her head raised from the water, sinking her legs again. Swinging them right before my eyes. She was older than the boy, her muscles had time to develop—time to become more toned. Still, she shot under just as fast when I pulled.

  This time when they searched the lake, there were more of them. The dinghies came quicker. As did the people with waders and metal sticks. This meant I had to leave her. Abandon her to the dark, where the only light came from the star-shaped holes I’d etched into my old wooden door.

  I watched the wetsuits with their masks and tanks search, and thought only of her face. The way her hair lay across her shoulders and hung like leaves when I brushed it. Her body pale, breasts not fully formed. Long legs spilling over the table. Her skin so perfect. I’d taken her just at the right time—before her father’s negligence would have made her scream.

  Down by the lake, they gathered. Another family with the same detective—the girl’s father still with a stubbie—on the jetty this time on the other side. By day two they’d pulled out a dog lead, shoes, a shopping trolley, a fine silver necklace with an o-shaped clasp, and an ingot from a diving belt they assumed was left during the previous search. All went into evidence bags, even though the officer logging them complained it was pointless. They should have listened to him and gone away. Left me to my lake in peace. But the woman detective, the one with the fitted black suit and white fairy-floss hair—her eyes said different.

  Blue like the height of the sky, they bored into everyone, especially the dog walkers. It was like she was memorising faces, so I kept well back. Took the paths that spun me higher, but still let me look down upon the search. She made them sweep each path, walking in rows. Poking and prodding. Still they came higher. Spoke to everyone while writing down names. As they came closer I left them to it, returned to my hut to look after my friend.

  On the seventh day, before the sun crept out from behind the ridge, I took her back to the water. But without her, the hut felt lonely. I missed her lavender lips answering my questions, holding her hand as I spoke of all the horrors of the world. They were watching the lake; the woman with the ice-blue eyes. But I needed a companion. Someone else who I knew would understand, who I still had a chance to save.

  I began making plans. Thinking of new ways to enter the water now they knew about my cave. I sat very still. Watching the weather. Reading the intentions of the savage wind. Waiting for the mercury to rise.

  Within two weeks it hit forty degrees. Searing gales with not a cloud in sight. The fire authority heaved the dial to red with black stripes, only this time no one came to the lake. No one except the detective.

  The same thing happened the following weekend. Thirty-seven. She was there with her team, patrolling the shores. Those knowing eyes searched for me in the water. And I wanted to risk it. Take a chance on sliding in, only I didn’t. Instead I listened from the shadows as people strolled passed. Snippets of conversations; talk of a Bunyip, something hideous like a monster in the lake. ‘How could the current take two children?’ they said. There has to be a creature. Something preternatural ripping innocents from their devoted families. Families who turned their backs just for a moment. It was much longer than that, I thought.

  I sprinted home in anger. Scrubbed the hut. Scoured the floors and tables and walls, while rubbing my scarred arms and legs. I was a saviour, not a monster. When one of their dogs strayed from the path and impaled herself on a tree root, I put her out of her misery. A boxer with oversized paws and a trusting face. Still they said nothing different. So, I lifted the dog from my table and buried her deep where she could sleep with the company of the worms.

  Desperate, I needed the cooling effect of the water. Was ready to risk it. Risk everything to feel the calming rush of those cold, cold legs.

  The sky was overcast the morning the radio predicted a record-breaker. Enormous grey clouds tumbled across the sky, punching into each other, as they began to block out the sun. The heat was to last four days. The water slapped into the shore, kneading the scorched earth. From the path above the lake I saw police walking in twos. There were three sets of them, if you included the plain clothes detective at the bench with his paper and the woman jogging laps of the lake. Ducks came in swarms only to drift away after realising their pleading was pointless: these people would not feed them. They turned their interest to the families who picnicked and played frisbee while their dogs splashed into the water. It was then I was spotted by the ice woman herself. She’d come higher along the path than usual and was peering through the trees. I was left with no choice but to run.

  Down the escarpment I scuttled, dodging burnt logs and blackthorn, grabbing onto stringybarks to steady myself, all while skimming the skewed floor for burrows that would swallow an ankle. The detective came down after me, only she didn’t see the mossy rock, nor notice it wasn’t supported, as she reached out to where my blue scarf had snagged in a tree.

  Cowering inside my hut, I barred the door. Crouched my hideous form beneath the table, like I did at school the only year my mother forced me to go. By day three I hadn’t moved. But nor had they k
icked the door in. One day left of heat and I was drowning in solitude. I pulled my mother’s maps from my trunk and strew them across the table, remembering the places we would go, Mum hoping the children would be kinder so she could feel less guilty. That they wouldn’t point and recoil while their parents scurried to retrieve them. In the end she insisted on covering me up. On me learning to hide what she’d done to me. I grabbed the maps and keys and bundled the neoprene into my arms before rattling down the parched driveway in the ute, weaving in and out of the shadows of trees who were hungry for a spark—any spark—that would help them explode.

  I was in the carpark when I heard the news. It was blaring from the cab of a nearby Pathfinder, as a scruffy fisherman with kind eyes hoisted his boat onto his trailer: ‘Police have confirmed the raid of a property near Daylesford they believe to be involved in the drowning and abduction of two children. They are currently on the lookout for a Daylesford woman with severe burns to the neck region who has an interest in diving.’ I nodded to the fisherman when he saluted and spoke over the rest of the report.

  ‘Sounds like they’ve found that Bunyip,’ he said.

  I waited until he drove up the ramp to remove my hat and glasses. Before swinging the tank from the back of my ute.

  The water was a dense green as I swam around the groin, dodging the seaweed, while remembering my mother’s words. ‘This is perfect weather for swimming, it’ll cool your skin. But keep close to the granite boulders. Not too close to be snagged by fisherman, but near enough not to be seen.’

  There was little swell to muddy my vision as my fins cut through the water. From a distance I hovered, watching teenagers somersault off the diving boards, coveting them as I had as a child. I imagined myself amongst them laughing; swimming with the confident children who scratched their way to the pontoon before grasping the slimy rope and hoisting themselves out of danger.

  The beaches were packed. Families everywhere. Children wearing life jackets. Boogie boards and paddle boarders. Large inflatable rings holding dozens of people afloat.

  Diving beneath the water, I propelled myself forward to look past the salt and the sand at all those beautiful and perfect legs.

  Butterscotch

  K.A. Rees

  I t started with breath. Hers and her mother’s. August escaped her mother’s hot angriness as she yelled after her, only been in the family for generations. Her mother’s words shot behind her retreating feet. It was because it was one of Gran Bauer’s glasses. She wouldn’t have cared so much if it was the ones from Dad’s family. She heard her dad’s voice raised, ‘She’s only little. Why did you expect her to clean the table if you didn’t want broken glass?’ More yelling. And then footsteps retreating along the gravel drive—a car door slamming and the tyres skidding, bits of gravel airborne; the car with her dad accelerated away. She ran to the drive after him, but he was already out the property gate. Gone.

  August knew what her mother’s breath looked like—it was dust. Small, brown, particulate. If you breathed it in you needed to expirate. August learned the words on the spelling test for October last year. Now it was January. She watched grass die beneath her feet. Apt. That was another word, but she thought it was too short to be on the list. August weighed the relationship between her mother’s breath and her words: the words were a known quantity. They were known at school, the medical centre and at the mechanic’s. And in her head, especially there. He’s gone August. Never to return. Like she’d crossed out the lines of a wayward letter. Not at this address. Return to sender. Her mother’s words took up too much space. August was bricked tight.

  August hated the shopping. Wherever she was dragged, they would bump into someone or other and her mother would stop to tilt her head—nodding arrhythmically, displaying her listening ear; waiting for the intake of their breath mid-sentence and then she would pounce. ‘Still fixing up the finances, no not a word. It’s very difficult. Yes, night shift at the cannery. August does bedtime. She doesn’t mind looking after Michael, do you love?’ And August would nod, complicit in this thing she called who had it worse, but can’t complain. And August felt guilty; not once did she stick up for him. She knew she had to let her mum tell these stories. Otherwise, she brought her anger home and spread it around. On every surface of the house.

  * * *

  Her dad used to play guitar on the veranda. On the northern side of the house a jacaranda leaned in like an unwelcome guest, said her mother, but August loved it; that side of the veranda was cool and in mid-spring, when the tree was in full bloom, purple flowers fell to the floor creating a thick sweep of lilac. She would sit under its dome with her father, listening to the sound of his guitar lengthening the afternoons.

  Michael didn’t remember their dad. August countered this by telling him stories of a man who almost always showed as the dinner was being cleared away, his long shadow darkening the door. It was this moment she waited for—eating her dinner slowly, glancing up at the clock as the minutes ticked loudly, moving the food around her mouth to make it last—even if it was tuna bake, which she hated, so she could still be awake when he got home. But her mother would say go to bed and August fell asleep listening for the sound of the Datsun travelling up the gravel drive. Her mother despised the Datsun. Whoever heard of a two-door for a farm car? It’s hardly a ute. It was what her mother called impractical.

  She also hated the colour. Diarrhoea, her mum said when her dad first brought the car up the drive. Butterscotch, her father shot back, hurt.

  August had a picture in her head of what he looked like now. A photo in a frame she carried behind her eyes, like facial mapping technology checking for points to flash a match on the screen. Points for the shaggy brown hair that cascaded across his eyes, the way when he swept it from his brow it would expose his palm cracked, the skin weathered and stained with engine oil. Points for the light dusting of freckles that ran across the bridge of his broad nose. Points for his large dark eyes she could still see herself in, even after all these days, weeks, months. Years. She liked his freckles; they made him look young. August remembered how he used to laugh; that was the Holden, before the Datsun—by the time he had the Datsun, the smiles didn’t come so easily. August would sit in the back in the slushy morning light watching air in the cab condense, steam rising from their breath alone. Dad said no farting, otherwise he’d wind the window down if you let one go. But it was always him in the end that did it, and he would pretend that you did, sitting in the back seat. Back then even August’s mum laughed. A dry laugh, like leaves broken open.

  August told Michael of the man who had a voice like one of the three tenors and who smelt of beer and sweat and turpentine. Sometimes something sweet clung to his breath. Like he’d been sucking on a Werther’s, it made her warm and caramel. Whenever she smelt it, she remembered the light in his room on the farm— how it spilled across the floor catching on the echoed limbs of the coral tree shadowed against the grain.

  August made things up, to remind Michael of the man he did not remember. She hoped to forge a connection for him through her memories but she mused that sometimes, Michael only listened because she made the stories interesting: their dad worked for the government on bioterrorism, and was off on important business saving the country from chemical and other ecological disasters. It was why he wasn’t with them. He was needed elsewhere. She wanted the tracery of these words to hold: she marvelled at them, how they were wrought, but they were edged too fine and crumbled.

  Michael picked up discrepancies so the stories needed modification. Sometimes, her tales were so elaborate she ran the risk of their mother coming home on a break and catching the two of them still awake. August knew her mother would be disgusted. Lies, she would say, the inky kohl she applied before the start of each shift smudged into the cracks around her eyes.

  Michael finally fell asleep. She turned his night light on. He had a turtle that glowed faint green, its tummy projecting stars onto the wall. The passageway between Michael
’s room and the kitchen was bone cold. August shivered, turned all but the porch light off. She left that light on—when it was working—for her mother. There was only the one heater. August would have to wait till Michael was deep in sleep before pushing its sticky wheels down the hall to her room. August’s room had a flat coldness to it, an unoccupied feel that failed to warm even when she was in it. It wasn’t like her room on the farm where she could feel her blood expanding, encompassing the cracks and corners, seeping into the textured floorboards. But her favourite room was her dad’s study. It had a slanting, natural light that probed through Venetians half closed from dust. Her thoughts turned once again to the man with the guitar; the man who smelt of cigarettes and turpentine and beer. She fell asleep blanketed in her memory.

  August wanted to discover more about the mystery of her father’s disappearance and did so by stealth, but her enquiries made their way back. Don’t wheedle people August! Her mother’s mouth twisted. August called her pigheaded and was grounded.

  One time, August found an old photo album. There was a picture of August in a long flowing dress. Her mum was holding her with her dad looking awkward in his suit; his arm around August’s mother’s shoulder. They looked much younger. Zach was there too. Zach was her godfather; her dad’s best friend. In this photo it was just the four of them.

  Her mother kept it. Just this one. When she looked through other albums, she found no more pictures of her dad. August thought this was her mother’s way of saying that Zach had a place in the family. She decided she would ask him. August had a feeling that he was forever biting his tongue against the words he didn’t want to flow.

  Late once, she caught her mum and Zach at the kitchen table. Zach had driven her mother home. August got up when she heard a different car parking on the street in front of the house. Her mother’s car had broken down. That’s what she said when August grilled her about it. By the time August finished in the bathroom, they had come inside and were speaking in low voices at the kitchen table. She snuck a peek from the hall, her mother holding the stem of a glass of white wine, Zach opposite her, one of his large calloused hands holding her mother’s unoccupied one. They were speaking in fish-hook whispers, snagging the conversation back and forth across the sandy riverbed of talk. August imagined she was hearing voices underwater, and she put her arms up to feel liquid surround her. And then she heard her mother say how hard it was, that she got nothing back from August, that August blamed her. She surfaced cold.