We'll Stand In That Place and other stories

by Michelle Cahill

  August beat a retreat out the back of the house, through razor grass etched in the field. She felt the blades snick wet against the hem of her nightdress. She stopped, stood watching her breath, trying to catch up to the wet wine of her mother’s words. A streak of sulphur-crested cockatoos banked hard against a gust that had risen with the spreading light. As she walked she swatted away new day flies with a strand of kangaroo grass yanked from the soil. Her mother found her difficult! When she did everything she was asked. Looked after Michael every evening after school, allowed no time for herself to do normal stuff, to muck about. She couldn’t wait to leave the crappy fibro with its stained walls. She couldn’t wait to leave the school she was stuck in, looking at the back of Maggie Nguyen’s head day after day after day. Then, when she was gone, maybe her mother might realise how lonely this place was. How, when the dark descended, she could hear every creak and groan of the old wooden frame, as if the house was trying to disgorge them into the night. Even the television did not shut out the sounds of its creaking complaints. But there was Michael. She did not want to leave him; she wanted to take him with her. When he was older, he wouldn’t need her as much as he did now so she wouldn’t have to feel guilty about leaving him with just their mother. Michael would go too, eventually. She had an image of the two of them feeding seagulls on a beach somewhere in Sydney.

  She would find her dad.

  * * *

  When August was in the mood to admit certain things, she understood what she knew about her father could be counted on fingers and toes. Then, there were the things that people said about him. There were more of these, but they were contradictory and confused her. Some things she overheard she wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to be hearing them—there was always something harsh in the way they were said: ‘Never could hold his drink.’‘Only a coward leaves his wife and kids.’‘I reckon she was having an affair.’‘You know he had a temper?’‘Pity for the kiddies.’‘She works nights now.’‘His best mate threw him out on his arse.’‘They lost the farm, you know.’‘Always down the pub.’ Words were sharp, like shards. They, the ones who said it, sent each other looks, eyebrows raised when they knew she was there. Then, they turned away, co-conspirators. She wasn’t supposed to understand.

  She did.

  They were trying to let her know her world was a small, closed thing. And she was not very important.

  And sometimes, when August forgot to cover up that she understood the things that they said, her mother did not fly off the handle. She sat her down on the bed and cupped her hand. Once, her mother’s voice wavered and her eyes watered and she gave August a prickly hug. August was appalled: she’d never actually seen her mother cry. Her mother tended to sob behind doors, prone on the bed with a pillow over her head to dampen the sound of her tear-streaked breath. When she opened the door, August noted the blotchy face and puffy eyes.

  * * *

  Zach unfurled when her mother was sick with flu. They’d been tasked with the takeaway run. August remembered the drive back in the car; it was raining. Zach had the driver’s side window down, smoking a cigarette. She remembered her father smoking in the Datsun too. It was warm and moist and she smelled chemicals pulling past her out the open window. Why did he leave, Zach? The words hung, despite their motion. Above, metallic clouds were crowding out the starch sky. Zach pulled over to the curb, out of the car.

  He didn’t answer until he returned with the takeaway. He turned the key in the ignition and switched it off again, ran his hands through his wavy hair. She could smell the takeaway sweating on the back seat. The vinyl was wet with rain that beaded through the open window. The sky above cracked, flashed purple, then rain ran in rivulets down the window, drummed fortissimo across the roof. August was covered by the absence of his words; the rain slapping the roof. She held her breath. Zach used his forearm to wipe a patch on the driver’s side. Then the words came. Her mum and dad argued. A vase was smashed. Her mother was heartbroken. And then furious. Something else was thrown and something else broken, there were threats. August heard a wet thing dislodge in Zach’s throat.

  I chucked your dad out, August. I told him to go. Zach looked past her to the street lights that had come on, to rainwater spilling down gutters carved in the side of the road.

  Her dad loved her. They were mates—she used to ride on his shoulders and put her arms around his neck and cry giddy-up. It wasn’t like Zach said, don’t come back. He could still come home. How could he forget?

  * * *

  Zach didn’t drink. She knew this now because she waited on tables in bars with drunken couples and served men in pubs with sun-burned noses. There were lots of words tossed around but not many of them she believed or chose to remember. Serving in diners watching the darkened faces of truckies under baseball caps, stubbing out cigarettes in the roadside ditch away from the fumes of the petrol bowsers, watching the cars pull in. Looking for his face. She worked behind the bar, mucking out the women’s toilets after Saturday nights rolled around and everyone went batshit crazy. The next day, the regulars also forgot.

  In a blue-lit laundromat she stared at the black and white tiles, too tired to do anything but flick her way through magazines, peering at the captions under the fleshy photos of famous people. She saved cash for rent. She knew no one, but she also knew that the only dirt in the city was from pollution and she could catch a bus to the beach on her day off. She forgot the town, the smell of the river, the sound that the wind made through the trees; the clatter of the birds as they flew home to roost in dusky evenings. She no longer saw iridescent pinks and blues bursting across the heavens, raining tiny insects in the twilight. She forgot her mother with the lines around her mouth, and the smudges under her eyes. She also forgot her brother and the phone messages he left; the tired voice imploring: she’s getting worse, you coming home. The edge to his voice, the implication. In her mind she saw her classmates who stayed, saw her brother; they were caught in a vortex, a country town-sized black hole where everything was frozen and where she was frozen too.

  Zach came for her. Told her about the phone box a kilometre from the pub where he would call, covered in urine, on his knees. Or Mal ringing Zach from the pub, he’s passed out on one of the pool tables, come and get him. He got aggressive like a dog in the yard, wanting to bloody noses, bite heads. He loved shots especially schnapps, sink the eight ball and you had a reason to line them up on the bar. One for everyone. Make it two. Funny guy. But Zach wasn’t laughing. Instead, Zach told her how he kept a clean set of clothes in the boot of his car. At least that way he wouldn’t go home smelling of piss. ‘Back to us,’ August said. ‘He always smelled of the pub.’ On occasion, something worse. Vomit. There was the other smell, too. It must have been when he played pool. On those occasions, he smelt like butterscotch.

  Aftertaste

  Claire Corbett

  T he sky at sunset—/ a cup of sake / would taste so good! *

  Before the evening had even begun, everyone knew the Sake Faction could not be awarded the prize, though it was clear they’d worked harder, and achieved more beauty, than all the others, even Hazelnut Moon. They had been working towards that night for so long, some had forgotten how it had started.

  It had started with their wish for death, some said, for transcendence, said others.

  Our Sun had burned out a billion years before and the Milky Way had been devoured by the Andromeda Galaxy after being eaten by the Magellanic Clouds but still our little probe sailed on through the intergalactic gulf, its progress perfectly illustrating the first law of motion.

  Until it was stopped.

  Warm Lobster in a Summer Preparation

  Until it was found, taken up by a race of beings so evolved that they were pondering Translation, leaving physical form altogether. Facing this decision had induced melancholy, an elegiac mood, which intercepting the probe interleaved with perfectly. Here was an artefact from a distant place and an equally distant past, a message from a
vanished people speaking out of deep silence and who (they were sure) had returned to that silence. A silence that had never been breached before in all the long eras of interstellar night that the people had lived through. (They called themselves The People, as all people do. As to what they looked and sounded like, it would be hard to say because there was nothing in all the universe like them and no one to look at them and compare them to anything else. But you are free to imagine anything you like. Creatures like storms. Creatures unfolding enamelled crystal veils and wings and eyes. All of these and none of these.)

  This message could not now ever be answered. Somehow it was worse realising that they had not been alone and never knew it, and now (they were sure of it) were returned to their aloneness once more.

  This physical message in its metal bottle—how quaint!—they must investigate. How could the people, their greatest Speaker said, not tarry a little longer (just a little while), put aside their deliberations over Translation, over what some saw as suicide and others believed to be Enlightenment, and see what the probe had to show them? What a perfect project, a faultless way to delay the hard decision. Do we stay or do we go? What is our purpose? Their purpose, for the moment, was to decipher this rarest of objects, a thing made in all the universe of accident, a thing purposely created in the wilderness of randomly colliding atoms and exploding stars.

  Galaxies are much emptier than atoms.

  The makers of the probe had suggested it would likely outlast humanity, the Earth and even the Sun and so it had. And more. How much information did it carry? All the information that existed at the time it was launched (but of course that wasn’t true; it didn’t contain the history of every movement of all the Earth’s stock markets, for example). It did contain the digitised DNA of every creature known (many were not known) and the amount of information it housed outran the terminology of yottabytes and geobytes. Some said it contained as much information as one mole of neon gas at 25° C. Some said it contained as much as 1.5×1077 bits—the information content of a one-solar-mass black hole. This was clearly absurd. It did not contain so much information as all that.

  Fried Reindeer Moss and Mushrooms

  The people worked out many of its secrets quickly. They understood the information was stored in many different ways. Prime numbers. Fibonacci spirals. The periodic table. They pored over images. They listened to music, extracted the notes and systems and played them in their own way, on their own instruments. None of these things detained them long. The art was intriguing, some of it pleasing but it didn’t, finally, mean all that much.

  The people began to lose interest. It seemed that, full of strange information as the probe was, it had little bearing on the dilemma that was consuming them.

  Beef Noodle Soup

  Finally, the people, like all peoples, were mainly interested in themselves.

  They saw this as the failing it was and a few redoubled their studies of the alien artefact. What could it tell them of the cosmos that was truly new? Surely there was something here to throw a light on their dilemma, even if only in a tangential way?

  Madagascar Chocolate Cake

  The researchers that persisted reviewed the pictures of plants and animals, and realised information describing their genetic makeup had been given, including samples. It would be interesting to recreate these creatures, some said. But where to start and in what context; what rationale for choosing this creature and not that one, this ecosystem and not another? And no one could think of a good reason to do so.

  Until one day, someone did.

  One day a Reader ran or flew to the Speaker with rings or eyes or veils glowing. Eureka, it said. Or some equivalent. I have found it, at last.

  What is it?

  A worthy project.

  Strawberry Jam

  This project, Speaker, might take a very long time.

  A very long time?

  Eons, Speaker.

  You have my attention. And the Speaker began to listen.

  The Reader described a story—the people had decoded the languages included though, without context, most of what they deciphered made no sense. But certain concepts they had grasped. Sex. Birth. Death.

  And in between all those things: Eating.

  The Reader had discovered descriptions of food. Grand dinners. State receptions. Banquets. And recipes.

  Razor Clams with Pineapple Dashi

  Recipes, said the Speaker. How long ago was it when such things ceased to matter? But wouldn’t it be interesting, said the Reader. To see if we could recreate one of these. Just one? One dish. One meal. One banquet, it was finally decided. But which one? We will create our own version of a winding water banquet said the Speaker, after considering all presentations. The format is from Heian Japan but the affinity clusters you’ve already formed will supply dishes from various cultures. And it will be a competition, a challenge. All teams will have the same resources and the winners will be awarded on the evening of the banquet, after we have tasted their creations.

  As with most big projects, such as building a house, it was the foun-dations that took all the time. Creating soil, and the complexity of all the microbes the soil needed for life and fertility: this took millennia and consumed ever more resources, to the point where the people became so cross at the difficulty that they refused to give up. This would not defeat them. They would taste a grape. They would make champagne and soy sauce. They were going to grow a tuna! They were going to do these things and these things would be relatively easy—they told themselves—once they had conquered the complexity of soil.

  Toro Sashimi

  The chemistry of ocean was another large task, and several planets and an orbital were set aside expressly for that. Elsewhere in the universe these unique things had evolved and one way of knowing them was to bring them to life and then taste them, incorporate them into their own bodies. The art of humanity was fine but the interest it generated only lasted for a few esoteric members of the people. But their food. Now that was a whole way of understanding the universe they could explore.

  Squid and Sloe Berry with White Currant and Pine

  A civilisation of the people grew up around rice, focused on the production of at least five varieties of sake. Many ages might pass, some said, before this goal was achieved. With the format of the winding water banquet already decided, the Sake Faction realised it was up to them to realise the environment for the evening. They set themselves to studying poetry, copying woodblock prints. Now, said the Sake Faction, which renamed itself The Jewelled Broom that Sweeps Away All Care. Now we begin to understand.

  Buttered Toast

  This could take millions of years! The people complained but it never seemed to occur to them to stop.

  This could take billions of years, said the Speaker. This is the best thing I have ever done.

  Coq au Vin

  We will never know if we’ve got it right, said the Reader.

  No, said the Speaker. But we are elaborating. Creatively. It is what we are here to do. How few speak of Translation now?

  At last. The gift of a truly Hard Problem. The taste of a mango. The texture of a meringue. The slip of a noodle. Next to this, music and mathematics were simple.

  After a few more millennia, when it appeared that the stage of refining techniques had been reached, the Speaker said: we do need to work towards culmination, this banquet we agreed on.

  Sounds dangerous, said the Reader.

  Black Truffle Risotto

  It might be, said the Speaker. Still, we need to come together and celebrate our efforts. We understand this has been a delaying tactic but what a glorious one. Perhaps the very definition of a civilised life is that it’s all a distraction. Suspending that one and only decision—how did their great dramatist put it? To be or not to be.

  Lemon Myrtle Pavlova with Wattleseed Macadamia Brittle and Finger Lime Pearls

  Macadamia nuts! That was a long story, interjected the Reader. The Encyclopaedic Forest
of Nuts was one of the most complex projects of all, even after we spun off the truffle taskforce into a unique culture on its own world: Hazelnut Moon. A wooded satellite that now shone down green light upon the people while across its surface a wilderness of oak, beech, hazelnut and pine trees flourished in seemingly infinite combinations with fungi to encourage the right ectomycorrhizal symbiosis, while dogs and pigs roamed with the people who lived in the villages dotted throughout that Moon’s seamless forest coat.

  Jasmine-Scented Steamed Prawns

  Yes, I’d stopped believing we’d ever achieve the truffles but even that was tame compared to evolving not one but two separate lines of cephalopods so we could try the calamari and baby octopus. Not convinced that was worth all the effort, said the Reader. Not for taste, no, said the Speaker. But the creatures themselves! Worth every moment we spent on them. I wonder, mused the Reader. Could they really be like the creatures that humans knew? They look like them. Shrimp. Clams. Crabs. Now crabs, they are worth a whole ocean planet.

  Coconut Lentil Dhal

  Finger limes were responsible for the most startling development, in the Speaker’s view—a long detour into imperial battles over shipping routes, ownership of finger lime genes, trade rivalry, cultivation secrets and finally, thrillingly (for the people had forgotten all about this), a war. Having tried war again, they decided they’d been right to abandon it the first time. But still, they’d been reminded and the moment had had its excitements. The problem of Translation had been neglected for centuries at a time.