We'll Stand In That Place and other stories

by Michelle Cahill

  Kay had organised Cressida’s enrolment at the lycée before leaving Australia, and she left for her first day from the hotel. Kay went with her to breakfast. In the dark winter morning the lights in the breakfast room shone yellow out into the courtyard, and the hotel cat was curled up near a heater. The receptionist brought her small boy in for breakfast, sitting him swathed in his blanket in front of a croissant and a cup of hot chocolate. Two older girls came in and helped him, breaking off bits of croissant and putting the cup in his hands. Then they peeled off his blanket and led him away, his mother replacing the blanket with a padded jacket and a school bag on his back.

  Kay went out to see estate agents again, struggling in her schoolgirl French. She stuttered out words, aware that she was talking gibberish. You were furnished do you any apartments?

  At last a phone call was returned and an arrangement made to meet a man who would show them his furnished apartments. She couldn’t believe that it was happening and spent the hours of the afternoon in a panic. It couldn’t be so, he wouldn’t turn up, they wouldn’t be liveable, they wouldn’t be affordable. Will, still sick, refused to panic.

  Cressida came home from school and the three of them went out into the cold night. The apartments were in a good area, right on the river. They’d dreamt of an apartment on the river from the first, when they’d seen the map and the great loop of water that enveloped the old town. Monsieur was where he said he would be and greeted them stiffly, opening the door and leading them up the stairs to an apartment. One room leading into another via a spiral staircase. He explained its virtues in a steady flow of rapid French. They stood in the top room and looked at each other. It was too small.

  Monsieur kept walking, out another door into the tiled corridor, unlocking the door of the apartment opposite. They followed him into a small stairwell and into two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a lounge room . . . it was fully furnished, and had a well-equipped kitchen. They stood in the lounge room in awe. ‘Vous êtes anglais?’ said the monsieur. ‘Australien,’ said Kay. ‘Aah,’ said the monsieur, and his shoulders seemed to relax. Then he was speaking English, talking about the Japanese who were booked to have the apartment in March, then, as if thinking aloud, adding, ‘But for five months, if you want this one, I give it to you. The Japonais will have the other one.’ A price was agreed. It would be empty on Sunday and they could move in.

  They went to dinner in celebratory mood, eating in the brasserie with the art deco dining room. The mirrors on facing walls created a room that went on forever, a world full of chandeliers. Through the tall windows onto the street they watched snow start to fall in huge white flakes. It came softly, steadily, brushing the windows. Cars drove down the street with snow piled on their roofs. People entered the brasserie smiling and shaking their heads, the quick white drops dissolving on their heavy coats.

  On Saturday they drove up into the hills to see drifts of snow on the ground and lumps of dirty ice by the side of the road. ‘Oh stop, stop. I’ve never trodden on real snow,’ said Cressida, and she placed her foot like a conqueror on the layer of icy slush. Australians don’t have many words for snow.

  They drove next to limestone cliffs, beside gorges hewn out by the river rushing far below. The road twisted round to expose a view down the valley, the villages arranged along its sides, the bare trees like meshed twigs stretching up its great barren climbs.

  Then it was Sunday and they moved into the apartment, discovering cupboard space and arranging their belongings. It was such a luxury to take clothes out of bags, to have a kitchen to cook in. ‘My own room!’ said Cressida. ‘Mum, no offence but that was hideous, sharing with you and—him.’ They had been tightly packed in their hotel room for a week and a half.

  The lounge room windows faced the river, and the bedrooms opened onto an alley at the back full of restaurants and bars. After dinner that night they walked past each one, inspecting as much as they could see through the darkened windows.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Will. ‘It’s going to be fun in summer.’

  They soon absorbed the small patterns of the town. The church bells that sounded every quarter hour. The siren that went off at midday. The shops shut on Monday morning. The open market with the mushroom stall on Friday morning. ‘I love the sound of the language,’ said Kay. ‘I love the way they say “bonjour” when you come into a shop, and “au revoir” when you leave. Customers, salespeople, anyone—they all notice you.’ Will nodded.

  The markets were full of crisp leeks, varieties of potatoes, small turnips with white bodies and mauve tops displayed to contrast with the boxes of lush red tomatoes from Morocco and Spain. The cheese stalls had columns of goat cheese, arrayed from fresh to desiccated. The fresh was barely like cheese at all. Thick spicy goat’s milk. The matured ones were almost hot in their sour-bitey tang, and tough to chew. Everything was full of strong seeping flavour.

  From the lounge room window the river rushed or flowed or bobbed its way downstream. On the other side, pollarded trees stood pruned and bulbous. Behind them was the restauration rapide that opened at midday and stayed open until midnight, heat rising from the vats of oil for cooking chips. There was a statue on the footpath near the bridge—a marquis who had been a governor of the town and was the first person to go down the river by steamboat. The statue was life-sized, bronze, so real in its stature, so unexpected. It stood alone in all weathers. Sometimes a knot of people would gather near that corner, but the marquis stood apart, above them. Sometimes at night a group of teenagers would climb up and pat his head, or pretend to talk to him, or tuck some rubbish under his arm.

  At the end of the bridge was an intersection with lights suspended above it, hazy in light rain or humid nights. On the coldest, clearest nights it was crisp, the light shining without distending, the people moving without a blur, each flower box and guard rail distinct. By day, the intersection was busy with cars, and the post office corner occupied by one of two groups. ‘Have you seen this?’ Kay said to Will. She was at the window. He was at the table, flipping papers for a reference he’d lost. ‘It’s like they have a roster. There are two groups, but they’re never there at the same time. It’s the young men today.’ The young men formed the larger group. They slouched and juggled and drank and talked as easily with their dogs as with each other. The dogs wore bandanas and regarded each other with a weary suspicion that occasionally broke into snarling fights. The other group was of older men, wearing hats and black coats. They moved slowly from one foot to the other, circling the corner, talking to each other in bursts of intense conversation. ‘Mmm’, Will said, and moved to the desk in the bedroom.

  Through those late winter nights came the sound of a song, a beating robotic sound, with the warmth of a human voice flowing, spiralling around the edges. The doors of the bars would open and it would spill suddenly into the street with a gust of smoky air, then the doors would shut again, holding in the fug, the tightly packed bodies swaying to their song. Kay would lie next to Will in bed, listening to the sounds of the alley, the opening and shutting of doors.

  The snow melted and the river ran swift brown, covering the footpath and making the ducks swim hard against the current or be swept along with it. While Cressida was at school they went to the museum and saw the sarcophaguses, the row of scarab beetle statues, the Gallic-Roman remains. They walked up the ramps past the chronologically arranged paintings, past icons and virgins and Noah and Adam and Eve, past still lives and a spinnet, past portraits and landscapes into the twentieth century.

  People sold jonquils on street corners. The markets filled with joyfully bright red strawberries, then mounds of carefully arranged white asparagus. Clumpy globe artichokes, the tiniest of green beans. Everything fresh and tender, tasting of the sun and the rain and the deep rich earth.

  Carnival came late that year, with Easter due right at the end of March. The shops filled with masks made of paper or pastry or chocolate. Children ran through the streets in clown suits and leopard s
kins and face paint. Troupes of musicians came for the weekend, and the narrow streets were filled with the boom of their drums, their metallic trumpets and clarinets. Each troupe had a uniform: jesters with purple and yellow floppy hats, marching bands with shields on their chests, aliens with sea-creature masks. But they all played the same mixture of militaristic marching music and antiquated pop songs. When the anarchistic sea creatures, young people with nose-rings and shaved heads, were denied entry to the Irish pub, they blockaded the street and played their best medley of Hitler youth and Abba until the management relented. Kay and Cressida watched from the steps of the church, laughing till they ached. ‘Oh look Will, look, they’re winning,’ Kay puffed, trying to whisper. Will smiled.

  The spring crept in, a green haze covering the willow by the river, the thick pale leaves of bulbs appearing in the dark brown soil, and Will said he was going. He would leave at the end of the month. He didn’t want to go too abruptly. He loved her, but he had to go. Had to go for his own sake. He was suffocating. Even in voicing his decision he found it easier to breathe. Kay looked out the window. She saw the people in the apartment directly opposite theirs. Their apartment took up the whole of one floor of the building, plus the two attic rooms. It was modern inside the old building, with light wooden stairs leading up to the attics. The downstairs section had been made into one large room, with three large double doors, French doors, opening onto the balcony made of black cast-iron panels. It was softly lit, warm and pretty. An orange drape hung on the wall behind the straw-coloured sofa. The family could be seen at their meal at the table in front of one of the double doors. Then the father was putting the child to bed, throwing up the bedcovers for a game, then sitting by the bed to read a book, then leaving the room, a night-light shining near the window.

  They slept in the bed together, felt the warmth of skin against skin, the rise and fall of another breathing body, but it was only sensations. It didn’t go any deeper. It didn’t mist out into feelings of love, or devotion. It hovered over the surface, like their hesitant words and disconnected glances.

  Cressida came home from school with stories of the people she saw on the bus and on the streets. She had stories of school lunches and school friends. She made dinner lively and pleasant. Their lunches without her were barren.

  The patisseries filled inexplicably with chocolate fish, lobsters and other sea creatures, and fish decorated every shop window in a hundred different ways. People dressed in fish costumes appeared on television talk shows. ‘It’s the Poisson d’avril,’ Cressida explained, finally picking up the information from school. Kay called it April Fish Day, but no one could think of a joke. Will bought trout for dinner.

  On Will’s last Sunday they decided to go for a drive. The sun was shining and the hills were growing green. The magnolia on the river bank was still full, creamy-white, and the tree behind it thick with pink blossoms. There was a faint optimism in the air. But the car was listing terribly. Its tyres had been slashed. They went home to spend the day, not in the sparkling hills, but ringing mechanics and waiting for assistance.

  Kay made a police report, reluctantly meeting the impatient gaze of the bullish young man at the front desk. Her French vanished. Single words issued from her lips. Car. Parking. Assistance. Tyres. Lacerated. The young man barked directions and somehow she registered them and went to sit and wait for something to happen. An older, more brusque man summonsed her with one word, ‘Insurance?’ and she followed him into a tiny office. He asked her name and address then another question which she didn’t follow. He reached over the desk and lifted her unadorned left hand. ‘Mariée? Non.’ He answered his own question. Married. No.

  She left the building with the signed report and turned down the street, her feet carrying her aimlessly. By the time she reached Rue de la Madeleine the shops were filling with a rush of prelunch shoppers. She stopped at the boulangerie and saw Will further down the street, walking towards her. They saw each other, and hesitated, then walked closer. It was a town where they usually recognised no one, and they were startled, and pleased. He took her hands and kissed her lightly on the mouth so naturally that she believed, for one moment, that they were together. They walked back to the apartment, her hand tightly in his, but by the time they walked inside, she knew again that he was leaving.

  Then the apartment was like a place where people are grieving. Where it doesn’t seem right to do anything more than pick up a book, or find some other quiet activity, like a nineteenth-century parlour where the situation forbids visitors and occupation is mandatory.

  The week dragged to a close. Some normal activities were necessary. They still went shopping for food, but it became exhausting just thinking of going out. Outside the house there were hordes of non-English speaking people, and each transaction was laden with humiliating possibilities.

  On Friday he left. Kay walked down the footpath next to the river. The red kite was wheeling above the citadel, and the heron was standing where the water drops down among the rocks near the little island. She stopped and watched, first the kite, then the heron, for it is possible to think that they will always be there, to pass them by just one more time and make the mistake of thinking that whenever you want to see them, they’ll be there: the kite circling effortlessly, flying into the thermals and gliding; the grey heron standing so still in the glistening water, its body compact, its neck swivelling to watch for the fish that will slip down the spillway, rippling over the rocks.

  Biographies

  Emily Brewin is a Melbourne-based author and educator. Her first novel, Hello, Goodbye, was released in 2017 with Allen & Unwin. Her second, Small Blessings, came out in February 2019 with the same publisher. She has been awarded an Australian Society of Authors mentorship for her fiction writing and undertook a Bundanon Trust artist residency and a Moreland writers’ residency in 2018 to develop her third novel, The Piano. Emily’s short stories have been shortlisted for a number of awards, including the 2019 Margaret River Short Story Competition. She has written for Feminartsy, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and Mamamia.

  Michelle Cahill’s short stories, Letter to Pessoa, won the UTS Glenda Adams Award, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing and was shortlisted in the Steele Rudd Queensland Literary Awards. She won the Hilary Mantel International Short Story Prize and was shortlisted in the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize. She was a Fellow at Kingston Writing School, a Visiting Scholar in Creative Writing at UNC, Charlotte, and a Fellow at Hawthornden Castle. She is an award-winning poet and critic. Her essays have appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, Southerly, Westerly and The Weekend Australian.

  Claire Corbett has had stories, essays and journalism published in journals including Picador New Writing, SMH, The Monthly, Griffith Review, Overland, Southerly, Antipodes, Science Fiction Film and Television, and Best Australian Stories 2014 and 2015. Her first novel, When We Have Wings (Allen & Unwin), was shortlisted for the 2012 Barbara Jefferis Award and shortlisted for the 2012 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction and published overseas. Watch Over Me, her second novel, was published by Allen & Unwin in 2017. She is writing her third novel. She teaches Creative Writing at UTS, is on the Board of Varuna, the National Writers’ House, and is the new fiction editor of Overland.

  Darryl R. Dymock enjoys writing short fiction, is a winner of the Roly Sussex Short Story Award, and has been published elsewhere including in Griffith Review and most recently in the anthology Within/Without These Walls. He is also the author of five narrative non-fiction books, including Hustling Hinkler and The Chalkies. In his other life he is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at Griffith University, Brisbane. Darryl lives in Brisbane with his wife and his laptop and says that in any writing the challenge is always the beginning, the middle and the end. He blogs occasionally at https://drdymock.wordpress.com.

  K. W. George is a writer from Brisbane. She has been published in a number of journals including Meanjin, Going Down Swinging, and The Big Issue. This is her fourth
appearance in a Margaret River Press Anthology, which she believes is a record of some kind, but who’s counting?

  Justine Hyde is a library director, writer and critic who lives in Melbourne. Her fiction, essays and reviews are published in The Age, The Australian , The Saturday Paper , Kill Your Darlings , The Lifted Brow, Meanjin and Seizure.

  Jenni Mazaraki is a writer and visual artist based in Melbourne. She is currently working on her first novel, an extract of which was shortlisted for the 2017 Deborah Cass Prize. Her poetry has been highly commended in The Bridport Prize 2018 and her short stories have been shortlisted for prizes including the Write Around the Murray Award 2017. Her poetry is included in the anthology #MeToo: Stories from the Australian movement published by Picador forthcoming 2019.

  Rachel McEleney’s short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Seizure, Ghostly Stringybark Anthology, Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies and An Alphabetical Amulet Anthology. Her poetry has appeared on the UWA Poets’ Corner in Perth. Rachel lived in several countries before settling in the south-west of Western Australia. The south-west landscape has inspired her writing and she likes to spend a lot of time in the bush, particularly in spring so she can search for orchids. She is a PhD candidate at Edith Cowan University’s South West Campus.

  Audrey Molloy was born in Dublin and grew up in rural Ireland. She now lives in Sydney, where she works as an optometrist and writer. Her poetry has been widely published, most recently in Meanjin, Cordite, Overland, Australian Poetry Anthology, Rabbit, Southerly, The Moth, The Irish Times and Magma. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for The Southern Cross Short Story Competition and has been published in The Blue Nib. Audrey’s work has been nominated for the Forward Prize and she is one of Eyewear Publishing’s Best New British and Irish Poets 2018. www.audreymolloy.com