We'll Stand In That Place and other stories Read online

  You stuck it into Andy and he flowered. The needle, anything.

  After the funeral Bonnie crammed the Kingswood with Andy’s stuff: runners, grass-stained and worn down at the right heel, courtesy of that knee and Andy’s compromised stride; then the suit, in which Andy would have been buried if Baby had got his way; then shoes, two pairs, one pair dressy and which Baby would have worn to the funeral, if they’d let him. CDs next; then Andy’s novels, some of the pages dog-eared, because Andy didn’t like bookmarks; then a Macquarie Dictionary, which must have been new because the pages hadn’t been Andied. Bonnie threw it all into the back seat of Andy’s car.

  Bonnie waved a fifty in Baby’s face. ‘Petrol.’

  She jingled the car keys and pressed them into Baby’s hands. She stood alongside him and folded an arm around his shoulders. They stared at the house where Andy had died. Someone screamed. Then another voice, and laughter.

  ‘Run, Baby.’

  Bonnie pushed him towards the driver’s door of the Kingswood. His shin struck the bumper. Baby knew Bonnie believed she had to get him in the car. Quick. She’d always watched out for him and knew it took him a while to figure the thrust of things. He let her push him into the driver’s seat and acquiesced while she fastened his seatbelt.

  Bonnie had been good to Andy. Maybe she’d feel better if she believed she’d saved Baby a belting. But he was never going to fight those bastards. Andy had explained lines in the sand, the power of the herd, consequences.

  ‘Live in the blur,’ he’d said. ‘On the edge, in the smudge where one thing can transform into another. You’ll be safe there, Baby.’

  Andy had vomited on the bedsheets and the pillow, so they’d covered his head with a towel and gone back to the party. Baby arrived to once-and-for-all have it out and the girl who rented the house, Bonnie’s sister, had told him that Andy was in the bedroom. Waiting, darling. Waiting.

  Baby wandered down the passage and pushed open the door to Andy’s room and all he thought was: They should have put the towel over his feet, because anyone can see those feet are dead.

  Baby wonders if he should tell the cowboy that he loves magnolias. And once they get talking and if the cowboy lowers his lariat, Baby might be able to explain why he stands out from the herd. Instead, he babbles.

  ‘I don’t belong,’ Baby says.

  ‘I wasn’t finished properly. Andy reckoned it was the same for everyone.

  ‘“But they look right, Andy.” That’s what I told him.

  ‘I should have told him the rest of it. How there are too many thresholds. Too many ways of seeing things. And what that does to you.

  ‘There’s waking up one morning and believing that you can read your feet and not liking that story. There’s dogs, and seeing them, really seeing them. There’s lines in the sand. There’s Andy. There’s thresholds you can’t see until you step into them. There’s love—that lariat that tightens with the struggle. There’s cowboys. There’s stepping through the threshold.

  ‘His feet should have been under the towel. He was just a boy. He wasn’t finished.’

  The cowboy stares at Baby. He lowers the hand that holds the belt. The noose nestles at his feet, a tangle of leather that from a distance might be mistaken for a small dog curled at the feet of someone it loved.

  ‘How’s this?’ Baby says. ‘We’ll walk to the beach and onto the sand. I’ll roll up the cuffs of Andy’s pants and your jeans. I’ll take off our shoes and our socks.

  ‘I could read our feet. But then I’d have to tell you why you thought your belt was a noose. I’d have to tell you why I should have been culled instead of Andy.

  ‘Instead, let’s stand in that place where the waves meet the sand. We’ll find that translucence—that way of seeing that transforms the unravelled butt of a cigarette into a butterfly with wings coloured and shaped like you’ve never seen. I’ll dream the weight of the paw of a dog resting on my left foot. I’ll conjure love by resting my right foot on my left.

  ‘In that place your belt and the noose at the end is a leather lead and a puppy. And the warmth and the lick of the water is the puppy’s tongue on your feet.

  ‘We’ll stand where everything smudges, and there are no lines in the sand.’

  Thylacine

  Catherine Noske

  1.

  T he man on the news tells her they have found a thylacine fossil. It is the feel-good story at the end of the bulletin and the man is smiling through the powdery sheen of his makeup. She turns the TV off.

  It is late to be hanging out the washing; she has left it very late. It probably won’t dry now, even though it is still warm. The humidity. It wouldn’t have dried during the day, either. It isn’t like down south, the heat here. It swells things, bursts things open. It holds droplets of water suspended in the air, so big you can almost see them, feel them. And so the washing never really dries, day or night. It went mouldy, once. She has learned now to hang it out only in the afternoons, or inside, in front of the fan, or to dry it in the machine. She has no idea if it really helps, hanging it out late, but the local women tell her it is what you should do. It feels cooler, at least.

  It will be dark soon. The night animals will come out, the possums and the bats. Their eyes frighten her. She isn’t used to such an abundance of life. Spiders and beetles and lizards. The house seems to bulge with it all, sometimes. She seems to bulge with it. On the evenings she is alone, it rustles and squeaks and squeals. She lies there and sweats. It would be dangerous to raise a child here, she thinks. The house is on stilts. That is meant to keep her safe, but still the animals and spiders get in.

  It is better when her husband is home. Nights like tonight, when he is away and she is left to hang his trousers and his smalls and the few stiff work shirts he has left behind, it is difficult, it is frightening; but she can almost manage it when he is home. The night animals don’t bother her so much. Their noises aren’t real compared with his. Back down south, the noises of the outside world meant so little. It’s only when he is home that she can remember what that was like.

  It is bizarre, this problem with the washing. Too hot to dry washing! This world is strange, she thinks. The cicadas will start up their ringing soon, and that is strange too. So many of them! And only one of her! The work shirts need to dry. He will be home in the next two days. No chance for washing, out there. He will need every last one. She has left it late, this time, to wash them. It all seemed too difficult. And she was so tired. Besides, he only ever has a few days and then he is gone again and she is left with more to wash. It is hard to see the point.

  The lights have gone on at the neighbours’ place. She can see the insects crawling in silhouette over their windows. Light the zapper, she reminds herself. Call home. Now she has come outside, she has woken up a little, and everything that was too hard in the heat of the day is closer to being possible. She picks up the empty washing basket and heads inside.

  2.

  The man on the news says: Further exploration by specialised teams in the area the thylacine fossil was discovered has been approved by the state government and local Indigenous cultural groups, and will go ahead with all possible speed.

  3.

  Her husband works in exploratory geology. He told her about the thylacine the night he found it. He sounded strange, but it might have been the line. He sounded as though he was drunk. She sat on the kitchen floor to talk to him. It was hard to hear. Beneath his voice came a faint buzzing, a quavering of pitch. It blurred things, made his words slippery and hard to hold. The spaces between them ran together. Wefounda breathe thylacinefossil. Perfectlypreserved. Furthernorththananyothereverbefore. It took her a moment to understand, and she was too slow to congratulate him. He hung up without saying Iloveyou.

  Now she sits on the kitchen floor again and hopes he will ring. Outside, the insects burst into life. Their noise is broken. She feels sweat bead gently on her forehead and wonders if he will ever come home.

  4.
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  He has been invited to give a paper. He writes: We found significant partial subfossils of a thylacine within proximity of KMG’s Matsu Mine in northern Western Australia. This is the furthest north and west in Australia that such a specimen has been recorded. The conclusion to be drawn is that, at one point in history, the thylacine population extended across mainland Australia, and potentially even through Papua New Guinea. There are Aboriginal cave drawings that support this hypothesis, showing thylacine being hunted. Felix (1998) suggests that it was competition with the dingo that reduced mainland thylacine numbers, the dingo holding the edge of having been adopted by the Aboriginal people as hunting companions. Building from cross-disciplinary sources, this paper will discuss this possibility.

  He types with fingers that are stiff, mechanical. His thoughts are stiff, mechanical. His wife is happy that he is home. He should come home more often, but it is hard, and perhaps he is a coward. He has been away a lot. He tells her it is field trips, but it isn’t.

  He finds things to do. He is a coward. He should just tell her.

  He thinks a lot about being a coward. Once, out in the field, at one of the camps, a group of men approached him in an old, beaten up truck. He was surveying, he had been invited. He was trying to find the woman who had told him he could come, but she wasn’t at the settlement and hadn’t been seen in a few days. There was a rumour she had gone to visit her daughter at the single women’s camp. When he went looking for her, the men came at him. The bonnet of their truck was tied down with baling twine. The men were yelling, their eyes frightened him. He didn’t speak their language. They kept yelling. He turned the Jeep around and didn’t stop. He drove back to the camp in silence, and he left the next day.

  He met an art dealer on his way back. He didn’t tell him what he was doing, but told him about the camp, about leaving. The art dealer laughed with his mouth open. The art dealer said they were all bluff, it was a big show, art was the same. The colonials used to call the Indigenous people savage. Primitive. Listening to the art dealer, he wondered if anyone had ever stopped. The profit doesn’t translate, the dealer told him. It isn’t really in their vocabulary.

  He writes: There have been multiple reported sightings of thylacine since they were declared extinct in . . . He pauses, thinks. 1936. Not only in Tasmania, but in Victoria, South Australia and even over the border in southern parts of Western Australia. Most sightings have been in range of the south coast of the country, and none have ever been confirmed. You would be lucky, at this point, to see one here! Pause for laughter, he thinks, and grimaces.

  Somehow, the fossil has become a victory. It uplifts people, symbolises the power of science. People smile when they hear about it. The first hours, the first days, he felt like that as well. His wife was the only one who did not react, when he told her. Maybe she understood more than he gave her credit for. It does not change anything. He thinks of the gaping, slack, open-cut mouth of Argyle, the pock-marked scars on the satellite maps. We can’t save that world, he thinks, that collective dream-world we have caught in our imaginations of a pristine, natural land. Gone. Done. But then, if they could comprehend that, they wouldn’t have asked him to speak.

  His wife appears around the door of his study. She has a sandwich on a plate, and she is smiling. He forces himself to smile back. Coward, the voice whispers in the back of his mind. He wonders when she will work it out.

  5.

  He tells her: I will be away longer this time. She feels herself step back as he says it. She has to repeat herself when she asks him why, he doesn’t hear her the first time. His fingers are busy, taptaptap, mechanical on the keyboard, the paper on the thylacine, the fossil. I am going back up there, he says. We are going looking for more. She nods and watches him for a moment. He is almost facing her, his desk facing the doorway, but his eyes don’t leave the computer. She slips softly back to the kitchen.

  She can feel him there, as she cleans up the lunch. He is something solid in the house, something real. Her own body feels lighter in consequence. The floorboards creak when he moves about, the hollow noise of his keyboard floats from his room. He cancels other noises out, things that might be there, might not. She does not turn the television on as she normally would, but lets the presence of him cushion her through the afternoon. She feels his mood shift, gradually. He settles, moves about less, types more steadily. His noises become softer, less aggressive. She takes him a cool drink, and this time he looks at her with grateful eyes. She feels herself relax, as well. She starts to sing in a low voice, a non-sense song, words slipping from her almost without her noticing. Welcome home, she sings tunelessly. You are home, I am home, we will be home, welcome home.

  When the sun goes down, she starts dinner. He emerges rumpled from the study to hover by the bench and watch her work. She is smiling when she turns around. It is peaceful.

  He is looking at her in a way she thought she might have forgotten. It feels strange and beautiful to be desired. As though a thick and dirty pelt is peeling back from her body to leave her skin shiny and new. It feels raw. She turns back to the carrots and tries to decide what it is that has changed. Chopchopchop, the anxiety of her life alone, gone. His eyes cancel the boredom. Her husband behind her sighs comfortably. She leaves the vegetables and pours him a glass of wine. She can’t find anything to say, but for once it doesn’t matter.

  That night in bed, he opens his arms and she feels herself flow into them like water. The whole world shrinks into the sensation of his stubble against her forehead and the gentle earthiness of his smell. She fell in love with his smell before anything. She used to try and catch it on her clothes.

  They are calling it the Jameson fossil, he says, and adds unnecessarily: After me.

  I know, she whispers. You told me.

  6.

  The man on the news says: This is a discovery that really shifts our understanding of our environment’s history!

  7.

  Some things, he thinks, come and go in the memory. Easily remembered, too easily forgotten. The smell of bleach from the laundry drags him backwards to his childhood, the local swimming pool with his mother and twin sisters, eating ice cream from tiny, individual tubs, on smooth wooden paddles. That smell on his skin, a taste in the back of his mouth, somewhere behind the ice cream, benevolent sweetness undercut. He can remember swimming with his wife when they first arrived in the north and had not yet learnt to distinguish between levels of heat. When the water was the only place the humidity was bearable, the only place in the world that made sense. The pool, dug with his very first pay cheque. He tries to remember why they left that house.

  His wife, he knows, is pretending he is not leaving. But his bag is already packed, he is almost running late, it will be dark by the time he makes it out there. He does not leave but waits for her to emerge. She is scrubbing at something, bent over the laundry trough. She is wearing yellow gloves. Bleach and soft rubber and once again he is taken back to their pool—the heavy cover, the smell of chlorine rising in the sun. His wife in the laundry wipes her hair back from her forehead with a damp forearm.

  You are amazing, she whispered to him last night. You are wonderful.

  It all came back with those words. The resentment, the reluctance, the claustrophobia. No one, he thinks, can live up to that. She is in denial, if she thinks he is all that. But then, he thinks, watching her in the laundry, he knows she is in denial. She ignored his bag. She brought him the shirts she had washed, but ignored the fact of his packing.

  And she never asked him how long he would be gone.

  It won’t matter once he is away. It never fails to surprise him, how quickly the emotion fades. There is no guilt, no feeling at all, until the point where he can make excuses no more, is forced to turn himself home. More and more, that is his life, and the days here at home are a strange interlude of overwhelming, mixed sensations. He loves her, somehow, when he is here. But not when he is gone. And already he can feel himself turning. In the
back of his mind, he is already thinking about the fossil site, thinking about the rock, thinking about other possible places where similar conditions exist. They are consulting with a specialist paleontologist from Sydney about the formation conditions. The mine will not be happy, but they have no choice.

  His wife pulls the plug from the laundry sink and the gloves from her hands. She turns to him. Framed in the doorway of the laundry she is little more than a silhouette. The light from the window behind her is almost forceful. He picks up the bag at his feet and slings it across his shoulder. She steps forward to kiss him and has to reach awkwardly over its bulk. There is a space between their bodies, broached only by the stiff movement of her arm. He tries to smile.

  From the front seat of the car, he looks back. Standing on the steps, her shoulders are round and slumped. The bag fills the passenger seat beside him. The strange energy of departure begins to bubble up. Already he can smell the iron-laced dirt of the mine, the lightness of an open space. He starts the car and backs out of the driveway. He turns onto the road and goes.

  8.

  She should tell him, she thinks, as he leaves. She is a coward. He will find out, one way or another. It will be obvious soon. She lets one hand slip down to her womb. Jameson, she thinks, watching him go. After you.

  The Day The Rain Stopped Dancing

  Rachel McEleney

  T he American President Jose Hernandez was on television. ‘We the American people are going to war on starvation. It is time to say enough is enough. No more will the people of Africa suffer. No more will their children starve.’ The camera cut to Africa and green-clothed US Corp personnel handing out bags of grain and then cut back to the President. ‘The world has . . .,’ Lily muted the television, sick of the constant rhetoric. ‘You’d think some joker would’ve put something decent on a loop. Not out-of-date news. We all know what fools we were to believe the propaganda. No need to keep reminding us.’ Lily changed channel, hoping that something would be on. ‘Snow, static, and more snow. Of course, only SBS were thoughtful enough to leave a constant reminder of our complacency. Why did we leave it so late?’