Treading Air (11 page)

Townsville, 1923

L
izzie finds Joe sitting on the top step, smoking a Capstan.

‘Not going to work?' she asks.

‘Haven't had one of these since the war.' He holds the cigarette in front of his eyes.

Lizzie sits beside him, takes it from his hand, has a drag and hands it back. He inspects the end where her lips have been, wraps his own around it. ‘Coppers might come today, Lizzie,' he says.

‘Why?' She shivers, thinking of the fan-tan parlour and the time, years ago, when the coppers took her dad away overnight. He hid her in a cupboard when he heard their booted feet on the stairs. ‘You'll end up in the lock with me otherwise,' he whispered, shutting the door on her and leaving her in the darkness. She listened to the cops moving through the house, her dad silent for once. Until he yelled out, ‘Where are you taking me?' and they told him. He yelled again, ‘Aunt Mabel will come for me,' and Lizzie knew then to run to their neighbour Mabel and tell her what had happened. The coppers were looking for her dad's takings from the bookmaking, but he never left them in the house. Wasn't that bloody stupid.

Still, the idea of cops in her place sends her back into the gloom between the cupboard's four wooden walls, the touch of an empty coat sleeve on her shoulder making her shiver.

Joe's hand holding the cigarette shakes. He cups it in the other one. The step under her foot is already heating up with the sun. He says, ‘Man got hurt at the meatworks yesterday. They're blaming me, peach.'

‘Christ, what happened?' The panic has settled in on her now. Her vision is hazy.

‘You don't want to know.'

‘I've a right to.'

Joe stalls a bit longer, then gives in. ‘Yeah? You want to know what goes on in that stinking place? Alright, peach, know what they do? Bloke in front of me goes out to the slaughter yards, shoots the beast 'tween the eyes, lifts it up on the block and tackle, swings it down to another bloke, skins it, then on to me. Me job's tails and hooves. That's what I do all day, tails and hooves. Had a new fella on with me, dumb as a bag of hammers, but don't need to be smart for tails and flamin' hooves. Me, thought maybe I can move on to the gutting, shuffle up to the next place in line for a bit of something different – that's what I had to look forward to. Not now, but. Bloody idiot was holding the tail, beast slipped off the tackle. Wasn't me fault, thing wasn't hooked on right. Blame should be on the bloke in the slaughter yard, but I was the one with the knife in me hand. Couldn't see what the hell I was doing.'

‘You tell 'em that?'

‘Overheard the bosses saying they wanted to be rid of me, it was my fault. Never liked me. I'm not a man other men like.'

She puts her arm around him, thinks of the money they're not going to have. From the way he described it, she can't picture the other man, or the injury.

Joe puts his palm to his forehead. ‘The bloke's gonna lose a hand. Might want compensation.'

‘Christ, we have nothing. Even less now you've no job.' Lizzie, exhausted, pictures herself back in the bedroom with her arm flung over her eyes to keep the sun out, the red dots in her vision forming into carcasses hung from the upper part of her eyelids. The beast sliding down, short-legged and hoofless. Joe strikes a match. ‘What're we gonna do?' she asks. When she opens her eyes, the sun hits her.

‘I'll get another job.'

‘Doing what?'

‘Whatever comes up.' He puts his hand over Lizzie's. ‘You might have to work too, just for a bit.'

‘Don't tell me that. I want to stay home, have a baby.' She's never said it out loud before, and now she's using it like a weapon. She doesn't even know if she means it, but Joe would be a good daddy for a boy.

He grabs her around the shoulders and squeezes tight. She's taken by surprise, stiffens, her hands still in her lap. He speaks into her neck. ‘Do you, peach? I wasn't sure. I'm so happy. So, so happy.' He kisses her all over her face, her ears, her neck. She wonders what she's done, telling him this. ‘I'll look after us,' he says. ‘I promise. I'll do better. Get meself another job.' He rubs his face against her shoulder, wetness on her skin. She thinks he's crying but doesn't want to see.

They sit in the sun with the house heating up behind them, the chooks scratching mechanically in the cool dirt underneath.

The two of them are stretched out on the lounge chairs, Lizzie dozing. When there's a beating on the door, she sits bolt upright, her heart thumping. Joe groans and rolls over, pressing his face to the back of the chair.

She's shaking when she opens the door to two coppers in their flat caps and black jackets with the double band of arrows pointing downwards across their sleeves. The one in front has wide-apart eyelashes, but the rest of his face is sunken. His eyes pop when he introduces himself as Inspector O'Sullivan. She misses the name of the other, who looks all of about fourteen, his shoulders thin. She stays in the doorway, not budging.

‘Can we speak to Mr O'Dea?' O'Sullivan says.

‘What about?' She wonders how long she can delay them.

O'Sullivan slides his eyes over her, maybe deciding how to play this. ‘We're investigating an incident at the meatworks.'

A hand on her shoulder, and Joe's behind her, saying, ‘What you want?'

O'Sullivan repeats himself, then Joe says, ‘I'd prefer to talk outside. Don't want to upset me wife.'

Lizzie thinks that he wasn't so squeamish in telling her before, but she's alright with not knowing. She wants none of it. Joe's bosses have obviously got the coppers on their side. The law always favours the wealthy.

Joe leads the cops down the stairs. They stand in the ragged shade cast by the frangipani tree, the men's faces dappled and unclear. The timbre of their voices reaches her, but she doesn't catch the words. Joe looks into the distance and scratches his head. O'Sullivan has his arms crossed and legs apart, as if he's on stage. The other one has his hands behind his back, but his attention has wandered; the pale oval of his face is turned from her, towards the neighbour's yard and the sweep of the road beyond. They don't seem ready to drag Joe away. She watches out for it anyway – things can turn at any moment with the coppers. And with Joe.

He puts his hands out, palm up, and his voice goes higher at the end. O'Sullivan uncrosses his arms and stands with his hands by his side. She tenses up on the top step, putting her hand on the railing, ready for flight. But O'Sullivan is stepping backwards, his arms folded again. Joe glances to her. O'Sullivan says something, then turns back to the road, where a black Model T is parked. The only car in the street. The young one seems caught unawares, takes a moment longer to move. He nods and tips his cap to Joe as though they're at a party, then follows O'Sullivan out of the yard.

Joe watches them go from under the tree. They U-turn awkwardly on the road, taking a couple of goes at it, gravel skidding out under the tyres. Joe comes up the stairs and cups his hands around the air near Lizzie's shoulders, gently directing her. ‘Go inside. It's alright. They've got nothing on me.'

She turns away, the security of his presence right behind her, relieved he's still with her and not being hauled off like her dad.

Joe and Lizzie have no time for banks. Her dad never liked them; she has his habit of keeping their savings in a tin. Three weeks after Joe loses his job, the tin is almost empty. They cleared out the cupboards yesterday, when she cooked up a sauce – no veggies to call it a stew – with the last of the flour. Lucky the chooks are still on the lay.

Joe's been going out and lining up in the unemployment queue. He spends every day out there, and comes back foul and jobless. ‘The bloke keeps saying, come back tomorrow, might be something then, but men behind me in the line get work over me. I reckon they're against me, Lizzie, after what happened at the meatworks.'

She touches his arm. She's not sure if this is true, but she trusts him enough to know he'd take a job if there was one. Facing her is the idea that she'll have to work as a domestic, cleaning up after some wealthy woman. She thinks of her mother, her squalid room at the back of the house and the way Lizzie was left for hours waiting to talk to that woman as she hid upstairs, disgusted.

Lizzie's father might help them, but she's not ready to write to him yet, begging. She hates writing anyway. He always picked on her spelling and made her feel small.

Joe knows a bloke who owns a pig farm that provides for the meatworks. He brings over a box of meat, which they stretch out for days. Then the fruit stall owner asks him why he hasn't seen him recently. When he hears Joe's story, he offers him a sack of blackened bananas. Lizzie's so hungry when Joe brings them that she eats five straight away and feels sick for the rest of the day. She moves in and out of consciousness, imagines the bananas mashed up in her belly, forces herself to stop. Still, her dreams are mushy. She wakes in the middle of the night, light-headed and aware of a presence in the bed. Putting her hands out, she feels along the length to check it isn't a giant banana, recognises Joe in the shape.

He wakes with her hands on him. ‘What?' he asks.

‘Just checking,' she says, and he doesn't ask what for, just turns over and falls back asleep.

In the morning, queasy still but able to move around, she writes up some cards to put in shops, her hand cramping as she copies out:
DOMESTIC AVILABLE TO WORK IMEDIATELY, 40 ROBERTS ST, HERMIT PARK.
Something's wrong with the words, but she can't work out what. Maybe it really needs to say that she has experience, but she can't bring herself to lie and make people think she'd been a domestic in Brisbane. Already it shames her that she has to put down her address. She wants the neighbours to think she can afford to be a housewife.

To make matters worse, Joe gives her a bit of a struggle. ‘You don't need to do this. Something'll come up for me. Want you to be at home when the baby comes.'

‘Cripes, Joe, don't pin too much on it. Hasn't happened yet.' She's shaky with worry. ‘How're we gonna feed it? We're living on bloody bananas.'

‘But I'll have work soon, I know it.'

She barely has any fight in her, is on the brink of giving in to him and going back to bed. But she's still queasy; earlier she had to move the bananas outside because she couldn't bear to look at them.

‘I believe you,' she says, ‘but let me help for a while.'

‘Promise me if you get a job, you'll give it up straight away once I get one.'

Her promise is easy to give – she doesn't want to work anyway.

She puts on her hat and heads towards Flinders Street. Most of the shopkeepers along Charters Towers Road let her leave her cards on the counter among a dusty pile of others. When she looks at rates that women are advertising, the bananas rise in her gut again. Half of what Joe used to make. Some less. Barely enough for the rent. And she was so stupid to say that thing about the baby – now Joe's got his heart set on it. The idea has blinded him.

In a tea room she sees a woman on her own leaning back into her chair, her eyes red as if she's been crying. Must be because she's been left high and dry. Lizzie looks away. She knows this sense of being abandoned that makes you forget everything and bawl out in the open, in a crowded tea room.

Her mum left on the morning of the day she promised to take Lizzie into the city, where she'd never been. Her mum was going to go on her own, but Lizzie begged and begged until finally her mum gave in. Lizzie stayed awake all night because her mum had said she was leaving early, would only take her if she was awake and ready to go. Lizzie kept awake in the chair in her room, her eiderdown wrapped around her.

In the cool of morning, she heard her mum moving around. Lizzie watched her through the crack in the door, packing her things into a portmanteau. Lizzie's dad woke up and mumbled something. Her mum glanced at him, turned back to her packing when he was still again. Lizzie didn't call out. She wanted her mum to come into her room and check to see if she was awake. Then she heard her mum's shoes on the stairs, their quick rhythm, the hum of the metal railing.

Lizzie was left alone in the house with a stranger she didn't know how to talk to. She tried to think of what she could have said to make her mum take her, but couldn't. Still can't. Why has this memory come back to her now, when she's down already?

Lizzie walks along Heurand Street in the midday sun and meets McWilliams outside fifty-one, counting coins in the palm of his hand. She's not quite sure he'll remember her, or what the situation is between him and Joe now, but he looks up and greets her cheerfully enough. He seems sober too.

‘What're you doing?' she asks.

‘Working out if I've enough to buy in. Want to help me?'

She snorts. ‘Not likely. Since Joe lost the job –' She holds up her empty hands. The rest of her cards she threw in the mangroves, too exhausted and hot to keep going.

‘Not found nothing?'

‘No.'

McWilliams glances away into the sun and squints his eyes.

‘Know anything going?' she asks.

He looks back to her face. ‘Maybe.' He scratches his head. ‘Some of the blokes at the works don't think much of 'im after what happened. Makes it hard.'

‘But it was an accident!' The heat and her wobbly tummy are getting to her. She's sick of this town. It doesn't give a man a second chance.

McWilliams tracks his eyes over her face and squints again. ‘Tell you what,' he says, ‘how about I lend you this, we go in there as partners, play a couple of games? You win, you can pay me back.'

‘I lose?'

‘We'll call it quits.'

‘Generous of you.' Lizzie can't work out what his game is.