Treading Air (13 page)

After the doctor's gone, Lizzie lies in the bed with Joe and wonders how long she can make that fan-tan money stretch out. Not three weeks to a month. When she touches him, he groans and pulls away. She lies stiffly on her side of the bed, her arms pressed to her side, hurt, useless to him.

She drifts and wakes to him standing in the middle of the room, turning his head back and forth. He holds his hands out. His fingers seem stiff. He says, ‘Where am I?'

Lizzie, groggy from her nap, says, ‘At home.'

He stares at her for a long time. His eyes are dark, and there's no recognition there. He says, ‘Righto,' and then comes back to bed and lies down with his hands across his chest. He must be asleep. She drifts again, the smell of his sweat close to her, overripe, on the brink of turning rotten.

In the evening he asks for a drink of water and sits up in bed with the glass in his hand. ‘I'm low, peach,' he says. ‘I can't get this picture out of me head, came to me when I was down in the dirt. A man at Lone Pine, on the ground like that too. Shot just out of reach of the trenches. A couple times we tried to pull him behind the lines, but the Turks opened fire. Had to leave him. He swelled up like a balloon, couldn't hardly recognise it as a body. No one wanted to bring him in then. He caved in. I feel all swollen like that, wanting for the cave-in.'

She says, ‘Don't be silly, that won't happen.' She's never heard Joe talk like this before. Doesn't want those images in her mind and resents him for giving them to her. Already she's had to witness the breaking open, the bruising, the stitching up of his body, which she's held and fucked and loved.

Later he says, ‘You won't ever have to see me like this again.'

She takes this as a good sign. ‘I reckon you must be getting better.'

But she's got her hopes up too soon. A week later he's still in bed, clutching his stomach and groaning. He was doing so well for a while, but something happened that pulled him back. He felt pain across the stomach, and it sent him into despair. The fan-tan money almost gone, the food too. He won't get better if he doesn't have food. He might be up and about by now if she was able to feed him properly. His skin turns pale. Usually he's dark from the sun – she loves his colouring. But he responds with groans and closed eyes to her suggestions that he get up and walk. The sheets are slimy with his sweat, and his pillow blossoms with rust-coloured tidemarks from the spit that leaks from his mouth while he sleeps. He has to piss in a bucket, which she hauls out and throws in the garden.

When she can't stand it any longer, she rips the slimy sheets off and moves him into a chair. He groans, holding his stomach, through all the hours it takes the sheets to dry on the line. She's in no rush to do that again, hates the business of washing anyway, wrestling the heavy cotton through the wringer, the sharp stinging smell of the blue. She puts Joe to bed again and inspects the now almost-black bloom of the bruise across his belly. Bea's offer of work surfaces in her mind. No one has mailed or called to the house after she left the shop cards. She can't bear to think of the future she planned for them; only a couple of weeks ago, she thought they might be able to buy a house. She tells Joe she's going out.

Lizzie calls at number fifty-one, and Murray opens the door. When she tells him her name, that she's come to Bea about work, he says he'll just go and see.

‘And thank you,' she says, ‘for your help with me hubby.'

He shrugs. ‘Bea asked me to do it.' He closes the door on her.

The parlour isn't open yet. A man walks up to the house while Lizzie stands outside and asks her if there's anything going. ‘Don't think so,' she says. The curtains are always drawn, so it's hard to tell, but she can't hear anything from the parlour.

He looks her up and down. ‘You come here often?'

‘A bit.'

‘I might see you later, then.' She can't read his look, something thoughtful and hopeful in it.

The door opens again, Murray behind it saying, ‘She wants to see you.'

It's strange to walk past the empty rooms, the table cleared of glasses. From somewhere in the lounge, Lizzie hears a clock ticking. Murray leads her down the hallway, further than she's ever been inside the house. He knocks on a door at the very end, and Bea's voice calls him to come in. She stands up from a winged chair, naked except for a pair of knickers and a feather headdress. Lizzie steps away to find that Murray has closed the door and her back's against it. She doesn't know where to look, ends up staring at Bea's nipples.

Bea laughs. ‘I don't usually start getting ready for a couple of hours.' The feather trembles as she speaks. ‘You came about a job?'

‘You said there might be something going?' Lizzie can't take her eyes off those nipples, the fringe of lumps around the brown areolae. Her own are small and pink. Hard to believe they're the same body part.

‘But you don't really want to clean, do you, love? I'd have thought you were smarter than that.'

‘What else is there?' But maybe she knows already.

‘You can work with my girls. We can set you up in a nice little cottage, five or six nights a week, another girl there for company or in case something goes wrong.'

Lizzie's winded. She wants to run, but Joe's at the house, his face all swollen, and there's nothing to eat.

Bea leans closer, her lips red and her eyebrows painted on. Her nipples point at Lizzie, who feels cornered, oddly aroused by Bea's heavy breasts. Her father calls a woman's breasts ‘jugs', and there's something container-like about Bea's, bellied out and full. ‘I quite like the work,' Bea says. ‘Most blokes have drunk the savagery out by the time they get to you. The rowdy ones don't get past the front door. I keep some muscle around – you've seen Murray already. What d'you reckon? Put you on a trial?'

Lizzie wonders how the hell she'll tell Joe. ‘How much do I get?'

‘Depends on what you do. We're mostly English women here, some gins for when their kind come in off the cane fields. Don't worry, I won't ask you to sleep with any blacks. Or chows.' She shudders her shoulders. ‘Most whites don't go in for that French stuff, though you can get through more if you take 'em between the breasts or in the mouth.'

Lizzie's astonished and slightly sickened by these options, this whole realm of possibilities.

‘Men pay between ten shillings and a pound for ten minutes to half an hour. You'll have to work your way up to the pounders, though. I take a flat rate of ten shillings a week from each girl, to pay the rent on the knocking shops – I own the three cottages next to fifty-one. You can keep anything you earn on the first night, even if you decide you don't like it. How's that sound?'

Lizzie's mum got twenty-seven pounds for a year's work as a domestic; Lizzie can get that in a couple of weeks. At the very least, she can do it for one night, feed Joe and her for a good while, till he gets better. One night doesn't mean anything. She commits to the handshake Bea's offering, and Bea bows slightly to meet her, nipples brushing the back of her hand. A good or a bad sign?

‘I'll give you some pretty knickers,' Bea says. ‘There's nice men, you know. You can enjoy them. Really grateful for what you give them. They see it like that – a gift.'

Lizzie arranges to meet Bea that night at number fifty-three Heurand Street, a box on stumps. A Japanese lantern in the hallway throws a red glow into the open verandah. Bea leans in the doorway, gesturing Lizzie to her. Pearls slide around her neck, loop underneath her belly, another string wrapped across her thigh, the top of her dress tucked into them. Lizzie takes stock of the width of the strand, the chunk of thigh, the pearls cutting into flesh.

Bea's colder now that their deal's made, rattling off the details without changing her voice, bored. ‘This'll be your cottage,' she says, and Lizzie likes the idea of occupying the house, owning it. ‘Most often, I'll send men down from the fan-tan game. Or, if they come here straight, and you're busy, get one of me fellas to send them up to me. They can play a game or two till you're ready. I'll give you bubbly to keep here – some blokes like a drink with a girl first. Charge 'em for it. Take their money at the end, when they're feeling good. Give it to Murray or whoever's on watch. I'll count it and give you your wages. You're in here with Thelma. She'll take you under her wing.' The name sounds familiar.

Bea shows her how to pick the men from the way they come over from the Causeway. One holds himself stiffly, walks wide-legged. ‘That one,' she says, ‘he'll be an arse.'

The man stops in front of them, nods to Lizzie. ‘How much?'

Bea steps up, Amazonian, her thighs set apart. Lizzie's entranced by Bea's thighs. She heard her telling a man in the fan-tan parlour that she does daily exercises, on her back with her legs in the air, circling her feet; eats the fat from T-bones to plumpen them. ‘I am my own creation,' she said. ‘Me own parents wouldn't recognise me.'

Now Bea says to the fella, ‘She's busy tonight, mate. Another time.'

‘What about the other girls?'

‘Busy too.'

‘Me money's not good enough?'

‘Nothing personal. We can only take so many. Next time.'

The man gives them a glare, all pursed lips, as though he thinks they're a bloody broken machine if they can't take him on. ‘Won't be coming back.'

Bea watches him off. Lizzie wonders what she would do if he got violent. She pictures Bea wrapping her pearls around his neck, pulling, getting her booted foot up for extra leverage. Lizzie reckons she's capable of it, but asks her if she can really afford to turn blokes away.

‘The ones who look like trouble. In this trade, you have to believe there'll be plenty more.' Bea gestures to the range that borders the town, purple in the twilight. ‘The mountains will provide. Can you guess how many men are up there, hungry when they come down? Nice blokes who'll treat you good and give you tips.'

‘No.'

‘I believe there are thousands. There's something like ten thousand men living in the town alone, most of them white. More in the hills, the goldfields, out in the paddocks with nothin' but sheep for company.'

‘That true?'

Bea shrugs. ‘Maybe. But if I start thinking the mountains are empty, out here suddenly becomes very frightening.' She rearranges her pearls, adjusts her slip over her bottom. ‘Those men in the mountains, they like older women.'

Lizzie stares into the scrub curled up through the range, the sky washed dark orange above the rock face. She's heard stories of the men who live up there, men who are never seen in the towns. She worries about them descending on her after being lost for years.

Thelma's already in her own room when Bea leads Lizzie inside hers. It's crowded with a bed, an armchair and a dressing table crowned with a clouded mirror, a boxy heart sliced out of one corner of the frame, scored and pierced with an arrow. Bea takes her back into the open lounge space, where a long armchair bulges in the middle from the weight of too many bodies. Bea opens up the drinks cabinet and pours bubbly into a high glass. ‘I don't let the girls do this often – only drink if the men are paying for it – but for this first night, might help. I have to get back to the table. I'll send Murray down with a nice fella soon.'

Lizzie holds the glass to her mouth. Her hands shake and her own body seems distant from her, out of her control. She thinks Bea notices, so she puts the glass down and keeps her hand on the table.

Bea says, ‘You'll be right, love,' and touches her shoulder.

She leaves Lizzie listening to the champagne faintly fizzing in the glass and, after a moment, Thelma, in the room down the hallway, crying out. A man's steady grunts. The surge and churn of Lizzie's guts, heavy. Footsteps on the verandah stairs. She downs the bubbly.

Murray opens the door, a man behind him, his hand to his head taking his hat off. Something familiar about him, his freckled face framed by a fringe of light brown hair.

Murray says, ‘Here she is,' and that sounds odd, as though she's been hiding.

The man hangs his hat on the stand, looks her over and smiles. Murray shuts the door behind him, goes down the stairs to the street. She'd like to follow him. She shouldn't be here.

‘Can I pour us a drink?' the man asks. ‘Bea said this one was on the house.'

Lizzie holds out her glass gratefully, her hands still shaking.

He takes the glass and sets it down. ‘I don't know where the glasses are kept.'

She glances around, sees them quickly, turned upside-down on a sideboard.

‘I'll get another,' the man says. He sits opposite her and pours them a drink. ‘Bea said this is your first time?'

Lizzie nods. He puts his fingers over her hand. She picks the champagne up with the other hand and takes a slug. Represses a burp, bubbles fizzing up her nose.

‘I'll be gentle,' he says, ‘but you need to relax or it'll be no fun. Drink up, sweetheart.'

She takes another drink, his words reaching her from somewhere distant, the bubbles between them, buoying her up. She studies his face, trying to place him. It comes to her through the drink – he's the man at the Garden of Roses, Chris Somebody, who sent her over to fifty-one in the first place. She remembers his desire for her, which he showed her out in the open, now here again. And her body's response to him.

‘It'll be a pleasure to show you the ropes,' he says.

‘I've seen you before.'

He studies her more closely now, his eyes pale above the line of freckles. ‘You're very beautiful. I would remember someone as beautiful as you.'

‘In a tea room. The Garden of Roses.' She can tell he can't remember, his face blank and the smile still. How many girls has he smiled at? Followed around Flinders Street?