Treading Air (2 page)

Lady Crier surges ahead of the others, overtaking another horse that Lizzie recognises, Lumpy Bill.

‘She's gonna place.' Joe has his hand on her elbow. She leans into him.

‘Liz –' Her dad.

She spins around, making sure he's ruined the end of the race for her. ‘What?'

Joe looks round too. The race is over, and Lizzie's pretty sure that Lady Crier placed second.

‘Sorry you had to see the other,' her dad says. ‘I know how you get sentimental about the horses.'

She looks away. She doesn't want Joe to know about this, hates her dad for bringing it up while he's standing there. Hates the idea of her being sentimental, which makes her seem small. Her dad touches her shoulder, leaves his hand there, and she stops herself shaking him off. ‘This is Joe,' she says.

Her dad puts his hand out, notices who Joe is, hesitates slightly.

‘Your daughter's already paid up,' Joe says, taking his hand.

Her dad glances at her. ‘Has she? Usually can't prise a shillin' out of 'er.'

‘She's a good girl,' Joe says.

Lizzie resents these two statements, equally untrue. Her dad's surely not convinced by Joe's description either. She's not an innocent, doesn't want Joe to think she wouldn't know how to kiss him if he wanted it. She's generous too, just not with her dad, who doesn't deserve a thing. She'd like Joe to know her without her dad's gaze making her into something else.

‘Pulled the wool over your eyes,' her dad says to Joe.

‘Thanks, Dad. Appreciated, I'm sure.'

‘Tell you what,' he says, now speaking to her, ‘I'll make it up to you. Let you invite your friends to me party tomorrow.'

Lizzie looks straight away to Joe. ‘Want to come?'

He hesitates. She holds herself still, waiting for his answer.

‘Alright,' he says.

Her dad shrugs, squeezes her shoulder. ‘Cheer up.'

She hates that he thinks it's solved that easily, that she can be bought off with the promise of a party.

‘You coming home with me?' he asks.

She nods, tells Joe the address and says goodbye. He says he's off to collect the winnings from Lady Crier. As soon as she and her dad leave the hum of the racetrack, silence opens up between them – nothing unusual in that. Joe's in her mind. He said he'd come.

Her dad makes a deal with the laundress down the road and gets Lizzie a dress for the party. He finds himself an outfit as well: a double-breasted suit, too loose at the hips. The clothes smell of their owners.

Lizzie gets dressed too early. She parades up and down in front of the mirror wearing the black crepe dress, her neck poking out of a wide lace collar, frills tumbling from the waist. The dress doesn't suit her, too tight at the waist and across the thighs. The collar belongs on an elegant lady; around Lizzie's neck the lace is foreign and crumpled. She lies on the bed with her back to the mirror, in a cloud of another woman's perfume – oranges with a whiff of body odour at the armpits – and watches the river. She rolls down her stockings, her legs prickling from the afternoon sun, until the silk circles her feet like those belled anklets she's seen in pictures of Indian dancers.

She always feels as if she's floating in her room, because their house spreads from the side of the hill. After Lizzie's mum left them, her dad decided to get out of the wharves in South Brisbane. ‘We need to elevate ourselves, Liz. That place was no good for her, no good for you either. I don't want you getting yourself so low. It's why the wealthy build their houses on the high points of a city. To catch the breezes.'

He could never afford the big ones at the top. But he took her, holding her hand, and stood outside the gates of the highest. They stared in at the painted lattice that hemmed the verandahs. A man without a hat came into the garden and stared back at them. Lizzie pulled on her dad's hand and whinged. She was frightened of being taken away in those days. Now she longs for it.

Her dad chose a house as close as he could get to the hilltop, high enough that men had hauled its timber up with ropes. Lizzie's room and the verandah balance on poles that plunge to the bottom of the hill. Even when they bought it, the house was teetering. The floorboards shook under their feet. They got it cheap.

Lizzie wakes up, groggy and crumpled on her bedcovers, when the first of the blokes arrive carrying longnecks and bottles of whisky. When she comes out, she sees a cluster of people around her dad. A man in suspenders with the collar turned down; a big woman with a tennis shade over her eyes and a tweed jacket. No Joe.

Her dad pours her a beer. ‘You look nice,' he says, and she's surprised into smiling. Her earlier dissatisfaction dissolves. If she's nice-looking now, her life will turn out. This is the sort of reasoning she goes through sometimes. Feels it more than thinks it. One moment leads to the next and the next, branching from this point in time, when her dad admired her in front of his friends.

Grace, stretched out on the couch, calls her name. Lizzie grabs her glass and joins her. Grace has taken to rimming her eyes with kohl. ‘Hello, my dear,' she says. ‘You smell good.'

‘Borrowed finery. Dad got it.'

Grace laughs. ‘Trust your old man to come up with the goods.'

Grace knows Lizzie and her dad too well. Lizzie and Grace go way back, even have matching tattoos – Grace's idea, one afternoon when they were bored and hanging around the Valley. The tattoo artist's son was standing out the front of the parlour, advertising his dad's work. He took his shirt off, flexing his biceps to make a dragon twist and flutter. A fish swam around his bellybutton, undulating at his will. Lizzie couldn't stop gaping at the movement of his ribs under the skin, the knot of muscles at his stomach. She enjoyed watching men, their bodies. His face she couldn't look at, the strange hooded eyes.

The girls stood across the street, staring while a group of white blokes egged him on, challenging him to match their strength as they dangled from the verandah rafters. When the boy held himself there for more than a minute, they gave up quickly, dropped to the pavement and wandered off.

Grace led Lizzie over the road. The boy smiled at them, put his fist in the palm of his hand and squeezed. The dragon shivered, a finely detailed creature, its looped scales swelling with his movements. ‘Like?' he asked.

‘Yeah,' said Grace. She turned to Lizzie. ‘You want one?'

Lizzie did, but she was frightened. The dragon, head tilted and eye crowned with whiskers, exhaled a blast of smoke at her.

She whispered in Grace's ear, ‘What do you think of him?'

‘The chow? Nothin'.' Grace gave her a look, and Lizzie felt embarrassed for asking, for being drawn to him. Something was wrong with her for thinking he was beautiful – he was too small, really.

‘How much,' Grace asked, ‘for a little one?'

He said he'd take them to his father and ushered them up a narrow, curved flight of stairs. The only light came from a thin window at the top, where the boy held aside a curtain of threaded corks. They stepped into a room hung with finely drawn charcoal sketches: mermaids, anchors, names curled with ribbons. The tattoo artist, an old man with a shaved head and a white doctor's coat, stood up and said something sharp to his son in their language.

The boy turned to Grace. ‘He won't tattoo you.'

‘Why not?' she demanded.

‘You're ladies. Too young. There'll be trouble for us from your parents. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have brought you.'

‘Maybe we should go.' Lizzie said it half-heartedly. She wanted one badly by then. Wanted to be a woman who was different and intriguing.

Grace ignored her and kept on at the boy, and then at the old man when he spoke to them in English, telling them to get out. She talked him down, arguing it was worth more than her life to show her folks the tattoo. When the old man finally relented and started pointing to the pictures tacked around the room, Lizzie felt overwhelmed, almost sickened. What could live on her body forever? Grace pointed out lilies, roses, passionfruit, and butterflies, wolves, birds. Lizzie turned them away. They were off somehow. ‘Come on, Lizzie.' Grace pouted and tugged at her wrist. ‘If you get it on your back, you don't even have to look at it.'

They agreed on a lady holding a spray of flowers, her head in profile. Lizzie's lady faced left, and Grace's right. Grace went first, while Lizzie held her hand. Lizzie wished she'd gone first. The tattoo gun sank into Grace's flesh. The artist had a strange smile. He gripped a cigarette in his teeth, inhaled, paused to take it out. ‘Do you think this bloke enjoys it too much?' Grace whispered in Lizzie's ear, and she nodded.

‘It hurts now,' the man said, ‘but you'll come back to me. Lot of ones get hooked.' He talked without pausing, telling them about his work, his customers. Lizzie found his accent hard to understand, felt embarrassed by the long pauses while she figured out what he said. Grace didn't even bother. She kept her back to him and her head turned away, her face shut down against the pain. Lizzie stared at the folds of skin above his eyes, which made him seem half-asleep to her. She'd never been so close to a man from Asia before to see how they were made.

He said that in Japan, it was against the law for working-class women to wear kimonos. ‘Hell's a kimono?' Grace asked, not turning around. She'd understood that well enough. He described a silk coat, long sleeves, elegant patterns of blossoms and leaves. He told them that it was a fashion for poor women to get these patterns tattooed on their bodies so they could wear a kimono forever. ‘Takes days and days. Have to rest in between, but the girl's beautiful now. Like a princess. No one can take it off her, even if she's locked up.'

Lizzie liked the thought of this man tattooing the women's bodies, and she wanted him to draw something like that on her. But by the time it was her turn, her heart was beating fast. Grace's flesh was red. ‘I think I'm going to faint,' she said. Then she grabbed Lizzie, who was shaking. ‘Don't you flamin' dare back out now.'

The artist rested his hand on Lizzie's side, and it tickled. She laughed at his hands on her skin and at the thought that this old Japanese man was the first to put his hands on her adult back, so sensitive from all the times she'd imagined being touched.

‘Don't move,' he said, the gun digging into her skin.

Grace sat in the corner, pale, her back pulled away from the frame of the chair.

The man clicked his tongue, muttered something in his language. Lizzie squeezed her eyes shut.

When it was done, Lizzie and Grace stood outside the tattoo parlour, light-headed from the pain, Lizzie suddenly aware of the street sounds around her, the omnibus, windows rattling in their frames, a man calling out to someone she couldn't see. She gathered herself together, trying to make the best of it. ‘Bloody hurts. But gives you a thrill, doesn't it?'

Grace teetered on the sidewalk. ‘Once I fell over on my back. Helping Mum hang up the washing, and I slipped and fell. Thought I'd broken my back. Worse pain than this. Different. Couldn't move. Dad had to carry me. I lay in bed for two days and just kept telling myself, “It can't be broken. It can't.” And then it got better.'

‘So I can talk myself out of this?'

‘Maybe. If you say it right.'

Later, Lizzie looked at the painted woman closely in the bathroom mirror. The ink was black, skin raised and red all around. When Lizzie stretched the flesh, the woman's face was wrong somehow, too timid, mouth turned down, when it should have been fierce. The tattoo didn't make her braver; all it did was throb.

Grace's mother saw hers within two days and almost kicked her out of home for it. Told her she could join a freak show, hell she cared, then she cried and asked Grace how she could be so cruel to herself. Lizzie's dad would never cry over her spoilt back, but still, she's taken to being extra careful, keeping her shirts tucked in and the bathroom door closed. He doesn't come near her anyway.

Lizzie can't bear to compare her tattoo to Grace's, to see what expression her woman has. Lizzie looks for her tattoo all the time, though, as Grace moves around the room, gesturing in her conversation so that her blouse lifts up. Sometimes Lizzie wonders if the ink under their skin has held them together too long.

In the lounge room at the party, Grace waves at her current man. Frank, he calls himself. He comes over and greets them. ‘You young ladies look good together.'

They smile up at him from the chair, tipsy, and Lizzie tries to imagine how Frank sees them. She hopes he thinks she's beautiful. She's terrified of not being noticed, even though she doesn't like his face, the downward curve of his shoulders. He gathers their glasses and returns with them overfull. Lizzie takes a slug of hers, settling back in the chair, crossing her ankles. She lets herself drift. Frank drags a chair closer to them. He directs his attention to Grace. Lizzie watches the room for Joe.

A man and a woman come in and stand awkwardly at the doorway, then the man sees her father and moves towards him. The woman hangs back as the man introduces her, his hand on her elbow. She smiles, peers under the cloche brim of her hat. Later, Lizzie sees her huddled with a group of three women, laughing hysterically. Her hat's gone.

The drink moves through Lizzie. Her dad is friends with too many fools: men from the tracks and the fan-tan dens, who lurk in darkened cinemas with their hands on their crotches. The women they bring with them are vacant or skittish.

Lizzie stumbles into the kitchen for another drink. Joe's standing there with his hat in his hands. Her vision rolls. He becomes the centre of the room. ‘Joe!' It comes out louder than she meant. He looks over and smiles. She has to concentrate as she walks to him. Asks him if he wants a drink. He nods. Bottles of warm beer and spirits sprout like saplings from the benchtop. She holds a few up to the light, but all that's left are the dregs. Embarrassment furs her back. ‘Sorry,' she says quickly, grabbing an empty bottle and telling Joe she'll go ask her dad. Joe pulls his mouth down.