Treading Air (22 page)

‘It's me.' She just wants to go back to sleep.

He turns the lamp on her again, then seems satisfied, comes to the other side of the bed and lies down.

‘Turn the light off,' she says, then falls back asleep in the next second.

In the morning she asks if he remembers what he did. ‘I had a dream,' he says. ‘Thought you were a soldier. We were in the trenches.'

‘You were searching for something.'

‘He was trying to kill me. Didn't want to lie down till I knew he wasn't carrying a gun.'

Lizzie hugs Joe around the waist. He pats her shoulder, tells her it's nothing. What made him believe she was a soldier? She thinks of the way his hands moved over her, not lovingly but methodically, wanting to test out every part of her and know her real shape.

On the day a man swims from the Strand to Magnetic Island, Joe hires them half a yacht so they can watch. The other half is taken up by a husband, wife and three sons.

On the gangplank, Lizzie asks, ‘Where'd you get the money?'

‘Bea's been good to us.'

‘You shouldn't throw it away, Joe. We're saving.' She thinks too of the new wireless radio he bought, the way he boasted that no one else had one in all of Townsville. How much did it cost? But she loves the music when it plays through the house, the crooners' voices filling her up, and the static of the silent times between the programs blocking out the sound of the street.

But Joe snorts at her. ‘How much that little outfit cost you?'

Lizzie's in a black-and-white number, the white skirt cut to reveal black cotton stripes beneath, a tie knotted under a wide collar. ‘It was going cheap.'

Joe barrels up behind her and lifts her over his shoulder. She screeches, and he says, ‘Let me have some fun too, peach,' sliding her down and plonking her on the deck.

The two young boys lean their arms against the railing, taking turns to press their foreheads on the plank. One lifts his fringe and says, ‘Is there a mark?' and the other points because there is and he wants one too. They push their heads hard, take their hands off the railing so they can get their whole bodyweight into it, their bums out. Then they rise, triumphant, to show each other the marks. This goes on until the big one hits the little one on the back of the head while he's pressed against the railing, and he bursts into tears and runs to his mum, who inspects him briefly, hauls the older boy out and smacks him hard across the thighs. They both cry in opposite corners of the deck.

Lizzie glimpses the third boy's tiny cock poking between the rails, a yellow stream arcing out and hitting the side of the boat where the hull flares like a woman's hips. She points this out to Joe and says, with a laugh, ‘Hope the swimmer's not coming through there.'

‘Bloody kids,' Joe says. He's wedged himself against the railing as far away as possible from the family. He's said a couple of things like this, and Lizzie is glad he's gone off the idea of having a baby. She's started wondering if she's able to have one, but she doesn't want to know till she's out of this place.

On the beach, two men drag a cage between them.

‘What's that for?' one of the boys asks.

‘Sharks,' his mum says.

‘Must be hollow,' Joe says to Lizzie, ‘for it to float like that.'

The swimmer's waiting on the sand in a bathing suit past his knees.

‘You wear anything like that?' Lizzie asks Joe.

‘Hell no,' he says. They both laugh, and one of the boys gives them a hard look. Lizzie pokes her tongue out at him. He turns away.

A man locks the swimmer in his shark cage, wades back to the beach, shaking water off his feet.

Bea started up a sweep among the men. Joe has money on the swimmer not making it, a tip from McWilliams. Hearing that name makes Lizzie's body hum. But maybe he and Joe are wrong this time – the man in the cage looks strong as he starts to swim. His moustache surfaces every time he turns his head, sheds water like waves hitting and sliding off a cliff face.

Out in the bay, the water is glassy. The island rises above them. Lizzie holds on to Joe's elbow, presses her cheek to his upper arm. He mutters under his breath because the man's past them, the water spraying off his arms, which cut the water in long, steady strokes. Then, halfway across the bay, the little tugboat pulling the cage mutters to a crawl. The man puts his head up in the air, treading water, getting nowhere. Lizzie can just see the blurred black of his mouth. ‘How much you have on him failing?' she asks Joe.

‘Enough,' he says and stares away to the island. From the beach, they catch the notes of a brass band, men in uniform along the shoreline, shouldering their instruments like fishing rods. She looks over to the man, swimming again but so slowly, the tugboat dipping at his side. She's tired, the weight of Joe's bet hanging on her limbs. He'll be in a stink if the swimmer makes it. It seems stupid that her whole afternoon will be spoilt or saved according to whether some moustache gets his act together.

‘Maybe I should have bribed him with you,' Joe says.

Lizzie's bitten. She thinks of his jealous guarding of her at the beginning; now he's throwing her to some fool who spends his spare time in a bloody cage in the middle of the sea. ‘Jesus, you can be foul,' she says.

‘Hold on, peach, 'twas meant as a compliment.'

‘It's not.'

‘Look, you bloody well chose to be there. You should be able to take it once in a while.' He's being loud. The family look over at them.

‘Lower your bloody voice. I have to be there. For us.'

‘That line's not working anymore. I can look after us both.'

‘Doing what exactly? Running errands for Bea?'

‘From you? Her servant girl?'

‘You can't go round doing what you do, thinking you can get away with it forever. We need to work hard, get out quick.'

‘Why can't you let me look after us both? Let me have me pride back, for fuck's sake.'

The mother glares at them, cups the ears of the child closest to her. Lizzie puts her hands out, shrugs, a stage gesture. The woman opens her mouth, thinks better of it, turns away. Lizzie is silenced. She doesn't have time for Joe's wounded pride. Needs to focus on the future, where they're going. He's abandoned her somewhere along the line, left her to struggle for them both.

He turns his back to her, watching the men on another boat call the swimmer on, the brass band sending notes over the water, which are caught up and snatched away, thrown out again in a discordant tumble. Lizzie flops onto a canvas lounge, tugs her hat over her eyes and looks through the weave at the bright sky. Her vision is sharpened at the pinhole, and the shape of the island pulls into focus, the rough spine of a beast. The cage bobs up and down. She imagines sharks circling beneath them and feels sorry for the man thrashing in the water.

Joe's face is calm – the men have stopped yelling, the tugboat's engine is off – and his broad shoulders are silhouetted against the sky. She shuts her eyes, lets the sun pierce their lids through the warp and weft of the hat. In the darkness, Joe's voice comes to her as through a megaphone. She opens her eyes, lifts the hat and stares back to the beach, wondering if she could make it. She thinks maybe not. Better to sleep till it's all over. The sun scorches her hair through the hat, but she doesn't move. When she opens her eyes again, Joe's holding an umbrella over her head. ‘He didn't make it,' he says. ‘Had to be taken back in a boat.' He grins.

Her anger flares: he's celebrating the swimmer's failure, he risked their money on such an uncertain outcome. He holds the umbrella askew so that the sun touches her face and burns her. She puts her hands to her cheeks, feels the heat on her fingers and knows she's ugly with sunburn. She'll have to cover it with powder and rouge. The umbrella's too late.

That night, McWilliams stands at the back door of Heurand Street and calls to her. She doesn't know if he did it on purpose, but Bea has sent Joe off with Murray to collect money a bloke owes her. No one's at the house except Thelma, busy with a man. McWilliams asks Lizzie if she wants to get out of there. ‘Nothing funny, just a walk. Promise.' She wants to be with him, her anger at Joe still just beneath the surface.

They cross Ross Creek and follow Boundary Street to the mouth of the river, where the nest of mangroves opens to the sea. At the port, the ships hover in globes of light from the lamps. One leaks oil, and the slick oozes from its bow, the sheen incandescent like the wings of an insect.

McWilliams has brought two twists of snow. He unrolls a picnic blanket, and Lizzie says, ‘Cripes.'

‘Just want you to be comfortable.'

She lies on her stomach on the blanket, crosses her legs and snorts the snow. She rests her head in her forearms and lets it kick her in the brain. McWilliams moves behind her, his hands on her ankles. Her body thrums with his touch. She doesn't move. He lifts her skirt, and she shivers at the wind on her thighs. She should kick him away, but she's given up now, the snow melting the last of her resistance, leaving only desire. He rests his hand on her upper thigh, heat radiating from him. Fumbles with the waistband of her knickers and pulls them down. Her arse exposed to him. He lets out a sigh, unclips her stockings from their suspenders. The snow picks out the feeling. He runs his hands over her, and they're warm like the slick of oil in the bay.

She curls her fingers in the sand and touches something, a wooden spade. It's so small she almost doesn't recognise it. She grasps the scoop, thinking of a child down here among the slug bodies and callused shells of barnacles; the tangled fishing nets with scales caught in the diamond gaps between the string; the buoys, beached with the low tide and oversized, heavy bottoms overturned on dry land.

McWilliams puts his fingers inside her. She claws the sand, hits water, her sleeve a straw sucking up the damp. She feels each of his fingers, scissoring against the walls of her inside, and she presses down on the blanket to get some pressure on her front part; she likes to be touched at the top, but doesn't know the word for it. He rubs his fingers in and out. She passes the shovel to him without knowing why, and he brings the scoop down a few times across her arse. Her insides spasm, squeezing his fingers. He lowers himself on top of her, breathing into her neck. His chest heavy on her back. Then he raises his lower half, the click of a buckle, a sound that arouses her, always. He pulls his fingers out and slides his cock in.

The water moves up her sleeve, and she remembers a man in a jewellery shop who made a show of putting blue dye into one of the vases on display and dipping in a white lily. A crowd gathered to watch the lily absorbing the dye. Her dad held her up to watch as the blue touched the petals. She could see the tracery of the veins, the slide of the dye through the lily until the whole flower was blue, blossoming with colour, opened out and radiating.

McWilliams leaves her again at Heurand Street, tells her he's going to meet up with Joe. ‘How can you?' she asks. She resents he even brought Joe's name up – won't he let her forget for a while that she's married?

‘Don't worry,' he says, ‘I can keep a secret. Just let things turn out however they will. It's beautiful to be with you.'

She feels the current of their lovemaking still and allows it to swallow her. She thinks she'll get away with it, then can't quite believe it.

Later, she walks towards home in darkness, surprised still by the warmth of the Townsville air even this late. Sweat drips down her back – and five in the morning is the coolest time, before the sun's up and after the heat from the day before has drained away.

She meets Joe and McWilliams on Charters Towers Road. Joe has that concentrated walk that means he's drunk too much and doesn't want to show it. She feels McWilliams' presence in the dark. Joe drapes his arm around her shoulders, and his weight is like a coat, too heavy in the heat but growing from her like a dog's fur, coming right out of her pores. She leans into him because she's sure he'll notice her stiffness. Worries she's given herself away already. ‘Good night?' she asks.

Joe grunts, laughs. She can't keep up with his stride, is propelled along by the force of his body. ‘We got the bugger at the table,' he says. He's sweating from the armpits; Lizzie can sense the wet gathering on her shoulder. ‘Fucking tiles and coins flying everywhere.' He lets go of her to sweep his hand across an imaginary fan-tan table, loaded down. She breaks away, trots ahead so he can't reach her. ‘He didn't have nothing, so I shook him down for his winnings,' Joe says, rattling coins in his pockets now both his hands are free. ‘Not enough, but I'll give 'em to Bea in the morning.'

‘Anyone we know?'

‘Maybe, possibly, yeah. A chow that hangs around, owns the grocery store down at Hermit Park. One who asked for you once. Ha.'

Lee. ‘He alright?' It's a risk asking, but Lizzie feels protective of him. He lost that room. She wonders what happened to his sister.

‘What's it matter? You go to that place filled with bloody chows. Hell for?' His voice hits at her, hard, from the dark, and she shuts her mouth. He grabs her hand, squeezes it. ‘It's my job, peach. You're not safe with chows thinking they can walk up and ask for you.'

She doesn't know what to say, remembering the strange attraction and revulsion she felt for Lee.

Joe takes her silence as her being sniffy and flings her hand away. ‘Come on, I work hard too.'

She tucks her arm into the crook of her other elbow. She wants to calm him, to draw his attention from the atmosphere between herself and McWilliams, thick and alive to her – surely Joe will sense it. ‘Alright, alright,' she says. ‘I'm just coming down off Thelma's snow. Dirty stuff, gives me the whoops.'

‘Don't know why you talk to that woman,' Joe says again.