Treading Air (23 page)

Lizzie turns from him; she's heard it before. ‘Haven't got much choice in that little box. You get to know someone when you hear all their pillow talk through a wall that thin, may as well be a curtain.' Sometimes she says things in front of Joe that make her see why he doesn't seem to know her – she doesn't recognise herself, the way she talks so coldly about Thelma.

‘Don't want to hear about it,' he says.

Lizzie feels stupidly like crying, even though she hasn't meant it. She turns her anger on McWilliams, who's walking a distance away, strobed by the city lights. He shouldn't have led her astray; he's ruined almost all of what's left between her and Joe. She hates them both, with the snow and grog inside her, the heat of the night in her nostrils. She strides down Roberts Street with the two men a good twenty yards behind her, fuelled by her own rage. She's wide awake, skittering along.

At the gate, Joe pulls her up to him. ‘Just want you to be proud of what I do.'

‘I am.' She knows she can't ask the same of him.

‘Can you thank me sometimes?'

‘Thank you.'

‘Not now. Like you mean it.'

‘I know you're looking out for us.'

He kisses her mouth, then disappears under the house. She figures he has a safe down there now, to stash the money.

McWilliams waits for her at the top step, his arms out between the doorway. Now he's here, when she least wants him, when she's simmering with her false apology to Joe. ‘Kiss me if you want to pass,' he whispers.

‘Don't play silly buggers. Joe's downstairs.'

She tries to get past him, but he digs his heels in. She touches his chest, and he takes a deep breath. Her cunt aches, and she kisses him, his tongue fills her whole mouth, nothing like the others, oh god. She pushes him, moves into the house, hears Joe move downstairs. She's standing in the hallway, away from the two men. McWilliams is framed in the doorway, looking into the night. A window's open. She should do something about it before the mosquitos eat them alive, but she can't move.

Joe comes upstairs and shoves by her in the hallway. ‘You really are inked, aren't you?' he says. He pulls the window shut.

McWilliams keeps his distance on the shuttered verandah. He might have an erection, poor bugger. She can hide her arousal from Joe too easily.

‘I won't stay,' McWilliams calls, and Joe raises his hand in a wave without turning around. Lizzie catches a glimpse of McWilliams' face, cut up by the shutters, the light from the dawn. She tells herself she won't let it happen again, that Joe's a mortar right now, waiting to explode. The thought makes her leaden and closed off; she needs to find something to distract herself.

She arrives at fifty-three to find Thelma loading her shifts into a carpetbag. ‘What's going on?' Lizzie asks, scared that she's leaving.

‘Dolly took me perfume,' Thelma says, shoving her dildo in, finding it doesn't fit longways, having to stand it up where its carved head emerges from the lip of the bag. ‘Can't leave anything in my room.'

Lizzie's relieved. ‘How're you going to fit it all in one bag?'

Thelma scrunches her nose and top lip. ‘I'm telling Bea,' she says.

Calmer now, Lizzie can give Thelma what she's looking for. ‘That Dolly. What a bloody cheek.'

‘I'm not having her take every one of my things.'

Lizzie nods, though she isn't sure Dolly would want the bottle opener in the shape of a cock. Lizzie's seen Thelma with it before, doing tricks, stroking it, swallowing it, but she can't get over the way it's painted, with folk art flowers from somewhere in Europe, the way a cuckoo clock might be.

Thelma drops the carpetbag at Lizzie's feet. ‘Watch it for me?'

Lizzie eyes off the bag, too full to close, the wooden dildo staring, unblinking, up at her, and she nods. ‘But I'll have to leave it if a man comes.'

‘Won't be long.'

‘Don't reckon you'll have much luck. Bea won't hear a word against her.'

‘Don't bloody care if Dolly's her niece. She can't pinch my gear.' Thelma cuts an exit. She can do a lovely flounce when she wants to. Lizzie suppresses the desire to riffle through the bag herself, put off by the possibility of more folk art cocks – not that cocks usually put her off.

Thelma announces her return by slamming the door and wailing about how unfair Bea is.

‘Blood's thicker than water,' Lizzie says. ‘We can't compete with that.' But though she already knows this, her anger still rises.

‘Best perfume I ever owned. The men loved it. Now they'll be complimenting Dolly about it. As if they didn't have enough trouble telling us apart in the dark.'

‘But does she have your thighs? Your backside? Surely they can't mistake that.'

‘Not bloody helping, Betty. Bea says I've no proof it's Dolly. Could be anyone. One of the men.' Thelma flings herself onto the couch.

Lizzie gets up from the lounge chair where she was snoozing, pours Thelma and herself a drink, and gives it to Thelma, the other hand on her shoulder.

‘But she did give me a little thing,' says Thelma, ‘protect myself with, now Joe's off and we've only got bloody Murray.' She pulls a revolver from her pocket and holds it out to Lizzie in her palm. The barrel seems long, extending out past her fingers. She presses it to Lizzie's chest, looking powerful, in control. Lizzie's never seen a woman with a gun before. ‘I should have a picture taken of me like this,' says Thelma, because there's a man comes round, takes pictures of the girls. He gets his daughter to colour them and sells them to the sailors as postcards.

‘Let me hold it,' Lizzie says, and Thelma hands the gun over. Lizzie runs her fingers across the lettering along the barrel: Young America. Seven bullets in the chamber. She likes the feel of it, thinks of all the times that would have been different if she'd had it: the morning her father saw her body illuminated in the pre-dawn sun and called her a fat pig; the time the neighbour's son pierced her wrist with a cigarette butt; that teacher who broke her pens and touched her legs.

‘You know how to use it?' Lizzie asks Thelma. She poses with it like she's seen at the pictures, her hands around the barrel, arms straight in front.

‘Cripes no,' Thelma says. ‘Bea said to leave it in the dresser or under me pillow, bring it out and wave it round if I need to give a man a bit of a fright.' She takes the gun off Lizzie and holds it in one hand, the other on her hip. ‘What d'you reckon?'

‘Terrifying. Just bloody well make sure you wave that thing in Dolly's face too. Don't let on you have no idea how to use it. Give
her
a fright.'

The next week, when Lizzie comes in from two days off, there are burrs running through her favourite chemise. Another night, a frog bobs to the surface of the kettle, its eyes silvered. Her mosquito net is torn. She and Thelma work themselves up in their lounge room, talking loudly through the drink. Sure now it's Dolly.

‘In the old days, she'd be burned as a witch,' Lizzie says. They're both ready for this, for hunting her down. They build up the pyre, fuel it with their accusations, light it with their tongues, lick Dolly's body with burning words.

Joe walks in on them one night and is suitably outraged on their behalf. ‘I'll sort her out for you,' he says, and Lizzie, sitting on the back of a lounge chair, feels ripe with the power of her husband, what he could do to the woman, his fist against her body. ‘Nothing serious,' he says. ‘Threaten to break her pet doggy's legs.'

‘She doesn't have a dog,' Thelma puts in.

‘I'd find something.'

‘Reckon she'd enjoy it too much,' Thelma says to him, ‘way she flirts with you.'

Lizzie lets that simmer inside her – it hurts Thelma has noticed – and finds herself getting stonkered before work. Makes her clumsy. She has a man flat out, brings her leg over him, but puts her knee down too close, pinches the flesh of his thigh. The bones of their knees mash together, so hard he loses his erection. She gives him half-price as a way of apologising, she feels that bad.

Thelma finds her dozing against the railings and says maybe she should go home. Lizzie, suddenly sober, bursts into tears and insists she's fine, capable. ‘Maybe I should send someone to get Joe,' Thelma says. Lizzie gets up and leaves. Thelma calls to her once and then lets her go.

When McWilliams comes to see Lizzie again, she lets him in, her resolve worn down by time apart. He brings her liquorice allsorts as though she's his school sweetheart. He offers them to her in a white paper bag, the top crumpled and damp where he held it in his hand for too long, waiting for her to finish with a man. They eat them on the back steps and blacken their fingers. Lizzie likes the yellow ones best, so McWilliams saves them for her. He sits one step below her and rests his head on her calf. She feels exposed, the pub at their backs, Thelma still in her room with a man.

‘Where's Joe?' Lizzie asks.

‘Does it matter?'

She wonders why McWilliams has to spoil everything, why he can't just accept the reality of Joe. An immoveable man. Joe would get her, get them both if he knew. Of course it fucking matters.

A clatter inside, behind them. Lizzie turns to glimpse Dolly in red shoes and a white shift, come to take over from Thelma. ‘Get away,' Lizzie hisses to McWilliams. ‘Don't want her to see you.' He shuffles off towards the mangroves with that stiff-legged walk of his.

Dolly bails Lizzie up in the hallway. ‘Who was that?'

Lizzie still has the paper bag in her hand. ‘No one.'

‘Giving you sweets, is he? Why doesn't he come round the front?'

‘Ah, bugger off.' Lizzie's a small girl; she has to stand on her toes to look Dolly in the eye. She lets herself tip forward, pinning the woman to the wall. Dolly gives her a sharp push, and Lizzie steps away, pulls herself up again. Dolly turns aside, moves to go into Thelma's room. ‘She isn't done yet,' Lizzie says. ‘You can't use it, nick her things while you're at it.'

‘What?' Dolly's startled, takes a step back, a little skip forward.

‘You heard me.'

Dolly clips up towards the lounge room, her ankles bending oddly in their high heels, never quite upright. Lizzie delivers a sharp kick to her shin, pulls her leg back quickly to get out of the way of Dolly's body sliding on the floorboards. Dolly scuttles her hand out, grabs Lizzie's ankle and tugs. Lizzie plants her bare feet. One foot slides out from under her. She puts her hand on the wall to stop herself from falling, swings the bag of liquorice allsorts down on Dolly's head. It splits open, lollies bouncing off Dolly, scattering on the ground. Lizzie brings her toes up to Dolly's face, tries to get them into the eye sockets, but Dolly's still clutching her ankle and holds her away. Lizzie gets out of her grip and skips off to the back door, to her bedroom, where she locks herself in, panting.

When she comes back out, Dolly's in the room with a man. The allsorts are still scattered in the hallway, squashed into the floorboards, flattened and smudged black. Lizzie scrapes them up with her fingernail, wondering exactly what Dolly saw and whether she'll tell Joe.

Brisbane, 1945

L
izzie's heart is beating so hard it rocks the bedframe. She listens for Dolly's sharp exhalations. Nurse Roberts' light shines like a beacon across the ward, throwing the women's shadows, elongating the bars of their bedheads. Lizzie wishes that the nurse would fix on something, pin it down and trace the edges, so Lizzie could get a shape of what's around her. Instead the lighthouse flash of the torch; Dolly a sea-sharpened rock, ready to sink her. She hears the movement of sheets, sees Dolly's silhouette rising. Lizzie rips out the tucked sheet on the other side of her, has one foot off the bed when Dolly swings her head wildly like a drunkard. She whispers, ‘Should've killed me properly. Stop me from being in this fucking place.'

She collapses back onto her bed, and Lizzie stays with a foot on the floor and the other tangled in the sheets, listening to her own breath catch in her chest. ‘Maybe I should've.' She's thought this so many times, she doesn't know how to take the fact Dolly agrees with her. It makes the possibility of her death more solid, a settling in Lizzie's chest, a clenching of the shoulderblades.

The torch beam hits Lizzie's face again, reddens her vision. Nurse Roberts doesn't speak but slides the light down Lizzie's uncovered leg and back into her face. Lizzie gets the point, slips her leg under again. She's known the nurse to call a wardsman for a girl sleepwalking, handcuffed her to the bed. Real kindly, this one. And Dolly's going nowhere. Lizzie is safer with both hands free. She looks to the ceiling, the crack running through the plaster right to the electric light in the middle of the room, elaborate stucco fanning from the centre. The past weighs down the ceiling. She wanted to be free of this so she could try again with Joe, not have this woman between them again. But does Dolly even have the strength to stand?

When Roberts ducks out to the loo, Lizzie makes her way over. Close up, she hears the bubbles of pain in Dolly's breath, the inhalation sticking at the throat. Lizzie tucks herself against the wall in case the nurse comes back in suddenly. She's heard the breathing of someone dying before. She shuts her eyes and tries to push the sound away. She'd like to throw a plate against the wall like she once did at a restaurant when she couldn't pay. That same helplessness. She imagines touching Dolly, maybe to speed up what's happening, but she can't bear the idea of putting her hands on the skin of that woman. She lets time run out from her, pictures Nurse Roberts squatting on the toilet, towelling off the last drips.

Dolly's voice in the dark: ‘Joe alive?'

Lizzie takes a moment with that one. ‘In gaol still,' she says, warily. The old jealousy hovers around her ribcage, a sense that in some way she's already been beaten.

‘Jesus, been more than fifteen years.'

Lizzie's laugh is cold. ‘Twenty.'

‘Shit. Oh, shit.' Dolly whistles softly between her teeth. Her breath fills the space between her and Lizzie; the sound expresses the long years rolling out, Lizzie's own astonishment at being here at all, in this hospital with fallen women who over the years have scratched the plaster off the walls, and where their bodies in the beds have hollowed out grooves in the floor.

Nurse Roberts comes back in with her torch flashing over the ward. Lizzie holds on to Dolly's bed end, pushes herself off. Lies in her own bed, and the springs dig into her aching back and hold her, the only thing stopping her sinking through the floor. Straight down to hell, she thinks, that's where we're going, Dolly and me. But the thought is someone else's. She doesn't believe it.