Treading Air (25 page)

‘He is,' Lizzie says to the cell wall. She doesn't want to look at O'Sullivan's face.

A woman comes in about an hour later, her head wrapped in a scarf. O'Sullivan lets her into the cell. She walks to the girl in the corner, puts her hand on her shoulder, says something in Italian that makes the girl cry. A man, the girl's father probably, is standing in the doorway with his hat held between his hand. Now the mother cries. Lizzie wishes she could understand; she'd like to see the girl comforted. The dad says nothing, just gazes out the door. As the mum passes O'Sullivan, arm around the girl's shoulders, she says something that Lizzie understands perfectly: ‘Why put her in there with such a woman?'

When they're gone, O'Sullivan leans against the doorway and says, ‘I thought you'd be nicer to her. Give her some reassurance.'

‘What did you want me to say?'

‘She was taken by some men who interfered with her. They kidnapped her, some kind of revenge. Thought, you know, being a woman. All your experience.'

‘I'm nobody's mother.' But Lizzie wonders how it is that little girls get used for revenge. She thinks of the girl's father, how he wouldn't look at his own daughter, not just Lizzie – his disgust with them.

Alone in the cell, she stretches out on the bench and flings her arms over her eyes. Turns her head, looks between the wooden planks of the bench. Buttons, thread, a white fuzz of mould, a spoon rusted with age, a googly eye from a toy, objects that have been washed up against the edges of the room and cut through with light from the bench's slats. She wonders what O'Sullivan thinks she is, asking her to say something to a poor little girl who's nothing like her. At least Lizzie had some kind of choice in the matter.

She hears Joe's voice and sits bolt upright. Her head spins. She holds on to the bench with both hands. Joe's asking why he can't visit her. She can't see around the cell door to where O'Sullivan sits at the front of the station. ‘She's already had one visitor today,' he's saying in the measured tones of a man who's talking to Joe – the slowing down, the careful wording.

She yells out, ‘No rules about that,' though she doesn't know if there are.

Neither man responds. She doesn't think they've heard her.

‘Who saw her?' Joe asks.

‘Can't tell you,' O'Sullivan says.

‘Don't you write it down?'

‘Yes.'

A pause.

‘I want to see my wife,' Joe says.

‘You can tomorrow.'

Her stomach lurches. What if Joe guesses it was McWilliams? She didn't even think about it when the man came, not that she'd invited him.

Joe bangs his hand on the side of the place as he leaves, trying to guess where she is, maybe, and send her a message through the walls. She can't work out if it was a warning or just a call to her. He hits the wall again, closer this time. She knows she should move, let him know she's there, that she's heard him, but she stays with her hands curled around the bench slats. He could read anything into her response, a connection or an admission of guilt.

O'Sullivan's voice outside: ‘Oi, stop that.'

Silence.

A few hours later, O'Sullivan gives her dinner, a thick stew and bread. He says, ‘I can't help you girls.'

The district court sentences Lizzie to a year in Stewart's Creek Gaol. Thelma gets off because she's deemed too drunk; O'Sullivan found her passed out on Heurand Street. ‘
On the ground
,' the newspaper says. ‘Fucking typical,' Lizzie says to Thelma when she visits her at the lockup, before they send her on. ‘Completely blotto and used in your defence.'

‘'Tis my only crime.'

‘Is Joe coming?' Lizzie asks.

‘Told me he would.'

He's hardly said anything to Lizzie since she was put away. He's visited a few times, held her hands in his and barely opened his mouth. McWilliams told her that Joe grabbed him by the shirtfront and asked if he'd been to see her. When McWilliams said he hadn't, Joe left it at that. ‘But he's got real rough,' McWilliams says, worried. ‘Biffed a fella in the eye, wasn't any need. Gave him a blinker.' Lizzie's main worries are that Dolly has got to Joe and that he might catch McWilliams visiting her. She doesn't want to take any more chances and tells McWilliams not to see her, that it's safer for him. She can't tell him to leave her forever, not when she needs him. She sobs in her stifling cell.

Joe arrives to walk her to the gaol. He brings a dress for her. ‘I wanted you to have something beautiful to wear for when you go in.' It's a sign that there's something left between them for her to hold on to over the next year. Maybe he doesn't know – better for her to believe that.

O'Sullivan lets her change in the interview room, locking the door on her. The table is ringed with tea stains, a brown smudge that Lizzie imagines to be the blood of a man's forehead coming down on the timber. Joe brought an evening gown, too much for the daylight, but she's pleased to get out of her apron and smock. He's chosen green silk with a sheer gauze V at the neck and frills at the ankles. A tighter skirt peeps out from underneath the overdress, which is pleated at the top and tied loosely round the waist. She leaves on her laddered stockings and wears a hat that cups her cheeks, a gauze veil that comes down over her eyes. The felt hat obscures her view.

Joe helps her into the street, holding her hand, O'Sullivan following at a safe distance in the tin lizzie. Joe squeezes her bones, but she doesn't say anything. Doesn't want to break their last thread.

Walking up the road to Stewart's Creek, she can't see anything but the ground right in front of her and the curve of her hat. She lets Joe lead her, reduces her mind to the gravel road, strewn with rubbish, a ball of waxed paper, the teeth of a broken bottle. She finds a marble in the dirt and clutches it in the hand free of Joe, though they'll take it off her once she's inside. It heats in her palm.

The gaol is fronted with a eucalypt and buffalo grass, the fluffed heads of cat's tails. Its entrance is arched, the shape echoed on each side of the doorway, bordered by columns picked out in white. The same white runs along the fence.

O'Sullivan walks inside with them to see them off, but the paperwork isn't ready. The woman at the counter, puffy at the wrists, thumbs through the books. ‘We've got no record of her coming,' she says. Lizzie wildly hopes that this has all been a mistake, that they'll let her out.

O'Sullivan grips her by the elbow and says, ‘It's like they've never seen a prisoner before.' To Joe, he says, ‘I'm sorry you have to see this.'

The woman behind the counter wears sandals underneath her loose dress, shuffles around the back office. She curls her toes to keep her shoes from falling off.

Lizzie says to O'Sullivan, ‘This count as part of me time?'

He sighs. ‘I sent it through two days ago.'

‘That'd be why,' the woman says from the back office. ‘Only caught up to three days ago.' She comes out with a piece of paper.

The reality of the gaol seizes Lizzie's body. Her insides squeezed and liquid, her head mushed. From under her hat, through her veil, she sees Joe's shoes, the shape of his mouth when he kisses her. They stick her clothes in a brown paper bag, give her a black smock and white apron.

The women prisoners are held in a building behind the central tower. This tower is thin on the bottom, bulging as it gets higher, with arms supported by smaller towers on either side where the guards march up and down. There's a bell at the top, pealing when the women need to wake up, have breakfast, stop for lunch, go to sleep.

The matrons put Lizzie to needlework. On the first day, the wardress raps her on the back of the knuckles with a ruler for her sloppy stitch, the meandering line of her thread. She makes Lizzie unpick it. When Lizzie tells her no, she slaps her across the cheek with the ruler. Lizzie yells – the sharp edge will ruin her face. Her cheek swells. Her jaw locks. The silence of the woman's violence shocks her. Dolly screeched and yelled, gave a warning. Not like this soundless lashing out, the wardress not needing to explain herself.

Lizzie wrings a compliment from the woman after she produces a beautiful straight seam. Then she holds up the smock and the two pieces fall apart; she only got one side. The woman throws it in her face. This is why I became a whore, Lizzie thinks, to avoid this kind of thing. Her hands freeze. Nobody touches her.

Everything reminds her of McWilliams, of Joe. The fold of the sheet, Joe's foot not quite covered in the night. She runs her finger over it.

When Joe visits, they're separated across a table. He touches her wrist. She almost cries because that's all he does; he has no pity for her. That night, her thoughts turn in on her. She's certain that Joe knows about McWilliams. In a half-dream, the jimmy she found under the house surfaces, blood on it. She can't scrub it out. She connects the blood to Dolly, feeling for the first time the full weight of what would have happened if the bullet had actually pierced some vital part of her, knocked her to the ground. She tries to push it away – she hadn't meant it, and the truth is that Dolly wasn't hurt. She was a danger to Lizzie, to Thelma. Lizzie just meant to scare her. Now the possibility of Dolly's death curls in her body, grips her gut, though her thoughts shift back to herself, her own problems.

Her desire for her sentence to be over is like a physical pain in her chest. But when she turns her mind to her life after prison, she can't imagine what she'll do. If Joe knows, McWilliams will never see her again. She can't form any clear sense of what happens – whether he's killed, or driven away, or just too frightened. Joe won't want her. Bea will never take her back. Her thoughts keep unfurling, the connections made without a break. The walls lean in towards her. The bunkbed mattress above her seems to be growing, like a fungus expanding, with the sour, rotten smell of the forest, leaching out spores that choke her.

At breakfast it's easy to hide the tin cup under her skirt, to miss drinking at lunch and dinner. She won't be thirsty for long. Her needle stabs the creamy calico – could be her skin if the thing wasn't so blunt. The threads hang loose in too-wide holes, and she can pick out the individual strands of the cotton, its freckled blemishes. In bed that night, she works at the rim of the cup with her teeth. Cuts her lips but keeps going. She opens out a jagged edge and drags the tin over her throat.

They let Joe see her in the hospital. She searches his face for clues that he knows about her and McWilliams. Nothing. He holds her hand and says, ‘What have you done to yourself?' He cups his forehead with his free hand. She thinks that he's crying. His face is grey when he presents it to her again, empty of everything but grief. He can't know. He says, ‘Promise me, peach, you'll never do this again.'

She wants to comfort him, but her relief is tangled up with guilt. She just squeezes his hand. Already the woman who tried to cut herself open seems distant, held together by the hospital sheets. Another thing she didn't mean. Lizzie covers her face with the blanket, unable to look at Joe. Wrapped up in the dark.

When she folds back the sheets, McWilliams is in a chair beside her, his hair crushed on one side. He lays his hand on her hip. Its weight presses through the sheets, his warmth slowly reaching her. She angles her body towards him, then remembers how cut up she is. She's sorry he had to see that. But it's pulled both of them to her, these men who tie her to the earth. He slides the chair closer to her bed, shuffles his body so he lies there, his head on the pillow next to hers. He says, ‘I was afraid you'd left me alone.'

Lizzie shakes her head. She finds it hard to believe that he's alive and with her, saying this. When he leaves her, later, it's with the impression of his hands on her body. Joe hardly touched her, while McWilliams seems more substantial, his body connected with hers.

When she's healed, they send O'Sullivan to take her back to the gaol. She feels weighed down inside its walls. For weeks after she can't speak and doesn't even try. Her cut-up neck bracelets her voice. In the absence of words, she lashes out. A woman swears at her, and Lizzie biffs her across the skull so hard her teeth rattle. She carries the woman's insult around with her for days, part punishment, part justification – she's a fucking cheese, a slut. Hell, she might have slept with all these women's husbands, one time or another. She doesn't care.

At the Sunday sermon in the prison chapel, it occurs to her that some force might want her alive. She hasn't been listening much – usually they get an uptight do-gooder to scrape away at the women about the evil of their sins. But this Sunday there's a young bloke. New to town, by the look of the sweat ringing under his arms and sheening his forehead, the smell that comes off him. He flings himself around and speaks with sheer masculine energy. He says, ‘God loves you,' and she recognises in its tones not the rote-learned speech she uses on the men at the cottage, but the words of McWilliams and his hands on her that day in the hospital.

The priest says, ‘You don't have to do anything to earn this love. It is always there, and He will forgive you.' It's never occurred to Lizzie that someone could love her without her needing to do anything. She wonders if there might be some hand organising this chaos, and she holds on to the possibility of this in those early days locked up, without quite believing it.

They move her into the laundry, the needlework wardress sick to the gills of her sloppiness and anger at the other women, seeming to see Lizzie's hand in every wildly placed thread and uneven hemline. Lizzie finds the women around her snobbish and weak, and she finds no comfort in routine. Through the barred windows, the hills hold the heat, turn purple, cough out mist in the morning.

She does better in laundry. The wardress, who smells of stale biscuits, says to her, while her hands are deep in the belly of a sheet, ‘After I teach you this, you'll do it when you get out?' Lizzie feels like crying. She's been reduced to that – so grateful for a hand on the shoulder, even from a woman with leather for skin. Grateful that someone cares about her future. But she wakes in the night filled with rage, because how could this woman think she was just a laundress? She doesn't want to be like her, coming home to a mouldy bed, stiff with disuse, a dinner of week-old peas, colourless with reheating. In the laundry there's no one to tell her about the inner workings of the town. She'd be left to piece it together from the contents of pockets, map out the relationships of Townsville from the stains on the sheets.