Treading Air (29 page)

Brisbane, 1925

T
he first afternoon at her dad's place, Lizzie finds him well and truly away with drink, sitting at the kitchen table, a plate of biscuits and marmite in front of him. He lets her in and goes back to finish his lunch. He doesn't offer her any. He settles in the chair, his eyes sheened and his elbows tucked into his body. ‘You know where your room is,' he says.

She's got a trunk, sold the furniture back to the real estate agent because she couldn't afford to take it. The agent gave her nothing for it, just asked her if there were any stains. She almost left there and then. For the first time, she thought of the fifty-three pounds tied up with the blood-stained sack from Lee's shop, and what she could have done with it if Joe hadn't been caught.

She sits at the table watching her dad eat. They both look at the bottle of brandy in front of the tray of blackened biscuits, and the scallop of her dad's tooth-marks – ‘Marmite's like shoe polish,' she remembers telling him once. Her dad picks up the bottle and puts it under his chair in a slow, gliding motion, as though she's a rabbit that might startle. His desire to appear sober is so obvious, she almost laughs.

Later, in the lounge room, she sits with her hands in her lap because she can't think what else to do. He puts his palm on her head and says, ‘You've mellowed in your old age.' She stays perfectly still until he goes away.

The old house settles in around her. The ceilings seem lower, hovering above her head and at the edge of her vision. She and her dad circle each other, peering round doorways, scuttling away when one encounters the other perched on a chair.

She sneaks into an afternoon matinee at the cinema. The petting parlour, Thelma used to call it. Lizzie lingers at the curtain while the usher hands out tickets. A woman fiddles with her coins, the usher not paying attention. Lizzie ducks behind the curtains and into the darkness.

It's a movie,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
She's never heard of it. The beginning is slow, images of a cathedral shaking faintly. When the hunchback is shown – bloated face, popping eyeball, wild hair, furred hands – she laughs. She's had men worse than that. Come up north, she thinks. You'll fit right in. The characters seem ridiculous, their bodies and faces contorted into emotions she can't quite make out. But the final image of the hunchback flinging himself on the ground, dying, lingers. It seems so clean – no blood, just the bells trembling above him.

She walks home. Brisbane tracks up and down in front of her. Her calves pinch; she's not used to this anymore. Apart from Castle Hill, Townsville is flat. In Brisbane she knows where she's going, but the hills come on her unexpectedly. She stands at the bottom, thinks for sure she'll never make it, tries to trick herself by walking quickly, ends up exhausted and in pain halfway to the top.

Her dad pulls himself upright when she comes into the lounge. His hands are empty. She offers him a cigarette. He says no, but he watches her so closely while she lights hers that she hands it to him and lights another. He sucks like it's a straw, his lips puckered, then scrapes the side of his tongue with a fingernail. ‘What you planning to do with yourself, girlie?'

‘I dunno,' she says and lies back against the chair, resting her hands on her stomach so it looks as if the smoke is billowing from her navel.

‘That man should've provided for you.'

‘He didn't bloody plan it,' she says to the ceiling. She chimneys the cigarette from her mouth.

‘But he knew the risks. Fucking idiot.'

She puts her hand up to her face, thinks of Joe in a cell that smells of other men, holding himself in, holding himself ready.

‘Why'd he let himself get caught?' her dad asks. ‘They were onto him in less than a couple of hours. Didn't even bury the money properly.'

‘He wasn't himself,' she says. Her dad's being unjust, but she can't tell him about her own part in it. She's been over all this too many times, at the trial, in the papers, things she didn't know herself: how O'Sullivan found the old tin bathtub still filled with water, silty because the men cleaned the mud off their boots in the kitchen. McWilliams said the mud was from his feet, and the paper wrote that yes, his feet were very dirty. Lizzie thinks of his feet flung over her hips that night. Her body responds to thoughts of him without her knowing, her nipples hard. She wishes her dad would shut up, let her stay with the sadness of the film she's just seen, her longing for McWilliams.

‘Joe didn't save anything for you?'

She snorts. She never saw any of Joe's makings, and the last of her stash went on a lawyer for him. She has beautiful clothes in her trunk: a dress stitched at the neckline and along the sleeves with a delicate web of threads, silk pyjamas patterned with Chinese flowers, a cloche straw hat that hugs her cheeks. But these are clothes for the knocking shop or the fan-tan parlour. She doesn't know where she'll wear them here – unless she joins her dad's friends at the races or gambling dens.

He gets up, shuffles around the room. ‘I can't keep you, Lizzie,' he says.

‘Didn't expect you to.' Truth is, she hasn't thought about it. Hasn't been thinking properly for months.

She drifts through the house, the chamferboard crossbeams like a sign now: keep out, you're not welcome. She doesn't think she can go back to whoring yet and doesn't know anyone in town who can show her a place. They'd probably know her father. More than once she wakes in the night to the weight of tears.

A row of empty beer bottles are lined up behind the lounge chair, and she throws them out, trying not to look at the liquid hardened in the bottom.

She sneaks into another movie, does her great disappearing-from-the-queue act and sees a Chinaman. Lee Gum See is with her, the vision of his cratered head. She lurches, doesn't look around enough and almost finds herself in a man's lap. He takes this as an invitation to keep his hand on her thigh during the film. In the dark, with the credits rolling, he asks her out for a drink. The idea of having to perform for him makes her tired. She says, ‘I couldn't possibly, I'm married.' He withdraws his hand and scrambles away. She sits in the seat with the lights up, people walking past her in the aisle, and feels bad about it. She wonders for whose benefit she's being pious – Joe would never find out. But her body has shut down, alien to her. She can't make it work.

Her dad and the matron's reference get her a job in the laundry. She almost cries when she sees the pittance she's paid at the end of the week. All the girls line up and get their envelope of two pounds. She gives half to her dad, who sniffs. ‘At least I get me sheets cleaned for free.'

In the laundry hardly any men come, and those who do look past her. She tries to catch their eye over the counter – the delivery boys, the hotelkeepers – but she's too close to the domestic cleanliness of their wives. Mostly it's the women who collect their sheets, uppity things, watery-eyed and sharp. Lizzie can't play or fight back like she did in the brothel.

She deals with a housekeeper who has a big order for guests. The woman stands counting the sheets while five o'clock passes, then says, ‘A pillowcase is missing.'

Something clicks inside Lizzie. ‘I don't think so.' She shoves the receipt at the woman and counts them herself, out loud for the woman's benefit, her voice getting shrill. There's the right number, sure enough. It's already half-past, her bus is gone and the other laundry women have left down the back stairs.

The customer starts bundling her sheets while Lizzie is still wrapping them in clean brown paper. ‘Hang on, I'm not finished,' she says. The sheets spill from their wrapping and tumble to the floor.

The woman picks them up and says, ‘These'll have to be done again. The floor's filthy.'

Lizzie screams at her, holding the parcel string like a garrotte; she can't even speak words, she's that angry. The boss keeps her out the back after that, so no chance of seeing any men.

It's hard to get up in the morning. The cold of the Brisbane winter makes her limbs heavy. Wind hollows out the tunnels of the streets, and the blue water dries out her hands, cracks her palms. A pimple grows on her chin, and she feels like cutting it out with her dad's razor. Her skin is stretched and heavy.

Her dad leaves for a week to go on a race circuit. When he comes back, she realises he's fat. His belly bloated. She forgets his wash one week, doesn't get it for a couple of days. She finds him still in the same shirt, a spray of oats crusted to the collar. He sweats. One of the laundry women sniffs the armpit of his shirt and says, ‘Me old man died of liver poisoning smelt like that.' Lizzie feels a jolt, but she pushes it away.

The warning came too late. The next day, her boss tells her there's a man outside wanting to talk. She finds one of her dad's pub friends on the landing out back. ‘He's in hospital, love. Collapsed this afternoon.' She wishes this fella had the grace to take off his hat when he told her this. It sits too high – his head can't possibly be that big. She can't concentrate on what he's saying.

Her dad's so yellow, she thinks that it's some trick of the eye, a contrast with the white of the sheets. ‘Like a fucking banana,' she says to him. He snorts. Dry foam around his mouth heaves with his breath.

When the doctor arrives, her dad says to him, ‘I want to die.'

The doctor says, ‘Not yet, there's still hope.' This is cruel. All three of them know there isn't. The prick just doesn't want to be the one to say it, he'll let some other doctor do it.

Her dad's breaths rattle. She counts them. Sometimes he sucks in air.

Her boss gives her time off, but she turns up anyway. ‘You don't have to tough it out,' the woman says to her, but she doesn't feel that she is. She feels better than she has for a long while, lighter, as though her innards have been scooped from her. She's shaky, but when she holds her hand out to her dad in the hospital ward, where she sits in a stiff-backed chair, it's still. She shuffles. The seat is hard. Her dad opens a filmy eye. She doesn't know if he sees her. She touches his shoulder, pulls away at its amphibian sheen.

A doctor comes in while she's gazing out the window and says, ‘I'm sorry, he's passed away.' She can't turn around because he'll see she's crying, and she doesn't want him standing there looking at his hands while she weeps.

She thinks she should find her mother. Takes the tram to the last house where she visited her and asks, as she did years ago, but the domestics know nothing. A woman with different-coloured eyes watches her suspiciously. Lizzie wonders if she's in the presence of a real-life witch, who will know how to punish her, strike her down with measles or kill her cow, if she had one. She keeps thinking, my dad's dead, my dad's dead, I don't want to steal your bloody things.

She doesn't know where else to go. Works her way through her dad's address book, putting a line through each of the names. She writes to Joe to tell him and doesn't mince words. She wants him to react, to hurt. And she lashes out at everyone in the address book, writing short, hard messages in cards with a pressed violet on the front, which she bought cheaply because something went wrong with the pressing and the purple leached from the petals. She worries that her dad's cousins will judge her spelling. She puts a notice in
The Courier
and hopes to hear from her mum.

In the Valley, she almost collides with the son of the old man who gave her the tattoo. His face is the same to her, young still, only his body has darkened with the curved petals of peonies and ghostings of smoke curls on his forearms. He doesn't recognise her but ushers her upstairs again with sweeping gestures. She shows his father the tattoo he did on her, and she's welcomed back. ‘I said you'd come again,' he tells her.

She asks him to give her a tombstone wreathed with a spray of flowers like the one her woman holds, and with a dove on top. Underneath she wants a ribbon saying, ‘In loving memory of dearest father'. She chooses her upper, inner forearm, where the flesh is pale and soft. Doesn't need to hide it anymore, not from her dad or Joe. The gun pierces her. She wants it, this pain. Feels better, her mind concentrated for once, clear. She's able to love her dad this way now, simply, with extravagant flourishes – the upward movement of the dove's wing, the clusters of flowers.

She cleans up for the wake, her arm aching. After the first thrill, she's pricked with irritation and pain, and moves half-heartedly, doesn't sweep the corners. Every cupboard has another bottle of booze, half-drunk and shoved backwards, its existence wiped from her dad's memory by the first half of the drink. Bottles of poison that she wishes she didn't have to touch.

The funeral is a mess, the priest late. ‘Is he drunk?' some great aunt whispers in front of her as the priest shoves the verse around his mouth like rocks. One aunt faints and slides gently down the pew, the bodies around her bending to catch and right her. The priest goes on, his voice rolling over the whispered, ‘Is she alright?' A woman sends her son out so that he doesn't have to witness the unconscious woman on the pew, her limbs askew. The priest finally notices and stops his sermon, staring at her until she's taken outside.

Lizzie's cousin doesn't come inside the wake. She sits in an old tin lizzie with her husband from Fordsdale and hands out a bunch of Geraldton wax to each of the mourners as they pass. Lizzie holds her flowers, stroking the prickled string that ties their stems together. Her dad said to her, the day before he died, ‘I brought it on myself.' The beginning of the end, when he gave up so fully he blamed himself.

A headache purples her vision, so she lies in bed listening to her relatives eat fruit mince pies and shiver in the cold of the shut-up house. The great aunt gives her a wet cloth for her head and draws the curtains.