Treading Air (3 page)

She finds her dad waving his arms about while he talks, waiting for the men around him to laugh at his jokes, which they do after he pauses. She stands behind him, arms crossed. When he turns to her, his eyes are bloodshot. ‘May I help you, my darling?' Posh and formal, as though he's a butler.

She holds up the bottle, shakes it. ‘Any more?'

Her dad snatches the bottle out of her hands and strides off to the kitchen. Lizzie wishes she hadn't asked. He scans the bottles on the bench, finds them all empty, squats down, starts riffling through the cupboards, clattering the bowls.

‘Don't have to be stroppy about it,' she says. ‘I was just asking.'

‘People are tight these days.' He speaks into the cupboard. ‘Don't bring anything to share. All on me.'

Lizzie can't look at Joe, who brought nothing.

He says, ‘No worries, mate, I'm alright.'

‘No,' Lizzie's dad says. ‘Guests need something to drink.'

‘Dad –'

‘You know how much this costs me? A blessed lot. You drink me out of house and home.'

‘Didn't drink hardly any. Plenty others –' Lizzie gestures to the room of people, their full glasses.

Joe says, ‘Don't worry about it. I'll find something else.'

Her dad stands up and slams the cupboard door.

‘Here, Joe, have mine.' Lizzie hands him her glass, sees a U of lipstick on the rim. Wishes she could take it back.

‘That's disgusting, Lizzie,' her dad says.

She's silenced. She turns her head away, swipes at her mouth.

Joe stands there with the glass. ‘Don't worry about it, peach. Nice gesture.'

‘Shouldn't encourage her.' Her dad takes the glass out of Joe's hand and tips it down the sink.

‘Here, I was enjoying that.' Anger lightnings through her. She turns her back to her dad, strides out of the kitchen and slams her hand against the doorframe. A man leaning in the passageway shuts his eyes at the sound but doesn't move. She gives him a look.

‘Aren't you too old for tantrums?' he says.

‘Fuck you.' She frightens herself saying it, not sure how he'll react, this stranger, and hurries away from him. The sides of the house close in on her. Everything is too small, the roof too low, the stain on the timber too dark. As a child she imagined the wood came from the black forests of fairytales.

Her father is still in the kitchen, talking to Joe. ‘She used to be so clever. Got in with a bad crowd.'

What does he expect from her? It's unfair of him to tell Joe these things. She needs to get outside, shoves the door open. The night air cools her face. The house traps the heat of all those bodies, drinking and sweating. She stands on the top step, wishing for her drink. A hand on her elbow – Joe. She leans into him, relieved her dad hasn't frightened him off. He says, ‘How can you see anything out here?'

Lizzie wants to explain her dad's talent of shrinking her to a little girl. Never grew much anyway, he's told her more than once. It makes her so angry she can barely think.

‘Want to make a fire?' Joe asks.

‘Alright.'

He ducks back inside and returns with a gas lamp, shaking a box of matches like castanets. He holds on to the railings, and Lizzie holds on to him. She likes the feel of his arm beneath his jacket. Curls her fingers around the crook of his elbow and tries to ignore the throb between her legs. They take the steps one at a time, the lantern blinding them to everything but the tread in front of them.

She sends him under the house, and he comes out rolling a barrel, barely keeping a hold of the thing. He up-ends the barrel, grabs it as it teeters. He asks her for newspapers, and she goes upstairs to find them. When she's at the top step he hails her, so she waves the papers above her head in mock triumph. Back down with him, she pulls them apart, wadding up the single sheets and flinging them in the barrel. He throws a match in, and the flame curls around the paper.

Lizzie hears Grace and turns towards her. She's still with Frank, who's carrying a fresh supply of rum. Maybe that's his appeal. They pass the bottle around, stare at the flames. Lizzie can't keep the thread of conversation. She watches Joe bring the bottle to his mouth, then suck in the air at the top as he pulls it away.

They finish off the rum. Lizzie is caught in the upward swell of drink. Joe and Frank talk boxing, sizing each other up. Frank stands and grabs Joe's elbow. ‘Show me what you can do.'

They move beyond the fire.

Grace says, ‘Hope Frank wins.' She might be joking, but Lizzie doesn't like the edge in her voice. Frank pushes Joe to the ground, and they both turn in the dry grass. ‘Give 'im one, Frank,' Grace calls out.

‘Shut up,' Lizzie says. Her body fizzes.

Joe scrambles up from underneath.

‘It's just a bit of fun.' Grace puts her hand out, misses connecting with Lizzie.

Frank brings his fist up into Joe's face with a funny popping noise. Joe sinks down, and Lizzie feels sick. Recalls the track, the horse falling and the voice of the woman next to her, ‘a sorry sight'. Why doesn't Joe move? She urges him up off the ground. Not like the dumb horse, with no fight left in him. She brings a light over to Joe. The white of his face, eyes barely open. She shakes his arm. ‘Get up.'

‘He'll be right, Liz. Leave him alone.' Grace makes to pull her away.

‘Sorry, mate,' Frank says. ‘Didn't mean it. Wasn't even that hard.'

Joe rights himself. He grunts and slips out of the light. The dark form of his body bunched up in the gloom. Frank, turned towards Grace, swings back round. Joe's fist connects with his jaw. Lizzie sees Frank's open mouth as his head jerks sideways then springs back into place. Joe snorts, a film of spit on his teeth. Frank takes an unsteady step, crossing his legs and tripping himself. He sits down hard, his knees up.

‘Christ, you have to do that?' Grace asks Joe, dropping next to Frank.

Joe breathes hard. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand.

‘Didn't see that coming,' Frank mutters.

Lizzie senses Joe's body next to her, the heat coming off him and the stillness of his hands by his sides. She's glad the two of them are the ones standing. Like she's in partnership with him. She helped him rally after Frank's hit took him down.

‘I'll get you a drink,' Joe says to Frank. ‘You hit me too hard in the first place.'

While he's gone, Lizzie tells Grace, ‘Don't spoil this, raising a stink. Joe's the most decent bloke I've met.'

‘Jesus,' says Grace.

‘You're so hard on me. I'm not beautiful like you.'

‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I'm the one whose man got the dirty left.'

Joe comes back with more booze, and Grace gets Frank sitting up and gives him the bottle. He takes a sip and spits it out. There's blood in it. He lies back down, clutching the bottle.

Joe walks away from them and plonks on the bottom step, Lizzie following.

‘Don't feel too good meself,' he says.

‘You crook?' With a flutter of fear, she moves closer to him, trying to make out his expression. Lines fan from the corners of his eyes. He puts an arm around her and pulls her against him. Off balance, she leans into him too heavily. His hand on her thigh, then her waist.

‘Sit next to me a minute,' he says. She fits her head into his shoulder and waits for her heart to stop beating so hard. The sky slides over her. The smell of rum on his breath. When he speaks again, his voice hums in his chest. ‘Don't leave.'

She's not used to people wanting her around. She tries to shut down the effect of his words, but something has already clicked over and reached out to him. The length of her thigh is along his, the movement of his heart against her cheek. She closes her eyes.

When she opens them, Grace is standing above her, and the fire is dying. Lizzie sits up. ‘I'm taking Frank home,' Grace says, and nods to Joe. ‘He didn't hold back on him. Loosed a tooth.'

‘They were just playing,' Lizzie says.

Grace leads Frank to the stairs. He misses the first step, falls forward with his hand out, pushes himself upright. His swollen-up face is visible in the light of the house, the blood on his bottom lip. Then Lizzie focuses on the warmth of Joe's hand in her own – strange he can do that to someone but then hold her so gently.

A man pushes past Frank and Grace as they move inside the house. He comes down the stairs and throws more wood into the barrel. He looks around, grabs hold of the neighbour's sloping fence, its pickets tilted like loose teeth, then he pushes in the already snapped crossbar and holds it aloft. He javelins the paling into the barrel, where it smoulders, paint bubbling. The smell of lead.

Joe says, ‘Want to go back up?' He lifts himself gingerly. Lizzie doesn't know if she should touch him as they climb the stairs. Inside, he squints in the light of the hallway and eyes the fringed lampshade as though it's a jellyfish up there, dangling from the ceiling.

Lizzie catches sight of limbs tangled on the lounge-room couch, a woman's stockinged foot with the shoe sliding off. They can't go in there. She finds them chairs in the darkened hallway, regrets moving now that her body is cooling away from Joe's.

‘Didn't mean to lose me block,' he says. ‘Hope I didn't cause trouble.'

She thinks of Grace's anger. ‘It's alright,' she says anyway.

‘I get … sometimes when I'm hurting.' He raises his hands, open-palmed. ‘The war did a number on me.' He puts a hand to his forehead.

‘Can't be as screwy as my old man.'

Joe laughs, and she feels clever. ‘I needed that. Stop taking meself so seriously. You get me out of me own head.' He cages her hand against her knee. She leans close to him, and his breath moves her hair. She holds herself away from him just barely. Wants to let herself go but doesn't think it would be right just yet. Something her mother would do. She has to be certain about him, that he'll hang around. She wonders what happened to him on the battlefield, what kind of pain he suffered that made him so ready to lash out. Grasping for something in the dark, some sense of it, she has no reference points. Her father was too old to fight.

She's drifting towards sleep, the booze deadening her, when Joe starts as if he's just waking up. ‘Let's get you into bed,' he says.

Groggy and heavy-limbed, she leads him into her room. The ceiling shifts, straightens, moves again. Her stomach trembles. She collapses on her bed, lets the blanket cushion her. Voices outside – the tangled couple in the lounge room must have shut the door, because someone's rattling the handle and knocking, saying, ‘Open up, open up!'

‘Bugger off,' the man calls, and something heavy hits the wall.

Lizzie presses into the wooden slats of the bedhead. Joe stands over her, close enough that he could touch her. People are calling goodbye to her dad, loud in the street outside her window, the sound dipping in and out as they wind their way down the hill. She cocoons herself, pulling the blanket over her head to block out the men singing downstairs, a high falsetto joining them, cracking, rising again. She tightens the blanket, imagines that it's this man standing above her. It both excites and scares her to think of Joe's arms around her in bed. She holds on to the sleeve of his shirt. ‘Stay.'

He pauses, but then he says, ‘Don't want to get you in trouble with your dad.'

She lets him go. Part of her is hurt. She doesn't want to look desperate, but he should stand up to her dad. ‘We're not doing anything wrong.'

‘I will if I stay.'

A surge inside her. She doesn't know what to tell him. He's already turning away. She wants to move towards him, but he's closed the door. The emptiness of the room, and the buzz of her own body.

A few days later, Joe takes her to the Osbourne Hotel, its arched doorways outlined in strips of white, matching bands framing the windows and balustrades of the top-storey verandah. Joe leads her into the entrance facing Ann Street, his hand on her back. As they walk through the main bar, a man with a billiards cue eyes her off. She stares back.

‘Know him?' Joe asks, and Lizzie shakes her head. She's worked out she can play safely with men from these distances, shoot quick glances and look down again. This way, it's easy enough to get rid of them – she can just turn aside for too long or disappear for a while. She enjoys the thrill of these moments, the connection of their eyes, the vibration of her body in response.

‘You shouldn't stare at strange men. Didn't your daddy tell you that?'

‘If he did, I forgot.' Her dad long ago stopped telling her what to do.

Joe increases the pressure of his hand on her waist. He steers her to the ladies' lounge out back and then to a table against the wall below a window. He gestures for her to sit in the chair locked in by another table. She sits there because she wants to be trapped by him. He seals off her exit with his body, laying his arm flat against the chair. A flight of darkened stairs rises above her head, leading to the hotel's guestrooms.

The waiter serves fat slabs of roast lamb, pooled with gravy and its own pink juices, a side of watery carrots and cabbage boiled of all colour. Joe forks a chunk, folds it into the middle of his mouth, has to have another go at getting his lips around it. He sieves beer through his teeth and the meat, chews, swallows. He pushes the vegetables so they rim the plate, leans back in his chair with his beer in his hand.

She asks him again about why he came north. He says something vague and looks away. Her knife goes through her meat softly; she's used to stringy silverside. When she turns to face Joe, he's close as though he has something else to say, but his lips are shut. She traces their outline with her eyes, slips down to the collar of his shirt, the top button undone. A tangle of dark hair. His hand on her wrist.