Treading Air (30 page)

Silence wakes her. She cries at the clean dishes stacked on the sink in neat towers, so lovely. Cries again at the pile of dishes left crusted with salmon paste under the sofa – fucking bastard who did it. How can she ever get the energy to clean them? The pale lozenges on the armchair's fabric blink at her through the dusk.

A solicitor visits and tells her that her dad owed some money. He holds the paperwork up to his face to read it, speaks through the squares of typed lettering with his shoulders hunched. She wants to tear off his grey chin-beard and moustache, black around the nose, framing the hole of his mouth.

She loses the furniture first, and she sleeps in the house filled only with streetlights. When the bank sends a mortgagee, she meets him at the gate. He tells her that she has to leave. She puts a rock through the window. He says, ‘I don't want to call the police, but I will if I have to.'

She's had enough of lockup and gathers her blankets, which smell of house dust from the floor, then hinges the last of her clothes into a suitcase. Makes a big show of leaving. The mortgagee watches her from his car. She comes back in the evening to find the doors bolted and realises she played that badly. She sleeps under the house that first night.

She gets herself to work, washes her clothes, takes to sleeping behind the tubs. Emerges each morning smelling of naphthalene. The boss woman hauls her out for missing the bluing. Lizzie walks away, leaving a sheet half-wrung out and dripping. She returns at night and takes handfuls from the till.

In the city she buys new lipstick and blush, puts it on in the jewellery shop window. A man in a woman's dress joins her, and they both fix their makeup. Lizzie loves the look of her mouth in lipstick, and of his face in lipstick too, the curve of the double-bow top lips. They smile at each other's reflections.

She watches a man with a saxophone on the street corner. He plays throaty jazz. People throng around him, but somehow differently. In the little semicircle of his music, they alter their stride and become more aware of their own bodies. The cinema has introduced the idea that life needs a soundtrack. He gives it to them – the right sounds for people who can afford to shop in the city. He smiles at Lizzie, and she forgets herself, forgets Joe and McWilliams, and smiles back. She lingers.

Afterwards, the musician gathers the coins people threw at his hat and rattles his pocket. ‘Buy you a drink?' he asks, bending to hear Lizzie's answer. He plays bareheaded, and his hair crests his forehead, slides across his skull in waves. He takes her to the Bellevue and gets her a shandy. He lives in a room above a dress shop. She wishes he fucked like he plays the saxophone.

In the morning she sleeps in. He's already left. She gets up at two, sweaty from the sheets. She has to open every cupboard door to find the toast rack, then rattles the handles of his gas stove, unable to start the mechanism. He returns home to find her eating stale bread, a bundle of burnt matches at her elbow. ‘You still here?' he asks. He's friendly enough, but she has the feeling of breaking a code. He says he's going out to busk. She comes with him into the street and turns at a corner, away from him, without saying goodbye.

That night she sleeps in the gardens. All the picnic shelters are full. A blanketed form bleats at her when she stands at the edges of a shelter, and in another a couple are yelling, exchanging only one word:
cunt, cunt, cunt
. Lizzie applies another layer of lipstick, despite its cost, and sleeps in it, because she has to have lovely things. She wakes in the night to the grey river and the thought that Joe won't be able to send her letters with no address. The idea hollows her out.

She tries to visit him. Stands outside Boggo Road Gaol, with its oddly festive arches, festooned with white stripes like the awnings of beach huts. The guard tells her that Saturdays are visiting days. She leaves her name in the book, asks for the date casually, but the answer means nothing because she can't remember what day it is and feels too stupid to ask.

The thought of actually seeing Joe freezes her limbs. She doesn't want to look at his hands, to remember again the way he held the jimmy. He must know about McWilliams. He'd know, surely, that morning when O'Sullivan nicked them, she was in bed with the man. What might Joe do to her? She remembers when she turned to find him following her on Charters Towers Road, his monstrousness. She holds on to the image, feeds it, allows him to mutate into a creature she knows well – a being that will smash her to pieces.

She wanders to Burke's Hotel. The place presents a lace balustrade to Annerley and Stephens roads, curves round the corner like a woman with her skirts spread. Lizzie thinks of the old days with Grace, when they used to beg drinks off old men. She sits in the ladies' lounge during the lunchtime rush, chooses a likely-looking fella. At the bar, she flings her arms around him. ‘Oh Dad, shout for me?' But she's come on too strong, doesn't have the quality of her younger self, the blonde brush on her legs still intact and her face clear; she's the same size, but her hips have flared out, her thighs rub together. The man pushes her away. She feels something in his pocket and lifts his wallet, her hands all over him so he doesn't know which parts to focus on. The bartender gestures her away with his head, and she moves off.

Weeks pass by. She gets friendly with cabbies and cinema ticket sellers. ‘I can go anywhere for free,' she tells a fella at the bar. ‘Watch any movie I want.'

‘Sleep through them, more like,' he quips.

She gets herself in trouble, stealing from too many men's trousers and coat pockets. When a copper tries to grab her, she tears his coat, holds the fabric in her hands and laughs. She reads about herself in the papers: ‘ELIZABETH'S EMBRACE. GAOL THE SEQUEL'. She's pleased when her name's in
The Courier
. Made it into the big city rag.

A man at the bar agrees to buy her a drink and orders a whisky. She gives in and lets him take her to his room in New Farm. At the doorway his footprints are stamped in mud and dried up, the tracery of the boot tread worn into the floorboards. The room smells of stale talcum powder. He swipes the clothes tumbled over his bed onto the floor with a scooped palm. She fucks him for a quid, her vision blurred with drink. His upper lip quivers when he comes. She'd like to show him the newspaper article, but stops herself. Doesn't want to give the game away.

He asks her to leave before the landlady catches him with her. She swipes his wallet, which holds a pound note and a picture of a labrador, speckled with mould.

At three a.m. she finds herself on the edges of the 'burbs in a slush, knowing she can't go any further.

She wakes in the grey dawn, lying at the back of someone's yard, a chook turning up the soil around her with a wrinkled claw, uttering long
bruck-brucks
. She remembers vaguely the slanted henhouse welcoming her in the night, the warmth of the birds' bodies. They shifted gently when she crouched to join them. She hears a woman's voice from inside the house, feet on the verandah. Lizzie's wallowing in the dirt and bird droppings, about to be discovered and kicked out. Loneliness hollows her even more than when her dad was dying, opens up space for possibilities.

She takes another job at a laundry, gets herself enough to rent out a room in a boarding house. She keeps seducing men in the pubs, sleeps with or steals from them. Whatever they let her do.

On her way to work she sees a postcard of the Magnetic Island kiosk, the fibro shack and a grass hut leaning up against it, an awning of palm fronds. Her longing for Joe surfaces, an ache in her belly and across her shoulders. She nicks the card and carries it in her purse for days.

She writes to Joe with a blunt lead pencil, sounding him out, awkward with her writing.
Are you well?
From Lizzie
. Can't write ‘love' yet. She thinks of her own time in gaol and knows the words aren't enough. She gives him the address of the boarding house. She wants to test him, find out for sure what he knows.

He takes a month to write back, all in caps, the lines not quite joining up.
AM WELL
. The ink running into the rag pulp paper, as though he pressed down hard and lingered. What the hell does he mean, writing a nothing phrase like that? She's lost her sense of him. Doesn't know how to reply, doesn't know if he'll love her or kill her. She needs more reassurance from him that she can look at his face and be safe.

The air of the city cools, heats up, cools again. Floodwaters pregnant with debris lap the awnings of houses along the river. Lizzie abandons a hat in the wind tunnel of George Street, lets go of the new laundry job, takes to whoring in South Brisbane, gets tired of that, works at another laundry. She's caught stealing, is packed off to gaol, the lock hospital. More parts of her memory blacken. She wakes, once, with her hands buried deep in the cold belly of a sheet in a corridor filled with the grey light just before a storm. The storm itself is gone from her. She fills in the gaps with memories from other storms, of the thunder bouncing off the river and back to her.

Stifled in the thick stone-walled cell at the women's prison, she's accidently given a bundle of Joe's mail. The sorter must have confused the two O'Dea inmates. Joe's no more than a few hundred yards away, separated by three solid layers of stone.

She's torn the envelope open before noticing that it's not her name on the front, that she doesn't recognise the handwriting. She catches the words ‘Mann River' – must be from one of the timber-getters Joe once worked with. In the bundle is a postcard sent to her old boarding house address, marked ‘return to sender' in spluttered ink. Her body churns. She reads the heavy capitals quickly, has to go back to make sense of them:
THOUGHT OF YOU AGAIN. MISS YOU
. She recognises the old Joe in the words.

When she gets out, she writes to him with her new address, tells him that she's safe. She thinks of going to see him, but the idea of being at the prison when she's not forced to repels her. The building weighs her down, and the years haven't been kind to her. In his short, rough notes, he sounds as though he still loves her. She finds she prefers to know him this way. She fills him in between the gaps of his sentences. They write, lose track of each other's addresses, write again. He says he forgives her, but she's not sure for what. The gaol a mooring, tying down their notes. She always finds one waiting for her when she gets sent away. Joe's letters steady her.

In her late thirties, she gets sentimental. She writes to ask if he wants to see her. He says it's better that she doesn't come. She's hurt, decides to go anyway, writes to say she's coming, and he doesn't appear. She sits on the metal chairs lined up along the walls of the visitors' room, the sun on her back. A woman at a table opposite a man laughs and then rests her head in her hands, her face covered. Lizzie wants to cry but feels dried out. The chair holds her upright when she has no strength at all.

Joe sends a postcard later, saying more than usual. He thinks it's too dangerous for her to see him. Doesn't want the men to know what she looks like, in case they get out before he does. She finds comfort in the empty notes. She can imagine Joe as the man she first fell in love with, although ages ago she left that Lizzie behind.

Brisbane, 1945

L
izzie stands outside the administration building, hands in her pockets, slinking around the corner whenever a uniform appears. About two hours later, a fella arrives. His face is sunburnt. She walks behind him. He's at the counter, mentioning Dolly's name. Got him. She pushes in before the woman at the desk has a chance to head out to the storage room. ‘And my stuff too. Elizabeth O'Dea.'

The woman squints at her and says, ‘Yes, Mrs O'Dea, I know who you are. I hope I never see you here again.'

Lizzie lets that one slide. She feels the bloke's eyes on her and looks up at him, gives a little closed-mouth smile and turns away with a sweep of her head. The woman brings out two paper bags and pushes two clipboards towards them.

The man up-ends Dolly's bag, starts counting out the coins. Normally Lizzie would too. Things have been stolen – she doesn't trust the woman with her holier-than-thou attitude. Instead, she says something about needing a fag, slides her gaze over the man again, signs the form and pushes open the door. Outside the cold air hits her. She lets it numb her cheeks and fingers, leaning against the wall and fiddling in her paper bag for a cigarette. It's stale and smells of mouse shit. She puts it in her mouth anyway and waits.

He comes out holding Dolly's package with the look of a stunned fish.

‘You have a light, Dad?' she asks.

He startles. She wonders if she'll miss her chance.

‘Didn't mean to give you a fright.' She smiles with her teeth this time.

He turns to her fully, his hand in his pocket, taking out the lighter. ‘Here.' His voice is higher than she expected. She almost laughs. Realises she's more nervous than she thought. It's an effort to keep her hand on the cigarette still. He holds the lighter and flicks it on. He tucks Dolly's parcel under his arm and cups his hands around the end of Lizzie's smoke.

She puts her foot forward. ‘Want to buy me a drink tonight?' she asks, as she leans into him and slides her hand into the parcel.

He clocks almost instantly, stiffening, but her fingers are already curled around something cold. She takes a fistful, pushes herself off him, bolts with the cigarette clenched between her teeth. He calls after her, stomping across the pavement of Boggo Road. She turns onto Annerley, lets the slope take her, hurtles to the intersection. At the corner she sees the crowd around the entrance of a bar, joins the throng, pushes her way to the front by pinching a man's bum and grinning at him till he moves. She locks herself in the loo and opens her hand to the key and a couple of pennies, fanned out on her palm.

The place, out front, is still a florist shop. That fan-tan game comes to her mind again, Lee saying his sister sold orchids there. In the shop a white woman holds up a carnation, its red petals frilled. She slides the stem into a glass vase of roses and baby's breath, touches the bloom with her middle finger to settle it among the faces of the flowers. Lizzie is struck by the gentleness of the gesture. She walks into the shop. The greenhouse smell of cut flowers. She dangles the key. ‘My friend is selling the place out back. Like to have a look.'

‘Dolly's place?' The woman holds the vase in front of her with both hands.

‘Yeah, I knew her from her time up north. You own this shop?'

The woman nods. ‘You're welcome to look out back, but it's a mess. Not sure it can be saved.'

‘Everything can be saved,' Lizzie says, but thinks of Dolly slipping out of the ward and not returning.

The florist opens a side gate, held closed with a loop of wire, its white paint flecked and crumbling. She tells Lizzie, ‘A Chinese woman lived here for years. I bought orchids off of her. She left after the floods – the place really is filthy. I tried to keep the orchids going, but I've no time.' She waves her hand open-palmed towards the river, the sky. In the gesture Lizzie reads the hopelessness, the dying flowers, the sister gone, her brother's caved-in face, blossoming blood. ‘I don't even know where she ended up,' the florist says. ‘She grew the most beautiful flowers. I can't find any like them.'

Lizzie looks to the cliffs of Kangaroo Point hemming in the river, hugging the bend. She'd like to tear out the part of her brain that holds on to the death of Lee Gum See, that injects her with it, just when she's trying to fix things.

The woman points to the room front. ‘I'll leave you to it.'

Lizzie stands in the dirt of the backyard and stares at the chipped exterior of this place she's wanted for so long. She falters, wondering whether her dreams have amounted only to this much, this low building squatting behind the florist shop with its bright terraced windows facing the road. The white external paint comes away in places and reveals the toothed mudbrick wall, the bricks dusty-dry and chipping. In the corner of the yard, a wheelbarrow has been up-ended, a load of dirt tumbled from its tray and its wheels turning slightly in the air. She pictures someone giving up on the barrow. But Lizzie's not about to do the same.

Inside, she moves her hand along the wall, finds the heavy enamel light switch and turns it on. Nothing happens. She senses the room mostly through smell, the dampness of cement and soil. A window, grilled, cuts up the light outside and channels it inwards. She steps forward. A table forms from the gloom, scratched up where the light hits it. A glass bottle stands at one end, another knocked over nearby. The texture of the ground changes as she moves further in. A beaten-down carpet, soggy in the middle, cuts a ragged line along the cracked cement. Around the window, an orange line of mould marks the flood level.

Underneath, a terracotta pot spills peat across the ground. She leans down and rights it, feels a stem, the roots still gripping the clump of dirt. A shrivelled orchid trembles on its branches. The soil around it is damp, the roots thick with water. She scoops the moss back in and wonders about the woman who planted it, Lee's sister. Where she's gone. Lizzie can feel her presence still. Holding the orchid, untangling the roots with the tips of her fingers, she lets herself have hopes for it.

For the first time in years she pictures Bea, with her thigh-high boots and her book of accounts balanced on her lap, how she entered the girls' earnings, took the commission off the top and gave the rest back to them. Seemed easy. But Lizzie knows, now, that Bea never did anything aboveboard. Everything was in cash, the money stored in safes that only Bea and Joe knew about. That was one of the things Joe did, taking the money away at the end of each night. He could help Lizzie here, like he did for Bea, now he's finally getting out of gaol. She has a desire to be protected again. She's so sick of having to handle things on her own, of getting knocked back, sent on to gaol or the lock.

She and Joe could set this place up together. They'd run it at night, when the florist has gone home. Lizzie pictures the back section petitioned off with Chinese screens, beds covered with cushions. She'd have some girls working for her, knows of a few already from the lock hospital who want to get off the street. She'd set them up here. All she needs is this space; she's learnt the tricks, seen everything.

In the light of the window, she up-ends the coins from her bag. She can sleep here, spend the lot on getting the lights rigged up. She reckons she has enough money for a deposit. Once connected, she can hold off on paying the bill for months.

Lizzie says a friendly goodbye to the florist, heads out for an hour or so, returns to greet her casually and tell her that they're new neighbours, she's bought the place off Dolly. The florist shakes her hand and says congratulations warily. ‘But the walls are rotting, you know,' she adds. ‘Mould all through them.'

‘Still standing,' Lizzie says. She's learnt not to look too far into the future. Within a second she might be bundled up and sent to the lock – there's not much point making long-term plans. She'll be able to make money and retire, or she might die at any moment. Borrows a mop, sandpaper, scrubbing brushes from the florist.

When she brings in a torch, she finds the whole back wall alive with orchids. They seem to lift their faces to the luminescence. Somehow, even after the florist abandoned them, they've kept alive. The walls around them are grey with mould. Someone's squatted and left a greasy imprint of their body, surrounded by empty longnecks. She clears out the bottles and sets up a mattress underneath the orchids. Their smell hovers over her while she sleeps. They're telling her that she can stay.

The florist comes out to watch Lizzie haul the beat-up table and the broken furniture outside and pile it into the yard. When she's not looking, Lizzie throws most of it in the river. She's going to need Joe to deal with the bigger stuff she can't shift – her body will turn on her quickly enough.

She spends days sanding back the walls. Her arms ache, go numb, reawaken. Her body's pressed out with the pain. She finds herself scrubbing at two a.m., her eyes almost shut and her hand still moving. Her hand was tingling while she slept, as though she was holding the brush anyway, so she might as well get up and achieve something with it.

On the day Joe is due to be released, Lizzie washes herself with a bucket of water, her heart beating so hard it moves the sponge when she holds it against her chest.

At the prison gates, they let out one man at a time. The families gather around the edges and greet them. Lizzie can't stand all the hugging, the tears. She worries when she tries to picture Joe and his face slides from her. She holds herself up with a pillar so she can see the men just as they leave, their sharp upward glances to the sky, to the hovering people, off down the street, to the pub, maybe.

A man comes out, grizzled at the whiskers. She's sure it's Joe, but he's greeted with a raised walking stick held by a man with a spine in the shape of a C. The released prisoner holds the upraised stick as though it's a hand and shakes it. They move on, the stick keeping the distance between them.

Joe comes out with another bloke. She almost misses him. His hair is grey and thin. His forehead seems enlarged, hanging heavy over his eyes. But he walks the same as he always did, with turned-out feet and a flick of the ankle. Seeing his walk hurts her – she wasn't expecting to recognise him this way.

She moves forward. Her mouth's open, ready to speak. His name has circled her head for years.

She thinks of Dolly's crucifix of wire. If the surgeons had cut her open, they would have found the Woman's Temperance coathanger unravelled and straightened, and an eaten-away rubber band.

Joe puts his hand on the man's shoulder, his palm flat. She remembers the weight of his body on hers, the forces that held them together, strong enough to keep her here, waiting for him. His arm is ropey with veins. She wants him to touch her. She needs him in the yard; the furniture's dragged to the limits of her own strength. She feels the weight of his notes to her, which have held her in place, kept her tied to the city, the gaol. She's dizzy, spiralling towards him.

He doesn't look like the man who wrote her those messages. The size of his body frightens her. She remembers the dead man who sent him to prison, what Joe did to him. What he's capable of doing to her. The florist's talk of Lee's sister, the wall of orchids still alive, has stirred things up. Twenty years on, the shock waves from when Joe brought that steel jimmy down are snaking out to meet her. The man she's put together from twenty years of scribbled postcards knocked down.

She turns away, walks fast along the bitumen road, frightened now that Joe will recognise her too. In an alleyway awash with the smell of rot, she holds her face in her hands and cries so much she vomits.

Two weeks later, Lizzie and the florist are being messy with the newspapers, spreading them out over the table, holding them down with cups and vases. A headline catches Lizzie's eye: ‘COURT CHARGE AFTER SOUTHSIDE SLASHING. “LIFER” RETURNS TO GAOL'. She reads about her own husband, wishes to god she hadn't seen it at all.

Joseph O'Dea was remanded by Mr Wilson, C.S.M, yesterday on the charge of having unlawfully done grievous bodily harm to Raymond George Fuller. The prosecutor said that a man had been slashed by a jagged-edged drinking glass and was seriously ill in hospital. The injured man suffered a severed artery in his right arm and extensive lacerations to the face, right leg and arm. Pleading his own case after a solicitor appearing for him had left the court, O'Dea said the last minute failure by friends to provide counsel's fees had left him without a mouthpiece
.

Lizzie leans against the brick wall of her place, listening to the cars streaming past like the tide rushing away. The magistrate's vision for her has fallen apart right in front of him – Mr Wilson is the same man who gave her a light sentence so she could be with her husband.

Part of her wants to defend Joe, to blame this Fuller bloke, but she can't get the energy. She knew all along Joe would fail.

She hears the notes of a saxophone from the street and finds herself buoyed up, as though a weight that has pressed her to the bottom of a lake has lifted and she's sprung to the surface, the open air, a vision of the horizon.

Next day, thinking of Lee and his sister, she sets up a pair of Chinese lanterns out the back of her place. At night they cast a glow across the river. She imagines the light penetrating Brisbane, welcoming the strays, the drifters, the bohemians. She's a new presence here in this city.