Treading Air (6 page)

He kisses her mouth, her throat. ‘Jesus, I don't even know what I'm doing.'

Lizzie laughs. ‘Neither do I.' Her body can't make sense of the surges that flow through her.

‘Have to get going, peach. Few jobs I need to finish.'

‘You'll come back to see me?'

‘'Course. I couldn't – you drive me wild, Lizzie. Scares me.'

She nods, though she's ready to jump in, no questions asked.

He raises his arm towards her as he turns the corner, and she cups her hand over her eyes to watch him, her body heavy with the absence of his touch, before trudging back up to the house. She goes into the bathroom to wash herself, and she looks for a long time at her reflection in the mirror, wondering if she's enough to hold Joe to her, if that's what he wants.

That bloody broken lock gives her away. Her dad opens the door, and she presses the towel to her breasts, puts her back to the window, but her dad glimpses the tattoo anyway. ‘What's this?' He spins her around.

‘Nothin'.'

‘Who made you do this?'

‘What? No one.'

‘Jesus, Lizzie.' Her dad holds her arm in the air, pulls the skin at her waist.

‘No one can see it. I've had it more than a year, and you only just noticed 'cause you came barging in.'

‘Christ, a year?'

‘Don't make such a fuss about it.' Lizzie snatches her arm away.

‘Grace put you up to this.'

Lizzie faces the wall, ties the towel around her front. ‘Bugger off.'

‘Liz, you should think better of yourself, treat yourself better.'

‘I like it, the way it looks.'

‘That man who comes round, he seen this?' Her dad sounds tired.

‘He likes it too.'

‘Christ, you sure?'

‘Why bring Joe into this?' Lizzie asks. She's losing, too exposed. Her dad's hit something, and she doesn't want him to make her cry. She takes a breath, drops the thread of the argument in the wash of emotions.

‘I don't trust that man,' says her dad. ‘Don't like where you're going with this thing on your back. Carrying on with him like that. If he comes here again, don't blame me if I punch him in the head.'

‘Why d'you have to ruin everything for me?' She's been holding on to these words for a long time.

When she was a little girl, her dad gave her a lolly stick and left her outside the pub. A man took her hand, led her around the side, unzipped his trousers. He held himself in his hand for her to look at, and she kept eating the lolly. She was sick afterwards in the tummy, vomited. Her dad got on his hands and knees, scrubbing up the spew. Why didn't he punch that bloke from behind the pub, with broken blood vessels mapped across his face, the veins on the other part of him? But that's her dad – always coming in too late, after the mess has been made.

She gathers up her clothes, shoves past him. ‘Bloody well fix that door.'

‘Don't pin your hopes on Joe, Liz. You won't be able to keep him.'

In her room, she cries again over the tattoo with its timid face, over her dad's words that echo the ones circling in her own head. She dresses quickly and leaves. She needs to get to Joe, to prove her dad wrong.

The tram drops her off a couple of streets from Joe's. In the quiet of the suburbs, she wonders if he'll even be home, needs him to be home. She hangs around the bottom of his street until a dog starts barking at her from a backyard. She turns the corner, worries a bit when she can't remember the number. Then she sees Joe in his yard, standing with his back to her and smoking in the sun. She opens the gate, and it squeaks.

Joe turns around and smiles. ‘You came to me,' he says.

She's surprised by how happy he is that she's here. She kisses him too hard. He seems to like it.

‘You alright?' he asks, his arms knotted around her back.

‘Had a fight with me dad.'

Joe nods. ‘Get the idea this isn't out of the ordinary.'

‘He saw the tattoo. Wasn't happy.'

‘Bugger.'

‘Thing is, it's ugly. I hate it.'

Joe puts his hands up. ‘Nothing wrong with it, peach.'

‘Should be beautiful.'

He kisses her face. ‘You're beautiful.'

She presses her body into him, the anger leaving her. His arms are warm around her shoulders. She's caught up in his rough animal smell, the strange mixture of repulsion and attraction. Maybe she shouldn't have been so easy to seduce.

He makes her ham and cheese bread rolls, and they eat them with beer on a blanket in the back garden under an umbrella tree. ‘This is nice,' Lizzie says. The sun's setting, its orange glow picking out the silver on the leaves of the umbrella tree. ‘I'm not usually the kind of girl nice things happen to.'

‘Can't be true.' She likes his sincerity when he says this. ‘You're not spending time with the right people.'

‘I like Grace, but sometimes –'

‘She's daft, Lizzie. You're more grown up.'

‘Maybe.' She never thought about it that way before. Grace has always seemed more able to handle herself.

‘I don't want you to be like her,' Joe says.

‘What's wrong with Grace?' Lizzie's getting hot. She doesn't want another fight. Doesn't have the energy. And she's got nowhere to go if she fights with Joe.

He gets up quickly and leans with one hand on the tree, his back to her. ‘Don't want you to be like those other girls, like Grace,' he says into the bark. ‘I want you to be proper. Had this idea in my head, since the war – I want a girl of me own. Want to set her up somewhere nice, get away. I want to marry you.'

Lizzie stands up, slides under his arm so she's facing him. His words have knocked her in the chest. He slips from her sight, seems to be at an odd angle to her. ‘You serious?' Now his vision is before her, she wants it so badly, to be that girl. But she's not sure of him.

Joe looks her square on. ‘Yeah. There's jobs up north. A friend worked with me on the cutting gangs, grew up there and has gone back to live – McWilliams, his name is. There's always something going on the cane farms, he tells me. The port at Townsville's so busy, ships have to wait in line to berth. Twenty thousand people up there, more even. A railway's opening up the west, and mines at Mount Isa send minerals to the port. We could start where no one knows us.'

She stands on her tiptoes to kiss him. He slides his tongue around her mouth. The treetops are already missing in the dark, and she can't make out his face, but his breath and body are hot.

‘I want that, Joe.'

He sighs like a hurt animal.

Grace chooses a wedding dress for her, picks out a pattern with a ribbon around the waist. Light cotton fabric, an off-cream. It's ready in another week.

Lizzie takes the dress into the fitting room at the back of the shop. Looking at herself in the mirror, she can't work out what to make of it. A stiff collar fans out above the neck, and a V of lace hangs at the elbows. The hemline is striking – a plume of material dips to her calves, the rest settling just below her knees. She buys matching lace gloves, white silk stockings and ankle-strapped heels. For the veil, a cap that hugs her forehead and cascades past her feet. She holds the dress in its tissue wrapping, feels the movement of the cotton under her fingers.

She leaves the dress out in her bedroom. Next time Joe visits, he has a look. ‘It's very simple.'

‘Yeah.' She hesitates. She finds it difficult to look at the dress. It seems to be carrying too much weight. ‘Grace picked it for me.'

He takes that in. He lifts the dress from the tissue and holds it up. The light from the window pierces it. ‘I'd like you in silk,' he says. ‘Diamonds if I could get them.'

When he leaves, he takes the dress with him.

In a week, he comes back with a parcel and leads her into her bedroom. ‘This is more you, peach,' he says. This dress seems to roll up out of the paper. She wants it as soon as she sees it. The fabric is richly layered: silk, then lace, then a misty veil of organza. The hem is cut into strips that end in a diamond point, sewn with pearls in spiral patterns. She touches the cool fabric, pinches the layer of organza.

‘It came with this,' he says. He shifts the dress to one hand and pulls out a fan made of bamboo and white feathers.

She takes it from him and slides her fingers over the feathers, tickling his palm and hers with them. This is the right dress for her; she'll be beautiful.

The night before the wedding, the pie vendor arrives. Lizzie's dad got flighty at the last minute, reckoned the only thing he could afford was sausage rolls. He called in a favour and asked a mate to cater, a vendor who still has a horse he hooks up to the trailer. Around ten, Lizzie hears the hooves. The man sets up under the house, lets the horse out to graze on the ragged grass that clumps around the edges of the fence where the neighbours water their bromeliads.

Lizzie can't sleep. She lies in bed and drifts, then wakes abruptly from an early morning doze to the smell of mince and buttery pastry. She's starved. She goes downstairs to ask for a pie for breakfast from the stringy, wide-calved man with a fringe that sips at his pupils. He gives her one, the meat still hot from the steel pot, and takes one for himself. They sit on the steps, licking the mince from their fingers, while he tells her that he makes a living mostly at night, dealing out the front of pubs after six o'clock closing, selling pies to men queasy from guzzling beer. The vendor has big hands. Lizzie watches him roll out the pastry, lift it up with an exaggerated gesture, fling it over the top of the mince. She likes his precision when he presses the lid on with a fork. It's strangely alright for this man to make the pies because he'll sell them, get himself out of debt with her dad. That somehow stops the act from being womanly.

Grace arrives to dress her and finds her with a line of mince down her chemise. ‘Jesus, Lizzie, you haven't even got your stockings on.'

‘What time is it?'

‘Too bloody early. Why'd you think before lunch was a good time?'

Lizzie roots around in the drawer for her suspender belt, her gloves, her stockings. She lifts her head up to see Grace inspecting the dress, laid out on the bed. ‘What happened to the one I picked?'

A pang at the sound of Grace's hurt. ‘Joe changed it for this one, suits me better.'

Grace looks down, fiddles with her earlobe.

‘Didn't think it mattered,' Lizzie says.

‘I wanted you to wear the dress I picked.'

‘Oh.' Lizzie turns back to the stockings, shuffles them around a bit, starts rummaging through her jewellery box, searching for the pearls. Grace sniffs, and then she's moving again, pulling the veil from the hook in the cupboard, laying it on the bed. She dresses Lizzie in silence and doesn't look her in the eye when she crouches down to draw on her eyebrows with charcoal.

Out of the bedroom, Lizzie stands with her dad on the top step, waiting for the time when they'll walk away from that house, the pie vendor following behind with his old horse-drawn trailer.

At Spring Hill they stand outside the church, its roof sloping steeply away from her, bracketed with twin turrets. Her stomach flips over, and she tries to stop her brain from humming too much. She doesn't want to fuck this up before it's even begun.

Joe arrives, and the bottom falls out of her. He's divine in his suit, a carnation in his buttonhole, black wool stretched between his shoulderblades. She longs to be home with him, have a drink and go to bed. But everyone's here. She wants them to see her too. Wishes Grace hadn't spoiled the dress. A sudden surge of anger towards her, in her pleated bridesmaid outfit, the mauve cotton hem lifting in the breeze. This is Lizzie's day. The anger dissolves when she walks down past the pews and hears a woman exclaim over the dress. She was right to have chosen this – Joe knows her better, this new version of herself. When he puts the ring on her finger, the ground dips away.

After the ceremony, they stand around the vendor, who hands out sausage rolls on blue porcelain plates her dad picked up cheap from one of his mates at the track. Joe walks towards her, his plate held out like a gift. Behind him, a bougainvillea clings to the church wall and lifts indigo sprays to the midday sky. She can't believe she's bound this man to her, taken on his name. Now she's Lizzie O'Dea. He bends to speak to her. She misses the first words, his presence filling up her awareness. ‘I've heard from my friend up north,' he says. ‘McWilliams got a job for me. At the meatworks in Townsville.'

She searches for some image of this place, this moment, to hold on to, but comes up blank. A vague sensation of heat. Her dad's snorting laugh. ‘Here, Liz,' he calls to her, ‘don't eat too many of 'em rolls or you won't be able to get out of your dress.'

A flake of pastry lifts from her roll and flaps gently in the breeze. She can't wait to be rid of him, rid of the lot of them, and be with Joe.

Brisbane, 1945

T
he woman who's after the coathanger calls for a nurse. One with sagging breasts and stretch marks up to her neck waddles over.

‘Can I walk up and down?' the coathanger woman asks her.

‘Be careful,' the nurse says. ‘They'll think you're better and send you back to gaol.'

So, the woman's here from Boggo Road. In for something serious, serving part of her sentence in the lock hospital so she doesn't infect the girls over at the gaol. Lizzie sits up to watch what the woman does next, but she moves too quickly. Black shadows of blood pulse in her eyes. She covers her face with her palms and rubs. Behind her eyes, pinpricks of light map out the hospital ward, the women lined up in beds, the grey light dissected by barred windows. When she's able to open her eyes, the coathanger woman is tugging at the starched sheet tucked tightly under her mattress.

Lizzie lies back down, her body heavy. She shifts onto her side and sees the coathangers, blurry from this distance, with shrivelled hospital gowns hanging from them like discarded skins, waiting for another woman to be issued with a blue slip ordering her to the check-up, the doctor's hands on her thighs, telling her to lift her hips up so he can get a better look at her. The finger he puts inside her will be too inquisitive, pushing against the edges. He'll wait for a response from her, but she'll give none because she doesn't like the fat that scoops under his chin. He'll be rough then, his feelings hurt; her insides are a mess anyway. And he's got the
Health Act
on his side. Once he knows she's infected, he can send her straight to the lock hospital.

It astounds Lizzie how her body welcomes this same gesture from a man she desires, while the doctor's cold fingers pucker the skin at the small of her back.

The coathanger woman is up and off the bed, shuffling down the aisle, drawing closer to Lizzie. She sees a nurse, freezes, doesn't seem to know which way to step. She looks so obvious, exposed out on the ward. ‘'Scuse me, love,' the nurse says. The woman presses herself against the end of a bed and tucks her arms in. There's a lady in the bed she's leaning against who sticks her toe through the frame and pokes her, warning her out of her space. Ten women are lined up in this lock hospital, a new one just sent in yesterday, and they're getting on one another's nerves. The coathanger woman must have pinched those blanket-covered toes, because their owner pulls her foot up, a snail's eye sliding into its stalk. The woman gives her a sharp glare and moves on towards the hangers.

Not only does the woman have a familiar voice, but now Lizzie's sure she knows her face – that dirty look has dug something up from a bloody long time ago. Lizzie picks the woman to be about her age or maybe a bit younger, so she tries to imagine her without the wrinkles and the blurry edges. As usual, her eyesight fails her. Ages ago she realised that with her poor eyes, she has two options: to be always ready or never ready for anything to strike out at her. She chose the first. She had to make choices like that after Joe was sent down. Before, he'd been between her and the horizon.

The woman stands at the end of the ward. When a matron comes in with a tea tray, Lizzie loses sight of her. Then she appears again, back near her own bed. As she climbs in, her nightie opens to show the coathanger, its lace frothing around her breasts. She lies down, runs her hands over her chest, seems comforted touching the hanger. It reminds Lizzie of a man in a sinking ship, checking that his life jacket is tied on, but she can't work out what the gesture means here, where they all went overboard long ago.