Treading Air (8 page)

Away from other people, Joe drops his aggressive shell. He brings her a mug of tea from the billy brewing over the coals, cups the bottom gently to give it to her so she won't burn her fingers. They lie in the sand as the fire dies and listen to the ocean, their own breath.

Joe says, ‘Today was perfect,' and even though she said something stupid to him in the morning, she knows it was. She tries to remember another time she was this happy and can't.

Over the next week, their hotel room becomes fetid with the heat of their bodies and the rubbish that builds up on the side of their bed.

Joe gets drunk one night and tries to climb in from the verandah. He hangs off its edge like an orangutan, his knees tucked in. Lizzie stands on the other side of the road and takes bets from the cluster of men gathered around her with drinks in their hands. The paling snaps, and Joe plummets. Lizzie screams. He lands hard on his feet, controls his fall backwards, then lies in the dirt with his knees up, groaning. Lizzie runs over to him, puts her ear to his lips to check his breathing. He grins at her from the dust.

‘You hurt?' she asks.

‘Back's a bit.'

She helps him up. He sits with his knees apart on the steps. The men come and get their money off Lizzie, and she has a go at Joe for making her lose it.

Then the manager comes out, looks at the broken paling and gives them their marching orders.

‘Can't you see he's injured?' Lizzie says. ‘We're sick of this flamin' place anyway.'

They scan the newspapers for rentals, find a cheap one listed in Roberts Street, Hermit Park. They visit the house in the early afternoon, the sun beating down on them as they cross the bridge to reach it. The ground dips through churned-up mud, pocked with troughs of boot prints, to the silt-heavy water, crooked mooring poles rising unsteadily into the air. At their backs, the orange face of Castle Hill gazing away from them, out to the ocean. The thick smell of mud rises from the creek on the other side of the road. The tide is low, exposing the mangroves' aerial roots, sharp little spikes erupting from the dirt. Lizzie imagines frogs down there and eels, things for the witches' brew, creatures with glassy eyes, elongated digits, mucus.

The house teeters on cement pillars in an open field of yellowed, brittle grass. The corrugated roofline is washed with rust, the paint on the stairs speckled and bubbled. Bamboo screens have been nailed across the verandah to close it in, and the light cuts up the stuffy enclosure. A bedframe without a mattress huddles in the corner.

The estate agent opens the front door. Their feet echo in a hallway empty of furniture, the floorboards crisscrossed with scratches. The heat has its own presence in the bedroom and hits Lizzie as soon as she enters. The one window is gummed closed, and she sees it's been painted shut from the outside. Paint splinters when she heaves the frame up, showering her feet with cream flakes. She puts her head out, leans on the sill. The water tank casts a shadow. Grass dips in the wind, its pale sheaves flashing.

A cough from the back of the house. When she turns around, she sees the bedroom door has been kicked in. She walks out to find Joe inspecting the kitchen, laid with lino patterned to look like tiles and curling up at the edges. She climbs down the back stairs, stands underneath the house, hears Joe moving above her head. In the dirt she spots something white. A wedding photograph, washed out in the sun, the woman's face blacked out, her eyes scribbled over until the paper broke.

The backyard drops to a line of grass, bright green against the dead grass cresting the hill behind it. A cloud of mosquitos hovers above the green, and she guesses there's water underneath. The neighbours are a good distance away, screened by a frangipani, the flowers blooming, yellow throated. Closer to the fence she sees a dead snake flipped over on the top strand of chicken wire.

The rent's good, and they're close to the city and hotels. Joe haggles with the estate agent, and they get the place for cheaper than anywhere this good in Brisbane.

Lizzie wonders about house prices. If rent is this cheap, maybe they can buy up here. That night, she sleeps with Joe in a real house for the first time, and the vision of them together in a place they own hovers before her as though it could be real. Her desire pricks her skin and stops her from sleeping.

Time spins out. With Joe at the meatworks, she flounders. In the afternoons their house heats up, leaving her sweaty. A rash develops along her stomach. She lies on the bed and dabs on calamine lotion, enjoying the cool pink liquid. She takes to wearing damp tea towels on her head, wetted from tank water that's barely cooler than the air.

When Joe comes home, he's tired and smells of stale meat. They slouch on the lounge, drinking Bulldog Stouts. One night he spills beer on the rug. She spends almost an hour scrubbing resentfully and slowly sobering up. He sits with his back to her, slugging down beer. She comes and sits down with him, the stain still hovering in her vision. He kisses her cheek, the top of her head. His beard stubble against her lips stings, tingling when he pulls his mouth away.

She offers up to him the same meals she gave her father: bacon and eggs, shepherd's pie, rabbit stew, bacon and egg pie when she can be bothered with the pastry. She hates watching Joe eat what she cooks. At the table he drives his fork into the centre of the meals, silently examines everything before it goes into his mouth. She waits for the delivery of his verdict and, in the silence, fills the gaps – he hates it, the cooking's foul. He surprises her at odd moments by announcing his love or disdain for a meal. One morning: ‘I didn't think much of the peel cake, Lizzie. Bland.' Took him two days to come out with that one.

Fear of his words slows her cooking. She grows to distrust her own taste and throws out
The Schauer Improved Cookery Book
by Misses A. and M. Schauer, bloody pair of old spinsters, with the offending peel cake recipe. Joe responds best to white sauce and potatoes, dislikes all spice, tomatoes and prunes. She tries serving meat rolled flat with a pin, potato peeled and quartered and fluffed with oil. Points at the meal. ‘What do you reckon?'

Joe screws up his nose. ‘Bit boring.'

‘Jesus.'

‘You asked for my opinion.'

She snatches his plate away.

‘Hold on, I'm still eating.'

‘Thought it was
boring
,' she says. He grabs the plate back, and she bursts into tears. ‘D'you like it or not?'

He lets her cry, skewering each potato chunk on his fork, putting them to his mouth one at a time. She leaves him in the kitchen with the light burning, simmers in the darkness of the bedroom under the quilt, the heat of her body trapped with her. He comes in, touches her shoulder. ‘You're warm,' he says.

She gazes at the ceiling, the dark spotting around her.

He sighs. ‘What's the matter, peach?'

‘Don't know. I hate cooking.'

His arm around her. He says he wants her to rub out what went on before, start again with him, and he won't say nothing about the food. All of this is just normal, she tells herself. When she works out what to do properly, they won't have any problems. Joe's gentle under all that, really – look at the way he came to her and wanted to make up. They'll get through.

Every morning it's a scramble to get him ready. She trusts herself enough to wake at six, so she doesn't buy an alarm clock. Waste of money. But Joe doesn't move when she does, he lies in bed still and heavy. If she misses six then they're in trouble.

Once she sits up in a fright, calms herself into thinking it's dark, but the light intrudes. She walks into the kitchen and looks at the time. When she wakes Joe he stares at her dully, an undercurrent of resentment, his eyes rimmed. She fries up toast in a bit of butter for him. He drags himself into the kitchen to eat it sullenly. ‘You're painful to watch,' she says. She brings him his clothes, but has to go outside when the clock hits eight-thirty because she can't stand it. He's still not dressed, and he's supposed to be over the river already.

One night she drinks too much and neither of them get up the next day at all. He kisses her in the early afternoon, and they fuck and cuddle in the damp sheets. Her legs hurt from not moving them.

He comes home one afternoon with an abattoir knife. ‘Feel the weight of it,' he says.

She holds the blade in her palm. ‘You supposed to have this?'

He takes it off her, shrugs, sits at the end of the table and spins the knife. The blade turns on the table, comes to rest. He points it at her and looks suggestive: raised eyebrows, come hither. She ignores him. He sighs, goes back to spinning the knife. ‘How can you do that?' he asks.

‘Do what?' She brings her own kitchen knife, much smaller, down on a potato. The severed half falls on the chopping board and wobbles. She cups her hand over it, stills it.

‘Turn on and off like that.'

‘What?'

‘Tease me, hold yourself back. I can't control myself like you.'

‘I don't feel like it, is all.'

‘Bullshit. You always feel like it.'

‘How d'you know?' She turns back to the potatoes, notices the shine of water on the halves opened out to her.

The chair scrapes, and his hands are on her hips, his cock pressed to her bum. She resists the temptation to swat at his hands with the knife, remembering his story of slicing his cousin's palm open while doing just that. She puts the knife down, turns to him. He seems to read this as a sign that she's given in, wrapping his hands around her, although she's not sure she means it that way. ‘See?' he says and kisses her with his hand on the back of her head.

She laughs, hits him at the top of his thigh, is surprised when it arouses him – she can tell by the look in his eyes. When she hits him harder, he kisses her, all tongue. She wants to make him yell, but he's not playing, just pushing her against the bench so the wooden edge cuts into her back. He grabs her wrist, lifts her hips up so she can sit on the bench with her legs either side of him. She gives in.

Afterwards they move to the bedroom, and he goes to sleep. She surprises herself, lying there with waves of anger rolling through her. She's lonely. Misses Grace. Once she and Grace played a game with some of the other girls. One would make up a question, and the others had to answer it truthfully. Grace's was, ‘Where would you like to be kissed?' Lizzie misunderstood and listed ‘beach, hammock, boat', while the girls all said places to be kissed on the body. Lizzie liked Grace's answers best: the lips, the neck, the fingers.

When Joe wakes up, Lizzie tells him this story, and he says, ‘You're more creative than Grace. Clever. Didn't do you no good spending time with her.' He must be right; he understands her better. There'd been a problem between her and Grace for ages. She was biding her time, waiting for someone like Joe.

But during the day, without him, without her dad or Grace, Lizzie is unanchored. She wanders from room to room. One afternoon she walks into town, arrives in the main street with her armpits ringed in a tide of sweat. She intends to go to the beach, but, at the top of Flinders Street, the Strand feels far away and she turns home.

A man standing on the corner eyes her off, and she walks into a tea room, the Garden of Roses, so she can watch him from a safe distance. The latticework that rims the doorway reminds her of gazebos, and she wonders why they haven't grown roses on it to live up to the tea room's name. Maybe the flowers died in the heat. She drinks lemonade in the narrow interior that funnels the wind. Her table is scored, a line made with a fork's prongs running through the varnish. The man on the corner disappears. The lemonade is sweet and cool. She filters mint leaves between her teeth and pictures Joe in the meatworks, the carcasses all around him.

She thinks of his criticisms of her cooking and feels wounded, then angry at herself for spoiling what they have. The time he first kissed her, she stepped away from him, unsure, but felt a force running between them. She didn't think such feelings were possible, and now wonders if she made this up, imposed it on the scene in the dark alley that she keeps coming back to, adding to, filling in the gaps.

The man from the corner is back, looking towards the tea room. She pictures herself in the dark mouth of the shop, slides her leg out from under the table. She's not certain if the man can see her. She'd like to look at a picture of Joe. The day without him stretches ahead.

When she looks up, the man is at the front of the tea room, his hat in his hand. She's surprised by his height; he has to stoop under the latticework. He orders tea without looking at her, stumbles slightly on the order, recovers by joking with the bloke in the apron, spotted transparent with grease, behind the counter. Her reflection is elongated in the scoop of a spoon. The man sits two tables down, facing her. She looks away and back again. His head is turned, facing out onto the street. He shifts his body sideways, his Adam's apple outlined against the road beyond.

Her lemonade is almost gone. The man makes eye contact with her, and she holds her face still. She wants to be true to Joe. The man smiles slightly, and she smiles back, then glances aside when a woman and her child walk past her table.

The boy's holding a little toy car. He runs it along her table, making the chugging sound of a motor. She's only been in a car once, loved the feeling of it, the vibration that hummed through her body. She smiles at the boy. He fumbles the car at the edge of the table. She pictures herself in the back seat, squeezed in next to her cousin, being driven by her cousin's rich boyfriend, a man who played cricket and wore a pressed vest with mother-of-pearl buttons, and who ignored the girls' shrieks from the back to go faster, their refusal to believe his warnings about the top-heaviness of the Ford, the way it's so easily overturned – but here it is playing out in front of Lizzie, the boy's car plummeting through the air, spinning, the girls thrown onto the roof, pulled down again, their dresses floating.