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 u
p 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.
She leans over to pick up the toy, aware of the man watching her. Even from this distance, she can sense his approval at her display of kindness to the boy. She holds the car out awkwardly, almost drops it again. Feels the heat in her cheeks and laughs at her clumsiness. The boy stares at her sternly – it’s no laughing matter – and inspects the toy for scratches. His mother tugs on his hand.
Lizzie looks back at the man, and he smiles at her. Heat in her groin. She panics, gathers her hat, doesn’t glance at the man as she pays. She’s sure he’s watching her leave, and she feels bad for looking at him, bad that she’s not able to stay and look some more.
When she steps outside the sun floods her vision, and she pauses. A voice behind her says, ‘Afternoon.’
Her eyes adjust, and the man’s there. ‘Afternoon,’ she says. ‘Bright, isn’t it?’ She shades her eyes – a useless gesture with her hat on – and her hand is shaking. She pulls it away from her face.
‘You off somewhere special?’ he asks. He has a line of freckles across his nose.
‘No. Home.’ A pause. She doesn’t want the conversation to end. ‘You?’
‘I play a game. Just a few friends at a house on Heurand Street.’
‘What game?’
‘Fan-tan. Among friends.’
That Chinese betting game her dad sometimes plays in the Valley.
‘Want to join us?’ the man asks.
She does, but the thought of Joe coming back and finding the house empty frightens her. It must be past four. She shakes her head. ‘Sorry.’
‘Another time, then. It’s number fifty-one. We’ll be there most afternoons. If you come round, say that Chris Stephens asked you.’
She nods and walks off quickly, feeling the shape of her body moving through the thick air. She sweats without being hot. Her feet slip in her shoes, and she turns them outwards to avoid blisters. She doesn’t look back. She wonders what it is about her that’s attracted this shady business, whether her father’s mark is on her, broadcasting that this woman will gamble and doesn’t mind which side of the law she’s on. She gets an itch to be back at the trots with her dad, placing bets, and misses the press of the race crowd, the anticipation of the horses about to start, the way they fling their bodies around the circuit. There, she had a sense of being part of something.
Walking home through the baked streets bordered with palings crooked like loose teeth and yards burnt to dust, she longs for a presence, human or animal, doesn’t matter. But they’re all sheltering from the sun, and fences and walls separate her.
In the trapped heat of her rented house, she wonders what she’s doing. She spends the afternoon listening out for Joe, going to the front door every time she hears something. A woman pushing a pram along the street, then a man leading his dog on a rope. When Joe finally arrives and kisses her, she’s stiff and unresponsive. Then she pictures Chris Stephens and kisses Joe back, remembering the man’s gaze on her body. She imagines Joe’s hands are his. She has to work hard to keep the fantasy up.
When she pulls away, Joe wanders off to change his clothes. She’s surprised that he doesn’t notice anything different about her. He hangs his stiff work shirt under the house. The first night he hung it in the bedroom and its smell crept in. She dreamt of dead things trapped in the ceiling, of the rabbit-oh’s skinned hares. She told Joe to keep his dirty clothes under the house, and he grumbled but did it anyway. Now underneath has been given over to him, to his blood-stained, dirty shirts and boots.
Lizzie spends the next day thinking about the fan-tan game. By afternoon, she’s making her way to Heurand Street. Number fifty-one squats on its haunches between the back of the Causeway Hotel and Ross Creek. She hears the men’s voices from the pub. The front door and window are shaded by a tin awning that seems too small in the afternoon glare. She knocks on the blank wooden door and wonders if she’s got the right place or if she’s going to wake up some bristling housewife.
A woman opens the door, and Lizzie steps back into the sunlight at the sight of her exotic silk dress that falls just below the knee and crosses over her breast to knot at the waist. A white crisscross pattern threads the neckline and sleeves. Lizzie longs for the woman’s shoes, black and sharply pointed at the toe, with cut-out triangles fanning across the upper. The woman asks, ‘Help you?’
Lizzie glances into the house, w
here a wide room opens out. She glimpses a man leaning back with a cigarette in his hand, another man bent towards him. Surely she’s come to the right place: the men out there, and the woman in front of her, like nothing she’s seen in Townsville yet. ‘I met a man – Chris – said you have a game here now and then. He invited me.’
‘Chris who?’ The woman is staring beyond her to the street, probably checking to see if she’s with anyone.
It takes a moment for the man’s name to slip into Lizzie’s head. ‘Stephens,’ she says. ‘Chris Stephens.’
The woman looks her full in the eye for the first time, brings a hand up to her turban and slides her fingers over the knot of material that twists down her shoulder. She doesn’t smile. ‘Come in,’ she says. Kohl is thickly smeared on her eyelids and underneath too, the whites of her eyes stark and compelling.
She steps back, and Lizzie moves through the door into the high-ceilinged room. The rest of the table becomes visible, three men and a woman sitting around it, talking and smoking. Drinking spirits from glass tumblers, whisky by the look of it. In the middle of the table, someone has drawn a chalk grid divided into four and numbered. The curtains are closed, and the room lit with a gas lamp that casts a dim, warm glow, odd to Lizzie after the washed-out afternoon. A sharp second of disappointment that Chris isn’t there.
One man blows smoke through his nose, looks her up and down. The bloke with a glass of whisky in his hand is the best-dressed Chinese man she’s ever seen. His hair is startlingly white, while his face is hairless and young-looking, and his waistcoat hugs his narrow chest and flat stomach. A pocket watch hangs from a chain at his middle.
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