Bea laughs. ‘I don’t usually start getting ready for a couple of hours.’ The feather trembles as she speaks. ‘You came about a job?’
‘You said there might be something going?’ Lizzie can’t take her eyes off those nipples, the fringe of lumps around the brown areolae. Her own are small and pink. Hard to believe they’re the same body part.
‘But you don’t really want to clean, do you, love? I’d have thought you were smarter than that.’
‘What else is there?’ But maybe she knows already.
‘You can work with my girls. We can set you up in a nice little cottage, five or six nights a week, another girl there for company or in case something goes wrong.’
Lizzie’s winded. She wants to run, but Joe’s at the house, his face all swollen, and there’s nothing to eat.
Bea leans closer, her lips red and her eyebrows painted on. Her nipples point at Lizzie, who feels cornered, oddly aroused by Bea’s heavy breasts. Her father calls a woman’s breasts ‘jugs’, and there’s something container-like about Bea’s, bellied out and full. ‘I quite like the work,’ Bea says. ‘Most blokes have drunk the savagery out by the time they get to you. The rowdy ones don’t get past the front door. I keep some muscle around – you’ve seen Murray already. What d’you reckon? Put you on a trial?’
Lizzie wonders how the hell she’ll tell Joe. ‘How much do I get?’
‘Depends on what you do. We’re mostly English women here, some gins for when their kind come in off the cane fields. Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to sleep with any blacks. Or chows.’ She shudders her shoulders. ‘Most whites don’t go in for that French stuff, though you can get through more if you take ’em between the breasts or in the mouth.’
Lizzie’s astonished and slightly sickened by these options, this whole realm of possibilities.
‘Men pay between ten shillings and a pound for ten minutes to half an hour. You’ll have to work your way up to the pounders, though. I take a flat rate of ten shillings a week from each girl, to pay the rent on the knocking shops – I own the three cottages next to fifty-one. You can keep anything you earn on the first night, even if you decide you don’t like it. How’s that sound?’
Lizzie’s mum got twenty-seven pounds for a year’s work as a domestic; Lizzie can get that in a couple of weeks. At the very least, she can do it for one night, feed Joe and her for a good while, till he gets better. One night doesn’t mean anything. She commits to the handshake Bea’s offering, and Bea bows slightly to meet her, nipples brushing the back of her hand. A good or a bad sign?
‘I’ll give you some pretty knickers,’ Bea says. ‘There’s nice men, you know. You can enjoy them. Really grateful for what you give them. They see it like that – a gift.’
Lizzie arranges to meet Bea that night at number fifty-three Heurand Street, a box on stumps. A Japanese lantern in the hallway throws a red glow into the open verandah. Bea leans in the doorway, gesturing Lizzie to her. Pearls slide around her neck, loop underneath her belly, another string wrapped across her thigh, the top of her dress tucked into them. Lizzie takes stock of the width of the strand, the chunk of thigh, the pearls cutting into flesh.
Bea’s colder now that their deal’s made, rattling off the details without changing her voice, bored. ‘This’ll be your cottage,’ she says, and Lizzie likes the idea of occupying the house, owning it. ‘Most often, I’ll send men down from the fan-tan game. Or, if they come here straight, and you’re busy, get one of me fellas to send them up to me. They can play a game or two till you’re ready. I’ll give you bubbly to keep here – some blokes like a drink with a girl first. Charge ’em for it. Take their money at the end, when they’re feeling good. Give it to Murray or whoever’s on watch. I’ll count it and give you your wages. You’re in here with Thelma. She’ll take you under her wing.’ The name sounds familiar.
Bea shows her how to pick the men from the way they come over from the Causeway. One holds himself stiffly, walks wide-legged. ‘That one,’ she says, ‘he’ll be an arse.’
The man stops in front of them, nods to Lizzie. ‘How much?’
Bea steps up, Amazonian, her thighs set apart. Lizzie’s entranced by Bea’s thighs. She heard her telling a man in the fan-tan parlour that she does daily exercises, on her back with her legs in the air, circling her feet; eats the fat from T-bones to plumpen them. ‘I am my own creation,’ she said. ‘Me own parents wouldn’t recognise me.’
Now Bea says to the fella, ‘She’s busy tonight, mate. Another time.’
‘What about the other girls?’
‘Busy too.’
‘Me money’s not good enough?’
‘Nothing personal. We can only take so many. Next time.’
The man gives them a glare, all pursed lips, as though he thinks they’re a bloody broken machine if they can’t take him on. ‘Won’t be coming back.’
Bea watches him off. Lizzie wonders what she would do if he got violent. She pictures Bea wrapping her pearls around his neck, pulling, getting her booted foot up for extra leverage. Lizzie reckons she’s capable of it, but asks her if she can really afford to turn blokes away.
‘The ones who look like trouble. In this trade, you have to believe there’ll be plenty more.’ Bea gestures to the range that borders the town, purple in the twilight. ‘The mountains will provide. Can you guess how many men are up there, hungry when they come down? Nice blokes who’ll treat you good and give you tips.’
‘No.’
‘I believe there are thousands. There’s something like ten thousand men living in the town alone, most of them white. More in the hills, the goldfields, out in the paddocks with nothin’ but sheep for company.’
‘That true?’
Bea shrugs. ‘Maybe. But if I start thinking the mountains are empty, out here suddenly becomes very frightening.’ She rearranges her pearls, adjusts her slip over her bottom. ‘Those men in the mountains, they like older women.’
Lizzie stares into the scrub curled up through the range, the sky washed dark orange above the rock face. She’s heard stories of the men who live up there, men who are never seen in the towns. She worries about them descending on her after being lost for years.
Thelma’s already in her own room when Bea leads Lizzie inside hers. It’s crowded with a bed, an armchair and a dressing table crowned with a clouded mirror, a boxy heart sliced out of one corner of the frame, scored and pierced with an arrow. Bea takes her back into the open lounge space, where a long armchair bulges in the middle from the weight of too many bodies. Bea opens up the drinks cabinet and pours bubbly into a high glass. ‘I don’t let the girls do this often – only drink if the men are paying for it – but for this first night, might help. I have to get back to the table. I’ll send Murray down with a nice fella soon.’
Lizzie holds the glass to her mouth. Her hands shake and her own body seems distant from her, out of her control. She thinks Bea notices, so she puts the glass down and keeps her hand on the table.
Bea says, ‘You’ll be right, love,’ and touches her shoulder.
She leaves Lizzie listening to the champagne faintly fizzing in the glass and, after a moment, Thelma, in the room down the hallway, crying out. A man’s steady grunts. The surge and churn of Lizzie’s guts, heavy. Footsteps on the verandah stairs. She downs the bubbly.
Murray opens the door, a man behind him, his hand to his head taking his hat off. Something familiar about him, his freckled face framed by a fringe of light brown hair.
Murray says, ‘Here she is,’ and that sounds odd, as though she’s been hiding.
The man hangs his hat on the stand, looks her over and smiles. Murray shuts the door behind him, goes down the stairs to the street. She’d like to follow him. She shouldn’t be here.
‘Can I pour us a drink?’ the man asks. ‘Bea said this one was on the house.’
Lizzie holds out her glass gratefully, her hands still shaking.
He takes the glass and sets it down. ‘I don’t kn
ow where the glasses are kept.’
She glances around, sees them quickly, turned upside-down on a sideboard.
‘I’ll get another,’ the man says. He sits opposite her and pours them a drink. ‘Bea said this is your first time?’
Lizzie nods. He puts his fingers over her hand. She picks the champagne up with the other hand and takes a slug. Represses a burp, bubbles fizzing up her nose.
‘I’ll be gentle,’ he says, ‘but you need to relax or it’ll be no fun. Drink up, sweetheart.’
She takes another drink, his words reaching her from somewhere distant, the bubbles between them, buoying her up. She studies his face, trying to place him. It comes to her through the drink – he’s the man at the Garden of Roses, Chris Somebody, who sent her over to fifty-one in the first place. She remembers his desire for her, which he showed her out in the open, now here again. And her body’s response to him.
‘It’ll be a pleasure to show you the ropes,’ he says.
‘I’ve seen you before.’
He studies her more closely now, his eyes pale above the line of freckles. ‘You’re very beautiful. I would remember someone as beautiful as you.’
‘In a tea room. The Garden of Roses.’ She can tell he can’t remember, his face blank and the smile still. How many girls has he smiled at? Followed around Flinders Street?
He just says, ‘Ah, yes, now I remember,’ so she reckons he’s lying. He pours another drink. ‘Let’s take this with us.’
He puts his hand on her upper arm. She doesn’t move for a moment. He leans down and kisses her on the mouth. He has the sweet, foul breath of the champagne. His tongue pushes against her lips. When he pulls away, she’s still leaning into his kiss and overbalances. He tugs her up and leads her into the bedroom.
‘You know your way around,’ she says.
He gives her a sharp look, a smile with one side of his mouth. ‘Not as stupefied as you appear. I come here a bit, do some favours for Bea every now and then.’
‘This a favour?’
‘No, darling. A pleasure. Now take your clothes off for me.’ Chris sits on the bed to watch her. The skirt she gets off easily enough, but she fumbles with the buttons on her blouse. He stands and puts his hands to her chest to help her. ‘You’ll learn to do this soon. Keep up the eye contact, really let the fella know you’re enjoying him watching you.’ He kisses her on the mouth again. Brings his hand to her chin and pinches it, pulling her bottom jaw down. ‘Let me in, sweetheart.’ He pushes his tongue into her open mouth. She can feel it over her own, slides her tongue above his. Then he pulls away. ‘Good girl. Kiss me back.’
She wants to try this kind of kissing, so she does. Feels it between her legs. He slides his tongue in and out as though he’s fucking her mouth. She allows herself to enjoy this, pushes away the thoughts of Joe that surface, tries not to compare Chris with him. She’s doing this so Joe can get better. Only one night. He doesn’t even need to know.
Chris takes her hand and puts it on his erection. Clenches his teeth. ‘Brush it through the cloth, make sure it’s nice and hard. That’s it.’ She slides her fingers over the material. Something strange about feeling his cock under the fabric, like that game she played as a child where you put your hand in a box and guessed what was there. She tries to trace its edges, to work out its size. Chris tugs off his trousers and underwear. His cock springs upward. She gets a little fright, steps back. Lets out a sharp, hysterical laugh.
He smiles at her emptily and says, ‘What is it?’
‘Just didn’t expect it to come at me like that.’
Laughing, he thrusts his hips forward, pushing his cock between her thighs. ‘I want you so badly.’ He rests his head on her shoulder and puts a finger between her legs to peel her knickers back. He shifts his cock forward, and it catches on her dry skin. He hooks a hand around her shoulder and spits, then he rubs the spit over his cock, shoves it between her legs again. It slips in. ‘That’s better.’ He rests again on her shoulder, moving the cock back and forth, moaning.
She waits for her own response. Feels nothing. She’s bored, waiting for something more to happen. She looks at the bed and, just to get him to stop that bloody rubbing, moves over to it and lies down.
‘Learning quickly,’ he says. ‘Open your legs for me.’ He puts his hands on her knees and gently pushes them apart, as if she didn’t understand what he asked. He says, ‘Stay still a moment.’ She lifts her head awkwardly and sees him riffling through a drawer. He takes out a small packet and holds it up. ‘I’ll put one on, shall I?’
Lizzie has no idea what he’s talking about and watches, fascinated, as he pulls something from the packet. Like the empty skin of those beetle larvae she’s found curled up in the garden, all white and loose. To her disgust now that she has this image in her head, he rolls it over his cock. ‘What is that?’ she asks.
‘A dreadnought. Stops you from getting pregnant and me from getting anything nasty. Latest thing. Didn’t trust ’em at first. Whoever heard of rubber ones? But better than fish skins, don’t break as much.’
‘Like magic,’ she says.
He laughs. She likes the easiness of the laugh.
He leans his weight over her, pressing. Fumbles around a bit. For a terrible moment she thinks he’ll go back to the thigh-rubbing, just horizontal now, but he props himself up on his elbow and spits again on his other hand. He rubs his cock, turning down his face and mouth, trying to get the position right. She feels him at the edges of her cunt. The dreadnought is alien inside her. He pushes, and his breath is heavy on her face. He turns his head to the side and scrunches his forehead. She almost laughs, he looks that serious. His mouth opens, panting, ah, ah. The backs of her knees hit the bed. She wishes she was lying down longways, decides she’ll do that next time, if there’s a next time. He gasps, and she’s sure he’s coming. Relief.
He gets up and pulls the dreadnought off, holding it between his thumb and finger. ‘You need a bin in here,’ he says. ‘You should thank me. Not every man will wear one of these.’ The thought frightens Lizzie.
After tossing the dreadnought on the ground, he gets dressed. She lies still on the bed. His trousers on, he takes some coins from his pocket. He taps her knee and, without her knickers on, she finds the gesture intrusive, despite what else he’s just done to her. She sits up.
‘Here, sweetheart. A pleasure to be your first.’
Shillings in her hands, she watches him go out, shutting the door behind him. She desperately wants to be clean. She stares around the room, and sees a pitcher and a bowl of water in the corner under the sideboard. A washcloth over the edge. She needs to get the smell of the man off her. She’s stiff, mechanical, all the nervousness drained out of her. The water stings between her thighs. She dries herself and goes back to the front room to drink some more of that champagne.
By the third man, she’s in pain, heavy between her legs and aching. She cries after he leaves. Thelma, in the next room, calls through the walls. Lizzie’s heard her while she fucks a bloke, breathes out and walks down the hallway to greet another one, but she still hasn’t seen her.
‘It’ll pass,’ Thelma calls now. ‘Try taking it between the thighs.’ After another one, Thelma keeps saying, ‘It’ll be alright.’
Lizzie finds she’s alone. Her body has a heaviness to it; she’d like to sleep. Thelma comes in from the other room. Lizzie recognises her as the woman from the drunken night with McWilliams and the bike, and from when she fetched Joe a doctor, but now Lizzie’s startled by the darkness of her skin in the gaslight. Close up, she has the strangest pale eyes. Her hair rolls from her face in waves. Lizzie can’t get the thought out of her mind, she’s black, she’s black, unable to make sense of the voice that talked to her between the men and the flat-nosed woman in front of her. She cries again.
Thelma puts her hand on Lizzie’s shoulder. ‘What’s wrong? Still hurting?’
Lizzie can’t tell her it’s because she’s black. She’s so disappoin
ted they can never be proper friends – she wants to have a new friend, someone like Grace. She can’t say anything about her own confusion at the comfort of the voice and the face in front of her. ‘You don’t look like you sound,’ is what she says.
Thelma gives her two quick pats on the shoulder. Lizzie closes her eyes.
‘Try not to sleep, too hard to wake up,’ Thelma tells her. ‘Some men like that, when you don’t move. But you have to be ready if they ask you to ride them.’ She gives Lizzie a little snow – just to rub on her teeth and wake her up. ‘I get the men to call me Madge. You’ll want to use a different name, ’specially since you’ve got a hubby.’ She turns her mouth down at Lizzie’s ring. ‘I’d take that off if I was you. Some men get excited by it, but in a town this size, it might cause problems.’
Lizzie touches her ring and feels as if she’s brushing her fingers over a wound. The snow kicks in. In this room, in the night, she wants to be the opposite of who she is in the daytime, with Joe. And she already gave her first name as Betty that day at the fan-tan parlour. She grins to herself. ‘How about Betty Knight?’ she says. ‘This stuff is lovely.’
‘You can buy some off Murray later. Gets you in debt, but it’s worth it.’
Lizzie buzzes, suddenly very aware of her own brilliance. They sit on the narrow verandah out the front of their cottage, looking back towards the pub. An orange moon swallows the sky around it. Thelma asks if she’s met Bea’s niece, Dolly, and Lizzie says she’s seen her a couple of times. Turns out Dolly uses the room Lizzie’s in, but wants to cut down her hours there. ‘Too tired, she tells Bea,’ says Thelma. ‘Prefers to be drinking and playing fan-tan, truth of the matter. But Bea’s got a blind spot for her. She’s been on the lookout for someone for a while, take over some of Dolly’s nights. Anyway, keep an eye on Dolly. Look you right in the face and lie to you.’
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