On her own in their back garden, the frangipani dropping heavy flowers at her feet, she can’t make sense of her feelings, her attraction to McWilliams with his tiny foot, her response to Lee. Joe’s disgust present in her own body, fighting with her fascination at these men’s faces, their bodies, so alien to her. She picks up a frangipani with thick browning petals. They feel like flesh beneath her fingers. She throws it away from her. Not a chow or a gimp, she tells herself. Don’t sink yourself that low.
Tuesdays are her nights off, and Joe invites McWilliams over for dinner and a drink. She gives them a feed of tongue. She remembers her dad picking up a whole tongue from the butcher’s shop. He drew it out of its brown paper. The pimpled meat was much longer than she’d expected, with a mass at the end. And grey, not pink like her own tongue. Her dad slid the tongue across her cheek, mooing. She tugged herself away, and he pursued her with it, hounding her. Now she pounds the meat with a mallet and recalls a man who sucked on her tongue so viciously that she was worried he’d wrench it out. Trying to pull back was no good – only made it hurt more. When he let her go, pain washed through her, and anger. Little things like that can put her right off her game.
Others arouse her unexpectedly. A man’s hand on the back of her head the first time he kissed her; another’s mouth on the top of her thigh where she felt no one had touched her before. These things can send her wild, and she knows she’ll enjoy the fucking, though she isn’t sure if she’s supposed to. But whenever she’s put off, she has to work hard to get into the swing again, sometimes gives up and just lies there. With Joe, she wishes he’d wait a second before he goes for her breasts. She’s tried to tell him, but he doesn’t respond much to instructions and forgets them quickly.
McWilliams arrives first. He calls down through the hallway, saying Joe’s on his way, just doing an extra chore for Bea. Lizzie pictures her giving Joe instructions in her quivering feather headdress and ropes of beads, and wonders what Joe makes of her outfits, if he thinks anything about them at all. Lizzie herself has become more flamboyant in the clothes she buys. She chooses silks and cottons for the heat, but picks out dresses that scoop low over her back, with wide ribbon bows at the neck or long sleeves embroidered with glass beads. In the mirror she hardly recognises herself.
When she pours McWilliams a drink, she’s aware of him studying her. Her hands shake. She can’t look at him. She leads him to the living room, asks him to take a seat, returns to the kitchen and pounds the tongue viciously. He leaves her to it.
Joe arrives, smelling of Bea’s perfume. He looks sour. ‘Stupid biddy sprayed this shit all over me.’
McWilliams walks into the kitchen and leans in the doorway, grinning, his arms crossed.
‘I like it,’ Lizzie says to Joe.
He scowls at her. ‘I’m not a girl.’
‘Wasn’t suggesting it.’
He stands at the sink and lathers his wrists and neck, wiping up and down all along his arms like a man ridding himself of mud. Lizzie smiles to herself and catches McWilliams’ eye. He grins back, and she looks at the slab of tongue pounded flat on the chopping board. She fumbles with the frying pan, knows he’s watching her. She makes a show of stoking up the fire and pulls a slab of butter from the icebox, slides her knife through it. Chucks it into the pan where it dissolves, bottom-first, in yellow bubbles. She throws in some onion, drawing out tears. Lets herself cry because she doesn’t know if she can stop what’s happening between them.
Joe slips his arm around her waist. ‘Smells beautiful.’
‘Just onion,’ she says, but it does, smells better than most other things she makes. She has no interest in trying to cook well for him anymore. She tucks herself into him and throws the tongue on, shivering her wooden spoon uselessly in the pan.
He lets her go and pours himself another beer. She worries about the heat of the pan searing the tongue. A few times, she’s found potatoes in the oven she forgot about, blackened and shrivelled, and boiled-down soups crusted on the bottom of the pan – she doesn’t want to get this wrong. The meat’s all cut up from her slicing it to see if it’s ready. Inside it’s still too pink, but she’s bored waiting and serves it anyway, with mash and watery peas, worried it’s taking too long. Joe and McWilliams don’t notice – is she being too fussy?
After dinner, they settle down to cards. Lizzie has too much beer and hiccups through a round. Joe and McWilliams take turns to scare her out of it, leaping from behind furniture and doorways, which just makes her hiccup louder because she opens her mouth to squeal and can’t bite down on the sound. The men roll around with laughter, while she hiccups hopelessly on.
‘Stand on your head and drink a glass of water,’ McWilliams says.
‘I’m not in the circus.’
‘I’ll help you,’ Joe says. He flings down a cushion.
She puts her head on it, tries to kick up her legs, tumbles with her skirts all askew. ‘It’s indecent,’ she says and feels herself blushing, even after everything she’s done. Hopes neither of them notice.
‘A new act for the menfolk,’ Joe says, and he grasps her ankles and lifts her legs.
Heavy-headed, Lizzie says, ‘I’m upside-down, now what?’
McWilliams rushes to fill a glass of water, while Joe tries to rearrange her skirts so they don’t cover her mouth. She finds herself both ridiculous and aroused to be wrong way round in front of these men, her stockings and shift exposed to them. McWilliams’ face comes into view. She tries to reach for the glass, almost falls over when she moves a hand, so he holds it up to her lips. She swallows a bit, chokes, hiccups, coughs, worries that she’ll drown. She kicks Joe off her, up-ends, sits with her legs out in front. ‘Went up me nose.’ She coughs, and Joe pats her on the back. She’s laughing but feels as though she’s been through the wringer. What a fool she is. She hopes McWilliams gets the message and leaves her alone. She thought she was done with being embarrassed, that the whoring had cured her of self-consciousness.
Joe puts his hand up and shushes them. ‘Are the hiccups gone?’
They sit in silence till Lizzie breaks it with a loud hiccup. They collapse, heads in hands. She appreciates Joe when he’s like this – drunk and laughing, fun. McWilliams hands her the rest of the water, and she takes it without looking at him because she’s not sure what happens to her when she does. She takes dainty sips.
Joe announces he’s off to have a piss. Lizzie finishes the glass, and McWilliams says, ‘I think they’re gone.’ Lizzie nods, not wanting to let another hiccup out. She’s supposed to be playing the unattainable whore. He puts his hand out towards her, and she longs to slide her fingers over the curve of his knuckles. Joe makes a sound at the doorway when he comes in, and they pull away from each other.
Lizzie gathers up the cards, shuffles them. Fumbles, and the cards spin out from her fingers. She laughs, gathers up the pack and hands it to Joe. When the cards get foggy in front of her eyes, she moves to an armchair. The men follow her. Joe tells her not to open another bottle, but ten minutes later he cracks a longneck. He waters hers down with lemonade. ‘Sip this and you’ll be fresh all evening,’ he says, as though passing on great wisdom.
‘Sounds horrible,’ says McWilliams.
‘Drunkard.’ Joe hands him a glass, and he takes a slug.
Joe downs his in two mouthfuls and rests his head on Lizzie’s thighs. She strokes his hair. McWilliams lies with his head against the back of the chair. She shifts Joe’s head so she can get up and go to the outhouse, the beer making its presence known, and takes a hurricane lamp with her, blinded except to the circle of light thrown at her feet. She feels McWilliams before she sees him, holds the light up so the glow touches his face. She asks him what’s wrong. ‘I can’t stand it,’ he says, ‘feeling like this and not doing anything about it.’
She looks away from his face, where his longing’s lit up for her.
After a while, he says, ‘Don’t be cold.’
She doesn’t want to hear it.
She puts the lamp on the ground and crashes her body into him in the dark outside the glow. His tongue in her mouth. She catches herself and moves away from him. ‘You’d better go,’ she says.
‘Let me see you? On your own.’
‘Not here. Not in my house with Joe.’
‘I just want to talk to you every now and then. Out the back of fifty-three.’
So he knows, and he’s alright with it. Something lifts from her. But she doesn’t say anything, can’t make herself say no. He walks off. She hears him moving past the side of the house, through the dried leaves, a lopsided footstep. She goes back upstairs and lies down next to Joe on the couch, spread-eagled in sleep, and cries. She’s shaking, drunk too much. Doesn’t know how to get out of this one, doesn’t even know which direction it came at her from.
A few days later, she and Thelma sit in the front room waiting for men to arrive. Thelma fiddles with a piece of ribbon and some glass pearls Joe found on a broken string outside the house. She says, ‘That Dolly, geez, she makes a racket. Time’s you’re not in, Betty. My god, what a performance. The men don’t want theatrics.’ This, although Thelma is the most dramatic person Lizzie knows.
‘Tell her to shut her trap.’
‘Did. Can’t help it, she says. The sound just wells up.’
Lizzie rolls her eyes. ‘She still hanging around that Colin fella?’
‘Oh yeah, he’s in here a couple days a week.’ Thelma threads the pearls onto the ribbon, wraps it around her wrist, then starts wrapping the ribbon around her foot. ‘Bea took me aside the other day,’ she says, ‘and told me to be nice to Dolly. Said that she was abandoned up here, right there at the harbour, man just up and left her. She waited for him for hours, sitting on her suitcase. He had both their wallets. She only had change from a drink she’d bought on the boat, tossed the coins in her pocket. Bea took her in.’
Lizzie softens to Dolly a bit when she hears this – never really thought about Dolly’s past. But the way Bea let Colin stay ’cause of Dolly still makes her itch. She thinks too of Dolly’s kohled eyes turned on Joe, the come-hither stare. ‘Yeah, well, that’s just because Dolly’s her niece,’ she says. ‘Something worse than that happened to you, and Bea hasn’t asked me to give you special treatment.’
‘That was a long time ago, but.’
‘Maybe.’ Lizzie decides Dolly’s not worth more talk.
Thelma unwraps the ribbon, runs it through her big toe, separates the two ends and ties it around her ankle. She holds it out to Lizzie, ‘Pretty, eh?’ She does the same for the other foot.
‘Mermaid’s shoes,’ Lizzie calls them.
‘Yeah, that’s right – completely useless.’ Thelma gives some ribbon to Lizzie, and they agree that they love the feel of it between their toes. ‘Almost as good as sex,’ Thelma says. They wave their feet in the air, pointing their toes like ballerinas.
They model for the men who arrive, wearing nothing but the ribbons. The next night, a new fella requests the ribbons, and Lizzie and Thelma feel like Coco Chanel, like they’ve made something new, even if they can’t wear it anywhere but the house. Then, out shopping a few days later, Lizzie buys a pair of silk pyjama trousers, along with a silk dressing-gown, like Bea’s, that cuts across her neck. Something to wear over the ribbons. It reminds her of the kimonos that the tattoo artist told her about, so she knows instantly that she must have it.
But Dolly starts stealing Lizzie’s ribbons. She hears this from one of the men, who tells her, probably to save his balls, that Dolly was a pale imitation. Lizzie storms into the lounge room, where Thelma drinks gin and tonic in a mug with a chip at the rim. Lizzie’s alight with anger. ‘She leaves the bed unmade too. You can see her imprint, the wet-patch stain. Puts me right off.’ She screws up her nose. ‘One man called me “Dolly”, you know? Like we all look the same to him.’
Thelma hands her the bottle of gin.
During the long afternoons, Lizzie doesn’t like to be by herself too much, so she often invites Thelma over. On a Thursday they sit in the shade of the frangipani with the breeze curling around them and brush each other’s hair, enjoying their lack of stockings, not needing to please anybody. They eat biscuits straight out of the tin and agree about the awkwardness of lipstick, that men love it but hate the way it smudges. How do the girls in the movies do it?
‘That’s probably why they leave the writing up so long,’ Thelma says. ‘Gives the girls time to fix their faces.’ She mimes madly trying to touch up her lips, pouts. ‘Get bored, when they leave that writing up there,’ she says, and Lizzie wonders if she can read, if that’s why she’s always asking what’s going on in the film.
Joe finds them relaxed on the lounge chairs, already into the beer. ‘You girls are hopeless.’ He pats Lizzie’s legs, and she tucks them up so he can sit down. ‘Don’t you have anything better to do?’
‘Isn’t it only a bit after five?’ Thelma asks. ‘Plenty of time.’
Joe frowns. ‘Don’t expect me to clean up after you when you have to go running off.’
‘You can’t even find the broom,’ says Lizzie, laughing at him.
‘It’s in the cupboard.’
‘Which one?’
Joe gestures vaguely. Thelma and Lizzie share a glance and keep laughing. He stalks off.
Later that night, he stands on the cottage verandah and talks at Lizzie through the screen. ‘Why do you always treat me bad in front of Thelma?’
‘What?’ Lizzie rolls her garters over her thighs. ‘It was a joke.’
‘Am I laughing?’
Lizzie comes out to him and puts her arms around his waist. She speaks into his shoulderblades. ‘Were you really hurt?’
He doesn’t say anything, but cups his hands over hers. ‘Just want to know you love me.’
‘’Course I do.’ She runs her hands down his back, slides her fingers along his arms. He doesn’t move. She wonders if she’s going to lose him over something so trivial and promises herself that she’ll never lust after another man, after McWilliams, again. Joe’s hers. ‘I do love you,’ she says.
He grabs her hands, turns around and kisses her, and she feels the power in the movement of his body. She’ll make sure Thelma only comes round when he’s not there. She’ll understand; she’s a good friend.
The woman who looks after Thelma’s boy gets sick, so Thelma brings him in. They take turns watching him between men, make up a bed for him in the kitchen at the back of the cottage and lock him in when they’re both busy. He sleeps fitfully, spasming in his dreams, fists pumping. Lizzie thought only dogs did that, and Thelma says he does it all the time. Lizzie would like to feel something for this child, but she’s too frightened.
He wakes up to tell her his dream of a blue starfish that sucked on his earlobe until his ear fell off, and she doesn’t know how to react. He asks her to lie next to him, so she stretches out stiffly on the sheets, the lino pressed against her back. He kicks her thigh in his sleep – ‘He does that all the time too,’ Thelma says. He seems fascinated by the workings of his own body. He likes to inspect his snot. He draws a picture and gives it to his mum, and she fastens it to her door with string on a hook, showing him as she does it. He jumps up and down, flapping his hands in excitement.
A black man who visits Thelma that night says her son’s skilled, he’d like to show him how to paint someday. Thelma touches her son’s sleeping head. When another man comes in, Lizzie hears Thelma pointing the picture out to him. A moment of silence between the two of them as they look.
Lying on the thin mattress in the kitchen, Lizzie hears a woman’s voice on the verandah. She goes out to see who it is; this time of night, it’s mostly just men. In the doorway she halts. Dolly. Joe’s standing close, his head tilted down to her. Lizzie opens her mouth to demand what Dolly’s doing here, but then Joe laughs. Lizzie stops. Hovers in the darkness, wondering if she’s been missing something. She’s spent so much energy hiding her feelings for other men, it hasn’t occurred to her seri
ously that Joe’s been looking at someone else too. And now here this bitch is in her black dress with lace at the sleeves and hem, and her obsidian beads plunging down her neckline, flirting with him. Her hands are on her hips, and she rocks back on one leg, pressing against the heel of her shoe so her toe points up and towards Joe.
Lizzie can’t take it. ‘What’re you doing here?’
Joe and Dolly turn to her, Dolly’s blonde bob swishing around her ears.
‘She’s just been playing fan-tan,’ Joe says.
Lizzie stands next to him, their arms touching. The gas lamp reflects off a jet brooch on Dolly’s shoulder, sends two starbursts of light right at Lizzie.
‘Yeah, sorry,’ Dolly says. She glances back up the street, towards Bea and the fan-tan parlour. ‘It’s just, I told Colin I’d be here. Thought we could use the bedroom for a while.’
‘Well, you can bloody well tell him that you can’t.’
Dolly slides her eyes back to Lizzie and then up to Joe. ‘Your hubby said you weren’t that busy, thought I might –’
‘No.’ How could Joe just let Dolly walk in here and then offer her Lizzie’s bedroom? Have that man over while she’s still in the house?
‘Come on, peach,’ he says. ‘Dolly says it’ll only be for an hour or so.’
‘No bloody way.’ She’s on the edge of something. She’d like to clout Dolly right across her overdone face.
‘Betty –’ Dolly gazes at her with her chin lowered and her eyes wide, as though Lizzie’s some bloke going to fall for that trick. She can’t handle the way Dolly uses her name.
‘Joe, tell her she can’t stay.’
‘I can’t see why –’
‘What flamin’ use are you? Tell her to wait her turn.’ Glaring up at his puzzled face, she’d like to clout him too.
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