Treading Air

by Ariella Van Luyn

  The banker taps the rod against the table again, at the pile that’s left. It’s a kick in her chest. Two. Fucking hell. Two. She pushes her hand against the table, harder than she meant. It tips sideways. Seems as though it’ll go over, but it teeters, shifts backwards, settles. Dolly hisses between her teeth and the cigarette, grins. Lizzie can’t stand her look. She shouldn’t take things so seriously, she only lost a couple of beans, but she hates that Dolly has the rooms now, something so solid as a piece of property.

  Lee has his head in his hands, fingers furrowing his hair, and Lizzie wants to scratch him. What a stupid coot to gamble something like that, to give Dolly so much power over her. Dolly will use it against her.

  Lizzie gets up, shaking, anger clouding her passage down the hallway. On the verandah she hits her head against a hurricane lamp hanging too low from the beam over the doorway. She swears and picks it up in both hands. Brings it down onto the wooden boards. It smashes, and the light dies. She stands with glass around her and tries to calm her rough breathing. She’ll have to pay for it.

  She hears a sound, turns to see Lee looking at the smashed-up lamp. He tells her, ‘You have no bloody idea.’ His voice cracks. ‘My sister, what’s she going to do? What if the bitch throws her out?’

  Lizzie’s anger drains away. Her own place, her business in Brisbane, was all a fantasy. She hasn’t lost anything. Not like this bloke. And it was the banker’s fault that Dolly joined their game, not Lee’s.

  ‘Dunno, mate,’ Lizzie says to him. ‘Dolly’s a bitch, that’s true enough.’

  They stare at the shards at their feet. Lizzie wonders how she’ll move past without getting hurt, but Lee just walks across, not looking. She can see he doesn’t care; it crunches beneath his heels. He heads out to Charters Towers Road, back to his shop. His body has the look of a man crushed.

  Brisbane, 1945

  The coathanger woman sits up and retches red spit. Lizzie, groggy with lack of sleep, takes her hacking personally, as if she’s just come into Lizzie’s house and spat on the floor. Lizzie wants to be rid of her. And she wants to know who the hell she is.

  A nurse comes over and shines a torch in the woman’s face. She’s thrashing around, crying and holding her hands over her mouth, catching the spit that bubbles up. The nurse, a young thing with knobbed wrists and dark hair on her arms, is new and still conscientious. ‘I can’t give you anything more yet,’ she says, calm and low, probably trying not to wake the other women. ‘It’s only been an hour since your last.’

  Most of the other nurses would give this woman a dose soon as she made a peep. The woman knows it too; she’s struggling and whining. ‘I hurt,’ she cries.

  Lizzie reckons she’s bunging it on a bit too much, but the thin nurse gives in and loads up the morphine. The coathanger woman’s in a state by this time, not paying attention to what’s going on. Stupid, can’t wind herself down again. The nurse struggles to hold her, flashes her face desperately around the ward, searching for help. Lizzie groans to herself when the nurse spots her and calls her over. Wrong woman, she thinks. No sympathy left. But the nurse is desperate, and Marge is swearing under her breath, so Lizzie gets up and takes hold of the woman.

  Up close, her face settles into something readable. That sense of recognition’s there again. Like Lizzie, the woman’s had a hard life: her face is fallen in, scored with wrinkles. The nurse moves the torch beam to her face, checking that the woman’s still with them before she puts the needle in.

  Lizzie has it then. She was thrown by the city they’re in now, because it wasn’t Brisbane where she knew the woman, but Townsville. Dolly. This is Dolly. Lizzie lets go of her shoulders and pulls back. Dolly throws her arms out, and the thin nurse jerks the needle away. ‘Hold her, why don’t you?’ she hisses.

  Lizzie presses herself against the wall, her palms flat beside her. Her head reels as though she’s been delivered a blow.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ The nurse looks like she wants to bolt.

  Lizzie places her hands on Dolly’s shoulders mechanically, watches the nurse bury the point of the needle in her arm. Blood wells around the steel shaft, which flashes a bright kernel of light. Dolly shudders and lies still, and Lizzie lets go of her shoulders. Her hands burn where she touched Dolly; she nurses them at her chest. Her instinct is to cover up, disguise her face and body – time’s helped with that too. She scuttles back to her bed, pulls the sheet around her. She lifts the edge of the blanket, gazes out at the ward, one eye still covered. Keeps the other eye open to the dark shapes of the women in their beds, edges lost again.

  Dolly appears to her as a black lump, filmy at the sides. The morphine will have kicked in. Lizzie’s safe to uncover herself.

  She feels as though she’s seeing a ghost, one carrying half her past in its wake, offering it up to her like the severed head that such creatures drag with them, the jaw slack and eyeballs rolling. Her skin crawls.

  Nurse Roberts walks past, shining her torch in their faces. Lizzie hates her. Nurse Roberts obsessively checks whether the women are asleep, uses the torch to make sure. Once, just as they were all falling asleep, she stood at the end of the ward and delivered this gem: ‘Girls, if you are in the habit of thinking before you go to sleep, you should stop it.’ The effect of which was to wake them and start them thinking.

  Now the torch beam’s on Lizzie, a red glow in the back of her eye socket.

  And then a voice: ‘I know you.’ Lizzie isn’t sure she’s heard right. Then her old name comes at her while she’s blinded by the light: ‘Betty Knight. Bet you’re real glad to see me suffer.’

  Lizzie looks away from the light. It’s true.

  Darkness, then the torch beam’s on them again. Dolly’s wrinkled face lit up, her mouth open, hands lifted over her eyes. Nurse Roberts shushes them, a hiss coming out from between the beds. For a moment, this ghost in the ward is silent.

  Townsville, 1923

  When Lizzie gets home in the morning, in the cool just before the sun has risen and the bats are outlined in the grey sky, she sees movement under the house between the palings. She stops in the gate. Joe’s voice comes to her. Her heart flickers. Someone answers. She recognises McWilliams’ voice and is galvanised, wide awake. But she stays at the gate, unsure of what to do.

  Joe is nailing boards across the beams. He looks up and sees her. He drops the boards, staring out from between the struts. She thinks of those horses in the stalls at the races, with only their top halves visible. When she was a little girl with her dad, she would make herself laugh by imagining what might be hidden by that small door aside from horse legs: octopus tentacles, spider legs, men’s hairy knees.

  Joe strides into the yard and grabs her into a hug. Her body vibrates where it touches his. Over his shoulder, she spots McWilliams before she looks away, anywhere but at him, and glimpses sheer sky and burnt-up ground. His presence presses in on her. She hears herself answer Joe’s welcome, and he lets her go. ‘What’s going on?’ she asks him, gesturing beneath the house.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘Just sick of bloody sticky beaks.’

  ‘It’ll get stinking hot under there.’

  He shrugs. ‘You alright, peach?’

  ‘I’m tired.’ She notices again his height, the way she has to gaze up into his face.

  ‘Go to sleep. I’ll be up later.’

  ‘It went well in Ingham?’

  He stares at his shoes. His face too still, like he’s shutting something off.

  ‘What?’ she asks.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ His hand on her arm, his fingers curled around her elbow.

  ‘Something’s wrong, I can tell from your face.’

  ‘Stop making things up.’

  Lizzie walks to the stairs. ‘I’m too tired to get it out of you now.’ She’s distanced from him and she’s not been home two minutes. She doesn’t have the energy to try breaking him open. Still can’t look McWilliams in the face. She pulls her body up the steps, s
ucking in her belly to appear thinner, knowing she’s watched by both men. At the top of the stairs, away from their overwhelming presences, she’s able to glance around.

  Later she’ll carry this image with her: the two of them beneath her, smudged in the early morning light, Joe at the bottom of the stairs with his hand on the rail, and McWilliams behind him, fingering his coat cuff.

  The sun rises and slips into her eyes. She moves inside the house, then the stuffy bedroom. Lying on the bed, she notices her aching cunt. She fears, just before she goes to sleep, that her work will loosen it too much and she won’t be tight enough. Already she can’t feel Joe at the sides.

  She wakes again in the heat and lies in bed thinking about opening a window. She listens for the men’s voices but can’t hear them. A fruit pigeon whoops from the frangipani tree. She wishes she’d said something to McWilliams, was able to touch him.

  She drifts again, waking properly a bit before lunch. The floorboards sigh beneath her bare feet. She calls to Joe, but he doesn’t answer. She makes herself a pot of tea and, while the leaves brew, she looks for Joe under the house. He’s finished boarding up. A pillar of light escapes through a gap between the planks. He’s set up a table in the middle, laid it out with garden tools – a spade, a pair of shears – and a couple of calico bags.

  At the end of the table is a steel jimmy she’s never seen before. Lifting it to the light, she finds it’s wrapped in leather. She flings it back on the table, thinking it isn’t a thing that Joe will be using in the garden. No use for it there. The weight of it stays in her palm.

  At the cottage on Heurand Street, Joe’s cigarette glows in the darkness, dies as he turns away from her, back to the hotel. He’s just told her that this is his third-last night on watch duty; Bea’s moving him up to other jobs. ‘She wants me chasing debts, starting next week. Taking McWilliams with me.’

  ‘You did that well in Ingham?’

  Joe shrugs. ‘Guess so.’ She can’t get him to open up on the subject, even after a couple of longnecks. All he says is he’s bored, standing there and listening to her fuck other men. ‘But you make different sounds with me,’ he says, and she says, ‘’Cause I love you.’ He smiles to himself, his chin down on his chest. She knows he comforts himself thinking this way, that he’s different from the others, that she and he are special. Once she slipped up, faked it with Joe and let out noises the same pitch as she did with the men. He said, ‘Don’t ever play that game with me. I’m disappointed.’ She was self-conscious with him for a while after.

  She’s not sure how she’ll feel without him on the door. Bea’s putting Murray back on for now.

  Lizzie and Thelma sit in the front room and slurp their longnecks in silence. Lizzie knows she shouldn’t be, but she’s annoyed with Joe for leaving her here, exposed to the likes of Murray and Colin. Annoyed at Bea for ordering him about, when it was Lizzie who brought him here. She’s used to thinking of him as her guard.

  In the silence between her and Thelma, Lizzie hears a voice. She peers through the doorway. Lee’s standing at the bottom step, talking to Joe. He looks bad in the light that shines down on his face, his hair mussed, eyes heavy. He sways. He must be well and truly inked. He says, ‘Miss Betty, please,’ and her cheeks and chest get hot, she’s so embarrassed by the way he says her name, the sad ‘miss’. He doesn’t know her last name. The thought of him with her – she thinks of the old tattoo artist, the first man’s hands on her adult body. Something in her longs to be touched by Lee. Another part is revolted.

  ‘She’s full,’ Joe says harshly. His voice is cold. She’s relieved he’s made a choice for her.

  She expects Lee to go away, but he doesn’t, his hand on the railing to stop himself swaying. ‘It’s quiet tonight,’ he says.

  ‘Look, mate, I said no and I mean it.’ Lizzie doesn’t like Joe’s tone.

  ‘Tomorrow, then? I’ve got the sugar.’ Lee fumbles in his pocket, takes out a handful of coins.

  ‘Bugger off.’ Joe brings the flat of his palm underneath Lee’s hand and smacks it hard. The coins fly up and out. Lee looks so confused, Lizzie has to laugh. Joe and Lee stare at her, and Joe laughs too. Lee gazes at her so seriously that she stops and steps back from the door. Then he glances slowly around to where the coins are scattered in the dirt, and kneels to pick them up.

  ‘Find someone else, mate,’ Joe says. Later, when Lee’s gone, he tells her, ‘Can you believe the hide of that little chow? What made him think he could have you?’

  Lizzie remembers the night of their fan-tan game, the way that she and Lee spoke to each other. She shrugs, and Joe gives her a look she can’t make out.

  McWilliams visits Lizzie the morning of Joe’s second-last shift, when she’s at Heurand Street. He avoids Joe out the front, knocks at the back door. She opens it, heavy with post-sex sleepiness, and he asks to come in. They sit on wooden chairs in the kitchen, as far from Joe as possible without being out where he might come for a smoke. And she always feels safer when she’s not in the bedroom.

  McWilliams says, ‘I missed you.’

  ‘Me too.’ She can’t help herself. A look passes between them. She turns to the glasses and the half-drunk longneck on the bench. Pours them each a drink, her back to him. ‘How was Ingham? Joe won’t say anything.’

  McWilliams takes the drink and says, ‘We did a deal with a couple of dagos. Bea’s going to buy a place off ’em and set up a knocking shop. They want a cut, in exchange for letting her set up there. These blokes don’t mess around. Call themselves the Black Hand.’

  ‘Crikey.’

  ‘Bea knows what she’s doing, I reckon. If she pays ’em what she owes, they’ll look after her. There’s money to be made out there in the cane fields.’

  Lizzie thinks of Lee’s key and the rooms at the back of the florist shop. Her fantasy business. Maybe she doesn’t need to do it all on her own – this is a way for Joe to help her, get some experience in this kind of thing.

  McWilliams says, ‘You look in your element in this house, with your shoes off and your hair all over the place.’

  She believes him, that she’s somehow right here. With him. It makes it easier to forget the other things: a man’s fist once, right across the cheekbone, and the conversations between the men at the grog shop about the girls. McWilliams makes her into something else, a vision. He says he’d like to paint her as a mermaid, but the closest body of water is the swamp. She imagines herself emerging from it, all muddied. ‘I didn’t know you painted,’ she says. She’s never met an artist before, only a man who did the signs above the shopfronts.

  ‘I’ll show you my work sometime.’

  She’s seen two mermaids in her life. One was at the sideshow. A woman wore a sequined tail, pearls draped around her neckline, her hair dotted with shells. But Lizzie saw the thread that held the sequins together. In her glass tank, the woman put her fingers up against the edge and the tips were wrinkled. The other time Lizzie saw a mermaid was in the back of a trailer belonging to a travelling Afghan. She and Grace paid two weeks’ savings to see it. He lifted a canvas flap, showed them a glass case. Inside was a brown creature, dried up and leathery, much smaller than a real woman, with a fish’s tail. The skin of its face was shrunken, the fat gone, leaving the outline of its skull, protruding teeth. Empty eye sockets and a fuzz of grey hair. The hands it reached into the air were webbed. Its skin sweated in the display case. Lizzie knew it was the real thing.

  Still, she wants to be that first mermaid so desperately, she lets McWilliams talk her into seeing the pearls, the shells.

  ‘Did something happen in Ingham?’ she asks him. She thought she wouldn’t ask, she’d let Joe have his secrets, but she’s three beers in and can’t stand it anymore.

  ‘The dagos asked Bea if they could test me and Joe. They hadn’t done the deal yet, so Bea let ’em. Promised us a cut. They sent us out woop woop to find a man camping on a beach who owed them money.’

  McWilliams tells her how they didn�
��t make a secret of their entrance, then heard the bloke crashing off into the bush. They decided to settle in, wait for him to come back. Joe helped himself to home brew and stale bread. McWilliams positioned himself in a canvas chair like the ones film directors use; he mimed the clapboard, but Joe looked at him blankly. ‘Not much of a one for movies, old Joe,’ Lizzie explains.

  Then, says McWilliams, they saw the bloke’s trousers strung on a line near the fire, still damp and stiff with a sea-water wash, and they realised they were after a bare-arsed bloke hiding in the bush. ‘He’ll be getting all scratched up,’ Joe said, through a mouthful of bread. McWilliams agreed. The sun rose, and the tent gave off the smell of mould. McWilliams moved his chair into the shade.

  An hour later, they caught a glimpse of white arse flashing through the bushes and ran after him. Joe tackled him, got him face-first into the mangroves. While Joe sat on top, the bloke complained he had a spike digging into him. Must have had more than that, nuts first into the little mangrove roots. Joe said, ‘You owe the Black Hand.’ Just like that. As though he was part of the gang. Joe held the bloke while he directed McWilliams to a jar buried in the sand near the third tent pole, filled with coinage.

  Then Joe let him up, and the man grabbed his own cock, inspecting it for damage. ‘I’m scratched,’ he said, genuinely distressed.

  Joe stashed the jar under his arm. When they were heading off, he stood on a pile of shit – the man was obviously too lazy to go far into the bush.

  Lizzie wonders why McWilliams told her that part about Joe. Doesn’t make him look so tough.