Joe comes upstairs and shoves by her in the hallway. ‘You really are inked, aren’t you?’ he says. He pulls the window shut.
McWilliams keeps his distance on the shuttered verandah. He might have an erection, poor bugger. She can hide her arousal from Joe too easily.
‘I won’t stay,’ McWilliams calls, and Joe raises his hand in a wave without turning around. Lizzie catches a glimpse of McWilliams’ face, cut up by the shutters, the light from the dawn. She tells herself she won’t let it happen again, that Joe’s a mortar right now, waiting to explode. The thought makes her leaden and closed off; she needs to find something to distract herself.
She arrives at fifty-three to find Thelma loading her shifts into a carpetbag. ‘What’s going on?’ Lizzie asks, scared that she’s leaving.
‘Dolly took me perfume,’ Thelma says, shoving her dildo in, finding it doesn’t fit longways, having to stand it up where its carved head emerges from the lip of the bag. ‘Can’t leave anything in my room.’
Lizzie’s relieved. ‘How’re you going to fit it all in one bag?’
Thelma scrunches her nose and top lip. ‘I’m telling Bea,’ she says.
Calmer now, Lizzie can give Thelma what she’s looking for. ‘That Dolly. What a bloody cheek.’
‘I’m not having her take every one of my things.’
Lizzie nods, though she isn’t sure Dolly would want the bottle opener in the shape of a cock. Lizzie’s seen Thelma with it before, doing tricks, stroking it, swallowing it, but she can’t get over the way it’s painted, with folk art flowers from somewhere in Europe, the way a cuckoo clock might be.
Thelma drops the carpetbag at Lizzie’s feet. ‘Watch it for me?’
Lizzie eyes off the bag, too full to close, the wooden dildo staring, unblinking, up at her, and she nods. ‘But I’ll have to leave it if a man comes.’
‘Won’t be long.’
‘Don’t reckon you’ll have much luck. Bea won’t hear a word against her.’
‘Don’t bloody care if Dolly’s her niece. She can’t pinch my gear.’ Thelma cuts an exit. She can do a lovely flounce when she wants to. Lizzie suppresses the desire to riffle through the bag herself, put off by the possibility of more folk art cocks – not that cocks usually put her off.
Thelma announces her return by slamming the door and wailing about how unfair Bea is.
‘Blood’s thicker than water,’ Lizzie says. ‘We can’t compete with that.’ But though she already knows this, her anger still rises.
‘Best perfume I ever owned. The men loved it. Now they’ll be complimenting Dolly about it. As if they didn’t have enough trouble telling us apart in the dark.’
‘But does she have your thighs? Your backside? Surely they can’t mistake that.’
‘Not bloody helping, Betty. Bea says I’ve no proof it’s Dolly. Could be anyone. One of the men.’ Thelma flings herself onto the couch.
Lizzie gets up from the lounge chair where she was snoozing, pours Thelma and herself a drink, and gives it to Thelma, the other hand on her shoulder.
‘But she did give me a little thing,’ says Thelma, ‘protect myself with, now Joe’s off and we’ve only got bloody Murray.’ She pulls a revolver from her pocket and holds it out to Lizzie in her palm. The barrel seems long, extending out past her fingers. She presses it to Lizzie’s chest, looking powerful, in control. Lizzie’s never seen a woman with a gun before. ‘I should have a picture taken of me like this,’ says Thelma, because there’s a man comes round, takes pictures of the girls. He gets his daughter to colour them and sells them to the sailors as postcards.
‘Let me hold it,’ Lizzie says, and Thelma hands the gun over. Lizzie runs her fingers across the lettering along the barrel: Young America. Seven bullets in the chamber. She likes the feel of it, thinks of all the times that would have been different if she’d had it: the morning her father saw her body illuminated in the pre-dawn sun and called her a fat pig; the time the neighbour’s son pierced her wrist with a cigarette butt; that teacher who broke her pens and touched her legs.
‘You know how to use it?’ Lizzie asks Thelma. She poses with it like she’s seen at the pictures, her hands around the barrel, arms straight in front.
‘Cripes no,’ Thelma says. ‘Bea said to leave it in the dresser or under me pillow, bring it out and wave it round if I need to give a man a bit of a fright.’ She takes the gun off Lizzie and holds it in one hand, the other on her hip. ‘What d’you reckon?’
‘Terrifying. Just bloody well make sure you wave that thing in Dolly’s face too. Don’t let on you have no idea how to use it. Give her a fright.’
The next week, when Lizzie comes in from two days off, there are burrs running through her favourite chemise. Another night, a frog bobs to the surface of the kettle, its eyes silvered. Her mosquito net is torn. She and Thelma work themselves up in their lounge room, talking loudly through the drink. Sure now it’s Dolly.
‘In the old days, she’d be burned as a witch,’ Lizzie says. They’re both ready for this, for hunting her down. They build up the pyre, fuel it with their accusations, light it with their tongues, lick Dolly’s body with burning words.
Joe walks in on them one night and is suitably outraged on their behalf. ‘I’ll sort her out for you,’ he says, and Lizzie, sitting on the back of a lounge chair, feels ripe with the power of her husband, what he could do to the woman, his fist against her body. ‘Nothing serious,’ he says. ‘Threaten to break her pet doggy’s legs.’
‘She doesn’t have a dog,’ Thelma puts in.
‘I’d find something.’
‘Reckon she’d enjoy it too much,’ Thelma says to him, ‘way she flirts with you.’
Lizzie lets that simmer inside her – it hurts Thelma has noticed – and finds herself getting stonkered before work. Makes her clumsy. She has a man flat out, brings her leg over him, but puts her knee down too close, pinches the flesh of his thigh. The bones of their knees mash together, so hard he loses his erection. She gives him half-price as a way of apologising, she feels that bad.
Thelma finds her dozing against the railings and says maybe she should go home. Lizzie, suddenly sober, bursts into tears and insists she’s fine, capable. ‘Maybe I should send someone to get Joe,’ Thelma says. Lizzie gets up and leaves. Thelma calls to her once and then lets her go.
When McWilliams comes to see Lizzie again, she lets him in, her resolve worn down by time apart. He brings her liquorice allsorts as though she’s his school sweetheart. He offers them to her in a white paper bag, the top crumpled and damp where he held it in his hand for too long, waiting for her to finish with a man. They eat them on the back steps and blacken their fingers. Lizzie likes the yellow ones best, so McWilliams saves them for her. He sits one step below her and rests his head on her calf. She feels exposed, the pub at their backs, Thelma still in her room with a man.
‘Where’s Joe?’ Lizzie asks.
‘Does it matter?’
She wonders why McWilliams has to spoil everything, why he can’t just accept the reality of Joe. An immoveable man. Joe would get her, get them both if he knew. Of course it fucking matters.
A clatter inside, behind them. Lizzie turns to glimpse Dolly in red shoes and a white shift, come to take over from Thelma. ‘Get away,’ Lizzie hisses to McWilliams. ‘Don’t want her to see you.’ He shuffles off towards the mangroves with that stiff-legged walk of his.
Dolly bails Lizzie up in the hallway. ‘Who was that?’
Lizzie still has the paper bag in her hand. ‘No one.’
‘Giving you sweets, is he? Why doesn’t he come round the front?’
‘Ah, bugger off.’ Lizzie’s a small girl; she has to stand on her toes to look Dolly in the eye. She lets herself tip forward, pinning the woman to the wall. Dolly gives her a sharp push, and Lizzie steps away, pulls herself up again. Dolly turns aside, moves to go into Thelma’s room. ‘She isn’t done yet,’ Lizzie says. ‘You can’t use it, nick her things while you’re at it.’
‘What?’ Dolly’s startled, takes a step back, a little skip forward.
‘You heard me.’
Dolly clips up towards the lounge room, her ankles bending oddly in their high heels, never quite upright. Lizzie delivers a sharp kick to her shin, pulls her leg back quickly to get out of the way of Dolly’s body sliding on the floorboards. Dolly scuttles her hand out, grabs Lizzie’s ankle and tugs. Lizzie plants her bare feet. One foot slides out from under her. She puts her hand on the wall to stop herself from falling, swings the bag of liquorice allsorts down on Dolly’s head. It splits open, lollies bouncing off Dolly, scattering on the ground. Lizzie brings her toes up to Dolly’s face, tries to get them into the eye sockets, but Dolly’s still clutching her ankle and holds her away. Lizzie gets out of her grip and skips off to the back door, to her bedroom, where she locks herself in, panting.
When she comes back out, Dolly’s in the room with a man. The allsorts are still scattered in the hallway, squashed into the floorboards, flattened and smudged black. Lizzie scrapes them up with her fingernail, wondering exactly what Dolly saw and whether she’ll tell Joe.
Brisbane, 1945
Lizzie’s heart is beating so hard it rocks the bedframe. She listens for Dolly’s sharp exhalations. Nurse Roberts’ light shines like a beacon across the ward, throwing the women’s shadows, elongating the bars of their bedheads. Lizzie wishes that the nurse would fix on something, pin it down and trace the edges, so Lizzie could get a shape of what’s around her. Instead the lighthouse flash of the torch; Dolly a sea-sharpened rock, ready to sink her. She hears the movement of sheets, sees Dolly’s silhouette rising. Lizzie rips out the tucked sheet on the other side of her, has one foot off the bed when Dolly swings her head wildly like a drunkard. She whispers, ‘Should’ve killed me properly. Stop me from being in this fucking place.’
She collapses back onto her bed, and Lizzie stays with a foot on the floor and the other tangled in the sheets, listening to her own breath catch in her chest. ‘Maybe I should’ve.’ She’s thought this so many times, she doesn’t know how to take the fact Dolly agrees with her. It makes the possibility of her death more solid, a settling in Lizzie’s chest, a clenching of the shoulderblades.
The torch beam hits Lizzie’s face again, reddens her vision. Nurse Roberts doesn’t speak but slides the light down Lizzie’s uncovered leg and back into her face. Lizzie gets the point, slips her leg under again. She’s known the nurse to call a wardsman for a girl sleepwalking, handcuffed her to the bed. Real kindly, this one. And Dolly’s going nowhere. Lizzie is safer with both hands free. She looks to the ceiling, the crack running through the plaster right to the electric light in the middle of the room, elaborate stucco fanning from the centre. The past weighs down the ceiling. She wanted to be free of this so she could try again with Joe, not have this woman between them again. But does Dolly even have the strength to stand?
When Roberts ducks out to the loo, Lizzie makes her way over. Close up, she hears the bubbles of pain in Dolly’s breath, the inhalation sticking at the throat. Lizzie tucks herself against the wall in case the nurse comes back in suddenly. She’s heard the breathing of someone dying before. She shuts her eyes and tries to push the sound away. She’d like to throw a plate against the wall like she once did at a restaurant when she couldn’t pay. That same helplessness. She imagines touching Dolly, maybe to speed up what’s happening, but she can’t bear the idea of putting her hands on the skin of that woman. She lets time run out from her, pictures Nurse Roberts squatting on the toilet, towelling off the last drips.
Dolly’s voice in the dark: ‘Joe alive?’
Lizzie takes a moment with that one. ‘In gaol still,’ she says, warily. The old jealousy hovers around her ribcage, a sense that in some way she’s already been beaten.
‘Jesus, been more than fifteen years.’
Lizzie’s laugh is cold. ‘Twenty.’
‘Shit. Oh, shit.’ Dolly whistles softly between her teeth. Her breath fills the space between her and Lizzie; the sound expresses the long years rolling out, Lizzie’s own astonishment at being here at all, in this hospital with fallen women who over the years have scratched the plaster off the walls, and where their bodies in the beds have hollowed out grooves in the floor.
Nurse Roberts comes back in with her torch flashing over the ward. Lizzie holds on to Dolly’s bed end, pushes herself off. Lies in her own bed, and the springs dig into her aching back and hold her, the only thing stopping her sinking through the floor. Straight down to hell, she thinks, that’s where we’re going, Dolly and me. But the thought is someone else’s. She doesn’t believe it.
Townsville, 1923
Thelma’s had a bad time of it lately. She comes to Lizzie’s house in the afternoon, just as Lizzie climbs out of bed. She’s red-faced, really in a state. Lizzie recognises the emotion straight away, she’s been carrying it around that long – everything comes at you through a haze that clouds your mind; things seem at once distant and deeply offensive.
‘Me money’s gone,’ Thelma tells her.
‘What?’ She didn’t know Thelma had any. She thinks of her own tin, still only half-full. Useless coins, mostly.
‘What’s the point of putting up with everything if I don’t have the money no more?’ Thelma works herself up, making a lot of noise, her voice broken. The words are just to make herself feel better. Lizzie stops listening and watches Thelma’s mouth move as she speaks, her tongue coming out, her teeth forward, the curl of her lips pulled down. Lately there have been more nights when Thelma’s withdrawn, refused to see anyone but Old Bill. Lizzie has rescued her more than once the past couple of months. One time, Bea came and found Lizzie waiting for business, and told her to get Thelma out of the bedroom. Thelma was drunk, taking up space, Bea said. Lizzie knew Bea would call Dolly in to replace her. Lizzie could barely look at Bea.
Since the business in Ingham – the expansion, Bea calls it – she’s been coming down harder on the girls, getting them to drum up business at the Causeway, stand out in the streets. The Black Hand doesn’t take kindly to debts unpaid. This makes Thelma worse, Lizzie too. They feel as though they’re in a factory line; the fun gone out of it, the sense of men coming to them.
The night that Dolly was called in, Lizzie rolled Thelma off the bed, ended up going down on her knees to try and get her on her back so she could move her, all the time muttering under her breath, ‘Fuck you, fuck you,’ and Thelma not even stirring. There was a screen in Thelma’s room, and Lizzie knew she wouldn’t get her any further, that Bea would have expected them to be gone by then. Lizzie half-rolled, half-dragged Thelma behind the screen. Voices in the corridor, footsteps into the room, a man and Dolly. Lizzie sat with her back to the wall and her legs out, Thelma sprawled on top of her, listening to the man grunting away with Dolly. Lizzie felt sick. The bristling legs of some insect brushed across her skin. Finally, Thelma came round. They snuck out between fucks, Dolly lying on the bed, her eyes shut, not moving.
Lizzie feels the loss of Thelma’s money personally; she hefted the flesh that was exchanged for it. ‘How much?’ she asks Thelma.
‘Nineteen pounds.’
‘Hell you doing with that much?’ The jealousy snaps at Lizzie. She should have more than that by now, with both her and Joe working. She’s been distracted, caught up in the pleasure of owning beautiful things, rewards she gives herself.
Thelma puts her face in her hands. ‘I had this idea –’ She flaps her palms across her cheeks. ‘Useless now. Bloody hell.’ She kneads her eyes.
Something dawns on Lizzie. ‘Dolly took it?’
‘Reckon. That new girl Bea put on came to my place last night, all kind. I was bored just talking to my boy – only so much you can say to a little kid, isn’t there? So I had a drink or two with her. Then I saw her and Dolly talking out back, and I got this feeling in me gut. Went and checked the stash. Gone.’
‘How d’you know they had something to do with it?’
&nb
sp; ‘I told that girl about it, didn’t I? She told Dolly.’ Thelma sighs. ‘I might’ve had more than a couple of drinks. It’s years’ worth, Betty. Years and years.’ She slams the kitchen door with the flat of her palm, so hard it shivers in its hinges.
‘Here!’ yells Lizzie, in her dad’s voice, meant for the horses.
Thelma turns in on herself.
‘Here,’ says Lizzie again, softer. She’s never seen Thelma this rough. She puts her arm around her, then pours her a drink. ‘Here.’
Thelma gulps it down standing with her hand on her hip, staring out into the street. Lizzie’s restless, her legs trembling. She feels the heat from Thelma, coming off her in waves. She asks Thelma where her boy is. He’s with the neighbour, who’s not expecting Thelma for a while. Lizzie fills up her glass again, pours herself one too.
It’s Thelma who brings out the gun, but Lizzie takes it off her in the end; she’s in no state to handle it. Lizzie waves the gun around, limp-wristed. Somehow it lightens the weight that’s been pressing on her since Dolly saw her and the shadow of McWilliams. Her mind, flurried with booze, plays out Dolly telling Joe about her sweetheart. She curls her fingers around the gun.
Lizzie and Thelma walk in silence, the gravelled road rolling under their feet, their steps ringing out around the neighbourhood, over the rooves of houses each with a warm huddle of bodies inside.
Dolly is in number fifty-three. Lizzie walks right up the back stairs and bangs on the door, the sound echoing through the house. She yells out to make the bitch take notice. Thelma has a rock in her hand and lobs it at the window. It hits the glass strangely, lacking force. Bounces off the pane and lands at their feet.
‘Jesus,’ says Lizzie.
‘See if you can do a better job.’
Treading Air Page 19