A door shuts. Footsteps, round the front of the house.
‘Shit,’ says Lizzie, and they’re after Dolly, chasing her down the road. She’s on Heurand Street, illuminated by a square of light from the window before she slips back into shadow. Heading towards the shelter of the Causeway.
‘I see you,’ says Thelma.
Lizzie, still running, holds up the gun and lets it off without knowing what she’s doing. Dolly’s feet still. The shot was wild. Thelma’s breath goes ragged. She folds over herself, her head facing the ground. Lizzie knows it’s up to her, that Thelma won’t make it any further. The street stretches out on either side of them, the road dipping back into the creek. Lizzie keeps running. Behind her, Thelma falls and calls out, ‘Get her, Betty!’
The air around Lizzie is heavy with water. She ploughs through it. Imagines herself in the river mud, dragged down. She slows her breathing, paces herself. Hears the pub, men’s voices raised. Two kids stare out at her from the back. ‘Got any food, Missus?’ the boy asks.
Lizzie shakes her head and strides on. Their dad will be somewhere.
The dirt is cakey from the rains, a layer of mud and dry underneath, churned up by the men who stand outside, holding pints and deciding whether they can afford to fuck a girl that night. Their voices bounce off the creek and back to Lizzie, distorted. Her legs are shaking. Dolly is silhouetted in the light from the hotel. Lizzie aims, lets the gun off, hears Dolly’s voice call out. She thinks: no one will steal from Thelma or me again.
A copper’s in front of her. No mistaking his black uniform, the flat cap. She doesn’t know how he got there so fast. All she can think to do is to slide the gun into her pocket and keep her hands behind her back. Dolly’s saying, ‘Take her, she’s shot me.’ She feels sick that Dolly’s still speaking; she’d like to shoot her tongue off. But the copper’s standing in front of her now, his hands spread out.
Dolly calls, ‘Watch her, she’s got the revolver!’
Lizzie yells at her to shut the fuck up. She puts her hand to the gun in her pocket – she’s about to be taken in, may as well finish the job. The copper lunges at her, wrapping his arms around her. The breath’s knocked out of her. She struggles against him, and he wrenches her arm up behind her back. She cries out. The metal from the handcuffs is warm where they’ve been pressed against his body. It feels too intimate, as though he’s one of her men, his body heat on her.
Another copper appears. She recognises O’Sullivan, who talked to Joe after the meatworks accident. He says, ‘I’ll take her.’ Puts his hand on her elbow as if he owns her. She tries to shrug out of it. He tightens his grip. ‘Check her,’ he says. The other shoves his hand, square and hard as a wooden block, into Lizzie’s front pocket and pulls out the gun. He holds it up to the light.
They put Lizzie in the back seat of their car – third time in her life she’s been in one. O’Sullivan talks to the group of men who’ve gathered around Dolly. The other copper sits up front, his hand loose on the bottom of the wheel. O’Sullivan climbs in and the suspension lowers. They drive her to the station, the lights of the town spooling out in her wake, leaving her suspended, slipping on the leather seat. She’s been abandoned. They’ve all left her: Thelma, Joe, McWilliams. These cops treat her like dirt. She wishes her head would stop spinning so she could see clearly. Tries not to vomit with the motion of the car.
At the station, O’Sullivan takes her name. He already knows it from his visit to Joe, so there’s no use trying to give him ‘Betty Knight’. The bench is too high for her; she has to put her elbows on top.
‘Occupation?’ he asks.
‘Housewife.’
‘Age?’
‘Twenty-seven,’ she lies. No one will bother to check, and maybe it will help keep this from her dad.
‘Height?’
‘Five foot.’ This she can’t hide.
O’Sullivan glances up at her, his eyes popping. ‘Eyes blue, hair brown.’
The shirt he wears gives his head the appearance of an egg in a cup. If he walked into number fifty-three, she’d know to be gentle with him, to ease him out of his clothes.
The booze is wearing off. The light in the station hits her. Her own breathing rattles around her brain.
When he’s done, O’Sullivan throws the pen down as though he’s disgusted. He’s bunging it on, enjoying the performance – if only he knew she was a second behind in processing, he’d slow down, give her time to make sense of it.
‘You girls come up north, and it does something to you,’ he says. ‘Hell, does something to me. I tried, you know, I really tried. But when it’s just me, only so much one man can do. So you want to fight, fight, but do it properly next time.’ He holds up the gun. ‘This? Looks impressive, but you’d have a hard time killing a pigeon with it.’ He flips it around on the bench and turns to lock it in the safe behind him.
The cell is hot with another girl’s body. She puts her head up. A dago, Lizzie thinks. Big breasts and skinny legs. ‘Be nice to her, will you?’ O’Sullivan asks.
‘What for?’ Lizzie’s not in the mood.
‘’Cause I say so.’ He locks the door on them.
He’s set her bail at eighty pounds. No way Joe or anyone can afford that.
The rain from last night pools in the dips of the cement floor. The heat evaporates it slowly, leaving tidemarks. Water hangs in the air. On the bench, the girl holds one hand in the other.
A reporter comes, and Lizzie hears them talking about her. She scratches her names in the wall: ‘Betty Knight’ and then, below it, ‘Lizzie O’Dea’.
McWilliams visits her the next morning. She takes the only chair, a wooden thing with no arms and two turned pieces that hold the seat up like a tea tray. McWilliams crouches so he can be closer to her. She wants to kiss him, hard on the mouth, but O’Sullivan watches them from between the bars.
McWilliams has brought in the newspaper. He shows her the capitalised headline: ‘SHOOTING AFFRAY’. He reads, ‘As a result of a shooting incident at the rear of the Causeway Hotel this morning, a young woman, Elizabeth O’Dea, has been arrested, while another young woman, Dolly Franks, is in hospital suffering from bullet wounds in the right thumb and breast. The wounds are not considered dangerous.’
The words sit painfully with Lizzie’s headache, rest in her clavicle, stop the air getting to her lungs. ‘She’ll live then.’ Lizzie wonders what the point of it all was. That bitch has brought her low, trapped her in this humid cell. ‘Wish I’d killed her.’
McWilliams picks her hand up by the thumb, presses his nail into the first joint. ‘That’s about as much damage as you did to her.’ Like O’Sullivan said, not enough power to kill a pigeon.
Lizzie feels helpless. ‘You have to do something. Dolly saw us together out back. She’ll tell Joe.’
‘He won’t make much of that.’
‘You don’t know him, you think that.’
‘I’ll protect you.’
‘How? I’m stuck here for a while at least.’ She wants to fuck McWilliams and slap him, he’s so disconnected from the truth of matters. He puts his hand on her arm and brings his face close to hers. O’Sullivan steps forward at this. ‘Mind your own,’ Lizzie hisses at him.
‘I am,’ the copper says, but he doesn’t come any closer. He walks over to a chair against the far wall, picks up his newspaper and the chipped teacup without a saucer. It looks small in his hands.
‘I don’t understand you,’ McWilliams whispers. ‘Why’d you have to go and do this bloody thing? Hurts me that I can’t kiss you.’
A scar runs underneath his chin. She can’t answer him, feels the walls heavy around her, the presence of the girl, silent in the corner. ‘There’s something wrong with that dago over there. Hasn’t said a word. Driving me barmy.’
McWilliams looks around Lizzie to the girl. ‘Hello,’ he says to her. She glances up for a second, and Lizzie watches her – she doesn’t know why McWilliams wants to talk to her. The girl wears a cott
on dress with a tea stain down the front and stockings with the bottom blackened in the shape of her footprint. ‘I seen her yesterday,’ McWilliams says, in a murmur right against Lizzie’s ear, even though O’Sullivan’s hidden behind his paper. ‘At the Criterion. She was with a bunch of her people but didn’t look too happy about it. They were feeding her toffee apples, and she was eating them ten to the dozen. I recognised one of those dagos from Ingham. So this might be the safest place for her.’
He sneaks a kiss on Lizzie’s lips and then leaves her, the cell cooling down from his presence.
O’Sullivan comes back over and says, ‘Thought your husband was a big man.’
‘He is,’ Lizzie says to the cell wall. She doesn’t want to look at O’Sullivan’s face.
A woman comes in about an hour later, her head wrapped in a scarf. O’Sullivan lets her into the cell. She walks to the girl in the corner, puts her hand on her shoulder, says something in Italian that makes the girl cry. A man, the girl’s father probably, is standing in the doorway with his hat held between his hand. Now the mother cries. Lizzie wishes she could understand; she’d like to see the girl comforted. The dad says nothing, just gazes out the door. As the mum passes O’Sullivan, arm around the girl’s shoulders, she says something that Lizzie understands perfectly: ‘Why put her in there with such a woman?’
When they’re gone, O’Sullivan leans against the doorway and says, ‘I thought you’d be nicer to her. Give her some reassurance.’
‘What did you want me to say?’
‘She was taken by some men who interfered with her. They kidnapped her, some kind of revenge. Thought, you know, being a woman. All your experience.’
‘I’m nobody’s mother.’ But Lizzie wonders how it is that little girls get used for revenge. She thinks of the girl’s father, how he wouldn’t look at his own daughter, not just Lizzie – his disgust with them.
Alone in the cell, she stretches out on the bench and flings her arms over her eyes. Turns her head, looks between the wooden planks of the bench. Buttons, thread, a white fuzz of mould, a spoon rusted with age, a googly eye from a toy, objects that have been washed up against the edges of the room and cut through with light from the bench’s slats. She wonders what O’Sullivan thinks she is, asking her to say something to a poor little girl who’s nothing like her. At least Lizzie had some kind of choice in the matter.
She hears Joe’s voice and sits bolt upright. Her head spins. She holds on to the bench with both hands. Joe’s asking why he can’t visit her. She can’t see around the cell door to where O’Sullivan sits at the front of the station. ‘She’s already had one visitor today,’ he’s saying in the measured tones of a man who’s talking to Joe – the slowing down, the careful wording.
She yells out, ‘No rules about that,’ though she doesn’t know if there are.
Neither man responds. She doesn’t think they’ve heard her.
‘Who saw her?’ Joe asks.
‘Can’t tell you,’ O’Sullivan says.
‘Don’t you write it down?’
‘Yes.’
A pause.
‘I want to see my wife,’ Joe says.
‘You can tomorrow.’
Her stomach lurches. What if Joe guesses it was McWilliams? She didn’t even think about it when the man came, not that she’d invited him.
Joe bangs his hand on the side of the place as he leaves, trying to guess where she is, maybe, and send her a message through the walls. She can’t work out if it was a warning or just a call to her. He hits the wall again, closer this time. She knows she should move, let him know she’s there, that she’s heard him, but she stays with her hands curled around the bench slats. He could read anything into her response, a connection or an admission of guilt.
O’Sullivan’s voice outside: ‘Oi, stop that.’
Silence.
A few hours later, O’Sullivan gives her dinner, a thick stew and bread. He says, ‘I can’t help you girls.’
The district court sentences Lizzie to a year in Stewart’s Creek Gaol. Thelma gets off because she’s deemed too drunk; O’Sullivan found her passed out on Heurand Street. ‘On the ground,’ the newspaper says. ‘Fucking typical,’ Lizzie says to Thelma when she visits her at the lockup, before they send her on. ‘Completely blotto and used in your defence.’
‘’Tis my only crime.’
‘Is Joe coming?’ Lizzie asks.
‘Told me he would.’
He’s hardly said anything to Lizzie since she was put away. He’s visited a few times, held her hands in his and barely opened his mouth. McWilliams told her that Joe grabbed him by the shirtfront and asked if he’d been to see her. When McWilliams said he hadn’t, Joe left it at that. ‘But he’s got real rough,’ McWilliams says, worried. ‘Biffed a fella in the eye, wasn’t any need. Gave him a blinker.’ Lizzie’s main worries are that Dolly has got to Joe and that he might catch McWilliams visiting her. She doesn’t want to take any more chances and tells McWilliams not to see her, that it’s safer for him. She can’t tell him to leave her forever, not when she needs him. She sobs in her stifling cell.
Joe arrives to walk her to the gaol. He brings a dress for her. ‘I wanted you to have something beautiful to wear for when you go in.’ It’s a sign that there’s something left between them for her to hold on to over the next year. Maybe he doesn’t know – better for her to believe that.
O’Sullivan lets her change in the interview room, locking the door on her. The table is ringed with tea stains, a brown smudge that Lizzie imagines to be the blood of a man’s forehead coming down on the timber. Joe brought an evening gown, too much for the daylight, but she’s pleased to get out of her apron and smock. He’s chosen green silk with a sheer gauze V at the neck and frills at the ankles. A tighter skirt peeps out from underneath the overdress, which is pleated at the top and tied loosely round the waist. She leaves on her laddered stockings and wears a hat that cups her cheeks, a gauze veil that comes down over her eyes. The felt hat obscures her view.
Joe helps her into the street, holding her hand, O’Sullivan following at a safe distance in the tin lizzie. Joe squeezes her bones, but she doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t want to break their last thread.
Walking up the road to Stewart’s Creek, she can’t see anything but the ground right in front of her and the curve of her hat. She lets Joe lead her, reduces her mind to the gravel road, strewn with rubbish, a ball of waxed paper, the teeth of a broken bottle. She finds a marble in the dirt and clutches it in the hand free of Joe, though they’ll take it off her once she’s inside. It heats in her palm.
The gaol is fronted with a eucalypt and buffalo grass, the fluffed heads of cat’s tails. Its entrance is arched, the shape echoed on each side of the doorway, bordered by columns picked out in white. The same white runs along the fence.
O’Sullivan walks inside with them to see them off, but the paperwork isn’t ready. The woman at the counter, puffy at the wrists, thumbs through the books. ‘We’ve got no record of her coming,’ she says. Lizzie wildly hopes that this has all been a mistake, that they’ll let her out.
O’Sullivan grips her by the elbow and says, ‘It’s like they’ve never seen a prisoner before.’ To Joe, he says, ‘I’m sorry you have to see this.’
The woman behind the counter wears sandals underneath her loose dress, shuffles around the back office. She curls her toes to keep her shoes from falling off.
Lizzie says to O’Sullivan, ‘This count as part of me time?’
He sighs. ‘I sent it through two days ago.’
‘That’d be why,’ the woman says from the back office. ‘Only caught up to three days ago.’ She comes out with a piece of paper.
The reality of the gaol seizes Lizzie’s body. Her insides squeezed and liquid, her head mushed. From under her hat, through her veil, she sees Joe’s shoes, the shape of his mouth when he kisses her. They stick her clothes in a brown paper bag, give her a black smock and white apron.
The w
omen prisoners are held in a building behind the central tower. This tower is thin on the bottom, bulging as it gets higher, with arms supported by smaller towers on either side where the guards march up and down. There’s a bell at the top, pealing when the women need to wake up, have breakfast, stop for lunch, go to sleep.
The matrons put Lizzie to needlework. On the first day, the wardress raps her on the back of the knuckles with a ruler for her sloppy stitch, the meandering line of her thread. She makes Lizzie unpick it. When Lizzie tells her no, she slaps her across the cheek with the ruler. Lizzie yells – the sharp edge will ruin her face. Her cheek swells. Her jaw locks. The silence of the woman’s violence shocks her. Dolly screeched and yelled, gave a warning. Not like this soundless lashing out, the wardress not needing to explain herself.
Lizzie wrings a compliment from the woman after she produces a beautiful straight seam. Then she holds up the smock and the two pieces fall apart; she only got one side. The woman throws it in her face. This is why I became a whore, Lizzie thinks, to avoid this kind of thing. Her hands freeze. Nobody touches her.
Everything reminds her of McWilliams, of Joe. The fold of the sheet, Joe’s foot not quite covered in the night. She runs her finger over it.
When Joe visits, they’re separated across a table. He touches her wrist. She almost cries because that’s all he does; he has no pity for her. That night, her thoughts turn in on her. She’s certain that Joe knows about McWilliams. In a half-dream, the jimmy she found under the house surfaces, blood on it. She can’t scrub it out. She connects the blood to Dolly, feeling for the first time the full weight of what would have happened if the bullet had actually pierced some vital part of her, knocked her to the ground. She tries to push it away – she hadn’t meant it, and the truth is that Dolly wasn’t hurt. She was a danger to Lizzie, to Thelma. Lizzie just meant to scare her. Now the possibility of Dolly’s death curls in her body, grips her gut, though her thoughts shift back to herself, her own problems.
Her desire for her sentence to be over is like a physical pain in her chest. But when she turns her mind to her life after prison, she can’t imagine what she’ll do. If Joe knows, McWilliams will never see her again. She can’t form any clear sense of what happens – whether he’s killed, or driven away, or just too frightened. Joe won’t want her. Bea will never take her back. Her thoughts keep unfurling, the connections made without a break. The walls lean in towards her. The bunkbed mattress above her seems to be growing, like a fungus expanding, with the sour, rotten smell of the forest, leaching out spores that choke her.
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