At breakfast it’s easy to hide the tin cup under her skirt, to miss drinking at lunch and dinner. She won’t be thirsty for long. Her needle stabs the creamy calico – could be her skin if the thing wasn’t so blunt. The threads hang loose in too-wide holes, and she can pick out the individual strands of the cotton, its freckled blemishes. In bed that night, she works at the rim of the cup with her teeth. Cuts her lips but keeps going. She opens out a jagged edge and drags the tin over her throat.
They let Joe see her in the hospital. She searches his face for clues that he knows about her and McWilliams. Nothing. He holds her hand and says, ‘What have you done to yourself?’ He cups his forehead with his free hand. She thinks that he’s crying. His face is grey when he presents it to her again, empty of everything but grief. He can’t know. He says, ‘Promise me, peach, you’ll never do this again.’
She wants to comfort him, but her relief is tangled up with guilt. She just squeezes his hand. Already the woman who tried to cut herself open seems distant, held together by the hospital sheets. Another thing she didn’t mean. Lizzie covers her face with the blanket, unable to look at Joe. Wrapped up in the dark.
When she folds back the sheets, McWilliams is in a chair beside her, his hair crushed on one side. He lays his hand on her hip. Its weight presses through the sheets, his warmth slowly reaching her. She angles her body towards him, then remembers how cut up she is. She’s sorry he had to see that. But it’s pulled both of them to her, these men who tie her to the earth. He slides the chair closer to her bed, shuffles his body so he lies there, his head on the pillow next to hers. He says, ‘I was afraid you’d left me alone.’
Lizzie shakes her head. She finds it hard to believe that he’s alive and with her, saying this. When he leaves her, later, it’s with the impression of his hands on her body. Joe hardly touched her, while McWilliams seems more substantial, his body connected with hers.
When she’s healed, they send O’Sullivan to take her back to the gaol. She feels weighed down inside its walls. For weeks after she can’t speak and doesn’t even try. Her cut-up neck bracelets her voice. In the absence of words, she lashes out. A woman swears at her, and Lizzie biffs her across the skull so hard her teeth rattle. She carries the woman’s insult around with her for days, part punishment, part justification – she’s a fucking cheese, a slut. Hell, she might have slept with all these women’s husbands, one time or another. She doesn’t care.
At the Sunday sermon in the prison chapel, it occurs to her that some force might want her alive. She hasn’t been listening much – usually they get an uptight do-gooder to scrape away at the women about the evil of their sins. But this Sunday there’s a young bloke. New to town, by the look of the sweat ringing under his arms and sheening his forehead, the smell that comes off him. He flings himself around and speaks with sheer masculine energy. He says, ‘God loves you,’ and she recognises in its tones not the rote-learned speech she uses on the men at the cottage, but the words of McWilliams and his hands on her that day in the hospital.
The priest says, ‘You don’t have to do anything to earn this love. It is always there, and He will forgive you.’ It’s never occurred to Lizzie that someone could love her without her needing to do anything. She wonders if there might be some hand organising this chaos, and she holds on to the possibility of this in those early days locked up, without quite believing it.
They move her into the laundry, the needlework wardress sick to the gills of her sloppiness and anger at the other women, seeming to see Lizzie’s hand in every wildly placed thread and uneven hemline. Lizzie finds the women around her snobbish and weak, and she finds no comfort in routine. Through the barred windows, the hills hold the heat, turn purple, cough out mist in the morning.
She does better in laundry. The wardress, who smells of stale biscuits, says to her, while her hands are deep in the belly of a sheet, ‘After I teach you this, you’ll do it when you get out?’ Lizzie feels like crying. She’s been reduced to that – so grateful for a hand on the shoulder, even from a woman with leather for skin. Grateful that someone cares about her future. But she wakes in the night filled with rage, because how could this woman think she was just a laundress? She doesn’t want to be like her, coming home to a mouldy bed, stiff with disuse, a dinner of week-old peas, colourless with reheating. In the laundry there’s no one to tell her about the inner workings of the town. She’d be left to piece it together from the contents of pockets, map out the relationships of Townsville from the stains on the sheets.
She sketches human eyes onto the walls, using a pink pencil for pattern making that she stole from the bitch up at needlework. She runs the brush at the end of the pencil over her own face, tickles her eyelashes with it. Her body aches for sex; she’s used to so much of it. The eyes she draws, with their delicate lashes and light irises, are McWilliams’.
When Joe visits that week, Lizzie asks him if he’s heard from Bea. He tells her that she doesn’t need to work there anymore – he’s earning enough now. Lizzie still wants him to ask Bea if she can come back. ‘You never looked happy at that place,’ he says. Lizzie always thought she looked beautiful, but she can’t remember clearly. The black parts in her mind gnaw at her. Then, after a week, she forgets that too.
She obsesses over her sheets, tells off a girl in her ward who spilled bean juice from a stolen tin on her bed. ‘Tomato doesn’t come out.’ Lizzie spreads the sheet between her fingers, holds it to the girl’s face.
‘Jesus, don’t rub it in.’ The girl, with a face coned into the point of her nose, seems ready to cry. ‘I was really enjoying that.’
‘Lick it off then.’
And the girl does, picking up the sheet and sucking the stain, the rest of the cotton coming out of her mouth like a spirit manifestation Lizzie once saw in a book, the ghost of a loved one pouring from the medium in a white cloud.
‘You’re barmy,’ Lizzie says. The girl laughs through the cloth.
Lizzie’s eye sketches are deemed obscene; she and two of the girls in the ward are told to repaint the walls. ‘Why?’ she asks the wardress, a woman who constantly scrapes the inside of her nostrils with a handkerchief-wrapped forefinger.
‘You draw this?’
‘’Course not, just askin’.’
‘Don’t.’
But Lizzie is really confused. One of the women on painting whispers, ‘They look like cunts,’ and swipes her brush over the middle of an eye. Lizzie drew them sideways as she lay in bed, so they seemed alright to her. But now, standing upright, she sees that the woman has a point.
Another woman calls out, ‘Touch me like that,’ and the painter tickles her brush across the eye-cunt. They all moan.
Soon they discover they can get off on paint fumes. They dollop some into the stolen baked-bean tin, hang their heads over it with a towel around their faces, just like Lizzie’s dad used to when he was sick, but with herbs and hot water. Lizzie inhales, rises from the tin red-faced and squinting, the towel draped on her head.
‘Madam Elizabeth,’ she writes on the wall, but she only has white paint. When they finish the job, the words are only visible to her because she knows where they are. If she was kept alive for something, this is where she’s headed: owning a brothel of her own, maybe helping some of these girls out. She could do that. Knows the business well enough now. McWilliams would let her.
At night she tells all the girls about the place she’s going to set up, how they can come and work for her. A couple of them tell her that she’s vile, that they wouldn’t want nothing to do with money made that way. But they’re in gaol for something, so their holier-than-thou attitude doesn’t worry Lizzie. Prudish bitches.
She spends the rest of her sentence building the place in her mind. She lays its chamferboard verandahs and trelliswork around her to keep the stuck-up women out, and gathers those to her who are her friends, who have suffered like her. She wants to be like the god that priest fella talks about – to love them without them hav
ing to earn it.
Brisbane, 1945
At four in the morning, Nurse Roberts washes Dolly, stretching her limbs out and sliding the cloth over them.
‘Why’d she do that?’ Dolly asks Lizzie when the nurse has gone off again.
‘Reckon they’ll operate. Take out what you swallowed.’
‘They can’t put me under.’ Her voice high-pitched.
Lizzie doesn’t mind the ether. A Yank told her that back home they put ether in their soft drinks when the booze was banned, for a bit of spark. He said this before sliding his hand to the back of her head, pulling her in to kiss him. She remembers too, more vaguely, the larrikins in the Valley, offering her a sniff.
Dolly cries with her face pressed into her pillow. ‘I don’t want to be alive no more,’ she sobs.
Lizzie turns away from the sound – she doesn’t want to hear it. She wonders if Lee lied to her all those years ago, and that boxy-looking sign on her fan-tan tile actually was a curse of some kind. Because that’s what has been following her. Turned up in the bed right next to her. Dolly asked about Joe, and now Lizzie needs to ask about Lee’s place.
Moaning, Dolly picks at the slivers in her lips, starts the blood again.
‘You still got those rooms?’ Lizzie asks.
‘What?’ Dolly’s voice is foggy.
‘The ones you won off Lee. By the river.’
Dolly says nothing. Lizzie wonders if she even remembers them. ‘Why?’ she asks finally.
‘I want to buy ’em.’ Lizzie didn’t plan on saying this, but she knows why she did. The rooms mean something to her, her luck returning. She can picture that night so clearly, her desire so strong it made her sick. The kick in the guts of losing. Now she’s the one with power, gazing down at Dolly wheezing in the bed with her mouth all bloody. No chance the woman is a threat to her. And even though she hasn’t got the means to buy them, she has to see where the waters lie.
Dolly sighs. ‘Place got flooded last year, haven’t had the energy to clean it. The chow’s sister was in there for a good while, renting. Left after the flood, reckoned she couldn’t stand it no more.’
‘You never thought to do anything with the rooms?’
‘Was living with Stanley. He was mostly keeping me. I wanted the rooms empty in case something happened and I needed a place to disappear.’
‘He good to you, Stanley?’ Lizzie asks.
Dolly’s whole body gets caught up in a dry retching. Lizzie sucks in her breath and looks out for Nurse Roberts. Her coughing dies among the beds, and the nurse doesn’t come.
‘Good as any,’ Dolly says in the end. Lizzie knows what that means. If he’s anything like Colin, he’d have told her he loved her, then used it as an excuse to fold her up so tiny she couldn’t recognise herself.
‘Will you sell the place to me?’ Lizzie pushes on.
‘It’s all I have of me own.’ Dolly’s words are so close to Lizzie’s longing that she’s pulled up short. ‘Stanley’s taken everything else. He’d big dreams for us, but he’s got no luck. Makes him cross as a cut snake.’ She sobs around the ridiculous phrase. Lizzie flinches at the sound coming to her in the dark.
Nurse Roberts walks back in, torch flashing, and Lizzie climbs back in bed, not able to sleep properly thinking about the possibility of the rooms.
She wakes fully, sits up and looks out the window, glowing with the steel body of dawn. The light hits Dolly. Lizzie can’t see the girl from Townsville in this woman, twisted up with pain and battered down. Dolly’s hands move like spiders on the covers.
A nurse knits in the corner, needles striking each other, the clacks carrying across the ward. Lizzie wouldn’t want a jumper made by that woman. Might choke you. She pictures the tangled wool like some form of plant life, wavy fronds moving to the windows in search of sunlight, climbing over the sleeping women’s beds, over hers and Dolly’s, that will keep them in their place, keep them invisible, the threads a dense canopy above their heads, each breathing in her own humid cocoon. Maybe some explorer will find them, wonder at the sounds of their shrouded rainforest, the voices of plants that speak in a language so muffled it can’t be decoded. From where they stand outside the plant masses, men will write books about the women, peering in through the threads, maybe finding an ear that hasn’t quite been covered, an eye glinting at them. They’ll guess at a rich interior life and linger on the details of the women’s sex lives, the places where they took the men – laneways, terraced houses, tents on the goldfields made waterproof with lime. Speculate on what kind of men they were – politicians, coppers, sailors, soldiers, grocers, adventurers. This they’ll know already; Lizzie knows the newspapers write about her still.
The clack of needles like rain. Dolly groans, and the threads unravel.
Townsville, 1924
They let Lizzie out in November. Joe takes her back to the house. The whole place is coated in a fine dust, and she pretends to snort it. ‘Leaving some for later?’
Joe scowls at her. Not in the mood for jokes.
She dumps her bags in the bedroom and lies on the bed in her own stockings, proper silk, glad she doesn’t have to feel that some other woman’s legs might have been in them, even though she knows well enough they were washed – she herself did it most of the time. The dress isn’t as beautiful as she remembers.
‘Got holes,’ she said, when she put it on back at the gaol. ‘Didn’t even put in mothballs?’
‘This isn’t the bloody Ritz,’ the wardress said and shoved the rest of her things at her. Lizzie doesn’t think the Ritz has mothballs either.
Joe bangs a pan around in the kitchen, swears loudly and returns later with horse’s eye. He plonks the plate on the bedside table, and its edge shivers. Lizzie startles. ‘Very gracious,’ she says, stuffy-nosed. ‘The lid’s not on straight.’ She adjusts the little circle of toast rested on top of the egg, cut with the rim of a cup from the bread so the egg looks out at the face that’ll eat it.
‘Cook it your bloody self, then,’ he says, picking his toast up with one hand and shoving it in his mouth.
‘Cripes, sorry, I was only joking.’
They eat in silence at opposite ends of the bed. She collects the dishes. Has to tug his plate out of his hand. She stands in the doorway and drops the plates onto the floor. ‘Why are you angry at me? I’m the one who’s been locked up being reformed by fucking do-gooders and sadists for twelve months.’
‘You got yourself there.’
‘That bitch bloody stole Thelma’s money.’
‘Couldn’t think of a better way? Jesus, I would’ve fixed it for you. Know what, peach? Fuck you.’
‘I was defending Thelma.’
‘Fuck her too.’
‘Hope you bloody haven’t.’
‘Being clever doesn’t suit you.’
‘Guess what, you’re stuck with it.’
Lizzie gathers up the pieces of plate, holds them in her hand, but they keep slipping back onto the floor. She swears every time they fall, picks the pieces up again, balancing them on her palm. Another piece tips from the bottom. Joe watches her, shakes his head and brings a bin. ‘Thought they taught you housekeeping in there.’
‘Didn’t let us loose on dishes.’ She picks up a shard, grips the bottom like a knife and waves it around.
Joe takes her wrist and squeezes. She uncurls her fingers. The shard drops to the floor. ‘It’s not fucking funny,’ he says. ‘When I seen you in that hospital with your throat all sliced up – ah hell, peach.’
The hurt in his voice knocks her. She’s flattened by guilt. In prison, she hardly thought about him at all, was caught in her fantasies about starting her own place, McWilliams with her. But now she’s here, Joe makes her feel the impossibilities of these plans. How could she leave him? She cries, reality sinking her. It’s strange she should cry now, no bars around her, when she hasn’t cried for months in gaol.
She tells Joe she’s sorry, she doesn’t know what’s going on. Feels so blood
y weak, can’t sort anything out in her head. In the gaol she was certain, knew what she wanted. In his presence she doubts herself. He strokes her back, and she sniffs up snot. ‘Feels nice when you touch me.’
‘I want you back,’ he says.
He fucks her among the broken dishes. She worries because she expects to be cut, can’t feel anything because of this. But her wetness on his hand reassures her she’s functioning at least. She’ll just have to wait a bit to feel again.
She finds a note in the letterbox, knows it’s from McWilliams: Tomorrow, six at fan-tan. Her body shakes with her own heartbeat. All morning she’s absent, can’t follow what Joe says. In the middle of the day, she thinks, I won’t see him, I can’t. She wants to make it right between her and Joe.
But by the afternoon, she just wants Joe to leave. She hasn’t answered him so many times that he put his mouth to her ear and yelled into it. She yelled back at him, her hand over her ringing ear.
He fiddles under the house till after six, while she prickles in the kitchen, watching the clock. She’s wound tight by the time she hears him open the gate and walk away. She puts on shoes and stockings, doesn’t want to think about it too much. When she does, she promises herself she’ll see McWilliams just this once.
She keeps her eyes on the gravel of Roberts Street and doesn’t look up until she’s on Charters Towers Road, when someone calls her name. ‘Miss Betty?’ It’s Lee, stopping on a bicycle beside her.
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