Treading Air

by Ariella Van Luyn

  ‘Hello,’ she says. ‘You off to fan-tan?’

  He nods and swings his leg over the bike so he can walk beside her.

  ‘Me too,’ she says, but she doesn’t want him hanging around. She just wants to get to McWilliams.

  ‘There’s a fella following you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I saw him, just for a second, when I was closing up the store. He turned the same corner you did.’

  ‘Know him?’

  Lee shakes his head. ‘Couldn’t see his face under his hat, across the street. But a big bloke. Reckon you should go home.’

  Her breath comes hard. ‘Reckon I should.’

  ‘You want me to walk you back?’

  ‘No, no.’ She doesn’t want to be seen with Lee, wonders if he has other reasons for telling her she’s being followed. But she can’t risk it, having anyone catch her going to meet McWilliams. She stops abruptly.

  Lee pulls up a couple of paces ahead. He looks at her.

  ‘I’m right,’ she says and waves him away. He might try to escort her home right there in the open. But he turns the bike to the city and the fan-tan parlour. She watches him ride away. Something wound-up and athletic about his movements, the thrust of his thighs on the pedals. She stands on the side of the road, her hands shaking. She doesn’t know which way to go, or if anyone is really following her. Could be someone from the prison or one of their friends come to get her. She was so boarded up, those last few months, she barely noticed if she angered anyone or not.

  She peaks her hands over her forehead to shade her eyes against the sun. A figure comes at her from the glare, a giant it seems, some runaway from the circus. No – Joe. She’s undone by the double image of her husband and a giant, both strange and familiar to her. She can’t move. She’s been inside for too long.

  He says, ‘Didn’t know you were going anywhere.’

  Lizzie doesn’t know what to say. How long will McWilliams wait? ‘I just want to play fan-tan again.’

  ‘Gone downhill since you left,’ Joe says. ‘Too many chows there now. Maybe you won’t mind, but. Saw you talking to one just before.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I remember him. Tried to visit you once, in the house.’

  ‘Don’t know.’ Lizzie looks back down Roberts Street. Wants to go home.

  ‘I remember all the men who visit you, peach.’

  ‘I try to forget them,’ she says.

  ‘You going then? To fan-tan?’

  ‘Oh no, Joe, not if there’s so many chows.’

  ‘That chow – he wanted you real bad. Never saw one in heat for a white girl like that. Makes you sick.’

  Lizzie doesn’t want to hear any more. And she can’t go to McWilliams. She imagines him sitting in the fan-tan parlour, waiting for her. Distress clouds her vision. She won’t come for him tonight.

  Thelma drops by with a longneck. ‘For old time’s sake,’ she says, taking a slug. Bea has another girl in Lizzie’s place. ‘Thought I should tell you,’ Thelma says. She runs her hands over her arms. ‘I’m getting out soon too. After the thing with Dolly, coppers didn’t give a shit about finding me money. Joe tell you what he did? He went and got it for me, off that bitch. He’s a good man, Betty.’

  ‘Joe talked to Dolly?’

  ‘Reckon he did more than that. She disappeared after. Bea said she sent her to Ingham, but I don’t know.’

  Lizzie thinks of the Italian girl who was with her in the cell. Thinks of the Black Hand. She reckons Ingham is the right kind of place for Dolly.

  ‘Joe didn’t tell me that. He say anything more? Dolly say anything to him?’

  ‘Don’t think he was listening, love.’

  Lizzie has to be calm about this; she can’t afford to give herself away. Dolly didn’t really see much, just her sitting with a man out the back. Lizzie can’t even remember if they touched. More than a year ago. The memory is almost dark to her.

  Thelma’s still talking. ‘I’ll be able to keep me boy safe.’ She didn’t bring her boy. Afterwards, Lizzie wonders about this, if she’s one of the things he’s being kept safe from.

  On the water’s edge, their bodies holding down a picnic blanket, the debris of their meal scattered around them, Lizzie asks Joe to put in a good word for her with Bea. He stares across the water to the island. Scummed foam marks the opening of the Ross River into the sea. He swears, shaking his head. His voice is flat, but there’s an edge underneath.

  She needs to be careful. ‘I just want to help out, like before. Both of us earning, we can start saving again. Joe –’

  ‘Fuck is wrong with you?’ His voice carries across the sea. ‘You want to go back to that filthy hole, have every man in town’s hands on you? Every night, when I let one of them in, was like I was fucking stabbed.’ He presses his finger to his chest.

  She can’t stand his screwed-up face. Wants to drown his voice with her own. Screeching over him, she doesn’t know what she’s saying, just making noise. Pulls up when she hears herself say, ‘I can’t.’ She wants to say she can’t be with him doing nothing again, nothing bigger than herself beyond him. He stands with his arms held away from his body, coiled, yelling at her to tell him what the fuck that means. She’s not ready for this and backs down – she doesn’t know, she’s not sure. He softens and puts his hands on her shoulders. ‘Let me look after you, peach.’ She presses her head into his chest. His heart pounds against her ear. The pale cotton of his shirt is the horizon in her vision, the blur of the sea beyond. His hand rests on the back of her head. ‘You don’t want to go back there. Bea’s fucked with your head.’

  Lizzie shoves away. ‘I knew what I was doing.’

  Joe shouts into her face. ‘Like hell you did.’ He keeps shouting about how badly she’s fucked up, a din that she tries to block out. Finally he stops.

  She can’t hold on to any shape of herself with enough conviction to answer him. She squeezes her toes in the sand. A polyp of coral, like innards, floats in on a wave, so subtle that its movement could be an accident. She grips it between her fingers and squeezes. Up close, it seems to be made of thousands of tiny green bubbles bundled together, but the surface is hard and sheened with salt water. Unrecognisable and repulsive. This is the kind of thing she’s been getting delivered since she got out of Stewart’s Creek – she can’t make sense of the way her life has twisted from her, taken on an aspect she never thought to see and can’t identify. She can’t recognise herself here. She tricked herself in the gaol, thinking she could get a place to run herself. Can’t even get her old work back.

  Into the silence, the expanse of sand, Joe says, ‘Thought about it a lot while you were away, peach. I’ll forgive anything you did before. Come back to me.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything wrong!’ She’s thinking of the whoring when she says this. She had to do it. It’s not fair for him to blame her.

  He makes a sharp shout of frustration. ‘Let’s just fucking go.’ He snatches up the picnic basket, pulls the blanket from the ground, sand flying off its edges. Lizzie follows him down Boundary Street, mangroves on either side. She can’t see beyond.

  When they get home, McWilliams is sleeping on the bed on their verandah – Joe found an old mattress, dragged it onto the springs, for nights when McWilliams is too tired or drunk to ride home. She holds the railing for support, Joe’s heavy weight behind her. On the wooden boards is a bottle of stout, the lid off and rolled away. Almost all of it gone. Joe pulls on McWilliams’ boot. He shudders awake, sits up, squints his eyes and shakes his head. ‘Lizzie,’ he says, voice stuffy.

  ‘We have a job tonight?’ Joe’s still gripping the picnic basket.

  ‘That’s why I’m waitin’ here. Bea sent a message.’ McWilliams holds himself with the stillness of a man trying to sober up.

  ‘Was out all day,’ Joe says. ‘Wanted to treat Lizzie. She hasn’t seen the sea since she was out.’ He says this like a man who’s rehearsed it too many times.

  McWilliams
combs his fringe with his fingers, shakes his head again with the hair still caught in his hands.

  Joe disappears inside the house. ‘Back soon,’ he yells from the hallway.

  Lizzie’s on the top step, her heart beating so it hurts. Her throat seems shrunk to the size of a straw. The old bedsprings shudder. McWilliams’ mouth on hers. He smells of beer, and his hands shake. She stares into his eyes to see if he means it. They’re red with booze. The paleness of sleep still on him. Will she ever be able to know this man? ‘A bag of chemicals,’ her dad used to say, when he went through a science phase and bought up big on children’s encyclopaedias because they were written in a way he could understand. ‘Humans are just a big bag of chemicals.’ It rendered Lizzie shapeless when he said it, made others that way too. Easier to cheat them, she thought, although her dad behaved as if this fact was a marvel.

  Her hands on McWilliams. She remembers her dad saying that underneath their skins were particles that flew around one another. It seemed to Lizzie so wonderful that their bodies could have something like that hidden away, as though she was inhabited by a power greater than herself. She wanted there and then to touch another person, to see if she could feel that movement. Hadn’t dared touch her dad. That longing stayed with her and now concentrates on McWilliams, the links connecting them.

  He breaks away and stands beside her on the top step, his hand to his forehead. ‘Where were you the other night? I stayed so long.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Joe, he followed me.’ She can’t speak properly.

  They hear him in the hallway, then he emerges with his boots on. ‘C’mon, mate, let’s go.’ He kisses Lizzie before they leave. His lips are slimed.

  As she turns back to the house, she hears Joe ask McWilliams who it is. His answer: ‘Some chow in Hermit Park. Owes Bea from fan-tan.’ From her bedroom window, Lizzie watches the two men walk away, McWilliams unsteady. He glances back, his hands to his face. Joe has something in his hand, the jimmy? He swings it as he walks, his strides wide. She can’t look at the two of them together for long.

  A gecko chitters above her head, shimmies down the wall. She still has mud on her boot where she stood in a puddle at the beach. Bangs it against the floor, unable to stand the sight of it.

  She’s not sure why, but McWilliams’ words to Joe, ‘Some chow in Hermit Park,’ niggle at her.

  A moth clings to the ceiling. She saw it the night before and wonders if it’s dead, its body still clinging to the slats. Wishes she had something to throw at it so she could check. She lies on the bed but her body is thrumming, can’t keep still. Pain grabs her between the shoulderblades, pulls.

  Something moves across her face. She swipes her hand over it, finds her fingers coated in the dust of the moth, released from the roof and plummeted down. Yellow ooze has burst from the moth and smeared on her palm. She flaps her hands, feeling that gunk on her skin, wanting it off. One-handed, she opens the chest of drawers, gets one of Joe’s hankies, scrubs at her hands. The moth’s wings are still flapping, but she can’t bring herself to squash its head. Bundling it up in the hanky, she feels its fluttering against the cloth. She wonders how it can get any air – the cloth must be porous enough for the breath of moths.

  Something clicks in her mind then: Lee. They’re going after Lee. She remembers what Joe’s said about the man. Traces the arc of the jimmy in his hand as he left the garden. She’s sure then. She has to stop him.

  The moon is held by a mountain. She comes at Lee’s shop from the front. Standing outside, peering through the glass front, she thinks she must have been wrong. The lights are off. She calls Joe’s name. No one answers.

  She presses her face to the glass. Can’t make out the details of the shop, her vision too blurred, everything in shadow. A bicycle leans against the unlocked door. The seat is slick with something. It’s not until her face is right up close to it that she realises it’s blood. She almost puts her foot on a cigarette holder, a smoked butt inside. Glass under her shoes. The lights are smashed.

  She isn’t ready for the body, the heavy, lumped shape of it, with its arms uplifted and the trail of blood where it’s been dragged. The head so smashed and bloody, she can’t make it out. She thinks for a moment it’s McWilliams, but the body is too small, the shape’s not right. Lee.

  His feet point towards the storeroom. His trouser pockets billow at his hips. A belt snakes the ground near him, its money pouch opened and empty.

  Her mind stretches out, frenzied, as though a child has flicked a skipping rope to make it ripple, sending waves of pain through her body. She’s shivering, clamps down on it, finds that clenching her jaw makes her teeth chatter more. Where’re Joe and McWilliams? She bolts, her thoughts speckled. Somewhere on Roberts Street she vomits, then keeps running home.

  The night draws together and forms two figures, one pregnant with a load in his arms. Joe and McWilliams materialise, grainy and blurred. She calls out but her voice is empty, travels nowhere. The houses around are silent. She can hear both men breathing. ‘Joe?’ She tries again. He looks up at where she’s crouched on the top step. ‘I saw the shop. Lee. Oh, Jesus.’

  Joe dumps the load he’s carrying, and it clatters on the cement pathway. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Careful.’ McWilliams, sharp and frightened.

  ‘Have to hide these things.’

  McWilliams says, ‘Need a shovel.’ Joe moves under the house, leaving the bundle lumped in the middle of the pavement. McWilliams takes the stairs two at a time to Lizzie, his steps wobbly. The weight of his hand on her shoulder, shaking. He smells of booze.

  He says, ‘Love, don’t cry so loud.’ She quietens. Doesn’t think she can move.

  She hears them beneath the house, shuffling around. Joe comes out with an axe in his hand. Sweat drips down her front. He disappears round the side of the house, McWilliams behind him. Chips into the ground, swears, cuts the words short at their loudness. The blade in the earth again, somewhere else, softer maybe, hollow. They’re at it for what seems like hours. She doesn’t want to look at the bundle on the pathway, the rags and paper, what’s wrapped inside. She presses her hands to her face. Their footsteps on the stairs. The railing shudders. She lifts her head. In the kitchen, the scraping of the iron on the stove, newspaper ruched, the fire lit.

  ‘Fill this up.’ Joe’s voice. The bang of the copper kettle against the tank. He comes down the hallway in his socks towards Lizzie, wraps his hands around her shoulders. ‘Hell you doing there at the shop?’

  Hard to make the words come. ‘Couldn’t find you.’

  ‘Christ, when will you trust me?’

  ‘He’s dead. His face all smashed in.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have seen that.’

  Joe’s breathing roughly. Makes her sick. She doesn’t want to taste the same air as him. Her own breath rattles shallowly in her throat.

  The kettle whistles. Joe turns and runs down the hallway. It cuts out. She follows him to the kitchen. Her legs shake. She has to lean against the doorframe, slides to the ground and tucks her legs up to her. She can’t properly make sense of what’s going on around her, the movements of the men. Joe tugs the old metal tub off the wall, clangs its bottom against the floor. The hot water tumbles, and the tin expands, popping in the heat. Lizzie tries to rise. Joe says, ‘Just stay sitting, peach, it’ll be better.’ She falls back as if he pushed her.

  The men slop water around. They wash themselves and submerge their boots in the dirty water. Joe comes to her shirtless and lifts her up. He carries her to the bedroom, tumbles her onto the bed. ‘We’re leaving, Lizzie. First thing. Just need to get some sleep. Pack up all your stuff.’

  ‘Joe –’

  ‘Don’t ask me nothin’. I’m not talking about it no more. It’s over, that part of our lives. We’ll start again, away from this fucking place. You don’t need to tell me anything, peach. It’s all forgotten.’

  ‘Don’t understand you.’

  ‘Just be quiet for a bit, let me slee
p. Pack anything you want in a bag you can carry by yourself.’

  ‘I don’t want to go.’

  He’s yelling now. ‘I’ve been so good to you! Most men’d just fucking kill you. ’Cause I love you, peach. So don’t you bloody say you’re not leaving with me. Don’t say another word.’ She scrambles away from him. He flops on the bed, rolls over to his side, tucks his legs up, pillows his head and passes out. She can’t stay in the room with him, can’t make sense of what he’s saying. Outside, the soil is dug up around the dunny as though some animal has been there. She thinks of horror stories about creatures that emerge from the soil at night under the power of voodoo.

  Out front, McWilliams sits on the bed, shirtless, his arms tucked around his legs. When she sits beside him, the bedsprings dip wildly. He’s too blotto to have had a hand in Lee’s death, she’s sure of it. The rust of the bed on him, mingling with the odour of drink. She puts her hand against the curve of his back. ‘Hell’s going on?’ she asks.

  McWilliams holds his own hands in a monkey grip. ‘Oh god, I’m sick.’

  ‘Never mind your bloody head. What happened?’ Her voice choked with tears.

  ‘I was sloshed when I left, more’n I thought. On the road, Joe said Dolly had seen you with a bloke out the back of the house. I thought he was going to kill me then, I really did. But he said he thought it was this chow we were going to see. He was going to mess him up so he couldn’t touch you again. I said, “I don’t reckon Lizzie’d do that.” But Joe went inside anyway, shouted out to the stupid bugger to give us the cash, then Joe was knocking everything off the shelves – flour everywhere, bottles broken. The Chinaman tried to stop him. Joe hit him with that jimmy. He made a real funny sound when it came down on him. Fucking blood everywhere. Joe with his hand in the till.’ McWilliams shivers. He lets out a groan, covers his mouth, kicks his heel against the bedsprings. ‘Fuck, fuck.’ The smell of rust rises with his heel.

  Lizzie can hear ringing somewhere. She gets up, forgets why and sits back down. McWilliams pulls her into him. His breath on her neck, and his eyelashes. Her neck is wet. He won’t stop shivering. Teeth against her skin like those wind-up toys that clatter along the floorboards. ‘I’m sorry, Betty,’ and she wonders why he uses her night-time name when the sun is already rising.