Treading Air

by Ariella Van Luyn

  They close the verandah shutters against the dawn and lock the front door. Lizzie makes up the bed.

  ‘Make it look like we’ve run already,’ McWilliams tells her. ‘And we will, after I get some sleep. Can’t think straight right now, can’t stand, too blotto. You’ll come with me, not Joe. I’ll take us away.’

  She lies with him, her body around his back, her hand on his chest, her ear against his spine. This is the first time she’s slept with anyone other than Joe for the night.

  She wakes up to thumping. She shudders, electricity passing through her. She opens the shutters, sees three men, one in a copper’s uniform, arrow insignia on the forearms, and the other a black man, probably a tracker. O’Sullivan with them. She runs to McWilliams, shakes him. He opens one pink eye.

  ‘Get up, get up.’ She chucks the first shoes she can put her hand to at him – Joe’s boots. Puts her eye to the window again, sees the copper haul himself up on the house stump and peer into the kitchen. He calls down to O’Sullivan, who points two fingers at the door. She doesn’t know what else to do, dives back into bed with McWilliams, lies still. Maybe they’ll go away if no one answers.

  The front door splinters, and the men are in the house, on the verandah. O’Sullivan rips their sheet off, a magician revealing a trick. ‘Why didn’t you answer when we knocked?’

  Lizzie wriggles to the bedhead, sits on the pillow.

  ‘Didn’t bloody well hear you,’ says McWilliams, sitting up. He’s wearing his tweed trousers, pulled them on so they could cuddle together in the night without sweating over each other’s knees.

  ‘I saw someone put their head up, pull the blankets over.’

  ‘What do you bloody well want, anyway?’ McWilliams stands, holds himself away from the coppers.

  O’Sullivan says, ‘I want to question you about the dead Chinaman at the grocery opposite the Rising Sun Hotel. Was told that you and O’Dea have been over that way. So you should know that anything you say might be given in evidence against you later on. Where’s O’Dea?’

  McWilliams shrugs. The other copper leaves to look around the house. He calls out in their bedroom, ‘Got him.’

  Lizzie scrambles out of bed when the cop brings Joe in, her back against the wall. He doesn’t look at her.

  ‘Where were you both last night?’ O’Sullivan asks the men. He has the manner of a man who’s stood in dog shit; he can’t believe he’s the one who has to deal with this.

  McWilliams says, ‘O’Dea and I walked home last night together. I don’t know what time. Too drunk.’

  ‘Did anyone see you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why’d you walk?’

  ‘Don’t take the bus when I’m drunk. Everyone looks at me leg. I got paid on Wednesday. Been drinking since then. Can’t remember nothing.’

  ‘Put a shirt on.’

  McWilliams grabs his shirt from the floor, pulls it over his head, and O’Sullivan grabs the hem, holding it out for the copper and the tracker to inspect. They all agree that the stains on its tails are blood. ‘Charlie,’ O’Sullivan says to the tracker, ‘go have a look around.’ The man leaves.

  ‘That’s not blood,’ Lizzie says.

  O’Sullivan looks at her for the first time. ‘What is it then, Mrs O’Dea? Seems like blood to me.’

  ‘Not a man’s blood. From the meatworks.’

  ‘Really?’ O’Sullivan asks, then says to McWilliams, ‘Put on your coat.’

  His gabardine coat hangs on the end of the bed. He hooks his finger under the collar, draws it to him, shrugs his shoulders into it, the check lining visible at the armpits. O’Sullivan takes his hands, turns up the sleeves. He finds a dark stain and shoves McWilliams’ hand towards Lizzie, to the other cops, to Joe, standing there in his creased shirt. ‘And this? What’s this?’

  ‘Everything’s bloodstains with you,’ Lizzie says.

  ‘Doesn’t look like a jacket you’d wear to work. The squirts of blood on here, they look like the blood I seen at the Chinaman’s shop. How come you got your cheese talking for you, McWilliams?’

  Joe brings his head up at this, seems about to say something. Lizzie stares, but he still won’t look at her.

  O’Sullivan takes McWilliams’ felt hat from the bedside table. ‘Here’s something else. Complete your outfit, McWilliams. But look at this.’ He displays the hat to Lizzie like he’s a shop woman showing her the latest fashions. ‘Blood?’

  ‘You’re bloody well silly with your blood.’

  O’Sullivan holds the hat out to McWilliams. ‘This yours? You speak, not her.’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  O’Sullivan picks up the boots at McWilliams’ feet. ‘Whose are these?’

  ‘O’Dea’s.’

  ‘Why are you putting on O’Dea’s shoes?’

  McWilliams shrugs. ‘First up, first dressed.’

  ‘S’pose you got these stains from the works too?’

  ‘Happens on occasion at the works. You get blood on your hands.’

  ‘Don’t say nothing more,’ Lizzie says. ‘He can’t get you if you say nothing.’

  ‘Right,’ O’Sullivan says, ‘this’ll do me.’

  From the garden, a voice calls to O’Sullivan, and he hands the hat back to McWilliams. ‘Finish getting dressed,’ he says.

  Lizzie follows O’Sullivan through the house. Out back, the tracker holds the dirt-crusted axe. He shows O’Sullivan the corner of a sugar bag weighed down with soil, wraps both hands around it and hauls it up. The bag vomits Joe’s jimmy twisted with leather, and a torch, rags, paper notes, silver coins. Lizzie sits on the ground – there’s no good she can do anyone now. She puts her hand on her knee and realises she’s still in her nightie, its lace falling away at the bottom. Can’t bring herself to do any needlework since she got out.

  The tracker bundles the objects in the sugar bag. The leather-bound jimmy emerges from the top, the leather darker in places. When the cop swings it up, Lizzie glimpses a white wrinkled chunk of matter, all folded. It takes her a moment to recognise it as skin, torn off and broken. Lee’s skin.

  Joe said that most other men would have killed her, and she feels as though she could be looking at her own skin, broken and sticky enough with blood to cling to the baton after it hollows her head.

  A man came to her once, perfectly normal face-on, but in the bedroom he turned to the side and the back of his head dipped away to nothing. Said a Turk had taken it, and they’d sewed him up alright, sent him back home. She kept her hands to the good side of his face. He barely spoke, requested nothing. She feels this horror again, the shock of seeing the man half-missing, the splattered baton in the tracker’s hands.

  The sun heats the ground under her bare feet and the top of her head. A succulent leaves a spray of burrs clinging to her nightie. The tracker shoulders the sugar bag, heads off round the side. He walks through the washing line, knocks over the Y-branch that holds up one side. The clean sheets – left there for days now – trail on the ground, ballooning in the wind.

  Lizzie has to haul herself up the stairs, her legs that shaky. In the hallway, the copper has Joe by the elbow. His wrists are cuffed at his back. She thinks of a chicken, headless, the pimpled skin of its wings tied up with string. The cop leads Joe down the stairs, and she follows them to the car. McWilliams is already in the back, his felt hat on, the tracker peering in at the window, still holding the bundle.

  O’Sullivan turns to her, his hand on the car. ‘Don’t come, Mrs O’Dea.’ He folds himself into the car, sits for a moment with his hands on the wheel, waiting for the tracker to load the sugar bag in the back. The other copper stands on the foot rail that runs along the outside of the car. The tracker hangs off the other side and taps the roof to signal they’re ready. O’Sullivan pulls out.

  Lizzie goes inside. Tries not to think of the two coppers, the tracker, Joe and McWilliams in that car together, the wind whistling between them. She pulls all the shutters closed. Makes the house into a cave, t
raps herself in with the heat, sweats it out as though she has a fever, like her dad did once when she was sick, blocking the chimney with old rags, shuttering her in the lounge room, sealing the door with towels, stoking up the fire. She felt as though she couldn’t breathe, a creature sitting on her chest and squeezing. Now, for the first time since she came to Townsville, she longs for her dad. Someone who hasn’t abandoned her.

  Thelma comes by next morning, banging on the door with a newspaper in her hand. ‘Betty, it’s me.’

  Lizzie opens the door. Thelma hugs her, and she doesn’t know what to do. She stands there with her arms at her side, crying. Thelma makes her tea, spreads out the paper on the arm of a chair, the pages curved. POLICE FIND. MURDER OF CHINESE, TOWNSVILLE. CHARGES. Joe’s and McWilliams’ names. Further down the page, FRESHLY DISTURBED SOIL. Lizzie can’t read any more.

  Thelma brought over a bottle of brandy and a steak. They balance the food on their knees with the bottle between them, listening to the wireless so Lizzie doesn’t have to talk. ‘I should get one of these,’ Thelma says, sliding her hand over the polished head of the wireless. Lizzie gives it to her, lets her take it away between her arms, because she can’t imagine being on her own with the chatter of men who speak so differently from her, from anyone she knows.

  When Joe’s sentence comes, Lizzie can only think of O’Sullivan taking the two men to see the body of Lee Gum See, laid out in the morgue, his face caved in. She heard this in the court, and that the men said nothing. She thinks it should be her, that she’s watching the trial when she is already dead.

  Joe’s face is still throughout the dealings, except after the jury comes back with the guilty verdict, and the police magistrate asks if he has anything to say. He says, ‘I never expected it any other way after His Honour summed up against me.’

  McWilliams says, ‘I’m an innocent man. The police had to pin it on someone. Perhaps the truth will be found out at the retrial.’

  Lizzie wears a veil over her face, stares at the courtroom filtered by mesh.

  She reads about McWilliams’ retrial in the paper – learns his first name too.

  ‘Gentlemen of the jury, do you find George McWilliams guilty or not guilty?’ ‘Not guilty.’ These words, uttered at a few minutes after three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, concluded the trial of George McWilliams.

  Based on the testimony of an omnibus driver and some local boys who saw him playing with a dog, the jury decided he was ‘too drunk to kill the Chinaman’.

  As soon as he’s free, McWilliams visits her. When he kisses her, she’s repelled, as though a crocodile stood up on its hind legs and smashed its snout into her face. He’s come too late to salvage anything. In the time between, she’s thought of the way he let Joe think it was Lee who Dolly had seen her with, let Joe clout a man to his death. Lee’s face rises to her mind.

  ‘Sorry,’ McWilliams says, his hands on her elbows. ‘Too soon, maybe.’

  ‘I’ll make you a cuppa,’ she says, by way of apology. She can’t look at him.

  He sits at the table with his hands folded on top of his tea cup. ‘You’re so thin,’ he says. She’s been too sick to eat. Wishes she could scrape Lee’s body from her mind.

  McWilliams touches her, his palm clammy. She doesn’t know what to say. Her life has been reduced to the four walls of the house and the courtroom, Thelma bringing her the papers.

  Lizzie asks McWilliams if he wants a boiled egg, cooks him one, burns her fingers on the shell, shouts ‘fuck’, drops it and bursts into tears. McWilliams carries the egg over to the table as if there’s a live chick still inside it. He cracks the shell and peels it. He gives it to her, and while she eats it, suddenly ravenous, he stands behind her and strokes her hair. ‘I want you so much,’ he says, and she lets him take her to bed.

  The bedclothes are tangled, strewn with hair. Her dirty footprint on the sheet untucked at the end. He pushes her down among the funnels of bedclothes. A feather pierces the eiderdown’s cotton cover and pricks her back. McWilliams takes off her skirt, pulls it way down to her ankles. Unbuttoning her top, sliding off her chemise, he says, ‘Don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear this many clothes before.’ She laughs, but wonders if he’s teasing her and feels hurt.

  She watches him peel off his belted trousers and shirt without bothering with the buttons. His body is pale from his time in the lockup. She thinks of the geckos that stay behind furniture too long, so pale you can see their organs, their black beating hearts, their pink digestive chords. Only their feet are darker, arrowed and clawed for climbing. The outline of his tongue is on her mouth, probing around, touching her teeth. This isn’t how she remembers his kisses.

  They are gummed together at the waist with sweat. His cock nudges her thighs. He stops kissing her, puts his hand down and rubs it. She presses him onto his back, takes his cock in her hand, squeezes, rubs up and down. She’s done this so often, it’s mechanical. Her head is heavy from lying on the bed. She doesn’t want to use her mouth, but he’s not responding. She takes his cock between her lips and sucks, and he swells in her mouth. She glances up at him, his cock between her teeth, and feels strangely doubled, one part of her carrying on a routine she knows so well, while the other is disconnected, cold. McWilliams looks relieved. She licks along the shaft, over the head, the cap of skin. He lifts his hips, and she pulls back from the sudden movement, gagging. He lies still again. The blood pulses and pools away under her fingertips. As soon as she moves up to his face, the thing goes down in her hands.

  She sucks him till her mouth hurts. Gives up, falls asleep with his cock in her hands. He shifts. She lies next to him, glad to have someone in bed with her.

  She wakes up to the bright light and McWilliams tucking his cock into his underwear. Disgust curls in her throat. It’s as though her mind has thrown up Lee’s body between them in the bed. She says, ‘I never want to see you again,’ and she’s only half-present when the words come out of her mouth.

  McWilliams’ skin is white and hotly sheened. ‘What do you mean?’

  More words swell inside her. She doesn’t have the energy to hold them back. ‘I don’t want you near me again. Can’t look at you without seeing that Chinaman all beaten up. I look at your hands, I think, they’ve been on that body. I can’t do it. So just get away from me.’

  He doesn’t fight. At least bloody Joe would have fought for her.

  But a week later, McWilliams turns up at the house, silvered with sweat and holding a longneck in a brown paper bag. She locks the door against him. It’s easier now she’s lived without him and Joe for a bit and proven to herself she can survive. She leans her back on the door and tries not to listen to him shouting from her lawn. ‘It wasn’t me. All that jury agreed. I was sloshed. Don’t punish me.’

  She lies in bed with a pillow over her ears. It’s too late now, for any of that. Later his words will come back to her, and she’ll wonder what she was really doing. But it’s the only power she has left – to punish him and herself.

  O’Sullivan, growing a beard now, visits to tell her that Joe’s being sent to Brisbane next week. They can’t hold him at Stewart’s Creek, not enough staff or fences. ‘Will you go with him? Prison’s lonely for men.’

  Lonely for women too. She doesn’t say it. O’Sullivan’s imagination has its limits.

  ‘There’ll be work in Brisbane for you,’ he says. ‘They won’t know what’s happened up here. You could get something decent. Matron at the prison said she’d write you a reference for your laundry work.’

  This time, Lizzie will try and make a decent go of her life. She can work, save properly like she always meant. It’ll be better, away from the whorehouse, where she felt the need to dress up, compete with Bea and Dolly; the lure of the fan-tan parlour.

  Before she leaves, Lizzie visits McWilliams’ rented house. She wants to tell him she’s going. The owner is in, a woman with a harelip curled like the ocean. ‘He’s moved, love,’ she tells Lizzie.

  �
�Know where?’

  ‘No. And he still has the cops coming over, letters from magistrates. All sorts of things.’ She gives Lizzie a significant look.

  Lizzie ends up with his letters – the woman wants them out of her house. She opens them all. One is a fine, and another is asking George McWilliams to sign a witness statement. So he ratted on Joe. She knows then, she’ll never see him again.

  She’s with Joe on the train to Brisbane. They don’t let her into the carriage where he’s kept with the police escort, but she sees him through the window, his head down, his hands between his legs. She lies on the bench with her head against the wall, the train rattling beneath her. This is as close as she’ll get to him. The broken, dried-up trees slide past her. Back to Brisbane.

  Brisbane, 1945

  Dolly sits up. She grips the side of the bed with both hands. ‘Tell ’em not to bother with me,’ she says.

  ‘Huh?’ Lizzie has been dozing. Her neck cramps.

  ‘The wire, wrapped in rubber bands. Rubber gets eaten away.’ Dolly holds two fingers together, the eclipse of her nails transparent. ‘Once the band’s gone – spring.’ She separates her fingers, hinged at the knuckle joints, makes a cross as though she’s warding off witches. Lizzie’s not sure it will be like this. The stomach isn’t an empty balloon but a muscle. The wire won’t burst apart like a flower but scrape Dolly’s innards to get open, more like a crucifix. Lizzie feels it inside her own belly. She shuts her eyes against the thought.

  Early morning rolls out, the acid of Dolly’s stomach working away. She’s unconscious for a while, doesn’t respond to Lizzie saying her name, but then she wakes and slips from bed to her feet, stooped over, half-crawling to Lizzie. ‘Lee’s rooms, you know?’ Her voice is soft. Lizzie presses an ear to her chest, hears her voice humming around her ribcage. ‘The key to that place, it’s with my stuff they’re holding. Stanley will come. You take it. He’ll not know what it’s for.’ She sways.