Treading Air
Page 26
At the prison gates, they let out one man at a time. The families gather around the edges and greet them. Lizzie can’t stand all the hugging, the tears. She worries when she tries to picture Joe and his face slides from her. She holds herself up with a pillar so she can see the men just as they leave, their sharp upward glances to the sky, to the hovering people, off down the street, to the pub, maybe.
A man comes out, grizzled at the whiskers. She’s sure it’s Joe, but he’s greeted with a raised walking stick held by a man with a spine in the shape of a C. The released prisoner holds the upraised stick as though it’s a hand and shakes it. They move on, the stick keeping the distance between them.
Joe comes out with another bloke. She almost misses him. His hair is grey and thin. His forehead seems enlarged, hanging heavy over his eyes. But he walks the same as he always did, with turned-out feet and a flick of the ankle. Seeing his walk hurts her – she wasn’t expecting to recognise him this way.
She moves forward. Her mouth’s open, ready to speak. His name has circled her head for years.
She thinks of Dolly’s crucifix of wire. If the surgeons had cut her open, they would have found the Woman’s Temperance coathanger unravelled and straightened, and an eaten-away rubber band.
Joe puts his hand on the man’s shoulder, his palm flat. She remembers the weight of his body on hers, the forces that held them together, strong enough to keep her here, waiting for him. His arm is ropey with veins. She wants him to touch her. She needs him in the yard; the furniture’s dragged to the limits of her own strength. She feels the weight of his notes to her, which have held her in place, kept her tied to the city, the gaol. She’s dizzy, spiralling towards him.
He doesn’t look like the man who wrote her those messages. The size of his body frightens her. She remembers the dead man who sent him to prison, what Joe did to him. What he’s capable of doing to her. The florist’s talk of Lee’s sister, the wall of orchids still alive, has stirred things up. Twenty years on, the shock waves from when Joe brought that steel jimmy down are snaking out to meet her. The man she’s put together from twenty years of scribbled postcards knocked down.
She turns away, walks fast along the bitumen road, frightened now that Joe will recognise her too. In an alleyway awash with the smell of rot, she holds her face in her hands and cries so much she vomits.
Two weeks later, Lizzie and the florist are being messy with the newspapers, spreading them out over the table, holding them down with cups and vases. A headline catches Lizzie’s eye: ‘COURT CHARGE AFTER SOUTHSIDE SLASHING. “LIFER” RETURNS TO GAOL’. She reads about her own husband, wishes to god she hadn’t seen it at all.
Joseph O’Dea was remanded by Mr Wilson, C.S.M, yesterday on the charge of having unlawfully done grievous bodily harm to Raymond George Fuller. The prosecutor said that a man had been slashed by a jagged-edged drinking glass and was seriously ill in hospital. The injured man suffered a severed artery in his right arm and extensive lacerations to the face, right leg and arm. Pleading his own case after a solicitor appearing for him had left the court, O’Dea said the last minute failure by friends to provide counsel’s fees had left him without a mouthpiece.
Lizzie leans against the brick wall of her place, listening to the cars streaming past like the tide rushing away. The magistrate’s vision for her has fallen apart right in front of him – Mr Wilson is the same man who gave her a light sentence so she could be with her husband.
Part of her wants to defend Joe, to blame this Fuller bloke, but she can’t get the energy. She knew all along Joe would fail.
She hears the notes of a saxophone from the street and finds herself buoyed up, as though a weight that has pressed her to the bottom of a lake has lifted and she’s sprung to the surface, the open air, a vision of the horizon.
Next day, thinking of Lee and his sister, she sets up a pair of Chinese lanterns out the back of her place. At night they cast a glow across the river. She imagines the light penetrating Brisbane, welcoming the strays, the drifters, the bohemians. She’s a new presence here in this city.
Acknowledgements
The events in this novel are loosely based on the life of Elizabeth O’Dea, alias Betty Knight, O’Brian, Stewart and Johnston, as she appears in newspaper articles in The Cairns Post, Townsville Daily Bulletin and Brisbane Courier from the 1920s to 1940s, as well as the brief mention of Elizabeth and Joseph O’Dea in James Morton and Susanna Lobez’s Gangland Queensland (2012, Melbourne University Publishing). Lizzie O’Dea is largely silent in these accounts. In this novel, I invent her personality, beliefs and day-to-day behaviours for the purposes of fiction and the character presented here is likely to be significantly different from the real Lizzie O’Dea. However, the newspaper articles in the novel are verbatim extracts from papers of the day.
Raelene Frances’ Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution (2007, UNSW Press) and Leigh S. Straw’s Drunks, Pests and Harlots: Criminal Women in Perth and Fremantle (2013, Humming Earth) were invaluable in presenting the historical and political context of women’s experiences of prostitution in Australia. Jill Nagle’s edited collection of writings from contemporary sex workers, Whores and Other Feminists (1997, Routledge), provided rich insight into the experiences of sex work from a feminist perspective.
I am grateful to Ray Hollyoak for his knowledge of the history of sex work in Townsville, and to Dr Shelley Greer for her advice about Townsville in the 1920s. Some of the historical detail has been altered to fit the narrative and timeline.
‘Startlingly beautiful, a joy! Van Luyn renders this time in Australian history in full technicolour.’
ALICE ROBINSON
In 1920s Queensland,
Lizzie O’Dea wants to get away from her dad and the memories of her mum that haunt her. At the races she meets attractive, war-scarred Joe and sees her chance to escape. But life with Joe isn’t what she dreamt it would be.
Finding herself on the fringes of society, Lizzie discovers a new sense of independence and sexuality, love and friendship. It’s a precarious life, though, always on the edge of collapse.
Two decades later, Lizzie is sick and worn out. Lying in a Brisbane lock hospital, she thinks about Joe, who’s been lost to her for many years. But she’s a survivor. There’s hope yet.
Set between Brisbane and Townsville, and based on real events that the author uncovered from historical archives, Treading Air is the remarkably vivid tale of a young Australian working-class rebel who clashed with the expectations of her world.
‘I love Lizzie O’Dea, a fallen woman who is tough and tender ’ a desiring, sensuous creature who deserves compassion without ever demanding pity. Ariella Van Luyn has crafted a rare and surprising historical depiction of a woman who lusts and loves, and owns her own sexuality even when it nearly kills her.’
ROCHELLE SIEMIENOWICZ