Treading Air (15 page)

His voice dips. ‘What've you done?'

‘I had to. We don't have nothing. We won't be able to live here. We can't drink, we can't eat nothing 'cept bread and fucking bananas, we can't buy new clothes, have any sort of life together.' Lizzie's voice lifts with tears, cuts out, comes back in again.

‘I don't understand.' Though it sounds as though he might.

She sits up and hurls the money across the room. The coins bounce off the walls, tremble on the floorboards. ‘Know how much that is? More 'an two pounds. You didn't bring that back in a fortnight. I'll be the making of us. I'm not gonna feel bad about it. So bloody well let me alone.'

‘I can't even think about you –' The mattress springs back up. He paces to the end of the room, his hand on his forehead. Brings his boot down onto the back of the door, and the wood splinters.

She winces. ‘Stop it. You'll hurt yourself more.'

He's shining the gas lamp on the floor, gathering the coins. He holds them in one hand, counting them with his thumb, the light in the other hand, and then stacks them on the bedside table.

‘Come back to bed, Joe. Remember what the doctor said.'

‘Can't get in bed with you.'

‘Stop it.' She might lose him. Thought he'd be on her side. Stupid. ‘Doesn't mean nothing, Joe.'

He stands over the bed, the lamp raised. ‘How can you fucking say that? You had men with you tonight?'

‘Don't think about it. Just take the money.'

‘Other men with their hands on you. Christ.' He flings the lamp away. It shatters against the floorboards. The room darkens for a minute, then the oil takes and a flame flares. She can't stop looking at the fire, licking up the corner of the room. Joe just stands there, his face in his hands, groaning. ‘You're me girl, me beautiful girl, and some cunt's had his filthy hands all over you.'

Lizzie shuts out the images of the men she's been with, their faces, their cocks and hands. ‘What else could I do?' The room's heating up, and she can't stand it. Joe does nothing, so she pulls the blanket off the bed and throws it over the flames. The room falls again into darkness. She can hear her own breathing, Joe still groaning in the middle of the room. The night between them.

‘Promise me you won't do it again,' he says finally, calmer. Offering a truce.

But the future is fanning out, the weeks more of nursing Joe, then looking for jobs, the sickening domestic work. A vision of her mother out the back of that bitch's place, wallowing in her own filth.

Across her silence, Joe says, ‘Fucking hell.' Then mutters, as if to himself, ‘This can't be happening. Me beautiful girl gone from me.'

‘I'm getting us food, getting you better.'

‘Fucking daft, naive little girl. You've dirtied yourself. Now you're no different from Grace or that gin parading out in the street.'

Takes Lizzie a second to realise he's talking about Thelma. When she does, their moments of connection through the wall are twisted around by his words and made filthy. She's reminded of her own shock at Thelma's blackness.

Lizzie's frightened now. She could really lose him. All of this will have been for nothing. She just wants him to focus on the money, what it could mean for them. She crosses the room and puts her hand out to him, his shirtsleeve under her fingers. His body hot. Her own sweat between her breasts and under her armpits.

He pulls his arm from her grip. ‘Can't stand to have you touch me.' An axe to her knees. She hears him kick the door again, a sick cracking as he smashes it against the frame.

She lets him go. He's hacked into her. She's burning up.

He's gone. She slams down the back steps, crouches beneath the frangipani tree, dry grass bending under her. She yells out, and her voice echoes over the swampy backyard. She sobs into the bow of her arm until nothing more comes out, and wishes Joe would return and say he didn't mean it, but she knows he won't. Can't tell how much she's hurt him. She pictures him collapsed in the street – terrified for him, but also thinking he deserves it.

She gets all the bad luck, she and her dad both. Maybe if Joe had kept his job, or if he wasn't such a stuck-up cunt, let her make them some money before giving the game away, they could have bought this house – she loves its hallways, the sense of a presence in its corners – and painted it up, a powder green. She could have done it while he was at work, given her something to do. But that's all lost now.

A masked plover, eyes ringed with yellow, chitters above. Exhaustion like a carpet thrown over her.

Lizzie wakes midmorning when she hears a crack. She flings the sheets off, her heart pounding, and skids across the floorboards to the front. She almost trips on Joe, curled over, his knees up and his hands around his gut. The cut above his eyebrow has opened. Blood speckles his cheek and the collar of his shirt.

‘Hell you doing?' Lizzie sinks down next to him.

His eyes are glassy, sheened with drink and salt water. ‘Fucking stonkered, peach.'

‘Get into bed, you barmy coot.'

He seems to think about this for a bit, his eyes rolling towards the ceiling. He puts one arm out, crooks his elbow and lifts his upper body. Gets hold of the doorframe and hauls himself to his feet. Lizzie guides him along the wall and pushes him into the bedroom. He sweats stale alcohol, collapses into the mattress face down, his arms at his sides. She drags him longways across the bed by his feet, gets her shoulder into it to roll him over. He grunts and holds his stomach again.

‘You've done yourself no fucking good,' she says.

They lie next to each other, silent. His breath heavy between his teeth. The bedsprings creak when he moves. His weight on her, his breath against her neck. He scrabbles with her dress, bunching it around her waist. His knees dipping the bed on either side of her. He unbuckles his belt, unbuttons his trousers. ‘Joe,' she says, but he doesn't respond, just shoves his cock inside her. He hasn't fucked her like this before, so rough, not bothering with spit or kissing her. It hurts; she's already battered from the night before.

He's done in less than a minute and rolls off her. She lies with her dress still gathered around her waist, hoping this means he forgives her.

‘I love you,' he says.

‘I love you too.' No pause, no thought.

‘It's done now. You might as well keep going. Just so long as you stay mine.'

She sleeps properly then, knowing he's come back to her.

Lizzie arrives at number fifty-three on Thursday night, wearing the gartered stockings and camisole Bea gave her.

With one man, she blows it by being too enthusiastic. Kisses him before he's expecting it, bumps her teeth against his, his mouth slightly open. He teeters, and she feels they'll both fall. To stop them, she puts her hand on his chest. He doesn't seem to mind. Tells her that he likes her tattoo. ‘Queenly,' he says, his hand on her back. ‘Story goes that Old Victoria had one, a lion fighting a snake. You're in good company.'

She learns to ask the men if she can touch them. They compliment her on her politeness, something she's never had before. With her dad she was always rude. She blames him for this. She's teaching herself a new way of being. Chris says, as he's adjusting his suspenders, which seem to Lizzie to be always getting twisted – no one would make a quick getaway in suspenders – ‘You're so delicate. Not like the others, who obsess over the naming of bodily organs.'

The men call her parts ‘cunt' and ‘pussy', but at first she can't bring herself to say this out loud in bed. It takes her longer to get to ‘cock' and ‘balls'. Now, she tries it out on a man she likes, who has a nicely rounded bottom. He comes to her from the rainforest, smelling of mould. Collecting soil samples, he tells her, when she traces the ellipses of dirt under his fingernails. She says, ‘I like your cock.' She rolls the word around in her mouth, and he shivers. The power of words to arouse.

She talks with Thelma on the verandah, waiting for men. Thelma has her own ideas about how it should all be done. ‘Don't let 'em tell you what to do,' she says, her cigarette smoke spiralling with her hand gestures.

‘How do you get away with that?'

‘They'll ask, but you decide if you want to do it or not. Or, overwhelm them with your lust.' Thelma grins around her cigarette. ‘Suck cock, don't kiss arse.'

Lizzie doesn't think she could stomach the mouth thing.

Thelma does a specialty for men without teeth. ‘First you treat 'em like a baby,' she says, her heel on the verandah railing and a stout in her hand. ‘Rub gin on their gums.' She slugs from the drink. ‘Then you tell them you like their tongue. No teeth in the way, can't do any harm down there.' She circles her pussy with her hand, holds her cigarette in the first two fingers, uses the others to point.

Thelma and Lizzie giggle hysterically, but Lizzie's not actually sure what Thelma is talking about. Thelma finishes off the beer and sucks her lips. ‘You have to laugh.'

Joe's face heals and the swelling in his abdomen recedes. The bruises washed of colour, with a darker purple rim. He sleeps late into the morning, lines up at the unemployment queue for a while in the afternoon, and starts dropping her off and picking her up from the cottage. ‘Don't like you walking through the streets at night.'

He must hang around waiting for her somewhere, because when he knocks on the door to come get her, she's always alone. He never ventures inside, waiting on the verandah for her to get dressed. Sometimes as they're leaving, they see Dolly coming in for a day shift, her eyes blackened with kohl. She waves to them as she slinks past, her blonde hair curved over her cheeks. Lizzie doesn't think the wave is for her – it's Joe Dolly's looking at, and he doesn't look away.

But he never speaks to Dolly, and he always walks Lizzie home, back through the stretch of dirt and grass between Roberts and Heurand Street. They walk in the middle of the road, the fronts of houses closed off to them, hidden with wild gardens of palms and frangipani. Passionfruit vines tangle in their own twisted fronds and push at the loose teeth of the railings.

She sleeps most of the mornings. She's slow to get moving, her body heavy. She wallows in the bed for hours, her joints aching. Bea doesn't like her going out too much during the day. ‘Men don't want to see you in the same places as their wives,' she says. ‘Makes 'em uncomfortable.'

When Lizzie's tired she wears the plainest dresses, chooses hats that hang down around her ears and over her eyes. She hates walking to work in the afternoon with her lacy underwear chafing beneath her dress; can't wait to get it off. She has to go past the Causeway, and the men call out to her from the windows. She doesn't look, not before the sun is set. Doesn't want to see their bristling faces and missing teeth.

Bea hasn't put her on a daytime shift yet. ‘You get a different sort,' she says, ‘during the day. Ask Thelma about it.' The afternoon pigs, Thelma calls them, who don't want to pay for a drink. They keep an eye on the clock while they're fucking, speed it up if it's close to six so they can swill another drink at the Causeway before closing time.

Lizzie doesn't mind taking men in the darkness, when she can imagine anyone. In the bedroom, she slips her dress off. She wears a negligee and a string of pearls. Keeps her garters on. She does her face in the mirror, plucking her eyebrows and drawing a browline with a charcoal pencil. She rouges her cheeks and her knees, so it looks as though she's been on all fours, getting fucked. Once Dolly leaves a metal square with the shape of cupid's-bow lips cut out of the middle, a template for putting on lipstick. Exaggerating the top lip and cutting off the sides of her mouth transforms her face. She becomes Betty Knight.

As Betty, she sees the men as children: one-minded, sensitive, quick to lash out if hurt or criticised. Scarcella farts in the bed, and she makes a joke of it, jumping out and waving her hand, ‘What died in here?' He grabs her, pulls her back down, lifts the bedclothes like a tent, presses her face into the smell. ‘Sniff that,' he says, and she laughs against the sheets because it's disgusting and she doesn't know what else to do.

So she reinforces her demeanour of gentleness and politeness. A man can do anything – pick his nose with one hand, hold his cock with the other; piss on her; cry and snot on her – and she doesn't move. They like her for it.

Thelma fights with the men. On the verandah with Lizzie, she swigs straight out of a longneck and yells at the blokes across the grass between the pub and Heurand Street. They yell foul things back at her, and she laughs. Lizzie asks why she does it, and Thelma says, ‘Feels comfortable. They know who I am straight up. Don't have to watch what I say. You – you've made a problem for yourself. Always holding back.'

But Thelma gets low sometimes. One night she doesn't sit out with Lizzie and refuses to see any man without booze. Her regular – a man with a crooked eye and an English accent, who answers to ‘Old Bill' – brings her a bottle of gin. Lizzie hears him grunting later, imagines him sweating over Thelma, comatose in her lethargy. The other men leave her alone, which makes her sadder because she has no money for that night. ‘You're the true man in this town,' Lizzie hears her tell Old Bill.

She paints for Lizzie, through the bedroom walls, desperate pictures of her decline. ‘Who will look after me little boy if I go?' she wails.

Not me, thinks Lizzie. I'll have them hook any kid out of me.

The idea of the baby she's promised Joe vanishes. She has no energy to care, doesn't want to bring another life into this or be responsible for it. Some men turn down the dreadnoughts, preferring to pull out or just come in her without saying much. She washes the come away in the bowl, sticking her fingers inside herself and scraping it out.