Treading Air (7 page)

Townsville, 1923

L
izzie is wedged, longways, on the bench seat of the train. She can lie out straight with her head against the padded wall, and her feet don't touch the other side. Joe's do. He can't have slept much. But he smiles, and something moves inside her. She holds this moment, the power of him to move her. He sees it, stands up and puts an arm on either side of her. He leans down to kiss her on the mouth. ‘Better watch it – might get yourself in trouble, looking at a man like that,' he says into her face.

His breath is sour. She notices the smell on herself too. She doesn't like the feel of sweat at the creases in her elbows and knees. Acrid smoke drifts through the window above her bed, smogs the rectangle of sunlight. Joe swings on the doorway, shifting with the motion of the train. He braces himself against the frame and lifts up his feet, letting the train rock him. She notices the muscles on his arms and sucks air between her teeth.

She shuts her eyes, and the motion of the carriage gives her the sense that she'll be hurled off the bench at any moment. She presses her fingers against the wall, something solid. When she opens her eyes, the doorway is empty.

Joe's still gone when they arrive at Townsville Station, and she has a moment of panic. She's a thousand miles from everyone else. What if Joe's abandoned her? No, she's being silly. He's just buggered off somewhere. She ungraciously attempts to salvage his bag out of the overhead compartment and is forced to stand on the seat to get it. Dragging her own suitcase with both hands, she slides his bag with her foot. When she gets to the carriage door, she looks around for some man to help her and, finding none, kicks Joe's bag onto the cement platform where it tumbles twice and nearly knocks over a child in a pram. Lizzie shrugs at the mother, swings her own bag forward into the gap and allows it to carry her onto the platform. She stops to retrieve Joe's bag and apologises to the woman with the baby. ‘My husband's gone,' she says.

The woman nods. ‘It's hard. At least mine left his look with the baby.'

Lizzie glances down at the sweaty baby and decides it's easier to let the woman think what she wants.

Shifting her bags nearer the wall, Lizzie stands in the shadow of the corrugated overhang. She imagines Joe lost in the carriages, stepped in the wrong place, disappeared somewhere, sucked back in time to the war, stuck in a loop on a wagon with other soldiers, like in those ghost ships she's heard about that sail the seas endlessly. She wonders again what happened to him in the war. The frond of a potted palm swipes her elbow. She brushes it away, her skin overly sensitive. The frond springs back, tickles her, and she rips the leaf off the stalk and shreds it to strips along the length of its veins. She needs to do something with her hands; she can't stand the waiting.

Joe appears when the pavement beside her is scattered with green curls.

‘Where you been?' she asks.

‘Getting us a honeymoon.' He grins, grabs at her waist, but she curves out of his reach and boots his suitcase. Can't believe he up and left her like that.

‘Not your packhorse,' she says.

Joe locks his fingers over her hand and brings it to his lips. ‘Sorry, peach.' He breathes warmth over her knuckles.

She pulls her hand away but is caught up with him again, his body, the lines at his mouth and eyes. He can read her too easily.

At the ticket booth they ask for a place to stay for a couple of days, and they're directed to the Great Northern Hotel. Lizzie makes a fuss, still irritated with Joe for leaving her in this new place, so he carries both their suitcases across the wide white road, divided by a traffic island planted with palm trees, still new and spindled. The powerlines cut the sky above their heads. White lattice dips below the top verandah of the hotel and casts long shadows over the timber front. Lizzie wonders whether she and Joe can really make a go of it out here; there's something unformed and expectant about the place.

They book a room at the Great Northern, facing the station and the curved garden directing the cars and carts picking up passengers. The man at the bar leaves them to bring their own bags up the stairs. When Lizzie opens the door, a wave of hot trapped air hits her. Joe heaves the suitcases onto the mattress. She opens the door to the verandah. Through the slats she sees a dog panting out the front of the pub, waiting for its owner. The cars and omnibuses are funnelled past. A man drives by with his arm hanging out the window.

She turns to Joe and finds him sprawled out on the bed. He touches his bent knee against hers. ‘We'll get a proper place soon.'

Two weeks until he starts work at the meatworks. Their honeymoon.

He sits up on his elbows, reaches his hand for her, but she's too hot to be touched. He drops back on the bed and spreads his arms out. ‘Come on, let's get your present.'

She waits for him to take something from his bag, worries that she broke her own present at the station, throwing his things around. In the silence, another car rattles past, and a man on the bottom floor calls out something lost in the roar of the engine.

Joe hauls himself up, takes her hand and leads her downstairs.

‘Don't reckon this present exists,' she says, and he laughs.

On Flinders Street, the road is smoother; the hotel owner told them it'd just been concreted. Three men in overalls watch another feed electric wires through a light pole that erupts in four curved prongs, an upside-down anchor. The old gas lamp lies on its back on the pavement, one side smashed. Lizzie wonders whether the lamplighter will end up in a patched canvas tent, squatting in the dirt, back at the unemployment camp she saw on the fringe of the railway station.

Powerlines crest buildings with flagged awnings like bibs. A man in a tie leans against a pole, talking to another man in rolled-up shirtsleeves, his fingers loosely curved around a briefcase. A woman holds a girl in a white dress and hat by the hand, pushing a low pram with the other, a linen sheet draped over the baby. The buildings turn down flat faces of brick and curved balustrade and lattice. Bikes lean against the gutters, a car butted up against one's tyre. Joe slows down, and Lizzie stops to look at the window of a jeweller's shop. Nothing takes her fancy. She's surprised at the progress of the place. She'd imagined some backwater, but there's people out, ten or more on the street around her. Maybe Joe was right to bring them here. Unburdened by the bags, she feels lighter, more capable.

‘Where are we going?' she asks.

Joe doesn't answer, squints against the glare. He speeds up, drags them to a fruit stall, decked out with a striped awning and bright with swollen watermelons and mangoes. A sign above it, written in capital letters with elaborate flourishes: ‘The Fruit Orchard'. Joe says something to the man behind the counter that she doesn't catch. The man nods, ducks underneath the lip of the counter and comes out with a paper bag rolled at the top. Joe passes over money. The man pockets it. Joe hands her the bag.

She takes it between thumb and finger, and screws up her nose. ‘Hell's this?'

Joe grins at her.

She feels like slapping him. ‘Got me hopes up, you bastard.'

‘Wait, wait.' He brings her round the corner, and the beach comes on them unexpectedly, the waves small and quiet.

‘Water's brown,' she says. The bite of disappointment.

He leads her down to the beach, a fringe of palm trees at their backs. Lizzie sits with the bag on her lap and waits for him to settle himself. She unrolls the top of the paper. A red apple nestles in the bag's creased bottom. She pulls it up by its stalk and makes to throw it at Joe, but he grabs it from her hand. She sits with her arms crossed, staring out to sea and the blue-purple outline of Magnetic Island hovering on the horizon.

Joe pierces the apple's dotted skin with his pocketknife, cuts it in half. One side falls open, exposes the flesh, curved and pale like skin left too long in the dark. The star of seeds on the inside is missing. Instead, a paper twist of white powder.

‘For my snow queen,' Joe says, presenting it to her.

‘Golly! That's not –?'

He grins at her again. ‘'Tis.'

‘Where'd you find it?'

He shrugs. ‘Man on the train told me. Put your hand out.'

She obeys, palm down, and Joe turns it up to him. He taps the snow onto her wrist. She hesitates. Doesn't want to make a fool of herself. The powder stirs in the wind.

‘Don't let it blow away.' He cups his hand over her wrist. ‘Here, I'll show you.' He blocks off one nostril, put his nose to her wrist and snorts. She giggles at his cold inhalation on her skin. He taps more snow out for her and lifts her wrist to her nose. ‘Sniff.'

She sucks it up, laughing, thinking that there will be no one to stop her, to make her feel small. She's free with Joe up here, where nobody knows them.

Joe and Lizzie scramble up the side of Castle Hill, their feet skittering over loose stones. Her dress tangles in brittle shrubs, and she stoops to unhook herself. He charges ahead. She heaves forward, feels the material of her skirt rip, grabs on to a clump of grass to pull herself away, and she is after him.

A tree trunk materialises from the darkness. She brakes hard. Joe crashes up ahead, takes hold of the rough bark and launches off the trunk. She has her hand out now, searching for him. The moon above them. Her body heavy. She can't see Joe. She stops, and the space around her hums with crickets. A weight on her shoulder. She shudders, raises her hand to brush the thing away, but then Joe's voice is in her ear, telling her to shut up and listen. He puts his arm around her waist. Pins and needles spread across her skin. She feels his heat, the slope behind them. She tilts into him. The wind carries a low moaning from somewhere up ahead. Little animal sounds, gasping – some strange northern creature, a bird maybe, calling to its mate across the cliff face and still sea.

A word carried across the grass makes her realise that the sound is human. She laughs. Joe brushes his fingers over her lips, and she bites his knuckle. A shiver of excitement runs through her. He kisses the tip of her ear, pulls her down into the grass. A blade pricks her knee.

They slither closer to the sounds. The man's white shirt glows in the moonlight. The woman's face is lost in a cloud of hair. The man sits up to shed his jacket, turning the sleeve inside out so that the silk lining unfurls, a rose-coloured cylinder held up in the darkness, the moon at its edges.

Joe crawls forward. He hooks his fingers in the jacket's collar, drawing it to him. He opens the jacket, and the silk lining is the colour of the lungs that move so close to the material. He extracts a leather wallet from the breast pocket and slips out four one-pound notes. He cups Lizzie's hand, as he did when he gave her the snow, and presses the notes into it, curls her fingers around them. She lifts her skirts, shows him a dimpled thigh, tucks the notes into the top of her stocking.

The man calls out. ‘Oi!'

Joe grabs Lizzie's hand and they career forward, the slope taking them. The horizon shifts upward, the stars and moon globed above their heads. She's propelled by an unknown force, his hand in hers, sweaty, his body a lead weight pulling her down.

She remembers suddenly the hotelkeeper telling her that men have begun work on a quarry, a gash cut into the landscape, dropping down. She wants to call out to Joe, but she's too breathless, the slope is too much. Her feet aren't touching the ground now, but treading air, churning up the stones in front of her, which slide across the surface. She laughs with the freedom of movement, Joe with her, no one else but them in the night, the streetlights along Flinders Street like oil wells set alight, burning endlessly, tankers pulled up at the wharf, the sea empty, glassy, mud beneath the surface, crabs buried in the mud, only their pincers raised above the dirt, snapping the empty water around them, hoping some unlucky creature will, by some lining up of the stars, a flicking of fins, be in that precise space at the moment when their pincers close around it and pull the fish, struggling, back into the hole.

They sleep the next day, and on the third take the steamer to Magnetic Island, carrying a wool blanket, borrowed-without-asking from the hotel, and tins of baked beans in a canvas bag. The dredger runs ahead of them, spitting up sand. It makes a trench, their boat wallowing in the shallows, the waves shucking its sides. Lizzie sees things this way – Joe opening up a way for them; they're moving ahead. They'll get a house of their own, once they're out of the hotel.

A sea eagle scoops down and hovers in front of the boat. Lizzie meets its eye, and the bird lifts away into a sky cupped to touch the horizon, the mountains swollen above the shoreline. Outside of the Townsville port, the ocean opens up and the breeze hits them, salt sticking to her palms.

The steamer docks, and they move across the jetty, wooden boards rattling, the sea gridded between the slats. A man presses too close behind her, and she tucks her body in to avoid contact. Joe's lost up ahead. She steps onto the dirt roadway, spots him waiting for her at the side. He holds his hand out to her, and they walk up the track holding hands. A hoop pine thrusts its roots through a rock severed down the middle. A buggy overtakes them, the horse shying at the corner and then plunging on. Lizzie wonders how they got the horse on the island and if it has ever left.

On the beach she finds a club of coral, grey and stained. She weighs it in her hands. The bay spreads out before them. A line of waves foams as it licks the rocks. Joe flings their canvas bag under a palm. The coconuts hanging from a tree seem erotic to her. Joe tries to climb it, knees out, feet gripping the trunk. He slides down and swears. She inhales another twist of snow.

While he's building a fire, she takes off her shoes and works her feet into the sand.

‘You look beautiful, the sea behind you,' Joe says, and the compliment fits her own vision of herself on the beach, a movie star with her hair messed in the wind.