Treading Air (4 page)

Something taps the window next to her head. ‘Lizzie!'

She spins around. Grace is leaning on the windowsill, a group of young men glued right behind her. Lizzie recognises Johnno and Hanrahan, and she turns from them. These boys crumbled the last of what she had with her mum. She hopes they're watching her and Joe, who's taking her out properly and buying her dinner. He nods warily at Grace and looks back at Lizzie.

‘Shout us a drink?' Grace says to the side of his face. ‘You owe me one after what you did to my fella.'

Joe looks at her full on. ‘You, because you're Lizzie's mate,' he says. ‘Not these larrikins.' Lizzie doesn't think he's said her name before. She's glad he doesn't want anything to do with the boys.

Grace nods at Joe, grins at Lizzie and eyes the window as though she's going to climb it, but Joe gestures her around with his forefinger. She disappears and then reappears at the entrance, heads over to their table.

‘What's your poison?' Joe asks her.

She eyes the downed pints in front of Lizzie and Joe. ‘Same as yours.'

Joe returns with his hands circling three beers. Grace sticks her tongue in the foam, and Lizzie does it too. She catches Joe staring, dips her tongue in the beer, wets it and runs it over her lips. Joe watches her, his head pressed against the wall and his face very still.

‘I interrupting something?' Grace asks. She looks at Lizzie over the rim of her glass and raises her eyebrows.

‘This'll be the last round before closing,' Joe says. The Osbourne is a respectable hotel that keeps the six p.m. closing time, so he must have been trying to impress Lizzie when he chose it.

‘Frank's recovered, thanks for asking,' Grace says to Joe, looking him straight on.

Joe says calmly, ‘Shouldn't have struck out like that in a friendly match. Needs to learn to control himself.'

Grace shoots a glance at Lizzie, who shrugs, staying right out of it. Frank was only passing through anyway. Lizzie doesn't know how Grace can stand it, the way men just disappear from her life. Already Lizzie has a flutter of panic at the thought that Joe might up and leave her.

One of the young men outside warbles, a willy-wagtail's cry, and tilts his head at Grace. ‘I'm off,' she says. ‘They've spotted a nice one for me.' She does this sometimes for a bit extra – flirts with men in bars and, while they're distracted, the boys pinch their coin. She downs the beer, stands up, wobbles and burps. Lizzie laughs. ‘Thanks for the drink, Dad,' Grace says and sits on Joe's knee to kiss him on the cheek. ‘I'll leave you to her.' Grace trips outside.

Joe eyes off the empty glass. ‘She can put it away,' he says.

‘I know. Grace and me've had some good nights together. One bar down there,' Lizzie points off along the street, ‘plays jazz on a Saturday, and by morning the floors are swimming in booze.'

‘You go there with Grace?' he asks, and Lizzie nods. ‘And those boys?'

‘Not them. Grace's friends. Don't like 'em much.' Lizzie isn't ready to tell him about what they asked her to do – what Grace does – with the men they find for her, out the back of hotels. She doesn't know the language for what's happened to her since her dad stopped caring where she went. She only plays around in the light, where the exits are visible. She's learnt to keep her expression still, to give the impression she's seen it all before and to keep her distance. On those nights with Grace, she longs to be touched, but backs away before anything much happens. Now she wants it.

As if he knows, Joe puts his arm around her shoulders, breathes into her neck. ‘Come to the jazz club with me.'

‘Alright.'

While she's standing on the edge of the pavement next to Joe, waiting for an omnibus to pass, the lights burn into Lizzie's memory as though she's lifting up and outside her own body. The feeling drops away, but she'll remember that moment, even if she forgets the rest of the night. Not that she wants to forget any of it.

The jazz club is dark. Joe complains about how much the drinks cost. She feels bad for suggesting the place and doesn't know what to say. Wishes he wouldn't spoil it. They sit in the dark while a man on stage licks the reed of his sax and slides through the notes, which fall down over them, the piano underneath stamping out a heartbeat. Across the bottom of the stage runs a painted banner showing frogs crouched on toadstools – they're playing the double bass, drums, an instrument Lizzie doesn't recognise. All badly painted, the frogs too fat, too human, their faces lumpy, eyes bulged and webbed feet raised as though waving. On the band's music stands hang fringed banners, stitched with their names in elaborate cursive: Willy, Ted, Bunny, Roy, Lynn. Behind them, a cloth peony vine weaves through wooden lattice to look like a Chinese garden; banners hang from either side, printed with Chinese lettering.

Joe's hand is in hers. The music slips away. Just him. The skin at his wrist, his forearm, feels different to the skin of younger men she's known. It sags, lacks elasticity. He acts as if he's holding something in, which she could touch if he'd let her. He moves his fingers over the pleats of her skirt, and she shivers, grins at him, but his face is turned to the stage. Maybe she's broken the rules. She looks back at the man folding over the sax and pretends nothing's going on.

Joe's fingers slide up and down her leg. It tickles. She wants to pull away. She hopes his movement changes, and that she doesn't laugh. When he leaves her to get a drink, she can still feel his hand. She's really got it bad – one of her mum's phrases. No choice but to let this disease run its course. But that implies it's something to be got over, and she's its victim. She doesn't feel like that, so maybe her mum was wrong. Maybe that's just what went on between her parents.

Joe returns. They sit awkwardly, Lizzie trying to think of a way she can go back to touching him. She leans closer so she can hear what he says. In the dark, his breath hits her ear with the music, sax notes falling from his mouth, some alien language, and she panics because shouldn't she understand?

He cups the back of her head and kisses her. She shuts her eyes. The movement of his lips on hers. Stout on his breath. When he puts his tongue in her mouth, she shivers and reaches hesitantly out with her own, feels it connect with his, two live muscles sliding together. Something drops away from her. She sinks into him, putting her hands on his arms and rubbing against his skin. When she opens her eyes, she meets his gaze unexpectedly – he's watching her kiss him. What does he make of her expressions, her clumsiness?

Voices mutter. A man from the bar comes up to them. ‘Excuse me,' he says. ‘Customers are complaining.'

They ignore him.

‘You'll have to leave.'

Joe eyeballs the man. Lizzie's already getting up, glancing at the ground, the sticky carpet, her once-beautiful shoes – how could she think they suited her? She comes out into the foyer where a man is selling tickets and the jazz is dim. She can see the light of the street outside, climbs up the stairs, Joe's hand on her wrist. ‘You alright?' he asks.

‘Yeah. Embarrassed.'

He holds her elbow. ‘Don't be.' He seems unmoved, pleased almost. It's different for men. Lizzie's not used to doing things in the open – she thought because he was doing it, it must be alright.

‘I know a place we can go,' he says.

They hold hands in the street because she doesn't know how to say no. She wants to touch Joe anyway, but she spends most of the time looking at the faces of other people to see if she can tell what they're thinking. When she and Joe cross the road, she allows her hand to slip out of his, walks slightly ahead.

He pulls her into a side road and pushes her against the blank backend of the pub. He bends down, and their teeth hit. His tongue, his hands. She's uncoiling. Her neck hurts from craning her face to him. He slides her up the wall, curls his hand around her hip. His cock against her inner thigh. She grins when she finds his wallet tucked into his coat pocket. Kisses him harder and lifts it, a trick Grace taught her.

‘Want to feel your skin,' he says, rolling up his shirt, untucking hers from the waistband of her skirt and pressing himself into her, kissing her, their bare bellies sliding together. He says, ‘Think you're clever, peach?' and takes his wallet from her stocking.

She laughs in the darkness.

‘Come back with me,' he says.

This panics her. She should say no, walk away, but she makes eye contact and feels the pull. The best she can do is stand away from him with her back against the wall. ‘Have to get home to Dad.'

‘Your old man don't care.' Joe keeps his eyes on her.

She speaks without meaning a word of it. ‘Does when I'm not there to cook him breakfast.'

Joe leans forward so his hips brush hers. She sucks the breath through her teeth. He's close enough that she can feel him looking down at her. ‘I'm not gonna hurt you.'

She laughs again. Doesn't believe him, and there's danger, pain in putting herself at risk. She looks down. Joe's boot tucked in between her feet. ‘You mightn't mean to,' she says to the ground.

‘Here,' he says, and she looks back at him, into his face, shadowed in the streetlight except for the crest of his cheekbones, the narrow, pale lips. ‘Promise you, I'll look after you. You're not like any girl I've met. Don't want to let you go.'

She knows that this is how she feels already, that there's not much point fighting against it. Knew soon as she saw him at the races. She's surprised he feels the same so quick. Wants to believe it badly. He leans into her, his breath against her mouth and his tongue between her lips, sliding behind her teeth. The breath goes out of her.

They climb up to St Pauls Terrace, where an omnibus turns the corner with them. A car slows down so its passenger can call out to them, his words jumbled and lost as the car moves on. The man's white face – black spots for eyes – leaves a luminous trail through the dark. They stop on the bridge, and a car slides underneath, its motor echoing at their feet. Joe kisses her with her back to the railing, and it dips a little. The space of air between her and the road, the breeze on her back. Joe's body all along hers. She tucks herself into him, frightened of falling. He kisses her harder and puts his hands around her back, exactly what she wanted him to do. ‘I can feel your heart beating,' he says.

She can't seem to stop laughing, all nerves.

They leave the roadway. He takes her down a path flattened out of the grass. The silence rings in her ears, the traffic noises gone. They hit a gravel path, and a dog barks from the verandah of a cottage squatting on wooden haunches. Joe leads them to a gate, pausing while he fumbles with the latch, breathing hard. Out the back, a frangipani tree is outlined in the glow of a streetlight. Grass tangles at her knees, already wet with dew. She wades through it. The stalks spring back in her wake, brushing her calves.

He gets the door unlocked, and it creaks open. She follows him down a hallway where a dark cavity in the wall indicates another room. The flare of a match illuminates his face. He holds it to the wick of a gas lamp. The faint smell of paraffin. A tangled cotton sheet wedged into his cast-iron bed end. The linen pillow, the thought of him flinging the sheet off his body that morning, makes her knees tremble. She leans on the bed.

He puts the light down, runs his hand along her arm. Kisses the corner of her mouth. A current moves through her. She shifts her face so she can kiss him straight on, presses herself into him, runs her hands over him, bites his lip.

He shoves her off. ‘Take it easy, peach.'

She doesn't know how to respond, feels awkward, too hot. Sweat at her armpits. When she steps away from him, her body is still humming, but the movement runs itself in loops. Paralyses her.

He pulls a longneck out of his bedside table. Picks up the lamp. ‘Back in a minute.' He leaves her in darkness, sweat cooling at her back. She doesn't know what she's doing here. She puts her hand out, meets cast iron, holds on.

Joe's light doubles back at her from a frameless mirror leant up against a wall, and herself in the silvered surface, her eyes black, dilated in the darkness, her bun unrolled and low at the neck, her skirt twisted. Joe puts the lamp down and pours beer into the glasses he's brought with him. He hands one to her. It fizzes in her hand before she takes a slug. She gulps the drink, holds her glass out for more. Joe fills her up. She swallows another half-glass.

Joe loops one hand around her waist and pulls her to him. He swivels her body so that the light falls on her. He pulls down the shoulder of her silk blouse. The heat of his body is against her, chest to shoulders, groin to arse. She tips her head back, takes in more beer. Joe pulls her arm out of the sleeve, the top draping across her like a toga. He rolls her brassiere off. She hates the look of her nipple unaroused, its fringe of lumps, flattened, inverted. She slides her hand over her nipple, checks between her fingers that the centre is raised, before she reveals it to Joe. He dips his finger in the last of her beer, traces the outline of the areola, presses the tip. Brings his head down and drinks the beer he's put there. His tongue is on her breast, and the feeling repeats between her legs as though there's a direct line between the two points.

He pushes her onto the bed, his cold fingers on her warm knees. He slides his hands up, taking her skirt with him. Her thighs, the tops of her stockings, all exposed to him. His body bears down over her. The breath moves out of her. She wants to be crushed. He puts his hand on her thigh and exhales. She hears the edge of his voice. Her cunt throbs. She shifts her hips into his and feels the fabric of his trousers, the heat coming off his chest.

He kneels, his knees either side of her hips and his legs against her upper thighs. He pulls off his shirt. She puts her hands on his chest, the globe of his ribcage. She claws him. All animal. His hand on her cunt, her own heat and wetness. He slips his finger between the curled hair and touches the walls of her cunt. She's pinned by his one finger, the alien sensation of it sliding inside her.