Treading Air (5 page)

He grunts and stands up abruptly to unbuckle his belt and pull off his trousers. The sound of the buckle makes her shiver. A dark wedge of pubic hair and his cock rising out from it, the upward movement of a pale shaft. Its head exposed and pink. She's only seen a few other cocks hard like this, and only when men and boys have brought them out to excite themselves. Each time she was revolted and confused by the shudder that ran through her at the sight. Now she longs to reach for it, roll it between her fingers, feel its heat. She puts her hand out. Joe grabs it and wraps her fingers around his cock. She weighs it in her palm and hears the shallowness in his breath. ‘Like it?' he asks.

‘Yeah.' What else to say? The thing fascinates her.

He breathes through his nose. She wants his hands all over her, but she doesn't know how to direct her desire – it sits on her and makes her heavy with guilt. The fear that he might find her ugly. She responds best when he encourages her, makes noises. She listens to his breath and tries to take the pulse of his cock, blood running through the veins under her fingers.

He puts himself back down over her. His mouth all over her lips. His tongue in her mouth forces her head back. ‘Jesus, I want you.' She's surprised by his focus as he parts her legs and fits his cock inside her. He fumbles, butting the head into the crease between her cunt and thigh, then closer, against the folds of her cunt, then he slides inside her. His movement between her legs. He fits his head into her shoulder and makes breathy animal noises against her ear. His hips press into her.

She's still wearing her shoes when he fucks her this first time.

He levers himself up and says, ‘Need to be careful.' He pulls out and takes his cock in his hand. She doesn't know what he's doing and wonders if she's upset him, then she flinches at the liquid that pours onto her stomach, its heat and pale viscosity. Her cunt tingles richly where he's just been. At that moment he could do anything to her, but he doesn't, just rolls off her and onto his back. She lies still until he puts a hand on her thigh. The other hand lies curled against his chest. He coughs. She rolls towards him, but he stops her. ‘Careful, don't want that stuff on me.'

‘Should've thought of that before,' she says, and she doesn't cuddle up to him like she meant to, but lies with her belly drying in the night air.

In the morning, he notices her tattoo and admires her for taking the pain. She walks home across the city with the sun at her back. A jacaranda offers its purple flowers to her head and feet. The traffic rolls past her like the ocean, and she's buoyed up. Joe's hands on her, his words, which she holds to herself like gifts. At last, she thinks. At last.

Lizzie expects Joe to come over in a day or so, but a week later he still hasn't shown. Maybe she read him wrong. He got what he wanted and fucked off. Life with her dad stretches out in front of her, making her cross-eyed with anxiety.

Grace comes to see her, and they go shopping. Lizzie looks out for Joe in the city, dawdling at the top of Brunswick Street. Grace pulls her away to look at shoes. In the shop, Grace tries to pocket some boot polish, not because she wants it much but because it's there. The shop woman catches her with her hand halfway to her pocket and asks them both to leave. Lizzie has no patience for Grace's tricks, but she says nothing and lets the silence build up. They lean on a wall under the awning at Waltons and watch the tram shuttle by. Grace hands her the cigarette they're sharing, its tip rimmed with lipstick. Lizzie takes a drag and squints against the smoke. Her tolerance for pain is down – the smoke stings her eyes, and her legs ache from standing.

A man in a suit passes them, and Grace stands with her foot out and watches him. He looks them both up and down as he walks. Grace puts the cigarette in her mouth and crosses her arms. Lizzie knows she plays out these gestures in her mind as though she's being filmed. ‘He's gonna look back. Is he looking back?' she asks.

Lizzie takes a peek around Grace's shoulder. ‘Yep. Don't look, but. He's turning around.' She watches him. ‘And another, under the brim of his hat.' With a thrill, Lizzie mimics the upturned brim, the bend of his neck.

Grace nods, the cigarette still in her hand. ‘Knew it.' They laugh. Lizzie feels better, like she might recover from Joe. She needed to be reminded that there are other men.

A group of young blokes turns the corner: Johnno and Hanrahan, and a few others.

Lizzie looks at Grace. ‘Get me away from these larrikins.'

‘They're alright, Liz. Don't let 'em bother you.' Grace holds on to her wrist.

One boy jumps on the back of a blinkered horse bound to a wagon, clips his heels against its sides and pretends to ride it. The horse blows air between its lips, shakes its head so the harness rattles. Another boy yells at the rider. He slides off the back just as a man comes out of the barbers, the cut bits of hair still snowing from his head, and gets into the buggy.

The boys move up to Grace and Lizzie. ‘Oi, chromo,' says Johnno, as Grace squints at him through her smoke.

‘Fuck you, Hanrahan,' Lizzie says, even though she knows swearing at him is pointless – he's a thick-skinned bugger.

Sure enough, Hanrahan flashes her a grin, shows his missing incisor. ‘Got something for you girls.' He looks over at Johnno, and they both grin.

Grace and Lizzie exchange glances too.

‘Not in the mood,' says Lizzie.

‘What is it?' Grace asks.

Johnno moves in closer, looks behind him, angles his body to block the view of the street. He pulls something from his pocket. A bottle of beer?

‘The fuck?' Grace goes to take it off him. Johnno holds it away from her.

Lizzie comes up behind him and snatches the bottle. ‘What's this? Supposed to impress us?'

Lizzie lifts her arm to throw it away, but Johnno grabs it. He puts his mouth up close to her ear and, despite herself, she listens. ‘Ether. Sniff it, and the world becomes beautiful.' He shivers his fingers, mimicking the swirl of magic that the vapours produce. Lizzie tugs free, but she already knows she'll take the bottle. This is exactly what she needs.

Johnno leads them to a side alley lined with rubbish. A cook from a hotel's kitchen throws a pot of prawn heads into a metal bin. A head stares at Lizzie with a globed black eye, its feelers waving from its spiked nose.

‘Who's gonna volunteer?' says Johnno, waving the bottle around.

Hanrahan takes the bottle and uncorks it. He holds the bottle up to his nose, cups his hands over it, inhales deeply, and passes it to Johnno.

‘I'm not putting that shit anywhere near me,' Grace says. ‘Give it to your mates.' She gestures to the boys kicking a rotten apple core around. They glance up with surprised expressions, then go back to the apple core. One of them laughs when it splatters against the wall, leaving a star of brown flesh.

‘What about you, Elizabeth?' Hanrahan is behind her. He has her wrist in his hand.

Lizzie takes the bottle off him, cups her hands around it like Hanrahan did. Inhales. It doesn't do much. He grabs it, sniffs it again and hands it back. The second time the wall in front of her skitters.

‘You're crazy,' Grace tells her. ‘You don't have to do what they say.'

Lizzie shrugs and sniffs it a third time.

Hanrahan says, ‘Go easy.'

‘It's weak.' Lizzie gives it back to him. She tries not to think of him with her mother. She leans against the wall, closes her eyes and works on forgetting Joe. A body next to her, a hand on her knee. Hanrahan's face, blackheads on his nose.

The last time Lizzie saw her mum she was living off the back of a house where she scrubbed the floors and spat in the soup pot. Lizzie sat on the step and peered in at the clothes draped around, her mum's dyed black hairs stretched across the pillows, the ground. The place smelt rotten. Lizzie sniffed the air, went in and searched the room, and found a rubbish pile mounting up around a wastepaper basket. She tossed it outside the door, into a drain where the family in the big house threw their litter too.

But the smell was still there. She tracked its strength, and worked out it was coming from under the bed. She lay down with her head on the side, lifted the quilt up. A dead animal smell. She raised the hem of the bedspread and saw a pile of cast-off rags, bloodied with use. Lizzie didn't like to think her mum was still bleeding like her. Meant it never stops, all the pain and lying in bed with a hot water bottle, the swollen abdomen, the smell of dried blood.

Lizzie scrambled up, flung herself out the door and retched. Her mum came around the side of the house. Lizzie couldn't find a way of saying what she'd seen, so she didn't say anything. Her mum kissed her on the cheek with her body pulled away. Made them tea with a bitter aftertaste.

Soon after, her mum lost her job and went to ground. Lizzie doesn't know where she's gone. When Lizzie came to ask, the woman who owns the house hid upstairs. Lizzie heard her talking to the maid. ‘The daughter of that disgusting woman? She left all her droppings.' The maid came out and put a glass of water on the bench. She said Missus would be down soon, but two hours later no one had come. Lizzie left.

That morning, on the way to the house, she'd noticed Hanrahan and Johnno hanging around the main street in the city, and jumping on and off trams. As she walked home, Johnno caught one right up to her, leapt off and said, ‘Your mum's a good root, I reckon. We came round to her place the other day. Hanrahan was out in the garden with her. All you could see was his bare arse going up and down.' Lizzie screwed up her face, striding quickly away from them, aware of her visibility in the street.

Now, with Hanrahan hemming her against the building, she wants to spit in his face. She steps away from him. ‘Don't lay a flamin' finger on me.'

Hanrahan holds up both hands. ‘Wasn't gonna.'

‘Bullshit. Johnno, tell Hanrahan to get out of my face.'

Johnno shrugs, won't look at her, holding the ether from the waist like a glass of beer. Hanrahan grins. The gap of his incisor appears. She knows why her mum chose him: he's good-looking, from Welsh stock, with wide, thick eyebrows. She doesn't know the tricks to make him stare at her like he must have done to her mum. He's never tried to touch her, which makes her hate him even more. Is it worse if they fuck you or if they don't?

She grabs Grace's arm and pulls her down the alley. ‘This stuff's rubbish.'

Joe turns up at her place again. She leads him into the kitchen, where he sits with his legs crossed, ankle resting on his knee, his hands on the raised leg. She leans against the bench. Her chest is tight.

‘G'day,' he says and nods.

‘Hello.' She looks at her bare feet, the bottles lined up on the bench, a half-eaten sandwich crawling with ants in the sink, the top slice of bread slid off, revealing German sausage speckled with fat. She feels light-headed. ‘How you been?' she asks.

‘Busy.' He fingers the rim of his hat on the table.

‘Cuppa?'

‘Yeah. Thanks.'

She fiddles with the matches, singes the fine down of hair on her fingers getting the burner lit. She seems to have lost her sense of space, bringing the teapot up too high, hitting it against the cupboard. The lid rattles, and she puts her hand on top. Joe watches her. Her stomach hurts. She pours the tea into the pot, and the leaves float greasily on top. She puts the cup on the table next to him while he gazes out the window. ‘It's there,' she says. He glances at the tea but doesn't take it.

She brings hers to the couch and spills it on herself sitting down. Licks her fingers and scrubs at the stain. She has the sense of something dropped and its pieces gone off, spinning across the room, lost under furniture where she can't fish them out.

‘Come on, peach,' Joe says. ‘We have to be able to talk.'

This is deeply unfair; she didn't just vanish for two weeks. She can't find a way of phrasing this without showing him too much. ‘What d'you want to talk about?'

He sits next to her on the couch. He's finally going to touch her.

He doesn't. Something's changed between them. She can't work out what. She puts her cup down, takes a breath and leans into him, touches his shoulder, puts her lips to his cheek, slides her tongue to the corner of his mouth. He turns to her. His breath in her face, his odd smell of tea and something foreign, a spice maybe. ‘You were all over me the other night,' he says. ‘I wanted to talk more. Want it to be proper with us.'

She couldn't find a way to show her desire except through moves she already knew, picked up from Grace and the smut novels with the brown covers. She and Grace spent ages in the shop choosing those books, the man at the counter eyeing them, a purple birthmark on his upper lip. Lizzie loved the thrill of studying it when she and Grace went over to pay. Then they discovered he'd ripped out the sauciest bits, so they didn't go back, but from the novels Lizzie had still picked up the business of kissing on the mouth, of hurling yourself on a man's chest, of heaving your bosom. What she thought she was supposed to do.

She sips her tea. ‘You heard the fight last night?'

Joe grins, launches into some story about a fight he saw, the moves of the boxers. She settles in to listen and nod, is careful only to touch him at the edges.

He glances out at the sun going down and says he has to go. She holds on to him, leading him out the front of the stairs and offering to walk with him to the end of the road, because she can't stand the idea of the house once he's gone, her sour, crumpled bed, the sodden tea leaves drowned at the bottom of the cups.

He holds her hand as they walk along the road. She's excited by the gesture, what it means for her as much as the dry touch of their palms together. She squeezes his fingers, shrugs her shoulders up to her ears and stares skywards. He tugs her closer, and she doesn't pull up in time, slams right into him. He wraps his arms around her shoulders, and they walk like this down the hill for a way, her face in his chest, not looking out. He kisses the top of her head and leads her underneath a Moreton Bay fig tree. She tucks herself into the trunk.