Free Treading Air by Ariella Van Luyn Page B

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