Read Online Treading Air by Ariella Van Luyn - Free Book Online

simple.’
    â€˜Yeah.’ She hesitates. She finds it difficult to look at the dress. It seems to be carrying too much weight. ‘Grace picked it for me.’
    He takes that in. He lifts the dress from the tissue and holds it up. The light from the window pierces it. ‘I’d like you in silk,’ he says. ‘Diamonds if I could get them.’
    When he leaves, he takes the dress with him.
    In a week, he comes back with a parcel and leads her into her bedroom. ‘This is more you, peach,’ he says. This dress seems to roll up out of the paper. She wants it as soon as she sees it. The fabric is richly layered: silk, then lace, then a misty veil of organza. The hem is cut into strips that end in a diamond point, sewn with pearls in spiral patterns. She touches the cool fabric, pinches the layer of organza.
    â€˜It came with this,’ he says. He shifts the dress to one hand and pulls out a fan made of bamboo and white feathers.
    She takes it from him and slides her fingers over the feathers, tickling his palm and hers with them. This is the right dress for her; she’ll be beautiful.
    The night before the wedding, the pie vendor arrives. Lizzie’s dad got flighty at the last minute, reckoned the only thing he could afford was sausage rolls. He called in a favour and asked a mate to cater, a vendor who still has a horse he hooks up to the trailer. Around ten, Lizzie hears the hooves. The man sets up under the house, lets the horse out to graze on the ragged grass that clumps around the edges of the fence where the neighbours water their bromeliads.
    Lizzie can’t sleep. She lies in bed and drifts, then wakes abruptly from an early morning doze to the smell of mince and buttery pastry. She’s starved. She goes downstairs to ask for a pie for breakfast from the stringy, wide-calved man with a fringe that sips at his pupils. He gives her one, the meat still hot from the steel pot, and takes one for himself. They sit on the steps, licking the mince from their fingers, while he tells her that he makes a living mostly at night, dealing out the front of pubs after six o’clock closing, selling pies to men queasy from guzzling beer. The vendor has big hands. Lizzie watches him roll out the pastry, lift it up with an exaggerated gesture, fling it over the top of the mince. She likes his precision when he presses the lid on with a fork. It’s strangely alright for this man to make the pies because he’ll sell them, get himself out of debt with her dad. That somehow stops the act from being womanly.
    Grace arrives to dress her and finds her with a line of mince down her chemise. ‘Jesus, Lizzie, you haven’t even got your stockings on.’
    â€˜What time is it?’
    â€˜Too bloody early. Why’d you think before lunch was a good time?’
    Lizzie roots around in the drawer for her suspender belt, her gloves, her stockings. She lifts her head up to see Grace inspecting the dress, laid out on the bed. ‘What happened to the one I picked?’
    A pang at the sound of Grace’s hurt. ‘Joe changed it for this one, suits me better.’
    Grace looks down, fiddles with her earlobe.
    â€˜Didn’t think it mattered,’ Lizzie says.
    â€˜I wanted you to wear the dress I picked.’
    â€˜Oh.’ Lizzie turns back to the stockings, shuffles them around a bit, starts rummaging through her jewellery box, searching for the pearls. Grace sniffs, and then she’s moving again, pulling the veil from the hook in the cupboard, laying it on the bed. She dresses Lizzie in silence and doesn’t look her in the eye when she crouches down to draw on her eyebrows with charcoal.
    Out of the bedroom, Lizzie stands with her dad on the top step, waiting for the time when they’ll walk away from that house, the pie vendor following behind with his old horse-drawn trailer.
    At Spring Hill they stand outside the church, its roof sloping steeply away from