The Blue Mile (11 page)

Yo

S
he is no lady, she is no girl. She is a jewel risen up from the sea.

Jesus, what are you doing to me this day? I promised I'd not think of her again, and I didn't. Are you having a laugh at me with this?

What do I say to her? ‘Ah . . .' I can see out the corner of my eye she's gone straight-backed, disdaining me down her fine long nose. Done her good turn for the season, now clear off so she can get to the theatre or wherever she's going. No wonder she didn't want paying; look at this place, all this finery. I knew she was a lady, and I knew she was a beautiful girl, but Jesus, spare me. I can't look at her; I say, to Ag: ‘Thanks again. We won't keep you further.'

‘No. Well. There you go.' She says it quick and sharp: hurry up, clear off.

‘Yeah, there you go.' Can't lift my eyes from Ag to her; start turning back to the door: ‘Wherever you go, there you are, ay, Ag?'

Ag rightly frowns at me: monkey-nut, what are you going on about?

The girl says: ‘Well, goodbye then, I suppose.' But softer now.

Jesus, her voice has me wanting to throw myself on my knees at her feet again. I'm still away with the music of her laughter, caught in her smile as she opened the door. That song is not for me, though, is it. ‘Right, yeah,' I say over it. ‘Goodbye. Thanks. Sure. Bye. Yeah.' Or some such string of bejabbering spoonery.

I look round my shoulder with a nod, so I don't seem completely lacking in manners as well as brainless, and I see her again, just for a second.

Jesus, but she is blindingly beautiful. Her curly blonde hair has been made into these ripples around her face, shining ripples. And what a face. Her eyes are the same colour as the waters of the harbour, not blue, not green, but exactly in between. As I look away again, though, I see the face of this other woman, by a curtain in the back corner of the shop, same eyes, maybe her sister, but with the blank stare of hatred in them:
Get out.
I'll oblige her.

‘Bye bye,' Ag waves as we leave, and she says to me as we near the stairs: ‘See, I said Miss Greene was a fairy princess, didn't I?'

‘You did, Ag. Yes, you did.'

And I don't know if I'm thankful or shattered that I'll never see her again.

Olivia

‘
I
forbid you from having anything to do with that young man ever again.'

‘Forbid all you like, Mother.' It's hardly likely we'll cross paths ever again. A sadness sweeps over me at that, swiftly followed by relief. The way he looked at me: couldn't look at me. I'm used to boys not looking at me, but that one . . . that was rough. I'm not that much of a Medusa. Not as though I didn't do him an insanely enormous favour today, either; he could have been a little kinder. Why would I ever want to see him again? Who is he to not look at me like that? Some dustman. Some stupid sunburnt dustman.

I look at myself square on in the cheval now: I'm not that bad. The gown does compensate somewhat. I can almost vanish into it, it's such a spectacular creation, and this fabric is . . . it is a little slip of heaven, nothing less. I am wearing air. And you have to be a bosomless stick to carry off these diagonals or you'd look like a house – lopsided one. My hair looks nice, too; Marjorie knows what she's doing. My face might remain all schnonk, but I'm no Medusa.

‘What's his name?' Mother asks behind me, holding those navy heels, and wanting a name for nark purposes.

I'm not going to tell her. Eoghan O'Keenan. E-o-g-h-a-n. Owen. Yoey. Yo-Yo. I'm not likely to forget it. And another strange sort of panic bubbles up at this: I don't care for boys. I never have. Why should I care about this one, or what he might think? I don't know who he is. I don't know anything about him. He's just a mannequin. For hideously cheap mercerised work shirts.

I don't care who he is.

God, but I see us meeting in the Gardens again, along that path by the wall, and my stomach flips.

No. I never want to see him again.

I won't see him again.

This is merely residual intrigue. That I'll never know anything about them. I'll never see dear little Agnes again or find out if she lives in the Botanic Gardens or a flat in Randwick. Never know if he's a death-defying dustman or . . . But there was something about him, something heroic – those fine, long fingers . . .

‘Put your shoes on. Please, Ollie,' Mother says.

I take them from her. Resigned to whatever the evening holds for me. The future.
Phlergh.
Grow up and thank God Glor never saw him; I'd have to hear her go on and on and on about his gorgeousness, how Lebanese girls always fall for the Irish boys. She's plying one with her mother's coffee cake in the lounge at her house right now, that Paul boy. It's all in the eyes with Irish boys. All in the deep blue sea of their eyes, and everywhere else. So gorgeous, and I'm the only one who saw this boy. It was just a dream after all. Little Agnes a sweet dream. Half a cheese sandwich is all that remains. And her rickrack and Fuji creation on my miniature. Oh but I meant for her to take that home.

Mother mists me with a fine cloud of Number Five, never mind that I always wear Coty's Lily: ‘Pout all you like, darling – enigmatic on your features. Smoky.'

She pencils my eyes, powders the schnonk. A coat of plum lipstick, grab handbag and wrap.

‘Out you scoot, darling, our cabbie awaits.'

Yo

‘
W
ill we visit Miss Greene again one day?' Ag asks me as we're walking back down to the Quay.

‘No, I doubt that,' I tell her. ‘But we will have egg and chips for tea.' While we're waiting for the pubs to close and the streets to clear. I doubt that six o'clock Saturday is any different in Balmain than anywhere else for fucked-up: maybe worse with a job load of wharfies.

‘But I don't want egg and chips for tea,' says Ag, that whine getting into her voice.

‘But I do,' I tell her, over the pointless want of saying to a seven year old, don't ask me how my day went, will you? I went up on the Sydney Harbour Bridge today, if you want to know, didn't miss a rivet. First go. I did all right. Never mind. I'm that tired and that hungry now I could eat a buttered frog through a flyscreen.

‘Miss Greene bought me a cheese sandwich,' Ag says.

‘Did she?'

‘She did.'

‘That was nice of her.' Miss Greene doesn't give a silver-plated shit about you, Aggie. But how do you tell a kid they're not good enough for some and will never be? I'm not about to.

‘Miss Greene let me play dresses with her little wooden mannequin.'

‘Did she?'

‘I made a skirt that was red and yellow. I sewed it all by myself, and Miss Greene said it was very good.'

Ag'll run out of things to say about Miss Greene. With any luck in this lifetime. Keep ignoring it. I'm not thinking about the girl; she's gone, a lifetime behind me. I'm thinking about getting my tea, and my bed, please, we need a good bed tonight, and I'm otherwise thinking about what I should say to Mr Adams about Ag when we meet him tomorrow. Should I tell him the truth? Or tell him she's mine? Should I take her to Mass with me in the morning or not? She's got to start her Holy Communion lessons in the new year. Somewhere. Don't think that far ahead; it's too much to consider. On more practical and immediate matters of salvation, how am I going to get my hands on a pair of sandshoes, never mind the hat, for Monday? All the shops are closed from now until then. And what will I do with Ag come Monday? I'm not leaving her with some strange sheila again. Got away with that once; never do that again. But where will she go for all the weeks of school holidays ahead? Somewhere . . .

‘She took me to see the Santa display and she bought me a pink cake there, Miss Greene did.'

‘Right. Shush for a minute there, will you, Ag?'

She does. She doesn't say another word, right down to the grease traps at the Quay. Her Yoey is a mean bastard. I'll make it up to her, get her an ice-cream for the ferry. After I've had my egg and chips.

Olivia

‘
D
on't speak, then,' Mother says as we get out of the cab. ‘Suits you too. Every fault's a fashion if you wear it well.'

We've only travelled a block and a half up Elizabeth Street, not a long enough trip for me to have let go of anything but the tight clasp of my hands, hanging on to each other as they were all the way, awaiting the call to the gallows. Which is here: the Merrick Club. It doesn't look like a place of execution; it looks like a small bank, wedged between Studebaker Motors and the Manchester Unity Oddfellows Society of the Secret Handshake, minarets of the synagogue beyond. Establishment but slightly shady.

A strip of red carpet at the threshold, less vice-regal crimson, more folly rose; the celluloid spike heels of these stupid satin pumps squish into it, as my heart and soul begin their inevitable squish into . . .

An empty foyer. It's only a dot after six; I don't suppose the fabulous people arrive until after eight. So they can't see me struggle to negotiate spike heels on the parquet. It's a fabulous foyer, though: elliptical columns like ships' funnels clad in silky oak veneer inlaid with bands of turquoise and bronze, the walls too. Snazz as. The oak is honey-coloured watermark taffeta. But as the girl at the cloakroom counter greets us with a cool, ‘Good evening,' lids so heavy with paint and the tedium of her own fabulousness, I can't help thinking: welcome to the
Titanic.

As a tuxedoed man emerges from behind one of the columns and makes a lunge for Mother. ‘Em, hello, you naughty little minx,' kissing the air either side of her face and just about startling me back out into the street. He is obviously not Bart Harley. I am aware that barristers are notoriously theatrical, but possibly not quite this theatrical. White spats, maroon cravat, and I'm sure he's pencilled his brows.

‘Arthur, darling.' Mother kisses the air around him in return, as he makes a lunge for my hand, and just about shrieks the silky oak veneer off the walls.

‘Em – oh Emily, is this yours?'

‘Of course.' Mother is droll and dry and utterly triumphant: ‘The girl and frock both, yes, all mine.'

‘Superlative,' he says to me and he looks right into my eyes as he does; something warm-hearted about him, puckish, dropping his voice to a whisper as he kisses my hand: ‘Superlative.' Before he shrieks at Mother again: ‘Oh but I must fly away, precious Em – got to go pick up something before the show. Nudgy nudge – you want some too?'

Mother's laugh is a soaring glissando of gaiety, but I catch the deadly daggers she looks at him as she waves him away.

So I have to speak – I have to know: ‘You want what too?'

‘Nothing, Ollie, shush. Up we go.' She waves me towards the staircase past the columns: ‘Bart'll meet us for a cocktail in the Library Lounge.'

‘Who was that Arthur man?' I pester as we take the stairs, ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' tinkling on a piano somewhere.

‘Arthur Spence – he's an actor. The ringmaster of the cabaret here, the supper show.'

‘Oh? You seem close in with him.' She's never mentioned anyone called Arthur to me before.

‘He's close in with everyone,' she says, shooing me up again. ‘Theatre people are always good to know – sequins, darling.'

Millions of hours of work, yes, and the last sort of work I'd ever want to do. But I wouldn't mind seeing a show, though; I love a good show, not that I've been to that many. You can disappear into the theatre, lights down, another place and time. I want to disappear right now as the chandelier above the staircase shimmers across the band of crystal drops at my hip. Dear God. I ask Mother, beg her: ‘Are we going to see this cabaret tonight?' Immediately?

‘Perhaps. If you grow up quickly enough,' she says as we reach the landing, where she waves ahead, her face divine in the glow of the late sun streaming through the windows above. ‘Oh look, wonderful, Bart's beaten us here.'

She is transformed in this moment, as I've never seen her; alabaster yielding to the softest silken flesh. A blush that finds its way through the powder on her cheeks, and I see: she loves him.

At the top of the stairs, I see him: soft grey hair, black-tie debonair, a crooked smile, raising his glass to her: he loves her too.

He is sartorial perfection. His jacket is a semi-formal cutaway in-betweener for an early soiree; distinctive and precisely tailored, possibly Savile Row. He is the Well Dressed Man: he will have an array of twenty suits to his wardrobe, one dozen hats, eight overcoats and four pairs of shoes, not including sports attire. She is wearing an old favourite tonight, her pewter lamé tunic, with long strands of jet beads, and when they meet, when they touch, with their silvers and blacks and superlative loveliness, they are two halves of a whole.

I knew it. I knew it would be this way, didn't I.

I look out at the gilt-edged figs of Hyde Park across the road, and the world as I know it shudders and disappears.

Yo

‘
Y
ou're fibbing to me, you are – you didn't go up there today.' Ag's looking over at the Bridge from the ferry rail. It looks amazing, side-on like this, going across from point to point, from Dawes to McMahons and back again now, with the sky going every colour there is as the sun sets.

I say: ‘I did, Ag. I was right up at the top there, and I don't believe it much either.'

She reaches up her arms to me, for me to pick her up. I do. She's tired, her body's asleep already; she smells of perfume and ice-cream, as a small girl should, and she says, over my shoulder: ‘It's made of liquorice sticks.'

‘What is?'

‘The Bridge.' She laughs: ‘Silly.'

‘You might be on to something there, Ag. Liquorice sticks . . .' I laugh back, at Ag and the black liquorice lines of the Bridge, light-headed, asleep too. ‘Them rivets are made of fruit bullets then, ay?'

‘Yeah,' she says. ‘That why there's a big piece missing out of it – see in the middle? Some greedy gorgy's been eating it. He's in them workshops – that's what all that banging is. He's getting hungry. He comes out in the night and gobbles up what you done in the day.'

‘Of course he does – I had been wondering about all that. You're a cracker, Ag.'

‘What's your favourite flavour?'

‘Of what?'

‘Fruit bullets.
Silly.
'

‘Blackcurrant.'

‘Mine's orange.'

‘I know it is.'

‘You know everything – every silly thing, Yoey Yo-Yo.'

‘I might just do.'

‘I could listen to you two all night,' this fella beside us joins in, a rough old voice, sharing the laugh with us. I turn around but I can't see him well for the sun in my eyes. He says: ‘She'll make you proud, that one. You're a lucky man.' And he tips his hat and walks off, before I can tell him I couldn't agree more. He's in a hurry to be in his home, I suppose, with all the other hats and lunch tins gathering to bolt off the ferry as it pulls in to the wharf.

Here at Balmain. Not that I can see it too well either, the sinking sun is that harsh. I look the other way for a second and it's hardly better with the glare coming off the water, but in it I catch the shadow shapes of Port Jackson, see this town of Sydney for what it is: a string of a hundred points and bays with a wharf or half-a-dozen sticking out of every one of them. Exhausting just to look at, and Ag, little as she is, has got heavy in my arms, arms that have never felt so heavy from work.

I start walking up from this Darling Street wharf. There are a dozen wharves on Balmain alone, as I learned getting the ticket for us here: besides the colliery and timber wharves, there's the Thames Street ferry, Louisa Street and Some Other Street. This one is the main one, and this Darling Street is the main road. When I asked what the pubs were like from the fella at the ticket counter, he said:
There's twenty-six of them, take your pick.
Twenty-six pubs in one suburb, full of wharfies, on a Saturday evening. I hold Ag a bit tighter to me, expecting the worst: Chippo by the sea. It's half-past six, so I'm expecting a hundred women are getting bashed in here somewhere, something to do between the pub and the knocker.

This Darling Street, though, as far as I can see, is empty, smelling of roasts in the oven, and if anyone's getting bashed, they're being very quiet about it. Even the tobacconist across from the ferry is closed. Maybe there's a hundred Wal Adamses round here, keeping the bastards in order.
Good people, working people,
that woman at the Paragon said last night. Was that only last night? Maybe that's the difference round here, though: good work. Men's work and only men's work. Trade depressions might mean you put off buying them new pair of boots, but it won't stop the need for coal steamers to be coming and going, will it? The houses along this street seem to say so; they're terraces but mostly wide and double-storey. There's a pair of them set back with a garden at the front, and a little wooden one next to it needs a coat of paint but it's got a window box full of bright red flowers. This is a good place.

A few hundred yards up the road, the first big pub we come to doesn't have a name on it, excepting a sign for Star Ale across the front tiles: not Tooths, at least, and it looks tidy enough, too; even the couple of fellas having a smoke in the lane by it, pretending they're not waiting for sly, are tidy-looking. The last door along the front of the pub says
PRIVATE ENTRANCE
and I say to Ag: ‘Reckon this'll do us.' But she doesn't answer; she's already fast asleep.

The fella who looks up from the evening paper at the counter, switching off the wireless beside him as he does, is fat and happy looking: ‘Yeah, g'day mate, what can I do for youse?'

‘We're looking for a room, just for the night. One bed'll do.' This freshly polished hallway will do.

‘Well, I can give you two beds, fella,' he says. ‘Seven and six the double, that's the only one I got, and that's breakfast as well, bath up the end of the hall.'

That's a bit expensive; that's a lot expensive, that's nearly as much as some of the pubs in town, and possibly explains the vacancy, but I've got my hand in my pocket before I tell him: ‘We'll take it.' I'd take it for a pound.

‘Good-o.' He grabs the key and comes out the door of his office, showing me up the stairs. ‘Welcome to the Commercial. No grog in the room, mind, but you can have an ale with your tea till nine.'

‘No worries,' I say; I'm not going to be awake long enough to even think about the want of a drink in me; I can hardly get one foot past the other on these stairs.

‘You're travelling light,' he says, checking us over, as he should.

I give him the horseshit I've been rehearsing: ‘We come in to go to the zoo – missed our train home, out west.' Don't ask me where west, or where the zoo is.

‘Big day for your little one?' he says at the top, a nod at Ag; not being nosy, just nice.

I nod. Big day all right.

He says: ‘My wife's sister is out near Bathurst – right pain if you miss that evening engine, isn't it?' He opens the door of the second room along this hall and I see Paradise. Two beds, and I can smell the soap in the linen from here. There's a washstand with a sink too, a white flannel on a hook by it. This will be the cleanest place my sister and I have ever laid our heads.

‘You had your tea?' He's asking after Ag, not me.

‘Yeah, thanks.'

‘Leave you to it, then,' he says. ‘Breakfast seven-thirty Sundays, all right?'

‘Couldn't be more, thank you again,' I tell him as he closes the door, though we won't be eating again till after Mass anyway.

I lay Ag on the bed nearest the window and go over to the washstand, soak the flannel and put it round the back of my neck. It just about jumps back off me with the heat of the sunburn there, but it feels good. Sweet Jesus, it feels good.

Everything is good.

We're going to be all right.

I get down on my knees by the washstand and I stay here for a long time: thank you.