The Blue Mile (16 page)

Olivia

‘
T
he boy is in love with you,' Mother spits through pins as I tack the lace train to the back of her wedding gown in her sunroom at Rose Bay. ‘What must he do, throw himself on the ground in supplication to have your attention?'

‘No,' I say, moving round to the front of her to check the pull on the charmeuse. Baby is starting to show, and if I keep my mind on the technical problem of its concealment then I can almost forget it's there, and that it will be born by the time they return from London – in a year's time. How convenient it is that Bart managed to organise a sabbatical at the Old Bailey? How convenient, too, that he convinced you to indulge me these past few months so that I might become accustomed to living alone. Working alone. Being alone. As if I'd never had a bit of practice at being not quite the most important thing in your life. How
in
convenient is this charmeuse, though – the shimmer in the weave is hitting exactly the wrong spot.

‘Ollie, I must have dropped you on your head when you were a baby.' She sees the sheen herself, hand smoothing over it. What to do? ‘This isn't turning him down for a night at the Merrick, you know.'

‘I know.' Apart from the first time, I haven't deliberately turned him down, three times in all now – I have genuinely been too busy to go dancing or dining. With three gowns for this very event Mother is referring to. The farewell dinner for the Governor, Admiral Sir Dudley de Chair, and Lady de Chair, tomorrow night. Warwick's invited me – or rather Mrs Bloxom has, in place of her niece, who couldn't attend. I don't know if Warwick – or Rick as he's known to his chums – is in love with me or what, but I don't want him to be. He is a nice boy, superlatively nice, really, and his attention is flattering, more flattering than anything I've ever known – barely believable, in fact. The bouquet of riotously delightful dahlias he sent me for my birthday,
Dearest Olivia, For You, Warmest regards, Rick,
was just about the warmest thing ever – a veritable blaze of autumn sunshine. But I don't love him back, and I won't. I'm not one for boys and being in love and that's that.

Mother turns to the cheval to look at the problem front-on. ‘Hm. Lace panel, down the centre. Three inches – distract the eye.' Then she looks up at me behind her again, thinking, sizing me: ‘If you're worried about matters with his Lordship coming out to ruin things, don't be. Leona Bloxom only finds you more attractive for it – any aristocratic connection is better than none to them.'

‘They
know
?' Oh dear God.

‘Bart mentioned something, yes, to clear the way, sound them out about the . . . unusual circumstances – but the Bloxoms are discreet. Grown-ups – they know these things happen.'

I could stab her in the backside with my squiggle snippers for things
happening
. ‘What have you been doing? Marrying me off behind my back?'

‘No, darling, no – I would never do any such thing. Warwick is in
love
with you, you silly girl. The boy is in torment for you. Honestly . . .'

‘Well, honestly, I'm not in love with him.' And I certainly won't be going to the Governor's dinner with him now, torment or not. They
know.
My torment. My Father: whom the entire English-speaking world now knows is in Kenya – on safari with a Hollywood film actress by the name of Gigi McAllister. There's a newsreel just come out, apparently, dead lions and zebras, luxurious tent facilities, native slaves, the whole grown-up atrocity, and I won't be going to a picture theatre anytime soon to witness it. Won't be going to the Governor's dinner as a sad little aristocratic pelt for the Bloxoms either.

‘You should go with him then to be
seen,
' Mother insists: ‘Think of your business if you can't think of him.'

My business. Yes.
OLIVIA COSTUMIÈRE.
I am mentally scraping off that
EMILY
right now, with my fingernails. But I am not so mercenary, not as she is. I tell her: ‘I'm doing all right as it is, thank you. I don't need to
go
to the dinner. I'm an artist, not some dilettante. People come to me at my salon – I don't chase them.'

Glissando of hilarity: ‘You are becoming arrogant, my daughter.'

‘You made me,' I retort, unbuttoning the gown, and as I do glance out of the windows of this sunroom, across the water, and I see the Bridge, the arch almost finished. From this distance the arms of it seem only a couple of inches apart, and I see that boy up there, in my mind, skipping across the breach, dancing over his words, turning to run, light on his feet, over the span. The sun on his face, in his eyes; the only boy I seem ever to have seen. The Christmas dustman boy. Deep blue boy who cares so for his little girl.
You couldn't find it in your heart to do me a favour in return, could you?
Figment boy. And I tell the Bridge: I'll go to the ball if you send me
that
boy – in a white tux and midnight trousers.

‘Come to London with us, darling,' Mother changes tack. ‘Won't you reconsider?'

No. I'm not going to London, despite Bart's offer to have me set up there. London is not where I want to go, where this upcoming summer season promises fifty-three and a half shades of beige wallpaper with contrasting trims of Ashes of Roses, a bloodless pink inspired by that infamous scent of
phlergh
especially designed with a base note of musky Parisienne contempt for the English. Nothing original, nothing inspiring comes out of London. I don't think I'd fit in, and if I ever were to go, I'd want to set myself up, thank you.

I kiss Mother goodbye and take the ferry home, my carpet bag heavy with wedding gown, and my mind stuffing itself full of events and busyness beyond this week. There's the April racing carnival coming up, and then the welcome party for the Games in May, the new Governor, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Philip Game and Lady Game – and that'll be a daytime event, too. I think it will be a perfect time for my Bridge series of hats to appear: purples, teals and bronzes, some winter drama. Min Bromley should be out of post-ditchment mourning by then too – I think I might send her a cheering note, tell her I've designed something especially for her. Perhaps I can put Warwick on to her, too, kill two birds . . . hm, they would look quite good as a pair, sketch them into matching tweeds and stitch them up together.
Voilà!
By the time I've switched ferries for the north side I've solved all the city's problems and my Bridge series is such a hit I'm waving away streamers, tooting out of the Quay for the Parisienne summer in a whirl of my old-favourite flame-red cape.

Dreaming. Dreams that are as delicate as Mother's champagne charmeuse. Let the water at it and it'll shrink and warp to rags. I hear a woman cry out as I take the steps up from the wharf: ‘No, please. Please, no!' and I look up to find her at the top, outside the flats above the vehicular punt ramp. Men are lugging her furniture and effects into the street. She's been evicted. The third I've seen in as many weeks. I look away, ashamed. Why do they choose the evening to turn them out into the street? Why not the morning? Why are people cruel to each other?

I hurry home, with the chill breeze at my back, and bolt the door behind me, keep my dreams shut in and safe from harm. Stitch by stitch, I fix my wishes into Mother's lace panel, get it done, out of the way, not thinking unkind thoughts such as
Why don't you make your own stupid wedding gown?
but rather seeing her walk radiantly down the aisle of St Andrew's Presbyterian a week from now, with a supper reception at the Royal Sydney Golf Club, before casual farewell drinks at the Tulip Restaurant on Wednesday afternoon, the day they depart. Streamered away by the uppest of up crowd, people I don't know and don't particularly want to know. So long as they continue to buy my hats and frocks.

Money in the bank for my own ticket . . .

Tooooot.

I know I've fallen asleep, my head on the table by my lamp, my hand still holding my pincushion, but I can't rouse from this dream. The woman from the flats is climbing the North Claw towards the breach. She's going to jump off. I know she is. Everyone is watching her from the wharf, pointing, but no one can stop her. She hits the water with a great big smash. Echoing across the harbour.

Hammering. From the workshops, of course, and it's not quite dawn. Roused now and compelled blinking into another day, I'm on the ferry again, beating the rush, and yawning up at the Bridge, into the breach. Good God but it's breathtaking now it's almost done: what's the industrial equivalent of haute couture? There is sadness in its beauty, though: what'll they do, all the men up there, when it's finished and there's no work to go to? Engineering Wonder of the World complete; move along. Women cry,
please no
; men walk the streets, dragging their shame to the Labour Exchange. My mary-janes clipping double-time through the hush of Pitt Street, so early I've even beaten the barrowmen.

But not Mr Jabour. The grille slides open on the Oriental Emporium, and he looks up from his keys, surprised: ‘Olivia, dear.' Smiling his fond sleepy smile: ‘It is too early – you are working too hard. Gloria is worried about you, so am I. We never see you.'

‘I'm all right.' I glance up the ground floor at all the sale signs in all the windows; Electrolux is throwing vacuums away for March, if you want one; Loughton's Tableware is closing down up in the gods. Only the Jabours seem untouched by catastrophe. I spy the brass bottle on the sideboard in there, the ruby and sapphire glass of the stopper glinting in some shaft of light coming in from somewhere I can't see – that'll be the genie that's looking after them. Or more likely that they only deal in the finest quality and most fabulous things – never out of style – and Mr Jabour, I now remember, has a new shipment from Iran just arrived, which is why he's here at this hour too. And why I'm now peering harder as if I might see through the boxes stacked by the cutting table to spy the treasure within.

‘I suppose you are all right,' he chuckles softly. ‘The young are always right. I was, when I was your age. I was exactly the same. Rushing around, working, working, working. I would hawk out on my own, from Broken Hill right down to Adelaide, and then go all the way back up to Sydney to buy. If I missed one sale, one bargain, one train, I thought: This is a disaster. It was the middle of the depression in the nineties then – and I went and opened my first shop, up on Flinders Street. It was madness. I don't know what I was trying to prove.'

He looks at me shrewdly for a moment, and then adds: ‘That shop: it burned down to the ground in my fifth week of business. I don't know why – someone didn't want me there. But it taught me a good lesson: don't want things too much. It's better to slow down, be happy with what you have before you want anything at all. Then, what you really want – it will come. It is a riddle, this life.' And now he asks the riddle of me: ‘What do
you
want, dear, from all this hard work?'

‘What do I want?' I don't know. I want my ticket to Paris. To the world: New York. Then Madrid. Cairo. Shanghai. I want my designs to be famous across the globe. Infamous. And on my afternoons off, I want to be muse to Matisse, the maestro's odalisque swathed in nothing but midnight velvet chiffon, lounging on a magic-carpet spun from lapis sky. With a copper fringe. Balancing a cherry on the end of my aquiline nose. I want articles about me appearing in
Vogue,
in French, to wipe the self-satisfied, stupid smile off Cassie Fortescue's face and all like her – if they could manage to read an article that length in any language. All things fantastical is what I want, and I don't know anything beyond my fantasies, my delicate and secret fantasies prone to shrinkage, warpage and utter devastation if subjected to a rainy day, and Mr Jabour knows I don't.

He says again: ‘Be happy.' And then he rubs his round genie belly, changing the subject and not changing it at all: ‘So, what is it about this boy Warwick I've been hearing about? He is a lawyer, yes?' Which means he has met the first criteria of Mr Jabour's prospective husband list, thanks for sharing that confidence with your whole family and half of Beirut, Glor.

I tell Mr Jabour: ‘Yes, he's a lawyer, but he's not my boy.'

‘Why not? Gloria says he's going to be a barrister.'
What more could you possibly want?
says Mr Jabour's face. Gloria's Paul Gallagher works for the firm that negotiated Mr Jabour's son-in-law's Tycoon shirt factory contracts with Gowings, so he's two rungs up the criteria list already. The road to happiness is paved with lawyers, especially if they are also going to become good sons-in-law from respected Eastern Suburbs Catholic families that religiously vote Labor. It's true: Gloria has won the happiness jackpot and knows it with all her heart: Paul is going to give her half-a-dozen beautiful Irish-Lebanese babies and a house in Dover Heights: they've already picked out the plot, new estate off Military Road, ocean view.

Just as I know – the one thing I
do
know – that happiness doesn't include any of that sort of thing for me; I tell Mr Jabour: ‘Warwick is a nice boy, but he won't make me happy.'

He gives that idea an ambivalent shrug, and as I turn to the stairs, he laughs me up them: ‘I will find you a nice boy to make you happy.' Great booming laughter thundering around the stairwell and all through the empty arcade.

‘Run, Olivia!' I do: laughing too, but scooting up and round the landings as if the genie's after me.

‘Come back down in an hour, though, my dear!' he calls. ‘I will have Persian tussahs for you! Special price!'

Yo

T
he first I hear of it is the quiet, some kind of stillness, even before Tarzan drops the gun as the workshop siren goes. Clarkie's calling up to us with some word that's come along from the phone: ‘Stop work! All men down!' Something's happened below.

In the cradle going down, Merv, Mr Adams's holder-up, says, ‘Reckon I seen a splash, to the northeast,' but no one says anything else. No one knows anything except that the whole bridgeworks have stopped, even the shops. It's something bad.

‘Addison,' we're told on the barge by Mr Harrison, who's telling us especially. It was Nipper Addison. I don't know him, except that he was a Pom and married a couple of months ago, not long after I started, and I had to put in a couple of shillings I didn't have for his wedding. He was a boilermaker's assistant. He was twenty-five. He could have been me. He fell a hundred and fifty feet, from the bottom chord, near where the road will soon be hung.

‘Nah,' Mr Harrison is saying, ‘it's not the fall that killed him. It seems he's drowned, poor lad. He came up – half-a-dozen dived in for him but he went under again before anyone could get to him. They're still looking for him now.'

Then there's just quiet. Just the water splashing against the barge, then the engine winding up. Someone calling out off a pontoon a hundred yards away or so, still looking for Nipper Addison.

‘You go home, Eoghan, if you need to,' says Mr Adams as we pull in to the dock; they're sending everyone home that works at height, should they need to get home, get to a pub, get away.

But I can't move from the dock. No one can. Everyone from the shops has come out into the sun. There's nothing going on, four hours of the shift to go, but no one can do anything but roll a smoke and not say much. My mind is charging, though, mostly with the thought: that could have been me. And the other thought: I have to get off working at height. I have to get into the shops full-time, dog shift every night if I have to. What would happen to Ag if I was killed? I can't dive; I can't even swim. Tarzan and them lunatics – Sean Lonergan, Mick Doolan, Vince Kelly – they chuck themselves off coal gantries bare-chested and drink their winnings afterwards. I'm not one of them.

Neither was Nipper Addison. Not reckless, nothing monkey-nutted about him: he was double-checking a bolt when he slipped, I've heard several say. Just slipped. No reason for it. ‘Just bad luck, poor Nip,' I hear someone from his own gang say now. ‘He was that slow and careful he couldn't keep worms in a tin. How could it happen to him?'

‘All right, come round, come round!' The blacksmith, Tom Canning, who usually calls a union meeting, calls a meeting now, as Mrs Daly, the lady who does the pays, comes out of the shops and gets into a cab; they're sending her to Mrs Addison, in Naremburn, to tell her before the rest of the world does. Naremburn: I've never been there, but I've seen it from the sky, every day. The suburbs to the north: all the tin roofs happy in amongst all the trees, gum trees and oak trees; all sorts of trees. Making a home there, they were, the Addisons.

Jesus. I'm shivering with the question still: what would happen to Ag if I was killed? I miss most of what Tom Canning is saying as I think round and round it, while my hand goes into my pocket with everyone else's for the collection, for Mrs Addison, in addition to what she'll get from Dorman Long and the union. Whatever she ends up with, it won't be enough; it won't bring him back. But it will be something; she will be looked after. Jesus, but would Ag be?

Mr Adams has got up now to speak, standing on top of a diesel drum, and he calls out to us in his no-horseshit way: ‘No man is replaceable.' He stops there and the quiet returns, the stillness, and it stills my mind as well; there's no man here not listening as he goes on.

‘Every man who leaves hearth and home daily to go to work is a soldier, make no mistake about that, gentlemen. Each and every one of you standing here, each man across this city and across this world, labours for his sustenance, his family, and for his country. You are soldiers who do not kill and destroy but who create our world for us. Like a soldier, the worker does not know whether this day will see his death on the job, or if he will survive. Unlike a soldier, the worker is not revered, nor celebrated. Every day he comes home safe to his family, it is a day like any other day. The rubbish is collected, roads and bridges and buildings are constructed, our coal is mined to light our homes, to warm our hearths, the trams and the trains and the buses run, shop doors open and close. Let us this day remember him who will not go home.'

There could not be a man here whose head is not hung in prayer.

‘Each one of you is irreplaceable, to your families, your communities, to your mates and to your union. Be proud, gentlemen, even in the grief of this day, that our safety record is the envy of the world. Our Bridge is the envy of the world. When you come back to work tomorrow, in every strike of the hammer, we will remember Sydney Edward Addison. We will remember those who have died before him here: Robbie Craig, Tom McKeown, Ang Peterson, Perc Poole, Ed Shirley, Nat Swandells, John Webb, Bill Woods. We will remember them today and every day we behold this Bridge of their creation, and may there be no more leave us in such tragedy.'

Amen.

The drinking will begin at the Rag and Famish on the corner of Miller and Berry, with the Engineers picking up the tab. I'm not going. I've gone straight back to prayer, shivering now with some strange relief: thank the Lord it wasn't me that fell.

I start walking away, away from everyone, and I doubt that it'll be noticed I'm gone, not today. I walk round along the back of Lavender Bay, down the path by the rail line, and, Lord, I'm praying with every step. I don't ask for much. I don't ask for impossible things or for anything a man doesn't need. I don't ask why you took Nipper Addison from his family, just as I don't ask why you took my brothers Michael and Brendan and our mother and father from mine. I only ever ask you that you let me live. Let me get on.

My eyes are suddenly full. With strange tears. For my family. Not until today have I grieved. Why today? I don't know. Maybe it's because no one has paid for the loss of my family and no one's ever going to. The brewery won't pay; no hat around up at the Sandringham for the death of my brother Michael either. But the company and the union and all Nipper Addison's mates will pay his family, to see that they are all right.

Mrs Addison will be looked after.

But my brother Michael was never looked after. No one in the Neighbourhood is sorry for what happened to him, not truthfully; only sorry for themselves, and what his life and his death and his sinning says about poverty. Michael won't be remembered by anyone, barely even by me. Grey and scarred and fucked rotten, on the kitchen table. He was an arsehole is the truth, but I'm not too certain that was wholly his fault. Nothing was Brendan's fault, either. Where's he, my little brother? Is he dead too? Brendan never gave anyone any trouble; you'd hardly know he was there at all. He was a good kid, but he could never get a look-in for a job: wrong time, wrong place, wrong horseshit trade depression. Or they just didn't like the look of him. Didn't see him. I didn't either. Some kid I was yelling at to get up to the shops for bread, for our tea:
What the fuck have you been doing all day?
Until he didn't come home at all, I didn't take in that he'd left the Neighbourhood until I hadn't seen him a fortnight.

I have to stop, lean against a lamp pole near me, near the public baths, closed up now summer's finished. I roll another smoke. Look down as I do and see there's a piece of broken glass on the path right by my left foot, the sun catching it. It's green, a muddy green, like the water washing up against the rubble stone of the shore here. I kick it with my toe, and it falls away somewhere down into the stones. Disappeared. What happened to my family? My mother and my father, they must have hoped for something better once, mustn't they? They got on a ship across the world for it, didn't they? Why did they come here then? What for? I don't know.

I see a ferry heading in towards the wharf across the bay, and I run for it.

I am not my brothers. I am not my family. It's just me and Ag, and when I woke this morning I was still smiling, still thinking I was something special from having been picked out of the class last night to demonstrate the planing machine. I've only been at Tech a week. I'm a fucking hero there, among the young fellas, and the teacher Mr Simpson, too, just for breathing: because I work on the Bridge. Jesus, I can still hardly believe I got eighty-seven out of a hundred in the Maths test.

I'm not going to fall. I'm going to get up tomorrow morning and catch hot cocks, because that's what I have to do, to keep on this path, up off the rocks. I will spare a thought for Nipper Addison as I do, but I'll be doing it for Ag. Lord, just let me see through a year at this: then I know she'll be looked after by them. By then, maybe Mr Adams would adopt her if I was killed. Would you do that for me? Would you give Ag to the Adamses? They'd love a daughter. But would they? Mrs Adams has her hands full with their Kenny, on twenty-four-hour shift for his needs and his moods. I don't know that they could take another child. Anyway, I'm not going to get killed, am I. If I make this ferry, I'm not going to get killed. Jesus, round the back of these endless jetties and boathouses here, I catch sight of the ferry tying up: if I make it, I will see out the year, I will see out my training, I will be a boilermaker and Ag will go on to high school and she'll become a teacher one day. She'll get a scholarship to the university, she's so smart with all her reading. She will be happy, and I won't get killed.

I make the ferry, it's going straight on to Balmain too, and by the time I've got there I've made that many bargains with God and whoever else might be listening I'm wretched from it. I'm so tired I could just lie down on the street and be done with it. I could do with a drink. For the first time since the night we left the Neighbourhood, I really am in want of an ale, to feel the cleansing cool down my neck, the warm nothing in my head. Just one schooey; I'll just have the one. But before I even see the awning of the Commercial, I find a friendly face looking at me: it's Mrs Buddle, blessed Mother of Darling Street Wharf, outside her little wooden house watering her flowers.

‘Hello, dear!' she waves. Eighty if she's a day. She gave Ag some of her geraniums last Sunday, in a pot – waiting for us to come by, as we do on our way back and forth from the park here. They have a chat just about every time we go by. Because this is home; our home. I'm going to fix the loose palings on Mrs Buddle's front fence this Sunday coming; give them a coat of paint one day too. I could lie down on this footpath just to claim it as mine. She says, sharp as a tack: ‘You're early today.'

I tell her: ‘There was an accident.'

‘Oh no, poor love.' She looks at the Bridge behind me, rising up over my shoulder, and she sighs for the thousand tragedies of it, asking me: ‘Do you want a cuppa, my love?'

‘Not just now, thanks.' I don't want to look at the Bridge for a bit, or talk about it; I tell her: ‘I have to get home.' Wait for Ag to get in from school and then we'll go to the pictures, I think, that Charlie Chaplin one is on,
The Circus,
at the National. Just . . . get away.

She nods: ‘You go and have some peace and quiet.'

I won't be getting that: little Johnny Becker will be tearing round the house while his father sleeps next door, and I'll be glad of it: he's a funny little kid. There's his mother, Nettie, out the front, having her ciggie as I come round the corner. Always alone with it, and I've finally worked out why: no one can stand her and her know-all gibbering.

‘Eoghan,' she smiles when she sees me, still hopeful for it. ‘What are you doing home?'

Before she can talk over me I tell her: ‘There was an accident, someone drowned.'

‘Oh my heavens, you don't say. What happened?'

She doesn't really care; she just wants the details so she can take them up to the shops, telling everyone she's the first to know. I shake my head; I'm not giving her anything.

She follows me into the house. Johnny's playing with his tin train, filling the truck with coal chips from the bin by the fireplace: getting filthy, having a great old time, and I'd like to join him. I look at the bin: I made it from an old pallet after Ag found the idea for it in the paper; good as a bought one.

Nettie's saying: ‘Why don't you go and lie down; I'll bring you in a brandy.'

‘No,' I say to both. ‘Thanks.'

‘Sometimes it helps, you know . . .' She puts her hand on my face and leaves it to trail down my neck.

It stirs me so that I grab her by the wrist, not gently, and I tell her again: ‘No.'

‘You don't have to be mean about it,' she pulls her hand away.

‘Not mean, Nettie. I just don't want that, right?' It's the wrong day for her to have pushed the issue, and I have to tell her now what I've been wanting to tell her for the last few weeks, tell her today because life can be too brutally short for horseshit: ‘I don't want you in my house anymore. Right?'

However meanly that might have come out, I don't want her near my business anymore. I don't want her near me.

Her eyes go wild: the look of a banshee.

I reckon she's going to smash me, but she says, as if I'm filth: ‘I can have better than you.'

I say: ‘Well, you'd better go and get it then.'

She gives me a last look of hatred before she drags Johnny up by the arm, leaving his train smash on the hearth stone, leaving him screaming, leaving this house. Slamming the front door.

Slamming this and that inside her own home, that's how much she cares for peace and quiet for her man. Telling me by all this carry-on that there will be consequences. I don't care, whatever she does or says. No one listens to her anyway.