The Blue Mile (28 page)

Five

Yo

‘
Y
ou can't go away again,' Ag says to her out in the sun, here in the courtyard of St Gus's, holding her hand like she'll never let it go again.

‘I won't go away again, not from you, Agnes, not ever,' she says, but she's looking at me. As half the parish is: wondering what I got for Christmas as they rush away to turn the roast. Mrs Buddle winks over her walking stick on her way through the gate: she'll get the story later, in detail, from Ag. ‘Come to my place for dinner today? Now?' Olivia is still looking at me, in that way I can't say no. ‘I've already made the ham. Basted it myself and everything. Whole leg – don't make me eat it all alone.'

‘Oh, can we go, Yoey – please?' Ag will never forgive me if we don't.

‘Yeah, all right,' I say, for all the grace lacking in that. I'm still not wholly believing Olivia is here with us – come
here
for us. To have Christmas dinner with us. She is Christmas: her dress is green with red ribbons going all around it, her gold curls set all around the edge of her little white hat. She's the best Christmas tree I've ever seen, and it's not like we were going to have much of a dinner this year ourselves anyway, taking some sandwiches down to the park. Mr Adams gave me a pound, as he did last year, but I spent all of it at Hordern's on Ag's new dress and shoes.

‘I must warn you, though,' she says, that bit of wicked in her smile, and making no attempt to hide it: ‘There will be dancing.'

‘Dancing?' I'm already laughing. And worried.

‘Dancing!' Ag reckons that's a top idea.

‘Yes,' Olivia says to her. ‘You'll never guess what Santa brought me.'

‘What?'

‘A wireless!'

‘No.' Ag can't wait to get there.

‘Yes.' Olivia looks back to me. ‘Don't worry. I'll teach you.'

‘You'll teach me what? To dance?' The bell starts going off in the tower, ringing all round this courtyard that's empty now, calling the overly faithful to the Solemn High Mass to come, and I don't hear what she says next. I'm just staring at her again. She came to Mass. She came to this particular Mass, and we nearly went earlier but that Ag wanted to sing more than joining Gladdy down at the park quicker; that's the hand of God. It must be. That Olivia Greene came to us at Mass at all. Yes, she did. She's here.

Holding her arms out to me, for a dance. Right here. Her laughter sings high above the bell: ‘Dance with me now.'

So I do. I take her and hold her to me and dance her round this empty courtyard of St Gus's, with this bell ringing and ringing out and only the great stone windows looking down on us. She leans her head back, still laughing, laughing up at the sky, and she says: ‘I knew it. I knew you could dance.'

Of course I can dance. How else do you get near a girl? I made a particular point of being all right enough at it to ask Lil Casey to a social at St Ben's, and I never did dance with her, because she said no to me. That was an age ago. I wasn't good enough for Lil Casey. But here I am, this Christmas Day, a year away, with Oonagh. Olivia Greene. I hold her closer, the tin-whistle slimness of her, and I put my cheek to hers: ‘It's amazing all the things I can do.'

She squeezes my hand: ‘Yes.' And she whispers, her breath on my ear at the finish of the bell: ‘I'll wait for you, Eoghan. I'll do whatever it takes.'

*

She comes to us again on the Sunday after. It's only two days that have passed but somehow it's like the constitution of the air has changed. The look of everything is clearer.

‘Hold on a second,' she says as we're leaving to walk round to St Gus's. She takes a little pair of scissors from her bag of tricks and cuts a flower from the gardenia bush at the front of our house and pins it on her straw hat. ‘What do you think, Agnes?' They fiddle about with the flower on the hat and I watch them. Ag is so happy, so easy in herself, and I take a second to take stock of how far she's come in this past year. She won the junior story-writing and the handwriting prize at school; the headmaster shook my hand in the street: that's never happened to an O'Keenan. Ag's gardenia's doubled in size too, with all her care. The leaves of the bush are darker and shinier, the flowers seem whiter and the scent of them in this patch of morning sun is miraculous in itself. The scent of memories for our future, and I'm easier in my own self too. I can look at Olivia here and I'm not going to die if I don't kiss her now. Because, one day, I will kiss her every day, in some patch of sunlight somewhere, and I will cherish that kiss, every day, for the rest of our lives.

I take her hand, up the street as we walk, for all the parish to see.

‘This is Miss Greene, my friend and Aggie's,' I introduce her to Mr Adams first, coming in the gate. He's on his own; Mrs Adams must be held up with their Kenny having another turn, to break their hearts more than is fair.

‘How do you do?' Olivia holds out her hand to him and he looks at it for a second, and not only because I'm sure he'd never have shook the hand of a woman in his life. But he takes it up and his pit-bull potato head smiles: ‘We're doing well, Miss Greene. How do you do?'

She looks under her hat in that nervous way she has when she's uncertain. ‘Very well, thank you. It's a beautiful morning, isn't it?'

‘It is, indeed.' Mr Adams shakes my hand too and pulls me down by the shoulder to say in my ear: ‘Beautiful morning?' and some Gaelainn of his that doubtless means: ‘Where in want of some new type of blasphemy did you find her, you lucky bastard?'

Mrs Buddle waves from the back pew as we go in the church doors, nodding to me that Ag told her every last thing yesterday when she skipped round to hers, so the rest of the congregation will know by teatime too. Clarkie, three pews down, gives me a look to match Mr Adams's Gaelainn. I give him a look back:
Believe it.

Thank you, Lord. I watch Olivia watching all that's going on through the Mass, her hand on Ag's shoulder all the while, listening though she doesn't understand a word. You don't really have to. Beyond doing the right thing, you're here for hope and wonder, to be better than you are, that's my belief, heretical as it might be, and I let myself hope and wonder: would she convert for me? Really? That would be a new height for pride and for happiness. I'm grinning with it even as I kneel to take Communion, even as Father O'Reagan has a good hard look there for sin on me.

Look harder. You'll find none. Even my prayer is pure. I have only one prayer, and it's all I'm asking for: this family that I want us to be.

*

‘Oh dear God,' Olivia is praying this Sunday, only seven Sundays later, on our way down to the Darling Street wharf, on our way across to the zoo for the afternoon. Or we were on our way. Now she is shaking like a leaf with fear.

She's just watched a fella get chucked up against the stone wall of the Shipwrights Arms. He's hit the footpath with the sound of something rending: not the wall.

‘You dirty fucking little –' says one them who just chucked him. One of three.

‘Shit – they're coming,' says another.

They are: there's about a dozen running full pelt down the hill at us. Hobnails smashing along the asphalt like it might be an army of twice more coming at us.

‘Oh dear, God.' Olivia is not screaming. She's gone past terrified. She's grabbed up Ag to her but she's just standing in the road, shaking.

I push them both into the lane that runs by the pub, and then I stand at the corner and watch.

I see who they are. I don't know any of them personally but I recognise them as colliers. They all drink at the Dry Dock, round at Mort Bay. They're not drunk today. I don't know what this fight is about. It doesn't matter. The mine is closing down and they've only got each other to blame: it was a collective, all these fellas here shareowners or sons of. Not anymore. There's no bargaining of anything if there's no company to work for. Lang's bank-robbing for roadworks will come a bit too late for them. All they've got left is their Communism now: collective poverty, and they're not happy about it.

‘What you fucking looking at?' One of them looks over at me.

I don't say anything. Just hold his stare, as I make myself ready to grab the girls and run. Where? How?

But I don't have to. The cops' whistles are coming down the street now, hanging out of a paddywagon coming down the hill, as they all take off across the park, disappearing before the wagon's got the brakes on.

One of the cops gets out and asks me: ‘Recognise any of them?'

I shake my head: ‘No.'

He looks hard for the horseshit: ‘You sure about that? I think I might recognise you.'

No, you fucking well don't, you steaming streak of filth. I tell him: ‘I'm sorry, I don't know any of them.'

That's not a lie, and I don't say it only to avoid getting my own head kicked in. My sympathy is with the colliers for all that they might be at fault themselves. Their collective was as mean as any boss, not paying their engine drivers properly, always in dispute, running the mine down, giving the council every excuse to threaten to close them down. And now it's happened. But the cops make sport of shooting at miners and waterside workers in this country when they dissent, and they don't always aim above their heads. You can't interrupt the lives of the rich with industrial action, can you. The rich that reckon everything happens by magic, and happens for them; if the rubbish bins aren't emptied on time you call the fucking cops, don't you.

This one is still giving me the hard stare. Not one of the cops is seeing to the fella on the ground yet. He hasn't moved. He could be dead for all they care about it.

The publican of the Shipwrights now sticks his head out the door by me: ‘I know exactly who they are, officer.'

Of course you fucking do: they don't spend their money in your pub.

‘Eoghan, are you all right?' Olivia's face appears next to his as she steps back round from the corner of the lane. She's still holding Ag to her, keeping her from grim death.

I say: ‘Yeah, I'm all right.'

Something in me is not right, though. Something in me doesn't want to keep walking past this. I can't keep on to the zoo, carry on with my Sunday. I'm staring at Olivia now and all I can think is: you're one of them and you always will be. As I will always be No one O'Paddy getting stopped by the cops that want to have a word. Barely enough change in my pocket for the fare out of here. Wages that wouldn't cover her drycleaning bills.

But she's looking over my shoulder now, waving her purse at the cop: ‘Officer. Officer – aren't you going to see if that poor fellow over there is all right?'

The cop looks at her with a bit of surprise first before he realises who's speaking to him and then he nods: ‘Of course, miss – an ambulance will be along.'

She's giving him a stare that says she'll turn him to dust if he tells a lie and it brings me back into myself, into the here of where we are. Olivia is like no one but herself. Class of her own.

She says over the top of the paddywagon, over all of us: ‘Oh look, here's the ferry pulling in.' And to Ag: ‘Come on then, poppet. Not going to let a couple of silly bullies ruin our fun, are we.'

Of course not.

We keep on to the zoo, to Taronga Park, across the water at Mosman. We've never been before, me and Ag; Olivia hasn't been for years. It's another beautiful day, all day long, and there's nothing like seeing Ag looking at a zebra for the first time. She's shaking with the wonder of it. Kangaroos. Turtles and fish. Squealing at snakes. Getting to feed a carrot to a giraffe and disbelieve its long blue tongue. See two baby lion cubs rolling around on the grass. See Olivia holding Ag's hand all day. A beautiful day, excepting that I paid for none of it.

It's nothing to her. She waves that purse around however she wants. We eat sausage rolls and fairy floss so dear they should be more plainly called stealing. And it's eating me.

‘You all right?' she asks me. ‘You've been quiet today.'

‘Have I?' Can't imagine why.

Olivia

‘
I
s that a peculiarly Australian thing too?' Lady Game asks me and I bite down hard on my pins with this sharp jab of embarrassment: no idea what she's referring to. Haven't been listening to a word. A little preoccupied today: that fighting in the street yesterday, it's playing around and around in my mind like a seaweedy newsreel, one the general public is never shown, for good reason. I'm frightened for Eoghan. I don't know why I should be, but I am. That he'll be set upon in the street; as if walking the streets is somehow more dangerous than fixing railings to the side of the sky. Perhaps it is. He was so withdrawn yesterday, all through the zoo – he's worried too, isn't he.

‘Olivia?'

What? Yes, that's right, Lady Game is wondering about peculiarly Australian things, isn't she.

‘I beg your pardon? I was deep into your hemline just then.'

‘And you do such very fine work, too, Olivia,' she smiles, that gently wry one. ‘Such attention to detail, you have, and I'm so grateful. I was only wondering, about that way Australians seem to have of speaking in a derogatory manner of those things of which you should really be most proud.' She looks out the window, over the crenellations and the figtops, at the glimpse of the arch there. ‘Your Bridge – I've now heard it called the Coathanger three times, by an array of people, and this morning, at the Bush Nursing function with the Country Women's Association, one of the ladies called it the Iron Lung. I don't know quite how to respond when I hear these terms. Isn't that terrible?'

I don't know whether she means the derogatory terms or her lack of response is terrible, but as I look out over at the arch myself I must work hard to stifle the snort: ‘Iron Lung? I've not heard that one before.' That's quite clever: great big metal thing and the only thing keeping the city alive, financially. Terrible, too, monstrous, but I tell Lady Game: ‘I'm sure it's said affectionately.'

‘But that's the thing – I don't
know.
The rural ladies this morning were quite critical of city attitudes and the priorities of the parliament. Their opinions of politicians are in no doubt, however – they call the parliament here the Bear Pit and the federal one is the Canberra Zoo.'

Takes me straight back to the monkey colony at Taronga yesterday, mad apes screeching and leaping about and shaking the wire of their cage and I do have to laugh at that: ‘Country women are infamous for calling spades spades.'

‘I'm gathering that.' Lady Game's eyes glitter with wry, but then she's as pensive again, looking out the window. ‘It's impressive how interested and active in politics Australian women are, especially amongst these country women. Conservative and utterly loyal to the Empire, they detest Mr Lang, to a woman, and yet a very lively debate broke out, just as I had to leave – about all the roadworks the Premier has planned. They desperately need the highways properly surfaced out in the rural areas but they were concerned they won't get the roads done because the money will be wasted on high unionised wages. I wished I could stay to hear them all. Such well-informed women, really very impressive.'

Are they? My face burns with some other embarrassment. I'm not impressive. I make hats and frocks and I startle and hide like a silly little girl at desperate men fighting in the street. Agnes was far better composed; she comforted
me
while we waited in that lane:
Don't worry, Miss Olivia,
she patted my hand,
Yoey knows how to keep out of trouble
. The only thing impressive about me was the fingernail marks I left in the top of Agnes's arm, I was so frightened. I can't mention any of that here, not a whisper of it, and not because the details of my life are inconsequential to Lady Game. They are preposterous. Unthinkable. The burn deepens with that other persistent whisper: Eoghan and I can't be together. Preposterous unthinkableness aside, he's going to lose his job. Sometime soon. When the road through the arch is finished. There is not going to be another job for him to go to, and he won't work with me. This is a catastrophe in waiting. It doesn't matter how much I love him. Worship him. We will never be married, and this hurt, this fear, this grinding ache is –

‘Cutting the heads off the tall poppies – that's what he said.' Lady Game pauses, waiting for my response. I was barely even aware she had been speaking.

I look up from my pinning: ‘I do beg your pardon, Lady Game. This voile is slippery as a basket of eels in butter. Who said what?'

‘Mr Lang.' I spy the frown that fleets across her mask of tranquillity. Definitely not an imperious frown; I've hurt her feelings, and that won't do: she is a sensitive and wonderful woman, as well as the linchpin of my livelihood. She is also ten times busier than I ever am – church fetes, hall openings, children's recitals, girls' athletics carnivals: I don't think there's an invitation she turns down – and these quiet moments with me I am certain are somehow a treat for her, a small haven of hats and frocks.

I sit back on my heels. ‘Please, tell me. What did Mr Lang say about the poppies?'

‘He used that analogy with Sir Philip the other evening – cutting the heads off the tall poppies.' She frowns properly: concerned. ‘He means to prune the incomes of the privileged. That's how he plans to fund his roadworks. I know he's not a socialist, he's far more intriguing than that, Sir Philip is convinced of his good intentions and his genuine care for his fellow man, but cutting the heads off the tall poppies – that sounds quite violent to me.'

It does. It gets yesterday's newsreel going round my mind again. That man's head hitting the wall of the hotel:
CRACK
. Eoghan doesn't think those men were fighting about anything in particular: they were fighting because they are angry. Chooks fighting over a button, he said, dismissive of the whole thing. I'd say they appeared out of their minds with anger. Who wouldn't be angry? I tell Lady Game: ‘Yes. There's a lot of anger . . .'

‘Yes,' Lady Game nods at the figtops, searching her own thoughts. ‘I think he might well be an angry man.' Then she looks down at me, something girlish, grinnish in her eyes: ‘You mustn't ever repeat any of the nonsense I spout here, Olivia. Promise me.'

‘Of course I promise. You can trust in my discretion always, Lady Game.' The Governor's wife tells me state secrets: you can't get more fabulous than that. She presses her lips together and I think she's going to tell me some more.

‘It's only gossip, of course,' she says and I'm listening with both ears now, ‘so I don't know if it's at all true, really, and it's come from a political opponent, too, but as a boy, Mr Lang sold newspapers on the street, at Brickfield Hill, on that corner where Anthony Hordern's Department Store is: he had to, to support his mother in some disastrous family circumstance – that's why he has such sympathy with the poor, and no sympathy at all for the indolent. Perhaps it's why he is so kindly towards women, too, why the education of the poor is so important to him – he wasn't able to complete high school himself. The man who told me this said it with no small amount of disparagement, explaining Mr Lang's appeal to the masses – his presidential-style self-made demagogy. But of all the stories there are about Mr Lang, that one seems to me to fit. He is an angry man and the anger is quite personal.'

And I do believe Lady Game might be quite smitten. Why wouldn't she be? Even Mother was partial to Mr Lang: tall, dark, dangerous and dreadfully kind.

‘I must say,' Lady Game continues wistfully, ‘it's Mrs Lang, the Premier's wife, who is the more intriguing and impressive, in her way.'

‘Mrs Lang?' I've only seen her once, and from a distance. Velma Jabour called me down to the window of Electrolux to watch her purchase a new vacuum cleaner a couple of weeks ago. Infamous as the dreariest dowd in the land, or of the western suburbs at least – she manages to make brown crepe look not so much tired as on its last legs.

‘She is a feminist,' Lady Game smiles with a hint of
now, now
in it as if she might have heard my unkind thought. ‘And while I'm never entirely sure what that term
feminist
means apart from fiercely well read, I do consider her to be exemplary of the finest Christian qualities a woman might possess.' Oh dear, this'll be a load of dull guff, I suppose. Christianity: I would call for it to be banned entirely except for what Sundays does for frocks, shush, don't ever tell Eoghan that Mass at St Gus, as far as I'm concerned, is the one true most interminable hour of the week. But Lady Game now drops her voice almost to a whisper: ‘This is the most terrible gossip, Olivia, told to me in the most terrible terms, by an awful bigot, too, but I must express it, for what it reveals of the utmost purity of spirit in the one it seeks to harm. Mrs Hilda Lang, as you'd be aware, is mother to nine children. But what's not generally known is that one of them is adopted and that this adopted one is in fact Mr Lang's own son – born out of adultery, to a woman called Nellie Anderson. He's about your age now.'

‘Oh?' Now that's a piece of gossip, I'll say.

‘Hm,' Lady Game concurs but her whisper is one of hushed astonishment, not scandal. ‘The affair carried on over several years and almost ended in divorce for the Langs but that Hilda Lang resisted that awful measure. This is not the extraordinary thing about her, though. The extraordinary thing is, when this Nellie Anderson died – suddenly and tragically when the child was small – Hilda Lang not only adopted him, but in the heartbreak that followed for Mr Lang, Hilda found it in her own heart to reconcile with her husband. Not only
that
,
but she named their next child Nellie. What does one call that sort of generosity? What is that sort of compassion but sublime?'

Gaspingly so. I nod: ‘Sublime indeed.'

‘It's the antithesis of anger, is it not? That turning of the cheek, with love.' Lady Game sighs and laments to the lampshade above: ‘But Hilda Lang doesn't know how to host a dinner party or how to wear a decent hat, and so I dare say history won't remember her as anything at all.'

No. But I will remember this moment. This story and its moral: don't judge a book, not until you've got to the end and then gone for a good long walk to digest it all. I stand up to stretch out my knees, my spirit somehow replenished. And more: I want to be an impressive woman. I want to stand beside Eoghan, whatever comes for us. Whatever it takes, I will do.