The Blue Mile (32 page)

What's left of options here for me? An advertisement in the papers? Pathetic little black and white box under
DRESS, FASHION, ETC
. I've never done anything like that; never had to. Mother would be more and more appalled, and I doubt it would do anything for me now anyway.
Exclusif
can't compete on the same track with ready-to-wear . . .

‘Morning, Ollie,' Coralie's bright face comes in with the bell.

How am I going to tell her I'll have to let her go? She'll find a place somewhere else – if Mr Jabour doesn't whisk her off somewhere, one of the department stores will snap her up as soon as look at her. I've heard that Hordern's might be expanding their fabric department to include a sewing school – Coralie would be perfect for something like that. I don't want to let her go, though. I don't want to let any of this go. My life. My world.

Mais non, ch
é
rie. Hold on
.
It's not over yet. Hold on, until the last fingernail breaks.

Hold on? What to? It seems that someone's let the water out of the harbour and we're all whirling towards the plughole.

You'll find something. And you will hold on.

*

I find Agnes up the top of the ferry steps, making her way round from the tram. Lugging her satchel on her shoulder, it's almost as big as she is. I call out: ‘Poppet!' And when she turns, for a moment, in her smile, in the bounce of her thick beribboned plaits, everything is beautiful. It's beautiful that business is so slow I can be here at the top of the ferry steps at four o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon two ticks away from Christmas, be here to see Agnes smile. There's my branch out of the whirlpool.

She waits for me to catch up and I ask her: ‘How was school today?' looking for signs every day, as I do, that some B is getting into her.

But she smiles again: ‘Miss Rosewood picked me out for reading.'

That is the world to Agnes, all that she is holding on to. I have to find a way to keep her at North Sydney Grammar. I'll beg for the money. My next letter to Mother might need to be a most interesting one, mightn't it? Whether we remain in Sydney or not. Small matter of a child I have acquired . . . if she hasn't already been informed. I'm expecting that telegram any day now:
OLIVIA JANE! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

Not today, though. Only our McIlraith's box waiting for us at the door. Annoyingly dumped on the step. I expressly asked them, as Mother has always done, to deliver it in the evening, in person, so that it doesn't get pinched. The miracle that it hasn't been makes me clap my hands: ‘Here's Christmas!'

‘Oh!' Agnes's deep blue eyes grow wide as the sky as I heft it inside and unfold the cardboard flaps of our bounty on the kitchen table.

‘Behold the infamous Mexican chocolate cake.' I lift it out first, and hold it aloft in its red and gold striped tin.

‘Ooh,' she says with giggling reverence, ‘it looks like a little circus tent,' and so it does, becoming something new and lovely through her eyes. And so we go through her discovery of the tins of almonds and walnuts, the cherry shortbread tarts, the fruit mince for our pies, for which she will make the pastry, while I eat all the Paradise pineapple creams and caramel fudge bonbons.

‘What's this?' Agnes holds up the bottle of French cognac that by some inexplicable force of habit I keep ordering.

I laugh, at myself. ‘It's a brandy, for sauce my mother used to make. But we have custard with our pudding, don't we? Silly.' I don't know how to make Mother's brandy sauce. I take the bottle from Agnes's half-quizzical, half-repulsed frown and shove it in the cupboard with its fellows: last year's full one and three opened others, languishing at the back of the top shelf with the soap flakes and turpentine. A short, sharp scald of sadness at the back of my throat.

But when I turn back around, my little poppet is grinning, asking me, ‘So, where does the Mexican infamous circus cake go?' Ever helpful, ever doing the job that needs to be done, there she is picking up the tin.

‘In the sideboard,' I say and step back into the sitting room to open the doors of it for her.

She kneels and peers in, telling me: ‘It's very dusty in here – you need new paper put down.' To line the bottom of the cupboard section. Was there ever a more perfect child?

I say: ‘Well, we'd better do that, then, hadn't we?' For I certainly never have in my life, and I doubt Mother ever did either.

Agnes carefully removes the jumble of silver and vases and china oddments that live there and pulls out the paper that lay beneath them. I had never noticed that there
was
paper lining there – and with it comes a cloud of ancient filth, and something else . . . A certificate of some kind swishes across the floor, lodging under the toe of my right shoe.

I pick it up. The paper is equally ancient, yellowed, but thick:
TICKET-OF-LEAVE
it's entitled. From the
Principal Superintendent of Convicts' Office. Sydney, New South Wales, 12 August 1842. It is His Excellency, the Governor's, Pleasure to dispense with the Attendance at Government Work of Tobias Weathercroft, who was tried at
somewhere indecipherable in
London, 25 May 1831, Convict for 14 years
. . .

‘Oh dear God.' I almost drop it, as if it's a spider.

‘What is it?' Agnes is alarmed, as if it might have bitten me.

‘Grandfather Weathercroft – my mother's grandfather – he was a convict.'

‘Oh?' Poppet face relaxes; relieved: is that all? She asks me: ‘What did he do?'

‘I don't know. Doesn't say.' I read it again. ‘This paper says he was allowed to work, in the District of the North Shore, for good behaviour.'

Agnes is not particularly interested in that. She sets about wiping the insides of the sideboard. While I laugh again – and darkly. Well, there's something else for the grape, isn't there. At least something to toss back to Mother when I get the dressing-down from her that's coming. A convict? I've always known this little stone house was made by convicts, the stone cut by them, but Grandfather Weathercroft a convict
himsel
f
? I'm not merely half-cash-strapped Australian, then, am I. The Honourable Olivia Jane Ashton Greene is half-convict. Not the right sort, all right. I wonder, is that why Mother truly wasn't an acceptable bride for his Lordship –
really
? A dramatic discovery of convict stain. Atrocity of atrocities. I wonder if Barty Woo knows. I'd almost want to go all the way to London to ask him in person.

Oh God, but that catches me. London: no. I'm not going to London. I live here. And Eoghan should be here, laughing at this with me. My ultimate emancipation via this little certificate. My ticket to love whomever I choose. Too late. I could tear it up with my own outrage; stamp these convict-sawn floorboards with it.

But I don't. I hide my anger from Agnes. I must, for I know she has enough of her own to grapple with, and later, after dinner, as I cuddle her into bed, I ask her before she sleeps: ‘Where shall we go to Mass on Christmas Day? You choose.'

She shakes her dear little curly head: ‘I don't want to go to Mass at all.'

‘No?' For all that religion has barely touched me, I must say: ‘Agnes, it's not God's fault your brother isn't here. We must pray for him anyway.'

‘Yes,' she says. ‘I know that. I pray for him every day. All day. I don't need to go to a church to do it. God hears me. It's Yoey who isn't listening.'

‘Hm. Yes.' I look up at the Bridge, crisscrossed black on indigo through the white slats of the venetians. The road is complete now, only waiting to be opened. You made that Bridge, Eoghan. I am begging you now. Please come home. A train rumbles out across the viaduct and into the tunnel below us. Hear me, if you can.
Me
– begging. Not something I enjoy.
Please.
Where are you?

Yo

‘
I
t is not in my power to say where the child is,' the fella at the Children's Court says.

‘I just want to know if she's all right. That's all. I'm not going to bother anyone.' I'm not going anywhere near Balmain, the way I am, if that's what he's worried about. Shame enough running into Ellen Callaghan yesterday up near Taylor Square,
Oh, I hardly recognised you, Eoghan
, she could hardly wait to tell me she'd heard through Father Madigan that Ag had gone to a good Catholic family, looking down her nose at me as if her own brother doesn't manage a fucking brothel.

This court fella rubs his eyes; tired of arseholes bothering him every day, then he says, again: ‘You must make application to the court to resume guardianship of your sister, otherwise I can't help you.'

I don't want guardianship of Ag. I'm not fit to polish her boots. I am an arsehole, as O'Keenan by definition must be, and I can't even look after myself, never mind a child. It's Christmas. I just want to know she's safe and happy, I just want to be sure. It's hard enough being this sober, to have come here; I'm sweating with it. I don't deserve to be near her. I just want to know if she's all right.

He takes pity; he says: ‘It is my understanding that the people who have her in foster care at present are considering adoption.'

‘The Adamses? I know them – they wouldn't mind you saying.' Though I'm certain Mr Adams wouldn't mind ripping me apart slowly for what I've done.

‘It is not in my power to say.'

‘Yeah, right.' I wander back out. I don't deserve to know.

‘How'd you go?' Ced asks me, leaning against one of the columns by the door.

I shake my head. ‘Drink?'

‘Yeah.'

We start walking back up to Flinders Street, up to Taylor Square, to the other Court House there on the edge of Darlo, where we're on the Communist Party tab. We're to be there at four o'clock anyway, expecting the King's own Girl Guides to arrive about then. I don't care where I'm going or what I'm doing. I can't stop thinking of Ag. It's Christmas. Jesus. It must be Mr and Mrs Adams that have Ag, mustn't it? It has to be. The only way I'll know is to go and front up to them. Sober up and front up to them. Front up to Mr Adams and tell him what exactly? Look, I'm not fucking pissed, yet, today. See – too fucking sober. I'm not on the dole yet, either. I've been getting piece work at the Texaco dock, a day here, a day there, rolling out them barrels, but mostly I'm getting paid to drink and run. Aren't I worth knowing.

Getting the Tooths into me at this pub; and three schooeys down, the Girl Guides are here to divert what's left of my attention. A bit early. It's only a quarter to.

They're into it quickly. Five of them, and one says to the barman: ‘Two bottles of KB and dead Commie bastard, if you don't mind.'

And then he doesn't know what hit him. Ced is that fast and that small, they never know who or what has hit them. There's some power in him, for a little fella, he comes up from under: crack. And then all they see is me.

A smile and a wink and I say: ‘Come on. Take this outside.'

That's what they want, a public fight, to show everyone what a pack of arseholes we are and how it's all the Big Fella's doing, and how the only ones who can stop the fighting is the Girl Guides. This arsehole gives them something more than they're after. I start running. They follow. The five of them. Pack of spoons.

I run them round into Little Bourke Street, down the length of it, and into the lane behind the empty warehouse there, where the real arseholes are waiting. They step out of the line of terraces across the road: a dozen wharfies, going into bat for Australia.

I watch them beat the living shit out of all the King's men, and something in me enjoys it. Watching them covering their heads, scared for their lives. They're not going to get killed, just expertly hurt, but they think they're going to die. I know what that feels like: you think you just can't take another hit. But you do. I keep watching until they're finished and one of the wharfies says, ‘Get scarce, kid.' Then I walk back up to Flinders, get on the tram, on the next one heading for La Perouse.

‘Fancy meeting you here,' says Ced, got on the stop before me.

I say: ‘How's about a drink, then?'

‘Oath, mate.'

Olivia

‘
T
his is him, isn't it? That's the name?'

‘You've found something?' I follow the Supreme Court clerk's finger down the ancient page. A register, of labour assignments, 1836, and here he is:
Weathercroft, Tobias – Aged 21 years – sent'd 14 years, theft of small pig – CCC 1831.
A small pig – made all the difference between hanging and transportation that
small,
I suppose. Good God, and this means he was only sixteen when put out to sea? But I ask the clerk what's not clear to me: ‘What does CCC mean?'

He smiles at me in a bemused way that suggests such convict enquiries are not a part of his everyday; he says: ‘CCC is the Central Criminal Court – the Old Bailey, in London.'

Where Bart prosecutes criminals nowadays. How funny. Round and round the wobbly wheel of fortune goes.

The clerk says: ‘I must say I'm surprised there was anything to be found here at all – these records are destined for destruction. Library doesn't want them, nor the Attorney-General's Office. Seems a shame, in a way.'

In every other way it's shame that will see these leather-bound volumes burned to dust. Who in their right mind would ever want this sort of ancient filth lurking at the bottom of the Supreme Court's sideboard waiting to fall out and humiliate them? I look at the
Assigned to
column and see that Grandfather Weathercroft was sent to work for a man called Joseph Johns, a pie-maker, of George Street North, at the Rocks. Look at it hard, before it disappears. I look up at the clerk again and ask him: ‘Might I have this register? Or just the page?'

‘I'm afraid not,' he smiles again, and regretfully: ‘It's property of the Crown.'

Aren't we all. I smile in return and thank him for his time. Something I have plenty of. Now that the discovery of fourteen small-pig-theft years is complete, I'll have to find some other lunchtime diversion. I pass the Thomas Cook travel agency on the way back to the arcade and resist making the booking, again. For passage to London. Stamped return to sender. But I can't – not yet. Not London. But where else might we go? There is no other logical place for us to go. So what am I waiting for? I spy the spine of the arch vaulting beyond the Quay and I'm waiting for the Bridge to officially open. That's the line in the sand at present. The nineteenth of March, the date has been set for the ceremony, thirteen days from today. If Eoghan doesn't show up then, I'm going to ask Mr Jabour to sign the adoption form and then Agnes and I will get on a ship. And Mother will get an awfully big surprise. I still haven't written to her about any of this, and the grape has evidently been just as remiss. I still haven't mentioned the idea of London to Agnes, either. If fate is a wheel, mine's got its gears stuck and left me dangling in midair.

With a riot of rayon in the window of the Emporium, the first thing I see rounding the entrance of the Strand.
Rayon.
Japanese rayon, one shilling, nine pence a yard. Uncrushable. Utterly fake: aren't we all. Mr Jabour waves to me across his cutting table – three customers in line. I smile back and mouth the word, ‘Rayon' at him in mock contempt just as I turn to the stairs. How often did he make me promise I'd never stoop to synthetics? Now look at him! Busy again. And Coralie with him as Velma is busily in production of a new grandchild for him now, too. They're scheming to set up a sewing school of their own, the genie and Coralie. And I will be busy again one day too. Hold on.

Go to London, insists some whisper under the clop of my mary-janes. Take up the shop that Mother has picked out for me in Piccadilly.
Noooo
, the remnant child in me wails at the idea. At the defeat. Can't I set up again in Chatswood? Not likely: it's too close to Mosman, and I shall forever carry the stain of Lady Game, wherever I go in this city. The Witches are baying for blood, with Premier Lang daring to declare that he will open the Bridge himself instead of the Governor. The New Guard have declared on the King's behalf that this must not be allowed to happen. The newspapers read as a wild colonial opera of high dudgeon; the Games must feel besieged on all sides. I should try to telephone Lady Game again, or leave a card:
You can always run away with me and Agnes, somewhere
. . .

How long before these putrid streams of bile reach my little poppet at school? I would like to think that is far-fetched, that the Witches would not stoop to such pettiness. But I am too well acquainted with them. Their mystifying hatred. It is frightening. Look at my salon: not one order in my register. I would like to write to Governor Game myself and beg him:
Please, sack Mr Lang and be done with it. Sack him now.
If it really would make the difference.

I see myself in the window, under the backwards
OLIVIA COUTURE.
Lost. What happened to the girl who dreamed magic-carpet odalisque dreams of Paris?

She is here,
says Madame.
Work. You have not broken one fingernail yet – not one.

Yes. Work. There is always work to do. I true up the edges of the Irish linen that's waiting for me, draped over the back of the chaise, spread it upon my table and start chalking up. A handkerchief shift, this will be. Gypsy-twirl from the hip. And if no one else will, I shall wear it myself. I shall wear it across the Bridge. Let the women of Sydney revert to type if they must: tasteless and inelegant in the fifty-three shades of beige that's just arrived, a freshly discarded season from Home: Bois de Rose Beige, Rose Beige, Ashes of Roses Beige, Beige Beige, Fawn Beige, Mushroom Beige, Biscuit Beige, Apricot Beige, Vanilla Beige, Coconut Beige, Peaches and Cream Beige. They won't miss me. My gypsy handkerchief is bright apple green.

*

‘But I don't want to go,' Agnes whispers, as if in whispering it quietly enough the whole idea might go away. The whole Bridge might disappear. Her class is among those invited to parade across
the span for the special children's day ahead of the opening.
I understand her reluctance: the Bridge is Yoey, to us both. Can't look at it without this torment of wondering; can't not look at it, either. The damn thing fills the sky outside the front door, sneaks through the slats of the venetians. Where are you, Eoghan? Why have you left us? You nasty, sneaking, horrible coward.

I promise her: ‘You don't have to go.'

‘I won't get into trouble?' deep blue pleading.

‘No, of course you won't.' I hold her to me, and hope.

She wakes with a bit of a sniffle on that Wednesday morning anyway, and it's raining. So we malinger together in our hideaway. We devour a box of Mr Hillier's best. We watch the raindrops ball on the petals of the geranium she planted in the window box I bought her for the back wall. We screwed it onto the sill together, facing north to catch the sun. She pinched the geraniums from the yard of the boarding house on the bend of Bay View Street, poking through the iron spokes of the fence. They'll plant themselves anywhere, those geraniums: Mrs Buddle told her so, in long-ago Balmain. Bright coral splash against this grey day today. Agnes spends the rest of it in a book and I don't mention London as ten thousand children trudge across the Bridge in this pouring rain.

And sometime in the night my little poppet moans: ‘Olivia?' A great heaving sob – and a raging headache. ‘It hurts . . .'

It really does. I hold her to me tight and terrified all through this night. If there is such a thing as God I'm telling him: don't you bloody dare let her get ill. Hasn't this child been harmed enough? You want to give her a good dose of the flu too? I rail at God until the dawn. Don't you let her be ill: this is not that kind of tragedy. No. I rail at Eoghan, for this is his fault too. His fault most of all. You hurt this child again and I'll – I'll –

Agnes wriggles around in my arm and says: ‘You can let me go now. Please. I'm a bit hot.'

Fever?

No. I'm only squashing her with my fears.

*

It's the storm over Mr Lang's hat that almost pushes me across the line and into the travel agency, though. He didn't wear a top hat to the opening ceremony. No top hat. No frockcoat.
Quelle horreur!
the Beige Witches shriek across the front page of the paper. He wore a homburg! The indecency! What do you expect from one who doesn't even own a dinner suit and is wedded to a feminist frump? Well, you'd expect some fool from the New Guard to be so outraged he'd charge at the Bridge ribbon on horseback and make a complete laughing stock of the whole nation by attempting to cut it with a blunt ceremonial sword. That's how one properly declares a bridge open in the name of a king. The newsreel is playing at every theatre in town – at two-hour intervals. I haven't seen it. An Irishman, this rogue ribbon-slasher purportedly is – all troublemakers must be, mustn't they? They locked him up in the lunatic asylum for the weekend, last heard babbling incoherently about top hats. Apparently Mr Lang's speech on the day was quite stirring nevertheless. Jolly good. Sydney is a lunatic asylum.

And yet I stop on the footpath at the window of Thomas Cook, staring into one of the posters there:
TO ENGLAND VIA CANADA AND BEAUTIFUL LAKE LOUISE.
A couple of dancers cheek to cheek in the top right corner and suddenly I can't conscience going anywhere. I am dancing with Eoghan under the Christmas bell of St Augustine –
I will wait for you,
I told him that day. And how can I conscience taking Agnes away from
her
country? Take her from all she's ever known? Take her from Eoghan, and take me from him, too, so, so far away? What if he really does come looking for us at Lavender Bay and finds us gone? I can't bear that thought. My determination to hurt him back vanishes, nothing but a puff of smoke on the breeze. I shall continue to wait, a little longer. Perhaps I should wait until after my birthday, just a few weeks more. I'll be so much more certain of what I'm doing at twenty-one, too, won't I. At twenty-one Grandfather Weathercroft was a convict slave to a pie-maker at the Rocks: then went on to play for sheep stations, and lose them. Life is long. And life is too short. Act now. Before the rent on the salon bankrupts you. But still, I resist. London – nooooo.

The Jabours are offering no encouragement, no help at all with this decision to take myself sensibly Home to Mother. My genie says: ‘Well, my dear, you know I will be sad to see you go.' His eyes are a pitiable deep umber glum and not for me alone. He holds no love for London or King George the German: they killed his brother, for thirty miserable million pieces of silver. Gloria gives me an outright: ‘No – you
can't
,' and little Robbie cries: are you insane? While Coralie suggests, most sensibly: ‘Come in on the sewing school with us, Ollie – it'll be buckets of fun.' It would too, and it is so obviously set to make a decent couple of buckets of money, but I don't want to teach. I want my salon back. I want my own dreams back.

I take my scattered self up to David Jones, for some chinchilla trim – can't get it anywhere but there and Foys at the moment. I'm so distracted by the time I get to the haberdashery department, though, I've forgotten what I want it for.

SYDNEY HARBOUR BRIDGE EXHIBITION

A miscellany of construction and design

The sign by the escalators directs me, through the shopping crowd. It's a steel-girder smash to the heart, this crowd, always is for me: how can the arcades be so quiet, so empty, and here, cash registers going
ding ding ding
everywhere. It's business, simple business – the buying power of bigger creatures – but it's not fair. Haute couture and crepe chaff bags all jumbled under the one convenient roof. I wander into the exhibition, all snaking pin-boards of draughtsmen's sketches and photographs and tables and tallies, and I'm still searching for why I'm here, when I'm drawn to a small glass-topped plinth at the end of one of the snakes. I wonder what's sleeping under the glass box: peer in and it's a pair of scissors. Mr Lang's ribbon-cutting scissors, when he got to have his go at it. I'm struck by how gaudy they are, a bright yellow gild, with flannel flowers and gum leaves twisting along the handles, around a likeness of the Bridge. Something from a pantomime. A prop.
Hand-wrought of Australian gold and containing six flame-coloured opals, quarried from Lightning Ridge, created in Angus & Coote's workrooms by Sydney's finest craftsmen,
says the card by them. I say they are just a pair of snippers: overwrought.

And suddenly I see in them that the argument is finished. It's time to cut my ties here. Eoghan has cut his: he is lost to us. Admit this most terrible of defeats. It's been five months now. And if he's not lost to us then it's him whose action, or inaction, is unconscionable. He can forget me all he likes – we were nothing but a blue mile of silly dreams. But how can he forget Agnes? How can he not fight for his sister? How can he not see all the wonderful things he had and might still have if he were damn well here? Mr Adams is still keeping his mail for him; keeping the light on for him. The Adamses loved him without question or complication. Why run from that? Why not see sense and damn well come back? Because he's dead, isn't he. Dead to me. He has to be. Took the ultimate coward's way out.

Despair: it's a leading cause of death among young men today.

For the life of me, I can't remember why I'm here. And I can't stand this city anymore. I have to get out of the DJs
ding ding ding
, and back down on Pitt, Ned the barrowman nods over his apples and oranges as if he knows what's happening here: I'm gone, I'm next, I'm packing up and moving on. Last week it was Monty – moving his photographic studio to a barrow at Manly, for the Sunday seaside trade, scrabbling for pennies from those who've got them. And now it's me, pulling the closed sign round early. Going home. To wait for Agnes to come in from school. I'm going to tell her today, this afternoon: we're going to start again. We're going to London. An adventure, together. Grab your hat and coat
. . .