by Kim Kelly
Damn her, I send my cursing up into the mess of squiggling limbs of the fat old Moreton Bay figs that stretch across the foreshore here.
Stomp, stomp, stomp, beneath their million leaves of glossy indifference, doing nothing to soothe me whatsoever.
DAMN!
I slap my hands onto the cool, solid stone of the wall that edges this garden from the sea, and I look out across the cove here, asking it for a loan of just the tiniest fraction of its serenity, just a moment to see my way clear in this.
But all I see now is a claggy haze of humidity rising off the water with the sun, over a great grey expanse of phlergh . . .
Yo
‘Look. Yoey – that’s her.’ Aggie points up ahead: ‘That’s the fairy princess from our tree.’
‘Is it?’ I say, not really looking, hurrying up the path now. We have to get across the harbour earlier than I’m due there, find a good safe spot for Ag to spend the day. I’m sick at the thought of leaving her on her own, in some place I know nothing of, but what else can I do? She’ll be right, won’t be the first day she’s spent alone with a bag of grapes and a bun.
‘Yoey,’ she gets a whine in her voice now, and she’s never one for whining: ‘You’re not looking.’ She pulls at my shirtsleeve.
I look up to where she’s pointing, at her fairy princess: it’s a girl standing by the seawall, her dress is white with pink flowers on it, and she has a long scarf round her neck that’s floating behind her on the breeze, of that see-through type material. I say: ‘You might be right, Ag – she’s got the same colours as your fairies last night.’
‘She must become a real girl in the daytime,’ Ag decides as we get nearer to her.
‘Yeah.’ I say, and I’m already past her in my head, counting the wharves along the Quay, to the Milsons Point one I checked for yesterday – Milsons not McMahons, we have to get to, the ticket fella at the Quay said, on the east side of Lavender Bay. Wharf number six, I count them off again, as if the little folk might have swapped them all around in the night just to entertain me. Then we’re to keep to the left along the water to the Dorman Long wharves – don’t go right to the trains or up the escalators to the tram, it’s a confusion round there, the ticket fella said. I pick Ag up the better to start a run for it.
But as I do she calls out, ‘Oh no – look!’ and I just catch what she sees: the wind picking up and taking the girl’s hat with it. A little white hat with a black band, it flies up and spins against the sky, till it’s caught by the branches of the fig behind us.
‘Oh dear God!’ the girl shouts at the tree, high and loud like a tin whistle. ‘Well, that’s just fabulous, that is.’
And it is. I can see her face now, and it’s stopped every other thought in my head, my feet as well. Her cheeks are the same colour as the flowers on her dress and her hair is as wild as Ag’s, only it’s gold, a wild halo of gold. She throws her hands up in the air. She’s very upset about this hat being in the tree. But her arms, long and pale and bare, are all I’m interested in for the moment. Everything about her seems long. She’s a tall girl, tall like a tree, a beautiful tree of a kind I’ve never seen before. She’s a –
‘We have to get the hat for her, Yoey,’ says Ag, kicking my backside.
‘What?’ I return to our reality as fast as I left it. I’m not climbing up any tree to fetch a hat. We have to get to Milsons Point – ten minutes ago. I look back over my shoulder towards the Quay, the tall masts of some old sailing ship this side of it telling me to move it along.
‘Oh, you wouldn’t be so kind, would you?’ the girl says and I look at her again. She’s looking up at the hat in the tree, wanting, worrying, asking with eyes that are neither blue nor green, and her voice is like honey now she’s not shouting. She could be a princess, she’s got that type of bearing about her. She is without doubt a fairy: she has me in her power. I look at the hat in the tree, searching for the best way up.
‘I can reach,’ Ag says. ‘You hold me up, Yoey, and I can shake it out.’
Takes a child to see sense sometimes, doesn’t it, and the hat’s tumbling into the girl’s hands two seconds later.
‘Thank you so much,’ she smiles, and her hands jitter a little putting her hat back on her head, pulling the brim of it so low on her face all I can see is her smile.
And I can no more reply than move from it. A smile that has changed me into a spoon, powerless except for goggling – and being instantly convinced that this is the girl. The girl. The one who will be mine. I have the worries of the world on my shoulders today. I have my little sister on my shoulders for sure. And I’ve decided to take a wife on the way to the ferry to I don’t know where, as if any girl would want me, never mind one such as this.
I laugh. Though it’s not funny. This is why I’ve never been too orderly about my business: too easily diverted from it. Thinking about a girl, drinking about a girl, and getting nothing done about anything while I’m definitely not getting the girl.
But she laughs as well: honey winding round that tin whistle. Jesus. I’ll bet she can sing.
She says again: ‘Thank you so much.’ And she smiles again: ‘I needed that laugh, too – really I did.’ She looks away, down at her shoes, as if she might have some terrible worry with them now too. They’re white shoes; of course they are.
‘I like your frock,’ Aggie says to her, and I don’t hear the reply.
I can only see the way this girl is smiling up at Ag now, this fairy princess smiling on my sister and talking with her about frocks, so that my own empty-headed spoonery now joins up with our need, and I’m asking this girl: ‘You couldn’t find it in your heart to do me a favour in return, could you?’
‘Oh?’
I’m as surprised as she is at the question, and I don’t know how it is I manage to continue with it when her eyes fall on me again, but I do; I ask her: ‘You couldn’t look after my little sister for a few hours, could you, today? While I’m at work. I’ll pay you.’
Her back straightens at the question, and though I’m an inch or two taller, the look she gives me squashes me into the gravel at our feet.
Yes, I have intelligence enough to know that question was monkey-nutted enough to win me a prize, thank you, and we’ll be on our way.
Olivia
‘No – wait,’ I call after them, and I’m not entirely sure what compels me to, apart from gratitude at being spared a walk back across town as hatless Medusa.
The man turns on his heel, scruffy work boots that have never known a polish, and two sets of impossibly blue eyes implore me, one above the other. Almost a cornflower blue, touch of violet; extraordinary colour. I glance away from them again, into the crook where the stone wall meets the path: why have I stopped them? Perhaps because the man is not much of a man but a boy, not much older than myself, and like myself he’s in a spot of bother on his way to work. I look up at the little girl on his shoulders: impossibly lovely, from jumble of jet ringlets to Indian red mary-janes. And although the answer must be, No, I can’t look after your little sister, as I have to go to work myself, and you shouldn’t have asked such an outstandingly insane question of a lady in the first place, I ask the near threadbare knees of the man’s trousers: ‘Where do you work?’
‘I’ve got a job on the Bridge,’ he says, ‘I start today,’ heart on incongruously crisp white shirtsleeve, and the little one, her whole tiny person cuddling his head: Please.
Well, that’s it then, isn’t it. How can I refuse? A Bridge worker. He could be the dustman there for all I know, but he might just as well be a brave and heroic scaler of monstrous Bridge claws, mightn’t he.
I look at him square on now, the whole of him, and when I do, something even odder strikes me. Whatever he might do for a living, he’s been designed to inspire maximum giddiness in a girl – tall and dark, and those eyes – but I am not giddified by him in the least. The seething bal
l of nervous squirms I carry about inside me has utterly ceased. Perhaps because he is laughably handsome – original template of masculine beauty variety of handsome – I am somehow safe in his gaze. Such an intent gaze, he’s not really looking at me at all, is he. He clearly needs this favour very much. A nice boy, obviously, looking after his little sister. Appealing for my assistance. Deserving of a good turn; as I might well be deserving of giving one.
And so, however impossible it might seem, I find myself replying: ‘I can look after your little sister, but she’ll have to come to work with me.’
‘Miss,’ he says, setting the girl on the path between us, his relief so plain I can feel his heart trip over it, ‘you are a life saver, you’ll never know how much I appreciate this. I’ll pay you – whatever you think is a reasonable thing. It’s just that we’ve been caught short today for help and we’re not from round here, and –’
‘No,’ I assure him, ‘you don’t need to pay me.’ His gratitude is as embarrassing as it is charming. Such a nice boy should not have to beg help of strangers in the street, all but on those threadbare knees, and I look away from him again. I look at his hand resting on his sister’s head; surprisingly well-kept hand, one that might belong to a tailor rather than a death-defying dustman.
And then I almost smirk – with the realisation of the favour this will do me too. Mother will be put out by my kindness, won’t she. A small and yet noble act of spite with which I might pay her back for all the madness she’s caused me, and for pinching my fabric. If she can marry a strange man, I can bring a strange child to the salon for a day. Petulant but fair. And priceless. Mother has affection for one child only: me. And Mother, beneath all her cosmopolitan savoir faire, is also a terrific snob: wait till she hears this little poppet open her mouth – coarse as the weave of her big brother’s shirt. Appalling bargain-table mercerised cotton, blindingly over-bleached and soft-collared. Dreadful. Lovely. I look at him square again and say: ‘I had better tell you who I am then, I suppose. My name is Olivia Greene – with an e on the end. And you’ll find us at a salon called Emily Costumière on the second floor of the Strand, do you know it – the arcade?’
‘I’ll find you,’ he says, and the neat proportion of his shoulderline has me mentally sketching him into a dinner jacket. ‘But I’m not sure when I . . .’
‘Doesn’t matter – be as late as you need to be.’ I dismiss his concern: with any luck, you’ll be so late I’ll have to give the Merrick a miss tonight. I don’t suppose the Saturday Bridge shift ends at midday as it does for the rest of us. Good God but I’d taper the cut for him, snug on the hip and make it white, with a brocade vest, trousers in midnight. Very New York. Very nice. ‘You’d better tell me your name, though, too, hadn’t you?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he shakes his head at himself, and I shake mine at the outrageous dimples in his cheeks, and he says something that I don’t hear properly – ‘Owing Keenly’? – his speech is so quick and fluid, dancing over his words. ‘Pardon?’
‘Yo-un,’ he says it slowly. ‘It’s e-o-g-h-a-n. Owen, but with a bit of a y at the front, or not . . . Eoghan O’Keenan.’
An Irishman. Of course you are. That’ll annoy Mother even more. Probably Catholic, too.
‘And I’m Agnes,’ the little one says, working her hand into mine. And I don’t mind a bit, she’s such a dear, dear, perfectly scrumptious thing.
‘You be a good girl now, Ag,’ he says to her and he assures me: ‘She’s a good girl, Miss Greene, I promise you. Thank you. Thank you a thousand times.’
And so we wave him off. ‘Bye-bye, Yo-Yo,’ little Agnes calls after him.
He turns once more, and I think he’s about to say something else – such as Wait, no, this is not right, I have no idea who you are, or if you might eat my sister for lunch – but he only waves back, and then runs off, towards the Quay.
How extraordinary.
‘I like your scarf, Miss Greene,’ little Agnes says. ‘Is it made of fairy wings?’
Extraordinarily lovely. I might have to eat her for lunch after all.
Yo
‘You’ve not got an issue with heights, have you, lad?’ this Mr Harrison says, raising his voice above the noise coming from the shops, looking me over outside the door that says OFFICE. He’s head foreman in charge of something to do with butting something or other, he said on introduction, and he’s got arms on him that look like they’re made of the stuff that’s being pounded into existence in the sheds behind him.
‘No,’ I shout back, I’ve got no issue with heights, though I wouldn’t know if I did. The tallest thing I’ve ever been on would be them escalators at Hordern’s yesterday, and before that the ladder up to the leather stores at Foulds. I look at the workshops again: they are tall, they are the famous iron shops of Dorman, Long and Company, they are enormous, and there’s a lot going on in them, a hundred men or more going all about and that much noise, but I don’t get the feeling that’s where I’ll be labouring today. Mr Harrison met me right here, Oi you, young fella, he saw me looking lost as I came up from the ferry, and he doesn’t look like he’s about to invite me anywhere inside now. I don’t look at the crane moving up near the open edge of the Bridge above his head; that’s quite a bit taller than anything I’ve ever seen. A lot taller than it seemed at any view I’ve had from the south side. I’m not sure I want to go up there.
Mr Harrison looks at my paper again and he says: ‘Boot-making before this, eh? Good eye for getting things right with that work?’
I nod and have no issue with that one: I’m particular at any work I do.
He looks at the paper yet again: ‘Funny name you’ve got – how do you say it?’
‘Yo-un.’ I wish I had a penny for every time I’ve had to say it, and having to shout it here is even less entertaining.
‘Ian?’ he cups his hand to his ear.
And I say, ‘Yeah, that’ll do.’ We can argue the difference another time.
‘S’pose you will, too.’ He shoves my paper into the front pocket of his leather apron. He’s got no more time to waste on the matter and he points behind me down the wharves, to what I suppose is the loading dock, as another crane is moving a great beam of iron onto a barge there. ‘You’re with Adams – Wal Adams, boilermaker, sub-foreman,’ and something I have no idea what he’s talking about, then: ‘See on that rear punt, bloke with the grey shirt, red braces. Get over there now, and do as you’re told, or you end up dead, right.’
That’s not a threat, that’s a fact, it seems. I look at the punt, but I can’t help seeing the crane behind, with that beam, which I can now see has a man balancing on either end. Jesus, what have I got myself into? A job. Six pounds a week. A home somewhere for me and Ag. If I ever see her again. Now that I’m here, now that I made it on time to these wharves at Milsons Point, I can’t believe I’ve left my sister with that girl – she could be anyone – and I can’t believe I told her Ag’s my sister, either. She could be taking her off to Welfare now. No, she’s not. Why would she do a thing like that? She’s Ag’s fairy anyway, and Ag’d not have gone with her otherwise. Have faith, for that’s all I can have. And don’t look up, and don’t waste any time doing as I’m told getting over to this last punt, to this Wal Adams fella with the red braces. When I find him I see he’s not a big fella and he’d be forty or more, but he’s built from iron too, and he could slice the lid off a tin can with the bastard look in his eye, for me, as I step onto the punt. I’m about to tell him who I am, when he says to the six or seven others standing with him: ‘Won’t see out the day, this one.’
A big ginger-headed fella takes a notebook out of his apron and says, ‘Right now, what’s your call for pretty boy?’ and they start taking bets, it seems – on me. Pretty Boy. ‘A week?’ Wal Adams says to him: ‘Why don’t you put your five bob in the poor box and save wasting the lead there, too, Tarz?’ And at that I’ve just caught in his accent that
this Wal Adams is an Ulsterman, with possibly a natural disregard for my skinny Kerry arse right there. I wonder if I can avoid telling him my name altogether.
‘Don’t mind Wal,’ the ginger-headed one says to me, and puts out his hand: ‘Clarrie McCall – but you can call me Tarzan, and you’ll be my follow-up, not Mr Adams’s, right?’ I nod, for whatever a follow-up might be, and shake on it. He’s wearing an apron too, but none of the others are; he must be a boss of some sort as well; he says: ‘What’s your name, then?’
‘Keenan,’ I say, swallowing the O, and it’s all swallowed by the winding up of the punt engine anyway.
‘Keen, ay? Good for you, Pretty Boy,’ says this Tarzan, and we’re moving out from this dock, back out into the harbour a bit and under this making of the Bridge that looks like a great big wall of ladders going all ways from here.
I’m going to a big crate below it, hanging by a hook and chains, that a couple of the other fellas catch. One hops over the rail of it and in. And they’re all getting in.
‘Pick up that bucket and broom. What are you – decoration?’ the Ulsterman yells at me from behind.
I pick up the bucket and broom he’s pointing at and it’s all I can do not to cross myself when the crate pitches with my weight as I fall lead-footed over the rail and in myself – and it’s not six inches off the ground yet, hasn’t even started taking us up.
‘Don’t look down is the trick,’ Tarzan says to me as it does start upwards. ‘Look out.’
I do as I’m told. I look out as we go up, out across the water, and the breeze is cold on my face. This is not difficult, this looking out. One of the other fellas is sitting up on the rail opposite, arm round the chain there, rolling a smoke, not difficult at all. I look out past him, across this blue mile of harbour to the Gardens, fix my eyes to the point of the land where Ag and I slept last night, to keep the rest of me from swaying, and it’s not difficult to keep looking out. What a beautiful city it is from here – a million trees worth of it. Merciful Lord, thank you. Whatever this day brings, it’ll be worth it, it’ll be better than yesterday, it has to be. And at the end of it, I’ll get to see the girl again. Olivia Greene. That smile, under her hat, lets me forget for a moment where I’ve left my guts and my sister. I know I can’t have the princess, I know I can’t have any girl as things are, but I ask the little folk in the figs anyway: go on, give me a chance.