The Blue Mile

by Kim Kelly

  Agnes won’t be joining me: she’s stunned with wonder, but for a reverent: ‘Ohhhhhh.’

  Mother smiles up at me from where she’s snipping the last of the squiggles from the chiffon hems and asks, smugly and rhetorically: ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘Like is not the word.’ I am terse as I say it, but terse with my own tiredness. Defeated. Mother will do what Mother will do; I shouldn’t try to fight it, any of it. But that was my fabric, the little girl inside me protests. Her voice is so small, though, so irrelevant, no one can hear her.

  Mother hasn’t noticed my dejection, or she’s not bothering to acknowledge it. She’s going to marry a barrister; the magistrate’s hammer descends and smashes my Mexican chocolate shell, smashes the whole sideboard to smithereens, and blows up the house and the business too, as she gets blithely up and goes over to the jewellery cabinet. ‘The crystal choker should set it off perfectly, don’t you think?’ She picks it out from the top shelf and holds it above the gown. ‘See? These blues, so fabulous, the crystal could be genuine against them – Viennese. Luscious and yet so simple. No other embellishment required.’

  No. Are all people who are born both beautiful and clever so stupid to others’ pain? I know I’ve been petulant, but I don’t deserve this.

  ‘Nothing except this.’ She steps over to me and removes my hat, scrabbling her fingers through my hair: ‘Good God, Ollie, what a bird’s nest.’

  That makes me feel so much better, Mother. She makes a side part with a fingernail, scraping along my scalp, and pins a clasp into my hair; one from the cabinet, one of my favourites, a line of baguette diamantes on a silver slide. That makes me feel utterly ridiculous.

  And now she notices my dejection: ‘Olivia Jane Greene, you must stop this silly game this instant.’

  And now I retort: ‘How about you stop sticking silly pins in bird’s nests?’

  ‘Oh Ollie,’ she sighs, annoyed. ‘Yes, it might look a little more stylish when we’ve got some warm oil into your curls. I’ve made you an appointment with Marjorie for three-thirty – she’s got some jasmine-scented in that’s just gorgeous.’ She detaches Agnes’s hand from mine, no more than an object to be removed, and she shoves me in front of the cheval in the fitting room. ‘Now I need you to try it on, see if the neckline is sitting well.’

  ‘Try what on?’

  ‘The gown, Ollie.’

  Oh. Cross purposes uncross and at last I see: ‘You made this gown for me?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mother’s exasperation turns to amazement: ‘What did you think you were going to wear this evening – a chaff bag?’

  I can’t answer her. Mother made this gown for me? She’s been up all night going blind with diagonals and crystal drops for me. This is too lovely by far, but the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, anguish clashing against any joy. I’m not going to the Merrick in it. I’m not going to the Merrick at all.

  ‘You truly don’t like it?’ Mother is aghast at the thought; she is hurt.

  ‘I like it, Mother. I do,’ I say, turning away, stepping between her and the fitting-room drapes.

  ‘Ollie . . . ?’

  I step round her again, step round the gown on the mannequin and into the stockroom, all these conflicting emotions whirling, surging through me so that, if I were that light globe hanging up there from the ceiling, I might explode. I can’t explode. There’s a little girl watching me from the end of the chaise. Why is there a little girl in the salon? That’s right: because I’m not going to the Merrick tonight. Don’t look at the gown. I reach up for the biscuit tin of odd buttons on the middle shelf above Mother’s machine table, and almost bring down one of my old hat blocks on my head with it. What am I doing with this button biscuit tin? That’s right: stepping back round past Mother to place the tin at my work table for the child; she’ll be a picture in the window today, won’t she, making rainbow trays of buttons for me. Don’t look at the gown.

  ‘Come and sit here, Agnes,’ I say and she climbs up onto my chair.

  And when I bend across her to take out the first tray of buttons, she places her little hand on my wrist and whispers, conspiratorially: ‘See, I knew you were a fairy princess. But I won’t tell no one.’

  Remind me again, why is there a little girl in the salon? That’s right: because I’m lost in a dream. There’s no little girl, no boy in the park, no gown of blue heaven, no salon, no mothballed trousseaux, no buttons but imaginary ones. The alarm hasn’t even gone off yet. Has it? I’m still in my bed. Either that or my nerves have gone full pitch and I’m delirious.

  And the little girl is a persistent illusion; she lisps as she pats my hand: ‘Your secret is safe with me.’

  Yo

  There is no fear like the fear of getting a four-inch white-hot iron cock in your face and that takes over all other sense as the hammering of the rivet gun takes over the hammering of my heart. After catching the first dozen or so rivets, my shoulders start aching from holding the bucket up, and a while after that the ache becomes white-hot skewers through my bones, until it becomes nothing but not getting it in the face. I don’t know what time it is or how many rivets have come down, but I know I’ve caught every one, and that becomes everything. I am the task. And I’ve done this before. It’s what I do. I could be stitching on soles and passing boots up the line. No room for thinking in it. Just the job, and I am just another bit in the machine.

  I am a machine.

  Until the hammering stops and Tarzan lays down the gun and yells at me: ‘Smoko.’

  It’s a sound from far away, though he’s not two yards distant, and as I put the bucket down, I look back along the curve to the rooftops of the workshops and I don’t lose my guts at all this time. I look down through the boards of the scaffold floor to the water and I see it for what it is: miraculous. I’m hanging off the side of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Fucking miraculous. I smile at Tarzan. I did it. I can do this job.

  He shakes his head and shouts something else but I don’t catch it, apart from the word ‘deaf’. Yes, I must be deaf, from that riveting. He waves at me to hurry up, back off the scaffold and onto the Bridge itself. All right, I think, I can do this now: I got on here, I can get off. But when I’m standing up on the plank looking across at the bit of rail at the edge of the chord, it seems too small and too far away.

  ‘Come on, Pretty, I want me cuppa,’ Tarzan says and I hear that clearly; he’s getting itchy about it, too.

  And it’s all too clear again: the water rears up at me from that foot-wide gap. But I can fight it this time: it’s just a gap, no different than walking across a storm water grate. Several hundred feet above the ground, with the breeze gusting up at your back.

  Chasm of death.

  Dolly, the fella who was round the other side of the riveting, leans down over the rail: ‘Here.’ He grabs me by the elbow and pulls me across.

  And the nails of my boots slip, metal on metal, and on the slant of the chord, so that if it wasn’t for Dolly holding me and the rail, I might have slid off.

  ‘Bloody hell, kid, get yourself some sandshoes,’ says Dolly, still with a hold of me, though I’ve made it onto the level surface of the chord joint now, into the shelter of it, out of the wind, and only now do I notice that they’re all wearing sandshoes, rubber soles. That fella at the Public Works office might’ve told me: get yourself some sandshoes. Slipped his mind. Too busy. Jesus, I could be dead.

  Clarkie, the cooker, shoves a hot tin mug of tea into my hands: ‘Monday, this is your job, right?’

  Whatever that might be; making the tea, I suppose. I say, ‘Right.’ I’ll find out Monday, won’t I.

  I take a sip of the tea, hot and sweet, and I’m taken away again by where I am. I’m sitting here having a cuppa on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge – fucking miraculous. My hands are shaking so that I can hardly roll my smoke, but I’m hearing myself asking: ‘How high up
are we here?’

  ‘About three hundred feet now here,’ says Tarzan. ‘She’ll be four hundred and forty at the top of the arch when she’s finished.’ He says that with pride, as if this is his Bridge.

  He opens a beaten-up old lunch tin and says, ‘Help yourself,’ and I don’t mind if I do, as I haven’t had anything to eat since that pork pie last night. And so I sit in sky chomping on fruitcake listening to Tarzan and Dolly talking about pneumatic something or other in regard to some issue with the riveting gun pressure that is lost on me, excepting that I work out that the tool Dolly holds up round the other side of the wall against Tarzan’s hammering is called a dolly.

  Then they’re quiet again, eating their cake, enjoying the view, until Clarkie’s off back to his oven and Tarzan and Dolly are getting back to their feet too, wiping cake crumbs into the sky. This is just another job; in a strange place. A beautiful place: look out at them trees all across the city. Sweet, sweet Jesus. I asked for a miracle and I got one. And I’m not going to let the fear of falling get me this time; I will think across it, talk over it, following Tarzan back to the plank, looking out across the great space between the two halves of the arch: ‘What’s the trick that’s holding the chords up?’

  As my heart is belting again: fucking hell, how can it be that we’re not toppling into the sea?

  ‘You’re full of questions,’ Tarzan says over his shoulder as he steps across the gap, not even looking where he’s going, he’s that confident of where he is, and I keep right behind him, my footsteps in his, it’s just a step and no congratulations for it, and then, when we’re back on the floor of the scaffold he turns around and shows me, pointing back down this curve of straight lines: ‘Tension cables,’ he says. ‘Beyond the abutment, you can see them. More than a hundred, north and south, anchoring each of the two sides, deep into the rock on either shore. They won’t budge for anything.’

  I can’t see these cables from here and I don’t know what an abutment is, but he smiles at me and my question, this ginger-headed Tarzan, and I believe him and his confidence in this Bridge, as Clarkie shouts, ‘Aye-o,’ from the oven and the gun starts up again.

  Olivia

  ‘Oh, look at that, aren’t they fabulous?’ I say of the reindeer in the David Jones Santa display, their hooves raking the air as they fly above the rooftops of Sydney. ‘Magical.’

  ‘Hm,’ says Agnes, studying them as she slowly and daintily devours her vanilla cupcake, cracking off the pink icing crumb by crumb to make it last. Then she looks up at me, studying still, and she says: ‘It’s not magic but, is it? It’s just a wind-up thing in them that makes them go. Magic is when things happen just by themselves, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hm,’ I reply. Such a bright little girl but so fixed on her fantasies; querying frown in want of confirmation from her fairy princess. ‘I suppose so,’ I tell her, and rather than squish her ideals by confessing that the only magic I believe in is the one that inspired the board of directors at DJs to get in a mechanical display to pack in the kiddies for Christmas, I say: ‘If it really rained tinsel snowflakes over Sydney – now that would be magical.’

  ‘That would be silly,’ Agnes giggles. ‘You are funny, Miss Greene.’ Grinning, with that conspiratorial squinchy-faced grin which says she will not be dissuaded from her conviction that I am somehow magical too.

  I say: ‘You’re funny.’ And I consult my watch: ‘But we should go, or Mother will turn us both into pumpkins.’ We’ve only been gone half an hour, but we really should be back at the salon; I shouldn’t have left. It’s been hectic all morning, not with serious purchasers but with expert pernicketers: I abandoned Mother to a woman after a pair of gloves, wanting the buttons of one swapped to the style of another, wasting time in lieu of money. Couldn’t have been a more perfect payback for Mother’s abandonment of me last night, if such an idea didn’t seem to belong to some other realm now. God, how are we to make up for the loss of the Bromley follow-on clientele?

  Agnes giggles again: ‘You won’t turn into a pumpkin – your carriage will, and that doesn’t happen until after the ball.’

  ‘Silly me again.’ I take Agnes by the hand and, possibly grasping it a little too hard, lead her through the throng of kiddies, past the reindeer, past the cake table, guilt nipping at my heels. I’m not going to the ball. My stomach lurches and spins, grasping for reprieve: if there is magic in the world, then make it so that I won’t have to go to the Merrick, Mother will stop this business with Bart Harley and we’ll all live happily ever after. As if Agnes might be a conduit for such a plea, I squeeze her hand: ‘You’re a clever little girl, aren’t you?’

  ‘Your mother is very clever to make that gown for you.’ Azure eyes look up at me, unblinking, crystal clear as her wonder. ‘I never seen such a magical thing as that.’

  ‘Hm.’ Ding, here’s the lift, ‘Oh good, look at that,’ but Agnes is unimpressed by lifts now; still in her rapture over the gown, she says as we descend: ‘Your mum must love you very much to make you such a special frock as that.’

  ‘Hm.’ I would change the subject to enquiring further about Agnes’s own mother if I weren’t so thoroughly caught up again in tortures over my own: the look of hurt on her lovely face. My lovely mother. I must make it up to her; I must, with no more than ordinary daughterly obedience, simply do as she asks and go to the Merrick. It’s only stupid dinner at a stupid restaurant. People do this sort of thing all the time. But each time I imagine this all I can see is my gangly frame mocked by that gown, and right in the midst of the snazziest place in town. Stares. Whispers. Who does she think she is? Trumped-up milliner. Sticky sticky stick insect, is she a bug or is she a boy? Or a baby giraffe, tripping over too-big two left feet on the dancefloor.

  I trip up the gutter crossing Castlereagh into the Imperial to prove that there is no such thing as magic at least, for if there were, I’d have sprained an ankle just now, wouldn’t I. We don’t even come close to being run over crossing Pitt Street either – traffic parts as if Moses were in town – and we’re back in the Strand. Dawdling slightly outside the Jabours’ but I see they’ve got a queue, Glor’s got her head in the sideboard, amongst the metallic laces, too busy to so much as look up to wave, while Mr Jabour’s genie ignores me from his bottle above.

  As does Mother when we return to the salon; she’s too busy to so much as look up and scowl. The glove pernicketer is still harassing her and she’s got another one umming and ahhing over the style samples across the hat tree, and yet another on the chaise flicking through the Vogues. That one I recognise.

  Fabulous: it’s Allison Palgrave. Friend of Cassie Fortescue, and if there is magic in the world it is naught but black.

  ‘Olivia,’ she looks up from the magazine, all dazzling white teeth deftly concealing her forked tongue. ‘You remember me, of course – it’s Ally. Ally Palgrave. How are you?’

  She couldn’t care less. I glance over at Mother, and in one twitch of an eyebrow she confirms what I instantly suspect. There is only one reason Allison Palgrave is here: to get the torrid details on Min Bromley’s wedding catastrophe. She’s not here for couture, judging by the atrocity she’s got on. It has the floaty fey lines of a Vionnet, but the fabric is all wrong for the design: ghastly wallpaper pattern of lotus flowers, elegant as the back end of a brewer’s cart. Bet she bought it in London: walking advertisement for Duped Colonial.

  ‘Ally, how lovely to see you,’ I say, as her evils against me tumble one over the other: smashing her tennis racquet into the back of my knees to make me buckle, pushing me into the trophy cabinet in the hall, always pushing me aside for living in lowly Lavender Bay in my tiny old cottage, with all the dirty trams and the trains and the workshops and the wharves, always sneering at my darned stockings and my bacon rissoles. Never give your tormentor the satisfaction of a reaction was the advice Mother gave me then, and it holds as well now: Allison Palgrave won’t be getting anything out of m
e today. Especially not here: my territory. My smile could get me arrested it’s so counterfeit: ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’

  ‘Oh, I’m just browsing around.’ Allison tosses my Paris Vogue onto the table as so much rubbish. ‘Thought maybe I’d like a bunch of summery things – for May-ish, though. I’m going Home again next year. May as in late spring at Home, of course. Wondering what to take, as usual.’

  Such a liar, as usual. ‘What sorts of summery things did you have in mind?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she throws her hands up in the air: oh, the ennui of being a paper mill heiress with nothing to do but contemplate your wardrobe and betray your friends. She says: ‘You wouldn’t have time for a coffee this afternoon, would you? We could have a good old catch-up, throw around some ideas.’

  I could have a good old throw-up. Every fibre of my being is screaming: Get out of my salon, you horrible bag of spiders! Liar, liar, liar. The last person Allison Palgrave would want to be seen in a coffee lounge with is me – or any working girl for that matter. But if a private ladies college education is good for anything, it’s good for this: ‘Oh, Ally, I’d love to but I’m so sorry, we’re terribly busy just now, as you can see. You wouldn’t be able to reschedule that coffee for sometime after Christmas, would you? Say, mid-Jan?’ Perhaps circa 1980.

  ‘Of course,’ Allison Palgrave continues the pretence too as she stands but her eyes dull: rebuffed and she knows it. Oh God, but I wish I could tell her who I really am, have her cringe at my feet and call me by my rightful name, the Honourable Miss Ashton Greene, more London and more entitled than she will ever be. But I can’t do that, no more than I would divulge a client’s confidential wedding catastrophe. Matters of scalding hatred and common decency aside, betrayal of the Bromleys is out of the question. The Bromleys – and the Fortescues and who knows who else if we play our cards well – are our customers; Allison Palgrave will never be. All money and no sense of style, and Commonwealth Bank director trumps filthy-stinky paper mill any day. ‘Goodbye, Ally.’ I see her out. ‘Hope to see you soon.’ Good God, but she is as broad as the chaise is long in that ensemble – overstuffed and ill-upholstered.