The Blue Mile

by Kim Kelly

  ‘Well done, darling,’ Mother whispers as she swishes past behind me. ‘Very well done.’

  But when I turn around again, I see only Agnes, sitting over there at my table, returned to folding and colour-sorting the little pile of remnant scraps I gave her when she finished the buttons, before we left for the morning tea. I didn’t instruct her to go back to it; I don’t even recall letting go of her hand. Seen, not heard, perfect picture of a perfect little girl. I wonder if any nasty B torments her at school: undoubtedly. I ask her, ‘Agnes, if I give you my little wooden mannequin, will you make her a gown for me?’

  She looks up at me with crystal-clear delight: ‘Oh, can I, please?’

  Oh, can I steal her and keep her always, please? I could sit and watch her play dolls with my little mannequin all day. But not this day.

  ‘Now, miss, here,’ the ummer and ahher at the hat tree summons me and the next four hours is a blur of horsehair froth and spider daisies. Don’t even stop for lunch.

  Mother doesn’t pop the closed sign round until quarter past three, in fact. ‘Shush, don’t tell the Minister for Industry,’ she winks at the coat stand in respect of our illicit trading, before she says to me: ‘Where’s this chap for the girl, then?’

  ‘The who?’ I’m tired and half-blind and I want one of those vanilla cupcakes with pink icing – seven of them.

  ‘The girl’s brother.’ She waves a hand at Agnes. ‘This Bridge worker chap. Don’t they finish at three or the unions go out on strike and what have you?’

  I wouldn’t know; Mother does: union people are Reds who go on strike and make the price of coal and everything else go up, forcing us all to hell in a handbag with a Labor prime minister – just look at the state of the economy, all his fault, though he’s not been in the job two months. Everything that goes wrong is Labor’s fault, and the unions’ – including the New York stock exchange falling into the sea. I look at Agnes, still working away diligently at my table, now pinning a length of raspberry rickrack zigzags to the hem of a skirt she’s made from a scrap of the lemon Fuji. She is me at the same age. But now, and for the first time, I wonder if I haven’t made some untold mistake bringing her here; this strange, otherworldly child, with the Bridge worker brother I met for all of about three minutes, in a public park. What exactly have I invited into the salon? What if they do live in the Gardens – like tramps? Sundowners. Drifters. No, that’s ridiculous: childish make-believe living under them trees. And he seemed such a nice boy, so concerned for his little sister. I tell Mother: ‘I’m sure he’ll be here soon.’

  Mother taps the face of her wristwatch. ‘You won’t be, Olivia – your appointment with Marjorie at half past, yes?’

  For my hair; for tonight. That sends me buckling and lurching and spinning again at full speed. I don’t want to get my hair done; I don’t even so much as want to look in the stockroom at that gown. I don’t want to look at Mother; I turn away, bend down and busy myself picking squiggles and snips of spider daisy off the rug. I’ve always loved this floor rug, its beginning-less pattern of Florentine swirls, curling off into lily trumpets.

  ‘Olivia.’ Mother is tired too; tired of my resistance. ‘This nonsense ceases now. Your nonsense. These anxieties, these confabulations of dread at coming out – it must stop today, this minute. Bart or no Bart, I’m not going to be around forever to progress our business socially – and it must be progressed if you are to become who you deserve to become. If you want this business, you must grow up – today – and accept all the responsibilities of it. Or, if you must remain closed in and shut up, accept Miss Greene’s Hat and Frocks in Homebush. Is that what you want?’

  No, I do not want: lonely suburban coffin lined with easy-wash, easy-fade poplins. Death by a thousand bolts of gingham. But still I can’t look at her. Still I resist.

  Mother gentles her tone: ‘What are you so afraid of, Ollie?’

  She knows very well. Sticky, sticky, stick – damn Bs – and the Merrick is their territory. In here, I’m the one holding the hatpin; out there, in this place I’ve never been, I will be exposed, alone, sneered at, rejected. Ugly. I’m terrified.

  Mother persists, ‘You can’t worry what that Palgrave girl might think of you, or what anyone might think of you. I know how much it hurts, Ollie darling, and I know what a waste of time it is to dwell on such things.’

  She does: she knows what it is to be sneered at and rejected, packed off and erased from Ashton Greene history, no less. But I know her story by heart; I dwell in its disaster, and lavishly. It was the spring of 1910. They met at the Savoy, quite by accident, as she was dining with old wool trade acquaintances of her father’s. She was wearing a gown of satin-banded bisque organza, copy of a delectable wasp-waisted Worth she’d seen at Hanover Square, every stitch her own, when amid the spangle and swirl of the grand banquet hall she was accosted by a tall and dashing stranger in finely tapering swallow tails. He was Shelby Ashton Greene, then a viscount’s honourable son, and he asked her to dance. By the end of summer, they’d eloped to Paris, where she wore genuine Poiret. I arrived the following spring in his London digs, and there she stayed. While he resumed his dashing. She was trapped, albeit in a rather pleasant Grosvenor Place prison, wondering how to work a nappy. Alone. No society, no friends, as if she didn’t exist, though every detail of his every peccadillo followed her in stares and whispers from Covent Garden to Belgravia. Girls called Penny and Edith, his valet’s niece, a restaurateur’s daughter, his whole battalion in Flanders, and then Marie, whoever she might have been. But do cheer yourself up, Emmy – I’ll always love you, too. Why don’t you change the drapes? He was ever honest with Mother, as were his family: the Ashton Greenes refused to acknowledge her at all, and my grandparents never laid eyes on me, not once in my seven years there. As if I am illegitimate. Why? Because self-stitched Emily Weathercroft was not the right sort. No breeding and no cash in the bank. Australian and sheepless. No good reason to despise a girl, force her to beg for her own divorce, beg for the fare back to Sydney, but that the Ashton Greenes are not the right sort in themselves. They can’t be, can they: look at my father – mean, arrogant, selfish, lion-hunting Don Juan.

  And I’m half him, aren’t I. I am a sparkling princess-cut pebble of shame every way I look at myself.

  ‘You are better than all of them put together.’ Mother places a finger under my chin to make me look at her. ‘And revenge is in your grasp.’

  ‘Revenge?’ I half-smile at that: Mother, for all her sharp edges, is far too lovely to play a convincing wicked witch.

  ‘Yes,’ she says and she smiles; outrageously lovely: ‘The only revenge worth having. And I want it to be yours.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ I sigh, not giving up forlorn.

  ‘To live well, darling.’ She says, her fingernail pressing the point into my chin: ‘Live well. Be happy. Become you. Nothing annoys a bully so much as success – your success. You shall have it – please, trust me.’ She releases my chin, enough said about it, on with the show, and she consults her watch again: ‘Now, if this Bridge chap isn’t here by – well, soonish – I shall have to telephone Bart about the girl. One of his chums is a magistrate at the Children’s Court, he’ll know what to do. And we must –’

  ‘No, please, miss!’ Agnes leaps up from the table, suddenly and desperately klaxon-loud: ‘Please. Please, don’t nark on us.’

  Yo

  ‘You get yourself a hat for Monday too, right?’ Tarzan says on the crate back down, or the ‘cradle’ as they call it. ‘Sandshoes and a hat. The back of your neck is a beauty, sunshine – that’s going to kill tonight.’

  Sunburn. I don’t doubt I’m sunburned. I’d reach round to see how bad it is but I’m not letting go of the rail.

  Adams, the sub-foreman and likely the Devil from Dungannon, has his bastard eye on me to see that I don’t. I take a good look at him now, half to help me ignore the feeling that
my kneecaps are going to slide down my shins and off the end of my toes with the swinging of the cradle as we descend. Adams looks like one of them British pit-bull terriers: bastard-faced Ulsterman. If the cable above us snapped, he’d take it in his iron jaws, no big issue. Or rip your guts out.

  He keeps that bastard eye on me and I think he’s going to give me another gobful for staring, but instead he says: ‘You get here early, too, Monday. You go back to Mattie Harrison at the shops and you tell him I said you’re to join with the IA – the Ironworkers Assistants.’

  No idea what he’s talking about but my face is so busy trying not to look ignorant I can’t get a word out to ask.

  ‘The union, lad,’ he says, casting his pig eyes heavenward up the cable, like he’s in want of asking the crane driver if he could be sent someone a bit more ignorant next time. ‘You’ll be with the FIU – Federated Ironworkers – under the Assistants with them. Right?’

  ‘Right.’ I don’t know the first thing about unions; never got my invitation to join one.

  ‘It’s important – listen.’ He starts barking on, in that way as he might be telling me I’m a scruttery waste of breath, et cetera, but he’s only explaining: ‘You’re not looked after by us in the gang up here – we’re all United Boilermakers or Ironworkers or Engineers. You’re with them down there – and as a labourer associated with the shops you’re with the FIU. If you were a labourer associated with any of the other trades, you’d be with the BLF – the Builders Labourers. See? It’s important you know who you’re with and who your delegate is. There’s nine different unions on this Bridge. Right?’

  ‘Right. Federated Ironworkers.’ If you say so.

  ‘Right. Under the Ironworkers Assistants Union.’

  ‘Right.’ Jesus. He can’t talk without yelling, this fella; maybe he’s permanently deaf from the rivet gun.

  ‘If you’re not with the union, you’ll not get paid. Like working for nothing, do you?’

  I’m not expected to answer that, I don’t think.

  ‘And if you’re not with the right union, you’ll not be looked after. Right? There’ll be a fine from the Industrial Court, too, if you don’t get on to it, a fine to you, two pounds or more – get that paperwork in Monday morning. Right?’

  ‘Yeah righto, Wal, lay off,’ says Tarzan. ‘Now where’s my five bob, ay?’

  Wal Adams turns them devil-pig eyes at Tarzan: ‘I made no bet with you – if he lasts the week, I’ll give ten to –’

  I don’t hear what he says as they start arguing the odds on Pretty Boy, and Clarkie, the cooker and chucker of hot cocks, winks across it at me: ‘You did all right, kid.’

  Yeah? Did I hear that right? I did all right? Clarkie nods. I did all right. My heart flies out across the water and back into me with the realisation, and the relief. I’ve got a job. I’ve got to join a union. I did all right. And I got through this day. Thank you, Lord, for looking after me. I look across the harbour at the Gardens and thank the little folk too, and as the cradle comes to a rest on the barge my hand comes off the rail and goes straight to my forehead, to make the sign of the cross. I just manage to stop myself, turn it into a scratch as Tarzan elbows me in the ribs.

  ‘Come for a dive with us this arvie, ay Pretty?’

  ‘A dive?’

  ‘Yeah, off the southern abutment – it’s a beaut day for it.’ I still don’t know what an abutment is, but he’s pointing across the water, at the other side of the Bridge. He says to my disbelieving face: ‘I’m joking.’

  ‘Right.’ Forgive me for not rolling about laughing.

  He has a good one, with everyone in the cradle, seven of them having a good old wheeze at me, then Tarzan stops laughing and points west, away from the city: ‘We dive round Balmain – off the coal gantry at the wharves this arvie. Got a bit of a competition going. North and South riveters. We get a crowd. Drink at the Opera House after.’

  That sounds so much more reasonable, doesn’t it? But the laughter’s stopped and I hear in that I’d be well advised to attend this activity of diving and drinking. He’s just said Balmain, too, hasn’t he – I could ask around for accommodation there. But besides not ever having learned to swim, never mind hurl myself off something the height of a ship, I can’t be in sniffing distance of a pub, not today, not now – I might go a keg – and I have to get to Ag. It must be heading for four o’clock, as we finished at half-past three, and I’ve still got to find this Strand Arcade place. And I’ve got less than two quid to my name, with no idea when I might get paid. I say: ‘Ah.’ As I play at being distracted rolling my smoke.

  ‘You don’t want to be going round with them,’ Adams says as the barge gets going back to the workshops, but I don’t know if that’s said to me, and I don’t look up from my smoke.

  ‘You don’t want to lose another bet,’ Tarzan says to him.

  ‘I haven’t made a fucking bet,’ says Adams. ‘But if I did, I’d put my money on Kelly and I wouldn’t lose.’

  Everyone in the cradle goes in at that, all arguing about their favourite, and the names are all Irish, apart from Tarzan McCall and you wouldn’t say for sure he’s not; there’s this Vince Kelly who they call Ned, and a Flanagan, a Murphy and a Mick Doolan; a Sean someone. It’s not that they’re Irish that grabs me, or that they’re all Irish and obviously monkey-nutted enough to chuck themselves off coal gantries, it’s that they’re all Irish boilermakers: tradesmen. I want to be one, I see, as if the idea has been sitting here on this barge waiting for me all this time to see: I want to be one of them that drives the rivet gun. Ticketed. Respected. How do I do that? The only ones I know that have got out of the Neighbourhood, or out of poverty at least, are knocking-shop proprietors, publicans, dope smugglers or cops. Or SP bookmakers. Never tradesmen.

  ‘So, you coming, Pretty?’ Tarzan nudges me again.

  I have to say yes, don’t I. But I can’t. Not today. I have no trouble looking troubled about it as I say: ‘I’ve got to get away today . . . family . . . obligation . . .’

  I watch the idea of getting a trade disappear into the wake of the barge as quick as it came. An opportunity missed. I’ll never be one of this lot. I’ll never drink with them. I don’t drink at all, do I? I do not. It’s a whole boat missed as I’m too old to learn a trade anyway – they only want boys straight from school for indenturing and that, don’t they.

  But that Adams claps me on the shoulder, ‘Good enough, lad,’ and nearly knocks me into the water with the surprise of it. An Ulsterman not calling me a faggotty old nana for having an excuse to avoid the pub. He’s looking at me with what I think might be a smile; it looks painful. ‘Some of us have families need looking after, don’t we.’ That smile; Jesus, is there a wife that loves that face? Seems so. But he’s got more in store for me; he says: ‘Now, you don’t happen to play cricket, do you?’

  ‘Cricket?’ I’m smacked. This is just about the least believable thing I have ever heard: an Irishman asking me if I play cricket? Do they play cricket in Belfast? I didn’t think them from the North were that odd.

  ‘Yes, lad.’ Adams is a cricket-playing grog-forgoing freak potato. ‘The UBU are short a couple of bats for tomorrow,’ he says. ‘We don’t expect to do well against Sheet Metal anyway but we’ll give it a go. Birchgrove Oval – midday. It’s a hat-around for the Ambulance Fund.’

  If I wasn’t so smacked, I would be rolling around on the deck of this barge with it. I drag hard on my smoke, thinking: this is an opportunity that’s not getting away from me. Take it. Take it now. But I don’t play cricket, not unless you can include the couple of Friday afternoons I was made to stand on the pitch at Redfern Park at the beginning of sixth class to avoid the attention of the truant officer. I don’t play any sports at all, besides darts, which I do not play anymore, do I, because I’ve only ever played it pissed. What do I say?

  I say: ‘I could give it a go, Mr Adams.’ D
on’t I. And it’s at Birchgrove. That’s near Balmain, isn’t it, where the colliery is over there? They probably all live round that way – where else do you get a job load of boilermakers and ironworkers but round where there’s wharves?

  ‘Good on you, then,’ says Adams, a freak potato but not a devil of any kind at all; he says: ‘I’d not have picked you for a family man.’

  I give him what I hope looks like an affirming smile in reply: I am a family man. Family of two that we are.

  He asks me as the barge starts churning up the water, pulling in: ‘You have far to get home?’

  ‘No, ah . . .’ Think. Opportunity. A more important, and urgent, one. We need to find a place to stay: now. ‘Um, yes, actually . . . it’s a fair way home, from out west . . .’ I give him another hopeful smile: ‘I’m looking for somewhere closer. Round Balmain, as it happens.’

  He shakes his head, not hopeful. ‘Not easy these days, is it? Not easy at all. I don’t envy anyone looking for any affordable housing nearer the city today.’ He folds his iron-hard forearms across his chest and turns up his lip: ‘But I might know someone who could help you.’

  ‘True?’ I sound like Ag on the tram to Hordern’s. This could be the best day of my life. Please.