The Blue Mile

by Kim Kelly

  ‘Incorrigible,’ Bart Harley’s crooked smile says of Mother, and of me: ‘Absolutely delightful,’ holding the door of this Jazz Room open for us. Perhaps I might find that pleasant one day too. There aren’t many men who would so enjoy a woman behaving as Mother does, not to mention handing out business cards under his nose, outrageous ones with gold lettering that look like invitations to a ball. But he’s clearly thrilled by her enterprise, her joie de vivre, and –

  Oh, but as I step through the doorway the stench of male odour in this Jazz Room overwhelms. Good God, gagging at it. The place is crowded already, a different crowd from the dining one, multitude of shoulder-to-shoulder tables crammed around the floor and a small stage, all surrounded by heavy velvet drapes, four walls of that folly rose, ingrained with endless nights of dancing sweat and tobacco smoke and some other awful, acrid smell. A trumpet screams through the dimness and the room starts spinning, I am feather-headed and the folly walls are closing in, and as I look at Bart Harley again, gesturing to a table in the centre near the dancefloor, all I can see is me eating my Mexican chocolate cake alone in the cottage on Christmas Day, picking the crumbs out of the bottom of the tin, and I’ve got to run away. I’ve got to get some air.

  I yank Mother by the wrist before she whirls off to someone she’s spotted across the floor: ‘Ladies?’

  She waves me away: ‘Back out in the hall and up to the right.’

  And I dash for it, celluloid heels skidding across the boards to the toilet rooms, to splash some water on my face, and while I’m at it I manage to smudge my make-up so that now I look like I’ve got a black eye. Startling under the bright bulbs surrounding the mirror. Damn. Always carry a phial of witch-hazel in your handbag for such unfortunate events. Unless you’re hopeless and, like me, don’t listen to your mother. I can’t carry this off, I tell the chi-chi gold taps and the marble basin. Miss Greene Hats and Frocks in Homebush, here I come. I don’t have the nerve for business. I make things. Beautiful, luxurious, stylish things. That’s what I do, all I want to do, and I’m good at it. Can’t I just do that and avoid everything else?

  Mais non, Madame Chanel appears in the mirror, a vision of elegant insouciance: Do you think I simply woke up famous and in Paris one day? I began with hats and frocks in Moulins, oui? The things I’ve done to get here. Pull yourself together, chérie. Find the woman in this dress – if there is no woman, there is no dress.

  I can almost feel her poke me in the ribs with her nail file. But that’s the very problem right there, isn’t it? There is no woman in this dress.

  ‘Ollie? Ollie Greene – that is you.’

  And that is Cassie Fortescue, trotting out from the conveniences to my left. This show couldn’t be better for farce.

  I sigh: ‘Yes. Me.’

  But I swear Madame Chanel says: Look at her. Finger under my chin, and so I do. I see Cassie Fortescue at my shoulder in the mirror, in her too-short dress and – oh dear – two black eyes. She is bouncing and smiling behind me, waving like a kitten after string. ‘I thought it was you in the dining room. God, how the hell are you, old beanie beanster, old sticky – it’s been ages, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it’s been a long time.’ Sticky. A flash of rage: I want to hold her face an inch from the lavatory water and see how she likes it. Or simply say: That dress is so much more appalling at close range – God, where the hell did you find it? You look like a frilled cover for a dunny brush.

  I don’t do anything but stare, though. There’s something odd about her, beyond the frock. She’s hopping about from foot to foot, already dancing, or like a child who’s had too much cake. She says, grinning: ‘Auntie called you this morning to keep shtum on Minnie, didn’t she?’

  I nod. Odder and odder, Cassie. Tell the whole ladies room what a shtumly devoted cousin you are, or put an ad in the paper: of the three compartments in here the doors of two remain closed and the occupants very quiet – no doubt so that they can hear every word.

  Cassie sniffs – horribly, like a guttersnipe – and lights up a cigarette, or tries to. I can’t believe this show I’m seeing now. Her hand is shaking as she strikes the lighter again: is she drunk?

  She gets it lit and she puffs and prattles: ‘I’ve been meaning to pop into the shop – Min is thrilled to the gills with what you’ve done. Was – ha, did. You know what I mean. Anyway, Palgrave says you’re a tough nut. Thanks for that, always good to know who your friends are. Poor Min, though. Don’t believe a word about Samuels going belly-up – that’s just for them to lose a few shareholders, get the price down before they do some merger thing with their other company. You know what I mean. Poor bugger, our dear Min. Bryden’s ditched her.’

  ‘Awful.’ Poor Min indeed, and Allison Palgrave was sent to test me? Somehow, that’s the most disgusting thing these girls have ever done to me. But for the first time ever, finally, and at last, I feel superior, in many more ways than sartorially. I am a lady, actually, rightful title or not. I smile, steel in my spine, and speak to her ill-chosen flouncery: ‘Truly awful. But yes, Cassie, yes, you must pop into the salon one day.’

  She over-giggles, ‘Oh yeah-o, I’ll say,’ then she snorts, and I’m altogether unsure now what a Ladies College education might’ve done for her. She’s behaving like a flapper on some lunacy-inducing drug. Perhaps she is. Who are you, Cassie Fortescue? No one, says Coco. Only a stranger on the road – the road to Paris. The road to you.

  A breathy laugh escapes me: ‘Toodles.’ And I’m past her. Easy as that, a little ladies room revelation, to hold my fears up to the light: and then go past them. I am past them. Cassie Fortescue is no one. A phantom fear. A puff of smoke. She disappears.

  I go back down the hall and into the Jazz Room where the smells are just smells somehow now too, the smell of people. Just people, having fun, all singing a song with that Arthur Spence ringleading them, a risqué burlesque. ‘Ta-ra-ra boom de ay! Ta-ra-ra boom de ay!’ they chorus and clap in time. All of the lewd jokes go over my head, but I know some of the words, and I don’t know where from: ‘Though fond of fun I’m never rude. Though not too bad I’m not too good.’ And I start laughing with the crowd, finally, at last. ‘A queen of swell society as freely gay as gay can be . . .’ They roar at that and I stand at the back of the room and I laugh: loud and freely. Not quite gay; but it’s not so bad.

  It’s five past nine now and there’s no hold on the liquor either. One rule for the rich and one rule for the poor; I know the contradiction well, but I’ve never seen it demonstrated quite so flagrantly as this before. I clap along with the next song too, but as I do I fancy I see Eoghan O’Keenan again, shoulderline on the edge of the empty dancefloor in that white tux, and I dismiss him as quickly again: there will be no white tuxedos this side of the stage in the Merrick any more than there’ll be a liquor raid. No riffraff in this place, private club, members only, do what you like here and do it till dawn. For a price.

  There’s a round of applause, a shuffling of chairs, a clarinet soars up through the thick smoky air. Mother and Bart Harley stand to take the floor. To ‘Blue Heaven’. Of course: well, it is the song of the year, after all. I laugh again, to myself, as I watch them step into a foxtrot. And I see that Bart Harley is not a fabulous dancer: stiff-gaited and a little hesitant on his feet, he is, but then no one’s perfect, are they?

  And Warwick Bloxom is beside me as the tempo changes again: ‘Miss Greene, would you care to dance?’

  Yo

  ‘There’s a bit of dry rot at the back of the kitchen here.’ Mr Adams is showing me a hole in the floor Ag could hide in if she had to, but I’m not bothered about it. The place is still a palace to me. A stone cottage of three rooms, a bed, a sofa and a kitchen, all older and damper and colder than anything in the Neighbourhood, and it’s nothing less than perfect. It’s got the gas on for light, and a good-looking fuel stove in the hearth here – a proper range type of stove.

 
‘You can fix that up and I wouldn’t raise the rent on you,’ the landlord, a Mr Sturgess, says of the hole in the floor. ‘It’s a permanent tenant I want, one who’ll pay the rent – and on time.’

  ‘That’s me,’ I say. I’ll pay the rent on time. I almost always have. I’ll fix the hole in the floor too, though I know as much about that sort of thing as I do cricket. I’m pretty sure I’m being told I’m expected to fix it.

  ‘We’ll see – see how we go,’ Mr Sturgess says to Mr Adams, wary, but we’re in. I’ll prove to him I’m a good tenant. I couldn’t be standing straighter if I tried, as his rough head over his stiff Sunday collar and tie turns back to me: ‘Well, at least you’re not a miner, I suppose.’

  ‘Miner?’ I ask; what’s wrong with them?

  Mr Adams says: ‘Last lot here was miners, never got the rent – if they’re not striking they’re planning one, or the council’s got the workings shut down with some old crank complaining about what the dust is doing to the worth of their property. Ay, Alf, all ten bobs’ worth of it.’

  Mr Sturgess lets out a laugh at that so powerful I think he’s going to bust his collar with it; but he goes grim again as quickly, for me: ‘Ten bob is ten bob, right? Those who don’t pay their way pay the consequences.’

  ‘Right, yes sir.’ He will find me and break parts of me and doubtless enjoy it.

  ‘So it’s just you and the kid?’ He doesn’t look at Ag, where she’s hiding behind my leg. I reckon this Sturgess might be the type who wouldn’t even look at his own kids, not unless they were mucking up.

  I tell him: ‘Yeah, it’s just the two of us.’ We’re not going to rip up what’s left of your floorboards for the stove, don’t worry, and I couldn’t lie about us in the end, to Mr Adams or anyone. When I got us to Mass, finding a St Augustine’s only two streets away, I realised horseshitting now would be pointless. There was not one face that didn’t take a good look at us walking up the street, never mind at the font in the door. Word will get around eventually. If the Devil is looking, he will find us; and what authority other than his would say Ag’s welfare isn’t best with me? I have a job, a house now. The Lord is looking after us, because I’m in the right. I told Mr Adams that our parents had left us: a lie only in that I doubt they’ve ever been with us. He said: That is a tragedy. And there is no greater truth.

  He says now, to his mate Sturgess and in pity of me: ‘They’ve no other family, as I told you. How many lads you know would take such care of a child on his own?’

  Mr Sturgess stares hard at me, and then he says again: ‘We’ll see about him, Wal.’

  I give him the nineteen bob for the rent, agreed as starting from last Thursday, just about all I’ve got left, and he gives me the key.

  ‘Thank you. You won’t be sorry, Mr Sturgess.’

  He says yet again: ‘We’ll see.’

  And Mr Adams says: ‘Lay off, Alf, the boy’s all right.’ I’m grateful for that, more than grateful, but I don’t know why he should be so sure of me; he turns to me now and he says: ‘We’ll see what you’re like with the bat, though, won’t we?’

  We will. We’re going to go and have a game of cricket now, aren’t we. It’s only a social game, for some charity fund they have; I only have to give it a go. Jesus, but I don’t want to fuck anything up with it. I’m not going to, though, am I. I’m not going to put a foot wrong for the remainder of my earthly life.

  Back outside, I look down this Fawcett Street, this skinny lane of cottages behind the timber dock at White Bay, some stone, some wooden, all sitting under the bell tower of St Augustine’s, with a stretch of scrub down the waterside end, a good view of the electric power station stacks beyond that, and it’s now I see the tree. In front of the place opposite. It’s small, with white flowers on it, and it looks to be struggling. But it’s a tree. I want one in front of our place too; I’m going to get one.

  ‘That’s the Opera House up there,’ Mr Adams nods down Gladstone Street as we start walking, pointing out the pub verandah rising above the rooftops that way. ‘The pisser Tarzan and them go to – he lives down that corner, Stephen Street, at rolling distance; his poor mother. I’m another two streets that way, Adolphus Street, the first house next to the corner shop there.’

  I look at him, set on being such a help to me, taking me under his wing, telling me which shop is best for groceries now, and I have to interrupt him to say: ‘Thanks, you know, for getting us a place. I don’t know what we’d have done.’

  ‘You needed the hand,’ he shrugs.

  And the Devil in me makes me say when I should just keep it shut: ‘You’ve gone well out of your way.’ I’m asking: so, what’s the bargain here?

  ‘Nothing out of my way,’ he shrugs again. ‘You’re all right, and I’m a good enough judge of that. I see you work well, you’re no time-wasting fool and you know the language. That’s good enough for me.’

  The first one is true, the second depends on the circumstances and the third has me smacked again and asking like the little folk might have been in his ear: ‘How do you know I know the language?’

  ‘Look on your face when I let it go at you.’ He laughs, recalling it, and it makes me laugh too: if I recall it correctly, I shat my soul into a tin cup, more fear of him than the height and the swinging of the cradle for a second there.

  He’s wheezing across the road with it, back on that main Darling Street and then onto another I can’t see a name for, and when he stops laughing he asks me: ‘Where’s your family from, then?’

  And when I say, ‘Tralee, mostly,’ he looks at me with greater pity than ever: ‘Oh.’ But he’s still having a laugh with me, not unkind, and that’s unheard of: a North–South not unkind laugh? Is there such a thing? There is for him.

  I have to ask in return: ‘What about you? Where are you from?’

  ‘Originally, Arranmore, off the coast of Donegal, but Lifford is where I left from.’ He’s there now, staring at some emerald hills.

  In Donegal, and that makes some sense of him: he’s from the North but not from Northern Ireland; even still: ‘I didn’t think they spoke Gaelainn up there.’

  ‘We don’t,’ he says, and I know that by now of course, he speaks his Ulster type of it, before he tells me: ‘It’s all Irish, though, isn’t it?’

  Yes, I nod: ‘It is.’

  ‘Never lose it, whatever of it you might have. Don’t let the Sasanaigh have that too; they’ve thieved enough off us.’

  Haven’t I heard that a thousand times. He’s an Irish Revivalist; like Father Madigan, pounding it out of the pulpit of St Ben’s, calling for the language to be taught in the school, and when the government said no, he declared it an Imperial conspiracy.

  But I have to admit to Mr Adams: ‘I don’t have much more than the worst words in me.’

  He shrugs: ‘Good enough. As long as you can tell the King where to go.’ He’s serious; but even more so now he says: ‘I see you didn’t bring a hat, though, nor shoes for playing.’ Unlike himself: he nipped home from Mass to change before meeting me at the house – he’s even got a white vest on.

  ‘I don’t have any gear for sports,’ I tell him. ‘Haven’t been able to get to the shops.’

  And the pity is genuine here: ‘It’s been hard for you, hasn’t it?’

  I shrug.

  He says: ‘Well, don’t worry about it, you’re on your way up now.’

  We are. Ag’s skipping along beside me and she’s smiling at this Mr Wal Adams: more than a nice old fella; somehow, he’s a friend, this cricket-playing Irish Revivalist pit bull: freak potato.

  And just for him I’m out for a duck on Birchgrove Oval, busy looking at the pitch that’s black from coal dust instead of the ball, and looking out for Aggie, where she’s sitting on the fence rail, not looking at me, but at another friend she’s made in five seconds, another little girl belonging to someone from the Shee
t Metal Workers Union.

  ‘Well that was a short innings,’ Mr Adams shakes his head as I walk off the pitch again, back among this crowd that’s congratulating me just for turning up to enjoy the sun and buy ginger ale and lamingtons for their Balmain Ambulance. There’s kids running around everywhere, hanging off trees, and a dog stealing the ball every five minutes, and as the shadows get long Mr Adams is slipping a pound note into my pocket and saying: ‘For Christmas – don’t say nothing about it. I mean it – say nothing to no one.’

  I can’t say anything about that at all, don’t worry, and not a lot more when Ag and me get back to the little stone cottage, our house, and there’s this woman on the front step not five minutes after we’ve got in, with a cake tin in her hands, saying: ‘Hello there, Nettie Becker, next door – welcome to Fawcett Street.’

  She might be about thirty, I suppose, something motherly about her but something else too: lipstick, on a Sunday, don’t think I saw her face at Mass or I’d have remembered it. She’s good-looking, all over. She just walks right past my goggling and into the house. ‘Now if there’s anything you need, you just shout over the fence.’ Poking around the bits and pieces of furniture in the front room. ‘Oh dear, but look at this place, didn’t they leave it in a state, filthy animals,’ and then to Ag, ‘Aren’t you a darling thing,’ and to me, ‘How old is she, your little one?’ Not waiting for an answer: ‘You don’t look old enough to have a child that age but you can never tell these things, can you?’

  This Nettie Becker could talk underwater with a mouthful of pebbles, and she’s past me again before I can correct her and say Ag’s my sister, poking her head round into the next room: ‘You’re not staying here tonight, are you? Where are your things? There’s no linen on the bed. Disgusting people. Where’s your linen?’

  ‘Ah . . .’ I think this is the first sound I make.

  ‘Never mind, I’ve got spare you can borrow. Won’t be a moment. It’s Johann, isn’t it?’ She finally stops to draw breath, back at the front door.