The Blue Mile

by Kim Kelly

  ‘I’m sorry, what?’

  ‘Your name – they said you had a funny name.’

  I don’t know who they is apart from pixies, but I tell her my funny name: ‘It’s Eoghan.’

  ‘Ian?’

  ‘Yo-un, or –’

  ‘Is that foreign?’

  ‘Irish.’

  ‘Never mind.’ She bats it off for a blowfly, and says to Ag: ‘And what’s yours?’

  ‘Agnes.’ I tell her on my sister’s behalf; Ag’s gone wary, trying to disappear altogether round the back of me.

  Nettie Becker doesn’t notice: ‘Aren’t you just darling?’

  A bit scary she might be, but in no more than ten minutes we’ve got sheets on the bed, a blanket for the sofa, a clean frying pan, a jug of milk and a bowl full of eggs from her chook run and she’s saying: ‘My wash day is Wednesdays, don’t mind throwing yours in too for a shilling, and as well of course the child can come to my house tomorrow while you’re working, if you need her to. Agnes, you can come and help me with my little Johnny. Would you like that? He’s only three, but he’s a handful and seven-quarters, I’ll say.’ She puts her hands on her hips and gives me a look that’s a bit scary too: ‘Any time after six – that’s when John’s off, up at the Glebe Island silos, lumping. Six till six, that’s what a ten-hour shift round there is – and anything goes between six and six round here. But no other time, right?’

  ‘Right,’ and that’s my final prayer answered, our new life set up; it doesn’t seem enough to say, ‘That’s very kind of you.’ But that’s all I can say.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ she says, in a sarcastic sort of way, making a sour face, but I don’t know what she means by it and can’t ask her because she’s turned on her heel and gone back out the door.

  Take a moment to scratch my head and then I ask Ag: ‘What do you reckon?’

  She shrugs; not too keen on Nettie Becker.

  But I am. She might be a strange sheila, but she seems ordinary strange; and she’s right next door, in this place full of decent working people, who obviously all have an eye out for each other even if they can’t get a story straight, and she is probably genuinely wanting help with her baby. It looks good all around. I tell Ag: ‘You might get a headache from her, but she might be some fun, too, yeah? She seems to like you.’

  Ag doesn’t want to know about it. She goes out to the kitchen and pushes the chair in here up to the sink so she can reach the tap. She turns it on, inspects the flow, and she turns it off. Her skinny little arms are then lifting the old black kettle the flitters left on the side of the sink, telling me she’s more than capable of looking after herself, once we work out the stove at least; and she says, filling the kettle now under the tap, with her back still to me: ‘Why can’t I go and help Miss Greene?’

  Because she wouldn’t want you to, you’re not good enough to, is the truth I won’t tell her, so I say: ‘Because you can’t,’ which is no reason at all; so I say: ‘Because we live here now. And that’s a pretty good thing, isn’t it? What do you reckon?’

  She turns on the chair and gives me one of them smiles that make the angels sing. ‘It’s the best house ever, Yoey.’

  It’s our house. It really is. We have landed on our feet.

  We have landed on our feet so surely that when I get down to the ferry the next morning Tarzan’s there waiting for me, ‘Hey, Pretty,’ with his sore Monday head and the sandshoes I couldn’t get for myself before now – and by another miracle they fit, too. I lose my guts all over again going up in the cradle, I know I will never get used to this height, but I as I look out this time I see the points and bays for what they are today: a tear in the emerald hills of my country, with a river of silver pouring through it from the sun. I will never get tired of this looking out either. I don’t want to catch white-hot flying cocks forever, though, nor scald my hands daily getting the billy off Clarkie’s stove, and like the Lord of Balmain has dreamed up a plan for that too, Tarzan says to me as I hand him his tea at smoko: ‘You should think about getting into a construction trade – you’re good on them feet when you get going.’

  Should I? Am I? What I wouldn’t do to get into any trade. But I don’t get too excited at the idea; I tell him: ‘Yeah, but I’m over twenty-one, bit old now, aren’t I?’

  ‘Old?’ he says. ‘Age doesn’t do you any harm up here. Any foreman working at height wants a fella he can trust above another any day – sixteen or sixty-six.’

  Trust. He trusts me? I am as tall as the top chord we’re standing on this second.

  ‘Keep kissing my pink hairy arse, kid,’ he tells me, ‘and one day you too might be on your way to sixteen quid a week.’ Because this Tarzan McCall can’t breathe if he’s not bragging.

  And I am disbelieving: ‘Sixteen what?’

  ‘Quid. That’s what you get riveting at height, from the increases we got last month.’

  ‘Shit – yeah?’ So that’s what I’m going to be, a riveter, like Mr Adams and Tarzan. I will make a point of finding out how.

  He says: ‘Yeah, I’m buying me mum the house with it now.’

  Good on you. One day, I’m going buy Ag a house, too.

  But for now, for Christmas, I’m going to buy her a little tree for the front of the one we’re renting. I get it from Paddy’s on Tuesday afternoon, and I have to fight for it, all the way down George Street and into the Haymarket, through the Christmas crowds. There’s a lot of happy faces here, trays of cherries and peaches flying everywhere, but mine is the happiest, finding what I’m looking for when I see it. ‘That’s a gardenia,’ the lady at the flower stall tells me. ‘Lovely choice but she’s a fusspot. Not too much sun, not too much shade, lad. Not too much water and not too little. But the flowers will reward you for your trouble with their scent.’ They already are: big white flowers that smell like some memory of summer I never knew I had.

  I carry this pot of summer under my arm back along George, back through the la-di-da end of town, back past that Strand Arcade, where I look up at all its gold trimmings and tell that Miss Greene in her ivory tower there: We’re just fine, top of the world, thank you.

  It’s all working out for us, it is. When I get back to the house, Ag’s telling me again, as she did yesterday, how she loves little Johnny Becker next door, his fat little face and his funny little laugh, and if she doesn’t think much of his mother she doesn’t complain, while Nettie thinks Ag’s nothing short of a miracle herself: ‘I’ve never seen him so still as when she’s telling him one of her stories – spellbound, he is. Oh, why, what have you got there? A gardenia?’ Nettie Becker knows all about them, for at least ten minutes; while Ag knows the petals are really the finest linen prized by the little folk of White Bay.

  Christmas morning, we go round to Saint Gus’s, and all the children are invited up to the front of the altar to sing before the solemn high Mass gets going. I’ve never known anything more heretical, and when they start singing the ‘Bird Song’, I have to hold my face in my hands as they do, ‘Full many a bird did wake and fly, curoo, curoo, curoo . . .’ as I’m taken by a river of gratitude I’ve never known, and it’s a river of golden light. ‘On Christmas Day in the morning . . . The lark, the dove and the red bird came . . .’ they sing and I pray for our poor mother, that you might find it in your heart, Lord, to do something for her suffering, to help her, wake her up to this light and mend her somehow, keep her from the Devil’s worst. And I promise you again here and forever that I will keep off the grog myself, that I will keep my sister as happy and well as she is this day. I will keep from all sinning, and keep my trust in you, Lord. For all you have given us.

  And when I look up again I see Mr Adams, looking at me from across the aisle; he’s with his wife and his son, a boy of about twelve, a sunny-faced kid who by some good fortune looks more like his mother than his father, but there’s something not right with him, so
mething touched and unmendable about him, rocking on his soles, singing to himself, some different tune. Mr Adams knows something about hard times and rivers of gratitude too; he nods at me: Merry Christmas.

  Then after, into the sun, Ag and me go back to our house and plant our little tree, or our shrub as Nettie Becker said it is. And after our dinner of tinned ham and spuds and the pudding we found on the front step, Ag and me go for a walk, up to the park near the Darling Street ferry, where there’s a dozen or so kids running around, playing tip. The friend she made on Sunday, Gladdy Hanrahan, waves her over: ‘Aggie!’ And she’s in.

  I roll a smoke and watch Ag running around, across the grass, and tripping up over the roots of a scrappy old gum, laughing and squealing and getting tipped. I look at the Bridge of liquorice sticks across the water: Merry Christmas. And I don’t think life gets any better than this.

  Olivia

  ‘I’m calling for the doctor, Em – this is not some trifling thing,’ says Bart from outside the bathroom door.

  I’m on the inside of it, with Mother. It’s Christmas night and she is terribly, unglamorously sick – just as she was twice yesterday, as well as the evening before that, and this morning, keeping us from church. I can only agree with Bart as I wring out the face washer for her again: ‘I think it’s for the best, Mother – you need to have a doctor see you.’

  ‘No. No, Ollie.’ Mother dismisses the idea even as she’s not yet letting the edge of the lavatory seat go: ‘I know what this is.’

  ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘Never mind. I know what this is, and it’ll pass in a minute.’

  ‘Mother, I –’

  ‘See – it’s finished.’ She gets up from her knees and takes the washer from me, the band of her engagement ring clunking against the porcelain tap handle as she turns it on. As if Bart’s adoration weren’t obvious enough, he’s given her this gigantic table-cut trapezium diamond set in platinum. Unboxed it just now, under the gigantic tree. Nothing smaller would fit in this bathroom, not to mention this Rose Bay mansion, up the Vaucluse end, which comes with its own jetty, private sea bath, and yacht, and an undisclosed number of staff – for the yacht, never mind the house. Prime view of the Bridge from the east but we’re not bothered about the effect on real estate values round this way, not when we’re inclined to give our future stepdaughter just a token Christmas offering of a sable shoulder wrap – a deliciously chocolatey, practically weightless Russian sable wrap – when I’d have been as content with Mexican chocolate and the sweet silver gypsy hoop earrings Mother bought for me: Thank that divinely long neck of yours that you’re one who can wear – oh dear, excuse me a moment, would you?

  Mother inspects her face after splashing and smiles at me now, smug: ‘See – it’s nothing.’

  ‘It is not nothing,’ Bart’s voice booms barrister-stern from the other side of the door.

  And he’s quite right. A doctor acquaintance is called from up the road and, after rather a lot of hissing behind the closed bedroom door, I hear Bart declare: ‘March, then – we’ll bring the wedding forward to March.’ And he calls for a toast of French champagne. Which Mother ominously declines: ‘Better not.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask when I’m called for. ‘What’s all this?’ I’m confused but I don’t want to know either.

  Mother’s smile is sparkling table-cut joy: ‘Darling Ollie – I must tell you now – you’re going to be a big sister.’

  ‘What?’ No. Insane. This is beyond scandalous.

  No, I am not going to be any such thing. I am the only child. I –

  It takes every ounce of self-possession for me not to run screaming out through the gigantic plate-glass picture window in the bedroom here and throw myself into the sea.

  Impossible!

  But it’s true, as undeniable as it is inevitable; it’s written all over her beautiful face. Luminescent. As neon.

  ‘Yes, darling, you’re going to be a big sister. Come here . . .’ Mother holds her arms out for me to join her on the gigantic bed, headboard a wall of genuine mahogany, where she’s reclining on a gigantic ivory brocade bolster. And I do embrace her. My mother, breathe in her stale perfume and all her loveliness. She’s such a slip of a woman, nothing to her; tiny, bird-slim ribcage, or my arms are so long around her it just feels that way. All too flimsy.

  She whispers as she holds me: ‘Won’t it be wonderful having a wardrobe to yourself at last?’

  ‘What?’ I pull away.

  ‘Here,’ she’s smug again with her smile, her triumph. ‘You’ll have your own suite of rooms. Room to create. Room to move.’

  ‘No.’ I can’t help that escaping and once it has I can’t help letting the rest of it go: ‘No, I’m not living here.’ The realisation stings and whirls around me: I can’t live with Mother and Bart. Baby makes three, not four. This is not my Blue Heaven. This is not my anything at all.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Ollie, of course you’ll live here. With me.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’ I’ve never been clearer about anything in my life. I intend to remain at Lavender Bay. It is my home.

  ‘Olivia Jane!’

  And so begins the argument, one that threatens to rage on up till the wedding and beyond as the days unfold and everyone joins in.

  Bart is gently cajoling: ‘Don’t you think you’ll be lonely, Olivia? And won’t it be better to be here, away from the bustle and noise of the bridgeworks?’ Be a good girl and comply with the pretence that you are your mother’s chaperone in this house up until the wedding and I’ll buy you a full-length mink.

  Glor, back from her grandparents’ in the bush, is direct as always: ‘Ollie, you can’t. WOMAN LIVING ALONE – that’s a headline usually ending in ATTACKED, BURGLED or FOUND DEAD. I don’t want you on your own all the way over there – come and live with us in Randwick. You know Mum would love to have you.’

  My mother is rapidly plumping infuriation: ‘I forbid it, Olivia Jane. You’re not twenty-one. You’re not even nineteen.’

  I give her an imperious dismissal: ‘You’re the one who’s been insisting I grow up and hurry up about it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she hisses her exasperation, ‘and not a week ago you were dragging your heels like a mule at coming out.’

  Aghast at the shocking irrelevance of that now, I can only say: ‘I’ve grown up hurriedly then, haven’t I?’

  ‘You can’t afford it,’ Mother appeals to reason, creasing her forehead with it. ‘The rates and the bills.’

  So I stomp: ‘I’ll demand a bigger allowance from Father then. I’ll threaten him – threaten to tell everyone what sort of a man he is – if he doesn’t give it to me.’

  Shrill glissando of disgust: ‘That’ll hurt you more than it might ever hurt him.’

  I know that. I know that too well: to expose Viscount Mosely, Lord Ashton Greene, would only mean humiliation, exposure of my own rejection. He will merely continue to ignore me in every importance sense, continue to remit his pittance from afar, absolving himself of me. He doesn’t have to give me anything at all; unless he has a son, the whole estate will go to one of his cousin’s sons anyway, whether I exist or not. Oh how I want to hurt him equally. Unfurl all this hatred and resentment coiled in my fist and one day . . .

  But for now, I can only respond with another imperious dismissal: ‘I don’t care. I’ll manage.’

  And I will if the post-Christmas business at Emily Costumière is any indication. First in the door is Mrs Bloxom, Warwick’s mother, with the aunt from Melbourne, after complete ensembles for the midsummer garden party at Government House, and collectively they pay for the balance owing on chaise and cabinetry. They are quickly followed by one of Cassie’s funster pals, Liz Hardy, after a New Year’s party frock with a bit of twirl to it, which then brings in half of Mosman, and I manage it all on my own because Mother’s too ill to do anything but loll about in her sunroo
m at Rose Bay, sewing twirly panelling for me and telephoning the salon twice a day to remind me not to let slip to anyone that she’s lolling about in scandal over there. Thirty-seven pounds, eleven shillings clear I end up with, after fabric and everything else. That’s almost a yearly wage for a shop girl – in less than one month. And in the midst of retail arcade catastrophe, too: by mid-January Wilton’s Ladies’ Tailor has a discreet For Lease sign pinned to the blind drawn on the door; there’s a whisper that Duke’s Men and Boys on the ground floor is going too, gobbled up by the department store trade; and Cynthia Designs in the Royal, purveyors of fine crepe atrocities, won’t be seeing in this new year, either. While I haven’t had time to be lonely or burgled or murdered or anything but busy. Indeed, I’m studying my receipts and outgoings again to see that I haven’t made a mistake with my adding-up.

  And I haven’t.

  My smile is quite possibly smug, triumphant and something approaching rather excited about my future, and I’m gazing at the backwards EMILY on the window wondering if I might change it to OLIVIA one day, when I see someone wave at me over the lettering. A man shape.

  It’s Warwick. I wave back and smile at him too. Haven’t seen him since that night at the Merrick, getting on for a month ago now, where he took great steps towards curing my fear of public dancing – at least two of them. Leading me onto the floor, first he trod on my toe, then, as he leapt back in dismay, he knocked a drink off a table and into a lady’s lap, all with the aplomb an Oxford cut affords a man: you might be a fool but you’ll never look like one. Once he got going, though, he dutifully led like a dream, and all eyes turned to the frock. Just the one dance, tripping over a quickstep for ‘It Had To Be You’, laughing through it just as I would trip about with Mother in the squeeze of our lounge, laughing with the whole room.

  I’m laughing now as he comes through the salon door: ‘Hello, Warwick.’

  ‘Miss Greene, hello,’ he says in his cheerful yet awkward way, as if he’s just forgotten where and what he is while in the midst of fumbling his hat off his head. There is something endearing about him, that high Oxford waist just a little too high, half his fringe flopping across his face, a new lyric for our song: And though your hair slips from its brill, with all your faults I love you still . . . like the big brother I never had.