The Blue Mile

by Kim Kelly

  There could not be a man here whose head is not hung in prayer.

  ‘Each one of you is irreplaceable, to your families, your communities, to your mates and to your union. Be proud, gentlemen, even in the grief of this day, that our safety record is the envy of the world. Our Bridge is the envy of the world. When you come back to work tomorrow, in every strike of the hammer, we will remember Sydney Edward Addison. We will remember those who have died before him here: Robbie Craig, Tom McKeown, Ang Peterson, Perc Poole, Ed Shirley, Nat Swandells, John Webb, Bill Woods. We will remember them today and every day we behold this Bridge of their creation, and may there be no more leave us in such tragedy.’

  Amen.

  The drinking will begin at the Rag and Famish on the corner of Miller and Berry, with the Engineers picking up the tab. I’m not going. I’ve gone straight back to prayer, shivering now with some strange relief: thank the Lord it wasn’t me that fell.

  I start walking away, away from everyone, and I doubt that it’ll be noticed I’m gone, not today. I walk round along the back of Lavender Bay, down the path by the rail line, and, Lord, I’m praying with every step. I don’t ask for much. I don’t ask for impossible things or for anything a man doesn’t need. I don’t ask why you took Nipper Addison from his family, just as I don’t ask why you took my brothers Michael and Brendan and our mother and father from mine. I only ever ask you that you let me live. Let me get on.

  My eyes are suddenly full. With strange tears. For my family. Not until today have I grieved. Why today? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because no one has paid for the loss of my family and no one’s ever going to. The brewery won’t pay; no hat around up at the Sandringham for the death of my brother Michael either. But the company and the union and all Nipper Addison’s mates will pay his family, to see that they are all right.

  Mrs Addison will be looked after.

  But my brother Michael was never looked after. No one in the Neighbourhood is sorry for what happened to him, not truthfully; only sorry for themselves, and what his life and his death and his sinning says about poverty. Michael won’t be remembered by anyone, barely even by me. Grey and scarred and fucked rotten, on the kitchen table. He was an arsehole is the truth, but I’m not too certain that was wholly his fault. Nothing was Brendan’s fault, either. Where’s he, my little brother? Is he dead too? Brendan never gave anyone any trouble; you’d hardly know he was there at all. He was a good kid, but he could never get a look-in for a job: wrong time, wrong place, wrong horseshit trade depression. Or they just didn’t like the look of him. Didn’t see him. I didn’t either. Some kid I was yelling at to get up to the shops for bread, for our tea: What the fuck have you been doing all day? Until he didn’t come home at all, I didn’t take in that he’d left the Neighbourhood until I hadn’t seen him a fortnight.

  I have to stop, lean against a lamp pole near me, near the public baths, closed up now summer’s finished. I roll another smoke. Look down as I do and see there’s a piece of broken glass on the path right by my left foot, the sun catching it. It’s green, a muddy green, like the water washing up against the rubble stone of the shore here. I kick it with my toe, and it falls away somewhere down into the stones. Disappeared. What happened to my family? My mother and my father, they must have hoped for something better once, mustn’t they? They got on a ship across the world for it, didn’t they? Why did they come here then? What for? I don’t know.

  I see a ferry heading in towards the wharf across the bay, and I run for it.

  I am not my brothers. I am not my family. It’s just me and Ag, and when I woke this morning I was still smiling, still thinking I was something special from having been picked out of the class last night to demonstrate the planing machine. I’ve only been at Tech a week. I’m a fucking hero there, among the young fellas, and the teacher Mr Simpson, too, just for breathing: because I work on the Bridge. Jesus, I can still hardly believe I got eighty-seven out of a hundred in the Maths test.

  I’m not going to fall. I’m going to get up tomorrow morning and catch hot cocks, because that’s what I have to do, to keep on this path, up off the rocks. I will spare a thought for Nipper Addison as I do, but I’ll be doing it for Ag. Lord, just let me see through a year at this: then I know she’ll be looked after by them. By then, maybe Mr Adams would adopt her if I was killed. Would you do that for me? Would you give Ag to the Adamses? They’d love a daughter. But would they? Mrs Adams has her hands full with their Kenny, on twenty-four-hour shift for his needs and his moods. I don’t know that they could take another child. Anyway, I’m not going to get killed, am I. If I make this ferry, I’m not going to get killed. Jesus, round the back of these endless jetties and boathouses here, I catch sight of the ferry tying up: if I make it, I will see out the year, I will see out my training, I will be a boilermaker and Ag will go on to high school and she’ll become a teacher one day. She’ll get a scholarship to the university, she’s so smart with all her reading. She will be happy, and I won’t get killed.

  I make the ferry, it’s going straight on to Balmain too, and by the time I’ve got there I’ve made that many bargains with God and whoever else might be listening I’m wretched from it. I’m so tired I could just lie down on the street and be done with it. I could do with a drink. For the first time since the night we left the Neighbourhood, I really am in want of an ale, to feel the cleansing cool down my neck, the warm nothing in my head. Just one schooey; I’ll just have the one. But before I even see the awning of the Commercial, I find a friendly face looking at me: it’s Mrs Buddle, blessed Mother of Darling Street Wharf, outside her little wooden house watering her flowers.

  ‘Hello, dear!’ she waves. Eighty if she’s a day. She gave Ag some of her geraniums last Sunday, in a pot – waiting for us to come by, as we do on our way back and forth from the park here. They have a chat just about every time we go by. Because this is home; our home. I’m going to fix the loose palings on Mrs Buddle’s front fence this Sunday coming; give them a coat of paint one day too. I could lie down on this footpath just to claim it as mine. She says, sharp as a tack: ‘You’re early today.’

  I tell her: ‘There was an accident.’

  ‘Oh no, poor love.’ She looks at the Bridge behind me, rising up over my shoulder, and she sighs for the thousand tragedies of it, asking me: ‘Do you want a cuppa, my love?’

  ‘Not just now, thanks.’ I don’t want to look at the Bridge for a bit, or talk about it; I tell her: ‘I have to get home.’ Wait for Ag to get in from school and then we’ll go to the pictures, I think, that Charlie Chaplin one is on, The Circus, at the National. Just . . . get away.

  She nods: ‘You go and have some peace and quiet.’

  I won’t be getting that: little Johnny Becker will be tearing round the house while his father sleeps next door, and I’ll be glad of it: he’s a funny little kid. There’s his mother, Nettie, out the front, having her ciggie as I come round the corner. Always alone with it, and I’ve finally worked out why: no one can stand her and her know-all gibbering.

  ‘Eoghan,’ she smiles when she sees me, still hopeful for it. ‘What are you doing home?’

  Before she can talk over me I tell her: ‘There was an accident, someone drowned.’

  ‘Oh my heavens, you don’t say. What happened?’

  She doesn’t really care; she just wants the details so she can take them up to the shops, telling everyone she’s the first to know. I shake my head; I’m not giving her anything.

  She follows me into the house. Johnny’s playing with his tin train, filling the truck with coal chips from the bin by the fireplace: getting filthy, having a great old time, and I’d like to join him. I look at the bin: I made it from an old pallet after Ag found the idea for it in the paper; good as a bought one.

  Nettie’s saying: ‘Why don’t you go and lie down; I’ll bring you in a brandy.’

  ‘No,’ I say to both. ‘Thanks.’
/>   ‘Sometimes it helps, you know . . .’ She puts her hand on my face and leaves it to trail down my neck.

  It stirs me so that I grab her by the wrist, not gently, and I tell her again: ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t have to be mean about it,’ she pulls her hand away.

  ‘Not mean, Nettie. I just don’t want that, right?’ It’s the wrong day for her to have pushed the issue, and I have to tell her now what I’ve been wanting to tell her for the last few weeks, tell her today because life can be too brutally short for horseshit: ‘I don’t want you in my house anymore. Right?’

  However meanly that might have come out, I don’t want her near my business anymore. I don’t want her near me.

  Her eyes go wild: the look of a banshee.

  I reckon she’s going to smash me, but she says, as if I’m filth: ‘I can have better than you.’

  I say: ‘Well, you’d better go and get it then.’

  She gives me a last look of hatred before she drags Johnny up by the arm, leaving his train smash on the hearth stone, leaving him screaming, leaving this house. Slamming the front door.

  Slamming this and that inside her own home, that’s how much she cares for peace and quiet for her man. Telling me by all this carry-on that there will be consequences. I don’t care, whatever she does or says. No one listens to her anyway.

  I lie down on the old sofa and wonder if the previous tenants had to leave it here in their rush to get away from her. I close my eyes. Wait for Ag. She’ll be pleased Nettie won’t be here anymore when she gets home from school. She never did warm to her, only little Johnny and she’ll survive without him tipping coal dust all round the floor. She’ll be eight in May, on the tenth. She’s old enough to get herself to and from school. She can go and help Mrs Buddle on Saturday and Wednesday nights, give her a shilling for the wash if we can’t manage it all ourselves. Or Ag can stop with the Hanrahans – her and Gladdy, giggling Gerties having the stay-overs they keep whining for. If Mrs Adams doesn’t grab her first: Ag is always welcome round there, and she’d only ever be a help with Kenny, he’s always that happy to see her – she marches round the yard to his strange beat, making up songs about castles built of cheese and great armies of possums and rats, making him laugh along like no one else does. We have other friends. We’ll be looked after.

  Nettie Becker can go and do herself a favour.

  Nipper Addison died today.

  I cover my face with my hands and I pray for him; for him and for his new young wife and all her hopes come to nothing. No amount of being looked after can do anything for that.

  It’s just luck. Brilliant one minute; horseshit the next. Nothing personal. Just a test of faith.

  I am alive.

  I did not fall.

  And when I open my eyes again, Ag’s flying through the door: ‘Yo-Yo!’

  Light of my life. How could I not have faith? I might go and see about getting me some swimming lessons, though . . .

  Olivia

  ‘Lady Game is partial to a fine hat, so I’ve discovered.’ Leona Bloxom gives me a scheming smile, as she signs her cheque for her own vice-regal welcome ensemble, as if Lady Game had cabled her personally from the ship when it docked yesterday in Fremantle, to tip her off. ‘She is particular, however. Low-brimmed and modest, the style of which you yourself are fond. Her outfits are always of a certain simplicity. A continental elegance.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ I say, practising my poker face – not imperious but hopefully more nonchalant – covering my surprise: an upper-class Englishwoman with taste? How extraordinary. Gwendolen Game, whose imminent arrival is all any woman who walks in here can talk about, is the daughter of a long line of beknighted British bankers, a forty-four-year-old mother of three who’s also partial to ball sports, so simplicity and continental elegance could well mean corduroy tunic and fleecy-lined bloomers. But, partial to a hat or not, a hat is what she’ll be getting: a welcome gift from Miss Olivia Greene. A bold gesture, risky too – and one I dreamed up myself, well before Mother’s letter arrived from London suggesting the very same, with the advice: Gwen Game is long-limbed and lithely built; why don’t you style her a smart jacket for the harbour chill as well, one that suits yourself, so that it’s ready when she can’t resist your invitation to the salon? Send her a small sample of sketches too, my darling – just a dozen or so. I can see you sketching into the night now as I write, oh how I miss you, Ollie – terribly. I do wish you’d recon–

  No, I’m not going to reconsider London. Don’t want to. Don’t need to. The wedding of Mr and Mrs Bartholomew Harley was superb, down to every detail – half-page splash across the Monday’s Evening News, and the Thursday’s Herald at the dock of the RMS Oberon, both displaying the frockery of talented daughter, Miss Olivia Greene. Thank you, Mother. When I get a moment to write back you’ll be pleased to know that I refused to be a pitiable figure lingering on the dock as the ship pulled out. Tooooot. I went home and watched you vanish from the front steps; then I stank up the house frying eggs and onion for my supper, for old times’ sake, listening for the traces of your horror ringing off the stone walls: Ollie, close the wardrobe door! What’s the difference between London and Rose Bay anyway? Just a bit more sea. And eight standard weeks for a letter, not a telephone connection to speak of. But honestly, I’ve barely had time to think about your abandoning of me. Really.

  ‘I don’t know how you’re managing all this on your own.’ Mrs Bloxom’s smile shifts from one scheme to the next, folding her chequebook back into her handbag: she’s still after me for her Rick. Mystifying but true, she’s holding on for my aristocratic connections: dubious as they are, her intentions are as plain as the schnonk on my face. She is especially fond of likening me among the vice-regal set to Lady Ursula Woodridge, whose West End salon in London is becoming quite the place for beige wallpaper at present. Poor little war waifs, Mrs Bloxom calls us, for the circumstances of fate that have led to our need to earn a living by hats and frocks. Never mind that Ursula Woodridge’s father actually died in the war, rather than having had his sense of morality removed and the fact distributed throughout the Empire by Cinesound. Or perhaps Mrs Bloxom is simply grateful I’ve got her out of brown crepe and into mauve georgette, with a mid-calf hem – she does have a decently turned pair of ankles, for a dowager. She chastises me affectionately: ‘I don’t know when you find the time to sleep.’

  ‘Oh, I manage.’ I stifle a yawn, slipping the cheque into the drawer and sliding my eyes over the figures scribbled across it as I do. One can’t be too careful, I have managed to learn quickly enough: in the past few weeks I’ve had Mr Trumble, from Barnaby’s Furs, short-change me accidentally by two yards of chinchilla trim, and I’ve had a pair of gloves disappear.

  Mrs Bloxom pulls on her own pair now, gathers her bags: ‘Now, Olivia dear, you won’t reconsider and come with me, will you?’

  No, not reconsidering this one either – attending the welcome garden party, for the Games. Hoorah for them. I smile, my gaze lingering at the bags on Mrs Bloxom’s arm, Olivia Couture printed on them, as it is now printed on the window and on my cards. Black on white, tootling-smart as a Sydney ferry; I’ve even reupholstered the chaise thus in crisp, wide taffeta stripes, and Couture is so much more sophisticated than Costumière, mais non? I’m a personal designer, an artist, not a seamstress who takes instruction from her clients, and I’m still smiling as I meet Mrs Bloxom’s gaze: ‘I’m sorry, no, I won’t be able to attend.’

  And it’s not merely my usual social reticence speaking here, but some strategy and one based on the example standing before me. The more aloof and yonderly I have become, the more Mrs Bloxom seems to buy. It’s happened with a couple of barristers’ wives I met at Mother’s wedding and then at the Tulip farewell, too – I’ve turned down invitations and they’ve turned up at the salon, following some commercial law of scarcity I don’t quite understand and am c
ertainly not about to question.

  Mrs Bloxom replies now, feigning cross: ‘I am most disappointed, young lady. This famous shyness of yours . . .’ She shakes her head at me knowingly and not knowing a thing about it. ‘You really are a wonderful girl, every last bit of you. I’ll get you along to something one day . . .’

  ‘You might just,’ my smile deepens, genuinely, as I wave her good day out the door; whatever I might think of Mrs Bloxom and her grasping at status, she and her friends, who think nothing of spending thirty of forty pounds an outfit, are doing wonderful things for my business. My plans. My visions. Letting me dare to believe that they might be realities, one day. Truly, Mother, I have not stopped for weeks now – months, God, is it? I’ve not had time to take a full breath since you blew me your kisses and tossed me your streamers from the promenade deck, and it seems I’ve caught every one . . . I will catch Lady Game, too: I will have her as my top client, and from there I will go triumphantly to London, to show you what I have made of myself by myself, and to steal Ursula Woodridge’s clients, on my way to Paris, where I will somehow steal an invitation to meet Madame Chanel. Alternatively, I could go via New York with vice-regal couturier embossed on my card, couldn’t I? Rich Americans love that splashy sort of thing, don’t they? Make my fortune first. I am beginning to taste it already.

  See my success, here in the salon. Look: all that’s left of my Bridge series, one lonely little aeroplane grey vagabond among my batch of new samples that range across the hat tree, and this one remains unpurchased, I would say, only because the grey is a little severe, perhaps too severe given the times. I’ll snazz it slightly for my next series, another Bridge series – they walked out the door; honestly, what a thrill. Everything to do with the Bridge is exciting: the arms are almost touching now, truly only a few yards apart, and there’ll be parties galore all across the city when they finally meet, with their great big clanking steel kiss. But – roll the drum – will they meet? Or will the whole thing fall into the sea when the restraining lines are let go? So, so very exciting. I’ll simply have to do a special one for Lady Game, won’t I. Hers, I see now, is the moss stocking cloche on the topmost branch above the aeroplane vagabond: softest cashmere, which should fit her so long as she comes with a head, and its only embellishment shall be a small gilt buckle, left of centre. I see her jacket against it, masculine pea-style, double-breasted, but cut from rich buttery gamboge tussah. Quilted. That will look superb in the window, too – an advertisement of pure luxury – and Lady Game shall have the colours of the harbour at dawn. With taupe gloves and shoes . . .