The Blue Mile

by Kim Kelly

  Take a deep breath and, as I do, I look up from under my umbrella, and see him, as I do every day. Right up the top today, striding along a beam under the north-side crane. Any man, every man-shape I see up there, is him. Stubborn fantasies not stuffing as easily back in their bottle as I’d thought. Slipping out like the threads of ‘Blue Heaven’ violins, making me look over my shoulder once or twice a day. Making me glad I’m too busy to think, and too stubborn myself to spend too long staring out the venetians at night following the fairy lights across that deep blue mile between us. Refusing to say his name to myself. If I were one of those girls with little to do, I’d have given in and somehow . . . done what? Chased him? I’d not do anything of the sort. This is only five minutes worth of a fading, shrinking dream. Ill-fitting, annoying. Like the scratch of an improperly finished seam between one’s shoulders: impossible to reach; whip it off and snip it off in the fitting room.

  That’s all it is. An irritating squiggle. Reduced to nothing as the honking, clopping chaos of the Quay whirls me into life. This real life. My fabulous life. One day, very soon, I’ll wake up and the Bridge will be complete. That chink in the sky between the arms will be closed, bolted fast with iron, and he simply won’t be there for me to look up for at all.

  Yo

  ‘Stop work – all men down!’ It’s Dolly shouts it out today from the underside of this final cross-member we’re on. ‘Hold off, Tarz!’ He has to shout it louder: ‘Stop work!’ Because Tarzan McCall is more than half-deaf lately; he didn’t even hear the workshop siren go off. I saw an ambulance come round by the dock about a half-hour ago when we stopped for smoko, but I didn’t mention it, and no one else did either: there’s been an ambulance every week, it seems, too many getting sloppy with the race on to the finish. I’m not getting sloppy: I’m on my hands and knees here with the southerly picking up. Tarzan steps across to the west top chord as if he’s just seen his tram. I crawl. I hate this job. I hate every fucking four-hundred-foot-high second of it.

  ‘Jesus, you’re a faggot, Pretty,’ Tarz says, watching me crawl.

  ‘Am I?’ A useless old woman? I don’t give a shit what you reckon, Tarzan ginger fucking monkey-nutted man: you are twice my weight. As I get to my feet, I somehow knock the chisel off my belt, and down it goes. ‘Fuck.’ There’s three shillings for nothing. That is such a sloppy sack of shitful I don’t feel the cradle swing as I step in. I roll a smoke.

  ‘You right?’ Mr Adams says to me.

  I look out, I look at the way the trees of the Gardens cover Bennelong Point like a woolly head, how the city sticks up out of it like a load of rotted and broken teeth, and I don’t say anything. The workshop siren is going off again anyway as we go down and I’m hoping the poor fella it’s wailing for is not dead, but obviously he is, or some similar tragedy has happened.

  ‘Bloke called Fred Gillon,’ Mr Harrison says when we’re down, wiping his forehead with a rag from his apron for the shame of it. I didn’t know him at all, not even to look at; no one in our gangs did. ‘Hoist collapsed on him, down on the approach, one of the tripod legs come away. All ten tons of it, come right down on top of him. Terrible thing, didn’t stand a chance. His mates all jumped clear, but it’s flattened the poor bloke, killed him where he stood.’

  There’s discussion about how fairly ordinary his mates must feel. Seeing something like that happen. Jesus. Imagination is good enough. I feel as if I may as well have seen it. I am seeing it, right before my eyes.

  ‘Go home any of you who needs to,’ Mr Adams is saying and this time telling me to clear off. I mustn’t look too good. Because obviously I’m not. I leave straight from the barge. I’ll put in what I don’t have for Fred Gillon tomorrow. I don’t go home, though.

  I walk round Lavender Bay, and my blood is pounding in my head, pounding right through to the insides of my bones with a feeling I can’t begin to name. I am alive. I keep walking round the jetties past the public baths, past them swimming lessons I never got to because they were on here too late Saturday arvos and at Mass time Sundays at Balmain and I’ve been too ashamed otherwise to ask anyone to teach me how. What is shame to a dead man? I am alive and I walk out along one of the jetties into the middle of the bay. I can see her ferry stop from here. I can just see one small corner of the tin roof of her house against the dark brick flats by it.

  From here, life suddenly looks too brutally short for horseshit. The leg of a tripod hoist come away. There’s not a lot you can do about that. No more than I can’t stop thinking about Olivia Greene. Wherever I am, whatever day it is, Olivia Greene is here, with me. I have tried but I can’t look at the harbour waters without looking into her eyes, can’t feel the sun on my back without remembering her smile. Seeing the way her hands go when she talks, like little birds tracing her thoughts around her. Ag’s not mentioned her again, not once, just a look in her eye now and again over our tea table that says: bastard. I don’t know if I’m depriving my sister of a mother, but I’m depriving her of a friend. I’ve got to do something about that now. I’ll go up and slip a note under her door, and I’ll tell her . . . what?

  I’m not going to be a boilermaker’s labourer forever. I might be unemployed again in the next few months if I can’t get on full-time in the shops, or on hanging the road deck. That’s right, unemployed again. I’ll lose my apprenticeship, lose my place at Tech, too, then. I’ll lose everything. There’s no other work to go to now; there’s nowhere that’s not putting men off in droves. That’s all the talk will be of at the Rag and Famish today: five minutes for Fred Gillon and the rest on how they’re going to get this Big Fella Lang back into the government of the state so we can keep our jobs. On a job that’s just about done. There’s nothing to be done about that, either.

  What point could there be in me telling Olivia Greene how much I think of her? Of what I think of anything.

  None.

  So I keep walking, back along the path below the railway tracks, keeping my eyes to the rubble shore. With my blood pounding a note out to me, telling me I’m an idiot for not living while I’m alive.

  *

  ‘It’s no lottery, Eoghan, no mistake about it.’ Mr Adams’s grip on my shoulder has his fingers just about driven through my flesh with his own relief, as well as mine. We’ve both got on the road deck work, all our gang has, for when the arch is done. He says: ‘You can be sure now you’re one of the best.’

  I am a boilermaker’s assistant now, officially, employed with the company directly and I’ll have to get membership with the union now too, but I rub my eyes to hide the disappointment at not getting in the shops full-time. I’d have taken the drop in pay and the shorter hours. There are just as many accidents in the shops – more so even – but they don’t happen at height in the shops, do they. I do not want to work at height anymore, even if it’s a thousand feet less hanging the road. I want my feet on the ground. But what I want and what I’ve got often bear little relation. Swimming lessons will be back on in October, I will book myself in for some then; Ag too. In the meantime, I can be certain and well pleased that I am one of the best. I know I am: too fucking terrified to make a mistake.

  ‘Good enough, lad,’ Mr Adams shakes me by the shoulder. ‘Good enough.’

  I look at him. His pit-bull potato head. Without him, I’d have nothing. I do well to make something of whatever I’ve got, I know, but without good people to give you a hand-up, you’ve got nothing to begin with. I owe him more than I can ever repay and all I can tell him is: ‘Thanks, Mr Adams. Thanks.’

  He shakes my shoulder again and he laughs at my face: ‘Ha!’

  The whistle from the crane goes off above us and we both look up, here outside the shops, and watch the dog men go up on the hook with the final piece of the east bottom chord, and strange as it is, I’m almost regretful it’s not our gang that will be among the ones to rivet it. To step across the gap. Only about three feet left between once this is i
n. Would I have the guts to jump across? I’ll never know now, will I. We watch some photographer fella getting in the cradle, going up to take pictures of it all, doubtless shitting himself and nearly losing his camera as the cradle bounces about twenty feet up – that’s Dave Anders up on them crane controls, nasty bastard, does that deliberately for any uninitiated passenger. I look over my shoulder, across Lavender Bay, as if she might be looking this way too, but all I see there is Tarz and Dolly deciding that they’ll start at the Rag and Famish with all the rest of the north-siders but get back to the Opera House by five to finish themselves off, staggering distance from home.

  ‘Come round to ours for tea to celebrate, Eoghan?’ Mr Adams asks me as we head for the ferry across to Darling Street.

  ‘Thanks, yeah. That would be good, if it suits Mrs Adams.’

  He hasn’t taken his hand off my shoulder. More relieved about our continuing employment than he’s letting on.

  A fight breaks out behind us, spilling out of the heavy shops. An industrial dispute, from those laid off dog shift. Single men, they are, all labourers employed with Public Works. That was me yesterday. There’s nothing Dorman Long can do for them. There’s just nowhere for them to go, even with the shuffling round of hours requested by the unions, there’s just not enough jobs to go round here, best at it or not. Soon there will be no dog shift at all, if the rumours there are true. There’s no other work going round, but the government relief work, if you can get it – slave wages for digging ditches for the Nationalists, breaking your back for the dole. That would be a reduction in pay to six shillings a week, for a single man, for me. You can’t live on that. You just can’t. It wouldn’t pay one-third of my rent.

  ‘Keep walking,’ Mr Adams says, as much to himself. There’s nothing more he or any union can do about it but see that their Big Fella gets back in. To do what? He’s not God. How do you make jobs out of thin air? You can’t; you need money. This state doesn’t have any, and what we do have we owe to the bank. The Bank of England. How do you tell the Bank of England to lay off wanting their money back? It’s their money, and as far as I understand it, it’s their money that runs the world.

  ‘Fuck you!’ someone shouts, and he’s crying: ‘Five years I’ve been here – five fucking years. You fucking bunch of –’

  ‘Keep walking.’

  There’s a wagon coming round to the shops now anyway. Not an ambulance. The cops will move them off in a minute. There’s a lot of cops around the works anyway; they say some Communists have threatened to cut the Bridge cables in protest of the great capitalist swindle that’s every trade depression. But that’s not really why the cops are here: they’re just here to keep a full-blown riot over jobs at bay.

  Olivia

  It seems only to get worse, this . . . I don’t know what it is. Each and every wattle bobble twist in the cord is him, round and round the violin strings go, Just Ollie and me, and Aggie makes three . . . Wouldn’t it be good if the mind could have a dial fixed to it like a wireless so you could turn it off? I’m thoroughly moony with it this evening. I’d just like to tell him I’d never have made the first of these wattles cloches if that one day hadn’t been made so beautiful by thoughts of him. And perhaps Lady Game would never have looked at my designs, and I wouldn’t now be contemplating having the hot water put through into the kitchen at home when I’m not otherwise wafting wistful for a boy who doesn’t exist.

  Mr Jabour and Glor are right: I must be lonely, being on my own every night, doing nothing but working all day every day. But I like being alone, don’t I. In so many respects I’ve always been alone. A little yonderly. I like to lose myself in my work, in my dreams and schemes. But perhaps it is making me a little mad. It is mad, surely, that even though the work has stopped on the arch of the Bridge, I still look up for him every day. He’s not there, in either figment or fact. He can’t be. The cables are being let go now, on either side, one hundred and twenty-eight in all – ping, ping, ping, I fancy they go, streaking through the air as so many lengths of black knicker elastic, though they don’t do any such thing. They are let go slowly, carefully, and the whole city is holding its breath in anticipation to see if the thing will crash into the sea or be the Wonder of the World it’s promised us for all this time it will be. But what do I see when I imagine that moment? I see the north and south arms meet with a last gentle clank and my figment boy placing the final pin to hold them together forever. It’s a great big hat pin. With a golden wattle bobble on the end of it. The entire nation applauds . . .

  ‘Is there anything else, Olivia?’ Coralie is asking me if it’s all right for her to go. It’s six-fifteen, on a Wednesday, and the Emporium grille screeches shut downstairs to tell me Mr Jabour is waiting and shaking his head at me. It’s more than all right.

  I smile: ‘You scoot.’

  ‘Toodles then.’ Coralie’s shy smile in return is a vision of real-life dreams coming true. I let it catch me up for a moment. Toodles . . . Imitation is the finest form of flattery, is it not? More than that, it’s so lovely to watch such excitement unfold in another: she’s so thrilled every day to be here, wrapped up in the thrill of creating beautiful things, and there’s a look in her eye, a certain thinking-waiting-lip-biting look, especially when I have her tacking up on the mannequin, that tells me one day soon she’s going to ask me if she can perform her own experiments here. And I will be thrilled, just to see what she comes up with.

  I smile down at the tiny real-life wattle bobble in my hands, at what it truly means to me: my dreams coming true. The ones that matter. The ones that mean I’m going to need to have an accountant do the books this year, for the first time ever, or I might get myself into trouble with a tax bill. How fabulous is that? Featherlight and fluffy these little wattle cloches may be, but they are listed and numbered on the inside band, so that my clients can be sure of their exclusivity – that was Glor’s idea, off the cuff, over coffee. You have to make people think that they’re special, no matter how common their taste may be. So true. That’s why Syrians are overtaking drapery in this country. So, do fifty, she said, and charge double. So here I am finishing off number forty-nine and thinking I should have the phone put on at Lavender Bay too, when I have the time to meet the phone man there.

  When will that be? God, I always have too much to do. If the stockroom weren’t so stuffed with stacked-up orders I really might purchase that trundle so I could sleep in there. And things just don’t get more fabulous than that, do they? What more could any girl want than Lady Game telephoning this morning? Is that my private wardrobe secretary Miss Olivia Greene? she asked. That thrill swooped and sang through every thread of me. She wants me to design her something special for a fundraising event for the District Nursing Association. Her actual private secretary, Miss Crowdy, who has an OBE for her heroic war work with the navy, takes shipshape care that the vice-regal touch lights upon every aspect of feminine health and welfare in the state, and Lady Game wants me to take care that she looks the part. I don’t wish to look too . . . distant, Olivia. I wish to appear approachable, I think is the word. I do so wish to be amongst things and be made good use of while I’m here. She couldn’t not be amongst things if she tried – she’s adored in every quarter already. But I do know what she means: she doesn’t want to look too fabulous amongst the easy-wash, easy-fade suburban poplin hoi polloi. Nor too dowdy. I will conjure up something just right, a little burst of early spring sunshine. Mr Jabour has some divine georgette prints just in . . . hmmm, that softest lime one with the faint leafy geometric floating through it. Perfect . . .

  Perfectly enormous yawn.

  I let myself pack up and float home on that, on Lady Game’s kindness. How special she has made me feel. She could shop exclusively at DJs, or go to Melbourne like those who find Home far too far to get to. She could simply not buy locally at all. But she’s my client. She chose me. I’m barely nineteen and I’m choosing the Governor’s wife a ge
ntly fluting skirt for the District Nurses. Yes, and that soft lime georgette, teamed with that misted petunia clutch purse that’s just appeared in the window of Strand Bags, across from the Emporium, and with that amethyst brooch I have, and perhaps a mid-brim of straw with a simple band of lavender . . . it gets me almost under the Bridge, almost lost enough to forget to look up.

  But still, I look up. There’s nothing to see, no Bridge to see at all, the night is so black, but still I must look up. Toot toot, the ferries call to each other and they’re the only sounds out here on the water tonight. Listen. All smash-bashing has more or less ceased now the workshops have cut back on their night shift. All is quiet on the blue mile tonight. Shhhh. Let it be simply lovely here in the crisp cold air. Tooooot. No, the melancholy ferry calls won’t quite let me. They whisper: poor Eoghan, he’s lost his job. Like most other labouring men have. And I’m whispering back: perhaps we’ll meet in the morning when he’s on his way in to the Labour Exchange. Shhhh, I whisper over that: Eoghan O’Keenan is not your boy. There is no boy. If ever there was one, he’s gone . . .

  It’s so quiet I can hear the water plashing on the wharf now. Shhh shhhh. My eyelids are so heavy by the time my key is in the door I almost miss the envelope sticking half out of the mail flap. Who could it be? Of course it’s an invitation to a ball, where a man in a white tux and midnight trousers wi–

  It’s a telegram. From London.

  From Bart Harley.

  IT’S A GIRL. SOPHIA. ALL WELL. EM SENDS LOVE. LETTER TO FOLLOW.