The Blue Mile

by Kim Kelly

  In all this, I catch the high whistle of ‘Oops!’ behind me and turn just in time to catch a girl by the elbow before she slips off the rocks.

  I laugh: ‘I’ve got you.’

  Half-hanging over the wash, she looks up at me: ‘Indeed you do.’

  That smile. Oh Jesus, I have died and you didn’t care to tell me.

  ‘Miss Greene?’ I test the reality.

  She says, straightening herself up: ‘Please don’t call me Miss Greene. Not today. Not any day. Call me Olivia. Just Olivia, from now on.’

  ‘Now on?’

  ‘Yes. From now on.’

  Olivia

  He doesn’t let go of my arm, and I don’t want him to.

  The stocky older man in the grey flannel shirt beside him says: ‘I’d better be off to rope in Tarzan, and don’t you forget yourself either, Eoghan – eight-thirty back here and in the cradle.’

  Figment boy looks at him as I’m sure I do: with complete incomprehension. Tarzan, cradle, untuneful Irish growl.

  When the man is gone we look at each other again, with no less incomprehension, and still he doesn’t let go of my arm.

  He says, finally: ‘Olivia.’

  ‘Yes?’

  He says: ‘I would like to kiss you, if I may.’

  I might nod; I’m not sure. My mind has gone to water, slipped into the sea at our feet, while my heart has flown away, zooming and looping the Bridge overhead. Kiss me: yes. Eoghan. Etherise me utterly. Here. Now.

  But he only smiles. Only? Those dimples – I will slip into the sea.

  His hand slips into mine. ‘Come on,’ he says, and he watches my step up the rocks. We start walking, back towards the path that runs along the head of the bay, through the thickening tide of Bridge wonderers. ‘And here’s the other half of the city,’ he says, smiling into them, so many workmen and so many suits pouring down the escalator from the tram and out from the station, all coming to have a look on their way to work. I can’t reply. I can barely breathe. Eoghan. He is holding my hand. The essence of my being is singing between our palms, with some other sensation altogether: a raindrop sizzling on an ember. I can barely see. But I do understand now how it is that a girl might find herself in a faint from this sort of thing.

  Oh God.

  We keep walking, away from the crowds, and he leads me in under the railway viaduct up from the baths, but every housewife in North Sydney is trotting down this way for a look too, coming down through the reserve beyond with an army of small children, all jumping about to the madly tooting ferries on the harbour.

  I look up through the scribble of trees towards the top of the reserve. My house is not two minutes down that way. I want him to come into my house. I want to be his odalisque there. In my room, in my sheets, with the sun streaming through the venetians. I want things I’ve never dreamed of.

  I whisper: ‘My house . . .’

  He squeezes my hand: ‘No.’ But he pulls me along up the steps here and towards my house anyway as though he knows the kinks in these streets as his own, and by the time Bay View twists up into East Crescent I should have well and truly reconsidered what I am about to do. We walk right past my house, and as we do Great Grandfather Weathercroft’s 1847 glowers at me from the lintel with the rattle of convict chains: You will not kiss this boy. But I can’t hear that. An ocean-going ship gives out a great big bellowing toot and I find it on the water, strung all over with hooray festoonery, tooting again, tooting up through my toes. What is this city going to do when the Bridge is actually completed? What am I going to do?

  ‘Blues Point,’ he says. ‘There’ll be no one around there.’

  I may whisper, ‘Yes,’ but I don’t know. I am a whisper, slipping round under the cliff face, past the queue of punts at the vehicular wharf and the rust-bucket council depot stores, and into the reserve beyond that. There is no one here. It’s always lonely here.

  He squeezes my hand again, up the steps to the old colonial lookout on top of the point. He pulls me into the little stone gun turret there that smells of salt and sandstone and some windswept childhood laughter curling around the edges of now.

  He takes my face in his hands. So close I breathe the smell of his skin as he does, that salty musky smell of a man somehow made new to me now, thrilling me now. He smells real. He says: ‘You are the most beautiful girl in the world.’

  And as his lips meet mine, I am. Beautiful. I believe it. I believe I am. I am the most beautiful girl in the world.

  I am the only girl in the world. At last.

  Yo

  I know it’s wrong, but she says yes. She keeps saying yes.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she says when I touch her cheek, and I touch her arm and I kiss her neck. Her perfume is so sweet, she is so sweet and soft everywhere I touch her, and my hand is well where it should not be, against her breast, and she is softer than anything I’ve ever known when she says: ‘Ruin me, Eoghan. Ruin me.’

  Four

  Olivia

  ‘No.’ He stops. He steps back against the turret wall and looks away, out the gun slit. ‘This is wrong,’ he says, and a cold humiliation sweeps through me. I don’t need to be told this is wrong.

  I push past him, back out into the light of day. What a dreadful thing I have done. What a dreadful fantasist I am. Thank God there is no one around here to have witnessed that. Ruin me? I told him to ruin me? There’s an aeroplane zooming over the arch now, with a banner flying behind it. It shrieks: HARLOT.

  I shriek as I run down the steps: ‘Don’t you follow me. Don’t you dare.’

  ‘Miss Greene,’ he says, following me. ‘Olivia. Let me apologise. I didn’t mean –’

  ‘No. Don’t tell me.’ I know what he meant. How revolting. I agree. I just threw myself at a boy. A Catholic boy, who has a crucifix nailed to the wall of his sitting room. I am going home to wash him off me. His smell. His hands. Oh God, who knows where they might have been. Filthy, clanging, metal things.

  ‘Olivia! Stop!’ He tries to pull me back by my arm.

  And I shriek again, pushing him away: ‘Don’t you dare!’

  ‘Stop, will you!’ He gets me by the wrist anyway, and drops his voice, pleading: ‘Your dress is caught up at the back.’

  ‘Oh?’ I glance behind me, at my pleats bunched up like a tartan concertina. ‘So it is.’ Worked its way up under my belt somehow, giving a good show of petticoat. I really didn’t need that humiliation as well, right in front of the punt just in, giving me a front row audience of two sparkling Rolls-Royce limousines rolling up the ramp. I stomp round towards the passenger wharf.

  He continues to follow. ‘I mean it was wrong for me to do that. I let go of my senses. I shouldn’t have asked –’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t have.’

  ‘I’ll not do that again.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  ‘I mean that. I mean–’

  ‘What could you possibly mean?’ I shove the words behind me, but I don’t look back. Meaningless. Stupid. Kiss. Ruin. This is not real: this is head cold delirium. I haven’t left the house. Oh God, please stop following me.

  He doesn’t. He keeps on as I start up the ferry steps: ‘I mean to marry you. I’ll not ask to kiss you again until you say you’ll marry me, Miss Greene. Olivia.’

  ‘What?’ I stop and turn around at the stair rail. ‘Marry me?’ I laugh – at him, down at him. What sort of a silly girl does he take me for? This is what Irish boys do with their dancing words, isn’t it: charm you out of your wits. Marry you, give you ten children, and then leave for the pub. Three full steps below me here, I give him my imperious best. ‘Well, you’ll be waiting a long time, won’t you?’

  But he’s not deterred. His gaze remains as steadily on mine and those deep blue eyes seem as honest and plain as the water behind him. ‘I know I will wait,’ he says. ‘I know I can’t have you. But that�
�s what I meant when I said no. That’s all I meant.’

  ‘That’s all? You only meant to say you mean to marry me?’ Insane.

  ‘Yes.’ He is emphatic, firm, but his deep blues search my face with that melting tenderness of his. ‘And it’s not just for seeing you here on this day,’ he says, ‘it’s not just the occasion getting away with me, though it has. I’ve meant to marry you since I first saw you, in the Gardens that morning. You are the most beautiful girl in the world, to me.’

  Outrageously charming. And yet I believe him again. I want him to kiss me again. Here, in the full light of day.

  ‘Excuse me.’ An elderly gentleman is shuffling down the steps beside us, and I watch the way Eoghan moves to let him past. Carefully, respectfully nodding an acknowledgement to the man. Nothing imaginary about that. He is a nice boy. Such a nice boy. This is dreadful.

  He looks up at me again, with such pleading; he says: ‘The lights are going to come on on the Bridge tonight, I’m going to take Ag out to see it. Would you come with us?’

  Would I? The Bridge is a solid steel rainbow across the cloudless sky behind him. I look at his hand on the rail below mine, fine long tailor’s fingers that do metal things. Such a brave boy, who goes up on that Bridge. The aeroplane zooms past from the west now, the banner I see actually says CELEBRATE! and I am a whisper again: ‘Yes.’

  This is dreadful. Dreadful trouble. Ruin.

  He says: ‘I should get back to the shops. Me and Ag’ll come and get you at six o’clock this evening? Have something to eat with us, somewhere?’

  ‘Yes,’ I feel my smile grow with the sweet delight of this: I will see Agnes again too. ‘Come and have dinner at my house,’ I say. ‘We can watch the lights come on from there. On my front step. It’s the best view.’

  ‘It is,’ he smiles back, not referring to the Bridge, and I swoosh and tumble into his dimples again. So very dreadful, being held up swimming inside his smile like this, but somehow I come to my own senses in it. Looking into his eyes, neither of us looking away. This is good, crystal clear. Kismet.

  ‘But I should get back to work too,’ I tell him. Indeed I must: no troop of fairies magicked away the thousand and one things on my to-do list while I was indisposed. Foremost, I must cut that pattern for Lady Game’s District Nurses, even if it ends up rebuffed thanks to his Lordship’s wanton efforts to destroy me. The show must go on, as they say. And then, good God, I must get things for dinner. What things? I don’t know how to cook proper dinner things.

  He says: ‘I will try, I have to warn you. I know I can’t have you, but I will try.’

  Fabulous. So shall I. Somehow.

  Madame Chanel clicks her tongue and sighs: You will not marry that boy, chérie.

  Won’t I? Why not?

  You are too young. He is too poor.

  I’m not listening. I watch him dance back down the steps, and I don’t know how any sane woman could look past a shoulderline like that. I watch him turn to wave at the bottom, where he calls out: ‘I mean worthy – I will try to be worthy of you.’

  And I know he already is.

  Yo

  ‘So, the bastard can’t even turn up to say hello,’ Tarzan says of the company boss, Mr Freeman, and the note he’s had pinned here for us on the office door.

  The arch is safely joined, it says. Mr Ralph Freeman personally extends to all employees of Dorman, Long and Co Ltd, an invitation to join him in the toast ‘Success to the Bridge’. Mr Freeman regrets it is impracticable to meet you all in person, but requests you to call at the office on completion of shift for the means of honouring the above toast.

  ‘And you’d want him to, would you?’ Mr Adams shakes his head. ‘Load of boiling King’s own bollocks, that is. You’re all invited to a toast that you’re regretfully not invited to attend. Fuck off.’

  ‘Pommies,’ Clarkie shakes his head too.

  And I start laughing. I don’t care if Mr Freeman is the King. I’m having tea with Olivia Greene tonight. Olivia. I kissed her. I’m still tasting that kiss. Touching her – Jesus. Stop it.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ Mr Adams shakes his head at me.

  ‘Nothing. Just happy.’

  ‘Right.’

  Happy all day, I am. Grinning all across the city from the centre pin. From the top of this last panel we’re on, on the first row of what will be twenty thousand or so, I’m smiling at each rivet as it hits the centre of my glove. Whack. I finally got me them gloves for catching, last Friday night. I got me Olivia Greene today. I love Olivia. I love rivets. I am just about broke from these gloves, and who cares? I am a happy rivet-catching machine, tossing hot cocks from right hand to left, where Tarz tongs them up to their holes and has to stop the gun after a while to ask me: ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  I say: ‘It’s a beautiful day.’

  He gives me a look: whatever you reckon. I laugh. I don’t miss a rivet all day; and I can’t keep from laughing all day either, even when the argument that’s been brewing gets going properly on the way back down in the cradle at the end of shift. We’ve come down with half a south-side gang, all of them Englishmen, and the horseshit starts flying over which engineer designed the Bridge: Freeman the Pom, or Mr Bradfield the Aussie. I’m no more interested in it than I am in arguing the toss of Don Bradman’s batting average on any day, but this day I’m especially uncaring of the differences between the comrades.

  ‘I’m off,’ I tell Mr Adams. ‘I don’t want to be late getting home – bringing Ag back in for the light show.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ he says. ‘Don’t you want to see how you’re to be honoured?’

  No, not really. But I go round to the office with the rest anyway. To receive a two-shilling piece. ‘It’s a Canberra florin.’ Mrs Daly hands them out, trying hard not to look too embarrassed about it. ‘Limited edition, they are,’ she tries harder, but they’re not medals; they don’t even have our names on the boxes, or a card or anything in them to say they’re ours. That is a bit cheap. A thousand pieces of silver. Someone calls out: ‘Where’s me invitation to the Australia Hotel then? I want me two-bob worth of champagne.’ No one laughs, not even me, but another says, ‘And you’ll bite the hand that feeds, will you?’ and for the first time the politics reaches me as I look at the picture of the King’s head on the coin. For the first time in my life I wonder at this King and Empire horseshit. I’m not British. I’m not Australian, either. I’m an Irishman. Aren’t I? Whoever you think you might be, you are a subject of this English king anyway, that’s the truth, but I’ve never been arsed to think about it before this.

  ‘Afternoon, gents,’ a cop noses in among us, sniffing out the barney before it’s got going, and I look down at the ground as O’Paddy should. Waiting for the trouble to pass. More than half the men standing here aren’t Englishmen of any type either – there’s Welsh and Yankie riggers come over for the sunshine and grog respectively, a couple of Dutch painters, a Canadian doggie, and a lot of Irish ironworkers and boilermakers – and the only thing stopping their argument from reaching its natural conclusion is the number of cops still hanging round the foreshore this afternoon, not here keeping celebrations in order any longer but waiting for a fight. The one that’s always threatening to go off round here. Probably especially today.

  ‘Off you go, lad,’ Mr Adams says to me, and there’s something sad in it. Regretful and tired. He says, glancing down at the piece of silver in his hand: ‘Don’t let this ruin your day. You have yourself a good time with your Aggie tonight, ay.’

  ‘I will,’ I say, and two steps away I’m back to not giving a flying sack of silver monkey nuts about anything else but Olivia.

  And the look on my little sister’s rosy face when I get home and say to her: ‘Guess where we’re going tonight, mischief?’

  ‘Where?’ she looks up from her schoolbook at the kitchen table, excited already.
r />   ‘We’re going to have our tea with Miss Olivia Greene.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes.’

  Olivia

  Chicken. How hard can it be to cook a chicken? Everyone can cook a chicken. It’s an ordinary proper dinner thing to cook. Even Mother can cook a chicken. I know you have to remember to get one without the insides left in and then you have to baste it in something or other, but I can’t remember precisely what basting is and there’s certainly no cookery book in this house to tell me. Do I even have so much as a scrap of a recipe of anything from the women’s pages in the paper? No. Mother used to buy the odd copy of New Idea to keep abreast of life amongst the middlings, always full of fabulous things to do with tripe and seersucker, but is there a single one under the bed? No. So, I am madly flicking through the Vogues now, plenty of them, in two different languages, or three if you count Americanese, and not too many proper dinner things in them. Fruit cocktails. Prawn canapés. Goose liver pâté. The Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey. But no chickens . . .

  Damn.

  And then not damn. Not really. I look around my little home, as if I haven’t been here for a while, see the slumpy chenille cushions on the sofa that once were scarlet and now are a dusky rose; the lopsided shade on the lamp, its grosgrain trim beginning to come loose from the bottom edge; the merry print of rioting Matisse flowers above the hearth that is lifting from its frame on one corner, damaged from a drowning it received via leaking roof three summers ago; the jumble of crumbling spines on the bookcase: what on earth did Mother ever want with that copy of The Rules of Golf? And I laugh: who am I trying to impress with a chicken?