The Blue Mile

by Kim Kelly

  ‘Yes,’ Lady Game nods at the figtops, searching her own thoughts. ‘I think he might well be an angry man.’ Then she looks down at me, something girlish, grinnish in her eyes: ‘You mustn’t ever repeat any of the nonsense I spout here, Olivia. Promise me.’

  ‘Of course I promise. You can trust in my discretion always, Lady Game.’ The Governor’s wife tells me state secrets: you can’t get more fabulous than that. She presses her lips together and I think she’s going to tell me some more.

  ‘It’s only gossip, of course,’ she says and I’m listening with both ears now, ‘so I don’t know if it’s at all true, really, and it’s come from a political opponent, too, but as a boy, Mr Lang sold newspapers on the street, at Brickfield Hill, on that corner where Anthony Hordern’s Department Store is: he had to, to support his mother in some disastrous family circumstance – that’s why he has such sympathy with the poor, and no sympathy at all for the indolent. Perhaps it’s why he is so kindly towards women, too, why the education of the poor is so important to him – he wasn’t able to complete high school himself. The man who told me this said it with no small amount of disparagement, explaining Mr Lang’s appeal to the masses – his presidential-style self-made demagogy. But of all the stories there are about Mr Lang, that one seems to me to fit. He is an angry man and the anger is quite personal.’

  And I do believe Lady Game might be quite smitten. Why wouldn’t she be? Even Mother was partial to Mr Lang: tall, dark, dangerous and dreadfully kind.

  ‘I must say,’ Lady Game continues wistfully, ‘it’s Mrs Lang, the Premier’s wife, who is the more intriguing and impressive, in her way.’

  ‘Mrs Lang?’ I’ve only seen her once, and from a distance. Velma Jabour called me down to the window of Electrolux to watch her purchase a new vacuum cleaner a couple of weeks ago. Infamous as the dreariest dowd in the land, or of the western suburbs at least – she manages to make brown crepe look not so much tired as on its last legs.

  ‘She is a feminist,’ Lady Game smiles with a hint of now, now in it as if she might have heard my unkind thought. ‘And while I’m never entirely sure what that term feminist means apart from fiercely well read, I do consider her to be exemplary of the finest Christian qualities a woman might possess.’ Oh dear, this’ll be a load of dull guff, I suppose. Christianity: I would call for it to be banned entirely except for what Sundays does for frocks, shush, don’t ever tell Eoghan that Mass at St Gus, as far as I’m concerned, is the one true most interminable hour of the week. But Lady Game now drops her voice almost to a whisper: ‘This is the most terrible gossip, Olivia, told to me in the most terrible terms, by an awful bigot, too, but I must express it, for what it reveals of the utmost purity of spirit in the one it seeks to harm. Mrs Hilda Lang, as you’d be aware, is mother to nine children. But what’s not generally known is that one of them is adopted and that this adopted one is in fact Mr Lang’s own son – born out of adultery, to a woman called Nellie Anderson. He’s about your age now.’

  ‘Oh?’ Now that’s a piece of gossip, I’ll say.

  ‘Hm,’ Lady Game concurs but her whisper is one of hushed astonishment, not scandal. ‘The affair carried on over several years and almost ended in divorce for the Langs but that Hilda Lang resisted that awful measure. This is not the extraordinary thing about her, though. The extraordinary thing is, when this Nellie Anderson died – suddenly and tragically when the child was small – Hilda Lang not only adopted him, but in the heartbreak that followed for Mr Lang, Hilda found it in her own heart to reconcile with her husband. Not only that, but she named their next child Nellie. What does one call that sort of generosity? What is that sort of compassion but sublime?’

  Gaspingly so. I nod: ‘Sublime indeed.’

  ‘It’s the antithesis of anger, is it not? That turning of the cheek, with love.’ Lady Game sighs and laments to the lampshade above: ‘But Hilda Lang doesn’t know how to host a dinner party or how to wear a decent hat, and so I dare say history won’t remember her as anything at all.’

  No. But I will remember this moment. This story and its moral: don’t judge a book, not until you’ve got to the end and then gone for a good long walk to digest it all. I stand up to stretch out my knees, my spirit somehow replenished. And more: I want to be an impressive woman. I want to stand beside Eoghan, whatever comes for us. Whatever it takes, I will do.

  Yo

  ‘Lang is Right! Lang is Right!’ You couldn’t shout against it if you were monkey-nutted enough to try. This crowd in the Domain is a thousand strong, at least, and most of them have left their women at home. I’ve counted at least thirty cops, and Lang’s not even here today. If he was there’d be ten thousand turned up and I wouldn’t have.

  I look at Mr Adams beside me: I’m giving up my Sunday afternoon to this? What for? A fight? The Labor Party can do that without my contribution, fighting itself three ways now, over this Lang Plan: New South Wales Bank Robbery Labor is breaking from Federal Labor, which is fucking itself up backwards on its way out of Canberra, and now there’s this other new lot breaking off the main party and joined with the Nationalists, calling itself the United Australia Party. There’s nothing united about Australia. And I’m just shitful about it. They’re letting the Nationalists win, by whatever name they call themselves, and that means I’m not going to get a living wage if I get lucky enough to work for the dole when I lose my job. When, not if. But Mr Adams doesn’t look at me. He’s full of faith, pumping his fist in the air with the rest of them: ‘Lang is Right! Lang is Right!’

  The fella on the podium is waving for everyone to shut up for two minutes to let him go on. He’s something do to with the Federal ALP lot, though he’s a Bank Robbery supporter; I don’t care who he is, going on again now: ‘It is wrong to denounce the Lang Plan as too drastic. It is too mild by far. The time has arrived for Australia to demand the entire cancellation of all war debts in conjunction with other Allied Powers. The –’

  ‘Lang is Right! Lang is Right!’

  Righto. I’m having an epiphany: I see how it is the rich get rich now. They don’t stand around in parks pointlessly shouting slogans on Sunday afternoons. When there are smarter things to do, such as studying for a Mechanical Principles examination that might become completely irrelevant to me when I lose my apprenticeship anyway. Another two minutes and we get another sentence: ‘The war debts are discreditable and sordid obligations which should never have existed!’

  ‘Lang is Right! Lang is Right!’

  Or I could be at Olivia’s. She’s making Ag’s costume for the school play today. Ag’s going to be a girl called Elsie in something called Make-Believe. She gets to say: What a lovely princess, and wear a petticoat skirt. Olivia had me cutting the bits of material for it before I left them this morning, saving her some time. I want to keep you in the sideboard and have you cutting for me always, she said. You’ve got a tailor’s hand, I tell you – true and sure. And a lot easier than cutting boot leather as I’ve done a thousand times before. I’d rather be at Balmain on my own today, though, finishing off the present I’m making her for her birthday, next Thursday, the sixteenth of April: I’m making her a shoe rack from pipe offcuts. Olivia has thirty-four pairs of shoes. I’ve done a pattern of flowers and leaves in tin up the sides, so it’ll be her shoe garden. It’s tall as a baker’s stand, don’t know how I’ll get it across on the ferry. Don’t know how it is she can be only twenty. That’s almost as amazing as the fact of anyone having thirty-four pair of shoes. When we met, she only had two good pairs, she told me; now she’s keeping the shoe shop in the arcade afloat. Things turn around, don’t they; you just have to work hard and hang on. You can’t let it eat you. You can’t let the bastards have you. Listen to Mrs Buddle telling Olivia every Sunday she sees her what a lucky girl she is to have found me. Is she? How am I going to stay afloat? I got my fifteen shilling raise I was due, and it’s taken the pressure off a bit. But for how long? I could just w
alk off forever for the wonder of that. I know my hours will get cut down again soon and then cut altogether. What am I going to do if I can’t find another job? How am I going to pay my debts then? The gas bill, my credit up at the grocers, the milko . . . What will I do? Cut out petticoat skirts inside Olivia’s sideboard? Not in this life.

  The fella on the podium has his voice cracking with it: ‘Is it just or even reasonable that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren should be condemned to perpetual servitude in attempts to pay millions annually to the chief beneficiaries of the war? Are Australian citizens truly expected to tamely and indefinitely tolerate preferential treatment to every country but Australia? These bankers are confidence men. Tricksters and highway bandits! Bankrupt of all morality! Support the Lang Plan!’

  ‘Lang is Right! Lang is Right!’

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

  ‘Come on,’ I say under my breath. I want to get going so I don’t lose the whole of the afternoon to this. I want to get to Olivia’s to get the roast on, too. She’s always late getting it in the oven if we have it over there and it’s the only meat me and Ag get all week, Don’t tell Olivia that, Ag – she’d be ‘appalled’, wouldn’t she? The cops are looking to be of the same mind, after their dinner. But Mr Adams is still pumping the air. I look around the crowd again. Tarzan and Clarkie aren’t here; neither’s Dolly: because they don’t do every last little thing Mr Adams tells them to.

  ‘Lang is Right! Lang is Right!’

  We’ve all got the idea, and the Governor’s heard you now, too.

  ‘Greater than Lenin! Lang is Right! Greater than Lenin! Lang is Right!’

  For fuck’s sake. I’m just reaching over to touch Mr Adams on the shoulder to tell him I’ll be off when they stop anyway and he decides: ‘Good enough, lads.’ Shaking some hands, saying some words about nipping United Australia in the bud, and saying to me: ‘Well, let’s not hang about then.’

  No, let’s not. We walk up across the lawns of the Domain and we’re almost up behind the big library, across from the gates to the Gardens there. I can’t see them gates without thinking of that first night Ag and I spent there – those gates. Ag’s started correcting my manner of speech, as if I don’t know the right way to say things.

  I’m wondering if that old bent paling in the fence might still be up there when I see this fella step in our path now, saying something that sounds like: ‘You don’t like paying your debts, eh?’

  ‘What did you say?’ I ask him innocently, because I don’t know that I heard him right.

  ‘Keep walking,’ says Mr Adams to me, and I see it’s not just one fella – it’s half-a-dozen.

  Another of them comes up beside the first one, saying: ‘An honourable man would consider welshing on a debt to the King as treason.’ He’s got an educated manner of speaking, but his shirt collar is greasy and his suit has seen better times. He’s maybe thirty and a big bastard, broader than Tarz even.

  Twice my age and twice my size, he steps in front of me: ‘Are you an honourable man?’

  Mr Adams puts a hand up in peace, between us: ‘No trouble here. Good day to you.’

  I look behind me. Jesus. A minute ago we were a thousand. Now we are two. Against six – no, seven, as another steps out from behind the nearest fig.

  ‘But you are making trouble,’ the first one says, ‘Irishman.’

  ‘No. No trouble,’ Mr Adams tells him plainly. ‘But I can make some, if you’d like.’ He looks the big bastard over, making a point of looking hard at some badge pinned on his coat, and he says to him in particular: ‘I’ve learned a thing or two about trouble, most of it in the Connaught Rangers.’

  I’m more surprised at that than the standovers in front of us. The Connaught Rangers? That’s a military regiment, legendary, the only one I’ve ever known of: otherwise called the Devil’s Own, ask Father Madigan why and you’ll be told they’re all saints and martyrs to Erin for their mutiny against the Imperialists. The pit-bull stare Mr Adams is giving these fellas back is enough to say it’s true: have a go and I’ll rip your faces off.

  While the rest of his own face is smiling: ‘I don’t know,’ he says, so steady and plain it’s a threat in itself, ‘it might have escaped your attention that we have our own parliament in Australia these days. We have our own laws and none of them say it’s treason not to bend over and let the Bank of England give it to you up the arse.’ He looks at the big one again, talking to that badge on his coat: ‘Maybe you like it that way, ay?’ he asks him, just as steady and plain: ‘You like it up the arse?’

  So one of the fellas behind can’t stop himself from laughing. Then they’re all put off.

  ‘Watch yourself,’ the first one says as we start walking. ‘We’ll be watching you.’

  When we’re a good distance off, I breathe out: ‘Who the fuck was that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Mr Adams, but he’ll find out. ‘That bloke, the big one – he’s ex-army. AIF pin on his coat.’

  That doesn’t mean much to me. I say, still in awe: ‘That was a skilful performance.’

  Mr Adams laughs with a big breath out too: ‘Performance is right.’

  I ask him: ‘Connaught Rangers?’ Can’t be true; can it? When I was a kid, I’d have got on a ship to India to join them: Irish heroes. I dreamed I’d be a drummer in their pipe band. Got the job stacking bottles at Quirks instead, and I believe the Rangers changed their stripes for the IRA soon after.

  Mr Adams shakes his potato head and waves it off: ‘Mistake of my life, that one, and a summer in France I’ll never get back.’ Holding up his hand to the sun in peace: ‘But we all do some arse-brained things along the way to learning, don’t we?’

  Olivia

  ‘You’re so good with that sort of thing – matching and knowing what goes,’ Mrs Bloxom is imploring. Scheming: her gloved thumb pressed to the back of my hand: ‘Warwick would be so grateful, dear.’

  Warwick has just purchased an apartment at Point Piper, above Seven Shillings Beach. I’m gratified to know that it cost almost two thousand pounds: real estate prices are not suffering from close Bridge views. But I am not going to decorate Warwick’s apartment for him. Because this is not about decorating Warwick’s apartment. It’s about Mrs Bloxom’s pursuit of me for her son. It has turned from mildly and amusingly relentless to vaguely threatening now: the pressure of her thumb on my hand is making my skin prickle all the way up my arm.

  I tell the fox trim at her gauntlet, and firmly: ‘Interior design is not my sort of thing, Mrs Bloxom – I can’t bear wallpaper, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh?’ she’s sceptical, fingernails pinch through the heavy cocoa charmeuse with the squeeze. ‘I’d be mindful not to pretend I was too far above anything if I were you, dear.’ She almost meows it.

  ‘Oh?’ I reply. My poker face is set but my heart is racing. She knows something. My first fear is Eoghan. She’s found out. How? Someone has seen us. It had to happen. It’s all right; I straighten my back. I won’t deny it. My heart lies with a Catholic tradesman, not your flop-fringed fop. Oh but dear God this heart is racing, Phar Lap in full gallop, thundering with panic. I haven’t even told Glor of our engagement. Why haven’t I? Because Glor is expecting her first baby in December and I don’t want to overexcite her. What rubbish. It’s now late October and I haven’t told anyone because – Because we agreed we’d wait to see Father O’Reagan in December, making it a year, before making our intentions official. What rubbish. I’ve been keeping this secret so close to my chest, as if it were made of antique glass. Stand beside him? I’ve done whatever it takes to wrap him in tissue and box him in the stockroom. So careful, I haven’t even had Agnes here at the salon after school. Too busy, I’ve said; too dangerous to be wandering around town in the evenings. Rubbish. Too dangerous for whom? Me. Because –

  ‘Nothing lasts forever.’ The fox trim sweeps up theatrically, releasing my hand,
and Mrs Bloxom’s gaze is cold on me as she declares: ‘Don’t be surprised if the Games are recalled to London any day, Olivia.’

  ‘What?’ I say, and I almost etherise with relief. ‘Ha!’ but it explodes from me. Mrs Bloxom is only being a catty old B about the Games: Sydney’s favourite new sport – that is, if you’re a Nationalist or whatever the conservatives call themselves these days. Mrs Bloxom is their chief mastermind – of course it’s all Lady Game’s fault that her husband won’t dismiss that treacherous Mr Lang in the name of the King – and as well, she’s still not forgiven me for breaking that appointment with her last April: she presumes I was running off to Government House, as I occasionally must do, but I was actually malingering: day after my birthday and I stayed at home that Friday to play with my shoe garden. So happy. I smile at Mrs Bloxom and her silly presumptions now, give her the full blast of almost a year’s worth of mostly wonderful Sundays and sweet blue miles of dreams.

  Mrs Bloxom snips: ‘Not a laughing matter, dear.’

  And I turn as quickly: ‘No, indeed it’s not a laughing matter.’ I give her my imperious best, which is less than the Fickle Witches of Upper Sydney deserve. These women, Mrs Bloxom at their vanguard, who are obsequious sycophants one moment and snubbing Lady Game en masse the next. Lady Game almost let a tear fall telling me what happened at the art gallery function in June: every woman turned her back when she entered the room, and when she got home she’d found she’d been uninvited to some event or other with the Country Women’s Band of Bigots. I say exactly what Lady Game told me that day: ‘It’s not the Governor’s business to dismiss an elected premier, Mrs Bloxom. We live in a democracy – one that even the King cares to uphold.’