The Blue Mile

by Kim Kelly

  We can’t stay malingering here forever, though. I’ve got to get back to the salon, assess what’s left of my clientele – Coralie’s taken three cancellations already, one of them from the Mosman set too, one of the Shadfords. Damn them all. And just as urgently I must sort out school for Agnes. It’s about halfway through the final term and she’s too clever at her books to miss out on any of it. She can’t go back to Balmain, though: it’s too out of the way, for me, and I truly don’t want her wandering around the city on her own. It’s too dangerous around the Quay, equidistant as it is between the Labour Exchange and Parliament House. There aren’t enough policemen to keep the streets safe. Just this Friday afternoon past I listened to a whole conversation outside the wardrobe window between a group of those New Guardsmen on their way to the ferry, deciding on which workingmen’s hotels they were going to ‘raid’, from the Rocks to Woolloomooloo, to stir up trouble and then blame the pursuant punch-ups on the trade unionists. ‘God save the King,’ they all shouted down the steps. Good God, what are we coming to?

  Agnes looks up from her drawing, her blue eyes huge with searching. Lost in somewhere else. Wondering where he is, and if he’s gone for good, if he might be dead, fallen down a ditch, hit his head, or if he’s just somewhere round and being despicable. And as I wander those same threads myself, I wonder if we should both go to London, Agnes and I, so that we’re not here waiting for him if or when he bothers to come back. But then my heart squeezes tight around some deeper knowledge: if he is alive, whatever has driven him to reject us, to reject his adored sister, it must be unbearable. What could it be? Shame at not paying the rent on time? Really?

  Oh, but I want him here, I do. So that I might slap him – quite hard – for this pain he is driving into me. How dare he. How dare he do this, dead or alive. I want to scream it out into the wind.

  *

  It’s odd how nature can occasionally throw up a perfect substitute object for one’s anger and frustration precisely when one is in need of it. The shop bell dings and in walks Cassie Fortescue, this very Monday morning, and after all this time. I haven’t seen her since that night at the Merrick, and this is the very first time she has ever set a white patent pump in the salon. Curious, most curious, and those shoes are an abomination – with those fawn stockings, really?

  I wave, above the telephone. I’ll finish my conversation first, with Gloria.

  I say: ‘I’m thinking of North Sydney Girls Grammar.’ For Agnes’s schooling. It’s not ideal: a little too Pymble Ladies, a little too one hundred percent Church of England, but convenience might have to win, only four stops on the Cremorne tram, if I can afford it. Agnes is in the stockroom with Coralie right now, setting up a nook for her in there so that she might keep ahead with her school texts and her increasingly voracious reading in the meantime.

  Glor says, entirely impractically: ‘No, Ollie. Put her in at Sacred Heart. Then I can have her with me in the afternoons.’

  ‘Dover Heights is not exactly easy to get t– ’

  ‘I’m only going to be bored with the baby.’

  I hear her mother in the background yelling: ‘You won’t be bored, Gloria, I can promise you that.’

  ‘Mum, shush, I’m on the phone,’ I can hear Glor roll her eyes. ‘I’ve got to go, Ol. She’s giving me a hard time about everything at the moment. You do what you think is best; Dad will agree. You’re such a good soul, Ol, you always do the right thing.’

  Perhaps not always. ‘Thanks, Glor. See you soon.’

  I place the phone back on the cradle and wait another moment before looking up again to say: ‘Hello there, Cassie.’ I remain seated at the table. I’m not getting to my feet for whatever has finally brought her here. There can really only be one reason she is here, and it’s certainly not for style. She’s come to crow. The tide of Sydney Witches is turning, she wants to tell me, even the Hardys are going to abandon me now, or perhaps she’s going to announce that the King has just recalled the Games. Whatever it is, she looks dreadful and I’m not being entirely unkind with this observation: she is greyish and gaunt and cigarette-scented. Losing all of her snub-nosed sweets. The ravages of cocaine and hobo-murdering, I suppose.

  ‘Hello, Olivia.’ Her smile is drawn on with a blunt pencil. She runs a finger along the top of my jewellery cabinet, as if she pops in here regularly for a browse. ‘Amazing what they can do with fakes these days.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ I say, as if any costumière would carry real gems. Get to the point and get out.

  She says, peering into the lower shelf of bangles and brooches: ‘It can be so hard to tell what’s what and who’s who. So confusing . . .’ Scrutinising the earrings now. I see what she’s doing. The inspection: that was always one of her tactics of intimidation, particularly on house parade, looking for signs of mended stockings and homemade bloomers.

  She turns to me: ‘But you’ve never been confused, have you, Olivia?’ There is a look in her eyes that can only be described as diabolical, and I am well and truly intimidated. She says: ‘You’ve always been the real McCoy, haven’t you? Always so far above the rest, haven’t you?’

  I’m not sure what she’s referring to. Somehow I manage to raise my voice above the pounding of my heart to say: ‘Not always above the rest, Cassie, no – certainly not when you had my head pressed into the lavatory bowl at school. What do you want?’

  She doesn’t reply. She just stares at me. She’s mad. Quite mad, I’m sure of it. And she always has been. I want to ask her, scream at her: Why do you hate me? Why are you such a horrible bully? You have everything and you always have had: you’re the daughter of a banker. Go away and enjoy your life. Lady Game’s a banker’s daughter too – go away and be impressive like her.

  But she can’t and pity swooshes through me, through that place where revenge used to be. Who would ever be Cassie’s friend? Truly. Cousin Min’s finally ditched her for a public servant, for purgatory in Canberra. Even Denis has ditched her: five minutes after his father paid the fifty pounds worth of good behaviour bond to the Crown.

  I say: ‘Cassie, can I help you with something?’

  She shrugs, but awkwardly: ‘Help me? No. I want to ask you something, though. Is it true, what I’ve heard along the grape, that you’ve got a certain boyfriend? A labourer? Irishman. He has a child, hasn’t he?’

  My heart is pounding faster. How could she know? I might have been seen with him, yes, someone’s seen us on the ferry with the picnic basket or whatever, but that detail? Wrong as it is. No one knows about us but the Jabours and the good people of St Gus’s in Balmain. No one else would know he’s Irish. My mind swoops around the Witches, to Mrs Bloxom, to Warwick at his Hunter Street chambers, and to the magistrate at the Children’s Court: an old chum of Bart’s. I can’t at this present moment recall the man’s name, nor the name of the clerk at the front desk, but they’d know mine from the vague exchange that day retrieving Agnes and this nasty snip has somehow swept from the court and along the grape like fire, growing horns and a tail as it goes. Who knows? Perhaps it’s on its way to London now. And I won’t deny it. I won’t deny it ever.

  I could not look more imperious as I tell Cassie Fortescue: ‘That’s right. His name is Eoghan O’Keenan. Go tell the grape he’s Catholic and unemployed now too.’ Wherever he damn well is.

  Not the retort she was expecting, and it takes a moment for her to state the obvious: ‘You’re finished now, you know.’

  ‘In your world, perhaps,’ I scoff with disgust and I mean it sincerely. ‘For whatever that might be worth.’

  She snorts in return: ‘That’s right – you don’t need us.’ The blunt pencil line of her mouth twists downwards. ‘I’d always wondered why you were so stuck-up. You’re a viscount’s bastard, aren’t you? And your mother was always a slut. Never wondered how she danced till two?’

  I did, once. Bit of magic Merrick fairy dust to see the lo
ng show through, might I suppose? But I am no bastard, no suppose about that. I look down at my hands on the table, at the blades of my pattern cutters too easily in reach, and I tell Cassie Fortescue: ‘Get out.’

  *

  ‘My dear, we have ourselves a boy!’ Mr Jabour waltzes me across the tiles of the ground floor as only a father of daughters might and I hug his precious joy to me. Finally, a boy for Mr Jabour.

  ‘What are they going to call him?’

  ‘Robert,’ his chest puffs out over his belly. ‘Robert Nicholas Gallagher. A fine name, don’t you think, dear?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whisper. ‘It’s a beautiful name.’ Nicholas is Mr Jabour’s name. ‘Is Gloria terribly bored?’ I ask him.

  ‘Lost her mind to it – Robbie, Robbie, my little Robbie, that’s all she can say now.’

  ‘Good.’

  He squeezes me tight for a moment, in wordless consolation, for all that is not good. It’s mid-December, eight-thirty on a Wednesday morning, and you wouldn’t know that Christmas is nine days away. The arcade is a crypt and will stay that way most of the day, doubtless. I listen to his steady genie heart telling me that this isn’t the first or last time the till has been empty. Things will work out. Maintain consistent quality, be confident of your stock and your expertise, always keep an attractive window display, give the impression of opulence and ease, treat every customer as if they were special. Simple; but for the last: largely impossible. I’m reduced to relying mostly on passing trade now, and that’s a little difficult up in the gods, on the very top floor. Mr Jabour sends what custom he can my way, but it’s not going to be enough; his clientele all sew: they don’t need me. I’m going to have to make a move. Sometime in the New Year. London. Paris. Chatswood. Homebush. I’m a little paralysed in the face of it. The decisions that will need to be made.

  Numb with worry at what might have happened to Eoghan. Has he disappeared, a swagman hobo trudging out into the countryside, hanging his head in shame on a road gang somewhere, or is he . . . ? Say it for real, not a wonder. He is dead. He must be. How else can he keep away from Agnes like this? Almost seven weeks now, seven long, slow weeks without a word. It’s not like he’s some poor illiterate, not like he can’t put a sentence together. Why not send a note? He has to be dead. Or he should be bloody well dead. In the New Year, if we still haven’t heard from him, the Jabours will apply to adopt Agnes. Did you hear that, Eoghan? They’re going to adopt her. You won’t have a sister anymore. And then . . . and then . . . we’re all going to disappear. We’re going to leave you. Should you ever come back, we won’t be here. The Jabours will help us. You’ll see. I should . . . I should –

  ‘I should go up and put the shingle out, I suppose,’ I say with my last cellophane shreds of defiance.

  Mr Jabour gives me one last squeeze: ‘Sometimes that’s all you can do.’

  Whatever it takes, to keep going.

  I go up and stare at the telephone. Should I call Government House? Beg for custom. Should I dare? The Games were booed at the opera on Saturday evening, quite overshadowing The Mikado at the Conservatorium Hall. Some would say suffering an Australian performance of any opera is torture enough. But publicly booed? In front of the students at the Conservatorium? What sort of barbaric society is this? If the King wanted to sack the Premier, he’d have asked the Governor to do it by now, and being insufferably rude and obnoxious isn’t going to achieve anything but insult to one least deserving of it: poor Lady Game. I doubt she’s much interested in how she might be attired for being ignored and booed at wherever she goes. But . . . damn it, I will dare. I pick up the phone.

  ‘Yes, good morning,’ I say to the butler at the other end. ‘Miss Olivia Greene, couturier, for Lady Game, please.’

  ‘One moment, please, madam,’ and I get Miss Crowdy’s impatient: ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s Olivia Greene, from – ’

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘Ah. Um. I’m only enquiring as to whether Lady Game is in any need of ward– ’

  ‘Not at present, thank you, Miss Greene. Good day.’

  Well. There the dare came and went. Perhaps the nasty snip has reached vice-regal ears, despite no one speaking to Lady Game. Would Lady Game really not want to be served by a labourer’s girlfriend? Perhaps. But really? Not too saintly of her, but it would depend upon how great the horns and tail have become on the story, wouldn’t it. How could she trust me with a confidence now? Perhaps she’s decided she can trust no one at all in this big, fat small-minded city anyway, and who on earth could blame her?

  What’s left of options here for me? An advertisement in the papers? Pathetic little black and white box under DRESS, FASHION, ETC. I’ve never done anything like that; never had to. Mother would be more and more appalled, and I doubt it would do anything for me now anyway. Exclusif can’t compete on the same track with ready-to-wear . . .

  ‘Morning, Ollie,’ Coralie’s bright face comes in with the bell.

  How am I going to tell her I’ll have to let her go? She’ll find a place somewhere else – if Mr Jabour doesn’t whisk her off somewhere, one of the department stores will snap her up as soon as look at her. I’ve heard that Hordern’s might be expanding their fabric department to include a sewing school – Coralie would be perfect for something like that. I don’t want to let her go, though. I don’t want to let any of this go. My life. My world.

  Mais non, chérie. Hold on. It’s not over yet. Hold on, until the last fingernail breaks.

  Hold on? What to? It seems that someone’s let the water out of the harbour and we’re all whirling towards the plughole.

  You’ll find something. And you will hold on.

  *

  I find Agnes up the top of the ferry steps, making her way round from the tram. Lugging her satchel on her shoulder, it’s almost as big as she is. I call out: ‘Poppet!’ And when she turns, for a moment, in her smile, in the bounce of her thick beribboned plaits, everything is beautiful. It’s beautiful that business is so slow I can be here at the top of the ferry steps at four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon two ticks away from Christmas, be here to see Agnes smile. There’s my branch out of the whirlpool.

  She waits for me to catch up and I ask her: ‘How was school today?’ looking for signs every day, as I do, that some B is getting into her.

  But she smiles again: ‘Miss Rosewood picked me out for reading.’

  That is the world to Agnes, all that she is holding on to. I have to find a way to keep her at North Sydney Grammar. I’ll beg for the money. My next letter to Mother might need to be a most interesting one, mightn’t it? Whether we remain in Sydney or not. Small matter of a child I have acquired . . . if she hasn’t already been informed. I’m expecting that telegram any day now: OLIVIA JANE! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

  Not today, though. Only our McIlraith’s box waiting for us at the door. Annoyingly dumped on the step. I expressly asked them, as Mother has always done, to deliver it in the evening, in person, so that it doesn’t get pinched. The miracle that it hasn’t been makes me clap my hands: ‘Here’s Christmas!’

  ‘Oh!’ Agnes’s deep blue eyes grow wide as the sky as I heft it inside and unfold the cardboard flaps of our bounty on the kitchen table.

  ‘Behold the infamous Mexican chocolate cake.’ I lift it out first, and hold it aloft in its red and gold striped tin.

  ‘Ooh,’ she says with giggling reverence, ‘it looks like a little circus tent,’ and so it does, becoming something new and lovely through her eyes. And so we go through her discovery of the tins of almonds and walnuts, the cherry shortbread tarts, the fruit mince for our pies, for which she will make the pastry, while I eat all the Paradise pineapple creams and caramel fudge bonbons.

  ‘What’s this?’ Agnes holds up the bottle of French cognac that by some inexplicable force of habit I keep ordering.

  I laugh, at myself. ‘It’s a brandy
, for sauce my mother used to make. But we have custard with our pudding, don’t we? Silly.’ I don’t know how to make Mother’s brandy sauce. I take the bottle from Agnes’s half-quizzical, half-repulsed frown and shove it in the cupboard with its fellows: last year’s full one and three opened others, languishing at the back of the top shelf with the soap flakes and turpentine. A short, sharp scald of sadness at the back of my throat.

  But when I turn back around, my little poppet is grinning, asking me, ‘So, where does the Mexican infamous circus cake go?’ Ever helpful, ever doing the job that needs to be done, there she is picking up the tin.

  ‘In the sideboard,’ I say and step back into the sitting room to open the doors of it for her.

  She kneels and peers in, telling me: ‘It’s very dusty in here – you need new paper put down.’ To line the bottom of the cupboard section. Was there ever a more perfect child?

  I say: ‘Well, we’d better do that, then, hadn’t we?’ For I certainly never have in my life, and I doubt Mother ever did either.

  Agnes carefully removes the jumble of silver and vases and china oddments that live there and pulls out the paper that lay beneath them. I had never noticed that there was paper lining there – and with it comes a cloud of ancient filth, and something else . . . A certificate of some kind swishes across the floor, lodging under the toe of my right shoe.

  I pick it up. The paper is equally ancient, yellowed, but thick: TICKET-OF-LEAVE it’s entitled. From the Principal Superintendent of Convicts’ Office. Sydney, New South Wales, 12 August 1842. It is His Excellency, the Governor’s, Pleasure to dispense with the Attendance at Government Work of Tobias Weathercroft, who was tried at somewhere indecipherable in London, 25 May 1831, Convict for 14 years . . .