by Kim Kelly
For Geraldine,
daughter of Lillian,
mother of me
We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are… Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
‘The Wanderer and his Shadow’
Human, All Too Human: A book for free spirits, 1880
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. Yeats,
‘Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’
The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899
Contents
Good White Bread
The Fire Tail
The Little Milkmaid
Making Waves
All At Sea
Out of the Blue
Her One True Darling
Forever and Ever, Amen
Newsflash
Waiting for Him to Come Home
Irish Coffee
A Troublesome Crop
Away on the Sweet Breeze
And Then Down the Lane
Author’s Note
Also by Kim Kelly
About the Author
GOOD WHITE BREAD
The good white bread comes in tubes, from town. Pipe loaves, they’re called. My grandmother carefully slices down the faint pipe lines in the circle crust with her feather knife. The handle of the knife is the colour of a dog bone, and the feathers are steel teeth – they will shred your fingers, if you’re not careful. The house is quiet downstairs; it’s just me and Grandma here, up in her flat, in her kitchen.
‘How do they get the bread out of the pipe?’ I ask her. I’m wondering at the lines in the crust: they bump along the loaf like the pipe might be made out of corrugated iron – tiny corrugated iron, though. I can’t work it out. ‘Wouldn’t it get stuck?’
‘Don’t addle me,’ she says, slicing, slicing. Her hips sway at the kitchen bench, her elbow sawing, sawing. Every slice is exactly the same size; I can’t imagine ever being able to do that.
She’s making toast, for lunch. She always has two slices, which she butters and then squishes a whole banana between with the back of a fork, but she doesn’t usually have the pipe loaf bread, the good white bread, just for this sort of everyday lunch if it’s just us, and she’s up to slice number eight now. I don’t think we’re expecting anyone to come round today. Maybe she’s hungry. But I can’t imagine that, either: she never eats more than what she calls an ‘elegant sufficiency’. Mum says that just means she doesn’t want to get fat. Mum always teases Grandma for being so vain, for being so slim and dyeing her hair. ‘There’s nothing wrong with taking care of your appearance,’ Grandma would always laugh back. She is beautiful, my grandmother: she piles up her red curls so that squiggly tendrils frame her face and make her eyes bluer than blue, and she makes all her own clothes – she makes all of mine, too. She’s always the most fashionable lady at mass. Today, she’s wearing her lolly-pink skirt with the white stitching, and her pink-and-white-striped blouse. Normally, she giggles a lot, even at mass. It’s the only time you can really see her wrinkles, when she giggles at something silly – especially when it’s at something Father Jovanovic has said, but Mum says that’s just because he’s too handsome. Grandma’s not even smiling now, though. She’s very sad at the moment, so I’m not going to addle her. I’m trying to be quiet.
Granddad’s never coming home again, that’s why she’s so sad. He had a stroke three Tuesdays ago, on his way home from work. He didn’t have to go to work – he’s retired. He only goes in to help the new man make sense of all the orders when it’s busy. They work in a huge refrigerator, making sure that all the thousands of bottles of flavoured milk and cartons of yoghurt get on the trucks and into the shops and all get paid for. Well, Granddad used to, anyway. He used to bring home strawberry milk and apricot yoghurt – my favourites. That’s not going to happen anymore.
I sleep in the big bed with Grandma now to keep Granddad’s side from getting cold. No-one asked me to; I just do. I don’t want her to read in bed alone. She reads doctor-and-nurse romance novels from the library, ‘to give her brain a rest,’ she says; and I read Nancy Drew detective mysteries – I’m collecting them. I love the name Nancy, it’s so pretty. My name is Brigid, and I don’t always like it. Bridge. Bridgey. Brigid. It’s an old-fashioned name. ‘A big name for a little girl,’ Mum always says. It’s a name I have to live up to. It’s my grandmother’s confirmation name, and my great-grandmother’s Christian name, apart from being Saint Brigid’s name in the first place. Brigid stands for being kind to the poor, healing sores, and, most importantly, being good at making cakes. I’m much more expert at licking the bowl clean – that’s the fault of my middle name, Danielle, Grandma says.
I wish I could make her laugh right now.
I can’t imagine how much she is missing Granddad. I miss him. I miss the rough way he rubbed my hair with the towel after Grandma washed it on Saturday afternoons. ‘You’ll rub her scalp off her head one day,’ she would tell him from the kitchen. I would say, ‘Ouch!’ But I didn’t mean it. I loved the way my head would bobble about in his big, rough hands, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, ash falling off the end and onto the carpet. Grandma says it’s good for keeping the moths away – cigarette ash on the carpet. Mum says cigarettes killed Granddad. I heard her whispering it to Dad in the bathroom downstairs, when she went in there to have a cry.
I look down at the carpet now, into the orange-and-brown swirls under the chair I’m sitting on. It’s Granddad’s usual chair. He would sit here, on this side of the kitchen table, where there’s lounge-room carpet on the floor, reading the newspaper, smoking his cigarette. I wonder how much cigarette ash is in there, in this bit of carpet. I look right under the table: there’s not a speck of dust in the tiny lines that go along the strip of golden metal that divides off the lounge-room-carpet side from the kitchen-vinyl-tiles side. It’s one long room up here in Grandma’s flat, a lounge room with a kitchen at one end, where the stove and the sink and the cupboards are – she designed it all this way herself. When I sit up straight in the chair again, a line of sunlight is going across my knees, coming through the open slits in the blinds behind me. I swing my legs out from under the chair. My legs are skinny and brown; bruised and spotted with mosquito bites.
It’s hot. I should go and play outside in the shade of the house, maybe see who’s home over the road, see if Sharon is back from the shops yet, but I don’t want to leave Grandma alone, not now while she’s being so strange about the toast. It’s school holidays, luckily, so I can be here at home with her. I don’t normally like school holidays that much. It’s so boring, especially the long summer holidays. It’s too hot to think properly. But I’m glad it’s holidays this time. Shane and Tim, my brothers, are at Aunty Jeannie and Uncle Vic’s in Campbelltown, on the farm, probably playing cricket with our cousins there, Matt and Jason. I’m glad they’re not here – they’re too loud, always smashing around inside or outside. The yard is too small to get away from them, and they just get bigger and teenage-stinkier every day. Anyone would think there were ten of them, not two. I never want to go to high school, where there would be more than a hundred of them.
Over my shoulder, through the blinds, I look out past the back fence and across the iron rooftops all the way to town. W
e live up on the hill, in Marrickville, so we can see right into Sydney. Australia Square is round, a pipe loaf standing up out of the ground, with its corrugated bumps gone all wobbly in the heat – the whole city looks like it’s melting. It’s 1976, January something. Wednesday. Mr Whitlam made a sticky mess of things before Christmas and he’s not Prime Minister anymore – he got the sack. Dad told Mum maybe that’s what made Granddad have such a bad stroke.
‘Oh you stupid—’ Grandma’s suddenly rousing at the sink. I turn back around and see the smoke curling up from the toaster. She’s burnt the first lot of toast, and now she’s grabbing it out to scrape off the charcoal into the sink with the flat back of the feather knife. She’s angry as she does it: scraping, scraping. Scraping off the black.
‘No, I am not wearing black,’ is what she said on the morning of Granddad’s funeral. She was angry then, much more angry. She said to the crucifix on the wall above the bed: ‘Steven would never approve of my wearing black in any circumstance – we go our own way, always have, always will.’ She didn’t know I was watching as she prayed there on her knees at the end of the bed that morning; she was having an argument with God, it sounded like. I don’t think she saw me at all for a couple of days. She probably didn’t look at God, either. I wasn’t allowed to go with her to the funeral, but I wish I could have. We always sit together at mass.
I wish I could make her happy again. Happy in her eyes, like the way she used to look at Granddad. We were all so happy at Christmas, just when the holidays started – Grandma bought Granddad some smart new handkerchiefs, and he really loved them even though they’re only handkerchiefs. That was only five days before – it just doesn’t seem fair.
‘I don’t mind the burnt ones,’ I tell her now in a rush, and it’s true, I like the burnt ones best – I like them with vegemite and no butter, so that Mum says I’m too fussy and Grandma says it’s not being too fussy to know what you want. ‘Save them for me. Please.’
I don’t know if she heard me, though. She just stands there at the sink, staring at the wall, like she’s looking for something in the daisy tiles there. She’s looking for Granddad – I might be only nine years old, but I know that. I’m looking for him, too.
I’m looking for something to make Grandma turn around to see me. Something not silly. Something to take us away, somewhere else, far away. I know …
‘Tell me the story about the little boy and the fire,’ I ask her, and if she tells me to be quiet it doesn’t matter. ‘Tell me about little Pete, tell me the fire tale,’ I ask her again, and I do want to hear the story. I’ve heard it ten times, probably, the fire tale. Fire tail: it makes me think of a dragon’s tail right now, swirling orange and brown through the air, over the rooftops, swirling us backwards in time, to the days when she was a girl. A little girl called Nell. ‘Tell me about when you were small. Please, Grandma?’
But still she doesn’t say anything. She puts the kettle on, and then she lights her cigarette. I think maybe I should make lunch for Grandma, rather than the other way round, but before I go to get up off the chair to do that, she turns to me, and she smiles. It’s sad, but it’s a smile, and I smile back at her.
THE FIRE TAIL
Peter Daniel Kennedy was the last of fourteen children and the thirteenth boy. Lucky Pete, they all called him, because they all loved him and, because of that, he was spoiled. He was the plumpest little boy that ever was, and the first of the Kennedys to be born in sunny Sydney. His face was the sun, ringed with strawberry curls.
His oldest brother, Dan, was twenty-two years his elder, and he would toss little Pete up in the air as soon as looking at him, toss him round the kitchen table and up the hall to all his brothers: Mick, Pat, Frankie, Chris, Ben, Dom, Sean, Martin, Eddie, Tom and Jack. In among all the boots and knees and elbows squashed into their little house in Surry Hills, was Nell – the real thirteenth and the only girl – but she was a whole other story in herself, and one for another time.
It was the happiest home anyone could ever hope to have, but no easy life for any in it, for Pete’s family, the Kennedys, were very poor – when it came to money, if not love and laughter, that is. His parents – being his mother, Brigid, and his father, who was also called Dan – had spent every penny they owned bringing all their children all the way from Ireland on the long journey across the sea to Australia. All except lucky little Pete, of course – he was born the year they arrived, on the seventeenth of September 1912. It’s true that his mother cried for the first three days after his birth, wondering how on earth she was going to keep her fourteenth and very much unexpected miracle when she could barely keep the other thirteen, but on that third day, a different kind of miracle was brought to her and her family: her husband, Dan – Mr Kennedy – finally got a good job.
Up until then, Dan the father and Dan the son, as well as the elder brothers Mick and Pat, and occasionally the first lot of twins Frankie and Chris, had had only piecemeal work labouring here and there, at this odd job and that, sweeping floors or lumping sacks. Sometimes they trapped rats for the Board of Public Health, getting a farthing a tail. They’d go rabbit hunting, too, out past the city, and at least what they didn’t sell they could bring home to Mother. So this good new job of Dan the father’s was a precious thing for the Kennedys. He was working now for the Eveleigh railway yards, over the tracks in Redfern, six days a week and regular hours, with money enough to pay the rent and most of the grocery bill – he even had to join the union, and pay them, too. It wasn’t the best job – he was only coaling and stoking the furnaces in the locomotive workshop as assistant to the blacksmiths there – but it was a start. It was the answer to their prayers. It’s true that he coveted a place in the workshop as a blacksmith, for that had been his trade back in Ireland, where he’d even had his own forge, but he’d never got his ticket to say that’s what he was for he’d never before had to leave his village to get one. He didn’t mind too much, though; he was a patient man – he had to be with all those children. And he believed if he worked hard enough, and prayed hard enough, he soon would be a blacksmith again.
Only it wasn’t to be. On the nineteenth of September, 1913, just one year and two days after little Pete was born, Dan the father was crossing the road at Regent Street, on his way home from work at Redfern to Surry Hills, just thinking of his dinner, just thinking of the way all his babies and boys would jostle and jabber around the table, all happy with good food in their bellies, when a runaway team of horses dragging a cart piled high with sacks of chicory root put an end to all his hopes and dreams. There was bedlam in the street when it happened, screaming and shouting, and the carter was going mad that his load had tipped over, shaking his fists in the air and crying that his chicory was all smashed and worthless now. No-one in the street was paying any attention to the carter, though. They were all screaming and shouting for Dan Kennedy, for he was killed, his poor head broken under that wild stamping of hooves. He was forty-four years old.
Dan the son stepped up and took on the role of head of the household as best he could, continuing to labour at this job and that, mostly lumping sacks of wheat off the Pyrmont wharves across town, but it was never enough to feed such a family of fifteen mouths altogether. Young Dan could do no better, though: he had no ticket for a trade himself, either, and no good education to speak of, beyond the very basics of reading and writing and arithmetic. Before they’d left Ireland, he’d walk seven miles into Tralee to lump cargo for the ships in the canal there, but when the docks at Fenit Harbour opened with the railways, he wasn’t needed so much anymore. He’d walk into Tralee, just as he’d walk into Pyrmont now, hoping, praying, for a day’s work. If it weren’t for the sunshine of Sydney, and Lucky Pete’s sunny little face to come home to, some days Dan felt he might as well chuck himself into the sea. Not that he would ever truly do a thing like that – no, he would never do a sinful thing like that to his mother.
Brigid Kennedy worked hard herself, at keeping the home run smartly, a
nd doing her own best to bring in what pennies she could. It was the only thing she could do against all her grief. She took in sewing and mending for the neighbours, and minding babies in the front room of their too-little house on Great Buckingham Street, but that didn’t add much to their income, either – it would barely pay for a basket of old bread, especially as Brigid Kennedy’s heart was too often too big and too fond of babies to charge the poor mothers needing baby-minding anything at all. At the heart of her heart, though, she knew she had too many fine sons to worry all that much. Their fortunes would surely change.
And so they did. Dan, Mick and Pat – the eldest three together – soon came up with an idea. What they lacked in education they made up for in plain old-fashioned brains. They were smart lads, shrewd and charming all, tall and handsome, too, with great big blue eyes, every single one – although none would marry before they saw their mother’s life made easier. It came to their attention that one of the old houses in nearby Elizabeth Lane had been condemned by Public Health – a rickety wreck of a thing with ‘DO NOT ENTER’ painted across its boarded up windows – and, as poverty is the true mother of invention, so they decided it would be the ideal place to set up a betting shop. This shop was the kind where men from the neighbourhood could come to have a little gamble on the horse races, or a quiet game of swy – which was a coin-tossing game – but since this was all quite against the law of the day, they needed a place such as the little tumble-down house on Elizabeth Lane to conduct their business. It was so perfect, this little house, the wooden floor was so rotten out the back they didn’t even have to bother putting a trapdoor in – if the police ever came, they could all just jump down through the holes in the boards to get away.
The betting shop was an instant success, and men would come from a mile all around and at all hours, to play their games. Sometimes the Kennedy boys made so much money they had to hide it from their mother so she wouldn’t worry how they might have got it. As it was, Brigid did worry a little; she had her suspicions, not least by the whispers of gossip that swept from privy to privy along the back lane, but she knew better than to ask her sons about it in this instance. Whatever they were doing when they left her care, their endeavours had meant they could all move to a bigger house, up on Crown Street. It meant never more than three to a bed now. It meant they could all stay together for as long as they could imagine. It meant Dom could take a boilermaker’s apprenticeship going at the gasworks; then Frankie and Chris got work at the post office running telegrams; then Ben got accepted into the technical college to learn to be a draughtsman. It meant a little bit of respectability, too, for even though the new house was still in Surry Hills, it was in a better part of that suburb.
