The Blue Mile

by Kim Kelly

‘Perhaps. If you grow up quickly enough,’ she says as we reach the landing, where she waves ahead, her face divine in the glow of the late sun streaming through the windows above. ‘Oh look, wonderful, Bart’s beaten us here.’

  She is transformed in this moment, as I’ve never seen her; alabaster yielding to the softest silken flesh. A blush that finds its way through the powder on her cheeks, and I see: she loves him.

  At the top of the stairs, I see him: soft grey hair, black-tie debonair, a crooked smile, raising his glass to her: he loves her too.

  He is sartorial perfection. His jacket is a semi-formal cutaway in-betweener for an early soiree; distinctive and precisely tailored, possibly Savile Row. He is the Well Dressed Man: he will have an array of twenty suits to his wardrobe, one dozen hats, eight overcoats and four pairs of shoes, not including sports attire. She is wearing an old favourite tonight, her pewter lamé tunic, with long strands of jet beads, and when they meet, when they touch, with their silvers and blacks and superlative loveliness, they are two halves of a whole.

  I knew it. I knew it would be this way, didn’t I.

  I look out at the gilt-edged figs of Hyde Park across the road, and the world as I know it shudders and disappears.

  Yo

  ‘You’re fibbing to me, you are – you didn’t go up there today.’ Ag’s looking over at the Bridge from the ferry rail. It looks amazing, side-on like this, going across from point to point, from Dawes to McMahons and back again now, with the sky going every colour there is as the sun sets.

  I say: ‘I did, Ag. I was right up at the top there, and I don’t believe it much either.’

  She reaches up her arms to me, for me to pick her up. I do. She’s tired, her body’s asleep already; she smells of perfume and ice-cream, as a small girl should, and she says, over my shoulder: ‘It’s made of liquorice sticks.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The Bridge.’ She laughs: ‘Silly.’

  ‘You might be on to something there, Ag. Liquorice sticks . . .’ I laugh back, at Ag and the black liquorice lines of the Bridge, light-headed, asleep too. ‘Them rivets are made of fruit bullets then, ay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘That why there’s a big piece missing out of it – see in the middle? Some greedy gorgy’s been eating it. He’s in them workshops – that’s what all that banging is. He’s getting hungry. He comes out in the night and gobbles up what you done in the day.’

  ‘Of course he does – I had been wondering about all that. You’re a cracker, Ag.’

  ‘What’s your favourite flavour?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Fruit bullets. Silly.’

  ‘Blackcurrant.’

  ‘Mine’s orange.’

  ‘I know it is.’

  ‘You know everything – every silly thing, Yoey Yo-Yo.’

  ‘I might just do.’

  ‘I could listen to you two all night,’ this fella beside us joins in, a rough old voice, sharing the laugh with us. I turn around but I can’t see him well for the sun in my eyes. He says: ‘She’ll make you proud, that one. You’re a lucky man.’ And he tips his hat and walks off, before I can tell him I couldn’t agree more. He’s in a hurry to be in his home, I suppose, with all the other hats and lunch tins gathering to bolt off the ferry as it pulls in to the wharf.

  Here at Balmain. Not that I can see it too well either, the sinking sun is that harsh. I look the other way for a second and it’s hardly better with the glare coming off the water, but in it I catch the shadow shapes of Port Jackson, see this town of Sydney for what it is: a string of a hundred points and bays with a wharf or half-a-dozen sticking out of every one of them. Exhausting just to look at, and Ag, little as she is, has got heavy in my arms, arms that have never felt so heavy from work.

  I start walking up from this Darling Street wharf. There are a dozen wharves on Balmain alone, as I learned getting the ticket for us here: besides the colliery and timber wharves, there’s the Thames Street ferry, Louisa Street and Some Other Street. This one is the main one, and this Darling Street is the main road. When I asked what the pubs were like from the fella at the ticket counter, he said: There’s twenty-six of them, take your pick. Twenty-six pubs in one suburb, full of wharfies, on a Saturday evening. I hold Ag a bit tighter to me, expecting the worst: Chippo by the sea. It’s half-past six, so I’m expecting a hundred women are getting bashed in here somewhere, something to do between the pub and the knocker.

  This Darling Street, though, as far as I can see, is empty, smelling of roasts in the oven, and if anyone’s getting bashed, they’re being very quiet about it. Even the tobacconist across from the ferry is closed. Maybe there’s a hundred Wal Adamses round here, keeping the bastards in order. Good people, working people, that woman at the Paragon said last night. Was that only last night? Maybe that’s the difference round here, though: good work. Men’s work and only men’s work. Trade depressions might mean you put off buying them new pair of boots, but it won’t stop the need for coal steamers to be coming and going, will it? The houses along this street seem to say so; they’re terraces but mostly wide and double-storey. There’s a pair of them set back with a garden at the front, and a little wooden one next to it needs a coat of paint but it’s got a window box full of bright red flowers. This is a good place.

  A few hundred yards up the road, the first big pub we come to doesn’t have a name on it, excepting a sign for Star Ale across the front tiles: not Tooths, at least, and it looks tidy enough, too; even the couple of fellas having a smoke in the lane by it, pretending they’re not waiting for sly, are tidy-looking. The last door along the front of the pub says PRIVATE ENTRANCE and I say to Ag: ‘Reckon this’ll do us.’ But she doesn’t answer; she’s already fast asleep.

  The fella who looks up from the evening paper at the counter, switching off the wireless beside him as he does, is fat and happy looking: ‘Yeah, g’day mate, what can I do for youse?’

  ‘We’re looking for a room, just for the night. One bed’ll do.’ This freshly polished hallway will do.

  ‘Well, I can give you two beds, fella,’ he says. ‘Seven and six the double, that’s the only one I got, and that’s breakfast as well, bath up the end of the hall.’

  That’s a bit expensive; that’s a lot expensive, that’s nearly as much as some of the pubs in town, and possibly explains the vacancy, but I’ve got my hand in my pocket before I tell him: ‘We’ll take it.’ I’d take it for a pound.

  ‘Good-o.’ He grabs the key and comes out the door of his office, showing me up the stairs. ‘Welcome to the Commercial. No grog in the room, mind, but you can have an ale with your tea till nine.’

  ‘No worries,’ I say; I’m not going to be awake long enough to even think about the want of a drink in me; I can hardly get one foot past the other on these stairs.

  ‘You’re travelling light,’ he says, checking us over, as he should.

  I give him the horseshit I’ve been rehearsing: ‘We come in to go to the zoo – missed our train home, out west.’ Don’t ask me where west, or where the zoo is.

  ‘Big day for your little one?’ he says at the top, a nod at Ag; not being nosy, just nice.

  I nod. Big day all right.

  He says: ‘My wife’s sister is out near Bathurst – right pain if you miss that evening engine, isn’t it?’ He opens the door of the second room along this hall and I see Paradise. Two beds, and I can smell the soap in the linen from here. There’s a washstand with a sink too, a white flannel on a hook by it. This will be the cleanest place my sister and I have ever laid our heads.

  ‘You had your tea?’ He’s asking after Ag, not me.

  ‘Yeah, thanks.’

  ‘Leave you to it, then,’ he says. ‘Breakfast seven-thirty Sundays, all right?’

  ‘Couldn’t be more, thank you again,’ I tell him as he closes the door, though we won’t be eating again till
after Mass anyway.

  I lay Ag on the bed nearest the window and go over to the washstand, soak the flannel and put it round the back of my neck. It just about jumps back off me with the heat of the sunburn there, but it feels good. Sweet Jesus, it feels good.

  Everything is good.

  We’re going to be all right.

  I get down on my knees by the washstand and I stay here for a long time: thank you.

  Olivia

  ‘Olivia, might I recommend the pea salad for entree? Sounds terribly humble but wait until you taste the minted mayonnaise.’ Bart Harley is so at ease with himself and his world, I want to hate him. I desperately want to push him out the great arched window beside our table. Watch him go splat on the footpath below. But he’s so charming. Suave and urbane, and all the same, there’s nothing arrogant about him. ‘Isn’t it a tasty dish, Em darling?’ he says, as if the future turning of the earth depends upon Mother’s approval of his opinion of this minted mayonnaise. He’s no Don Juan. The only thing desperate about him is his desire to win my approval too.

  I look back down at the menu. It’s all festive fare: devilled oysters, lobster tartlets, turkey and goose with all the trimmings, cherry pie, plum pudding . . . everything but a partridge in pear sauce and all mouth-watering, but I don’t think I can eat a thing.

  Still, I say: ‘Yes, please, that sounds lovely.’ And good God, but I think I might be going to cry. Stare harder at the menu. How am I going to get through three courses of this? Glance at my watch: five to seven. Longest almost hour of my life so far, much of it spent listening to Bart Harley going gooey over this frock, toasting Mother’s design with French champagne; he’s completely in awe of her and freely admits he has been since they first met a year ago. A year ago? She’s had her design on him going for a whole year. Of course she has. And when he is not going gooey over her, he’s a King’s Counsel Crown Prosecutor putting razor-gang thugs in prison, presently going after some doctor who’s been doing unseemly things at the behest of that infamous mobsteress Tilly Devine. He plays jazz clarinet and goes sailing in his spare time. He’s forty-three and never been married. Never found ‘the One’ – until now. Bart Harley is too fabulous.

  ‘Oh look, there’s young Warwick.’ Mother is calling someone over to the table now: ‘Ollie, Warwick Bloxom is Bart’s new clerk – his baby lawyer. What a pleasant surprise.’ Her too-casual tone suggesting that this Warwick’s appearance is no surprise to her at all.

  I look up quickly and see a pleasant-faced boy, fresh from the pleasant-boy factory with his long fringe neatly brilled back and dinner jacket cut high at the waist, Oxford style, the type you wouldn’t see at Pearson’s because he lunches at the Australia Club, possibly with his father, who is possibly a stockbroker, a wheat merchant or member of parliament for the Nationalist Party, or all three. Much monied, evening dress every night type, all fopsy accoutrements present and accounted for but a topper, and I must force myself to be pleasant in return to him: his mother or sister might possibly want a bunch of summery things for Home one day.

  ‘How do you do?’ I manage, before burying my face in the menu again, and Mother digs her heel into my toe to make me look up again.

  ‘Miss Greene, isn’t it?’ He bows slightly, and he’s slightly awkward about it, too: he’s been put up to this, I know it. He holds my gaze for so long he’s being paid by the second for it, and what I wouldn’t do for a brim to slide under, or for the chandelier above us to come down and send me through the floor.

  ‘What brings you in tonight, eh, Rick?’ Bart Harley rescues the moment, as fabulously avuncular as he is smooth.

  ‘Oh,’ and Warwick gives a light chuckle, rather be elsewhere now: ‘I’ve brought Mother in for dinner, sir, with my aunt up from Melbourne, proving to them that this is not the den of iniquity they imagine. But never fear,’ another phony chuckle, ‘I’ll ditch them after we’ve eaten –’

  Bart Harley laughs at that, a genuine and jolly laugh. ‘You two must have a dance later,’ he says, and he is referring to me.

  Mother adds a glissando trill and they’re all laughing.

  We two must have a dance?

  Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ho ho ho ho ho ho.

  When hell freezes and the earth stops turning, but I think of his mother and his aunt and say: ‘That would be lovely.’

  The pea salad is, at least, when it arrives, and I give it my full attention. ‘Oh dear yum, Mr Harley, you were right about this minted mayonnaise.’

  ‘It’s Bart, please.’

  La la la la la la, listen to the string quartet in the corner playing ‘Angels We Have Heard On High’, very prettily too, tinkling over whatever lovey-dovey gushy mush from Barty Woo I’m not listening to next. Chatter is rising round the dining room; it’s filling up, and I dare a few more glances about, to find a few more distractions from my anxieties confabulated and otherwise. The business opportunities here do indeed appear to be abundant. Mother spake the truth, and so does the regular assertion in the women’s pages that Australians do not know how to dress after five. Half the men in drack sacks as if they’ve just come in from the office, and far too many dowdy dowagers in dreary unmitigated crepe atrocities like matrons from the Anti-Liquor League – which is not likely judging from the quantity of wine being consumed in here. I’ve never seen so many wine bottles in one go.

  ‘I’ll have the shiraz with the beef,’ Bart Harley tells the sommelier. ‘And you, Em dear?’

  ‘I think the riesling for the goose, don’t you?’ Mother replies, and I’m tempted to ask if her consumption is legal. This will be her third glass – after the champagne cocktail in the Library Lounge and the chablis she just had with her lobster entree.

  ‘Would you like a glass of something, Olivia – perhaps a spritzer?’ Bart Harley asks me.

  And I decline: ‘No, thank you.’ I’m not going to be carted off for a drunken giraffe when this place is raided after nine. I have been drunk, just the once, on our cognac last Christmas Eve when Mother was out – I tried it, retched savagely on it, don’t know how anyone does it, not to mention Mother, and she hasn’t even got to her martini yet.

  I glance away, across the room again, and imagine I catch a glimpse of a dark-haired boy in white tux and midnight trousers. Wanting to find him here, and not merely for another pathetic glimpse of the heroic dustman, but because, even to the utterly untravelled, this is clearly not New York: did that chap over there truly just blow his nose into his napkin? Glance the other way at the sound of a party coming in through the doors of the dining room, the sound of barging gaiety: a small flock of funsters has arrived. My kind of clientele, at last.

  With Cassie Fortescue in their midst.

  There she is. My nemesis and Min Bromley’s cousin, and as sincerely, edibly, hatefully gorgeous as ever. Petite and perfectly proportioned, I hope her overbeaded headband slips off her glossy auburn bob, down her minuscule nose and strangles her. Sticky, sticky, stick. How I despise her, this girl who first composed that taunt. Still, I mentally redesign her boxy shift, lengthen it a little so she doesn’t appear so dumpy in it, and so last summer, one tier of flouncery too much at the waist. Her beau, whom I instantly recognise as Denis Clifton, looks like he got his clobber off the rack at Gowings – you would not know his father is Director-General of Customs House, but there’s Sydney High old boys for you. How I could clothe this city, and how I betray myself. I should design Cassie Fortescue a trousseau entirely of rayon. Flapper.

  Mother’s heel spikes me again as the main arrives: Eat your turkey and grow up, Olivia Jane.

  No, I don’t want to.

  So she leans across and whispers in my ear: ‘Back straight, darling.’ Not hissing. ‘How I wish you could see yourself as I do – as we all do. You are the most beautiful girl in the room.’

  You are my mother and you’re drunk.

  I don’t know how she’s not, as New Y
orkers might say, utterly spiflicated by half-past eight, halfway through dessert, halfway through her glass of sweet muscat, when that Arthur Spence fellow appears at the dining room doors and announces: ‘Supper time, ladies and jellybeans!’ Pencilled eyes more crazed than puckish, and he’s swapped his tux for a gold lamé vest. ‘Show begins in ten minutes!’

  Mother looks at her wristwatch and stifles a yawn. ‘Martini time already?’

  ‘You are insatiable,’ Bart Harley remains gooey as the cherry pie. ‘Shall we?’

  ‘Ollie?’ Mother asks.

  ‘Yes, shall we what?’ I’m watching Cassie and her pack flap to their feet and head for the doors.

  ‘Shall we carry on into the Jazz Room for the show?’

  No. Jazz Room: Cassie and dancing in there. And I’m tired, ghastly delirious tired now. But Mother must be too. I don’t know how she does it. Three times a week. This show that’s as much business as it is pleasure for her. Remember: this is all for me. Going blind with drop crystal beads and diagonals for me. Me and me alone it will be, as Mother is going to marry Bart Harley. The least I can do is walk into the room, and then disappear into this show, into this frock. Only across the hall . . . Stand up. Grow up. It’s not hard.

  Through the tables and there’s a hand on my arm: ‘Dear girl, come here and let us see your gown.’ When my heart resumes beating I find two crepe dowagers smiling above their pearls at me – the dowagers belonging to that Warwick Bloxom, who’s striding for the stairs, ‘I’ll fetch you a cab, Mama,’ as the aunt from Melbourne clucks at me: ‘I must tell you how becoming that style is on you. Those colours. Delightful.’

  And it is somehow. I find myself actually smiling in return. There’s no reason for her to lie; I’m sure she has no idea who I am, and possibly couldn’t care less. I must be wearing the frock well; and that’s the point, isn’t it.

  ‘One of our own designs,’ Mother gets a sale in before they go. ‘Our card.’