The Blue Mile

by Kim Kelly

  I tell Nettie: ‘No, no thanks.’ But I can’t put her off altogether, can I? Can’t put her offside: we need her, too. I tell her: ‘Not tonight; I’ve got books to be getting on with. My exam’s tomorrow week. Maybe another time . . .’

  Olivia

  ‘The boy is in love with you,’ Mother spits through pins as I tack the lace train to the back of her wedding gown in her sunroom at Rose Bay. ‘What must he do, throw himself on the ground in supplication to have your attention?’

  ‘No,’ I say, moving round to the front of her to check the pull on the charmeuse. Baby is starting to show, and if I keep my mind on the technical problem of its concealment then I can almost forget it’s there, and that it will be born by the time they return from London – in a year’s time. How convenient it is that Bart managed to organise a sabbatical at the Old Bailey? How convenient, too, that he convinced you to indulge me these past few months so that I might become accustomed to living alone. Working alone. Being alone. As if I’d never had a bit of practice at being not quite the most important thing in your life. How inconvenient is this charmeuse, though – the shimmer in the weave is hitting exactly the wrong spot.

  ‘Ollie, I must have dropped you on your head when you were a baby.’ She sees the sheen herself, hand smoothing over it. What to do? ‘This isn’t turning him down for a night at the Merrick, you know.’

  ‘I know.’ Apart from the first time, I haven’t deliberately turned him down, three times in all now – I have genuinely been too busy to go dancing or dining. With three gowns for this very event Mother is referring to. The farewell dinner for the Governor, Admiral Sir Dudley de Chair, and Lady de Chair, tomorrow night. Warwick’s invited me – or rather Mrs Bloxom has, in place of her niece, who couldn’t attend. I don’t know if Warwick – or Rick as he’s known to his chums – is in love with me or what, but I don’t want him to be. He is a nice boy, superlatively nice, really, and his attention is flattering, more flattering than anything I’ve ever known – barely believable, in fact. The bouquet of riotously delightful dahlias he sent me for my birthday, Dearest Olivia, For You, Warmest regards, Rick, was just about the warmest thing ever – a veritable blaze of autumn sunshine. But I don’t love him back, and I won’t. I’m not one for boys and being in love and that’s that.

  Mother turns to the cheval to look at the problem front-on. ‘Hm. Lace panel, down the centre. Three inches – distract the eye.’ Then she looks up at me behind her again, thinking, sizing me: ‘If you’re worried about matters with his Lordship coming out to ruin things, don’t be. Leona Bloxom only finds you more attractive for it – any aristocratic connection is better than none to them.’

  ‘They know?’ Oh dear God.

  ‘Bart mentioned something, yes, to clear the way, sound them out about the . . . unusual circumstances – but the Bloxoms are discreet. Grown-ups – they know these things happen.’

  I could stab her in the backside with my squiggle snippers for things happening. ‘What have you been doing? Marrying me off behind my back?’

  ‘No, darling, no – I would never do any such thing. Warwick is in love with you, you silly girl. The boy is in torment for you. Honestly . . .’

  ‘Well, honestly, I’m not in love with him.’ And I certainly won’t be going to the Governor’s dinner with him now, torment or not. They know. My torment. My Father: whom the entire English-speaking world now knows is in Kenya – on safari with a Hollywood film actress by the name of Gigi McAllister. There’s a newsreel just come out, apparently, dead lions and zebras, luxurious tent facilities, native slaves, the whole grown-up atrocity, and I won’t be going to a picture theatre anytime soon to witness it. Won’t be going to the Governor’s dinner as a sad little aristocratic pelt for the Bloxoms either.

  ‘You should go with him then to be seen,’ Mother insists: ‘Think of your business if you can’t think of him.’

  My business. Yes. OLIVIA COSTUMIÈRE. I am mentally scraping off that EMILY right now, with my fingernails. But I am not so mercenary, not as she is. I tell her: ‘I’m doing all right as it is, thank you. I don’t need to go to the dinner. I’m an artist, not some dilettante. People come to me at my salon – I don’t chase them.’

  Glissando of hilarity: ‘You are becoming arrogant, my daughter.’

  ‘You made me,’ I retort, unbuttoning the gown, and as I do glance out of the windows of this sunroom, across the water, and I see the Bridge, the arch almost finished. From this distance the arms of it seem only a couple of inches apart, and I see that boy up there, in my mind, skipping across the breach, dancing over his words, turning to run, light on his feet, over the span. The sun on his face, in his eyes; the only boy I seem ever to have seen. The Christmas dustman boy. Deep blue boy who cares so for his little girl. You couldn’t find it in your heart to do me a favour in return, could you? Figment boy. And I tell the Bridge: I’ll go to the ball if you send me that boy – in a white tux and midnight trousers.

  ‘Come to London with us, darling,’ Mother changes tack. ‘Won’t you reconsider?’

  No. I’m not going to London, despite Bart’s offer to have me set up there. London is not where I want to go, where this upcoming summer season promises fifty-three and a half shades of beige wallpaper with contrasting trims of Ashes of Roses, a bloodless pink inspired by that infamous scent of phlergh especially designed with a base note of musky Parisienne contempt for the English. Nothing original, nothing inspiring comes out of London. I don’t think I’d fit in, and if I ever were to go, I’d want to set myself up, thank you.

  I kiss Mother goodbye and take the ferry home, my carpet bag heavy with wedding gown, and my mind stuffing itself full of events and busyness beyond this week. There’s the April racing carnival coming up, and then the welcome party for the Games in May, the new Governor, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Philip Game and Lady Game – and that’ll be a daytime event, too. I think it will be a perfect time for my Bridge series of hats to appear: purples, teals and bronzes, some winter drama. Min Bromley should be out of post-ditchment mourning by then too – I think I might send her a cheering note, tell her I’ve designed something especially for her. Perhaps I can put Warwick on to her, too, kill two birds . . . hm, they would look quite good as a pair, sketch them into matching tweeds and stitch them up together. Voilà! By the time I’ve switched ferries for the north side I’ve solved all the city’s problems and my Bridge series is such a hit I’m waving away streamers, tooting out of the Quay for the Parisienne summer in a whirl of my old-favourite flame-red cape.

  Dreaming. Dreams that are as delicate as Mother’s champagne charmeuse. Let the water at it and it’ll shrink and warp to rags. I hear a woman cry out as I take the steps up from the wharf: ‘No, please. Please, no!’ and I look up to find her at the top, outside the flats above the vehicular punt ramp. Men are lugging her furniture and effects into the street. She’s been evicted. The third I’ve seen in as many weeks. I look away, ashamed. Why do they choose the evening to turn them out into the street? Why not the morning? Why are people cruel to each other?

  I hurry home, with the chill breeze at my back, and bolt the door behind me, keep my dreams shut in and safe from harm. Stitch by stitch, I fix my wishes into Mother’s lace panel, get it done, out of the way, not thinking unkind thoughts such as Why don’t you make your own stupid wedding gown? but rather seeing her walk radiantly down the aisle of St Andrew’s Presbyterian a week from now, with a supper reception at the Royal Sydney Golf Club, before casual farewell drinks at the Tulip Restaurant on Wednesday afternoon, the day they depart. Streamered away by the uppest of up crowd, people I don’t know and don’t particularly want to know. So long as they continue to buy my hats and frocks.

  Money in the bank for my own ticket . . .

  Tooooot.

  I know I’ve fallen asleep, my head on the table by my lamp, my hand still holding my pincushion, but I can’t rouse from this dream. The woman from
the flats is climbing the North Claw towards the breach. She’s going to jump off. I know she is. Everyone is watching her from the wharf, pointing, but no one can stop her. She hits the water with a great big smash. Echoing across the harbour.

  Hammering. From the workshops, of course, and it’s not quite dawn. Roused now and compelled blinking into another day, I’m on the ferry again, beating the rush, and yawning up at the Bridge, into the breach. Good God but it’s breathtaking now it’s almost done: what’s the industrial equivalent of haute couture? There is sadness in its beauty, though: what’ll they do, all the men up there, when it’s finished and there’s no work to go to? Engineering Wonder of the World complete; move along. Women cry, please no; men walk the streets, dragging their shame to the Labour Exchange. My mary-janes clipping double-time through the hush of Pitt Street, so early I’ve even beaten the barrowmen.

  But not Mr Jabour. The grille slides open on the Oriental Emporium, and he looks up from his keys, surprised: ‘Olivia, dear.’ Smiling his fond sleepy smile: ‘It is too early – you are working too hard. Gloria is worried about you, so am I. We never see you.’

  ‘I’m all right.’ I glance up the ground floor at all the sale signs in all the windows; Electrolux is throwing vacuums away for March, if you want one; Loughton’s Tableware is closing down up in the gods. Only the Jabours seem untouched by catastrophe. I spy the brass bottle on the sideboard in there, the ruby and sapphire glass of the stopper glinting in some shaft of light coming in from somewhere I can’t see – that’ll be the genie that’s looking after them. Or more likely that they only deal in the finest quality and most fabulous things – never out of style – and Mr Jabour, I now remember, has a new shipment from Iran just arrived, which is why he’s here at this hour too. And why I’m now peering harder as if I might see through the boxes stacked by the cutting table to spy the treasure within.

  ‘I suppose you are all right,’ he chuckles softly. ‘The young are always right. I was, when I was your age. I was exactly the same. Rushing around, working, working, working. I would hawk out on my own, from Broken Hill right down to Adelaide, and then go all the way back up to Sydney to buy. If I missed one sale, one bargain, one train, I thought: This is a disaster. It was the middle of the depression in the nineties then – and I went and opened my first shop, up on Flinders Street. It was madness. I don’t know what I was trying to prove.’

  He looks at me shrewdly for a moment, and then adds: ‘That shop: it burned down to the ground in my fifth week of business. I don’t know why – someone didn’t want me there. But it taught me a good lesson: don’t want things too much. It’s better to slow down, be happy with what you have before you want anything at all. Then, what you really want – it will come. It is a riddle, this life.’ And now he asks the riddle of me: ‘What do you want, dear, from all this hard work?’

  ‘What do I want?’ I don’t know. I want my ticket to Paris. To the world: New York. Then Madrid. Cairo. Shanghai. I want my designs to be famous across the globe. Infamous. And on my afternoons off, I want to be muse to Matisse, the maestro’s odalisque swathed in nothing but midnight velvet chiffon, lounging on a magic-carpet spun from lapis sky. With a copper fringe. Balancing a cherry on the end of my aquiline nose. I want articles about me appearing in Vogue, in French, to wipe the self-satisfied, stupid smile off Cassie Fortescue’s face and all like her – if they could manage to read an article that length in any language. All things fantastical is what I want, and I don’t know anything beyond my fantasies, my delicate and secret fantasies prone to shrinkage, warpage and utter devastation if subjected to a rainy day, and Mr Jabour knows I don’t.

  He says again: ‘Be happy.’ And then he rubs his round genie belly, changing the subject and not changing it at all: ‘So, what is it about this boy Warwick I’ve been hearing about? He is a lawyer, yes?’ Which means he has met the first criteria of Mr Jabour’s prospective husband list, thanks for sharing that confidence with your whole family and half of Beirut, Glor.

  I tell Mr Jabour: ‘Yes, he’s a lawyer, but he’s not my boy.’

  ‘Why not? Gloria says he’s going to be a barrister.’ What more could you possibly want? says Mr Jabour’s face. Gloria’s Paul Gallagher works for the firm that negotiated Mr Jabour’s son-in-law’s Tycoon shirt factory contracts with Gowings, so he’s two rungs up the criteria list already. The road to happiness is paved with lawyers, especially if they are also going to become good sons-in-law from respected Eastern Suburbs Catholic families that religiously vote Labor. It’s true: Gloria has won the happiness jackpot and knows it with all her heart: Paul is going to give her half-a-dozen beautiful Irish-Lebanese babies and a house in Dover Heights: they’ve already picked out the plot, new estate off Military Road, ocean view.

  Just as I know – the one thing I do know – that happiness doesn’t include any of that sort of thing for me; I tell Mr Jabour: ‘Warwick is a nice boy, but he won’t make me happy.’

  He gives that idea an ambivalent shrug, and as I turn to the stairs, he laughs me up them: ‘I will find you a nice boy to make you happy.’ Great booming laughter thundering around the stairwell and all through the empty arcade.

  ‘Run, Olivia!’ I do: laughing too, but scooting up and round the landings as if the genie’s after me.

  ‘Come back down in an hour, though, my dear!’ he calls. ‘I will have Persian tussahs for you! Special price!’

  Yo

  The first I hear of it is the quiet, some kind of stillness, even before Tarzan drops the gun as the workshop siren goes. Clarkie’s calling up to us with some word that’s come along from the phone: ‘Stop work! All men down!’ Something’s happened below.

  In the cradle going down, Merv, Mr Adams’s holder-up, says, ‘Reckon I seen a splash, to the northeast,’ but no one says anything else. No one knows anything except that the whole bridgeworks have stopped, even the shops. It’s something bad.

  ‘Addison,’ we’re told on the barge by Mr Harrison, who’s telling us especially. It was Nipper Addison. I don’t know him, except that he was a Pom and married a couple of months ago, not long after I started, and I had to put in a couple of shillings I didn’t have for his wedding. He was a boilermaker’s assistant. He was twenty-five. He could have been me. He fell a hundred and fifty feet, from the bottom chord, near where the road will soon be hung.

  ‘Nah,’ Mr Harrison is saying, ‘it’s not the fall that killed him. It seems he’s drowned, poor lad. He came up – half-a-dozen dived in for him but he went under again before anyone could get to him. They’re still looking for him now.’

  Then there’s just quiet. Just the water splashing against the barge, then the engine winding up. Someone calling out off a pontoon a hundred yards away or so, still looking for Nipper Addison.

  ‘You go home, Eoghan, if you need to,’ says Mr Adams as we pull in to the dock; they’re sending everyone home that works at height, should they need to get home, get to a pub, get away.

  But I can’t move from the dock. No one can. Everyone from the shops has come out into the sun. There’s nothing going on, four hours of the shift to go, but no one can do anything but roll a smoke and not say much. My mind is charging, though, mostly with the thought: that could have been me. And the other thought: I have to get off working at height. I have to get into the shops full-time, dog shift every night if I have to. What would happen to Ag if I was killed? I can’t dive; I can’t even swim. Tarzan and them lunatics – Sean Lonergan, Mick Doolan, Vince Kelly – they chuck themselves off coal gantries bare-chested and drink their winnings afterwards. I’m not one of them.

  Neither was Nipper Addison. Not reckless, nothing monkey-nutted about him: he was double-checking a bolt when he slipped, I’ve heard several say. Just slipped. No reason for it. ‘Just bad luck, poor Nip,’ I hear someone from his own gang say now. ‘He was that slow and careful he couldn’t keep worms in a tin. How could it happen to him?’


  ‘All right, come round, come round!’ The blacksmith, Tom Canning, who usually calls a union meeting, calls a meeting now, as Mrs Daly, the lady who does the pays, comes out of the shops and gets into a cab; they’re sending her to Mrs Addison, in Naremburn, to tell her before the rest of the world does. Naremburn: I’ve never been there, but I’ve seen it from the sky, every day. The suburbs to the north: all the tin roofs happy in amongst all the trees, gum trees and oak trees; all sorts of trees. Making a home there, they were, the Addisons.

  Jesus. I’m shivering with the question still: what would happen to Ag if I was killed? I miss most of what Tom Canning is saying as I think round and round it, while my hand goes into my pocket with everyone else’s for the collection, for Mrs Addison, in addition to what she’ll get from Dorman Long and the union. Whatever she ends up with, it won’t be enough; it won’t bring him back. But it will be something; she will be looked after. Jesus, but would Ag be?

  Mr Adams has got up now to speak, standing on top of a diesel drum, and he calls out to us in his no-horseshit way: ‘No man is replaceable.’ He stops there and the quiet returns, the stillness, and it stills my mind as well; there’s no man here not listening as he goes on.

  ‘Every man who leaves hearth and home daily to go to work is a soldier, make no mistake about that, gentlemen. Each and every one of you standing here, each man across this city and across this world, labours for his sustenance, his family, and for his country. You are soldiers who do not kill and destroy but who create our world for us. Like a soldier, the worker does not know whether this day will see his death on the job, or if he will survive. Unlike a soldier, the worker is not revered, nor celebrated. Every day he comes home safe to his family, it is a day like any other day. The rubbish is collected, roads and bridges and buildings are constructed, our coal is mined to light our homes, to warm our hearths, the trams and the trains and the buses run, shop doors open and close. Let us this day remember him who will not go home.’