by Kim Kelly
‘Trouble?’ Oh, hilarity, I know this is trouble. Eoghan O’Keenan. A fantasy upon a fantasy. He can’t possibly be feeling this tingling too. He’s only grateful that I brought his sister back, and I can barely hear my footsteps on the path, that’s how high above him I am. In trouble. I tell him: ‘No trouble at all. You can come and pick her up after your night school. I’m just near the top of the steps up from McMahons Point wharf, can’t miss the house – it looks just like yours.’
Toot. Toot.
Yo
Heading back home, Ag says: ‘You love Miss Greene, don’t you, Yo-Yo?’
‘I do not,’ I say. ‘I don’t know her. You don’t love someone after five minutes.’
‘You do, though, don’t you, Yoey?’
Yes, I might well do. Ag’s skipping backwards ahead of me up the hill, happier than she’s ever been. I might love Miss Greene. I’m still holding her card in my pocket, don’t want to let it go if it might break this spell.
I see Mrs Buddle’s front lamp is off as we pass her geraniums; she’ll have seen us then, or heard already that Ag is home, safe and well. Good. I might love Miss Greene so much I can’t stop in to chat right now because I don’t know what to say.
Olivia
‘What are you all dreamy Dora about?’ Glor asks me as I button her in. ‘You haven’t stopped smiling since you got here. Are you unwell?’
‘You are a terrible friend, Gloria Jabour. Can’t a girl just be happy? I have a hundred reasons to be.’
‘A hundred new clients?’ she scoffs. ‘Business isn’t everything, Ollie.’ She looks at me in the mirror, eyelids at half-mast: scornful. ‘I don’t like you being alone. Gives me the shivers you over there all by yourself at night. Dad’s invited Hoddy Delmont to the party, especially for you – he’s with Customs House, junior inspector, and yes, he’s got a law degree. Be nice to him.’
‘I shall.’ Customs House? That gives me a shudder: I can only think he must be Cassie Fortescue’s drug runner, briefcase full of cocaine-filled matchboxes – that’s how they do it, isn’t it?
‘Oh, my. Oh, Olivia . . .’ Mrs Jabour appears at the door of Glor’s bedroom: ‘Oh my, my, my, what have you done?’ She inspects my beading at the neckline, shakes her head delightedly scandalised at the plunging backline. ‘You are a maker of dreams, my girl, a maker of dreams. But Gloria,’ Mrs Jabour drops identical eyelids at her daughter, ‘you are too thin – I can see your bones.’
‘Mum.’
Arabian princess eyeball-rolling contest ensues, with a backhanded smack to Gloria’s copper-shot derriere and a: ‘Hurry up, daughter, your father is waiting in the car.’
‘Hurry up, Norma!’ Aunty Karma shrieks for Mrs Jabour up the two flights of stairs, up from the kitchen, and over half of Beirut bustling in the hall.
‘Where are my earrings?’
‘It’s going to rain – get the umbrellas!’
‘No it’s not – don’t be stupid! Where is my coat – who took my coat?’
‘Don’t forget the tabouli, oh my God! It’s in the red tin, under the eggs.’
The tabouli is found, thank God, and stuffed into the back of Eddie Nasser’s Tycoon factory lorry with the rest of the seventeen tons of food Mrs Jabour and Aunty Karma have made for the party.
HONK HONK! HONK HONK! Mr Jabour presses the horn of the Oldsmobile every few seconds, the whole five minutes from Randwick to Waverley, just to hear Gloria wail each time: ‘Dad – stop it. Please – please. You are so embarrassing.’
‘What, Gloria? Can’t a father be proud?’
I’m half-ruined from laughing before we’ve even pulled up at the tennis club, where inside everything is a wonder whirl of beautiful: peacock drapes over the windows, a starburst of silver ribbon across the ceiling, everything twinkling with loveliness, with Mr Jabour’s particular style and pride. Especially beautiful are Glor and Paul. Their eyes meet across the roomful of napkins embroidered with G&P and it is fact: their babies will be the most gorgeous babies ever made.
Hoddy Delmont isn’t too bad either I decide when Velma points him out. He’s at least six inches taller than me, with the most lush auburn hair, and quick about introducing himself with the line: ‘I’ve heard so much about you, Miss Greene – most of it good.’ Witty and a little debonair, he is. ‘You’re a dreadful dancer, too, I’m told – shall we?’ He gives me his arm as a saxophone calls all to the floor, and I take it. Why not? I don’t even notice my feet are moving, much less take a moment to worry about how I might be making a muddle of this first waltz, whatever it might be. Because I’m in a dream. I am dancing on air in a wonder whirl with Eoghan O’Keenan. My Bridge boy. I can’t even think of the Bridge, much less look at it, without my heart tumbling and swooshing and waving for him. I quickstep across girders swinging off cable strings all night long and there’s not a joke I don’t laugh at, not a glint off the crystal that doesn’t singularly thrill.
And when the cab takes me home under the arch on the punt, I look up and send my wishes right up through the tiny space that’s left between the arms. I want our arms to meet. I want to kiss him. I’ve never wanted to kiss any boy. Ever.
I dream it through until dawn, until I’m back on the ferry and under the Bridge again. Looking for him up there. I don’t actually wave. But I am wearing my flame-red cape in the hope that he will not fail to see me and I am indeed smiling as wide as I can smile. Like a lovestruck loon.
Yo
‘You want to hit a ferry or catch one, Pretty Boy?’ Tarzan shouts in my face after I’ve missed the rivet for the third time. I never miss and there is no excuse today: not a breath of wind and Clarkie is cooking not two yards away from us. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you this morning?’
‘Nothing, just a bit tired.’ Just a bit looking for her on every ferry that passes under, looking across the bay at her house. It’s easy to pick that out, right on the bend of the road, between a block of flats and a big old boarding house. I walked over there yesterday, telling myself I should check for Ag’s sake. Jesus help me.
Tarzan does; he says: ‘Miss another and I’ll send you down.’
Not necessarily by the cradle.
‘Right,’ I nod, but I have another sly look at the ferry passing under now. I see a red coat standing on the stern of this one and I think it’s her.
Olivia
Even the welcome bunting for the new Governor at the Quay is beautiful. Customs House is a great big beribboned gift and I am so high I could twirl up to its top balcony, pop myself there like great big red rosette.
‘Are they here yet?’ I ask the man at the kiosk and he points out beyond the wharves: ‘Almost. Ship’s been sighted off the heads, miss.’
‘Jolly good!’ I toot. Everything is so sparkling fabulous I barely notice the blind digger has been shooed off from his post under the awning for the day. There are plenty of policemen about to take care of that sort of thing, I see, twenty or more strolling around through the morning crowd: move along poverty, move along unemployed unfortunates, only beautiful ones allowed around here today.
‘Miss,’ a policeman by the corner of Pitt tips his cap and smiles at me as if I might be beautiful too. Perhaps I might even dare to believe I am. I float up through the chaos of carts and cabs, up, up, up to the salon to complete my gift to Lady Game, and I know exactly what I am. I am searching amongst my boxes of bits in the stockroom for just the right gold buckle to place on the moss cashmere – when a masterstroke of inspiration takes me. This hat does not want a tame and dreary little sports-mistress buckle at all. It wants a small but festive spray of Sydney wattle. A few deft twists of some lemon and chartreuse satin cord and it’s an elegant explosion of joy. It’s so beautiful I could almost cry.
‘That is absolutely darling,’ Liz Hardy’s mother says of my wattle when she calls in for some inspiration on a new winter coat. I float over to the chaise to show he
r my sketch for the pea-style, and by the time she leaves, I’ve got three patterns to cut, including the gamboge tussah for the window, to catch the eye of Lady Game. But before I get to that, I wrap the vice-regal cloche in tissue and, with the rest of my sample sketches, I pack it into one of my new white Olivia Couture boxes. I’m so pleased with these boxes, tied with a black ribbon, that is the signature of my salon. Mine. Tie the ribbon tight with wishes now: if I should catch Lady Game’s eye, my life really will change. Even still, the thrill of this idea, this anticipation of dreams come true, pales in comparison to my waiting for Wednesday.
It’s fortunate then I am so flat-out hectic over these next seventy-two hours, otherwise I might explode and etherise entirely before we get there. Before little Agnes’s darling face appears at the window at twenty-two minutes to four. Waving, excited as I am: ‘Miss Greene!’
Straightaway she spies the little mannequin I’ve set out for her, still with her own creation pinned on it, and she squeals: ‘You kept it for me!’
I must have done, mustn’t I. I’ve been far too busy to clear the stockroom of extraneous bits lately is the truth of it. Or is it simply fate after all? Kismet, as the Arabs say.
Agnes sits down at my table, and I watch her stitch another and then another row of rickrack zigzags to her lemon Fuji skirt, while I dress the big mannequin in the gamboge for the window. So like I was when I was small, such concentration with the needle. Except that she is so full of chatter today. Was I ever such a chatterbox? She tells me all about her friends at school, especially her best friend Gladdy Hanrahan, who always brings the best sandwiches for lunch as her dad’s a foreman at the soap factory, and she’s the champion at jumping ropes in the playground.
‘I love Gladdy, I do. I loved her the first second I saw her. I’m allowed to call her mum Aunty Fern. But Aunty Fern, she was so cross that I didn’t run away to her house. I did at first, I told her. I ran all the way up to Rowntree Street to her house – it’s so far and I ran so fast I thought my legs would fly off or go on fire. But when I got there, their dog Maxie was out the front barking, and I’m even more scared of him than that lady from Welfare – he’s big and black and there he was snarling at me through the gate and I don’t believe he wouldn’t bite me even though everyone says he wouldn’t – and so I had to run again. And that’s when I knew the only one to help me was you.’
You knew. You darling, darling thing. I say: ‘You’re full of stories, you are.’
She nods: ‘I am. I love stories.’
‘Why do you love stories?’
‘I don’t know.’ She shrugs and snips a squiggle. ‘I think stories must be like the air – without them my brains can’t breathe.’
‘That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard, Agnes,’ I tell her, and in the smile she gives me in reply, I simply can’t imagine ever being without her. I want her in my afternoon every day. Pick up squiggles and pack away to her merry chatter every day. ‘Home time,’ I say and it’s another fabulous adventure to her. As we walk down to the Quay, through the spent bunting, all grimy and torn, I almost ask her why she’s really here, with me. I want to know about her mother; what happened to her. But I resist; I’m sure it’s not something good. Instead, I say as we head under the arch: ‘Your brother is very brave to work up there.’
She shrugs, looking up at the box-thing of men coming down above us. ‘Oh, he’s scared out of his brains all the time. It’s only the rubber on their sandshoes that sticks them on. But he says anything worth doing is scary.’
Like love, chérie, Madame Chanel whispers over the water. Avoid it if you can.
No. I don’t want to avoid it. At the door of my house, I am drawn by another impulse thus far foreign to me: I have to tidy up in here. Good God, the place looks like a bomb has hit it – a rainbow bomb – half my wardrobe spilling into the hall trying to crawl itself to the drycleaners. Line of smalls across the kitchen window – the Flags of Slattern. His house was so neat . . . and clean . . . even the hearthstone was swept.
‘Miss Greene! Look at all your special things!’ Agnes is in little-girl heaven amongst a pile of scarves spilling out of their basket.
‘You don’t happen to want to help me sort all this mess out, do you?’
‘Oh, can I, please?’
We tidy my house: scarves in basket, clothes on hangers, fabric scraps and magazines in orderly piles, all conspicuous bonbon wrappers and squiggles removed. We feast on scrambled eggs and tinned asparagus. And then we settle down on the sofa to wait. Agnes is in a world of wonder with a stack of old Vogues, and I watch her: so like me, she is, lost inside the pages so immediately. I prattle silly into a House of Drécoll sketch across her knees: ‘Did you know there’s a designer called Agnes too? French, with a grave accent over the e and you don’t pronounce the g – so you say Anyes. Madame Agnès Havet of Paris – she was very famous when I was a little girl, when I was just about your age. She was the designer to the Empress of Russia.’
Agnes looks up at me and through me to some sequinned splash of her imagination: ‘An empress?’
‘Yes.’ My smile is the thrill of then and now entwined: ‘Lots of crushed velvet and brocaded bodice panels, all Grecian goddess lines. A bit old-fashioned now, I suppose, on the wheel of fashion fortune . . . but I’m sure I’ve kept some of those old Les Modes of Mother’s somewhere. I’ll show you . . .’ I get up to look into the impossible mess under my bed for Russian empresses, for those days before the Titanic sank the world into a war and raised the price of hemlines.
I release a squeak of a shriek under the bed while I’m here: ‘Oh God!’ Eoghan. Eoghan O’Keenan. Oh dear God. He is coming here. I am waiting for him. I am waiting to explode.
Yo
Get it into your spooned-out head that Miss Greene is not in any way interested in you personally. She’s fond of Agnes. Who wouldn’t be? And she’s obviously a kind girl. For a lady. She’s a lady. A charitable lady. She’s not interested in me. She’s not interested in someone wearing a naval surplus coat of wool so mean the sheep wanted its money back, but the only union-labour approved one I could get without pawning my arse. Nor would she want someone who spends Saturday nights on dog shift getting deafer from rivet holes going into plate indoors and still can’t afford gloves for the catching, because I’m still paying off the tool belt I had to get and it’s only got a hammer and chisel in it yet. And even if she’d have a pauper, she’d not be after one come from where I’ve come from. Not this side of hell.
But she has to be wanting me, says that voice from the other side. It’s the Devil. Made me get a haircut yesterday. Made me nearly take my hand off on the planer just now at tech to demonstrate a quick amputation to the class.
The steps are too steep and too few going up to her house. To her door, and I’m knocking on it, my heart filling my mouth so wholly I won’t be able to speak. Speak to her. I’ll have to.
Jesus, and the door is opening, and she’s saying: ‘Hello there. Yes, good evening. No trouble finding us? Of course not. Er – Mr O’Keenan. Should I better call you Eoghan? Oh, I don’t know. What’s decorum here? Do come in, please. I have Agnes hard at work reading fashion magazines. She’s had an awful time of it. Ha.’
This is the girl I’m going to marry, her hands fluttering all about as she talks, saying my name so it sounds like Yon, because that’s how she says it, so that’s what it is.
‘La la la la la la la. I do go on, don’t I.’
Don’t ever stop.
I’m going to marry you, Miss Olivia Greene. Yes, I am.
Olivia
‘Well, we won’t keep you longer. It was very nice of you to have Agnes over this evening. Say thank you to Miss Greene, Ag,’ he says, slowly, carefully, as if he might’ve been robbed of his personality on the way here.
And I know. I don’t know how I know, but there’s something in his eyes, something in his looking aw
ay from me as he does, that tells me now: he feels this too. This tingling . . . singing . . . swooping . . . sensation. Sensational, he is. The collar of his duffel coat turned up at the back of his neck; the flush of his cheek; his fair skin; his dark hair. Black on white, and those deep blue – ooh . . .
He’s folding Agnes’s magazine and placing it back on the pile. He smooths out the dog-eared bottom corner of the cover, unthinkingly respectful of the value in everything. I see his fingers again, such fine fingers on one who does metal things. Such pristine and particularly cared-for fingernails. These are tailor’s hands. Hands for fine work; hands to make valuable things with. He has a grazy scrape on the back of his left one and I want to kiss it.
Agnes says: ‘Thank you, Miss Greene. I’ve had such a lot of fun.’
I say to both of them: ‘Please, call me Olivia.’ And I retie the bow at the end of her plait, as much to still my hands, my damn nervy hands, as to slake the compulsion for tying untied bows. ‘I suppose you do have to go home,’ my attempt at a sigh comes out in little fly-away breaths and can’t hide the plea when I add, ‘so that you might come back again. Yes?’
‘Can I, Yoey?’ Please.
‘Well, I don’t know, Ag, I . . .’
He looks to be in a torment over it. Please be in a torment for me, and not some other thing, some other girl. My conscience says it should be another girl. Some nice girl from Balmain. But I can’t help it. If it’s cruel, it’s cruel to us equally: please.
He says: ‘All right, then. Next Wednesday will be all right, I think.’
‘Hooray!’ Agnes throws her arms around his waist, and I don’t know how I’m going to last the week.
