The Blue Mile

by Kim Kelly

  Would Eoghan O’Keenan care if we dined on Leggo’s tinned tomato soup? That warm tingling feeling squiggles up the back of my neck and I know the answer. If I am to do this daring thing, this wonderful thing, I must begin as I wish to go on: as myself, stray bonbon wrappers down the side of the sofa and all. Be myself or no one at all. Be at home.

  So, I walk up to Dean’s bakery on Blues Point Road and buy the last lot of their Vienna pipe loaf, which we will have toasted with bacon and cheese and the tinned beetroot that’s sitting in the cupboard. My favourite scrumptious circle toasties. And for dessert . . . hm, I can’t decide. I ask the baker: ‘What shall I have, the apple cake or the cinnamon roll?’ He says: ‘Have both!’ I say: ‘Jolly good, then I shall.’ With custard. Custard I can make – the best custard ever. Need eggs. Yes.

  And a bottle of Quirks fizzy . . . raspberry or lime? Both! And a bottle of beer? Wine? I wonder as I pass Bluey’s pub on the corner. No. I wouldn’t know what to buy – I’m not old enough to ask for it anyway, I laugh to myself, and a man leaning against the tiles tips his hat: ‘Good afternoon, miss.’

  Yes. Glorious afternoon, it is indeed, as golden as the day began, with the low sun blasting across the point. When I turn back into East Crescent Street, even the Bridge is dusted in gold.

  Good God, but what am I going to wear?

  Yo

  ‘Yes, Yoey,’ Ag’s pulling on my coat up Darling Street, ‘you have to get flowers. Flowers and chocolates. That’s polite. That’s the rules.’

  ‘Rules?’ Several of them that I know of are already broken. How do you tell a child that? You don’t. I don’t. She made me shave. What are they teaching eight year olds today? It’s that public school. Jesus. How am I not going to kiss Olivia Greene again tonight? Because I’m not. I’ve got Ag with me. Get back in your skin, O’Keenan, it’s all right.

  ‘Look, sweetpeas – get them.’ Ag is dragging at me to a stop at the shop on the corner of Adolphus, pointing at the bucket of flowers by the step.

  ‘Aren’t they lovely, dear,’ Mrs Buddle agrees, coming out of the shop. ‘They tell you it’s the end of winter.’ And she waves her stick at me. ‘Special occasion?’

  ‘Er . . .’ I don’t know what to say, but Ag just about shouts it across the harbour anyway: ‘We’re going to have tea at Miss Olivia’s house. She’s a lady. She invited us. She’s so lovely, she’s prettier than anything that’s ever been written in a book!’

  ‘Is she, dear?’ Mrs Buddle thinks that’s a cracker, and she looks at me over her eyeglasses: ‘Well, I hope you both enjoy your tea.’

  ‘We will!’

  By the time Ag’s done we’ve got the sweetpeas and a tin of chocolate caramels and she says to me when we’re on the water: ‘See – look, it’s all matching. The sky, the sweets tin and the sweetpeas. Everything is all lilac and pink.’

  It is. The sunset is a cracker tonight. I say: ‘What, that’s the rule, is it? The sky’s got to match your flowers and your lolly tin?’

  ‘No, silly,’ Ag rolls her eyes. ‘It’s just nice. Isn’t it? All lilac and pink. And in Lavender Bay, too!’

  Yes, it is, even if it means we’re stony now till payday.

  And when Olivia Greene opens her door to us she is prettier than anything that’s ever been written in a book, and the dress she’s wearing matches the purple colour in the flowers too. Why wouldn’t it?

  ‘Oh!’ she says, with her hands going all around like little birds. ‘Oh, but you shouldn’t have. Oh! Oh, but I’m so very glad you did.’ She smiles over the sweets tin, a bit of wicked in it. ‘Caramel centres? Yum, yum, yummy, yum. Come in. Come in. I’m making circle toasties for dinner – special speciality of this house.’

  I’m going to marry this girl. I have to.

  Olivia

  He prefers lime fizzy to raspberry. So do I. He prefers pickles over chutney or sauce. So do I. As I make up the toasties, he chats away about their trip here. ‘The sky, it was just about the same colour as your dress – did you see it, ay?’ he asks and I answer: ‘Was it?’ Of course he has an eye for colour. Of course he does! But I’m not really taking in what he says. I’m listening to how he says what he says, the sounds and the shapes of his voice, the gentle lilt to his words. He says them instead of those, and me and Ag instead of Agnes and I. He says ay at the ends of his questions. It doesn’t bother me. Oddly, not really. It only seems right that he’s here in my kitchen and that Agnes is down the hall with her face at the front door ready to sing out if the lights come on before we’re settled on the picnic rug she’s laid across the steps.

  ‘This all looks too good to eat,’ he says as I slide the toasties onto a plate. ‘But I’m hungry, I have to admit.’

  ‘Good,’ I say, and I wonder what he might have had for lunch, if he had lunch. Do they eat lunch up on the Bridge? Suppose they must, but I don’t ask him; I’m not sure how to ask him anything. I don’t want to appear rude. Or too silly. So many questions. I start gathering our feast onto the tea tray and as I reach for the pickle jar, so does he and his hand touches mine. He doesn’t move it away and the tingle deepens and sizzles out from somewhere in the centre of my hips and swishes right down to my knees. I touch the back of his hand with my thumb, not accidentally. His beautiful fingers –

  ‘Yoey! Miss Olivia! Quick! Something’s happening!’ Agnes calls down the hall, and I fumble the pickles onto the tray, just about smashing one of the glasses as I do, lime fizzy sloshing everywhere. I laugh. So does he. Our laughter together, a ribbon twist of joy.

  ‘Look, look!’ Agnes is jumping about on the steps and I can see the sweep of searchlights in the rectangle of night around her. ‘Hurry up!’

  As soon as I place the tray on the top step, Agnes has her hand in mine and the lights come on over the arch, a double strand of pearls across the black.

  ‘Oh,’ I whisper as I sit down on the steps. ‘Look at that. It’s our gateway to Fairyland.’

  ‘Yes.’ Agnes climbs onto my lap. ‘You are exactly right about that, Miss Olivia.’

  Eoghan sits beside me and hands across the plate of circle toasties. I am so very happy in this moment. I’m so very happy I could cry. I want my dinner with Eoghan and Agnes O’Keenan on my front steps every night. I want this with all my heart. I make a wish for this, with all my heart.

  Yo

  ‘Can I go inside and look at the French magazines, Miss Olivia?’ Ag asks when she’s finished her tea. She makes a big act of yawning. She’s not tired. She’s had two cups of that raspberry Quirks – she’ll be talking in her sleep. She’s letting us alone, and I’m not disappointed about it.

  ‘Of course.’ Miss Olivia isn’t disappointed either. She says: ‘I’ll get you a rug, though – it’s chilly now.’

  She stands up on the step and I’m eye to ankle with her for a second; her stockings are so fine I can see through to her skin. I spend the next two minutes wanting to, listening to her footsteps in the house, and the way she chats with Ag has me seeing through to her heart. She is as good inside as out. Jesus, what am I doing here, with her? Am I good enough? I can’t be, can I? Am I sounding too much of a spoon to her; have I been too quiet or been talking too much? I don’t know. Help me.

  When she comes back she sits down beside me again and she says, looking out to the Bridge: ‘I wonder if I would ever be brave enough to go up there.’

  And whatever it is about her that makes me feel good makes me feel good now, forgetting I have anything to worry about at all. I tell her: ‘I’ll take you one day, and we’ll see. There’s a walkway, right across.’

  ‘No,’ she says, making an act of pulling herself away from the idea, pretending to be shocked. ‘I was only wondering.’

  And all I want to do is kiss her again. More than kiss her. But I will not. I tell her: ‘You’ll never have to wonder, not with me, Olivia. I’ll always think of you as I do right now, today. Whatever
might happen.’ That sounds like the greatest steaming line of spadework that ever was, for sure, but I mean it.

  She doesn’t say anything. She only looks back out at the Bridge. It really is the best view from here, not only of her. The way this house sits on the bend at the top of the cliff steps, it could be the only house in the world. We could be the only two people in the world. Up in the clouds.

  I ask her: ‘Are you not cold?’ That sounds even worse spadework, but I mean that too. I’m not cold. You could hit me with a blunt axe and I’d not feel it. But she might be cold. I don’t want her to be cold out here. I want her in my arms. Jesus.

  She shakes her head, still looking at the Bridge: ‘I think I might feel the same way, for you.’

  There isn’t a name for the feeling I have in return at that.

  And now she looks at me: ‘You know, I probably wouldn’t object if you kissed me again.’

  ‘No.’ That comes out of me quick to jolt us both away from it. As much as I think I’m going to die if I don’t kiss her in the next five seconds, I know I won’t stop there. I can’t stop there. I’m too scared to kiss her again for what it might lead to. What I know it will lead to, What it is leading to even without doing anything. Jesus, Ag is not ten yards away, up the hall behind us. I make myself remember Jack Callaghan’s girl, Mary Lightfoot, dead after the abortionist; let myself remember her mother’s wailing all down the street like a blunt axe to my head. No. I tell Olivia, ‘I meant what I said this morning. I want to marry you. One day.’

  She looks to be in some kind of pain at that idea. She says: ‘You’re religious, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, I won’t deny it. Maybe I’m not the average Mick that fucks first and begs forgiveness later, but I am a Catholic, and one with responsibilities, one who’s made too many bargains with God to count lately, and I don’t suppose she is one at all. I’m dead certain she’s not a Catholic. Lord, what are you doing, leading me here? As you must have done, because I haven’t come here wholly of my own accord, have I. I never set out for this girl. And it’s not wholly my religion stopping me from kissing her either. I tell her: ‘I am religious, but I am practical-minded too.’ I tell her again in case she’s missed it: ‘I mean to marry you, before . . .’

  She only looks in more pain at that, and then I really let her have it. I tell her: ‘I’ve given thought to it. In four years, I’ll be a qualified journeyman, at boilermaking, and on building construction that’s as much as sixteen pounds a week. I mean to earn that eventually. That’s almost twice a schoolteacher’s salary.’ What do I sound like? Like she would want to marry a boilermaker. Wholly and desperately monkey-nutted.

  But she doesn’t point that out to me. She’s more polite about it; she says: ‘Eoghan, I’m practical too. My business is turning over at least twice that at the moment. But that may not be the case next week, or the week after, for either of us. It’s all so precarious, for everyone. Who could plan to marry?’

  True enough. And she earns twice what I might do at the top of the trade. What hope do I have here? She’s not just a lady – she’s independent. I’ve really picked one, haven’t I.

  She says: ‘Oh, please don’t misunderstand me. It’s not a matter of money or class, not for me – believe me, I’ve given that some thought. And if you knew the half of my situation you might want to run a mile. I’m not of good stock.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I say. ‘You’d have to try hard to beat my stock for bottom of the barrel.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ she says. ‘My parents are divorced, for a start. Up until recently, my mother was a martini-swilling dance-hall socialite, while my father is always, always a philandering, reckless, good-for-nothing Don Juan, presently under arrest in Africa for the murder of a Hollywood actress.’ She makes a face of disgust and closes her eyes as she adds: ‘He’s a viscount.’ As if that explains all of what she’s just said.

  I start laughing, I’m not sure I know what a viscount is, or a martini, and she starts laughing too, that high tin whistle floating out over the night. When she laughs she’s even more . . . there’s no name for this either.

  She says: ‘My father will ruin me before you do.’ And she nudges her shoulder into mine as if we might’ve been friends for years: ‘What about you, then? How bad is your family?’

  My father’s fist smashes down between us and she must see something of that on my face. She says: ‘I’m sorry. That was rude. It’s a talent of mine.’

  ‘You’re not rude,’ I say, ‘you’re honest.’ And she may as well know the truth of it, if I mean anything I say. I tell her: ‘My father is not a good man, violent and usually drunk, and my mother is feeble and always drunk, probably on account of him more than anything. I’ve got one brother dead from them by hanging himself, and another I don’t where he’s gone. I had to get Ag away from them, away from where we lived, in Chippendale. That’s what we were doing when we first met you, that morning in the Gardens, getting away from them, getting away from Chippo.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her eyes go wide with something else I don’t have a name for. Some type of wonder. She says: ‘I see. You got away, in the Gardens. Good for you. That trouble with Child Welfare. I see.’

  She doesn’t see; she wouldn’t know the first thing about where we’ve come from or what trouble we’ve had. But I say: ‘Yeah. I win the bad family stakes then, ay?’

  She says, ‘No. No, you don’t.’

  She puts her hand on mine. Smoothing her fingers down over mine. She says: ‘You’re a good man, though. Admirably good. You’ve also got lovely hands.’ The shiver that sends through me is some sort of heavenly bliss, but still I don’t kiss her. Her face is an inch from mine, I can smell the lime drink and apple cake on her breath and still I manage not to kiss her. There’s a curl come free from the pin in her hair and there’s never been a greater mastery of will than my resisting the need here to brush it from her forehead.

  But my voice does crack a bit as I say: ‘I should get Ag home now, it’s getting late.’

  She nods and gives me a slow, crooked smile as we get up from the doorstep: ‘One way or another you will ruin me.’

  I promise her: ‘If it’s the last thing I do.’

  Please.

  She lets her smile take me fully: ‘But not if I ruin you first.’

  Olivia

  It’s the strangest thing, this calm. This warm, tingling calm of certainty. That yesterday, this morning, he was a dream, and now, here, as we say goodnight, he is a part of the fabric. My fabric. There is no going back from this.

  ‘Can I come to the salon again after school? Can I, please?’ Agnes looks from her brother to me, bursting bright with confidence that the answer must be yes.

  And I look to him. ‘It’s Wednesday today, isn’t it? Make it Wednesday again, then?’ Begin again as we’d meant to go on in the first place. This time, with conviction.

  He says: ‘All right, then. Wednesdays it is, for ruining.’

  ‘Ruining?’ Agnes asks, wanting to share the fun of whatever that might be. ‘What’s ruining?’

  ‘Never you mind,’ he says, sounding worried at the prospect already.

  Yes. It’s going to be awful. Utterly dreadful. And I’m not waiting four years for it, either, I am confident of that. I’m already running up a new dream, one in which the three of us travel to Paris on the RMS Fantastico. We can’t be together here, not in this world. It wouldn’t be acceptable, not to the upper circle. Murderous aristocracy is one thing; wedding a tradesman is entirely another. I would lose my clientele overnight. Get thee direct to Homebush – where the middling matrons might not buy from me either, from one who is young and newly married and in business. A girl can’t win, and I don’t want any of that suburban phlerghishness anyway. I want us to be each other’s inspiration, slaves to love and beauty, in our cosy magic-carpeted salon on the Left Bank of the Seine.

  Mon
Dieu, chérie, but you have eaten too much sugar tonight.

  But how can I not love him? This rescuer and protector of little girls. They did sleep in the Gardens that night, didn’t they, I know it now, and that thought does not appal me in the slightest. It only makes him more heroic. He is perfection in a man. Look at the particular and careful way he’s unfolding his sister’s cardigan now and tell me those hands wouldn’t best be pinning and cutting silk. I want to marry him – now. I want to beg him to stay, beg him to have me – now.

  He says: ‘Well, we’ll see you Wednesday, then.’

  I almost groan. ‘Wednesday, then.’

  ‘Yay!’ Agnes bounces between us, and just as they’re leaving I reach for his hand and pull him back to me, into the hall. I brush my lips against his, to breathe in his smell, that salty man smell, and something else – is that Ponds Cold Cream?

  He whispers: ‘No.’

  I whisper: ‘Yes.’

  I bend to kiss Agnes too, ‘See you soon, poppet,’ and when they’ve disappeared down the steps to the wharf, I close the door and I bounce around too. All night. I can’t sleep a wink from scheming. How can I make it all possible for us? I finish cutting the lining for Lady Game’s District Nurses and I keep seeing his hands as I do, those beautiful fingers. They’re not boilermaking metal-thumping hands. They’re tailor’s hands. Surely. We shall go into business together. Surely. There must be a path for us . . . somehow. White tux and some elocution lessons, perhaps . . . but who would want to change a thing about him? A white tuxedo on that shoulderline, though – truly, what sane woman wouldn’t want that? He wouldn’t have to open his mouth at all.

  Well past dawn, I’ve almost finished tacking up the vice-regal frock when I hear the mail clunk through the slot with the post boy’s call: ‘Telegram!’ It’s from Mrs B Harley, and I almost don’t want to open it. Mother. Whatever is in it, I don’t want to know. I don’t want it to intrude on the whirl of my new dream. But it glares at me until I open it, and read, in her code: Ignore Lordship drama. Not his fault for once. Accident with pills. Poor silly girl. All good here. Letter in mail. Please write again soon. Miss you darling. Love Mother.