The Blue Mile

Read The Blue Mile Online

Authors: Kim Kelly

About
The Blue Mile

As 1929 draws to a close, Irish–Australian Eoghan O'Keenan flees his abusive family home, gets a job on the Harbour Bridge and embarks on a new life in Balmain.

In her cottage on the north side of Sydney at Lavendar Bay, the chic and smart Olivia Greene is working on her latest millinery creations, dreaming of becoming the next Coco Chanel.

A chance meeting between them in the Botanic Gardens sparks an unconventional romance. But with vastly different backgrounds and absolutely nothing in common, the blue mile of harbour separating Olivia and Eoghan is the least of the obstacles that threaten their love.

By mid-1932, the construction of the Bridge is complete, but the city is in chaos as the Great Depression begins to bite and the unemployed edge ever closer to a violent revolt.

And then Eoghan disappears.

Set against the spectacular backdrop of Sydney Harbour, The Blue Mile is a tale of both the wild and calculated gambles a city took to build a wonder of the world, and of the marvellous risks some people are willing to take for the love of a lifetime.

For Nin & Nana

They lie, the men who tell us, for reasons of their own,

That want is here a stranger, and that misery's unknown;

For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet

My windowsill is level with the faces in the street.

Henry Lawson, ‘Faces in the Street', 1888

At present I am afraid there is nothing very hopeful to be said for Australia.

Otto Niemeyer, Bank of England, 1930

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

Gabrielle ‘Coco' Chanel, ageless

One

Yo

T
here aren't any trees in Chippendale. I see this now, this evening, as if I'm seeing it for the first time, as if I'm not stepping out the door of the Native Rose for the hundredth time to find this street treeless. Cleveland Street. There are telegraph poles here, a mile of them all along it, but there are no trees. Only telegraph poles, which used to be trees.

I look the other way, behind me, where there are trees. I can see the tops of the figs of Victoria Park, but they're in Darlington, and beyond them the trees at the university, fenced off from us. Precious trees, they must be. I look down at my boots: here, on the footpath, in Chippo.

Keep looking down at these boots, until they stop swimming about beneath me. I'm a bit shickered, I see, and very possibly for the last time, for a while at least. I've been drinking here at the Rose since three, drinking my last pay too. None of which discredits the fact of there being no trees in Chippendale. There is not a struggling blade of grass to piss on in Chippo. Only telegraph poles.

‘Move it along, Yo.' Jack's fists smash down onto the back of my shoulders as he jumps off the step of the pub behind me, more shickered than me, on the rum for the last few.

‘Move it along, the pair of you.' Cully closes the door after us, pretending he's not happy with our efforts to empty our pockets into his till. We're the last out. I'm almost always the last out. Round the corner into Shepherd Street, O'Gorman's dragging his heels ahead of us, Finnerty and Nash ahead of him, two dozen or so heading home. Any ordinary Thursday evening, it could be, each of us having dutifully played our parts in the daily transference of cash from factory to publican.

‘Giz a smoke then.' Jack takes the tin from my pocket and helps himself, leaning into me too hard, so that I fall over my feet and into the gutter – with the last of my tobacco flying over the road and mostly into a pile of horseshit.

‘Too clever, Jack,' I thank him for it.

‘Oi sorry, Yo.' He's looking at the horseshit, reckoning the for and against.

I shove him along: ‘You spoon-headed idiot.'

But I soon pull him back as we near the corner of Pine Lane. The factory. Our factory. Foulds Boots, from which we got well and truly booted today. The low sun is coming off the windows on the building, making them golden, and Mr Foulds is standing beneath them, locking up, saying goodnight to Mrs Whitby who oversees the girls. Three hours ago he was saying he was sorry to us. Jack takes in a breath beside me, but before he lets it out again, I say: ‘Leave it.'

It's not going to help us much to be in trouble as well as unemployed, and Foulds is not a bad sort of fella. At least he bothered with an explanation. It's the fault of this ‘trade depression business biting in', he said; and that the girls will take a third as much as us now that we're men, he didn't say. I turned twenty-one on the nineteenth of June, exactly six months ago today, should be grateful I was kept on that long, bad planning on my part that I didn't see it coming. Didn't look. Jack'll be twenty-one come February, not that you'd know it, the veteran way he drinks, but that's meant Foulds'd have to put his pay up too, or risk the fine from the inspector. He's not a bad sort of fella, Mr Foulds, no. He wouldn't underpay a man, wouldn't risk a fine – he's avoiding that by not employing any men at all.

It's the week before Christmas; I was going to buy Aggie a new dress.

My own fist curls into a ball, a hot ball of anger. Useless anger.

Foulds sees us over his shoulder and he's quick to be off, going round the corner a block out of his way to the train. Home to his family. Somewhere in Petersham, he lives. There'd be plenty of trees there. I'll bet he's got a garden, with his own tree in it, kids hanging off it everywhere. I'll bet he sleeps well in his bed, without much of a thought for us, if he has a thought at all.

‘It's all sorry O'Paddy to some!' Jack shouts after him, and I pull him back, pulling myself back too.

‘Leave it, Jack. It's all O'Paddy to the cops too, you know.'

He stops still on the footpath. Staring at nothing, the uselessness coming over him too. Staring at the future, at tomorrow, no work to get to. Nothing.

Nothing but a worn out joke between us: ‘You know O'Paddy's easier for them to spell,' I say.

So he says: ‘I can't spell your name either, Yo.'

And I say, ‘Can't argue with that,' as we start moving along again, because there isn't any argument in it. Jack's not a spoon, not really, he's not ignorant, but he can't spell, has trouble enough with his own name, Callaghan, despite Sister Joe's efforts with the ruler, too long ago now. I can still feel it, though, smashing across the back of my own hand:
Get to the Devil then, Eoghan O'Keenan
.
Get out!
Couldn't win an argument then, either.

Jesus, where am I going to now? Where am I going to find another job? And you know I'm not blaspheming with this wonder, Lord; I'm praying for the answer. It's going to be the same story all over Chippo. I will knock and ask at every door, at every
No Situations Vacant
sign, at the knitting mills on Wellington Street, the shirtmakers on Abercrombie, the sweets factory at the corner of Mooregate and Daniels. I will take any work. But they'll all be wanting girls, if they'll be wanting anyone, paying them on air and lint and crumbs of peppermint. Not men. And not ones called Eoghan O'Keenan. Are men with names such as mine even considered to be men? Eoghan –
How do you say that again?
Yo-un, it's not that hard – Owen will do if you're not too keen on your whys, or you're not my mother, pity her.
Come again?
Ah, forget it. Forget we have names at all. Or a need for living wages. What are we then? Dead men?

No, get away with that. I'm living, all right. Only pissed, more than usual, and for the last time, O'Keenan. It's always the last time, isn't it? It is, this time, unless I can get another wage of some kind. I tell Jack: ‘We should go up to Redfern in the morning, try at the Lebbo places.' The Syrian factories; I've heard they've got a new one, bed linens and that, and their shirt makers have always got work on of one sort or another.

But Jack says: ‘The Lebbos?' Turning his lip up as if I've just said let's go and see about work picking the filth off the legs of cockroaches, never mind the ten minute walk to Redfern to save the tram fare.

A job's a job, though, isn't it? I need the money. I don't care if it's not the proper wage they'll be offering, or what bargain makes the inspector never take a look in them Lebbo shops. We turn into Myrtle Street, our street, past Gibsons on the corner, the furniture factory, where I worked before Foulds, sweeping first, as a boy, and then lugging dressers and wardrobes and that, and no one's working there now. It closed down a fortnight ago, laying everyone off: seventeen men and boys; the Finnertys have not got a man in work in their house now. Jesus. Remember when I got the job stitching at Foulds, though? I'd thought I was something special, with the machine work. I thought I was getting some skill at it. I was there nearly three years – three
years,
that's a long time to be working anywhere in this world. But I know I do a good job when I'm at any sort of work: I have to. Why else would Foulds have kept me on so long on a man's wage? Remember: I've never been sacked before this day. Not even from my first job stacking the bottles at Quirks cordials – the boss there put me on to Gibsons when he was closing up to move out west. Because I'm worth a job. I have to get another job. I will get another job, trade depression horseshit or no. And I'm getting another one – tomorrow.

‘Reckon I'll go up and say hello to Hammo tonight – you coming?' Jack says, picking up his pace with the idea.

‘No,' I say; I won't be going up to say hello to Mick Hammond tonight, or any night. But I hear what Jack's suggesting: Hammo's done better for himself than anyone else we know, going in with Tex Coogan, looking after his girls for him at the knocker at Strawberry Hills. Why not be the dirty O'Paddys we were born to be? And end up dead quickly too: Tex Coogan is after a share of the coke trade up at the Cross, is the word. I tell Jack: ‘You should leave that alone too.'

He doesn't answer me; he says, ‘See you later on, then,' and he ducks under the verandah of his house, gate banging behind him, with the number seven swinging upside down on it beside the eight of number eighty-seven, hanging on by a nail.

I want to shout after him, tell him again, he should leave that alone, but I don't. It's his business what he does, and we've got different concerns. I cross the road, following the eternal fart of boiled cabbage and bacon bones home: if that's what you might call the place, when you're not calling it the gateway to Satan's arsehole. One hundred and twenty-two Myrtle Street, but there's no number on this gate.

And I can't believe my luck today as I find the Lord of Darkness himself is here in visitation: the front door's wide open and I can see right through to the kitchen, the shape of his boots stretched out there by the table.

My father is home, and far too early for it. It can't be six-fifteen yet. He won't have lost his job today, too, I can be certain of that: he's a carter for Tooths and rusted on with them. Only two minutes at a stagger up on George Street West, but he's never home before nine o'clock at least, staying on at Ryan's, the tap next door, as long after closing as is necessary to be certain my mother will be thoroughly, and I might say mercifully, unconscious with the Royal Reserve on his return, if he comes home at all.

Jesus. No blasphemy in this one either. I am a dead man now. He's heard I've been sacked, hasn't he. It's my wages pay the rent and put food on that table.

I'm not for a bashing. Fuck this. No. Not now, I'm not having this now, too. I turn around, going to the Callaghans', I've decided – I'll go and say hello to Hammo tonight after all. But I don't even get across the road. A motor car speeds past through a puddle that splashes right up over the pickets of the verandah and onto my boots. I see the shape of a woman's hat, in the backseat, as the motor heads round into Abercrombie at the Oak, a red hat in a white motor, taking a fast shortcut through nowhere. I could hurl myself after it, hurl myself across the roof of that motor to get away, get anywhere, but that Aggie chooses now to hurl herself at me: ‘Yo-Yo!'

My little sister, wrapping herself around my knees, preventing any sort of escape, settling my fate.

‘Evening, Ag.' I pick her up, little slip of nothing that she is. Seven, and small for it, smaller still under her head full of wild black curls, and telling me through her lost front teeth, ‘You smell like beer.'

‘I'm sure I do,' I tell her. Aggie: her blue eyes bright and fearful and wanting. Very possibly hungry. I stop still in her eyes for this second, her skinny arms around my neck as if they might afford me some protection. I say: ‘We'll go out and get some chips in a bit, yeah?'

‘Eoghan!' he shouts. Our father.

Aggie nods and I put her back down on the doorstep. She slips into the front room, where she'll hide under our mother's bed till he's finished.

‘Eoghan, you scruttery fuck, get in here!' No scrape of the kitchen chair. He's not going to bother to get up and find me; he's so sure I'll come, to save our mother the bashing instead, or delay it, while anyone who hears or cares decides it's Kath O'Keenan, our mother, the one who has trouble with the drink. Jesus, but you know I could run and leave them both to it, run as both my brothers have before me.

But that Ag is waiting, and she's waiting for me, because I'm all that she has, bag of horseshit that I might be.

I'll take what's coming.

‘
Screan ort
!
' He smashes his fist down onto the table.

Yes, our father, telling me I'm damned. At least I might still be pissed enough not to feel it too much. Then me and Ag'll go out for some chips. We'll have to go to Kennedy's, though, up on Regent Street by the tracks: they're open late.

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