The Blue Mile (25 page)

Yo

‘
Y
es, 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

H
e 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

‘
C
an 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

I
t'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.

Poor silly girl. That slides down my spine like a bead of ice. Never mind, there'll be another along soon. More importantly, his Lordship's drama has blown over, within the week, too. How convenient. Ignore it. Finish the tacking and pack up my troubles in my carpet couture bag, it's time to reopen the salon.

Time to flick through a newspaper, too,
et voilà
I find one left on the ferry on my way to the Quay now telling me that the Viscount Mosely, Lord Ashton Greene, is upon his release from questioning reportedly heartbroken by the untimely loss of Gigi McAllister. He says:
The light has been extinguished from my world.

God, how I hate him.

I look up at the Bridge, for Eoghan, for he
is
there. This dream is solid steel, crisp and clear, and I will have it all. I will be loved. I will be fabulous. Damn Lord Ashton Greene. I will never let him near my thoughts again; I will never let any stupid fears shake me from my path again.

My steps have never been surer. These Pitt Street shop windows are the galleries that line my way to happiness, this bright jostling of colour, of life, weaving round the verandah poles. Real life. Ned tosses me an apple from his barrow as I pass: ‘For that smile of yours this morning, miss.'

I blow him a kiss. One for Glor, too, across the cutting table of the Emporium as I swing round the banister and fly up the staircase. To
my
salon. I snatch the note from the window of the door. I'm back in business this minute, and picking up the telephone, calling Government House, for Lady Game. I get Miss Crowdy on the line first, of course: ‘Yes, who is it?' she says in her no-time-wasters way. On any other day I might have to fight myself not to stumble at it, but not today.

I say in my own no-time-wasters way: ‘It's Olivia Greene. As promised, I have Lady Game's outfit for the District Nursing Association event ready for a fitting. When might that be convenient?'

‘It is not at all convenient for Lady Game to break from her schedule at present,' Miss Crowdy almost barks. Impatient. Aha, I think. Here's my top client, putting the phone down on the end of our relationship. Too much of a scandal risk, that Olivia Greene. Bloody well damn you. Damn the lot of you – I'm ready to snarl.

But Miss Crowdy barks again: ‘You'll have to come here, girl. Four-thirty and half an hour only – that's all you've got.'

‘This afternoon?'

‘Yes, of course,' she sighs: I'm such a waste of time, I am.

I say: ‘I'll be there.'

*

Humble servant that I am. Lady Game is very much the Lady this afternoon: distracted. Busy. Cool. ‘Oh yes. Lovely print,' she says of the georgette: whatever. No private wardrobe secretary intimacy for me today. I'm on my knees, repinning the hem to bring it down half an inch, when Lady Game says, as if she's returned to the warmth of herself: ‘I'm sorry to put you out like this, Olivia, calling you over here in your business hours. You must've had an interesting week?'

I take a deep breath in through the pins before responding to that. I've had a very interesting week, and let's put the best of it at the top of this breath to steady it: I've fallen dreadfully and irrevocably in love with the man I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. There. Let that secret warm me against the other. The other is hardly secret anyway. Lady Game would know of my father. She would know of the scandal. But I'm unsure if she knows as yet of my relation to it – she wouldn't know I'm his daughter unless someone told her, would she? Which means she probably knows.

I take the pins out of my mouth: ‘Yes, it's been an interesting week.' Say nothing more; if Lady Game wishes to pry, let her.

She says, with that distracted air again: ‘I went to school with your aunt – well, your father's sister, who would have been your aunt. Poor dear Phoebe. Do you know of her?'

She asks that last so gently I sit back on my heels and look up at her, like the small, wanting child I am. ‘No, I don't.' I barely know anything about the Ashton Greenes at all, ancient family pile in Cambridgeshire that Mother certainly never saw.

‘Well, I'm not surprised at that,' Lady Game smiles as gently, and with some sadness. ‘You'd never have met Phoebe; she died before you were born. The seventeenth of January, 1910, it was – strange how I remember the date. But perhaps not strange: it was such a terrible thing, a shock to everyone. She was so . . .' She looks out of this upper storey dressing-room window, across the crenellations of the balcony and the tops of the figs beyond. ‘
Vibrant,
Phoebe was. Then one rainy afternoon, she slipped getting out of a cab, hit her head on the pavement, and she was gone. Terrible, terrible thing. Made no sense, she was only fifteen. I don't think Shelby ever quite recovered from it. He adored her so. I think it hit him even harder than the war. I think it caused him to make certain errors of judgment. And now this awful business in Kenya, with that young woman . . .'

I think Lady Game is trying to tell me something about forgiveness, but my heart only hardens further. I don't care about his reasons. Everyone has
reasons
for their personal atrocities. But there can be no excuse for his rejection of me. None. I was only a child. Cast off. He deserves every blow that comes his way. I return my attention to the hemline and give Lady Game as much honesty as decorum will allow: ‘I don't know my father.'

‘No. I imagine you don't,' Lady Game says, softer still. ‘And I want you to know, Olivia, that whatever happens in that realm will have no bearing on my regard for you – none whatsoever. Indeed, quite the opposite.'

I bow my head at that. I have to, at the kindness. I see why she's favoured me now: she's known who I am all along. So very kind, so discreet, and I am humbled: ‘Thank you.'

‘Excuse me, Lady Game,' Miss Crowdy knocks and enters at the same time. ‘It is now after five. We must attend to the details for the women's hockey afternoon party.'

Lady Game sweeps quite another smile over me. Perhaps she's a little intimidated by her secretary too, or perhaps it's just a fond smile for me. Whatever it is, I should come to my senses at this exchange, be dissuaded now from my reckless path, my determination to have my Irish Catholic tradesman. But I am not.

When I get home, there's a postcard come through the mail slot for me, a print of the Bridge. A view from the top, looking down the arch to the south, over the city. On the reverse is written in a hand of plain straight lines:

One day you will stand with me up here, Olivia.

By some other miracle I made it through this day without falling. All the same I fell a thousand times – for you.

Yo

Giddy. And sleepy. Oh dear God I could swallow the sky with this yawn. I fall onto my bed and I fall asleep. I sleep like a cat stretched out languorous in the sun.