The Blue Mile (26 page)

Yo

I
hear her singing as I get to the top of the ferry steps, coming out through the open window of her house and across the night. She can sing, all right, better than my best imaginings of it. So sweet and so high, I don't want to knock on the door to interrupt her.

‘Just Aggie and me, and a cossie makes three . . .'

And Ag and her start laughing, having fun in there. How good is that? How good is all this? It's been five weeks of these Wednesday evenings and with each one I'm more convinced, if that could be possible.

I knock at the door, and she's not two seconds from opening it. ‘Hello there!' Her smile, always looking a bit surprised I'm here again, before she pulls me in by the elbow and a quick sly kiss that only I can see. And feel. Jesus, I wish she wouldn't do it; but I can't imagine her not. I can't imagine not having this quick sly Wednesday kiss from her. Less than a second's worth, for all it might take all week to recover from it. It's just a kiss; that's all it is.

With Ag as sweet and high jumping around her Miss Olivia and this night jumping up and down behind her on her bed in some funny fancy-dress made of scarves and flowers all in her hair, and asking me: ‘Yoey, can we go, please?'

‘Go where?' I ask her. You can go anywhere you want.

‘To the baths – the Fairy Bower baths,' she says. ‘On Saturday.'

‘Ahhh.' Baths for swimming? I don't know about that idea. ‘What's Fairy Bower?' It could well not actually exist.

‘Up between Manly and Shelly Beach – there are baths there,' Olivia says to me. ‘At the rock pool, pretty spot. I thought we'd picnic – you can come out for a frolic Saturdays now, can't you?'

That's true. I've no dog shift to go to Saturdays anymore. Now we're on the deck, it's Monday to Friday, with the corresponding cut to our pay, again, and up until last week, unpaid Saturday mornings in the shops, for me, welding, for my Tech practicals, hanging out for my fifteen shilling increase for second year that I've just found out I won't get until March. And be thankful for it, too: another fifty were let go from the heavy shop yesterday. Don't know what we pay union fees for. We've got a political meeting about it coming up on the weekend –
You're to be there, no apologies accepted, or the Devil take you,
Mr Adams said to us all this morning – and that's not a way out of this swimming, either: the meeting is on Sunday afternoon. Shit, but I can't afford to go anywhere. I can't afford a picnic. I can hardly afford to buy Ag an ice-cream at the moment. I've never even been to Manly – doesn't everything cost twice as much there?

‘Please, Yoey. We've
never
been swimming, ever,' Ag says, with that whine getting in her voice.

For a second I could say to them both, don't ask me how my day went first, will you; don't ask me how Tech went tonight. I'm getting the first year prize, I just found out. I'll get the certificate Friday week. Or some such horseshit thing fairies couldn't care less about between their la-di-da French magazines and eating too many lollies.

‘But only if it's warm enough, Agnes,' Olivia says to her.

It'll be warm enough, though. It's only the end of September but it's been that hot it seems that summer is here already.

‘What do you say?' Olivia looks at me:
Go on, say yes – what's wrong with you?

I look at Ag. I should be ashamed that she's never been swimming. I am. I'm ashamed I can't swim, too. I don't want Olivia to know I can't. I can't afford whatever it is to hire bathers there, never mind drowning in front of her. I say: ‘We'll see what the weather's like, won't we?'

‘Yay!' Ag says, jumping up and down on the bed again.

As Olivia leans in to me: ‘Wait till you see me flapping about in the water. I'm not much of a swimmer – you could die laughing.'

I doubt it. I will be looking at Olivia Greene in a bathing suit as I drown. Not all bad, I suppose. Except that we could all drown. No. I can't go swimming. In public. In a bathing suit myself. Jesus, no.

‘I've already asked Coralie to man the salon for the morning,' she leans into me some more. ‘I need a day of fun and sun, I must say. I've been yearning for it. A day with you – a
whole
day. I've already bought half the treats.'
Please,
her voice is saying to me:
don't say no.
That turns me round again: Olivia works hard, as hard as me, just differently, and with money left over at the end of the week, money for treats. I won't always be this hard up.

‘Yay!' Ag yells, still jumping, and throwing her scarves around: ‘Treats and sunshine! And my new pink cossies! Look, Yoey, look what we made tonight!'

It's a pink bathing costume, you wouldn't miss her in a crowd, and she's that thrilled about it. How can I say no?

‘It'll be a great day.' Olivia works her hand into mine behind my back.

‘Yeah.' I try for a smile. If we survive it.

*

Depth of water 2 feet 6 inches,
says the sign this end of the baths. We'll survive. And the only public here to watch me make an arse of myself is kids. About a hundred of them, running around all over the rocks and diving in the deeper end of the pool. I step out of the dressing sheds with the word
MANLY
stamped across my chest on this cossie hired for tuppence and legs I never knew were this hairy. What could go wrong?

Ag is waving me over to where she's waiting by the steps of the pool, and I wouldn't have missed this day for a bucket of gold as I see Olivia there beside her. Her bathers are striped black and white and her hat is matching. Who else brings two hats on an outing to be sure they match her outfit? What else has she got in her bag of tricks? The brim of this hat is so big it falls right over her face. She lifts it up and pins it back and waves too. Then she dips her toe in the water, and there's something about the way she does that, something about the grace of her long arms and her even longer legs that has me wondering if she's altogether human again. She is made of hazel wands.

And now in she jumps, up to her knees. ‘Oh!' she says with the shock of it and then she moves towards the centre of the pool, swimming with those long arms out ahead of her, no flapping about to it at all, until she stops and turns and calls back to Ag: ‘Come on, Miss Fish, I'll catch you!'

Aggie runs up the side of the pool and jumps – right into Olivia's arms. Screaming. Safe. Having the time of her life. This means everything to me. I just stand where I am for a minute, listening to the kids screaming and the gulls screaming above them looking for chips to pinch, with the waves washing on the rocks and all the kids washing through the waves in this ocean pool and Olivia laughing at something Ag has said, and for the first time ever I believe I'm in a family. That's how it seems. Like our new life is completed. The past is behind me. I'm just a man at the seaside, like any other man here, watching out for his kid. Entitled to a future: a good one.

And then Olivia screams: ‘Oh God! Oh my God!'

A terrified scream. Flapping about. And I can't see Ag in all the splashing.

Olivia screams again: ‘Help!'

Olivia

‘
O
h my God. Help me!'

There's something caught around my foot. Dragging at me.

I shove Agnes back towards the wall. ‘Oh God, hold on.'

The horror in her eyes is the horror in my heart. It's some creature from the deep. No, it's not. It's a shark. I haven't had a nice day's outing anywhere for how long?
Years
. And now I'm being attacked by a shark. I'm certain it's a shark. Eating my leg. Oh my God.

‘Oh God, Eoghan – help me!'

Yo

I
don't reckon anyone has taken to the water faster.

‘My leg!' she's screaming. ‘My leg!'

I don't know what I'm doing but diving down into this water to find what devil of a thing it is that's got her. I find her ankle. Then the other. Then something the likes of which I've never felt before. Slimy; weird; something waving through the water. Heavy. I pull it up to the surface, and somehow even I know what it is.

It's seaweed. A great big slippery mess of seaweed.

‘Oh! No!' Olivia screams again when she sees it, but now she's laughing. Covering her eyes and laughing and saying, ‘Oh God, how embarrassing,' and grabbing Ag from the side of the pool and kissing her head and telling her: ‘I must have scared you half to death. Oh Agnes – look. It was only a silly lump of seaweed.'

‘Yuck.' Ag screws up her face and then she tells me: ‘Put it back in the sea, Yoey.'

I push it over the side and into the waves and only now I realise I just swam about ten yards. How did I do that?

‘Our hero,' Olivia says and she gives me a kiss, on the cheek, here, in this public pool, with Ag on her hip and kids everywhere.

Just for a second I feel like a hero too. ‘I fight seaweed monsters wherever I go,' I say, and I sink back in the water, to see if it's true that I can swim. I can float, for sure. Miraculous, and not at all. Of course I can float. I don't know what I was so worried about. I float on my back with my face to the sun and I listen to Ag and Olivia go off on some other story, about the pine fairies that live around here off the rocks.

Then we have something to eat, then we have another swim, then we eat again and all day none of us can look at each other without laughing ourselves to tears about the seaweed monster. This is the best day of my life.

We're packing up to go, packing up the half a house of tins and towels and hats Olivia brought with us, when she says to me: ‘Thank you. I've never been so happy. So free.'

‘Neither have I. Thank you.'

By the time we've got the ferry back to Lavender Bay, it's almost dark and Ag is half-asleep as I carry her up the steps. ‘Ooh, it's chilly now,' Olivia says, ‘I'm all sunburn shivery,' and when we get in she tucks a blanket round Ag on the sofa and she is asleep, and Olivia is pulling me out through the kitchen: ‘Come on, you need some cream on those seaweed-monster-slaying shoulders. You can have some of my Ponds – you'll be a lobster under that shirt.' She starts laughing again, at the seaweed monster and my own Ponds beauty regimen I had to admit to her the other week.

I know I am sunburned, too; I can feel it against my shirt already. But I'm not laughing now. There's a look in her eyes, even before she's pulling me into the bathroom and saying: ‘You can have a shower too, if you like – a hot one.'

I'm not sure what she's meant by it but I'm sure of its effect on me. I want to say,
Stop right there, you don't want to be leading me along, not now.
I say: ‘I don't want a shower, thanks anyway.'

‘Well, I might,' she says, and she pulls me the rest of the way through the bathroom door. ‘Shhhh. It'll be all right, so long as we don't lie down together.'

‘What?' I don't know what she means by that for a second, then I realise she doesn't know the first thing about what she's doing. Not that I know much more than what you get from one of them filthy American magazines, but I do well know that it doesn't matter if we lie down together or not. Jack and Mary would go round the back of Gibsons, two doors down from her house, to the low window ledge there, not a place for lying down.

I just say: ‘No. It won't be all right.'

‘I only want to see you.' She starts undoing my shirt. ‘I want to see your whole chest. I want to see all of you.'

‘No, you don't. That's not what will happen.'

‘I don't care what happens.'

‘I do.'

‘But I love you.' She unties the side of her dress, making it fall open, and somehow the sight of her petticoat is worse on me than having seen her all day in those bathers. She latches the bathroom door behind us and lights the boiler, turning on the taps.

I say: ‘No, Olivia, I –'

‘Yes.' Her cheeks are pink as the tiles here, her eyes are wild.

The hot water is steaming up the room. I've never had a hot shower. I've never been in a house that had one. We don't have a bathroom. We don't have a bath. Ag has her tub by the stove Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and I save coal with a flannel at the sink every day. While this shower is – Lord, you are making this hell for me. I don't know if such sinning in love will send us into damnation, if such a thing could ever be called evil, all I know is that it's wrong. Creating a child in sin is wrong. I'm not going to test the power of God or his grace, see if he might take away this love He's given us if we break the rules. Take everything I'm hoping for. Everything I'm working for. Call that superstitious idiocy or cowardice, call that whatever you want. I am not taking this risk. No.

She pushes the shirt off my shoulders, laughing against my neck: ‘If you don't kiss me now, I don't want to see you again.'

She holds herself against me. Right against the part of me that has no mind to tell her no. Jesus, can she really be so blind to what's going on here? The power she has over me?

Olivia

‘
B
e careful or you won't see me again,' he says and his voice is flat. Liltless. Threatening. Buttoning up his shirt.

‘No.' Oh no. Oh dear. I say: ‘I didn't really mean to say I wouldn't see you again, I –'

‘Well, you did say it and it's too far. What you want is not happening, right? Nothing is happening between us. I should get Ag home.'

‘No! Don't go,' I beg him. I only wanted to kiss, properly kiss, touch him as I want to, and . . . I don't know. My mind and my thighs are swimming for want of him. Why is he so angry? ‘What do you mean nothing is happening between us?'

‘I mean now – this evening. This day is finished.'

‘Oh.' Yes. I see. Humiliation number two for this day: a much more profound one. He truly is religious, he truly does mean what he says. No proper kissing before marriage, et cetera. I turn off the water and try to laugh but my voice is a quivery breath: ‘I'm sorry. I wish we could just elope and be done with it.' And, bizarrely, I think I do mean that: some restitution for my own disastrous conception mindlessly achieved on the way to the Champs-Élysées, I'd elope to Chatswood with Eoghan to prove to him all I feel. That this is real.

He's not having any of it; his voice is rough: ‘No priest I know would marry us – you're not of age and you're not Catholic. Pull your dress round, will you?'

Pull my dress round? Not a Catholic.
How dare you. I pull my dress round and say with all the condescension I can muster: ‘There are other perfectly respectable ways to marry, you know.'

He looks as if that's the most astonishingly stupid thing he's ever heard. He says: ‘There is no other way. Not for me.'

How did we take this turn so suddenly? We've had such a beautiful day. I'm in a welter now.

I say: ‘Well, I'll become a Catholic, I'll convert.'
INSANE!
Mother screams at me from the other side of the world.

Eoghan appears to agree with her; he says: ‘You can't just become Catholic because you want to get married – it's not that simple. You have to do lessons – on the liturgy, the sacraments, your Holy Communion. You have to go to confession first. As it is, I'll have to miss Communion tomorrow because of this.'

‘What?' I don't know what he's talking about. I never even went to Sunday school with any regularity, only to keep out of Mother's hair when necessary, and just often enough to appear respectable.

He says: ‘You can't just put on a pretty dress and have it done.'

That
is
insulting. Mightily. I say: ‘I am aware of the seriousness of marriage. I am also aware that religion is ridiculous.'

‘Perhaps to you, but not to me.' Now I've insulted him.

But I keep going with it: ‘No less ridiculous than fairies in the garden and magic-carpet rides.'

‘Will you keep your voice down?' he hisses at me, deep blues flashing some black anger. ‘You want Ag listening to this?'

‘No.' But I can't stop this train now either. ‘I think you're the one who isn't serious. You're just toying with my heart.' As Irish boys do. Every foolishness I've ever felt rages through me: ‘Religious objection? That sounds like backsliding to me. You don't love me. You're not genuine.'

‘Not genuine?' He clenches his jaw, with some rage to match mine. He closes his eyes, taking a deep breath, and he opens them, calm again, his words deliberate: ‘Listen, I don't expect you to share my faith, but I do expect you to be respectful of it. In four years, I will marry you. By then, I will have my journeyman's ticket, and by then I'd hope you will come to see what my faith means to me. We are too young now. I want to do things the right way, morally, old-hat as that might sound, and I want to be able to provide for you.'

‘Provide for me?' My words are shrill with my objection to seeing anything resembling his point of view now. ‘But you don't need to provide for me. My business –'

‘That could go in a second,' he stubbornly maintains his notions of practicality. ‘You've said so yourself. Anyway, how would we live, Olivia? How would you do your business when the babies come?'

‘Babies?' Yes, babies: that word cuts through my infuriation. I have actually given this a good deal of thought: I'm not having the Catholic ten, that's for certain. I will have two, or perhaps three, our little curly-topped ones gambolling about in our salon on the Left Bank of the Seine. There are methods of preventing more – my French is good enough to have gleaned that much from Mother's old copies of
L'Amour et la Mode.
But, relentlessly stupid as I appear to be right now, I choose this moment to share with him the ultimate practicality of my own fantastical faith: ‘Go into business with me, Eoghan. We'll do it together. Babies and business, all of it.'

He laughs at the idea. At me.

That crushes. That humiliates me more than anything. ‘What? Why not?'

‘Me? In the princess palace?' he laughs again, and not happily. ‘Where will you hide me, Miss Greene? In your stockroom? What will you have me do there? Sewing beads on your frocks?'

‘Why not?' I repeat, so hurt at this. ‘It's good enough for me. It's good enough for Jean Patou. Gustav Beer. Christoff von Drécoll. Caret. Bulloz. Lucien Lelong. The House of Worth – hundreds of them. Men sewing beads. What's the difference between that and cutting and machining at Foulds Boots?' as I know he's done before this.

‘A big difference, and you know it.' He says, flatly, intractably: ‘Foulds make work boots. Cutting and machining is not a proper trade. And sewing beads is not for me. That's ridiculous.'

‘That is
not,
' I protest. ‘That is
not
ridiculous.' I look at his tailor's hands, those beautiful fingers, and I appeal to them: ‘You want to
be
a boilermaker?'

‘If that's what I have to be to have a good and simple life.' What is that in his eyes now? Sadness? Disappointment?

Disbelief in mine: ‘But I don't want a good and simple life.'

‘Then you don't want me.' He turns away, unlatches the door.

‘Eoghan – don't you turn your back to me. Please.'

He closes the door behind him. I hear him wake Agnes: ‘Come on, mischief. What you been eating today making you so heavy then – lead sandwiches?' She mumbles something sleepily and they leave.

Leave me dirty. I am ugly and ashamed. More ugly than I have ever been.

But mostly angry, and mostly because he's right. This isn't going to work with us, is it. Our worlds are far too far apart.
Pass me them crystal beads, will you?
That's never going to happen. No more than my taking up rosary beads. You can't make a dream come true just by wanting.

Plain as the schnonk on my face, and as burned. Look at it. Horrible.

This is the most horrible, most painful degradation of my life.

Lead sandwiches, I'll say.