The Blue Mile (27 page)

Yo

T
he two cops coming down Darling Street take a good look at me as I head for the saloon doors of the Unity Hall Hotel. I'm still that fired up from yesterday I could almost stop and ask them if they want to cage me for it. A good thing that it's Sunday and the taps are off.

I'm sure the publican doesn't agree: the Unity is packed, the meeting brought inside from Loyalty Square by the rain. I see Tarzan's square red head through the crowd, this side of the bar, over near a fella that's already holding the floor. The meeting has started, I'm late, and I don't care. ‘Hear hear,' this metal trades mob goes and the fella speaking goes on, his voice that sharp and hard it's carving his words into the walls.

‘While there is a pinched and starving belly in Balmain, not a penny – not a penny – should go to the bondholders of London.' The fella smashes his fist into his palm to make that a promise. He's a big fella. He looks like he must be standing on a box at first glance, but he's not. ‘Lang is right!' someone calls out and I see who this is: it's the Big Fella. It's Mr Lang. He does look a bit like my father, strangely. A fucking enormous likeness of Satan O'Keenan himself.

And there is a few pinched and starving among us here, not convinced of the Second Coming of this Big Fella Lang. ‘Talk is cheap – won't fill no bellies,' someone calls from over the other side of the bar, at the back. I see who it is: it's a fella called Tommo, a blacksmith on the timber wharves, until recently. He's also a Communist. A lot of shouting goes on now, from one side of the room to the other. I stare ahead; roll another smoke I don't want. I don't want to be here. This is horseshit. This is the Labour Movement, as I understand it: Jack Lang is the Labor Party, but everyone in it hates him, especially Federal Labor – they reckon he's a dictator, and a Communist. But the Communists hate him more than anyone else, because he's really a Capitalist. He's an estate agent, of Lang & Dawes, with half of western Sydney owing money to him. And he hates the Communists back. Lang hates the unions too. And some wonder why I'm not too interested politics. They can't even spell ‘labour' the same way twice. Only one reason I'm here: to see the Nationalists put out of the job of running the place so that if I ever have to work for the dole, I will get the living wage for it. Or two reasons: Mr Adams told me to come. For numbers. To make a good show against the Communists, so they don't upset the vote by scaring off those a bit less inclined to be kicking in the heads of their enemies. Jesus.

Lang is standing there talking to some fella next to him, not bothered in the least by the horseshit flying around. He doesn't have to be bothered. When he opens his mouth again, he says: ‘Those in the Labor Party who know me best know that my word is my promise. It will be done. The bloodsucking bondholders will be denied.'

And everyone shuts up like schoolkids with the archbishop walked in. This Lang knows how to silence a mob even quicker than Mr Adams. He might well be a dictator.

‘Return to me the premiership of this state and I will see to it that the interference of British bankers in our affairs is stopped. The economic science of these Shylocks, and of the Nationalists who support them, is wrong. Their so-termed “sound” economy is crippling this state. You know this yourselves. But did you know, gentlemen, that the Bank of England has discounted its interest rates even to Austria – our enemy in the Great War – and yet no discount has been offered here? We must pay a full five percent while all other nations pay but three or four. No discount for a nation that has sacrificed sixty thousand of its youth and millions of pounds of its wealth to fight for the British cause. How can this be so?'

No one says a word. There are plenty here who have suffered the loss of a mate, a brother, a father. Even my own father went to Palestine, though I don't remember it as anything but some different kind of crying in our mother. I was eleven when he came back, and I don't know why he ever did. We're all waiting for an answer here.

‘How, you might wonder, can the Nationalists not ask on your behalf for that discount? A discount of a mere one-quarter of a percent would provide the government with public money, which then can be used for the invigoration of our economy. The only invigoration the Nationalists are concerned with is that which lines their own pockets, as they force wages down ever lower, using this Depression as an excuse to increase their profits. But you know this also. My government, should you return me, will not be slave to Shylock, or to the mindless sheep of the Loan Council in Canberra, nor to the board of the Commonwealth Bank – cowards all of them. My government will put your needs, the needs of this great state of New South Wales, this great engine room of the Australian economy, above all other considerations.'

He leaves that to settle, and even I think I know what he's saying here: he'll go against the Federal Government if he has to, and the Federal Government isn't run by Nationalists. He'll go against his own party.

He goes on about what he's going to do for us if we vote for him – return the forty-four-hour week and minimum wages, more powers to the Fair Rents Court and a moratorium on evictions, and building roads from here to billy-o to make jobs, Lots of jobs. ‘So that
you – YOU,
gentlemen
–
will be the invigorators of this state yourselves, as you and your families spend your well-earned wages in the many good businesses of your neighbourhoods. This, gentlemen, is sound economy. This is not a mere promise. This is common sense. And for it, a discount from the Bank of England will be and must be demanded!'

He smashes his fist into his palm again and the whole room goes up in calling for it to be true. It does seem to make sense, too, even to me. He's going to rob the bank, this Jack Lang. He's going to rob the Bank of England for us. Good on him.

A chant starts up: ‘Lang is right! Lang is right!'

Even Commie Tommo looks impressed by what's gone on here. There might even be a moratorium on colliers and dockers kicking heads in tonight.

I see Mr Adams now too; he comes over to me through the crowd. He's happy. ‘We will win,' he says, and his fist is tight with that. It's not just the Labor Party he wants to win, it's fairness, common sense, with the minimum of head-kicking.

I nod: ‘Righto, then. I think I know who I'll vote for now.'

Mr Adams smiles and taps me on the shoulder with that fist: ‘Don't you even joke about it, boy.'

The chanting has got louder, and I look over at this Mr Lang: he's smiling like a king amongst it. Putting on his hat, making himself half a foot taller again, getting ready to go. I see over the other side of the bar the Communist lot have already left out the Beattie Street doors. I should go too.

I tell Mr Adams: ‘I've got to get back. I don't want to leave Ag alone too long with –'

But he's already turned away, started talking to someone else. I leave them to it, and make it quick back down the hill home, through the spitting rain. I don't want to leave Ag alone too long, it's true – we're expecting bailiffs at Number Four sometime today, actual bailiffs from the court, as the moratorium on rent defaulting will come too late for the Bardons that live there, and they're not going to go quietly.

The street is quiet when I get down there, though, and when I get in the house Ag's got something nice in the oven. Smells like a cake. I ask her: ‘What you got cooking?'

She says, so proud of herself she's half a foot taller: ‘I'm making them biscuits, the ones Mrs Buddle gave me the recipe for. They look nearly as good as hers.'

‘Aren't you clever,' I tell her. She is, and newly every day.

She says: ‘If they taste as good, I'm going to make some more for Miss Olivia, for Wednesday.'

Horse fucking shit you will. I don't want to have this discussion with my sister. I've avoided it through Mass and all the way afterwards with my head in the
Historical, Theoretical and Practical Text-Book of Steam,
busy not reading it, and then having somewhere else to be. But it has to be discussed now. I tell her: ‘You're not going on Wednesday.'

‘What?'

‘Wednesdays are off, we're not visiting Miss Olivia anymore.'

‘No, don't say that. Yoey? Why?' I've told her the sky has fallen in.

‘I'm sorry, Aggie, but that's the way it is. There's no more talking about it.'

‘No. But why?' She's not going to leave this alone, as if I ever thought she might. She whines: ‘But you
love
her.'

I do. I did. But it's not possible to love her anymore. It's not reasonable. Why? I stop myself short of telling Ag we will never be good enough and I keep it instead to what she might understand; I say: ‘Miss Olivia isn't a Catholic.'

Ag screws up her face at me: ‘So? Gladdy isn't Catholic and she's my friend.'

‘It's not the same thing, Ag.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because it's not, Ag. The Hanrahans are godless communists –
completely different thing.'

‘But –'

‘Shush.'

‘God doesn't care if you're a Catholic or not.' Ag shakes her head at me, disgusted at my idiocy. ‘He only cares if you're good.'

She turns round on her heel, goes back out to the kitchen, throwing the tea towel across her shoulder, telling me I'm making a mistake.

Maybe so, but it's my mistake to make. Ag is eight years old. She is not standing in my shoes, and Lord, with your blessing and her own cleverness, she never will. Stand in my sandshoes, hanging off the edge of the road deck on a scaffold, hanging off the edge of the air, hanging on by my toes to this monkey-nutted job, where an ability to swim means nothing to the dive. The fall would kill you. Tell me then, when you stand in those shoes, that hanging on to my faith isn't worth it. I hear Ag sniff at the stove; she's crying about it. But I will not be led towards that particular way of sinning again. Five minutes of fun and a lifetime to repent fuck knows what consequences.

Olivia isn't worth it, not worth risking all I've done to better myself. She doesn't care how far I've come or how fast the return journey back to the gutter can be. What do I have without my God? Nothing without His grace. No roof over our heads. No fucking biscuits. And princess calls me ridiculous. She'd like to keep me up in her ivory tower ladies shop, would she? What, as her fucking pet?

*

‘Alleluia, praise the Lord, and fuck me, yeah!' Tarzan holds his gun high in want of riveting the sky: ‘He's alive!'

Someone's taken the dive, come off and down through the joinings of the deck above us.

‘Told you I seen that splash,' Tarz says and he's said it a dozen times. He saw a splash, and we thought it must have been a length of pipe or rail that's going on round that side. But it's one of us. And he's come up. It's a hundred and seventy feet of certain death and I couldn't be less moved by the miracle. We've just watched him get pulled from the water, someone dived off the cradle to help him, and now the word that's come up the phone from the shops is that he's alive.

‘Well, who was it?' Tarz is asking Clarkie, who got the message just now.

‘It's Ned – course it is. It's Ned Kelly,' he says, shaking his head, having a laugh, taking the notebook out of his leather apron to write something down, like there might've been a bet on it being Kelly.

Vince Kelly, his name is, one of them that chucks himself off coal gantries, ships and any other construction of similar height for the fun of it. His boots ripped off their soles and ended up past his knees with the power of the fall, we're told at smoko, and he's cracked a rib or two. But other than that, he's all right. They reckon he dropped the hammer off his tool belt to break the water as he fell.

Dolly says, with something like envy: ‘Jeez, he'll be famous tomorra.'

And Tarz McCall can't wait to start off the celebrations: ‘Who's coming for a dive this arvie, then?' Because that's what you'd want to do, isn't it. Chuck yourself off coal gantries in your off hours – or, as Clarkie did last Saturday arvie, pull a motorcar across the yard of the shops, by his teeth. For a fucking monkey-nutted dare. Tarz says: ‘Come on, Pretty – you never come along. What's wrong with you?' Telling me I've got no guts.

‘Get fucked,' I tell him.

There's plenty of guts around here and I'm not celebrating it or joining your circus. I hate this fucking job, as anyone with half a brain should. This miracle of Vince Kelly, it's just the nightmare come to life. Your feet losing hold, your hand missing the rail. Or the rail that isn't there at all. It's all the luck of surviving the fall used up, and my sister will never look me in the eye again anyway.

‘Get fucked yourself, you skinny-arsed little faggot,' says Tarz.

‘Righto then,' says Mr Adams. ‘That's enough from you both. All heads to be kept until after Saturday and that is an order, that is a union directive, that is law.'

Saturday. Saturday is election day: Jack Lang can get fucked too.

Olivia

‘
C
oralie says you've been grumpy as a bear. Come on, Ollie – what's happened? You're up and you're down, you're round and around like a Ferris wheel.'

‘Am I?' I growl through the pins in my teeth. Coralie has no business telling tales. When she gets back from the bank, I'll –

‘Don't you be cross with Coralie,' Glor warns. ‘She's only worried. So am I, now. What's wrong?'

‘Nothing.'

‘I've seen the little girl, you know, going up in the lift to you. Agnes, isn't it? Coralie says she hasn't been in for weeks now, and I've held my tongue for long enough waiting for you to tell me what's been going on. What's happened with this Bridge boy? Has he harmed you? If he has, I'll tell Paul and he'll see that the police get him for it. If he's laid a hand –'

‘Don't be hysterical, Glor.' I sit back on my heels and look up at her, distracted again by how divine this wedding ensemble is on her. A vision in Chantilly over Shantung, ivory bebe roses round the crown of her veil: Gloria Jabour is really an angel. I'm not. Far from it. My cheeks are hot with the shame: I virtually demanded he harm me. I am my mother's daughter. No, I'm more pathetic than a whore – there was no advantage whatsoever in the affair for me. It's been a month since and this shame only squirms worse and worse. I say: ‘No boy has harmed me. There is no boy.'

No boy. There will come a time, I suppose, when I don't gasp like I've stabbed myself every time I think it.

‘Oh,' Glor says, a small thud of dashed hopes; but she wants to know all about it: ‘Why don't we have Pearson's prawns for lunch?'

‘We'll never get in there again,' I say. Not exactly a lie to avoid luncheon interrogation, either. You can't go near the place for the gaggle of journalists and young hopefuls who follow Mr Lang around like a line of puppies. They follow his car from Macquarie Street down to Pitt. What a show. Women worst of all – one fainted in the street on seeing him get out of the car yesterday, mother of three, wanting his autograph. Now that he's won back the government and he's going to save us all from despair. A landslide victory, it was. There's no one in this arcade who didn't vote for him, even if they can't admit to it openly. You can't get any business going without money in the till, elementary accounting, and as Mr Jabour says, it's not entirely our fault the money isn't there. In his opinion, the faceless men of London stole it and spent it on guns and killing the flower of our youth; got our wool at a discount rate, too.

‘Well, a sandwich then,' says Glor. ‘At the Aristocrat. Quick one.'

‘Glor, I can't – truly, I've not got time to blink today.' Business has gone entirely the other way for me – never-ending orders, money stuffed in the till like so much kapok bursting out of a mattress. And here's Coralie back from the bank now, with her hands full of boxes of summer straw berets for trimming. ‘Did you get the cellophane too?' I ask her – I'm going to experiment with some little fruit-salady sprays of the stuff. ‘Yes, Ollie. All present and accounted for.' And as well the telephone is ringing. ‘Sorry, Glor.'

It's Miss Crowdy on the line: ‘Can you come at four?'

My head swims. Mostly with gratitude. I'm yet to finish the ribbon cloche for Lady Game's ensemble, for the parliamentary reception thing, on Friday. Oh, but I shall. I shall get it done, to the rhythm of this mantra: what a very lucky girl am I. Sad and ragged round the edges, but very, very lucky. Aren't I?

*

‘Extraordinary man, this Mr Lang.' Lady Game is setting the short brim of the cloche just so, and it's perfect – metallics suit her so very well, this steely blue satin bringing out her pretty eyes. ‘Philip is not so much impressed as intrigued by him,' she tells the mirror. ‘He's never been abroad and sees no cause to go – “Australia is good enough for me, I never want to be out of it,” he said, and proudly. He doesn't even own a dinner suit – deliberately so, as he's a wealthy man. Isn't that a bundle of contradictions?'

‘Yes, it is,' I suppose. I'm distracted, holding the white peony brooch I've made for the cloche against her head to see what she thinks.

She thinks: ‘A little too young for me, Olivia.' Waving it off with an abstracted frown.

It's not too young for her; it softens the aeroplane hue and it's lovely on her. Everything is: pretty face and a lithe sporty figure, you can do anything you like with fashion. But who am I to argue?

‘Or is it this famous egalitarianism of yours?' she asks me with a little wry smile.

‘I beg your pardon, Lady Game?' I've quite lost the thread.

‘This pride in not going abroad and not owning a dinner suit.' She turns to me. Lady Game is sincerely curious, and she takes her vice-regal role very seriously, she does so want to be useful and to do the right thing. Do good things. I'm still in awe that my opinion means anything to her at all.

I say: ‘I'm not sure I know, really.' Search my memory for Mother's disdain for all things working class, and tell Lady Game: ‘I think the dinner suit might be a Labor Party thing.' Or a general Australian male sort of thing – there are so many stubbornly ill-attired men in this city it is embarrassing to wonder what outsiders must think of us. How must we look to the English uppers, never mind the Continentals? Like a nation of walking bargain-table drack sack atrocities.

‘Hm,' she frowns, thoughtful. ‘Some of them refuse to toast the King. That is terrible. I fear Mr Lang is going to put Philip in a terrible position one day. But there's something about him . . . Something . . .' She won't say and she waves the thought away as sillier than my peony, then smiles, a deeper shade of wry: ‘Well, he
is
rather handsome, I must say.'

‘Do you think so, Lady Game?' I laugh with her. I think Sir Philip is handsomer, especially in his brass-button military regalia. But what would I know? I'm not a forty-four-year-old mother of three. They do share something, though, I think, Governor Game
and Premier Lang: something in their eyes. Something soulful.
A searching, a blueness. That only brings Eoghan's eyes to me. I close mine for a moment, to let the swimming pass. The way he held me in the baths, in my distress: killed a seaweed monster for me . . .

‘Are you all right, Olivia?' Lady Game's concern for me is as sincere as the rest of her.

‘Yes,' I smile. ‘A little woozy with busyness, that's all.'

A little monumentally heartbroken. I won't be doing this love thing again. Ever.

*

Must be one of those days, though . . . A letter from Mother is waiting for me when I get home, another one.

La la la la la la la la la, it goes on about London, how they've moved to new apartments in Mayfair.

Please write, darling. Please, please, please, I haven't heard from you now in weeks and weeks. What are you up to? How are things at the salon? Better still, come to London and tell me. You must. Come to London – and stay. Or perhaps I shall assert my parental right and compel you to, Olivia Jane. You know I don't mean that, but I do miss you so. Sophia is growing so quickly, becoming so like you.

That can't be true: I look like his Lordship. Beaky as Fagan's parrot.

But you see Bart looks to be settling in here for the longer term now. He's been offered chambers in . . . some place I've never heard of . . . our move could well be permanent.

What could I write to respond to that? Permanent abandonment. My page is utterly blank.

You would adore it here, Olivia. I know you don't remember much of your childhood when we were at Grosvenor Place, but I'm sure the loveliness of London would all come flooding back. The squirrels running about through Hyde Park ahead of winter, they bring back memories for me of you as a little girl, so delighted by them. There's a little place I have my eye on for you, too – it's in Piccadilly, right in the hub, and it would be perfect to set your shingle on. I know it's clichéd, but society here is so much more genteel, polite, and so blessedly cool, so much more your style, Ollie – I didn't know how much I missed it myself until I returned.

As if eight years of desperate loneliness there never occurred. Just where do I get my tendency to confabulate? And she goes on and on . . .

Things aren't nearly so bad here with all this financial catastrophe business, either. I've heard it's got to unmanageable proportions in Sydney – it's quite the talk at Australia House. Unemployment is what – twenty-five percent there? How appalling. That's even worse than New York, and it's less than half that here. You'll have no trouble with clientele in any case – little birdies are already whispering your triumph with Gwendolen Game . . .

I toss the letter into the drawer of the hall stand and close it. I don't
want to read any more. Mother stepping over khaki swags to have the life she always wanted: London, money, position. She can have it.

While here we have twenty-five percent. Twenty-five percent of what? Men. That's awful. More awful that I've been too busy to take note of what is happening right under my schnonk. Murderers and thieves: that shame whips through me once more, a motorcar zooming through my soul, skittling hobos. What am I doing making frocks and hats for the rich?

In answer, a woman cries out from one of the top windows of the boarding house next door: ‘No, John – no! What do we do now? Where can we go?'

She sobs and howls for almost half an hour solid. No one tells her to be quiet. Her cries call out across the harbour long after they've ceased, and no one answers her.

I should go next door and offer her a room here. I have a spare one: it contains my wardrobe. But I don't offer, do I. I don't do anything.

*

I do my best for the economy. I have new tin put on the roof, I have the hot water put through to the kitchen. I fill my cupboards with far more than I need, religiously. I have the phone put on and I contemplate the purchase of a wireless for myself, for Christmas, as I have a good solid cry at Glor's wedding. Not altogether miserable: she's so beautiful, such a beautiful angel amongst the white marzipan columns of Our Lady of Whatnot, her Paul almost cries too.

Mr Jabour puts his arm around me at the reception; he says: ‘Be happy, Olivia, my dear – you're next, I promise. You know, you have probably already met him. Things tend to happen this way.'

Not this thing, not for me. I am a wilted bloom in this room full of flowers. In the Randwick Town Hall no less, trestle tables groaning under the weight of the Irish-Lebanese race to the middle-class wedding-gift competition. ‘Paul's football team have bought them a crystal dessert service,' Velma whispers to me across the three-tiered cake of bluebirds and butterflies. That's so sweet, I think I might have to go and have a good lie-down.

I go home and wait for the McIlraith's man to bring my Mexican chocolate box.

And I am stunned by my aloneness. There is no boy. There is no little girl. All through this year's mad Christmas blitz I am stunned.

The Jabours are off to Grandpapa Jidi's in Never Never Menindee as usual.

Glor and Paul are quite busy with each other.

And Mother is in London.

London. That's where I was born. I am English. Perhaps Mother is right. It is where I belong. Not Paris, not New York, not Lavender Bay. But London.

Maybe I should . . .

*

Turn up unannounced at St Augustine's on Christmas morning. Halfway through the service I arrive, though as it's all in Latin, I have no idea where it's up to, really.

I stand at the back of the church, looking for him. No idea if he's here. Maybe he goes on Christmas Eve. Do Catholics do that? I don't know anything about it. He probably goes twice or seventeen times anyway, he's so devout, damn him. It's so crowded,
though, stuffed to the stained-glass and gilt-arched windows.
A pretty Russian empress style of church, and now all the children
are going down the aisle, to stand before the fairy castle altar. I
suppose it's their Communion or something, but at a signal from the organ pipes above they start singing as they gather there.

It's a song I don't know. It's a language I don't know. It doesn't sound Latin, as if I'd know. Is it Irish? I suppose it must be. All the children wave their hands, making birds' wings as they sing, and the tune is somehow familiar . . . What is it? They sing me the English now, to tell me: ‘The lark, the dove, and the red bird came, and they did sing in sweet Jesus' name, on Christmas day in the morning . . .'

And there it is. So beautiful, so very sweet, I can hear the threads of magic-carpet laughter tinkling through it.

And then I see him. His black hair; his white shirt. Three pews from the back, on the aisle, just about right under my nose.

I tiptoe down the aisle and slip in beside him.

He turns to me. Stunned: ‘What?'

Something small, dark and fast hurtles towards me at the end of the song: Agnes, holding me tight, burying her face in my skirt.

She looks up at me and cries: ‘I knew it, I knew you would come back. I prayed and prayed so hard.'

I look up at him. What's that in his eyes? What's he thinking? I don't know. But now he smiles.

And I am here, where I belong. Inside his smile. Inside my tear that falls with relief now at knowing solidly. This is where I belong. I am a native of his deep blue searching eyes.