The Blue Mile (3 page)

‘Please, wait!' I call out across the wharf, hatbox clattering against portfolio.

He doesn't look up.

‘Wait!' I shout, and I make a leap for it.

‘All right, miss, where's the fire?' He shakes his head as I thump aboard, bumping his shoulder. He says some other disparaging thing but I don't hear it as the whistle blows.

Blowing me and my embarrassment round to a lonely seat up near the bow. Where the water looks strung with fairy lights, there are so many vessels dotted about – it's a dream. I close my eyes for a second and see a beaded evening cloche: teal, gold, pearl. Mmmm.

Open them again as the ferry chugs under the great claw of the Bridge, as it is so far, this Dawes Point end. Look out across the harbour at its matching pair in the north, at Milsons Point. Two monstrous, grasping claws, they seem. Black against the teal dream sky.

I don't know about this Bridge creature. It's a necessary evil: that awful ferry crash with the schoolchildren last month, and half-a-dozen near misses every year, the harbour is just too crowded at peak times. This Bridge will also be something heroic, some kind of wonder of the world, if it succeeds in holding itself up, so they say. But no matter how wondrous it is, it's going to ruin the view. Our view over Lavender Bay. What will that do to the value of our house? It's only a tiny thing, a tiny, leaky-roofed cottage, but it's all we own, apart from hats and frocks. No one thinks about that sort of thing, do they, when they go off and build a bridge. Oh dear, your home is worthless now. Tough luck. Be grateful they didn't demolish our house with a wrecking ball, I suppose.

I shiver with the cooler breeze coming straight off the water. I shiver with the wonder of how precarious everything seems, and not just for Mother and me. For everyone, everything. Whole stock exchanges tumbling into the drink . . .

Look up into the great North Claw, reaching out into nothing. Imagine working up there, catching fifty tons of girder or what have you, dangling off a crane perched high on the edge of nowhere. I'd rather not. Listen to the clang, crunch, grrr of the workshops below, grinding on all day and night, and be grateful we don't live at Milsons Point. Good God, that must be appalling to live on top of. But I look up at the claw again now as the ferry pulls away towards McMahons Point and it's a different view altogether. I see the zigzag that will run along the whole arch, soaring from point to point, a glimpse of the majesty of it. The genius of its design.

And I'm swished right the way through with inspiration at it. When the ferry pulls in to the wharf, I'm the first to thump off, ‘Excuse me!', bashing a man in the leg with my hatbox on my way. I don't stop to say sorry: I fly up the steps to the ridge top and home. To make a start on my creation for Glor. I've seen it now. I know exactly –
exactly
– what I want it to be.

Yo

‘
S
hut your mouth, woman,' our father spits into our mother's crying. His face is grey with hatred and his mouth is an old scar ripped through it as he blames her: ‘It's you who killed him.'

That makes the cop flinch. Constable Smith, I think he said, and no older than me, if he's a day. Never seen this one before, but he's getting his lesson in O'Paddy tonight. He's just now brought our brother Michael in through the back and laid him across the kitchen table. Michael's dead, and the grazes across his neck tell how. He's hanged himself, at the boarding house up on Goold Street, where he was living. Dying. I haven't seen him for more than a month before this, since he left the tin-pressers at Ultimo, where he was working; not laid off: sacked for drinking on the job. Drinking himself to death, here's the evidence. Lost two stone off him, at least; it's a wonder the weight of him could do the job. But it has. Found this afternoon when the landlady came for the rent.

But regardless of these facts, our father now turns his menace to the other cop, McKinley, who on any other day is a bastard to match him, and he tells him: ‘You will find out who did this, who murdered this boy.'

I'm sure I look at him just as McKinley does: disbelieving. Doesn't want it known that Michael has murdered himself. Jesus, at what low place in the shitheap of hypocrisy does this sit?

McKinley shakes his head: ‘We'll leave that to you, O'Keenan.' The cops have done us enough of a courtesy as it is, bringing Michael home, instead of tossing him in the morgue for the pauper that he is.

And now they're leaving, the constable saying, ‘Evening, missus, er, sorry . . .' to our mother, who won't stop crying, if ever she has.

I look at Michael again. He's grey as our father, only he is in fact dead. My brother is dead; not me. I'm having trouble with this fact: half-relieved I'm not getting a fist in my face for coming in sacked. Jesus. Michael is dead? Yes, and he is not at peace about it. His jaw is crooked, as if he'd taken one there. Maybe he did. I wouldn't know. I didn't know him well at all. There's another fact to trouble me: twenty years under the same roof and three streets away after, and I didn't know him well. I can't remember a time he wasn't drinking. Always fucked or looking to be; he was never going to run very far. Twenty-three years old, he is; was. Never had a life. Never knew him. Nor Brendan, our other brother. He's seventeen and I've not seen him for more than a year. No one has. He could be dead too for all anyone knows.

Our mother is holding Michael's hand in hers, his dead hand, and crying, ‘Michael, my Michael,' over and over again, until it's like a siren far away, from me, although she's right here, a kitchen table's breadth away.

‘I said shut your mouth, woman,' our father says again, but softer, telling her something in Gaelainn, the language I don't know, calling her Kathleen and pouring her a glass of the Royal Reserve. Pouring blood into a filthy glass.

She takes it from him. She's let go Michael's hand and stops her crying long enough to drink it down, all of it. She'll drink that whole bottle now. She's had one already: I see the empty by the fire, the fire I lit this morning, which she's let go out and not lit again all day.

It is her fault that Michael's dead, and she'll never see it. I do, though. I see it all too well, this moment, in the claret stain of her face. A thief at the least, she is, for taking herself from us, for putting more of the Child Endowment down her fat red neck in grog than food in her daughter's mouth. Aggie. Jesus, she can't see Michael like this; I'm hoping she's stayed hiding.

‘Eoghan, get Madigan,' our father says to me, telling me now it's my fault; telling me I'm to go and get Father Madigan at St Benedict's. ‘Tell him your brother's been murdered, that he fell in with Coogan, got himself lynched.'

I stare at him again: the Devil has lost his senses. Madigan's no doubt already heard the truth of it; if McKinley told our father of it near five o'clock at the brewery stables, then it's bound to have been a dozen times across the road to St Ben's by now. Madigan is not going to bury Michael, and we've no money for it anyway. No one will chip in for a funeral, not even the Callaghans, not even any of them at Tooths – especially not them. No one will want to be near this. And I'm not saying anything with the breath of the name Coogan in it to anyone, or I'll be the one getting lynched.

‘Pat, leave it,' our mother begs: ‘Please. Pat –'

That brings his fist smashing down on the table again, making Michael's boots jump as if he might be brought to life, making our mother scream and beg again, ‘Please, Pat!'

Why does she beg him? I ask you, Lord. She's always begging him, and that's what sets him off, the same as showing a cur your fear.

‘Don't just stand there, useless fuck,' he spits his hatred into me. ‘I said get Madigan.'

I nod at him, but before I go I look at our mother once more, taking Michael's boots off, taking them from the table as if that might keep the Devil from this house, her hands shaking from fear and grog, and now I turn my back on them, on the pair of them, and I walk out, up the hall to the front room, and there I reach under our mother's bed for Ag and drag her out by the ankle with one word: ‘Shush.'

I'm holding Aggie's curly little head to my chest as the gate bangs closed behind us, holding her tight to me as I start to run, and I don't care if that man bashes that woman to death without me there tonight. I hope he does, so that he will be hanged himself, so that they are both gone and with them all the shame I've ever felt for being born to them.

I've taken the corner at Abercrombie and run halfway to St Ben's before I tell Ag, promise her: ‘We're not going back.'

She says, not letting go of my neck: ‘Are we going up to Kennedy's for chips?'

‘No,' I tell her. ‘We're not going to Kennedy's now.'

We're getting out of Chippendale, out of this scruttery shitheap, and we're never coming back.

Coming up to St Ben's on the corner, Ag asks me: ‘Where are we going, Yo-Yo?'

‘I don't know,' I tell her, the spire of the church to our left and the chimney of Tooths to our right. I am running through my life, thick with the stench of hops, the entire extent of my life set between George Street West ahead and Cleveland Street behind us. You can live and work and die here without ever going outside their bounds. Not me. Not Aggie and me. There's music coming from St Ben's, from the hall, a banjo and a fiddle winding round a tin whistle. The Christmas concert; I see Ellen Callaghan, one of Jack's little sisters, she's with Lil Casey, and they're walking down between the back of the convent and the church, in their emerald dancing skirts, flowers wound through their hair. I tighten my hold on Aggie: she can never be one of them girls, not if we stay here, and I will never kiss Lil Casey, because she'd never go with me, never look at me.

Where are we going, though? Where can we go? At the side of the brewery, at the stables, I see one of the other carters, Frank O'Toole, just inside the gates; he's cooling off his draught mare with a few buckets, late in from his run. He's an all right sort of fella, that one, not one of them our father would consider a mate, not one he drinks with, but I step up my pace to get past him, past all of it. The band at St Ben's is pounding out ‘God Save Ireland' now and my head is pounding with my boots from the skinful I had myself this evening. The last ale I will ever have, I promise myself, again, but a promise to the death this time. If alcohol should pass these lips ever again, then the Devil can have me too.

I tell Ag, for want of another idea: ‘We'll catch a tram, yeah? Into town.'

‘Can we?' Aggie tightens her hold on me as we turn into George Street West, where I keep running, dodging this way and that through the traffic across the road and right past the tram stop because we can't stop here, not right in front of Ryan's Hotel. I keep on up to Railway Square, where the clock on the tower of Clark's strikes the half-hour. I look up at the clock: seven-thirty. I look at Clark's: I was going to get Ag's Christmas dress there, though I've never been inside before, or in any department store. And I can't remember the last time I caught a tram.

I keep running, right through the crowd around Central Station. I keep running right past the fish-and-chips on the bend into the Haymarket, though I know Ag is starving for her tea. I keep running even though I need a smoke; Jesus but I need a smoke now.

‘Are we going to get a tram, Yo?' Ag asks me. She never complains, my sister. Ever. She asks, but she never complains.

‘In a bit, Ag,' I tell her. I won't let you down. Ever. One day, I promise you, you'll never be wanting again. ‘We'll get a tram in a bit.'

When I can stop running. There's a whistle still screaming through the banjo and the fiddle in my mind, though they are well behind us. Screaming through my legs. God save Ireland? Jesus, God save Agnes O'Keenan and me.

Olivia

I
wish we had a wireless, I sigh into my zigzag of silver satin. I'd turn some music on over the rather heavier metallic fashioning going on and on and on crash-thunk down at the bridgeworks tonight, bashing and grinding out the old adage that success is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. To be gained only one stitch at a time. Or one hydraulic hammer smash at a time.

Crash. Bang. Thunk.

It's five after eight now, too. Must be another big bit of zig or zag going up tomorrow, or perhaps I'm especially bothered by it tonight. I don't know how the people at Milsons Point get any rest at all, I really don't. How long is this going to go on for? At least another two years, they say. I wonder if we might afford a wireless, sooner rather than later; they've got some models on special at Hordern's right now. Perhaps, with Min Bromley's final payment for the trousseau and with some Christmas sales –

SCREEEEECH. THUNK.

And I stab straight into the top of my palm with my needle at that one. Oh, for crying out – don't get a bloody smudge on the sisal, Ollie. I drop Glor's hat and press my handkerchief onto the wound, inspect it under the lamp and it's hardly there already.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

I just about jump out of my chair with this one – a bit closer to home. Indeed, it's the front door. A man calling: ‘McIlraith's!'

Our McIlraith's hamper is here – I'd all but forgotten it was due – our box of festive goodies. Yummy yum yum: it'll be a task and a half not to get into it forthwith. I open the door to the man and give him a cheerful: ‘Good evening, you're late.'

The man doesn't return my smile; he grunts, slaps the box down on the step at my feet and thrusts a docket at me: ‘Sign there, will you.'

‘Oh. Yes.' I sign the paper and give it back, presuming I've offended: ‘I didn't mean you're late – I meant it's late, to be working.'

He grunts again, says something unintelligible and climbs back into his motor-lorry, putters off. Rude man. Obviously has no idea what a Parisienne muse is when he's looking at one, does he.

Crash. Thunk. SCREEEECH.

Or perhaps he lives at Milsons Point and hasn't slept for six months. I look out at the North Claw, in the very last of the light, black talons on indigo velvet. Striking, and I'm almost compelled to dart back inside to sketch it: a slouched toque with a random spray of girder-ish appliqué high on the upturned side. Crisp. Smart. A little theatrical. Winter, most definitely. A whole series of Bridge hats, by the season . . .

And fun for another day. I must stick to finishing Glor's tonight. Oh but it's turning out well; I look over my shoulder down the hall and spy it, toppled on its side on the tea table under the lamp, just as I dropped it. When I finish it off with the bronze ribbon bands round the brim, which will contain the silver zigzags, it's going to be
the
snazz. Snazziest snazz that ever there was. It's so Glor.
I want to give it to her tomorrow at our lunch, and not only because
I'm bursting to. We possibly won't get another chance before Christmas. Things will most certainly be hectic for us both in the rush, and then the Jabours shut shop lunchtime Christmas Eve, when they all pile into their elderly Oldsmobile, off to Mr Jabour's equally elderly parents' place in Menindee, wherever that might be, in the Never-Never somewhere. So very odd, the thought that Gloria's a native, second generation and of bush pedigree, too – her grandpapa Jidi is a pioneer outback haberdasher from Broken Hill.

That returns my smile to me as I heave our hamper in off the doorstep: if there's such a thing as Levantine pioneer outback haberdashers from Broken Hill, then there can be such a thing as internationally renowned costumières from Sydney, can't there? And – oh dear God – there's always the Mexican chocolate cake, I see as I flip the lid of our box of goodies. How am I going to keep my hands off
that
till Christmas? Ritual yuletide torture. How cruel are the Mexicans to combine dark chocolate and cinnamon in the one cake and then smother it in a layer of cinnamony-chocolate shell? How cruel to have to wait six days to eat it? Think about prawns at Pearson's with Glor tomorrow. Mmmmm. Now, put the Mexican chocolate cake in the sideboard. Put it in the sideboard right this minute and lock it. Take the rest into the kitchen and unpack it: almonds and walnuts and cherry shortbread tarts, fruit mince for our pies, Paradise pineapple creams, caramel fudge bonbons, the real French cognac for our brandy sauce . . . oh dear God. All for Mother and me. Just the two of us – and we'll eat every crumb. After an appearance at the Christ Church morning service while the ham cooks, we'll race each other home to spend the rest of the day wallowing in fabulous, honey-glazed, chocolatey-cinnamon sin.

It will be just the same this year, won't it? I ask the depths of the pantry as I hide the tin of bonbons behind the Bovril and baked beans. Of course it will be, I answer myself above the whisper of doubt.

Darling Em
. . .

What's she doing now? Whirling about with
Bart
to ‘Blue Heaven' in the Jazz Room, martini in hand. A place as foreign as Menindee, to me. He's not going to whirl you away from me, is he?

But Mother is entitled to a romance, isn't she? A real one. Not a strategic liaison for a deal on felt supplies or a dancefloor fling to help pay the council rates by the frock orders of the envious that might or might not come of it. She's entitled to two dozen spectacular white roses. She's only thirty-nine, and she's so very delightful, and so very deserving of all good things. This is her chance, perhaps, now that I'm grown. I so very much want her to be happy, in a permanent whirl of happy, happy days. But I don't want a man in our lives; I don't want us to change. I can't remember ever having had a man in our lives. I can't remember our Christmases in London at all either. I only remember them here, by McIlraith's boxes.

In this little leaky-roofed house. Our house. I put my hand on the cool, solid stone of the wall between the kitchen and the sitting room. It's a good foot thick – not about to whirl off at any time soon. It used to be the back wall of the house, and I remember when it was, before Mother had this kitchen added on with the bathroom soon after we arrived, with the tuppence go-away money she got out of his Lordship. I remember it most vividly and permanently: I was terrified of that outside lavatory, the spiders and the spooky hoots of the ferries through the night. I'd been terrified for weeks, it had seemed, for the whole of the voyage here, terrified just looking at the sea, that endless sea. Mother had jollied me along, of course –
This is our adventure, Ollie. Grab your hat and coat.
Intrepid, Mother is, unfailingly chin-up intrepid; I've only ever seen her frightened once. Somewhere in London, out shopping, we saw a biplane in the sky: she grabbed me and pulled me along the street and into a lane so fast she hurt my arm. I can still hear the crash-bang thumping of her heart as she held me to her. Wasn't until years later I realised what had been going on then: the Germans, dropping their bombs in the summer of 1917. We left not long after that, mother not taking no from a man about travelling restrictions and submarines.
Does the name Ashton Greene mean nothing to you, sir?
Our passport out. Didn't say goodbye to Daddy, though; can barely remember what his Lordship looks like; he was still in Flanders at the time, with that woman called Marie, with whom Mother decided she didn't want to share a marriage, however fleetingly – such backward, colonial sensibilities she has.

She's a native, Mother, undeniably, and so is this house – indeed, it's a brief history of the nation. Convict hewn,
1847
engraved above the front door, built by her Grandfather Weathercroft, before he made his fortune in shipping wool along the riverways, so he could build a great big stone house on an estate at Windsor, on the
Hawkesbury, where Mother grew up, with her beloved brothers, Archie and Alex. The Weathercrofts had a great big sheep station of their own in Mudgee too by then, but her father lost it after the slump of the nineties. Soon as she was old enough, no older than I am now, Mother was sent to London to marry well –
well-accomplished
disaster
, as she says. Sent Home to Mother England, then all the way home again eight awful years later, and utterly alone but for me, as both Archie and Alex were killed in France, and her parents had gone not long after them, utterly ruined, in every way, the remains of the shipping company gone too, finished off by the railways. A wild colonial tragedy. Some wobble of the wheel of fate kept the creditors from getting their claws on this cottage, though. Or perhaps it was simply overlooked, it's certainly small enough: four rooms on a handkerchief-sized piece of East Crescent ridge top, lost amongst the great jostling argument of flats and great big boarding houses that range around us. But it's ours. My home. We'll always have it. Won't we?

And McIlraith's Christmas boxes.

And Mexican chocolate cake. No: don't think about that Mexican chocolate cake. Get back to my ribbons, my creation for Glor. Don't think about the cake. Don't. Thread my needle, settle to it, one stitch at a time.

Grrrr. Thunk. SCREEECH.

Good God, but remember how frightened I was when the bridgeworks first got under way? What was I – thirteen? School holidays and they brought the whole of the rock face at Milsons Point down to put the workshops there and move the train station round the bay:
BOOOOM.
That rattled the windows. The sound of the end of the world. Mother sang it away that night; she sang ‘My Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown':
oh, when I had it on, I walked on the air
. . . I can't remember how the rest of it goes, though. I try to catch it as I stitch but it swims off and loops around into ‘Blue Heaven'; that'll do, sing the blues away:
A smiling face, da da da da, a cosy room, a little nest that nestles where the roses bloom, tra la la la la, tra la la la la, so happy in myyyy bluuue heaven
. . .

Who needs a wireless when you can rattle the windows all by yourself? While you're not even looking at that sideboard, are you, Olivia? There is no sideboard and there is no cake. None at all.

Stop looking at that clock, too. Won't bring Mother home any quicker.