The Blue Mile (6 page)

Yo

‘
I
'm sorry, lad, but there's no room at the inn, as they say,' this woman at the Paragon says, and this is the fifth hotel we've asked at round the Quay. She's all pity for us, leaning over the counter at her private entrance window, with no reason not to believe our story, which is a sad and simple one, and true enough: that I've come into Sydney from out west for work on the Bridge, with my child who's lately lost her mother. The woman shakes her head: ‘You could go round to the Loo but, love, always vacancies there, and then there's always them places a bit further afield towards Paddington, though I wouldn't take the little girl there, you know what I mean.'

I do, and I understand the warning. I wouldn't take Aggie into the filthy knocking shop that is Paddo all the way to Darlinghurst if paradise lay in the very centre of it; I'm not taking her round to Woolloomooloo either, for the entertainment of sailors bawling and brawling all night long. Not that they'd be likely to wake her. She's asleep, and heavy with it now, long past caring about me making creases in her frock, or failing her again, as I am.

I look at the woman for a second in want of pleading with her: what in Jesus' name is a homeless man with a child supposed to do? But I know the answer: go back to the Gardens, for tonight. Blessed be our merciful Lord it isn't raining. And know that we are not alone in our plight; we can't be: from all the enquiries I've made this evening, it seems it's near impossible to find decent, cheap accommodation in the city even with a good job, unless you're after a room at the Australia Hotel – that big one on Martin Place we passed just last night, as it turns out. The rates there are very reasonable, apparently, only you have to own a dinner suit to get in the door.

‘If you ask me,' the woman taps the counter with her finger, thinking, really wanting to help us, ‘Balmain's not a bad place to look, lad – it might be a bit rough around the edges but they're good people, working people. Try for a boarding house over that way, you'll be right.'

‘Thanks.' I nod. Balmain. That's the second time I've received that advice, but it'll have to wait till tomorrow now. The clock on the wall behind the woman's head says it's five after nine. It's too late to be going off somewhere I don't know. Balmain's not far – it's where those timber and colliery's wharves are, and that big electric power station, further down the harbour to the west, you can see it across the water from Pyrmont – but it might as well be another country. I've never been there.

I'm about to turn away when the woman says: ‘Hang on a sec, there.'

I think she might be going to see what she can do for us by way of accommodation, but she comes back with a paper bag. ‘Couple of pork pies for you, love. My Maurie makes them himself, they're very good.'

‘Thanks,' I say to her again. ‘That's very kind of you, I appreciate it.' And I do. Goodness. There is plenty of that about if you need it, isn't there. Just no room at the inn. Not tonight.

I hold Ag tight to me as we walk back into the street, don't look back at the great Tooths billboard lit up above the pub, calling all souls in for
SYDNEY BITTER,
wouldn't want to stay there anyway, would we. I walk back round towards the Gardens. Back through this empty city. You wouldn't know there were any homeless people about, not in the night, it's so quiet once you get up to Macquarie Street. Not even a late-opening department store round here. There's nothing but the trees and the bats that live in them. Those fucking fruit bats. I've got to try to get some sleep tonight; I'm supposing I only got about four or five hours last night, bits and pieces of it, thanks to the bats and the damp of the ground, and keeping one eye on Ag and the other out for a cop or a gatekeeper that might fall over us in the dark. I need a good sleep tonight. I've got a job to turn up to in the morning. What in Jesus' name am going to do with Ag tomorrow while I'm at it? On the North Shore, too. Somewhere I've never been, either.

At least the Gardens is safe. No luck getting back in until I've gone all the way up and round to where I found the bent-out railing last night, and when we're in, I keep walking, just keep walking, almost back down to the harbour again, as if by walking I might somehow get us further away from hopeless. I get us down to the tram sheds this side of the Quay, and they're lit up like hell's tomorrow, so I keep walking down to the seawall, away from the harbour lights, to where the sound of the water washing against the wall seems quieter than silence. It sounds like sleep. Even the figs here are quiet. The air is warm and still. This will be a good place for us tonight, I think.

And then a dog barks somewhere in the blackness ahead and a fella calls out: ‘That you, Perc?'

I don't run. I couldn't run if it was Welfare after us. I'm far too past it now. I say: ‘No, and I'm not looking for trouble.'

‘Righto,' this fella laughs as he comes up to us. ‘No one's ever looking for trouble, are they – poor lonely bugger, he is, that Mr Trouble.' I can't see him well, but I can smell him. On the metho.

Ag must smell it too; she wakes up and yawns: ‘Yoey?'

And the old fella sees her; he says: ‘Ah, you got trouble anyway, I take it. What you doing out here in the night then?'

‘Not a lot.'

‘Righto,' he says. ‘Well, since you're not looking for trouble, let me tell you two bob's: you don't want to go into the Domain for not a lot tonight.'

‘Wasn't thinking to,' I say, thinking about it. The Domain, it's the park along from the Gardens, behind St Mary's Cathedral, where there's a permanent hobos' camp and the soap-boxers preach their politics on Sundays, not that I've ever been to see or hear any of that steaming pile. I ask him: ‘What's going on there?'

The laugh goes out of his voice: ‘Listen, you can still get a good feed from the Salvos there, my word you can, but you have to get there before five o'clock. After sunset, no good. Lot of young blokes hanging about nowadays, warming Mrs Mac's Chair – like you, not looking for trouble, none of them. But they are – stirred up and it's worse than the last time, it is. It's no place for you to be taking a child.'

I don't need to be told that, and not by this old piece of shitbag. Keep going past him.

‘Stay round the Gardens,' he calls after us. ‘We'll look out for you – we're the Governor's new groundsmen!' He starts laughing again, wheezing like a dead man with it.

I keep walking, and Ag says when we're well past him: ‘Don't worry, Yo-Yo. We'll find a place tomorrow.' Patting me on the shoulder.

Jesus, please: she's seven years old and consoling me. Have a heart, listen to her now as she chooses our tree for this night, telling me all about the fairies that live in this part of the Gardens, that they have white wings and pink roses in their hair, and they all have the prettiest names, like Nina and Lucy, and that they'll like the hard bit of this pork pie crust to dunk in their tea. ‘Don't worry, Yoey, Queen Oonagh likes us, I know she does.' Telling me with it all that I haven't failed her a bit, and soon enough, in the warm still air, she's asleep again in my arms, in the arms of this tree.

I don't sleep, though. The more I will it, the more I can't do it, and the louder, beneath the quiet wash of the water, I can hear our mother crying for us. Telling me I should take Ag back to her; but I can't do that. Ag hasn't mentioned our mother once. Not once since we left. And I can't take her back for all the crying in the world. I can't take her back to that life. It is not any life to have. I need to sleep, to best take our chance at this next life, whatever it might be, but I can't sleep, not really. My gut chews around and around the shame in me for not taking Ag away from there sooner, doing it properly, in some orderly way – with a place to live, with a job. Not sleeping in a park. Not sleeping at all. Greasy in my veins from wanting a drink to bring it to me, and hating that want more than ever: days that come and go in the half-hour before closing, making that sly bottle of KB last into the night, until you don't care anymore, until you'd drink anything, anytime. Our mother crying and crying. I can only close my eyes over it and try to will the sun to rise, to bring me the new day, this new life, as fast as it can come for us.

And when it does come, the seawall is a ring of gold stone around us, and in the quickness of Ag's smile as she turns in my arms to find me still here, it doesn't seem to matter that I haven't slept, or that I don't know what or how we'll manage this next hour, never mind this day. I just have things to do.

Olivia

I
can't do it. I've tried to reconcile it all in my mind, tried to be accepting, mature, calm, reasoned. Forced it into floral georgette. Be sweet. Unselfish.

Impossible.

I've continued this argument down the ferry steps, under monster claws North and South, and right through the gangway at the Quay: impossible. I simply can't go to the Merrick tonight.

And it's
not
selfishness on my part anyway.

How can Mother justify herself to
me
? Not coming home – again – last night. When I got back to the shop yesterday afternoon, I was met with a note:
Ollie darling, taken some work over to Bart's at Rose Bay, need the peace and quiet – see you in the morning.
The morning that finds me a ruin now, a frowzled and frayed scrap of ruin. And it's her fault. How do I know she's safe in Rose Bay somewhere and not met a bad end somehow, tossed in the harbour there? How do I know she's merely been making love all night long? Oh dear God –
merely
? Does she
want
to ruin me absolutely with this carry-on? Even without
that
humiliation, how can she conscience leaving me all alone, for two long nights in a row? Leaving me alone to deal with Friday late opening five minutes to Christmas. Leaving me to go home alone to the torture of untouchable Mexican chocolate cake in the sideboard. And – the worst – pinching my bolt of blue heaven on her way out the door. While it may be true that she is unaware of my attachment to that fabric, primarily because I wasn't talking to her yesterday, she could have left it and
asked
me before taking it
for herself.

I pull my brim down tight against my ears, to keep this rage and infuriation in. But it won't stay in – it's even escaping through my hair today. Which is only more and more reason I am not going to the Merrick tonight: I'm not taking this rebellious mess anywhere it might be hatless, not to mention the rest of me: it looks like it's been through the surf. It is the surf, at Manly, in a tempest. I'm a tempest. Competing with Medusa for ugly.

While Mother is . . .

I glance up Pitt Street ahead, along the bright riot of verandah posts of this busiest street, already a mad contest of carts and lorries and trams and people intent on parting with their hard-earned. The place my mother has delivered me my future. My business. My certainty. Myself. My mother. And the storm suddenly dies out of me. My gorgeous and clever mother who has raised me, loved me, sacrificed herself for me and cared for me in all ways for all these years. She can do as she pleases. She can marry Bart Harley, she can marry Don Juan.

So long as I don't have to go to the Merrick tonight.

But no. No, she can't do any such thing! The storm rails up again and I am a child lost and wailing in it.

Mother can't marry Bart Harley. She simply can't. And I can't hurt her by saying no to it either. To him. He must be made to disappear, then. Can't one of those razor-gang drug hoodlums shoot him in revenge? I'm going to unstopper that brass bottle on Mr Jabour's sideboard and command the genie to arrange it forthwith.

Oh dear God, that takes me by the throat: what creature am I to think such a spiteful thing? Take a sharp left along Albert Street, up to the Gardens. Now. I must cool myself down before I do anything else. I can't go into the arcade in this state. And I can't be so cruel to Mother.

Damn her, I send my cursing up into the mess of squiggling limbs of the fat old Moreton Bay figs that stretch across the foreshore here.

Stomp, stomp, stomp, beneath their million leaves of glossy indifference, doing nothing to soothe me whatsoever.

DAMN!

I slap my hands onto the cool, solid stone of the wall that edges this garden from the sea, and I look out across the cove here, asking it for a loan of just the tiniest fraction of its serenity, just a moment to see my way clear in this.

But all I see now is a claggy haze of humidity rising off the water with the sun, over a great grey expanse of
phlergh
. . .

Yo

‘
L
ook. Yoey – that's her.' Aggie points up ahead: ‘That's the fairy princess from our tree.'

‘Is it?' I say, not really looking, hurrying up the path now. We have to get across the harbour earlier than I'm due there, find a good safe spot for Ag to spend the day. I'm sick at the thought of leaving her on her own, in some place I know nothing of, but what else can I do? She'll be right, won't be the first day she's spent alone with a bag of grapes and a bun.

‘Yoey,' she gets a whine in her voice now, and she's never one for whining: ‘You're not looking.' She pulls at my shirtsleeve.

I look up to where she's pointing, at her fairy princess: it's a girl standing by the seawall, her dress is white with pink flowers on it, and she has a long scarf round her neck that's floating behind her on the breeze, of that see-through type material. I say: ‘You might be right, Ag – she's got the same colours as your fairies last night.'

‘She must become a real girl in the daytime,' Ag decides as we get nearer to her.

‘Yeah.' I say, and I'm already past her in my head, counting the wharves along the Quay, to the Milsons Point one I checked for yesterday –
Milsons
not
McMahons,
we have to get to, the ticket fella at the Quay said, on the
east
side of Lavender Bay. Wharf number six, I count them off again, as if the little folk might have swapped them all around in the night just to entertain me. Then we're to keep to the
left
along the water to the Dorman Long wharves – don't go right to the trains or up the escalators to the tram, it's a confusion round there, the ticket fella said. I pick Ag up the better to start a run for it.

But as I do she calls out, ‘Oh no – look!' and I just catch what she sees: the wind picking up and taking the girl's hat with it. A little white hat with a black band, it flies up and spins against the sky, till it's caught by the branches of the fig behind us.

‘Oh dear God!' the girl shouts at the tree, high and loud like a tin whistle. ‘Well, that's just fabulous, that is.'

And it is. I can see her face now, and it's stopped every other thought in my head, my feet as well. Her cheeks are the same colour as the flowers on her dress and her hair is as wild as Ag's, only it's gold, a wild halo of gold. She throws her hands up in the air. She's very upset about this hat being in the tree. But her arms, long and pale and bare, are all I'm interested in for the moment. Everything about her seems long. She's a tall girl, tall like a tree, a beautiful tree of a kind I've never seen before. She's a –

‘We have to get the hat for her, Yoey,' says Ag, kicking my backside.

‘What?' I return to our reality as fast as I left it. I'm not climbing up any tree to fetch a hat. We have to get to Milsons Point – ten minutes ago. I look back over my shoulder towards the Quay, the tall masts of some old sailing ship this side of it telling me to move it along.

‘Oh, you wouldn't be so kind, would you?' the girl says and I look at her again. She's looking up at the hat in the tree, wanting, worrying, asking with eyes that are neither blue nor green, and her voice is like honey now she's not shouting. She could be a princess, she's got that type of bearing about her. She is without doubt a fairy: she has me in her power. I look at the hat in the tree, searching for the best way up.

‘I can reach,' Ag says. ‘You hold me up, Yoey, and I can shake it out.'

Takes a child to see sense sometimes, doesn't it, and the hat's tumbling into the girl's hands two seconds later.

‘Thank you so much,' she smiles, and her hands jitter a little putting her hat back on her head, pulling the brim of it so low on her face all I can see is her smile.

And I can no more reply than move from it. A smile that has changed me into a spoon, powerless except for goggling – and being instantly convinced that this is the girl.
The
girl. The one who will be mine. I have the worries of the world on my shoulders today. I have my little sister on my shoulders for sure. And I've decided to take a wife on the way to the ferry to I don't know where, as if any girl would want me, never mind one such as this.

I laugh. Though it's not funny. This is why I've never been too orderly about my business: too easily diverted from it. Thinking about a girl, drinking about a girl, and getting nothing done about anything while I'm definitely not getting the girl.

But she laughs as well: honey winding round that tin whistle. Jesus. I'll bet she can sing.

She says again: ‘Thank you so much.' And she smiles again: ‘I needed that laugh, too – really I did.' She looks away, down at her shoes, as if she might have some terrible worry with them now too. They're white shoes; of course they are.

‘I like your frock,' Aggie says to her, and I don't hear the reply.

I can only see the way this girl is smiling up at Ag now, this fairy princess smiling on my sister and talking with her about frocks, so that my own empty-headed spoonery now joins up with our need, and I'm asking this girl: ‘You couldn't find it in your heart to do me a favour in return, could you?'

‘Oh?'

I'm as surprised as she is at the question, and I don't know how it is I manage to continue with it when her eyes fall on me again, but I do; I ask her: ‘You couldn't look after my little sister for a few hours, could you, today? While I'm at work. I'll pay you.'

Her back straightens at the question, and though I'm an inch or two taller, the look she gives me squashes me into the gravel at our feet.

Yes, I have intelligence enough to know that question was monkey-nutted enough to win me a prize, thank you, and we'll be on our way.