The Blue Mile (9 page)

Yo

T
here is no fear like the fear of getting a four-inch white-hot iron cock in your face and that takes over all other sense as the hammering of the rivet gun takes over the hammering of my heart. After catching the first dozen or so rivets, my shoulders start aching from holding the bucket up, and a while after that the ache becomes white-hot skewers through my bones, until it becomes nothing but not getting it in the face. I don't know what time it is or how many rivets have come down, but I know I've caught every one, and that becomes everything. I am the task. And I've done this before. It's what I do. I could be stitching on soles and passing boots up the line. No room for thinking in it. Just the job, and I am just another bit in the machine.

I am a machine.

Until the hammering stops and Tarzan lays down the gun and yells at me: ‘Smoko.'

It's a sound from far away, though he's not two yards distant, and as I put the bucket down, I look back along the curve to the rooftops of the workshops and I don't lose my guts at all this time. I look down through the boards of the scaffold floor to the water and I see it for what it is: miraculous. I'm hanging off the side of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Fucking miraculous. I smile at Tarzan. I did it. I can do this job.

He shakes his head and shouts something else but I don't catch it, apart from the word ‘deaf'. Yes, I must be deaf, from that riveting. He waves at me to hurry up, back off the scaffold and onto the Bridge itself. All right, I think, I can do this now: I got on here, I can get off. But when I'm standing up on the plank looking across at the bit of rail at the edge of the chord, it seems too small and too far away.

‘Come on, Pretty, I want me cuppa,' Tarzan says and I hear that clearly; he's getting itchy about it, too.

And it's all too clear again: the water rears up at me from that foot-wide gap. But I can fight it this time: it's just a gap, no different than walking across a storm water grate. Several hundred feet above the ground, with the breeze gusting up at your back.

Chasm of death.

Dolly, the fella who was round the other side of the riveting, leans down over the rail: ‘Here.' He grabs me by the elbow and pulls me across.

And the nails of my boots slip, metal on metal, and on the slant of the chord, so that if it wasn't for Dolly holding me and the rail, I might have slid off.

‘Bloody hell, kid, get yourself some sandshoes,' says Dolly, still with a hold of me, though I've made it onto the level surface of the chord joint now, into the shelter of it, out of the wind, and only now do I notice that they're all wearing sandshoes, rubber soles. That fella at the Public Works office might've told me: get yourself some sandshoes. Slipped his mind. Too busy. Jesus, I could be dead.

Clarkie, the cooker, shoves a hot tin mug of tea into my hands: ‘Monday, this is your job, right?'

Whatever that might be; making the tea, I suppose. I say, ‘Right.' I'll find out Monday, won't I.

I take a sip of the tea, hot and sweet, and I'm taken away again by where I am. I'm sitting here having a cuppa on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge – fucking miraculous. My hands are shaking so that I can hardly roll my smoke, but I'm hearing myself asking: ‘How high up are we here?'

‘About three hundred feet now here,' says Tarzan. ‘She'll be four hundred and forty at the top of the arch when she's finished.' He says that with pride, as if this is his Bridge.

He opens a beaten-up old lunch tin and says, ‘Help yourself,' and I don't mind if I do, as I haven't had anything to eat since that pork pie last night. And so I sit in sky chomping on fruitcake listening to Tarzan and Dolly talking about pneumatic something or other in regard to some issue with the riveting gun pressure that is lost on me, excepting that I work out that the tool Dolly holds up round the other side of the wall against Tarzan's hammering is called a dolly.

Then they're quiet again, eating their cake, enjoying the view, until Clarkie's off back to his oven and Tarzan and Dolly are getting back to their feet too, wiping cake crumbs into the sky. This is just another job; in a strange place. A beautiful place: look out at them trees all across the city. Sweet, sweet Jesus. I asked for a miracle and I got one. And I'm not going to let the fear of falling get me this time; I will think across it, talk over it, following Tarzan back to the plank, looking out across the great space between the two halves of the arch: ‘What's the trick that's holding the chords up?'

As my heart is belting again: fucking hell, how can it be that we're not toppling into the sea?

‘You're full of questions,' Tarzan says over his shoulder as he steps across the gap, not even looking where he's going, he's that confident of where he is, and I keep right behind him, my footsteps in his, it's just a step and no congratulations for it, and then, when we're back on the floor of the scaffold he turns around and shows me, pointing back down this curve of straight lines: ‘Tension cables,' he says. ‘Beyond the abutment, you can see them. More than a hundred, north and south, anchoring each of the two sides, deep into the rock on either shore. They won't budge for anything.'

I can't see these cables from here and I don't know what an abutment is, but he smiles at me and my question, this ginger-headed Tarzan, and I believe him and his confidence in this Bridge, as Clarkie shouts, ‘Aye-o,' from the oven and the gun starts up again.

Olivia

‘
O
h, look at that, aren't they fabulous?' I say of the reindeer in the David Jones Santa display, their hooves raking the air as they fly above the rooftops of Sydney. ‘Magical.'

‘Hm,' says Agnes, studying them as she slowly and daintily devours her vanilla cupcake, cracking off the pink icing crumb by crumb to make it last. Then she looks up at me, studying still, and she says: ‘It's not magic but, is it? It's just a wind-up thing in them that makes them go. Magic is when things happen just by themselves, isn't it?'

‘Hm,' I reply. Such a bright little girl but so fixed on her fantasies; querying frown in want of confirmation from her fairy princess. ‘I suppose so,' I tell her, and rather than squish her ideals by confessing that the only magic I believe in is the one that inspired the board of directors at DJs to get in a mechanical display to pack in the kiddies for Christmas, I say: ‘If it really rained tinsel snowflakes over Sydney – now
that
would be magical.'

‘That would be silly,' Agnes giggles. ‘You are funny, Miss Greene.' Grinning, with that conspiratorial squinchy-faced grin which says she will not be dissuaded from her conviction that I am somehow magical too.

I say: ‘You're funny.' And I consult my watch: ‘But we should go, or Mother will turn us both into pumpkins.' We've only been gone half an hour, but we really should be back at the salon; I shouldn't have left. It's been hectic all morning, not with serious purchasers but with expert pernicketers: I abandoned Mother to a woman after a pair of gloves, wanting the buttons of one swapped to the style of another, wasting time in lieu of money. Couldn't have been a more perfect payback for Mother's abandonment of me last night, if such an idea didn't seem to belong to some other realm now. God, how are we to make up for the loss of the Bromley follow-on clientele?

Agnes giggles again: ‘You won't turn into a pumpkin – your
carriage
will, and that doesn't happen until
after
the ball.'

‘Silly me again.' I take Agnes by the hand and, possibly grasping it a little too hard, lead her through the throng of kiddies, past the reindeer, past the cake table, guilt nipping at my heels. I'm not going to the ball. My stomach lurches and spins, grasping for reprieve: if there is magic in the world, then make it so that I won't have to go to the Merrick, Mother will stop this business with Bart Harley and we'll all live happily ever after. As if Agnes might be a conduit for such a plea, I squeeze her hand: ‘You're a clever little girl, aren't you?'

‘Your mother is very clever to make that gown for you.' Azure eyes look up at me, unblinking, crystal clear as her wonder. ‘I never seen such a magical thing as that.'

‘Hm.'
Ding
, here's the lift, ‘Oh good, look at that,' but Agnes is unimpressed by lifts now; still in her rapture over the gown, she says as we descend: ‘Your mum must love you very much to make you such a special frock as that.'

‘Hm.' I would change the subject to enquiring further about Agnes's own mother if I weren't so thoroughly caught up again in tortures over my own: the look of hurt on her lovely face. My lovely mother. I must make it up to her; I must, with no more than ordinary daughterly obedience, simply do as she asks and go to the Merrick. It's only stupid dinner at a stupid restaurant. People do this sort of thing
all the time
. But each time I imagine this all I can see is my gangly frame mocked by that gown, and right in the midst of the snazziest place in town. Stares. Whispers. Who does she think she is? Trumped-up milliner.
Sticky sticky stick insect, is she a bug or is she a boy?
Or a baby giraffe, tripping over too-big two left feet on the dancefloor.

I trip up the gutter crossing Castlereagh into the Imperial to prove that there is no such thing as magic at least, for if there were, I'd have sprained an ankle just now, wouldn't I. We don't even come close to being run over crossing Pitt Street either – traffic parts as if Moses were in town – and we're back in the Strand. Dawdling slightly outside the Jabours' but I see they've got a queue, Glor's got her head in the sideboard, amongst the metallic laces, too busy to so much as look up to wave, while Mr Jabour's genie ignores me from his bottle above.

As does Mother when we return to the salon; she's too busy to so much as look up and scowl. The glove pernicketer is still harassing her and she's got another one umming and ahhing over the style samples across the hat tree, and yet another on the chaise flicking through the
Vogue
s. That one I recognise.

Fabulous: it's Allison Palgrave. Friend of Cassie Fortescue, and if there is magic in the world it is naught but black.

‘Olivia,' she looks up from the magazine, all dazzling white teeth deftly concealing her forked tongue. ‘You remember me, of course – it's Ally. Ally Palgrave. How
are
you?'

She couldn't care less. I glance over at Mother, and in one twitch of an eyebrow she confirms what I instantly suspect. There is only one reason Allison Palgrave is here: to get the torrid details on Min Bromley's wedding catastrophe. She's not here for couture, judging by the atrocity she's got on. It has the floaty fey lines of a Vionnet, but the fabric is all wrong for the design: ghastly wallpaper pattern of lotus flowers, elegant as the back end of a brewer's cart. Bet she bought it in London: walking advertisement for Duped Colonial.

‘Ally, how lovely to see you,' I say, as her evils against me tumble one over the other: smashing her tennis racquet into the back of my knees to make me buckle, pushing me into the trophy cabinet in the hall, always pushing me aside for living in lowly Lavender Bay in my tiny old cottage, with all the dirty trams and the trains and the workshops and the wharves, always sneering at my darned stockings and my bacon rissoles. Never give your tormentor the satisfaction of a reaction was the advice Mother gave me then, and it holds as well now: Allison Palgrave won't be getting anything out of me today. Especially not here: my territory. My smile could get me arrested it's so counterfeit: ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?'

‘Oh, I'm just browsing around.' Allison tosses my Paris
Vogue
onto the table as so much rubbish. ‘Thought maybe I'd like a bunch of summery things – for May-ish, though. I'm going Home again next year. May as in late spring at Home, of course. Wondering what to take, as usual.'

Such a liar, as usual. ‘What sorts of summery things did you have in mind?'

‘Oh, I don't know,' she throws her hands up in the air: oh, the ennui of being a paper mill heiress with nothing to do but contemplate your wardrobe and betray your friends. She says: ‘You wouldn't have time for a coffee this afternoon, would you? We could have a good old catch-up, throw around some ideas.'

I could have a good old throw-up. Every fibre of my being is screaming:
Get out of my salon, you horrible bag of spiders!
Liar, liar, liar. The last person Allison Palgrave would want to be seen in a coffee lounge with is me – or any working girl for that matter. But if a private ladies college education is good for anything, it's good for this: ‘Oh, Ally, I'd love to but I'm so sorry, we're terribly busy just now, as you can see. You wouldn't be able to reschedule that coffee for sometime after Christmas, would you? Say, mid-Jan?' Perhaps circa 1980.

‘Of course,' Allison Palgrave continues the pretence too as she stands but her eyes dull: rebuffed and she knows it. Oh God, but I wish I could tell her who I really am, have her cringe at my feet and call me by my rightful name, the Honourable Miss Ashton Greene, more London and more entitled than she will ever be. But I can't do that, no more than I would divulge a client's confidential wedding catastrophe. Matters of scalding hatred and common decency aside, betrayal of the Bromleys is out of the question. The Bromleys – and the Fortescues and who knows who else if we play our cards well –
are
our customers; Allison Palgrave will never be. All money and no sense of style, and Commonwealth Bank director trumps filthy-stinky paper mill any day. ‘Goodbye, Ally.' I see her out. ‘Hope to see you soon.' Good God, but she is as broad as the chaise is long in that ensemble – overstuffed and ill-upholstered.

‘Well done, darling,' Mother whispers as she swishes past behind me. ‘Very well done.'

But when I turn around again, I see only Agnes, sitting over there at my table, returned to folding and colour-sorting the little pile of remnant scraps I gave her when she finished the buttons, before we left for the morning tea. I didn't instruct her to go back to it; I don't even recall letting go of her hand. Seen, not heard, perfect picture of a perfect little girl. I wonder if any nasty B torments her at school: undoubtedly. I ask her, ‘Agnes, if I give you my little wooden mannequin, will you make her a gown for me?'

She looks up at me with crystal-clear delight: ‘Oh, can I, please?'

Oh, can I steal her and keep her always, please? I could sit and watch her play dolls with my little mannequin all day. But not this day.

‘Now, miss, here,' the ummer and ahher at the hat tree summons me and the next four hours is a blur of horsehair froth and spider daisies. Don't even stop for lunch.

Mother doesn't pop the closed sign round until quarter past three, in fact. ‘Shush, don't tell the Minister for Industry,' she winks at the coat stand in respect of our illicit trading, before she says to me: ‘Where's this chap for the girl, then?'

‘The who?' I'm tired and half-blind and I want one of those vanilla cupcakes with pink icing – seven of them.

‘The girl's brother.' She waves a hand at Agnes. ‘This Bridge worker chap. Don't they finish at three or the unions go out on strike and what have you?'

I wouldn't know; Mother does: union people are Reds who go on strike and make the price of coal and everything else go up, forcing us all to hell in a handbag with a Labor prime minister – just look at the state of the economy, all his fault, though he's not been in the job two months. Everything that goes wrong is Labor's fault, and the unions' – including the New York stock exchange falling into the sea. I look at Agnes, still working away diligently at my table, now pinning a length of raspberry rickrack zigzags to the hem of a skirt she's made from a scrap of the lemon Fuji. She is me at the same age. But now, and for the first time, I wonder if I haven't made some untold mistake bringing her here; this strange, otherworldly child, with the Bridge worker brother I met for all of about three minutes, in a public park. What exactly have I invited into the salon? What if they
do
live in the Gardens – like tramps? Sundowners. Drifters. No, that's ridiculous: childish make-believe living under
them
trees. And he seemed such a nice boy, so concerned for his little sister. I tell Mother: ‘I'm sure he'll be here soon.'

Mother taps the face of her wristwatch. ‘You won't be, Olivia – your appointment with Marjorie at half past, yes?'

For my hair; for tonight. That sends me buckling and lurching and spinning again at full speed. I don't want to get my hair done; I don't even so much as want to look in the stockroom at that gown. I don't want to look at Mother; I turn away, bend down and busy myself picking squiggles and snips of spider daisy off the rug. I've always loved this floor rug, its beginning-less pattern of Florentine swirls, curling off into lily trumpets.

‘Olivia.' Mother is tired too; tired of my resistance. ‘This nonsense ceases now
. Your
nonsense. These anxieties, these confabulations of dread at coming out – it must stop today, this minute. Bart or no Bart, I'm not going to be around forever to progress our business socially – and it
must
be progressed if you are to become who you deserve to become. If you want this business, you must grow up – today – and accept all the responsibilities of it. Or, if you must remain closed in and shut up, accept Miss Greene's Hat and Frocks in Homebush. Is that what you want?'

No, I do not want: lonely suburban coffin lined with easy-wash, easy-fade poplins. Death by a thousand bolts of gingham. But still I can't look at her. Still I resist.

Mother gentles her tone: ‘What are you so afraid of, Ollie?'

She knows very well.
Sticky, sticky, stick –
damn Bs – and the Merrick is
their
territory. In here, I'm the one holding the hatpin; out there, in this place I've never been, I will be exposed, alone, sneered at, rejected. Ugly. I'm terrified.

Mother persists, ‘You can't worry what that Palgrave girl might think of you, or what anyone might think of you. I know how much it hurts, Ollie darling, and I know what a waste of time it is to dwell on such things.'

She does: she knows what it is to be sneered at and rejected, packed off and erased from Ashton Greene history, no less. But I know her story by heart; I dwell in its disaster, and lavishly. It was the spring of 1910. They met at the Savoy, quite by accident, as she was dining with old wool trade acquaintances of her father's. She was wearing a gown of satin-banded bisque organza, copy of a delectable wasp-waisted Worth she'd seen at Hanover Square, every stitch her own, when amid the spangle and swirl of the grand banquet hall she was accosted by a tall and dashing stranger in finely tapering swallow tails. He was Shelby Ashton Greene, then a viscount's honourable son, and he asked her to dance. By the end of summer, they'd eloped to Paris, where she wore genuine Poiret. I arrived the following spring in his London digs, and there she stayed. While he resumed his dashing. She was trapped, albeit in a rather pleasant Grosvenor Place prison, wondering how to work a nappy. Alone. No society, no friends, as if she didn't exist, though every detail of his every peccadillo followed her in stares and whispers from Covent Garden to Belgravia. Girls called Penny and Edith, his valet's niece, a restaurateur's daughter, his whole battalion in Flanders, and then Marie, whoever she might have been.
But do cheer yourself up, Emmy – I'll always love you, too. Why don't you change the drapes?
He was ever honest with Mother, as were his family: the Ashton Greenes refused to acknowledge her at all, and my grandparents never laid eyes on me, not once in my seven years there. As if I am illegitimate. Why? Because self-stitched Emily Weathercroft was not the right sort. No breeding and no cash in the bank. Australian and sheepless. No good reason to despise a girl, force her to beg for her own divorce, beg for the fare back to Sydney, but that the Ashton Greenes are not the right sort in themselves. They can't be, can they: look at my father – mean, arrogant, selfish, lion-hunting Don Juan.