The Blue Mile Read online

  And one of them, the tallest one, steps in our path: ‘Lovely night, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ I nod, and go to step around him, get past the glare of the lamp.

  But another says, stepping out too, to meet me there: ‘You all right tonight, young man?’

  He’s an old man, and there’s something familiar about the lines on his face, like he might be an old alco dragged up from the gutter. There’s some kindliness in this face that puts me at ease enough to ask him: ‘We’re looking for somewhere to eat.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, and all the Salvos look at each other as if conferring about it before he adds: ‘There’s not much around this part of town, not this time of night.’

  There’s helpful for you. I say: ‘Thought as much,’ and I go to keep on round them.

  But the old man stops me again, his eyes gone bright with an idea. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he says: ‘Do you like apricots?’

  ‘Apricots?’ I can’t say I remember the last time I had one, and the strangeness of the question fixes me to the spot for a second.

  ‘Yes, lad. They’re a bit overripe,’ he says, looking behind him and then back to me. ‘But they’ll be sweet. Barrowman passing earlier this evening give us a couple of bags.’ And a couple of paper bags there are, sitting by the trombone case. ‘The little girl might like a few, eh? She looks a sweet thing. Your little girl?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, holding her so tight round the legs it’s a wonder she doesn’t wake and yelp with it. My little girl, and what do you reckon about it, you sly old bastard? Just you try it on with me – go on. I’ll take you all on.

  ‘It’s all right,’ another of them says, a short, fat one, fiddling about with the bags, slipping something from his pocket in one too. He’s smiling as he hands the bag to me. ‘You’ll be doing me a favour, lad.’ He pats his gut: ‘I’m on a diet.’

  I take the bag from him. I don’t even say thanks. I’ve taken three steps back and sideways, away from them, and I’m running again now, off Pitt Street, uphill, as fast as I can manage, keeping to the shadows. On the next corner, there’s this big-end hotel with all lights blazing, shiny motors along the road outside and a doorman out the front. A woman is getting out of one of the cars, I hear her laughing. I see her shiny dress caught under the lights and she’s made of diamonds, and though my boots have got some lead in them now, I can’t stop running.

  I don’t stop again until we’ve got to the top of this hill and I’ve turned left again, taking the darker alternative, back towards the Quay. And now I’ve got no idea where we are. Shame bashes into me again: this is my city, I’ve lived not five minutes from here since we come off the ship from Tralee, when I was two years old, and I’ve no idea where I am in it now. Not a fucking clue. How can I look after Ag when I can’t even say where I am?

  Jesus. I could cry. I could stand here and cry.

  But Aggie rouses in my arms, rubbing her eyes. ‘Yo-Yo?’

  It’s a crime that she’s ever been denied the simplest thing: her safety. I say, ‘Bet you’re starving,’ and I scrunch the bag I’m holding by her left foot.

  Her eyes light up like Christmas as she holds my face in her little hands, and I could cry for that too. She doesn’t know what’s in the bag, only that I’ve got it for her. Promise her again: one day, you’ll never want for anything. I look about for somewhere we might sit so she can tuck in, but there’s not a bench in sight. Of course there’s not. But as I’m squinting up the road and across it, towards the furthest street lamp I can see, I just make out a gateway – big high palace gates. I could fall on my knees with the recognition.

  I know where we are. That’s the Gardens up there, the gates to the Botanic Gardens. I tell Ag: ‘We’re off for a picnic, yeah?’ And she’s says: ‘Can we, Yo?’ as I start heading off again. I’m hoping so. I’ve only been here a couple of times and a long time ago, three or four years, it must be, just before I left Gibsons and we did some big deliveries of cupboards and desks and that, to Parliament House, which I realise we’ve just walked right past. We’re on Macquarie Street. I could laugh with relief.

  Almost. When we get up to the corner and cross the road, there’s a cop, on the beat, on the path outside the Gardens, between the gates and the statue in front of them. I don’t have to tell Ag to shush as I sneak us down behind a line of skinny-trunked trees that run this side of the statue, watching him all the while; she’s watching him too. I take note of where we are: behind us, a big building that looks like a courthouse, with a stone triangle face and columns, but it’s something else; I don’t remember what. Yes, I do: it’s a library. I ate a pie on the lawn here, looking across at them gates, the walls either side about ten foot high, and the gates even higher, keeping the mob out dusk till dawn. When I look at the cop again, he’s moving off into the darkness, down the road behind the library. We watch him till he disappears, till the crunching of his boots is long enough gone.

  Then we’re across the roadway, quick as thinking it, and I’m following the wall down from the gate and into the dark, running my hand along the iron railings, looking for a break or some kind of leg-up so we can get over, but I find one railing that’s bent out like a runaway lorry’s smashed into it for us earlier, thank you, Lord, and we’re through. Into the trees: fat trunks and great black billowing heads; they’re fig trees. I keep on for a bit, through the trees, with the sweet smells of the earth and the softness of walking on the grass letting me believe for a few moments that we might be all right. We’re together, we’ll be all right; I’m just looking for a place to picnic, with my little sister, my starving, shoeless little mop-headed sister. I keep on through the darkness and the quiet until I think my lead boots are going to sink right through the softness of the earth, I’m that weary. But before they do, I trip up on a fig root and I ask Ag: ‘This do us, then?’

  ‘Mmm,’ she says, with her chin on my head, she wouldn’t care, and I can hear her smiling as I put her down on the ground, in the fork of these great big fig roots that rise so high near the trunk they seem made to harbour us. I pass her an apricot and I listen to her chomp that down, slurping the juice of it, and I listen to the rustling and squeaking up in the huge roof of the branches of this tree – bats, I suppose, big fat fruit bats, same as the ones in Victoria Park. And Aggie says: ‘That was nice. Is there another one?’

  ‘There is,’ I tell her. ‘There’s another five of them.’ There’s also a sandwich in the bag, wrapped in paper. A big fat sandwich. She won’t mind whatever’s on it, and I say: ‘You can have all the apricots when you finish this.’

  I have half with her. It’s ham and pickle, and it tastes just like what it is: a gift from heaven, from good strangers in the street, and for the first time in what seems forever, I think maybe we might be all right too. I will be giving us a fair crack at all right anyway. Somehow.

  As she’s chomping away, Ag sneaks back in under my arms, making herself snug. She says, through a mouthful: ‘Will we go on a tram tomorrow?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ag,’ I tell her. ‘Maybe. Got to get you some shoes before we get far anywhere, yeah?’

  ‘Buckle shoes?’

  ‘Whatever ones you want. And a new dress, too.’

  ‘You mean it, Yoey?’

  ‘Yes.’ I’m counting out our budget now, and she can have the whole of our £3 17s 6d, if that’s what buckle shoes and a new dress are worth to her. I’ll get another job soon. Things will work out.

  But for this moment, this night, weariness is finishing me. With my gut chomping round that ham and pickle, I’ve even gone past my want of a smoke, and my lids are already at half-mast as I ask Ag: ‘Reckon we should stay here tonight or go home?’

  ‘Stay here,’ she doesn’t hesitate. She pushes the back of her curly head into my chest: ‘Promise me, Yo-Yo, promise you won’t take me back there.’ I do. She says: ‘I like this tree.’

  ‘S
o do I,’ I tell her. ‘It’s a wonderful tree.’ I look up into its branches, so thick with their leaves it’s blacker than black against the starless sky, and I close my eyes and pray for our brother Michael, that he is at peace with you, Lord. Somewhere.

  ‘There’s fairies up there in it,’ Aggie whispers. ‘Can you hear them?’

  ‘I can hear them,’ I tell her, and I know her eyes are wide with it as she tells me all about the fairies that live in this tree and how apricots are their favourite thing and so she’s going to leave one for them and if it’s gone in the morning we’ll know that Oonagh the Fairy Queen likes us. I hold her to me as she burrows round deeper inside my arms, inside the arms of this great fig tree, and inside her blue eyes, wide and bright, some kind of sleep claims me.

  Olivia

  Can’t decide if it’s the alarm clock gone rogue or the Bridge Monster resuming its din in earnest, but I do know it’s dawn and it’s screeching. Listen carefully: it’s only the brakes of a tram plummeting down Blues Point Road. Good morning. Open eyes.

  And see that Mother is not here. Her bed across the other side of our dressing table is untouched. She didn’t come home last night. Not at all. Furious. And petrified. What has this Bart Harley done with her? Fling off the bedclothes. Furious. Petrified. Furious. Furious. Clock says five to six. I’ve had three hours’ sleep, at the maximum. After I finished Glor’s zigzags, I painted my white mary-janes, sketched out that indigo toque and then made us some bacon rissoles for breakfast, knowing we’d be tired this morning. Trying not to worry. Waiting. And waiting. And – how dare they. Arrrrrgh!

  SCREEEECH! The workshops reply.

  ‘Please!’ I yell out at the harbour, at the nothing between the claws and at everything, before I begin stomping about. I’ll give you two dozen spectacular roses, I will. Throw myself under the shower and into the wardrobe, where I rail at her liberally, and there’s plenty of her to rail at here, in our wardrobe that is the entirety of the other front room. At least I have no trouble deciding what I’ll wear today. Red. Box pleats. Severe. Angry. Black cloche with the red feather. Black stomping-cross double-strap mary-janes. There: this’ll tell her what I think.

  Before I realise I can’t possibly wear this ensemble. I’m going to Pearson’s with Glor today. Take it all off and re-ensemble in floral – the sage georgette with the white peonies. White split brim, fix it with a brooch of horsehair froth. That’s quite a lovely effect. And an excuse to add my favourite gloves with the little heart-shaped buttons. White mary-janes still tacky but they’ll do. I’ll do. Glare at myself in the mirror for a final assessment: pity about the face and the knobbly twigs you’ve got for limbs.

  Out you go, don’t forget hatbox and portfolio. Remember I’ve forgotten bacon rissole halfway down the ferry steps. I turn to go back for it, but half of North Sydney is now descending on McMahons Point wharf, pouring out from the tram, avoiding the welter of the train connection by the workshops across the bay, as we all do, and it’s not even peak hour yet. Fabulous: the ferry is already jam-packed as I step onto it, right into the midst of a tribe of sweaty schoolboys, already overheated for their last day of term. Good God but the Bridge can’t come soon enough to fix this. Not to mention that you could virtually walk punt to punt with the vehicular traffic from Blues Point to the Quay this time of day, the stench of adolescent male body odour is going to kill me.

  Transcend it, Olivia. Be elsewhere in your mind. Look up as we chug under the North Claw, and see that indeed a big bit of zig or zag is swinging off it on a hook. All eyes on this ferry are watching it, this girder being hauled up by the creeper crane, a spider reeling a catch into its web. Only it’s men who will receive it. I look for them now – there they are, silhouetted in the golden light of the sunrise, four of them, lined up on a ledge of claw hanging out into blue space, waiting to receive this massive swinging girder, which has a man on it, too. Ceaselessly impressive to witness. Utterly heroic. I almost forget I’m cross. In fact I’m conjuring another hat for my Bridge series: an afternoon casual in sunburst yellow, a vagabond of plaited straw with froth of a deeper shade below a crown criss-crossed with slate satin. Nice.

  ‘Oh geez!’ one of the boys near me calls out, as the whole ferry gasps. ‘Did you see that?’

  No, what? I search the claw as we pull away towards the Quay.

  ‘He nearly fell – geez, did you see? The other bloke caught him by the braces.’

  Glad I didn’t see that. Giddy enough as it is, and astonished, as ever, that it doesn’t happen all the time. How do they not fall off? There have been some nasty things happen at the workshops, and there was that gruesome incident with that fellow being squished building the approach road, but no one’s fallen off the claws. I reach across to the ferry rail to touch wood and see the box thing going up on the Dawes Point side, full of workmen, men in a pen. Please don’t fall off, any of you.

  But I could push a few schoolboys into the drink as I fight my way through them to get off the ferry. ‘Move aside, let the lady through,’ a gentleman commands by the gangway, and I can’t even smile a thankyou at him. Head down and busy at the task of pushing my way through the pack at the Quay. Mad mob or what, surging up from the other wharves: men, hundreds of them. I stand at the kiosk for a moment to readjust the strap of the portfolio cutting into the crook of my elbow, and I watch them: a river of men, all heading round past this end wharf and up into George Street North. Towards the Rocks. An army of filing clerks, by the looks of them. How odd.

  I ask the man at the kiosk window: ‘What’s going on at the Rocks?’

  He shrugs: ‘Another demo at the Labour Exchange, I s’pose,’ and he reaches past me to take money for the paper.

  ‘Labour Exchange?’ I ask the air.

  ‘The unemployment office,’ I hear another voice say, below me. It’s the old blind digger, under the awning, so close he’d be looking right at my shins, if he could. He says: ‘It’s coming on fast now.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘This depression. It’s coming for us again. Happened just like this back in the nineties, putting men on the street overnight. Hard times ahead.’

  ‘Oh.’ I manage to find two halfpennies in the bottom of my handbag and plink them into his cup, as if that might stave it off. Unemployment has been creeping up and up all year, a matter of general grumbling, and now –

  BOOM. THUNK.

  Here are the faces of international catastrophe, all these middling men trudging round to the Labour Exchange. I shudder, and then I just about run away, up Pitt Street, fleeing the curse of them. Their middling wives and sweethearts won’t be indulged with a new ensemble this Christmas, will they, and I’m mentally finishing Min Bromley’s bebe roses as I scoot double-time to the Strand. Mother is bang-on right, isn’t she: we must look up the ladder for our clientele now. As up as we can go.

  When I reach the arcade, I look down the ground floor to see if the Jabours are in yet, for me to snap up the best of their new Fujis: no, the grille is still closed, and I’m taking the stairs around the lift well two by two as if our livelihood depends upon it. Perhaps it does. Perhaps it depends on this Bart Harley chap too. Hard times call for hard measures, and my anger is dissipating now as I reach the window of our shop, the gold lettering, the velveteen. Mother really does know what she’s doing, doesn’t she.

  But in the next breath my thoughts are in uproar again as I spy the stockroom door is open. Just a crack, but open it surely is. Oh dear God, we’ve been robbed! My hand flies to my mouth.

  Before I see the swathe of honey cashmere draped over one of the hooks on the coat stand. Mother’s wrap. The one she took with her last night. Fling open the stockroom door.

  ‘Mother!’ I am so shrill I rattle the glass in the cabinetry. ‘Where on earth have you been?’

  She looks up from her beading, at her sewing table, squeezed in amongst the shelves of fabric bolts and boxes of b
its – as if she’s been at that all night. Butter wouldn’t melt. She smiles, slowly, not even a hint of apology in her eyes as she says: ‘Now Ollie, please, I –’

  ‘No.’ I put my hand up. ‘Don’t tell me. I do not wish to know.’

  Mother puts her beading down and stands up. ‘You look beautiful today, darling.’

  ‘Do I?’ I close the stockroom door on her, tempted to lock it.

  But she follows me out. ‘Ollie. Now, don’t you get all imperious with me. You must know. Bart has asked me to marry him.’

  ‘What?’ Shrill smashes through the glass roof of this arcade. ‘You’ve not known him a fortnight. That’s insane!’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiles, an immeasurably happy sort of smile. ‘It may appear insane, darling, but Bart and I have been acquainted a little longer than a fortnight, and you must know I’m considering saying yes.’

  ‘No!’ Atrocity of atrocities, and I could not sound more like a petulant five year old if I tried. Mexican chocolate cake stomped on and smashed to pieces.

  ‘Yes.’ Mother is calm. ‘We must arrange for you to meet. I won’t accept him if you truly can’t. Please, Ollie. Tomorrow night, we’ll dine at the Merrick.’

  ‘At the Merrick?’ Not that I’ve ever been there but it is presently the place to be seen, where all the beauties go, theatre people, intellectual people, and people who want to be seen with them. Not a place for me. A place where I can’t hide under the brim of my hat. And I don’t dance. Or rather I can: like a baby giraffe. How cruel are you, Mother?