The Blue Mile Page 6

  It’s Glor: ‘Lunch now.’

  ‘Oh? Is that the time?’ My stomach groans. Audibly.

  Glor clicks her tongue. ‘Yes, that’s the time. You’re Christmas blitzed already, aren’t you? Come on. You complain about being twiggy, and you don’t eat properly. Hop it now.’

  She starts dragging me out by the elbow, and I grab hat, gloves and handbag as I call out: ‘Mother? I’m off with Glor – Pearson’s. Might be a while.’

  ‘Oh, is that the time?’ I hear her wonder from the stockroom as I’m pulled out the door, only just remembering to grab special snazz-filled hatbox from coat stand. Glor doesn’t even notice: too busy hurrying me along.

  Into the lunchtime melee: the ground floor of the arcade is teeming. If it wasn’t for Pearson’s prawns, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble battling through it. We’ve only got to get two minutes down Pitt, just over the other side of King Street, oh but the stench of humanity. So humid today too – phlergh, but is a little talcum powder really too much trouble? I could collapse from it, but that Glor is still pulling me along: ‘We can’t be late, they’ll give our table away.’

  They would, too: one of the waiters is standing at the door, turning a couple of chaps away, the usual Pearson’s chaps, young lawyers and journalists, come here to rub shoulders with barristers and politicians, which is why Glor likes to lunch here: for the young lawyers. Hasn’t found one she likes, yet. But they all like her: the pair at the door are so transfixed as she walks past them the waiter tells them to move along.

  Oh, the stench of masculinity in here: powerful amongst the powerful. I pull my brim down as we’re seated, and Glor says at my hatbox: ‘What in whosiwhatsits, Ollie – you’ve brought some work with you, have you?’

  ‘Oh? No!’ I push the box across the table to her: ‘This is for you. Ho ho ho, lovely one.’

  ‘Oh!’ Her surprise is a treat in itself and she hasn’t even opened it yet. She lifts the lid off the hatbox and she cries out, for the whole cafe to hear: ‘Olivia Greene, oh my! Olivia Greene, what have you done!’

  So that everyone in the room looks at me. Including – oh dear God – there he is, bang on time, it’s Mr Lang, Leader of the Opposition, walking across to his usual table at the back of the cafe, tipping his hat, granite jaw cracking into a grin – at me – on his way through. Mr Fabulous. Even Mother thinks he’s fabulous, as most mothers do, for bringing in the Child Endowment when he was the premier – not that she’d ever openly admit to supporting Labor Party anything, or the raise in company tax that funds anything they do. Six shillings worth of well-earned justice, she calls the maternal pittance under her hat, and I call Mr Lang fabulous right now for taking the attention from me. People would look at him even if he wasn’t Mr Lang, though: so tall and dark, and those searching eyes, soulful – for a suburban real estate agent, anyway.

  ‘Oh, Ollie.’ Glor couldn’t care less if John Barrymore himself romped in as Don Juan as she lifts the zigzags up out of the box. ‘I adore it. Velma and May are going to be crazed with jealousy.’ Her older sisters. I grin. They will be crazed.

  Our bubble of loveliness is restored, and just as the waiter takes our order, Glor leans across the table and whispers: ‘Don’t look now, but boy to the right, two tables across, maroon tie – what do you think?’

  I think I want to run out into Pitt Street and scream. Why does everyone I love want a boy? I don’t. They don’t look at me, unless they’re a bemused leader of the opposition, and I don’t look at them. Glor’s rattling on about this one: Paul Gallagher, he’s so and so’s son, who’s a friend of Uncle George, and he went to Waverley College, the year below Cousin Sam, and her father approves – ‘I’m thinking of letting Dad ask him over for coffee. What do you think, Ollie?’

  Give him a glance from under my brim. He looks all right. Generic boy. Fresh-faced garden variety. Nice. Reasonably gorgeous blue eyes. Not handsome enough for her, though. I say: ‘He looks hardy enough to withstand coffee at your house. But it’s what you think that matters, Glor.’

  He looks across the room and smiles at her, enchanted.

  And my prawns taste of grit.

  Glor doesn’t notice; she’s too busy making eyes at him, and trying on his name about a hundred times: Paul this, Paul that, la la la la la la la la . . .

  Until I look up at the wall clock and, ‘Oh dear God, Glor,’ I deliver the excuse I’ve been fabricating these past five minutes: ‘I’ve forgotten I have to pick up some fox trim from Barnaby’s, for an appointment I’ve got coming in at three – I’m going to have to go.’

  ‘Oh, Ol, I –’

  I pop my share of the bill on the table and I’m off. I don’t know where. Anywhere, pounding out this screeching resentment to the rhythm of my mary-janes, some grubby black mark on the left toe already. I’ve got to get clear of this stinking, cloying crush of Pitt Street, and I stomp round into Hunter, past the garish vermillion drapes of the Tulip Restaurant on the corner where Bart Harley took Mother to lunch the other day, past his wretched chambers four doors up. Bart stupid Harley everywhere. Oh look: there’s a mob of them, flapping across the road on their way back to the law courts. What is the collective noun for barristers? A murder? They look like horrible crows.

  I just about start to run, up to the Gardens, to be clear of all of it. Haven’t been for a walk up here for months, not to mention a run. Too busy. Stop being busy now. For five minutes. Be calm. Stop being a baby. Breathe in the fresh, sweet air beyond the gates. Ah. There . . . Incredible, how instantly soothing that is, although it doesn’t yet slow my pace. I take the path down behind the Conservatorium of Music and follow it right round towards Government House, to the water, to this most soothing of views out from Farm Cove: not a stupid ferry or a stupid Bridge or a stupid person in sight.

  Just the water, and me.

  And this colour – this gold-shot teal. And that’s exactly it. I see it now: Min Bromley’s going-away dress. Shantung and organza, in magic-carpet teal. Of course.

  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, workin
g 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 attac
hment 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.