The Blue Mile (33 page)

And hesitate once more at the top of the ferry steps, at the 1847 staring down at me from the lintel. How can I think of leaving my little stone fortress above the bay? Mother'll sell it for a carport for the flats next door as soon as I'm out of it, as soon as the price is right, won't she
. . .
and the price will be right. Bridge views around here are in bonanza, with the trains going across taking the traffic jams away, with plans now for a fun park to be built on the site of the old workshops.

I almost slip on the mail as I open the door. Pick it up. Jolly good, it's from his Lordship. How exciting – it'll be the birthday card, by the feel. Must do something extra special with this month's pitiful pittance remittance in celebration, apart from paying the shop rental: buy us fifteen pounds' worth of new shoes with it, all of it – in snakeskin – see if I don't, you horrible fool. Completely, utterly, mystifyingly lacking in embarrassment at being the worst excuse for a man I know. I almost don't read the card. He never has anything to say to me apart from
trust you are well
. Couldn't care less, et cetera. But this time, his few soulless sentences say something quite different.

I will arrive in Sydney in June and once established I shall make my search for a suitable property, for a vineyard, to make my retirement in kinder climes.

My heart stops.

I am very much looking forward to seeing you. It has been far too long.

It has been sixteen years, almost. I was five when he left for Flanders, left me for the last time. Honestly, all I remember of him is his nose and his stink; not one kiss, not one smile or tender word.

And he wants to see me now. He wants
kinder climes
now?

Happy 21st birthday, Olivia.

Ah. Finally, I see my path ahead.

Beginning with an ungainly sprint up to the post office and a reply telegram:

FATHER! HOW EXCITING! BUT ALAS I AM BROKE. IN TROUBLE. PLEASE CABLE £200.
No, I am calculating madly how much it will cost me to set out my shingle at Piccadilly, under my own terms – not Mother's. Make that:
£350. THRILLED TO SEE YOU IN JUNE
.

And not before hell freezes over and I'm compelled to go ice-skating across it. He wants something from me – at long, long
last.
And he will give me whatever I want in return. Three hundred and fifty pounds is lunch money to him. Just as I know that tomorrow, I will be stepping through those travel agency doors. I will be booking our passage for sometime in May – that will give me time to tidy all squiggles here. Agnes and I shall arrive in England in July. Midsummer. Good. A flicker of raindrops balling on lolly pink snapdragons by a duck pond, somewhere in Hyde Park, that other Hyde Park, far far away. Soon to be dancing gaily with Olivia Couture pea-style gamboge, with my teals and my violets, all my lush lapis dreams. Done. And all fingernails intact, too.

But still, my fingers tremble with the key in the door as I return to my little haven of stone, and my shoe garden whispers from the wardrobe as get in:
No – wait.
You promised him under the bell.
I'll wait for you, Eoghan. I'll do whatever it takes.

No: no more. I glare at the blackened tin vine leaves arabesquing up the sides of the shelves, lily trumpets spilling round the copper pipes. So beautiful: you, you and your fine tailor's hands, should be in business with me: my poet, my dancer, my lover, never to be.

You are gone.

Sit down to the letter I must write.

Dearest Mother, guess who's coming to London
. . .
and find us a decent flat, will you, dear, because we won't be living with you.

This is
my
adventure.
Just Aggie and me
. . .
and just Aggie and me
. . .

Yo

‘
T
hey're planning to kidnap him,' Ced says at the bar of the Botany Bay, where we drink in the day, most days.

I laugh, on my second. ‘The Girl Guides are going to kidnap the Bank Robber?' Because Lang is just not going to pay up. The United Australia Federal Spoons have tried to force him to kiss them British bondholder bollocks but Lang won't have it. Get fucked. I don't give a fuck, either. It's Olivia's birthday today. But then, I don't give a fuck any day. I tell Ced: ‘Get me a front-row ticket, will you?'

‘I'll get you more than that, you lousy bludger,' he says. ‘Sometimes I do question your commitment to the cause.'

‘Why? Because I don't have any?'

He laughs now. I'm a good Communist. Only ever wanted a simple life, and that's what I have now: do as you're told and you'll get a drink, comrade.

Ced has stopped laughing, though. ‘The CMF have been put on alert by the Federals.'

‘Who?'

‘The Citizens' Militia Forces, mate – the army.'

‘Oh. So?'

‘They have guns.' He shakes his head at me: spoon.

‘So do the cops.' I shake mine back. I never thought I'd ever sit on the same side as the cops, but here we are. This is an entertaining show.

Ced says: ‘That's right, Paddy. And what happens when two sides in a conflict are armed?'

‘Oh.' War. ‘Right.'

I don't know that I like the sound of that. Unlikely to be a pipe band at this type of war.

Have another ale or seven, and another game of fucking billiards, and then Ced's boring my brain out my arsehole and up the road with another capitalist conspiracy: ‘That's why Phar Lap had to die, you see. They had to kill him – he was upsetting the numbers. Too good. Hadn't lost a race since the Cup, had he, the bastard horse? So the Yanks had to poison him, didn't they?'

Did they? Amazing. It's a long walk back to La Perouse from here. Two miles of nothing, the trams don't come round this part of the bay, and I know I'm on the grog properly because of how I'm walking. I've been drinking all day, not quickly but solidly, and I'm not in the least bit shickered from it. I know where I'm going: into the gutter. Or into the sand. There's no gutters round here. I'll just have to fall through the sand, like piss.

As it's Saturday evening, Ced says, ‘We'll get some goods of exchange, ay?' and we stop halfway to make a visit to the Chinese market gardens. Some beetroot, some carrots, we grab whatever there is down the ends of these rows along Bunnerong Road. One of the Chings sees us and starts up yelling, setting his dog after us, but we've already gone. Running. Ced's nearly as fast as me, too; amazing, for such a little fella. I've never been a thief, though, and this raiding doesn't sit too well in me. Ced reckons it's not technically thieving if you take stuff off the Chinese, but I don't know. I've got carrots spilling out of my pockets and I didn't make them. I miss making something. Anything. But I can't think about that. What would be the point?

The dog gives up and we stop running just past the kiosk at the Yarra Junction tram stop, where we follow the line down to the tin and board humpies of the camp, for something to eat, for Ced to keep our presence up round here, and for his weekend supply of Happy Valley Special Reserve. That's what the beetroot and carrots are for: Granny Smith lets him have two bottles for five bob if he brings something for the kids.

‘What you got for me tonight then, love?' She's at her flyscreen. She's as fat as she is short, made just like an apple, with a face like a picture-book granny, but you wouldn't want to cross her. She'd have you razored. She runs the groggery and feeds the kids round here off the proceeds of her sly rum when the Governor's wife isn't having her photo taken with a soup ladle. There's plenty of kids and only dole rations to keep them. I don't come here in the daytime: kids running around everywhere, happy kids: they don't care they've got no shoes. Running round on the sand. I can't look at them. I see my sister in every one. I see my failure in every one. In everyone.

I am not on the dole, though, I tell myself, like it means anything. I'm not on the dole. Not on the capitalist shut-up, sit-down payroll. I'm on the payroll of the righteous. Righteous anger: it's the last of anything of any worth I have.

Some other dog is barking somewhere and I look across Granny's back fence, into the darkness. I look along the line of wire fences that go down to the beach, separating the Abos on the reserve further round, from the campers here in the gully on the point, and a cop looks back at me: ‘Evening.' Making his rounds. There's usually a cop or two keeping an eye, especially of a Saturday night, keeping them no-hoper blacks from mixing too much with us good folk. I start laughing at I don't know the fuck what.

Granny Smith pulls me inside her tin and board palace: ‘Get in here, young fella, and eat something, will you?'

She's got fish on. She's always got fish on, caught fresh off the rocks here, by the Abos next door. It smells good and probably tastes good too. I don't seem to taste anything anymore. Ced is jawing on to her about something, more conspiracy horseshit – that we'll likely come down here if it comes to a war. We'll likely sabotage the Bunnerong Power Station, put the streetlights and the trams out, and make La Perouse a stronghold. Yeah, that's what we'll do, won't we.

Granny Smith says: ‘You'll give us fair warning to get the kids out.' Or she'll put our lights out.

We give her sixpence each for our tea and then we walk up the hill, to our own shit box back up past the Coast Hospital, where they put you if you've got a plague. The Communist Party of Australia has all the best squats. Interestingly, they all come with wireless phones, though, on loan from the socialistically minded of the sly betting industry. On the right side of the tram tracks, we are here, too. Lots of fresh air, it comes screaming up straight off the sea, over this high ground between Happy Valley and Long Bay Gaol. Ced is pulling the cork on his Special Reserve already as we walk up through the thick scrub here and I'm telling myself I've still got a way to fall yet. I can get up, I can get out. I can get back to Ag, one day. I'm not living in the humpies down in the gully. I'm not on the dole. I'm not on the rum.

I tell Ced: ‘You'll kill yourself with that one day.'

He says: ‘So?'

I don't know what his story is, I don't know who he is really, but I know what he means. We're dead men already. But I don't want to go that way, on the grog. Fuck no, I don't. I roll a smoke. Happy birthday, Olivia. How do the rich sleep in their beds at night? Better quality alcohol. I have none left tonight that I can drink and no business thinking about Olivia at all. I don't sleep for reckoning it'd be good if I just didn't wake up one day. Drag my arse along a wide-eyed dream up to the Bridge and take a dive.

*

‘Well, well, well. Look who we have here.' This barmaid is looking at me across the taps of the Alexandria Hotel. Red lips on a mouth that's sucked too fair a share of lemons.

I'm thinking she's a whore on the side and that I don't want to go from the clap either. Jesus, but it takes me a minute to recognise her too.

It's Nettie Becker, looking about twenty years older than the last time I saw her, though it can't be two years.

‘Yeah,' I say. ‘Well, what do you know.'

And then I just stand there like a spoon, thinking: horseshit. We don't need a scene here. Ced and me have pulled up at the bar, waiting for Girl Guides. They've been making their presence known and their intentions spill around the produce railhead. Ced is leaning over at the barman now, asking him who's on cockatoo and where, to warn us of how many.

Nettie seems to know about that; she says: ‘I always told you, didn't I? Lang is right.'

‘Yeah.' I give Nettie a smile at remembering: she always did know everything and she did love her Jack Lang. I say: ‘Good on him.' And I mean it today: he's just withdrawn the whole of the Treasury funds from the Commonwealth Bank – every last cent. Set up his own separate cash economy out of Trades Hall, at the Haymarket, under police and union guard, so that public employees, such as the railways fellas in this bar, can get paid. He's accused the United Arseholes in Canberra of enforcing an illegal state of slavery otherwise. He's a fucking hero, however monkey-nutted that might be. Political suicide.

Nettie's saying: ‘Careful you don't get that pretty face bashed up.'

‘They'd have to catch me first,' I laugh; I've never got caught at this game.

‘That's right. You're not an easy catch, are you?' she says and presses those red lips together, little red lines running off round her mouth, look like they're painful.

I could tell her it was never her business to try me, but I keep my mind on the job, don't make a scene. I ask her instead: ‘How's little Johnny going?'

She shakes her head; she just says: ‘Measles.'

‘Shit, no.' He's died from it, those lines say. A kick in the guts just to hear it. I say: ‘That's rough.'

She doesn't say anything, giving me a long hard stare as she slides the ale across the bar at me. What? Blaming
me
? It's not my fault you're a loose bitch with a dirty mouth that got you turfed into the street. But something in me takes it anyway.

I say: ‘I'm sorry to hear that.'

She turns away to serve someone else and I tell my glass: we're all to blame. For all this shit.

Some more than others.

‘Seventeen of them – coming down Henderson Road!' the cockie screams in through the pub doors.

That was quick, I've hardly touched my beer, way too fucking sober yet, and that's too many to keep out of the bar this time, so we have to wait for them all to get in, count their khaki armbands. This National Guard. Who the fuck do they reckon they are? Masters of hypocrisy: King's men who would have the Governor–General sacked for being a Jew, if they could, and would cut all Welfare to women, let the daughters of Eve starve and all their snot-faced children with them. Hollow men. Tight-fisted greengrocers thieving fruit and veg wholesale. Ced bolts the doors behind the last; I bolt the doors round the Garden Street side. And then the bar turns to them as one representation of the Railway Workers Union, about thirty members strong.

The head of them here, an engine driver called Gil Gregory, makes himself known to the Girl Guides: ‘This is as far south as you blokes go, right? You're not welcome here.'

The head of the Girl Guides steps up to him. ‘We've only stopped in for a drink. This is a free country, is it not? This is a
public
bar?' He flicks his oiled hair off his face with a jerk of his head, the tosser he is. ‘Or have the Communists decided to make it illegal for an honest man to enjoy a beer after work?'

He takes a baton out of the inside of his coat, one like the cops carry, turned handle with a leather strap, and the bad end about eighteen inches long.

Gil Gregory nods at it: ‘I'm not a Communist. I'm an Aussie, and you're a fascist Pommy scab.'

The barman shoves Nettie out the dining room door and it's on.

I don't watch today.

‘Oi.' I get smacked across the shoulder with a baton.

And then I get stuck in.

I don't know who this fella is that's just smacked me, but I've slammed his hand up against the wall behind him and he's dropped the baton. I hear it hit the boards, and I am pounding into him like he's got to take every punch I've never thrown but wanted to. He gets one in but I don't feel it. I can only feel my fist smacking into his head, his fat bastard roast-ham head. He falls down. He's got his hands around his head. He's had enough. I know he's had enough.

I scream at him: ‘You had enough?'

‘Yes,' he's crying for me to stop, on his knees.

But I keep going. I smack his head into the boards by the back of his collar and I tell him: ‘This is your interest payment.' I get up and I have every intention of putting the boot into him too, but one of the railways fellas has the back of my collar now: ‘You're not supposed to kill them, lad.'

No. I look around me. The Girl Guides are getting turfed out onto the street, red faces, ripped shirts. The cops are waiting out there to move them along quietly. It's over. One of the railways fellas picks up a baton and taps one of the Girl Guides on the arse with it: ‘Naughty, naughty boy.' The bar falls around laughing.

But I don't laugh.

‘Eoghan O'Keenan,' Nettie comes at me with her handkerchief. ‘I see you got caught.'

‘What?' I back off. I taste the blood on my lip. I say: ‘That's nothing.' And it isn't.

But I find I've suddenly had enough. Had enough of what? I don't know. My own hollow.

‘Toast to the King, mate?' Ced says. ‘Jeez, you might have earned one today.'

I say: ‘No. I haven't earned shit.'

I'm as surprised as Ced. I want to stay sober. I want to be sober, tomorrow and the next. I want to be ready for this war that's coming. I am an honest man: I want to pound another filthy fascist head.