Free The Blue Mile by Kim Kelly Page B

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,