Monica Bloom

by Nick Earls

  Katharine dived back into the pool and swam some laps.

  ‘I’m rambling,’ Monica said. ‘I’m jetlagged. I still have my kitten mittens in my bag. How insane.’

  When I got home my mother had my school uniforms out and was ironing a shirt.

  ‘You woke me with that game,’ she said, and she shot steam into my collar and pressed it flat.

  ‘I tried to talk them out of it, of course,’ I told her. ‘But it’s a question of breeding. If you’d had the decency to have twins, I would have gone into it on equal terms, but they outvote me every time.’

  ‘You should have taken Andy,’ she said, taking the next shirt out of the basket and shaking it. ‘We caught up with them two years later, remember.’

  And I said, ‘Mornings aren’t his thing,’ and we gave each other a look that acknowledged neither of us exactly knew what Andy’s thing was.

  ‘He’s still sleeping,’ she said. ‘And so’s your father.’ She drove the iron across the back of the shirt. She was wearing a robe, one that Andy and I had got together to buy for her the Christmas before last, and the bottom of it flapped around with the vigour of the ironing. ‘I had too much of that Marco Polo in my head to keep sleeping,’ she said. She moved the shirt around to iron the front, and she looked up. ‘Was that their cousin? The other person over there? What’s she like?’

  TWO

  What’s she like?

  She stayed in my head after that first meeting, more than made sense.

  Years later I would think there had been something brittle about her from the start. Or fragile. They’re almost the same. But that would take hindsight, and more. And I can’t honestly say that she was either of those things. Circumstances have to be taken into account too.

  She was an outsider. That much is true.

  Andy’s hair was still wet when we got to school the next morning in our well-pressed shirts. We weren’t the first there, so most of the upper lockers in the grade-twelve section were gone, but I found a free one at the far end from the houseroom door. I stacked my new books in no particular order and thought: this is the last time. Erica had put the idea in my head, and it would keep coming back to me. Last year’s owner of the locker had put stickers on the inside of the door — one a Levi’s logo, the other saying ‘colour radio 4IP’ A year ago he had stood on this spot claiming a locker for the last time. He might be anywhere now. I left the stickers where they were and decided to see if they could go the whole year without changing, without their corners lifting or any of their colour chipping or flaking away or fading, until they were handed on to the next day-one grade-twelver who would draw this door open on its cheap screeching hinges. I couldn’t remember who had had the locker the year before.

  Up the back of the houseroom, once we had all filed in and before the first meeting of the year started, Chris Clarke told us about losing his virginity in the Christmas holidays. His parents hadn’t wanted him hanging around the house the whole time, so they had sent him jackarooing. She was a girl called Desley who lived out there. ‘Out there’ being somewhere west of Mitchell and seven or eight hours west of here, as close as I could tell. She made all the moves, he said. One morning they went out on a couple of horses before the day had got too hot, and they did it on a blanket on a creek bank. He told us how it was, from a physical point of view. He said there was some resistance at first, as if it almost wasn’t right, and then all of a sudden he was in and it was smooth. They did it four times altogether, and she had already written him one letter since he’d got home. He didn’t know what to do about that.

  I remembered a TV show, James at Sixteen, and James had done it on a blanket on a creek bank the first time, so I wasn’t sure about Chris Clarke’s story. Then I remembered James had done it in a sleeping-bag, so I figured it must be true after all. James had also gone through some embarrassing sequence of events involving a condom, but in Chris Clarke’s creek-bank scene those had been provided by Desley, who seemed to know what she was doing.

  Chris Clarke looked the same, other than some minor sunburn that particularly affected his nose, but I was sure he walked differently Maybe it was just all the time on horseback, but Chris Clarke had done it and we hadn’t. And the first thing he did on the first day of grade twelve was give up the details, and the whole day it made it seem like something that might actually happen to any of us that year. Some Desley might choose us, maybe on the bus or at a dance or anywhere, and we would do it without hesitation or reflection. She would be there, taking us through it step by step and we would blank our minds and do it. I wondered if any part of it was uncomfortable or very different to what Chris Clarke had expected, but no one was asking questions.

  We traded some stories, and more than likely a few lies. I said I’d gone to the coast and pashed a girl behind a boat on New Year’s Eve. That was one of the lies. I’d been at the coast, I’d been at the party, but when midnight came we all just shouted ‘Happy New Year’ and fireworks blazed for ten minutes and then we went home to bed. Story of my life. I would have said her name was Amanda, if anyone had asked. It would have been a great moment, fireworks bursting in the sky and the light of the bonfire on her cheeks as she leaned in towards me and made the move.

  I wasn’t sure if Chris Clarke felt anything for Desley at all. My mother had made the point a couple of times — as mothers, I have since found out, often do — that it was better to wait until it was with someone you felt something for. It was a point I never openly conceded, but I liked the idea of it — feeling something for someone, and one thing leading to another. Bring on the fireworks, bring on the upturned boats.

  Chris Clarke’s story hadn’t been much like that. It was still an impressive act though, an impressive occurrence on a holiday. We felt nothing but admiration for it.

  That night we had two men from my father’s company over for dinner. They had come from head office in Melbourne and were off to the mines in the morning with him, but the flight left early so it was smarter to come up the day before and put in some time in the office in Brisbane.

  They came with him from the city and they shook my hand and Andy’s, and took their ties off when my mother offered to look after their jackets. My father, who would normally change into one of his most casual shirts before dinner, also kept his business shirt on. In years to come he wouldn’t do that for anyone, but back then he still did, and we had a clear sense that we were ‘entertaining’ when work people came over — he stayed dressed for business and my mother made three courses.

  By the time Andy and I were in our late twenties it would be very different. I once brought a girl home to meet the family and before the meal was served I found my father going through the laundry basket, pulling out a dirty tracksuit top. He told me, ‘I’m not going to wear a clean tracksuit to eat,’ clearly incredulous that anyone might expect otherwise. My mother was into roasting a lot by that time, and the peak of my father’s hospitality on those nights was the point when he would offer the guest first pick of the carcass. Needless to say, Andy and I didn’t get into the habit of introducing many girls to our parents. ‘We should make girls sign a waiver,’ he said to me once. ‘A waiver that says they acknowledge we aren’t responsible for the night’s activities and aren’t to be judged for any of it.’ He was a lawyer by then.

  In 1980, our family was very different to that. My mother would have spent most of the day putting the meal together, and she had new candles on the table, and fresh flowers.

  ‘Long pants,’ she said rather too fiercely to Andy when he came out of his room wearing shorts. ‘Long pants.’ She herded him back towards his door. ‘These people are from head office. These people are from Melbourne.’ And she emphasised Melbourne as if that should have been all he needed to know.

  ‘Melbourne people vomit if they see knees,’ I told him, and he said, ‘Why is that kind of information never part of the briefing?’

  The men from Melbourne arrived with my father and gave up their jacke
ts and ties for beers. My mother brought a bowl of nuts and a bowl of cubed cheese from the kitchen and took the three of them out to the verandah, where she said it would be cooler, while she finished preparing the meal. ‘I have some crystallised ginger as well if anyone would like it?’ she said, but there were no takers.

  Andy and I set the table and had a difference of opinion about the order of the cutlery. My mother stuck her head around the door and hissed some instructions and told Andy he should ask our guests if they would like wine with their meal. He slouched off to do it, shaking his head. The food was good on those nights, and sometimes we scored a half glass of wine ourselves, but the price to be paid was too great as far as we were concerned. Too much tension. Too much fuss going on.

  He came back and reported that they wanted wine but no ice, and my mother said, ‘You didn’t really ask them if they wanted ice with wine, did you?’

  Andy glared at her and seethed most of the way through the prawn cocktail. My parents put ice in their wine all the time when it was just the four of us, but we pretended they didn’t on nights when we were entertaining.

  That night my father drank more than he normally would, or maybe it was the lack of the usual diluting effect of the ice that meant more wine ended up in his glass. The men from Melbourne, though, put their hands over their glasses when they were offered more. Andy had been sent to the kitchen to get the cask from the fridge and only my father ended up taking some. ‘Just a half,’ he said, and Andy knew that meant three quarters. My father later went to the fridge himself at least a couple of times.

  The men from Melbourne were bean counters, he told me a few days after their visit. It was the first time I’d heard the expression and I wondered what business a mining company would have with beans. My father was an engineer, and accountants had become a much bigger part of his life since he had become state manager two years and four months before. I’m not sure that he liked the job much, ever.

  We ate our prawn cocktails, and Andy and I tried to look practised at it, since that’s what these people from Melbourne would surely expect. I watched them closely, how they handled their forks, where they put their hands when they weren’t eating. We had always been brought up not to lean on the table.

  ‘Carol makes her own thousand-island dressing,’ my father said proudly. My mother’s prawn-cocktail recipe was special, and its features worth bringing into conversation. ‘She’d never settle for just buying it.’

  Andy asked which thousand islands they were, but no one knew. ‘That’s a lot of islands,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t get a thousand islands everywhere. That must narrow it down.’ I suggested Indonesia and said it was quite an archipelago, and Andy said, ‘You wouldn’t come close if you tried it here. Moreton Bay has, what, four big islands and about ten small ones?’

  ‘Fourteen-island dressing,’ my father said. ‘You should set up a stall, Carol, and give it a go. Don’t know that there’d be much of a market with a name like that, though. Those people with the extra nine hundred and eighty-six islands might make it tough.’

  It was his flattest, most hard-worked joke of the night, if it was a joke at all. It was intended as a joke — we could all tell from the delivery —and that certainty made it worse. He took a solo laugh at the end of it, and Andy kicked me in the shin and glared down at his plate while we waited for something better to be said and hoped our father wouldn’t be the one to try to say it.

  Instead he offered the Melbourne men more wine again, but they said no. One of them asked if the prawns came from here, but my mother wasn’t sure. We cleared the table and Andy and I helped my mother serve the main, chicken cacciatore. My father talked work with the men while we were doing this. There were figures they needed to go through some time in the next two days. They all groaned about an internal audit and my father said, ‘I’m still getting my head around that.’

  He had sweat rings spreading from his armpits by then. It was a humid night and he had put on weight in this job but insisted he hadn’t, and he refused to change his shirt size. So, he was this swollen man with a stretched shirt-front, a white shirt with dark patches spreading across it and the lines of his singlet clear underneath. He had a big moustache in those days too, thick and turned down at the ends, and it had caught some of the thousand-island dressing. The candlelight gleamed on the sweat on his face. I don’t know what mood my mother had been trying for, but the result didn’t feel quite right.

  She brought in a pedestal fan and it clicked around on its stand and blew out one of the candles. Steam rose from the chicken cacciatore and we all sweated more. The conversation fell away. Dinner became something of an ordeal.

  We knew nothing about the Melbourne kind of football, or close to nothing. They knew nothing about either of the rugby codes. One of them, the more senior of the two, collected wine and cellared it. The other had had a holiday at the Gold Coast once, in winter, and he told us he couldn’t believe how warm it was in the middle of the day, though still quite cool at night. ‘That’s how it is,’ my father said quickly. ‘It’s quite cold some nights but the winter days are great. Less cold at night on the coast, though, than here. Sometimes by several degrees.’

  ‘It can get pretty hot at the coast in summer,’ my mother said, though this was surely self-evident, since every one of us was working up a foul sweat on this late-January night and the Gold Coast was not much more than an hour or so down the road.

  We dutifully ate the pavlova and the men from Melbourne left by taxi. They said it had been great coming over — far better than eating in the hotel or trying to find somewhere in the city. There was a breeze picking up as we stood on the steps, but it had never found its way inside.

  My father washed up. Andy and I wiped everything dry and put it away.

  ‘Well, love, you can’t show better hospitality than that,’ my father said as my mother squirted wine from the cask into a glass loaded with ice cubes.

  ‘We should have got a bottle of wine,’ she said. ‘Tonight we should have had a bottle.’

  My father looked as if he felt he should reply but didn’t know what to say, so he kept scrubbing away at the tomato-red slick of sauce around the saucepan.

  ‘That’s the kind of people they were,’ my mother said, and then he said, without turning round, ‘But what would we have got? Which exact bottle of wine would have been right?’

  He worked the pot scrubber hard against the saucepan. Andy and I rubbed the glasses till they gleamed and arranged them in the cupboard in rows.

  ‘I don’t know,’ my mother said. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  THREE

  A few weeks into the school year, there was a dance at St Catherine’s. The twins and I had been regulars at the dances there the year before, and planned to be again. Mr Hartnett felt that we had a good arrangement, he and I — that I would escort his daughters there and back. He said he felt better knowing they were leaving the house with a man in tow, though he conceded that any comfort it gave him was probably in his head.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll keep them on their best behaviour,’ he said on more than one occasion, and each time he said it he would let out a great guffawing laugh and one or both of his daughters would punch him in the arm.

  So, it became automatic for the three of us to go together, and we did the same to dances at my school as well. I looked deceptively successful, turning up with two girls — an identical girl on either side — but soon enough people knew they were my next-door neighbours and not one good rumour came from it. I was a link to St Catherine’s, though, and that wasn’t bad. I got to know some of their friends, which meant that anyone from my school who knew me at all would take it as a chance to meet St Catherine’s girls. They would see me there early in the night at a dance talking to the twins and a couple of their friends, and they would appear at my shoulder, waiting to be introduced.

  I would have done the same. School dances didn’t have half the openness that parents feared. The boys spent much
of the time clumped next to the tables of cordial complaining to each other about how hard it was to break into any group of girls. The girls spent their time dancing in circles with their bags and purses on the floor in the middle. One year at school I did an assignment that looked at Roman military tactics, and these girls had a clear innate understanding of defensive formations.

  But it was Monica Bloom who was on my mind as we set out for the first dance of 1980. She would be there, the twins said.

  I had settled into the patterns of the school year, and she had been my best secret distraction. My summer holiday had amounted to nothing before its last day and, as quadratic equations unscrambled themselves in front of me in maths in the way they were supposed to, it would be her face I would think about. Monica Bloom with her blindfold on and her hand on my chest. In my head it became a lot, that moment a few seconds long.

  I thought of going to the beach with her, or at least what that would be like. I recast my New Year’s Eve lie with her in it, but kept it to myself, her hand on my chest again between the upturned boats as the fireworks burst wide open and filled up the sky over Pumicestone Passage. I imagined us running clear of the crowd, covered by the cracking fizzing sounds of the fireworks, and disappearing among the she-oaks to our own stretch of sand.

  I knew there was a risk in all that, but I thought it was the obvious risk of disappointment that so often comes with so much one-sided contemplation. I hoped she had thought of me at least once or twice. I tried to remember anything I had done that might have stuck in her head and I resolved to do better next time. This time. The school dance.

  I could ask one question of the twins and get away with it, I figured. Two and they would be onto me. I imagined that scene and the way the conversation would go as they needled me and drove me deeper into embarrassment, and then I imagined turning up at the dance after that and seeing Monica there with a look of complete blankness on her face, and Erica and Katharine introducing us again.