by Nick Earls
So I didn’t ask my question directly. As the front door of their house shut behind us and we walked down the stone steps towards the street, all I said was, ‘Who’s going tonight?’ and Katharine said, ‘Stacks of people. Everyone.’
‘Everyone,’ Erica said. ‘The usual people. Except Rosemary has chickenpox, so not her.’
The gate creaked as I shut it behind us. A bat stumbled out of a tree and with three big beats of its wings lifted above the powerlines and away across the road.
‘Our cousin will be there, probably,’ Erica said. ‘Monica, the one you met in our pool.’
We walked down the hill, but they said nothing more about her. Nothing about how she was doing at school or how much they saw of her there. Nothing, of course, about whether or not she had mentioned me. I ran that fantasy through in my head. ‘She’s talked about you quite a bit,’ one of them would say. ‘She said she hoped you’d be there tonight.’
On the next hill, I could see the lights outside St Catherine’s and the dark blocks of classrooms and peaked roof of the chapel. The twins talked about school, their annoying parents, my annoying friends who never lived up to their cryptic expectations. They had holidayed at a better part of the coast and bumped into a few of them, but the boys had concentrated as much on stealing beer from their fathers as they had on making the right moves and, when the twins had come back, there had been stories of vomiting into bushes and bins and nothing that appealed to them at all. Not that the people involved were actually my friends — though I did know them from school — but the twins always chose to call them that when they wanted to say, ‘Some of your friends are such dickheads . . .’ or something else that didn’t flatter them. At other times, they would be looking for introductions if they liked what they saw. At no time was it completely clear what the boys in question could do that would be entirely right.
Andy and I had had a holiday of early starts catching the morning surf before the crowds came to the beach, with the days meandering through to barbecues on the back verandah of our rented house most evenings. We rode our bikes around the streets. We got ourselves lost in the swamp out the back, but found our way out again. Andy bought porn and rolled it up in a towel in his saddlebag until he could sneak it into the house. Mostly it was pretty low-grade stuff, but one day he couldn’t resist a magazine with a feature headed ‘Shaved and Dangerous’ and he sat there on his bunk saying, ‘Jesus Christ,’ repeatedly and in a harsh whisper as a whole new world he wasn’t even slightly ready for opened up to him. He tossed and turned in his sleep that night, and would only look at a page or two at a time afterwards.
The twins’ heels click-clacked down the street and we walked past houses with dinner smells and TV noise coming out through their open front windows. ‘Turn that off,’ someone shouted. ‘Turn that thing off now and come to the table.’ We reached the intersection, crossed the street and walked past two old blocks of units and more houses and the empty school tennis courts, with their nets hanging with the tension out of them and signs that said they were private property and should only be played on with white-soled shoes. We could hear the music now and, at the top of the hill, people were getting out of cars. I was already looking for Monica Bloom when we were still well away down the street.
I danced with the twins and then I left them with their friends on the pretext of looking for mine, and I walked through the darkened hall among groups of dancers and then outside through the crowd gathered in the lights of the courtyard. The band was loud even there, but the conversations rose above it and parents, teachers and nuns prowled the peripheries, some of them with torches.
I thought she might be anywhere, somewhere in the crowd and I might be missing her. Or maybe she was with someone already, and out of torch range. I put myself through too much of that before I bumped into Erica and had to ask her.
‘Did you say your cousin was going to be here?’ That’s how I put it. ‘I haven’t seen her.’ And Erica said, ‘Oh, yeah, I heard a few of the boarders were banned for some reason. I think she was part of that.’
So I stopped looking then and bought a can of Solo. I went back inside and danced and sweated, and it was much easier, not looking. I knew she was close by, though. In the boarding house where she could hear the music but not be part of it. I fought to put that thought out of my head.
The following Tuesday my mother said, ‘Your father may be late tonight. There’s been a problem at work.’
She was making another kneeler for the school chapel, one with our house crest on it, and she was about half-way through and sitting with it on her lap when Andy and I got home. She wore glasses for reading and close work, and she took them off when we came in the door. We could tell something was wrong. Her first sentences came out sounding rehearsed, as if she’d sat there choosing the words while she embroidered the sail of the ship on the crest and waited for us to arrive.
‘I’m sure it’ll all be fine,’ she said. ‘But today it’s quite a problem.’
Something had turned up in the internal audit at my father’s work — not something that involved him directly, but it was public now and he had to be the face of it.
We watched him on the six o’clock news. His press conference was the last local piece before the international stories. We were waiting for it by then, but it was still a surprise to see him on screen. I had never known anyone who had been on TV, and I felt proud but also protective. I saw vulnerability in him for the first time, and I didn’t want that in my world. He sat at a table with a plain backdrop and a sheet of paper in his hands, and he cleared his throat while he scanned the words before starting to speak. Pride was the wrong kind of feeling then, I knew that. It had been instinctive. Only important people make the TV news. He read his statement. Recently, an irregularity had been found in the company’s Queensland accounts. Payments for repairs to equipment failed to tally with invoices, and this was being pursued by auditors in an attempt to reconcile the figures.
The lights shone on his forehead and the camera picked it up. He looked awkward, unprepared. He looked caught-out. He kept his eyes on his notes, getting every word right. The upper edge of the paper started to tremble.
Close to a million dollars was unaccounted for. Police had been called in.
They showed footage, uniformed police carrying boxes from my father’s building, then they went back to the press conference. He put his statement down and fielded questions. He was sweating under the lights and his answers came out as ‘That’s still under investigation’ and ‘It’s too early to say’, and all this time his name was on screen: Peter Sherman, state manager, Iliad Resources.
We watched in silence, since it could easily be taken as the performance of a guilty man, and we knew he wasn’t that. No one was even suggesting he was. It was just how he looked. My mother, who had worked hard on the kneeler during the earlier news items, picked it up without thinking and held it against her chest.
This was how the story started for us, clipped into a two-minute news item, my father not even in the room. He would have explained more to us, reassured us, if he had been there. I was certain of that. He would have told us it had been a strange kind of day, but it would blow over.
The news went to an ad break, and the first ad was for Uncle Sam’s Miracle Herbal Hair Shampoo. My mother kept watching the screen intently, as if the story wasn’t over. Then she breathed out.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I should get back to dinner.’ She was most of the way to the kitchen before she added, ‘I’m sure this’ll be all right.’
My father’s car pulled up under the house just in time for the seven o’clock news and this time the four of us watched.
‘What a day,’ he said as he walked in with his briefcase in his hand and his jacket over his other arm. ‘I could do without too many more of those. How was everybody else’s day then?’
‘Fine,’ Andy said. ‘A bit less TV coverage than yours.’
It was the right response, a
nd my father gave a rather forced laugh. He pulled his tie off and rolled up his sleeves and sat in his usual seat. Normally he would have changed and taken a beer from the fridge by then, but not this day. We were taking the pretence of normality only half way there, and that made it altogether stranger.
‘So, did you see it at six?’ my father said, and my mother said, ‘Yes, on Channel Nine.’ He looked like he was waiting for more, so she added, ‘You were good on that. It can’t have been easy though.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Have we got any nuts? I feel like some nuts. A beer and some nuts.’
‘Dinner’s ready,’ she said. ‘I can serve it whenever. As soon as, you know, as soon as the story’s run. If you want to see it.’
And he said, ‘Oh, right, yes,’ as if it hadn’t been at the top of his mind all the time.
The story ran on the ABC, and it was neither better nor worse than it had been on Nine.
‘Let’s eat,’ my father said, the instant it was done. ‘Let’s eat and talk about other things. This is just work. It’ll be okay.’
Later, we heard our parents talking. They were in their room, but we could hear them through Andy’s wall.
‘It was bloody Alex,’ my father said. ‘That’s how it looks. It all points to him. I don’t know what it’s about. I don’t know why he thought he’d get away with it.’
My mother’s voice said something less distinct in reply, to which my father said, ‘How should I know?’ For the first time there was exasperation in his voice. ‘I’ve got more of this shit tomorrow. I’ve no idea how long it’ll take. Or quite how ugly it’ll get, to be honest.’
There was silence in there for a while.
‘Which one’s Alex?’ Andy said in a whisper, and I said, ‘I think he’s the one who did all the barbecuing at the Christmas party. The one with the wench apron with the big tits.’
My mother spoke again. A drawer opened and closed.
‘It’ll be okay,’ my father said, just audibly this time. ‘I’m sure it’ll be okay. But it’ll take some sorting out.’
On the bus to school the next morning, Andy said, ‘Do you reckon anyone will have seen it?’ and I didn’t know I hoped they hadn’t.
They saw it as the week went on, almost certainly. It was in the papers every day as the amount embezzled climbed to well over a million dollars and Alex was taken in for questioning.
‘It’ll be okay,’ I told people at school on the rare occasions when it came up. I don’t know what I meant by that. It wasn’t okay for the company, and certainly not okay for Alex Pegler. I meant that it would pass, perhaps. I meant that normal life would return as soon as possible for my father and the rest of us.
I wasn’t ready for the St Catherine’s boarders’ weekend, or for Monica Bloom to turn up next door on Friday afternoon.
FOUR
Her hair looked lighter the second time I saw her. On Saturday we played tennis on the Hartnetts’ court — the twins, Monica Bloom and me.
When I’d arrived home from school on Friday, my mother had told me she had seen the three of them walking up the hill in their uniforms. She was in the kitchen flicking though a new recipe book when Andy and I came in through the back door. She wanted to make something nice, she said, something different. The turmoil of the week’s events had not yet settled and was not about to.
‘Did you know it’s already the first boarders’ weekend at St Catherine’s?’ she said. ‘This term’s going quickly. It looks like they’ve got their cousin visiting next door.’
My mother baked her new dessert, though it sagged in the middle when it came out of the oven and didn’t look like the picture. ‘I prefer it this way,’ my father said, though he had never had it before. ‘I prefer things with a bit of density to them.’
My mother said nothing, and Andy said he was going for seconds if anyone wanted any. He brought the wine cask in from the fridge as well, and refilled their glasses. My father stopped talking — it was as though he had run out of talk — and looked distractedly around the room. Andy told us about his science project, and the excursion his class would be going on to a quarry where fossils had been found.
‘Fossils,’ he said. ‘Ammonites and things like that.’
But our father didn’t bite. He had some fossils of his own, in a shoe box. They were mostly just leaves pressed into stone, but there were also dragonflies and a fish from a site near Ipswich that had once been a lake. He had collected them all himself when he was our age or younger. Well before we were old enough to understand, he would show them to us and try to impress upon us how old they were. We’d driven for hours to see dinosaur footprints when we lived in Central Queensland.
‘There’ll be more of it in the morning’s papers,’ he told my mother while he was washing the dishes. ‘I know that already. They’re charging Alex.’
‘Why did he do it?’ my mother said as she covered the left-over dessert with Glad Wrap and put it in the fridge.
‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Who ever knows in these situations?’
The papers the next morning put it down to gambling debts. There was a picture of Alex being led into a building by police, and a smaller photo of my father’s head. He was quoted in the article, and there was a column of text to one side headed ‘Pressure mounts on Iliad chief’.
‘Iliad Resources’ state manager has found it second nature to win the respect of miners, but the big end of town has proven a harder nut to crack.’ That’s what it said. ‘Peter Sherman has mining in his blood, but it’s the dollars and cents that may be defeating him.’
By the time I read it he was mowing the lawn in the front yard, heaving the mower over tree roots and skimming the bark from them, pushing it across the weeds and the imperfect blue couch grass. My mother was in the shower. It was the best chance I had to read the paper in secret and fold it up the way I had found it.
I listened to the mower moving up and down the garden, and the clattering thrashing sound as another seed pod went up into the blades. This was the first time a word like ‘defeat’ had come up. I couldn’t imagine my father defeated and I needed that idea to go. He was mowing the lawn — that was normal enough. He was getting on with his weekend in the normal way and he had the respect of the miners, and that still counted for something. The ‘dollars and cents’ line was just a theory, an idea that read well without necessarily being true. That’s what I decided, and I made some toast and a cup of tea and tried to read the sports pages instead.
Erica knocked at the back door at around ten to invite me to play tennis. Monica was there and they needed a fourth.
I found my racquet in my room and took it out of its press. Through the windows I could hear Monica and Katharine hitting up — the ball hitting the racquet strings or the fence, Katharine calling out, ‘Bad luck.’
‘It’s been weird seeing your dad on the news this week,’ Erica said once we were through the gate and on her side of the fence.
‘Weirder at our place,’ I told her. ‘Trust me.’
‘Did you know the guy?’ she said. ‘The one who took the money?’
‘I’ve met him a few times. He’s come round for dinner once or twice.’ I thought about that, Alex the thief in our house. He seemed like any other guest, no more or less likely to steal on a grand scale. Maybe that had made it easier to do.
The huge umbrella tree outside one end of the court grew through the fence, but I could see Katharine behind it on the baseline hitting one casual forehand and then another. Monica Bloom’s hair was in plaits again, and she was wearing a sleeveless top and shorts and, like the rest of us, no shoes. That was how it worked for us on the Hartnetts’ court. Bill Hartnett ran a tournament for his staff in the lead-up to Christmas, and the court was rolled and marked for that and shoes were worn. We used their balls for months afterwards, and once we had finished with them they were given to the dogs. The line markings were never quite straight and one corner of the court had a slope where the ground had subsided a
little, but you needed to know the court to see it.
Erica told me to stay with Katharine and she went around to Monica’s side of the net. Monica flipped a ball up from the ground with her racquet and her foot and she waved and said, ‘Hi, Matt.’
The first time one twin served to the other, we faced each other over the net. She spun the racquet in her hand and smiled and said, ‘I’m a bit out of practice,’ before sending her first volley into my thigh, hard as a punch.
‘Sorry,’ she said, and she laughed. ‘I meant to hit it behind you.’
‘And I meant to hit it back,’ I told her. ‘Or I would have, if I’d seen it.’
We played one set, and Katharine and I lost six–four. I tried too hard to ace Monica, and I double-faulted to her at least twice. All of that’s embarrassing.
She admitted to tennis lessons when we sat by the pool afterwards. ‘My mother,’ she said. ‘Tennis, piano and bridge. She wanted to get me ready for polite society.’
It reminded me of a poem I’d studied at school, by John Betjeman. It was set in the twenties or thirties, and featured a rather underwhelming man who was beaten at tennis by the lively Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, the object of his affections. Monica’s mother seemed to have an idea of polite society that was fixed in that era. I didn’t know any other fifteen-year-old who could play bridge. I didn’t know anyone who could play bridge. I now had some sense of how the narrator of the Betjeman poem felt though.
Mrs Hartnett brought out a plate of watermelon cut into wedges with all the visible seeds removed. That wouldn’t have happened on our side of the fence. Andy and I had always had seed-spitting competitions, or spat the seeds at each other, and rogue watermelon plants regularly sprouted in our lawn.
Monica’s cheeks stayed red in the heat. She was wearing the bluebird earrings again. She sat on the plastic poolside chair with her legs crossed at the ankles, and she looked down into the water as the breeze rippled across it. Katharine went inside to fetch us some drinks. Erica said, ‘Bugger it,’ and jumped into the pool in the clothes she had worn for tennis. She shouted to Katharine to fetch her a towel.
