by Nick Earls
‘This is so much better than school,’ Monica said, and I asked her how school was going. ‘Oh, you know how it is,’ she told me. ‘You’ve changed schools. And changed places. I’ve never lived in the tropics. What was it like where you lived before? Tell me about that.’
So I did. I told her about my Dyak nanny, though all I knew was a photo and some details from my parents. It was my most exotic story, so I led with it. I told her about the Queensland mining towns too, back when my father was an engineer and before he became the boss. We got to Moranbah not long after it had started — a town created anew for the massive open-cut operations being set up nearby. It took school to teach us that not everywhere was like that, not everywhere was a one-purpose one-industry town, made in one go and populated only as long as coal might come out of the ground. I told her what it was like to drive through the bush, sometimes for hours, and then all of a sudden to come across a mine where everything was giant size — the trains were miles long, the coal heaps were as high as city buildings, the trucks had tyres as wide as a man and twice as tall.
I’d never told my school friends this, I realised. Not once. But they had never asked, and Monica had.
She told me about where she had lived — in Melbourne to start with, then in Norwich in England, then Dublin where her father had become head of department.
‘I’ve done it all,’ she said of her parents’ plan for her to get the most out of other countries. ‘I’ve done everything there is to do in the bottom half of Ireland. They want to enrich me. It’s that thing about holding your own in society again. And then they make me move countries, so . . .’ She shrugged. ‘I’ve spent more weekends than you’d believe in the back seat of our car, driving around in mist and sleet seeing almost nothing of the Ring of Kerry or the Dingle Peninsula or who knows where else. Some days it was beautiful, though, I’ve got to admit that. We had a week in Cork when it never rained. That was good.’
Inside, the radio went on. It was playing Dragon’s ‘April Sun in Cuba’. The song’s exotic edge — perfumed nights, Havana alleyways, escape — might have been blunted by extensive airplay, but it was still there if you paid attention, if you actually listened. They wouldn’t have heard it in Ireland. I was pretty sure of that. Katherine opened a window, and the noise of it moving stiffly along its runner caught Monica’s attention and we both looked that way.
‘Just thought we’d have some music,’ Katharine shouted down to us, before stepping away and back into the kitchen.
Monica looked down at her toes, which had red polish on the nails, and then up at me again.
‘My father played madrigal tapes in the car that week in Cork, though,’ she said, and the conversation was still all mine. She rolled her eyes. ‘Greatest hits of the fifteenth century. I’ll have to kill you if you tell me you like madrigals.’
And I said, ‘I didn’t think anyone had actually liked madrigals since Henry the Eighth,’ taking a guess at the history and for the first time getting something out of the music appreciation classes we’d sat through in grade eight.
She laughed and said, ‘Well, maybe I don’t have to kill you then. That’s good.’ She was smiling and looking right at me, and she opened her eyes a little wider then and looked quickly away. She took a breath and sighed and shrugged. She drew her legs up and hugged her knees. ‘We were supposed to take turns. That was the deal. So Mum chose Simon and Garfunkel, which was mostly okay. And I chose The Clash, “London Calling”.’ It was a wry smile now. ‘I only ever got one turn.’
Katharine was on her way outside with a jug and some glasses. ‘The Clash?’ she said and laughed. ‘I can’t imagine your parents listening to The Clash. Hilarious. I made some punch. I know that’s not what you’re used to here, Matt, but apparently the two of you add up to serious guest status. That’s what Mum reckons.’
She poured it into glasses, Erica asked where her towel was and Katharine said, ‘I made punch instead. I got distracted. Mum even made me rip up some mint leaves and put them in there.’
‘This is clearly the kind of society event your mother wants to prepare you for,’ I said to Monica. ‘A conversation about madrigals, and there’s leaf matter in these drinks. You don’t get that just anywhere.’
She laughed and said, ‘To high society,’ and clinked her glass against mine. She took a mouthful and said, ‘At home there would be gin in this.’ She shook her head and said she thought she was glad to be here instead.
She had tried to fit in in Ireland, and she had got off to a good start by having the most Irish of names. ‘Bloom couldn’t be better,’ she said, ‘since that’s the surname of the main character in James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is the most Dublin book there ever was, apparently, and there was a saint called Monica, and they do love to name people after saints. It also sounds great the way they say it. Monica Bloom.’ She took another mouthful, and looked for a moment as if she was going to stop talking. ‘I’m sure that’s what made me keep trying to get in trouble with the teachers,’ she said, ‘just so I could hear them say my whole name with that Dublin accent. Monica Bloom. Monica Bloom. How good does that sound?’
So it stuck in my head exactly that way, from that day on. Monica Bloom, said the way it would be in Dublin — something exotic and charming and from far away. To me, she was all of those things. I so wanted her to notice me in the best way. I wanted to be her anchor in this new place.
Mr Hartnett came up the steps in a wide-brimmed hat and gardening clothes. ‘Punch,’ he said, seeing the jug. ‘What’s going on here? I assume you girls brought out a glass for your poor old father who’s been working hard in the garden?’
‘I’ve finished with mine,’ Katharine said, holding her glass out to him.
He filled it from the jug and drank it in one go, and he took his hat off and dropped it on the table.
‘How’s your father taking all this?’ he said, and he turned to me. ‘It’s a rotten business. Rotten that so much of it seems to be piling up on him when it’s nothing he did.’
And that was how the conversation with Monica came to an end. I was angry that the other part of my life had cut back in, annoyed with Mr Hartnett though he meant well and was letting me know my father had his support.
I had wanted, maybe needed, the afternoon to be a break from all that. Mostly, though, I had wanted more of the several perfect minutes while Dragon played ‘April Sun in Cuba’ and the punch was being made and Erica was swimming and I was listening to the stories being told by Monica Bloom. Monica Bloom, said in the Dublin way, in the steaming heat of the last Saturday afternoon of that Brisbane summer as the storm clouds piled up in the southwest and then swept in to clear the air with driving rain that had my mother running around shutting windows and shouting for us all to do the same.
My father resigned the next day. He had nothing to go to, no plan. He just resigned.
The Hartnetts had taken Monica to the Gold Coast, where Mrs Hartnett’s parents had retired — Mrs Hartnett’s mother was Monica’s great aunt — and I spent the day on homework and TV, and giving my mind over to better things. Thinking about the best bits of the day before, cutting my memories back to the edges of our conversation and replaying it in my head. Taking it further sometimes, imagining Mr Hartnett not there, the twins not there. I stared at my textbooks, but lost myself in that.
‘It’s good that you played tennis with those girls,’ my mother said. ‘It would be good if Monica made some friends here. The poor thing. She’s come a long way. Mrs Hartnett says she’s brought all the wrong clothes.’
My father made some phone calls on Sunday morning, and then went out for a few hours. My mother made lunch and sat with Andy and me to eat it, but she seemed distracted throughout. We were all waiting. The heat set in and the air was thick with humidity rising from the grass after the storm of the evening before. We ate waldorf salad and pieces of chicken and white bread rolls. Andy ate both drumsticks down to the bone.
I don’t know if
my mother knew then what was going to happen. If I had to guess, I’d say the situation was close to certain when my father had left, almost decided but not entirely. I thought it was to do with Alex. I thought he was probably visiting Alex in jail and asking him why he’d done it or telling him to hold nothing back, since it would be easier that way for everyone. I thought he was getting on with business.
Mostly, though, I thought about Monica Bloom instead of all that — retreated into a better world that, I believed, bordered on existing. Monica was so out of place here, with her three-cities’ worth of life already lived and her wrong clothes, and she had treated me as if I were the only person who might understand. And all I had seen was coalmines and the dry bush and the prefab towns we had passed through, my family and me, before ending up here, for just a few years, on this hill. But I did understand, I was convinced of that. And no one else did. The Hartnetts couldn’t, and I think she knew it and didn’t even try with them. There was more to her story, of course, but I didn’t know it then.
My father’s car pulled in under the house late in the afternoon. My mother was down there doing laundry and through the floorboards of my bedroom I could hear them talking, but not well enough to make out any words. They came upstairs together. I walked to my door and saw Andy was standing at his. He shook his head and shrugged — he hadn’t heard anything, either.
Our parents took us into the lounge room and we all sat down. My mother looked pale and she was clenching her teeth. She still held two clothes pegs in her hand.
‘Well,’ my father said. ‘I’ve been tied up with work most of the day, as you probably guessed. And here’s where things stand. I’ve thought it all through, and I’ve decided to resign.’ He paused, to give the word its due. His eyes lifted from the spot he was staring at on the floor and moved quickly to me and then to Andy. He cleared his throat. He was already looking away again. ‘Better to jump than to be pushed. Better for everyone. The problem with this — the embezzling — is that, even though it’s nothing to do with me, it happened on my watch. Someone has to take the blame for it not being noticed, and that person is going to be me. Things will be all right, though. This should sort it out.’
Andy wasn’t ready for the news at all, and his mouth actually hung open as he took it in. I had seen the papers the day before, so I had known the pressure was increasing. I had kept this outcome out of my head though, as much as possible. For Iliad Resources, this was close to the end of the story. There was still Alex’s trial to come, and the revelations of his debts, and his subsequent conviction, but the damage was contained. There would be no more embezzling, and investors could take comfort that a new state manager was coming in — one with more experience with the numbers.
For my family, though, this was a moment somewhere near the beginning of our story of that year. My father had lost his job for something that he had not done, but that had happened on his watch. It was the first time I had ever heard that expression, and every time I’ve heard it since a picture of that moment has come to mind. My father, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees and his hands clasped, his work shirt with the top two buttons undone, saying it in a conversational way. It sounded more like something he had heard about someone else and was repeating to us than his way of summing up his life on that day.
He asked Andy and me if we could help him bring some boxes up from the car. He had been packing up his office.
‘So, this’ll be in the papers? Right?’ Andy said, and my father said, ‘It probably will be. I don’t think we can avoid that.’
They made it public the following morning and the TV news crews were there again, as well as the papers, so the first we saw of it was at six o’clock. Or, in fact, six-fifteen The scandal had stayed newsworthy for a couple of weeks, but it was never big enough to be the lead. The world always had several more important things going on and, though the end of my father’s time at Iliad was public every step of the way, it was mostly at a level that put it just ahead of the story about a horse being rescued from a swimming pool, or someone winning big in a lottery.
‘The Iliad scandal claimed a victim today,’ the story began, and there was my father, hesitant again and reading from another single sheet of paper while the cameras seemed determined to shoot him in a light and from an angle that lent him a degree of guilt he’d never earned. But the story had opened by calling him a victim, and to me that’s what he was.
FIVE
At school it hardly came up, but not because no one was aware of it. It was on TV and in the papers. Everyone knew about it, but almost no one talked.
It reminded me of the year before, when Paul Cameron’s father got cancer and Paul missed a few days of school. An announcement was made at the house meeting. We were all told that, when we saw him again, we should take into account what he was going through, but none of us knew how, since what he was going through was nothing we’d ever known. When he came back, we avoided him instead. Maybe he had close friends who didn’t do that, I don’t know, but I do know it’s what most of us did. I know it’s what I did.
I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. I had no idea what you should say to someone whose father has cancer, no idea how bad the cancer was or what Paul Cameron’s life was like, what those three or four days had been like at home, what might happen to him next. So I couldn’t start a conversation. There was no way in. I had heard the things people say in movies when someone’s relative has cancer, but every one of them would have sounded manufactured and insincere. So, I shut up. I tended to avoid him, though never, I hoped, in an obvious way. Eventually I found other, regular, things to talk to him about, and our low-grade friendship steadied again and was just like it had been before, with his father’s cancer never mentioned. I don’t know what kind of recovery he made, though I once heard second-hand that he had had a course of treatment that had made him lose his hair.
My father’s public fall seemed to work the same way as news of Paul Cameron’s father’s cancer. People mostly settled on the option of pretending it wasn’t going on, and the safest way for them to do that was to stand back and let time pass. Conversations would go quiet as I approached, or they would not take my arrival into account and slip around me. I’m sure that wasn’t my imagination.
Each time it happened, I would remember again — I would see my father, reading from his sheet of paper, explaining that it had happened on his watch, using the expression he had tried out on us in the lounge room. I was embarrassed then that I was who I was, that I now came up to any conversation with this story attached to me, that I sent out this bow wave of awkwardness. That’s what they felt, the others at school — they felt awkward. Nothing more important than that. My arrival created discomfort, but I could help it pass by moving on. I thought at first, like me, they were embarrassed, but I came to realise that that wasn’t it. Embarrassment was mine alone, and perhaps some kind of disgrace too.
On the Tuesday night, after my parents had gone to bed, Andy came to the bathroom door while I was cleaning my teeth. Our father had gone into work that day It felt almost normal, though he had stopped wearing ties and we had to tell ourselves anything normal about it wasn’t real. He would be gone by the end of the week, his job in new hands. Everything he had to offer his replacement would have been extracted by then.
Andy asked me what I thought would happen, and I told him I was sure nothing would. Nothing else. Things would be all right. I told him that because it had been our father’s line from two days before, and also because it was all both of us had known and all that made sense that night. Our house was too solid to take away, our father too used to work not to have any.
He had been sick once, just one time that I could remember, with an ear problem that affected his balance and kept him in bed or around the house for a week. That was the strangest time we had ever had until he lost his job, and perhaps I thought we had something like that ahead of us — a week or so of being surprised by him being around the hou
se at all hours, looking pale and unfocused. Then all would be normal again. I couldn’t see it any other way.
But he had not made a mistake before, as far as I knew. He had not been on TV explaining himself and taking blame. It still seemed wrong to me that he had had to do that. He was an engineer — that was what he knew, and what he knew well — and it seemed unfair that someone had embezzled for a while in some cunning way and my father was supposed to have known. I was sure the men we had met from Melbourne had kept their jobs.
Everything was not all right though.
A week later, at lunchtime, I was at the edge of one of the school ovals when I saw a scuffle start some distance away — two boys going up against each other, with more forming a circle around them. They were chest to chest and then grappling with each other, their shoes kicking up dust.
It was Andy’s voice I heard above the rest — the one clear thing that came through — Andy shouting, with a rage and despair that took him past the brink of attack, ‘My father’s not a fucking criminal.’
He took a swing at the bigger boy, but just clipped his cheek, and the bigger boy’s fist hit him in the stomach and he doubled over. I was there to break it up by then, pulling other students away to get through to Andy, shouting to both of them to stop it. It had already stopped, though. There wasn’t much fight left in Andy, and a teacher was coming from the other side. In an instant, everyone else was playing handball or on to some other business, and it was just the teacher, Andy, the boy who hit him and me who were left standing there, facing each other down.
The teacher was roaring about detentions, as he would under the circumstances, and I asked if I could talk to him first, explain what was going on. It was Mr Kiefer, who had taught me German in my first year at the school. I had never been good at it — I had arrived two years too late to be good at it — but he knew me, and that was enough. He told Andy and the other boy to stay right where they were and I took him aside and told him what I had heard.
