by Nick Earls
‘Yeah, down at the club,’ I told him. ‘Down at the club we play bridge and drink gin and all that. There are butlers, and nuts in bowls. No, dickhead. She told me she could play bridge, and you wanted to know about her.’
‘Oh, righto.’ It seemed set to keep him happy, and then he said, ‘Hey, did you see that thing about bowls of nuts in bars? About how there’s the urine of maybe fifteen different animals in each bowl? How do they tell that? How do they tell it’s fifteen animals? Isn’t urine just urine?’
‘Excuse me?’ It was Erica’s voice, and she laughed. She was above us on the verandah, at the top of the steps.
‘Um, it was this thing I read,’ Andy said as the others appeared near her. ‘Hi, um, I read this thing about bowls of nuts in bars and how on average, when scientifically analysed, each one has the urine of fifteen different animals. That was all.’
‘Fifteen animals?’ Erica said, and now they were all laughing. Andy was going red, but I didn’t expect him to back down. When he read something, he took it to be a fact and he remembered it, though not always precisely.
‘That’s a lot of animals,’ I said. ‘When surely, for most of us, you see one rat squatting over the nuts and that’s more than enough.’
Katharine said, ‘Yuk,’ and Monica laughed and said, ‘Hi, Matt, by the way.’
She was behind Katharine and holding her racquet in front of her. I said hello, and knew I was about to stare, to analyse the smile she gave me more than I should. The handle of her racquet clunked against the verandah railing and she nearly dropped it. She caught it awkwardly and her cheeks went pink.
‘Balls,’ Erica said, and she handed me a tin. She led the way to the court, talking over her shoulder as we walked single file along the flagstones. ‘So, how’s it going at your place? Many people through? Are you keeping the creepy ones out?’
I couldn’t care. In that minute I couldn’t care about our side of the fence, my life over there. I’d spent days thinking about the next time I would see Monica, and now here she was.
‘With the exception of the real estate agent maybe,’ I told her, and Andy said, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and gave me another jab in the back with his racquet.
I let him catch up with me as we walked onto the court and towards the far end, and as we passed the net I said to him, ‘The good thing is, I can give you a completely crippling dead arm for that racquet poking any time I want. It doesn’t have to be now.’
‘Really?’ he said nonchalantly, and he gave his racquet a spin. ‘Why not now?’
‘Decorum.’ I walked over to the forehand side.
‘Not in front of the ladies?’ he said, but pronouncing it ‘lay-deez’. ‘That’s never stopped you doing anything before.’
‘And it’s not stopping me now. It’s just simple tennis etiquette: don’t harm your brother too grievously on court.’ I was annoyed with my mother for making me include him. I rolled a ball out of the tin and patted it to him with my racquet. ‘Now, hit this to one of those nice lay-deez and let’s get this started.’
He whipped it over to Erica, and then slugged her miss-hit backhand return down the line. Andy was a clean hitter of the ball, but he never cared much about where it went, though he seemed to play in a way that meant partners never held it against him.
Monica worked on her ground strokes first, then stood at the net popping volleys at my feet. It might have been just me, but there were times when it felt like there were only the two of us on court. She was wearing a singlet top, and she swayed between shots, continually changing her balance and getting ready for the next ball to come her way. But the tennis we played mostly didn’t live up to that. I wanted it to be better, and I wanted to stop and to talk to her. With each minute I had a feeling of time running out, of time that could have been better spent.
We played for an hour and a half, until it started to get dark and the sound of cicadas came in from the trees on all sides.
‘We’ll get some drinks,’ Katharine said, looking at Erica. Erica shrugged and it seemed to mean yes.
Andy flicked a ball up from the ground and drove it chest high into the fence. ‘How do you reckon the open-for-inspection went?’ he said, before walking over to pick the ball up and hit it again.
‘Hard to tell from here.’ I wanted him to go, to leave with the twins. ‘I’m sure Monica and I can roll up the net and pick the balls up if you want to get home and find out.’
So Monica and I stood there as the other three left the court. Andy ran past the twins, swishing his racquet and shouting, ‘Thanks, that was fun,’ and the twins walked off and the gate clanged shut behind them. Up in the Hartnetts’ house, a light went on.
Monica turned and looked at me. She was swinging her racquet gently by her side, her arm still idly practising. She smiled. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Balls or net?’
I took the net.
I turned the handle until it was slack, I unhooked the ends and laid the net flat on the ground and I bundled it up. There was a covered area under the verandah where the court didn’t need a fence and where the equipment was kept, and I dumped the net there, on a table. When I turned, Monica was standing nearby with the ball tins.
‘I bet you didn’t expect to see me again so soon,’ she said.
‘It’s like a bonus boarders’ weekend.’ I almost said more, but then it didn’t happen. I wanted to tell her how good it was that she was there.
She handed me the tins, which I knew went upstairs. I put them down on the net.
‘There’s another dance at school in a couple of weeks,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘You should come.’
‘Are they going to let you go to it?’
She laughed. ‘Jesus — I can’t be in trouble all the time. My slate’s clean now, I think. For the moment. A suspension does that, surely? You should come to the dance.’
I almost kissed her then. I had no words in my head and I felt the urge to, strongly. I imagined it all, but I didn’t know how it would start or whether I’d be much good at it, or even if it was something she might want. The cicadas blazed away. I looked at her eyes, her mouth, in the quickly fading light. Her mouth was slightly open. I wanted to kiss her. She was close and the talk had stopped.
Then the twins turned up with cordial and biscuits. The gate creaked open on its rusty hinges and there they were, each of them with a tray. Monica made a noise that sounded like a laugh, but just the start of one, and we both took a half step backwards and away from each other.
She looked back at me then. ‘Katharine said she told you what happened. Why I got suspended.’
‘Yeah. She told me something.’
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe what happened. I thought Sally was faking it when she hit the floor and, you know, started having the fit. I only did it because she was the only one who hadn’t had a go. And that didn’t seem fair. You should feel it. It’s great. It’s like you’re disappearing. You’re just falling away and away.’
Katharine stopped a few metres from us and looked up to the windows and shouted, ‘Mum, could you put the light on?’
‘She’ll be all right, though,’ Monica said, still just to me. ‘Sally. She’s okay. I called today and she’s back at school. I feel pretty terrible about it, though.’
The light under the verandah snapped on, and she blinked and put her arm up and moved around so that she wasn’t looking right into it. Everything was bright now where we were, and the court and the world beyond it was darker than ever. Katharine and Erica pushed the net along and made room on the table for the trays.
‘It was an accident,’ I said, but it felt like the last remnant of a conversation that was already gone. ‘You couldn’t guess it would happen. And she’s okay, which is good.’
Katharine handed me a drink and said, ‘Is this Sally Barnes? Yeah, she’s fine apparently. She’s epileptic, or something, but she never told people. Something like that. What can you do?’ She took a bite of a custard-cream
biscuit and shrugged.
We sat around on the mismatched chairs — chairs that had long ago ceased to have an upstairs life — and we drank our cordial and talked, the four of us.
‘It was all over the school yesterday and the day before,’ Erica said. ‘It’s like you’re some outlaw. The story’s going around, but you’ve disappeared.’
Monica groaned at the thought of it. She didn’t want this outlaw status. ‘I’ll be back on Monday. The mystery’ll be over then. She hit the floor like she was dead. It was terrible.’ She took a biscuit but she didn’t eat it.
She wanted to get off the topic, and she told us more about Dublin, about sneaking out in the middle of the night to see bands. The girl next door was at uni and could get her into bars, as long as she was inconspicuous and sober when she was there. ‘But it wasn’t about the drinking,’ she said. ‘Not for me. It was about the bands, and having a life.’ A number of times she fell asleep in school the next day. It happened enough that she was sent for blood tests that said she was very mildly anaemic, so she was told to eat more meat. Her parents never noticed her sneaking out. She had her own key. ‘I don’t even know if they would have minded,’ she said. ‘We never talked about it. It was culturally enriching, so it might have been okay.’
Katharine laughed, and poured more cordial from the jug. Ice cubes clinked against the side.
They were going to the Gold Coast the next day, leaving early for another visit to see the twins’ grandparents. Monica said that the highlight the previous time had been Bill Hartnett getting a speeding ticket, trying to bluster his way out of it and then realising he was in a car with three teenagers and needed to be setting a good example — an example of a good, remorseful citizen who had slipped that one and only time.
My mother called my name over the fence around then. Dinner was almost ready and I had to go. I told Monica I hoped the whole suspension issue would just fade away, become less newsworthy in a hurry, and she said, ‘Yeah, thanks.’
‘And let’s hope that’s it,’ I said. ‘You don’t want them to stop you doing things. Going to dances and things. Having a life.’
And she looked me in the eyes, and smiled.
‘That should be fine, shouldn’t it?’ Katharine said. ‘Going to dances and things?’
And Monica said, ‘Yeah. The slate’s clean. It just means two weeks of keeping the nuns happy, and I can do that. Two weeks. Easy.’
I could smell dinner when I got to the gate. It was a chicken recipe my mother had picked up at a fundraising appearance by a celebrity chef at a lunch at school, a big mothers’ committee event. Andy had the table set, and my father was standing on the verandah holding a beer and staring out into the night.
The open-for-inspection hadn’t gone particularly well — six people this time, and again two were apparently serious. Phone numbers had been collected and would be followed up.
We sat and ate, my father with his beer, my mother with her watered-down wine, and for one night I didn’t care. Not about the house, not about a lot of things I spent hours on any given day caring about. I had the feeling Monica Bloom and I had made a plan and no one else in the world knew it. There was a dance at St Catherine’s in two weeks, and we would both be there I should have kissed her, but I didn’t know if it would have gone right or not. I should have kissed her, but it was a risk I couldn’t take that afternoon. I couldn’t let another thing go wrong. This way, though, it was no worse than a missed opportunity, with all its possibilities intact and waiting for a night just two weeks ahead.
There was something there. In my better moments I was convinced of it. That counted for a lot as my father pushed dumbly on through the meal, my mother feigned a shaky optimism about the two new potential buyers and Andy and I fought on with the pretence that all was close to normal, since that seemed to be what our parents needed from us then.
‘You were right,’ Andy said. ‘She was pretty good at tennis, their cousin.’
And I said, ‘Yeah, I told you. And you should drop in to the club some time for a hand of bridge. She’d really teach you a thing or two then.’
‘Not with all that rat piss in the nuts, my friend,’ he said, and my mother dropped the spoon into the casserole dish. ‘Sorry,’ Andy said to her. ‘That was a reference from earlier, and you weren’t there. Great dinner by the way.’
I laughed and explained nothing. Andy didn’t either, but he didn’t think to. He thought he’d said it all.
EIGHT
In the week leading up to the auction, the mood in our house seemed to sag. We were coasting towards an anticlimax, but always looking the other way, focusing on tasks that would keep the place ready, that might let us pretend there was dignity in this move, this exit from Hamilton. I knew the feeling would be very different in a family that was moving up, that had bought somewhere bigger and better and now had to finish the business of the change by selling the old place.
When we left Moranbah, it had been quite okay to leave the house. I had friends I would miss, but there was a good, positive reason to move. I understood that. We had music on while we packed boxes, and my mother talked about the kind of house we would find ourselves in Brisbane, and the people we might get to know in our new life.
We were selling the Hamilton house because we were failing to keep it, and everyone knew that. It was what the sign out the front had been telling the world for weeks. So, the best we could hope for was a good sale. That’s where the best hope for dignity lay. People would say, ‘Well, at least they got a good price for their house. They bought well and sold well. They deserve better luck, and maybe it’s changing now.’ None of us expected that, though. It was not a time to be selling, that’s what the papers said. Not unless you had to.
A couple came through midweek with the real estate agent. It might have been Wednesday evening. I was doing homework, and there was a knock on my half-open bedroom door. ‘The people are here to look at the house,’ my mother said, though I knew it already because I had heard the doorbell a while before, and the talk that had gone on in the dining room and kitchen.
She pushed the door open wider and they stepped in, looking around at all the corners of the room and at the floorboards and the view from my windows. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ the woman said, and the man smiled in a polite, artificial way. He was wearing a suit and might have come from work. I imagined them having two kids, maybe a few years younger than Andy and me. I told her it was fine, but we all felt the discomfort of it and no one came more than a step in from the door.
‘It’s screened,’ my mother said. ‘All the windows are screened.’ Then they moved off down the hallway andI heard her say, ‘This is Andy’s room, which is much the same as Matt’s.’ I don’t think they went in.
My father’s job that week was to find us somewhere to rent. Somewhere close by, my mother had said when we all talked about it. Close by, so that it wouldn’t be too disruptive. She wanted Andy and me to catch the same buses to and from school as we had been, if possible, and she wanted to be close to her work.
We had that discussion after dinner one night. My mother had kept Saturday’s paper and had marked a couple of houses she thought looked like possibilities.
‘Or maybe we should think about a flat this time,’ she said. ‘It’s only for a while, and that way there would be no garden to look after and there might even be a pool. I mean a big flat, a nice one. One with facilities, and a balcony facing the city.’ It sounded good, the way she put it. Positive.
‘With a lift?’ Andy said. ‘With a lift, and could we be on one of the higher floors? And a tennis court. Could we have one with a tennis court?’
‘Maybe we should just check into a resort,’ my father said with a terseness that surprised me. I think it was the first time he had spoken.
Andy looked at my mother, and she gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. My father took the paper, and the pen that was lying on it. He looked up and down the columns of northside rental p
roperties, or perhaps he just stared at the page while turning the pen over and over in his hand. He sighed and smiled in a tired way, and looked up at Andy.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said.
And then he did nothing, as far as I could tell. The paper sat on the coffee table for days, still with the same two houses marked, and he told us nothing about any progress. He never mentioned going to real estate agents, he made no calls at all while we were at home.
The change in him was more and more apparent as the weeks passed, and I didn’t like to think of how he had been two months or so before, back when he was working and the scandal had yet to hit. I didn’t want to think there had been any change in him at all, or I wanted to believe that he was simply more thoughtful now, working in his head, planning a way out. But on the worst days he seemed lost in our lives, as if we moved around him with a speed too quick for him to track, though we were doing only the things we had always done — the things we had done since moving to Brisbane anyway — with the exception of my mother’s job.
Saturday came, and the real estate agent hammered in another sign that said ‘Auction today’ in large capitals, with the time of the auction handwritten in a space beneath. The house was open for inspection in the hour before, so he was back after lunch setting up for that, unfolding his table, fanning his flyers and stacking a few business cards in a pile. The only smile I ever saw from him was on those flyers, and it hadn’t come easily. Len Ovens was his name and that was the day I learned it, or the day I paid attention. I didn’t remember hearing it earlier, though.
The flyer was new It had a black-and-white image of the front of the house that was too dark to show anything, other than the roof coming to a point near the middle. In the bottom-right corner, it had a smaller photo, of the same quality, of Len Ovens, with his hairline and teeth featuring in a way that made him look like a shabby vampire. Underneath it said ‘Len Ovens, JP’. In bold type under the house photo it said ‘Motivated Vendor’. That was followed by a paragraph talking the place up in the usual real-estate-agent style, then information about quarterly rates, lot numbers and registered plans. I imagined those were facts that a serious potential buyer might need.
