Monica Bloom

by Nick Earls

  Towards the end of the hour some people turned up — a family, some couples, groups I couldn’t work out. They walked around under the house, hitting the stumps and gauging the clearance, and they went through the rooms upstairs. Len Ovens moved his table to the front verandah for the auction and asked my mother if she had any flowers, which she didn’t. The auctioneer arrived in his big steely-grey Mercedes and walked up the path like a rock star.

  ‘Fine-looking place we’ve got here,’ he said as Len took his briefcase and made room for it on the table.

  The auctioneer’s head seemed to pivot on his broad shoulders as he looked quickly around, making a show of taking it all in without ever taking a step inside the house. He shook my father’s hand and turned the conversation quickly to his own Mercedes and the tax position associated with it being a luxury vehicle.

  ‘Of course it’s all work,’ he said, and laughed loudly. ‘You can’t drive around to these things in just anything, can you? I’ve got the log books and you’d be surprised how much driving ends up being work.’ He came out with another big laugh that I didn’t understand and that no one shared, though my father made some attempt to — giving a laugh that went ‘huh’ and nodding his head a few times.

  Len Ovens and the auctioneer took my parents aside for instructions, and Andy and I walked through the spic-and-span house wondering what we were supposed to do. Andy put his ear to a wall and tapped the boards with his knuckles and said, ‘Magnificent timber. Magnificent.’

  My parents found us and took us through to the back as Len gathered people up and asked them to move to the front verandah. The four of us sat around the small table that was just outside the back door, and we waited. I asked my father about the auctioneer and his car, and he told me it was to do with tax law.

  ‘His car is classified as a luxury vehicle,’ he said, ‘for obvious reasons. So if he wants to write it off as a business expense he’s probably under more scrutiny He keeps log books that record how far he drives and why he makes each trip, and somehow he keeps them in a way that records every trip as business use, so it’s a hundred per cent tax deductible.’

  ‘Do you do that?’ I said to him. ‘That kind of thing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  On the front verandah, the auction began. The auctioneer’s voice had volume and purpose, though I couldn’t make out the words from the back of the house, and the crowd’s murmuring stopped. He moved into some kind of explanation.

  My father thought about my question and leaned across the table. He dropped his voice to a loud, clear whisper and said, ‘Because I’m not a wanker.’

  My mother looked shocked, and then that passed and she said, ‘Not that we go around calling people that every day, but, yes.’

  I was glad to hear something like that come out of my father, some sign that not everything was numb, even if I didn’t straight away see that small part of that big day for what it was. The rich auctioneer, cheating on his tax and taking his fee and caring not at all about what happened to us. My father, who cheated at nothing and was left sitting out the back as his home was sold because of someone else’s thieving, some other books in the city that had been tricked up to look good enough as a million dollars or more had slid out of them and into the pocket of Alex Pegler. My father had little time for cheats, particularly that year, and a slimy, small-scale cheat who boasted about it was never going to impress him.

  I wanted to say, ‘Yes. Yes, he’s a wanker. We all think he’s a wanker.’ He seemed like one to me, and I wanted to support my father, to join in on something he was feeling and let him know I was with him. But by then the word had been said as much as it could be — even though that was only once — and I hadn’t fully understood the tax explanation anyway.

  Len Ovens appeared behind the screen door. ‘We’re getting going,’ he said. ‘Don’s read the conditions and we’re about to start. We’ve got quite a nice crowd.’

  So it began, and Don’s voice was louder with his ‘What am I bid? What am I bid? Come on, who’ll start me? Who’ll start me on this fine family home that we’re definitely here to sell?’

  My father got up and shut the back door and then sat down again, leaning forward with his elbows on his thighs and his hands clasped. None of us talked. It seemed as if a long time passed, but it probably wasn’t long at all. I tried to think about other, better, things, but I expect none of us could.

  The door opened and Len Ovens was there. ‘We have a couple of bidders, but it’s slowing down,’ he said. ‘Don’ll keep working them. We’re not there yet. Not near the reserve.’ He looked at my mother, and then at my father, and shut the door again.

  The strain started to show on my mother’s face. My father sighed deeply and leaned back in his chair.

  In a couple of minutes Len was there again. ‘It looks like it’s gone as far as it’ll go this afternoon. One bidder dropped out and it’s sitting short of the reserve. About fifteen thousand short. They’re definitely interested though. They seem to be. If we pass it in now they’ll have first right to negotiate.’

  ‘Pass it in,’ my father said. The bid was nowhere near what they were looking for. ‘It’s not our day.’

  So it finished there and soon we walked back into our tidy house, and the crowd was gone and the auctioneer was gone and there was nothing left in the afternoon. Len Ovens was folding up the legs of his card table, and he stayed to talk to my mother a while longer on the front verandah. My father went somewhere by himself.

  I said to Andy, ‘Do you want to go for a swim next door?’ and he said, ‘Do you really want to talk about this just yet? They’ll ask how it went, and it was obviously a dismal failure.’

  He was right, and we didn’t go.

  My mother took us out to dinner at Bonanza Steak-house, but it was just the three of us this time, since my father had developed a headache.

  ‘It’ll sell,’ she said. ‘This’ll get sorted out. An auction is a tactic. You don’t always expect to sell at the auction itself. It flushes out interest.’

  She told us to have whatever we wanted, and ordered a salad and a glass of water for herself. Then she changed her mind and said, ‘Actually, I’ll have a moselle. A glass of moselle. Why not?’

  Nothing came of the highest bidder, but new potential buyers surfaced two or three days after the auction. Again my mother showed them around and, when they appeared at my door, I realised that the couple who had come the week before hadn’t turned up on Saturday. I wondered why not. I wondered what our house had failed to do to make them come back ready to bid. I wondered if it would do it again tonight.

  I told them they could come into my room for a proper look around, but they said they could see I was busy and they didn’t want to interrupt.

  ‘But you have already,’ I wanted to say. ‘Or have we been talking about enzymes of the digestive system and I didn’t even know it?’ Instead I said, ‘No really, it’s okay,’ so they walked over to the windows and looked out to the Hartnetts’ and said it would be good in this room with a northerly breeze.

  ‘I think Scott would like this,’ the man said, and the woman agreed. They walked back to the door and stopped in the hall with my mother. ‘Why are you selling?’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind me asking.’

  It was the question I had kept hoping wouldn’t come up. It wasn’t about the house. It wasn’t necessary.

  ‘Just a change of circumstances,’ my mother told him. ‘We’d love to stay here, but there are work reasons. Some moves are unavoidable.’

  It was true, but not the whole truth, and I thought she had worded it cleverly. She might have said it more than once to other people when I hadn’t been around. It didn’t sound like the first time. She led them down the hall and went on with the tour. I kept working with my lists of enzymes, wishing the pancreas wasn’t quite so complicated. The textbook had a picture of Islets of Langerhans cells, and I got stuck staring at it while trying to get my head aroun
d the difference between pancreatic hormones and pancreatic enzymes. I didn’t know if I would ever need that information after my biology exam.

  There are probably people whose whole job is about nothing else but Islets of Langerhans cells and their ramifications. Their work world is so small, even the rest of the pancreas gets in the way. When did they know that that’s what they would do? That they would finetune the possibilities of work all the way down to this? I didn’t know what I would do once this year was behind me. People always ask you that when you meet them and you’re sixteen, but I didn’t know and kept having the feeling that I was supposed to.

  I was at a school where a lot of people had their answers ready They were aiming for medicine or law, or one of those other professions that involves a specific degree and gets talked about as a job to aspire to. Their fathers were often in the business already, and sometimes their mothers were too. My father’s engineering degree counted, I suppose, though it wasn’t something I wanted to do.

  I went to school with people who seemed to know they would be in medicine or law the next year, even though they hadn’t yet sat the exams that would get them there. Moranbah hadn’t been like that. Anyone thinking of those degrees had been the exception, and the degree had seemed a long way off, a long and complicated way from our small town in the bush to the big city. Most of us hadn’t even seen Brisbane, and at some level it had stayed suspended in our imaginations as a vast, seething, dangerous place. In Moranbah, we knew the size and scope of our world.

  When we moved here and started school, Andy and I kept being told how lucky we were that the places came up at all.

  My mother turned up at my door again after the potential buyers had left. ‘I think these ones might be serious,’ she said. ‘Properly serious, not real-estate-agent serious. But we’ll see, I suppose.’

  ‘That question about why we’re moving annoys me,’ I said. ‘Why do they think it’s their business?’

  She frowned and folded her arms. ‘I don’t know. But they ask it. They just do. They want reassurance. They want to hear something good.’ She reached out and took the doorknob in her hand. I noticed her nails had no nail polish on them, or seemed not to. That was a change for her. ‘They want to know you’re not escaping because the house is about to slide off the hill or because it’s infested with white ants, things like that.’

  I realised then that my father had begun to fade from the news. The question had not been about him, and the answer had been enough. From that time on, not everyone would work out in an instant who he was. It had already started happening. Other news had come along and he had been forgotten as new stories, new scandals, were taken up instead. We had some privacy back, but it would have been wrong to think we had it all, wrong to expect that the name Sherman would never trigger something in someone new, never bring to the surface a small imperfect memory of the news of early 1980.

  But it had been school I had been thinking of when my mother walked in. School, how lucky we were to get the places, how much it all cost.

  ‘If next term’s fees are a problem, I could change schools,’ I told her. It was out of me, I’m sure, before I’d even thought it. I didn’t want to change schools, but I had days of feeling useless, days when I felt acutely that I was eating, drinking, practically inhaling money we didn’t have.

  ‘There’ll be no need for that. Things aren’t. . .’ She paused to give it some thought. ‘Things aren’t that way. We want you to stay there. It’s a good place for you. It’ll help get you somewhere.’

  ‘Well, maybe you could pull Andy out then. That should save a few bucks.’

  She laughed, as she was supposed to, and said, ‘Andy can stay too. It’s good for him as well. But one thing he could do — and maybe you could ask him, since I’m not supposed to know — one thing he could do would be to tidy his pornography away really well before that couple turns up for another look at the house. They’re coming back with a builder and we had a comment or two after the auction apparently. And he could make sure his bin’s empty of tissues.’

  ‘Sure,’ I told her, and I knocked on the wall that divided our rooms and I shouted, ‘Hey, Andy, Mum says your stick books have to go before our buyer turns up again.’

  From the other side of the wall, I heard a textbook slam shut and Andy say loudly, ‘Get. . .’ and a word after it that he muffled deliberately

  My mother stifled a laugh with her hand and said, ‘I just wanted them to be better hidden. Invisible.’

  ‘He thinks they’re hidden now,’ I told her. ‘He’s not a good hider.’ And then I shouted out, ‘On second thoughts put them in a box somewhere. We might get fifty cents for each of them if we have to have a garage sale.’

  ‘Get even more fucked,’ he shouted back, this time saying every word clearly.

  My mother laughed, a dirty kind of laugh I’d never heard from her before. The laugh you would come out with, I thought, if someone told a joke in a bar. Never before would Andy have used that word in her hearing, never would he have got away with it.

  ‘They cost two bucks each, you bastard,’ he shouted. ‘And some of them are in good condition.’

  This time, the house sold. Len Ovens came over with the couple and their builder the next day, and by that evening he had an offer in writing. It was low, but not ridiculously so, and he said there was some room to move.

  My parents ended up settling for less than they were looking for, something we seemed to do a lot at that time. We had gone from having everything in place to scrambling to keep some kind of traction, and we would settle — and quickly — for less than we had hoped for, since it was more than nothing. The bank could take your house if everything went really bad — that’s how I understood it, and I was sure I could see that thought, and others like it, in my parents too.

  So, they had a deal on paper, a definite figure, a definite time frame. We had certainty.

  Andy and I swam in the Hartnetts’ pool that evening with the twins and he said, ‘Thank God. That’s the last time I ever tidy that bedroom. It was really taking it out of me.’

  We told them the house was sold and Katharine said, ‘Who to? Tell me they’re not awful.’

  They asked where we were moving to, but we didn’t know. We told them the plan was to stay nearby and they said we should come over to swim and play tennis whenever we wanted.

  Bill Hartnett came outside and said, ‘I hope your parents got a good price for it,’ and I told him I thought they’d done all right. I knew he would have the price out of his new neighbours within minutes of them moving in, and I knew he would see it for what it was, but that was a moment I was happy to miss and a conversation I was happy never to have.

  The pool had underwater lighting and our bodies glowed in it, paler than they were, and we played Marco Polo until Mrs Hartnett told us it was too late for that kind of noise. We stayed in the water and hung off the sides of the pool with our arms along the pebble dash and looked up at the sky and the pool light shimmering in the trees. Summer was over, but the night wasn’t cold. In opulent houses all around us, houses of size and substance, evenings were coming to a close. French doors were shutting and locking, and lush subtropical gardens were being left to cats and dogs, and to bats out on their broad leather wings looking for fruit. Soon, Andy and I would go through the gate with our towels around our shoulders and we would be home again and asleep in our own dark house that, before winter, would be someone else’s.

  ‘The dance on Saturday,’ Katharine said. ‘Are we going?’

  It was Saturday that was on my mind when I went to the bathroom later. I had stayed up doing some reading for English, but not got too far with it. I wanted to have time with Monica on Saturday when it would be just the two of us. That had almost never happened so far. I wanted a chance with her, a chance away from everyone. If I could get my thoughts clear, I might even talk to her about what it had been like for the house to be sold, what it meant for my family and me, where it fitted
in this sequence of events. It was hard, some days, to line it all up and see past it.

  It felt like we were failing, still failing, though we were forever talking ourselves around to the idea that each new step would fix something, take us forward. My father showed no signs of that kind of momentum, though my mother was different. She had talked the doctors into putting money towards new plants for the surgery, and the response had been positive so she was now urging them to let her change the vertical blinds. She had a colour scheme picked out, and was sure they would see her point. We all knew, I think, that this job would not be temporary, whatever came along next for my father.

  Andy had squeezed the last out of the toothpaste tube, and I looked for a new one. We always had a supply in the top drawer, but I couldn’t see any there. I found some tablets with my father’s name on the box. I didn’t know what they were, but the date on the label was three weeks before, and the prescribing doctor was one my mother worked for. The label said to ‘take as directed’, and inside there was a sheet of paper, a sheet of the doctor’s letterhead stationery, with a schedule that pushed the dose up every few days.

  I wondered if he was sick, but I couldn’t think what might be wrong. I folded the sheet up just the way it had been and put the box back in the drawer.

  I stood in the hallway, looking down into the darkness towards my parents’ bedroom. Things could go wrong before you knew it — I’d seen that happen this year. I walked down the hall and stood at their door, with no plan to do more than that, no plan at all. I waited, but there was no sound, nothing to reassure me. I had questions but I wouldn’t ask them, not now anyway, maybe not ever. Any question felt like a risk, even just to think it.

  I went back to the bathroom to look for toothpaste again. Light spilled out through the open door and across the hall onto the polished floor of the spare room. I took a look in there and a dressmaker’s dummy startled me, standing rigid in the starlight that was coming in through the windows. It had shoulders and a waist but no head, and my heart raced until I put the light on and saw it there clearly on its stand, a floral print fabric pinned around it. It usually stayed in a cupboard, but my mother had started work on a dress before going full-time at the surgery.