Monica Bloom

by Nick Earls

  There was a laundry basket on the bed with some of her clothes in it, ready for ironing. There were some school shirts in there as well, and I realised she was still ironing them, despite her full-time job. I pulled out a crumpled shirt and I picked up the iron, but it had a dial on it with settings I didn’t understand, and I couldn’t remember from wearing my shirts where the creases went.

  I shook the shirt hard and smoothed it out across the spare bed, and decided that was as good as anything, or near enough. I took it into my room and hung it from my doorknob on a hanger.

  Saturday night was clear and cool. I met the twins at the Hartnetts’ back door and walked through their house with them to the stone front steps. Their parents had gone out to a dinner function, something to do with the local Lions Club. Bill was a member, and had been district governor a couple of years before we came to Brisbane.

  Katharine and Erica argued about which lights they were supposed to leave on, and Katharine went back inside and turned lights off in the lounge and dining rooms.

  ‘As if it matters,’ Erica said to me while we waited for her at the door.

  ‘I can’t believe this might be the last time we do this,’ Katharine said as we walked down the hill. ‘I can’t believe that you could be living anywhere by the next dance.’

  They asked if we had plans for moving yet, if we had found a place in the past few days, and I told them we hadn’t as far as I knew

  ‘They gave us such a lecture about this dance at assembly yesterday,’ Erica said. ‘It’ll be so embarrassing if they go through with it all, everything they’re saying they’ll do. They reckon they found condoms in the bushes after the last one. Used ones.’

  ‘It was the usual thing,’ Katharine said. ‘The usual talk that we get before at least one dance every year. This is our last chance. Our last chance to show we can be trusted, and all that.’ She laughed. ‘So be ready. There’s to be nothing too wicked from you tonight.’

  I thought back to my time with Monica on the tennis court, the move I had nearly made, how intense it had all felt. I let myself imagine a few extra minutes of it, playing out in a perfect way, Monica’s arms around my neck, her mouth meeting mine. The thought of her was so strong I couldn’t see how I was keeping it to myself.

  But Katharine and Erica were still talking about the threatened security measures, and how ridiculous it all was, and saying they had rights but sometimes people didn’t respect them.

  As we passed the tennis courts, two cars drove by us and stopped at the brightly lit entrance to the school. St Catherine’s girls, younger than us, were standing around in clusters waiting for more of their friends to arrive. I saw Tim Dixon, who I recognised from school, with a blonde St Catherine’s girl in a green strapless dress. He was a rower in the first eight, and a prefect, and not someone who would ever need to talk to me at school, but he called me over by name. He had a jacket that made his broad shoulders look broader. At school he wore a blazer with a gold sporting pocket, and he carried himself at the dance as though it was somehow still visible. But he wanted to talk to me, and I wouldn’t have guessed that he knew my name.

  He said he had a favour to ask, and that he had brought rum along in three small hip flasks but jackets were being searched on the way in.

  ‘I’m going to put two of them in my socks,’ he said, ‘but I need someone else to get the other one in there.’

  We had never even made eye contact before, and now we seemed like allies. In front of the girl in green and the Hartnetts, Tim Dixon was meeting me as an equal. I’d never gone looking for that, but I could give it up forever by saying no. And I liked the idea of it — being part of something, breaking a rule, for five minutes or maybe even hours not caring about what people thought of my father or even about the state he was in. This evening, my life would be about something different. I would be known for something different. And there was music ahead, and Monica Bloom, and I felt a flash of rare wild optimism. So I agreed, and we went around the corner into the dark and I took a flask and slipped it into one of my socks.

  We rejoined the others in the queue and Katharine said, ‘And so, the wickedness begins . . .’ We were all in on it then.

  The main security measure seemed to be two fathers and a teacher glaring at everyone as they walked past. Flasks of rum in the pockets of a jacket might have been obvious, but there was no security operating at ankle level. We paid our money, had our wrists stamped and walked through.

  There was recorded music coming from the hall — the band hadn’t started up yet and the crowd was mostly still outside. There were people I knew and people I didn’t, but no Monica Bloom, as far as I could see. Tim Dixon and I went into a toilet block with a temporary sign that said ‘Boys’.

  ‘Thanks for that,’ he said as I reached down to my ankle and lifted up the leg of my jeans. ‘I owe you a Coke with some of this stuff in later.’

  I thanked him, knowing it would never come to that. The offer had shown his gratitude, and that would be as far as he would need to take it. That’s probably how we both felt. I nearly added, ‘I’m not a rum drinker actually.’ I had tried rum once and hadn’t liked it much, but it didn’t seem to be the thing to say. The flask had writing etched into it, and it said ‘James T L Dixon, MBBS Graduation, 12 XII 1956’.

  Tim didn’t explain, though I was sure it was his father’s. He took it from me and slid it into an inside pocket in his jacket. ‘Right then,’ he said, and he seemed ready for me to move from his orbit. ‘Better find that girl again before someone else does.’

  It was a joke, and he moved off with all the self-assurance anyone could need, leading the way out of the toilets and back into the crowd. I caught up with Katharine and Erica on the hall steps just as the band began to play. They opened with Foreigner’s ‘Cold as Ice’, then moved into the Eagles’ ‘Take it Easy’ — classic covers from the preceding few years, and the kind of songs they must have played in one school hall after another. These were the records we listened to at home, but delivered louder and more forcefully by the band, in a way parents could never like, a way that hit like a physical force. It felt good. There were pink-and-blue lights swirling around, apparently at random, but the room was mostly dark. The floor vibrated with the drums and bass, and my eyes adjusted. There were seats set up at the back, but all they had on them so far was bags and jackets, and everyone was dancing.

  It took me almost an hour to find Monica Bloom, and I was outside again by then and getting myself a drink. She was standing under a light talking to someone, another girl. She had a can of Coke and her hair was in a ponytail. She was wearing a cream top with long sleeves and a dark skirt that went to her knees. My heart thumped up into my throat and then settled.

  She saw me as I approached, and she mouthed ‘Hi’ and smiled. ‘What have you been doing?’ was the first thing she said. ‘I was sure I would have bumped into you by now.’

  I told her I’d been around. I didn’t tell her I’d been around looking for her. I seemed to have to account for myself, though, and I liked the way that felt.

  ‘This is Sally,’ she said. ‘I should introduce you. Sally, this is Matt.’

  Sally looked at Monica and then at me and said, ‘Hi. You live next to Monica’s cousins, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ I told her. ‘Just on the next hill.’ I forgot completely that that was about to change. Then I thought of our house, the auction, the sale. I couldn’t tell them.

  ‘I’m a boarder too,’ Sally said, and I realised they had talked about me. Sally knew I lived next to the Hartnetts. I glanced at Monica, who made eye contact, then looked at my shoulder and took a mouthful of Coke. Sally was still talking. ‘We used to be near each other in the dorm, but they shifted us after the incident.’ She said ‘incident’ as if it came with a capital ‘I’, and consequences.

  ‘The suspension thing,’ Monica said, perhaps without much enthusiasm for the topic. ‘That game I told you about.’ She looked at Sall
y, but Sally wasn’t stopping.

  ‘I still can’t believe it, you know,’ Sally said. ‘That you got suspended.’ She turned back to me. ‘They hardly said anything to me about it. Other than going on and on about my health and how I should never do it again.’

  ‘I have a target on me,’ Monica said, drawing a wide circle over her chest with her index finger. ‘I don’t know if you can see it, but plenty of people can.’

  She said we should dance then, and the three of us went into the hall.

  I have almost no recollection of Sally I think she had dark hair. In the hall I tried to play it cool, but as blue light darted across Monica’s face I couldn’t help looking at her. The light was cut by a filter into the shapes of stars and moons, and the crescent of a moon swayed across her cheek and into her hair.

  We danced until the end of the band’s set, when the recorded music came on at a lower volume, and Sally said, ‘I’ve just seen someone I want to catch up with. I’ll see you later.’

  Monica and I stood on the steps in the cool breeze, and around us people crowded the trestle tables that were carrying drinks and sat on the low walls and the grass, their nights going wrong or right or nowhere, caught up in the loud talk or standing at the edges of conversations, laughing and complaining. The album playing was Billy Joel’s ‘The Stranger’.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said. ‘All this noise . . .’ I asked if she would prefer madrigals and she laughed and said, ‘I would not prefer madrigals. Not as long as I live.’ She led us down through the crowd, and turned back towards me as we passed a teacher talking to a group of girls. ‘I don’t know how well you know this place. When you’re a boarder you get to know it pretty well.’

  I caught up to her — the crowd had thinned out that far from the hall, and it was easier to walk beside her — and we went behind a Moreton Bay fig and a hedge to a square of grass where there was no one. The moon was quite high in the eastern sky, and almost full, and the lawn and the pale path that ran across it caught the light between the dark two-storey blocks of classrooms.

  I wanted to kiss her now in case the chance never came again. I wanted just once to be that impulsive kind of person. But for too many weeks it had been the best thing I had thought about, for two weeks I had thought of us at this dance disappearing from the crowd and into the moonlight, and now it was happening.

  ‘We’re not supposed to be here,’ Monica said. ‘How stupid is that? We’re all supposed to pack into that small space and shout at each other.’

  We kept walking, along the path, down some steps and between two buildings. We came to the chapel and walked around to its far side and Monica said, ‘Here,’ and we sat on a bench that had its back to the chapel wall and that looked far into the south and east, to the buildings of the city centre and across the suburbs.

  It was almost quiet, the noise of the dance subdued and adrift somewhere, other people’s noise. The moon was more powerful here than any of that, and its light beat down on rooftops and the park below us and caught in the ripples of the Hamilton Reach, where the river turned east for the last time and broadened out and slid without much notice ever paid to it past the wharves and the mangroves and into the bay. The city looked bigger than I had ever seen it, and yet I knew it well enough now so it didn’t feel too big, as it once might have done.

  ‘You’ve been here two years now,’ Monica said. She drew her feet in under the bench and leaned forward, resting her arms on her knees. She looked small doing that with the huge city before us. ‘Would you say it was home yet?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told her, and it felt honest to say that. ‘It’s what I’ve got, I guess. I can’t see myself going back anywhere else.’ I couldn’t see our house from here, the house we would soon be leaving. Not quite. It was behind the shoulder of the hill, on the eastern side. ‘We’re moving, though. Maybe you knew that. Probably not far. Maybe just a few streets. I don’t know how that’ll be.’

  Her forehead furrowed and she let out a breath that was more of a sigh. Her hands were bunched into fists now, resting in her lap. Her skirt had a tartan pattern. It might have been tweed. It was something thick and from another climate anyway. This was not home for her, I knew that.

  ‘I’m in so much trouble here,’ she said. ‘I can’t do anything right.’

  She told me more about Dublin and Norwich, her life that had been scattered around and long ago stopped making sense to her. Her parents who said she had to explore herself, find out who she was, and gave her no sense of what they meant by it. Her father who had affairs, two that she knew of so probably far more. Her mother who was often drunk in the daytime but who had maintained that it never hurt anyone, until she fell down the stairs and broke her leg. Monica switched to boarding at her school then, while her mother went through surgery and weeks of rehabilitation.

  ‘And do you know how much the Hartnetts know about all this?’ she said, looking straight ahead and across the city ‘None of it. Nothing at all. Just that the school didn’t work out. And I tried boarding and that didn’t work out either. So here I am.’ She looked at me, and then looked away again. ‘And I can’t talk to anyone about it. My parents keep secrets, better than I knew they did. It didn’t take me long at the Hartnetts’ house to work out they don’t know my mother very well. I don’t know what’s happening in Dublin. I get letters sometimes . . .’

  I had been going to point out the features of the city, if she didn’t know them — the TV towers on Mount Coot-tha with the lights of the suburbs sweeping around the lower slopes, the dark, slung frame of the Story Bridge, the suburb where my school was, on the other side of the water. That idea felt stupid now.

  She told me more about her life, and I said the best things I could. She hardly believed she would stay anywhere, and I wanted that to be wrong. I wanted her to see some of the things I had seen in her, but I wasn’t good at finding words for them.

  She talked and I listened. It had all built up in her, I could tell.

  She asked about my father — what had happened there. ‘What’s it doing to you?’ she said. She was the only person who ever asked that, or at least put it that directly.

  And I admitted aloud for the only time that I didn’t know what would happen in my own life, that it had been a year when I had sometimes felt afraid and ashamed. That was true, and I had said it to no one. I said it now, looking out at the city, and when I turned Monica was looking at me and she reached up and put her arms around my neck. She hugged me and I felt her cheek on mine, and that was the very moment I felt most afraid about my family and what was happening to them, my father whose spirit had left him weeks before, my mother who had her own life now, who had gone out into the world and found it ready for her and herself ready for it.

  ‘I can’t fix it,’ I said. ‘That’s what kills me. Andy and I, we try to take each new shitty thing in our stride. We try to keep things normal. That’s our plan. It’s not much of a plan.’ I didn’t know what would happen to us. I had no confident idea, other than knowing there was more change ahead.

  ‘I hate this,’ Monica said, pushing her forehead and her eyes hard into my shoulder. ‘I hate this.’ Then her grip softened, but her head stayed where it was.

  My arms were around her, and I felt her breathe, a long sigh in and out. I leaned over and I kissed her on her head, on the line where her hair was drawn back to make her ponytail.

  ‘This bit I don’t hate,’ she said.

  There was a sound, shoes on the concrete path, light, a torch beam swinging around, through the bushes, against the fence and then onto us.

  ‘Monica Bloom,’ a hard voice said. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  With that it was over. The nun had seen the target on Monica and taken aim at it. I was nothing to her, invisible, and when she marched Monica away I was left standing by the bench, listening to her harsh voice and her questions that weren’t meant for answering. ‘Did you pay no attention when the announcement was mad
e about what was out of bounds tonight? Did you really think that was any kind of activity for a chapel?’

  When I walked to the corner of the chapel and looked up towards the school, they were gone and I couldn’t see where. I was alone in St Catherine’s in the dark. I started to come up with answers I might have given the nun. I even said aloud, ‘We were just talking,’ but only into empty cold air. I knew we would have done more than talk. It was about to happen. But there was also a conversation that needed to keep going, a conversation we had never been allowed and that had now been taken from us. I wanted to be with Monica for that reason as much as any other. We needed to say more to each other, and no one else would do.

  I retraced the path we had taken between the buildings and across the lawn, past the Moreton Bay fig and back to the dance. I don’t know why. Perhaps the sound drew me there as much as anything.

  Tim Dixon called out to me. He was quite drunk now and all his rum was gone. He introduced me to his girlfriend and her friend Zoe, who I knew only by reputation. Zoe was the leader of a pack of St Catherine’s girls who, it was said, would stop at nothing. They were called the moll patrol. Even parents knew the term, so they were famous examples of bad behaviour, though I don’t recall there being any specific stories to back it up.

  The night made no sense at all by then, and I ended up dancing with them inside. It was Tim’s idea, I think, and I couldn’t stop it. Everyone else gave Zoe space on the dance floor, and I danced with her in an automatic kind of way, wondering all the time about Monica and what would happen. Zoe reached out to put her arms around my neck when the band played Brian Ferry’s ‘Let’s Stick Together’. She asked if I’d like to go to the seats up the back with her. I told her I was having a good time dancing and she said, ‘Suit yourself,’ shrugged her shoulders and walked up to the stage where she argued with the band until they agreed to play Ram Jam’s ‘Black Betty’.