by Nick Earls
Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation. The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.
Nick Earls is the author of fourteen books, including the bestselling novels Zigzag Street and Bachelor Kisses, Headgames, a collection of short stories, and several novels for young adults, including After January and 48 Shades of Brown, which won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award for older readers in 2000.
His work has been published internationally in English and in translation, as well as being successfully adapted for film and theatre. He worked as a suburban GP and medical editor before turning to writing. Nick Earls lives in Brisbane.
NICK EARLS
Monica Bloom
This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012 First published by Penguin Group (Australia), a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd in 2006
Copyright © Nick Earls 2006
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Table of Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
ONE
It was my last year at school, our last year that began in the house on the hill at Hamilton, and it did not become the year any of us had expected. It started well enough when, on the final day of the holidays, a new voice made its way over the fence from the neighbours’ pool. It was the twins’ cousin, Monica Bloom, arrived that morning from Dublin.
I lay in bed listening to every word she said, and the sound of her laughing and her mixture of an accent. So, it was her voice I liked first.
It was not unusual for the twins to be shouting in their pool early in the morning on a weekend or a holiday. Their best feature was the way they owned their own lives and lived them with a forward kind of confidence, and their worst was that they weren’t particularly considerate. For me, this translated into some kind of awe, and that’s all. I couldn’t have put any other words to it. I was in awe of them, in a quiet way, and in awe of the space they took up. But at the same time we were friends, and they were who they were, and I suspect they never reflected upon it. That wouldn’t have been their way.
We were the same age, but they were most things I was not. That much I knew, even if I didn’t know how to sum up a person’s features. They were outgoing, and sometimes quite dramatically so. They were at ease with themselves and sporty and rich. Over three generations their family had grown used to money. Their great-grandfather had developed a kind of chipboard and had been able to set up a business in building materials that their father ran now that his turn had come. They weren’t wealthy on any world-beating scale, but they were more than wealthy enough.
That much I found out from the way their father talked, which is best described as haughtily, as he looked through his windows and down the hill towards our house and he swirled the ice in his scotch and joked in his usual structured way about not knowing what would happen when he turned up his toes. Not with those two mad daughters of his. Erica and Katharine, the twins. It was a set piece he delivered, and I’d got to know it fairly well over the previous two years.
I had no idea what to say in those conversations, so I hardly spoke, which was okay, since it didn’t seem to be required. He told me to call him by his first name, but I never quite could so I called him nothing instead. Spending time with the twins was easier for me when he wasn’t around. He was all about business, and connections. They had a photo of the company’s first truck over the bar in their games room. It was loaded with boards and had men wearing braces and hats posed next to it. ‘Wm. Hartnett & Sons’ it said on the truck, and there was William Hartnett with a big moustache and his eyes hidden in the shadow cast by the brim of his hat. It was a small operation in those days, one truck, six men — five or six. It wasn’t that by 1980. By then his grandson, Bill Hartnett, ran the business with what seemed like great assurance, as though the future, even of generations ahead, was never in doubt. There would always be building and people would always need boards, he told me once as we stood in front of the picture. They handled all kinds of timber now, of course, and other products. They had diversified long before.
Monica Bloom’s mother and the mother of the twins were cousins. They had gone to school at St Catherine’s, which was on the next hill, and the twins went there as well, so it seemed that Monica was to go to school there too, as a boarder.
I lay there the morning she arrived with just my sheet over me and plenty of heat already in the day There were lorikeets bickering in the tree outside my window, a bottlebrush, and they had been there since dawn. If they weren’t so richly coloured they wouldn’t get away with it, I thought. We’d call them pests and sort them out.
My parents liked to sleep in on weekends and holidays, so they were still in bed at the other end of the house. We had a rule about not making any noise, though they were heavy sleepers and could sleep through most sounds a neighbourhood could make as it got on with its business.
There was talk about school in the pool next door. I could hear it. Talk about teachers and nuns, some stories I’d heard from the twins before — the old nun who fell asleep in assembly and snored, the teacher who might be a lesbian and who had once been seen on a motorbike with another woman, the gardener who wore very short shorts and no underpants and was rumoured to have done time for various offences (with enough variety across the tellings I’d sat through that he had almost certainly done none of it). And the voice I knew to be Monica Bloom’s said it sounded just like Dublin, except for the gardener’s shorts.
‘I’ve hardly been here,’ she said, and I imagined her looking up at the trees next door, the poincianas and palms that hung over the pool and the clear deep-blue sky beyond them. ‘I’ve hardly been here at all, not in my whole life, not to Brisbane. I can remember Melbourne, but not Brisbane. And even Melbourne was long ago.’
I hadn’t known that about her until then, but I didn’t know much. I knew her mother had left Brisbane a long time ago and that her father was a professor and that they’d travelled. And that was it. That was all I knew.
My family had made two big moves in my time, the second of them a little over, two years befo
re, when we came from the Central Queensland coalfields to Brisbane. We had been in Borneo for the first two years of my life, but it’s not something I have a memory of. We moved back to Australia when my mother was pregnant with Andy, and he was born in Rockhampton. I had a nanny in Borneo, who I don’t remember at all though I do have a picture of her, of the two of us — me as a gleaming white baby in her black hands with dark jungle behind us. She’s holding me up to the camera. I’m laughing in what must have been a gurgly baby kind of way. She was a Dyak and her father was a headhunter, or had been once, and the first words I spoke were in her language. This is what I’m told.
The Hartnetts had spent two generations on this hill. They were well established as Hamilton people now.
I didn’t want to go back to school. Not much. But I had only one more year of it, and it would start when it would start. I thought I could see that year stretching ahead of me in an entirely predictable way, though I was very wrong about that. One more year of putting on that blue-and-grey uniform and catching two buses there with Andy and two buses back. Achieving reasonable but not spectacular results in all fields of school endeavour, playing cricket for the thirds, or seconds if it worked out well, editing the school magazine with three other people who were a group of close friends but never unhappy to have me along.
I knew that I could put my heart into it, but that wouldn’t make it a better year. I wasn’t going to be one of those people who left feeling bonded to the school for life.
An Old Boy — that’s what we called past students — came to address the assembly one Friday when I was in grade eleven. He had just become a Supreme Court judge, I think. And he said, ‘If, in the decades to come, you look back on your time here as the best years of your life, your school has let you down.’ I looked around the assembly at people whose finest hours, I knew, were upon them — a rower or two who were known only for that, a cross-country runner who peaked as the state schools champion at seventeen, a dull prefect with broad shoulders and a future on a drought-stricken property that would never break even — and saw each one of them gazing indolently at the burgundy stage curtains or the grass of the quadrangle where some nondescript birds pecked at seeds.
For that moment I had them beaten. They were kings here, but my future would be better than this. They had a status that I think I stopped wishing for that day, and I had that judge’s line with me from then on. I wondered how the judge’s time at the school had been, if he had been some kind of hero then, made some mark, or slipped through without flair or attention only to be reclaimed with his rise in the law
I don’t know what I was doing, though, having fixed ideas about other people’s futures, about their whole lives, when certainty can turn quickly and a change of plans can come in the next unguarded moment.
Next door, at least one Hartnett twin was swimming laps. It sounded like Erica’s butterfly, long pouncing strokes that had people telling her she should train seriously, though she never did.
I got out of bed, put on some board shorts and a T-shirt, and picked up a towel and a banana on my way out. I shut the back door quietly, and the screen door, and I left them unlocked. I ate the banana in a couple of bites and dropped the peel on the compost heap near the fence, I went through the gate that linked our place to the Hartnetts’ and I met Monica Bloom for the first of five times.
‘Four’s enough for Marco Polo,’ Katharine said, and Erica handled the introductions. ‘This is Matt, our next-door neighbour,’ she said. ‘And this is Monica, the cousin we were telling you about.’
Monica Bloom stood up in the waist-deep water and said, ‘Hi,’ with her hand shading the sun from her eyes. And I said, ‘Hi,’ and she dropped down into the water again.
She was wearing a light-blue bikini and she had pale skin and two wet blonde plaits. I looked away quickly because I was giving far too much thought to the way the water had run down her body when she had stood up, off her shoulders and her breasts and down the bare skin of her upper abdomen. Her eyes were blue too. But I misjudged her height in the pool and thought she was smaller, and younger, than she was. I found out after that first meeting that she was soon to be sixteen, which was my age until my next birthday in April. She was to start her second-last year of school on the day I started my last.
Perhaps the twins made her look smaller too, with their broad tanned shoulders and the amount of water they claimed swimming big restless freestyle strokes instead of standing still or lazing around at the shallow end. They were definitely Hartnetts, and she was definitely not.
So we played Marco Polo, and woke up the neighbourhood, I expect. It can’t be a quiet game, and I don’t suppose it was the first morning or the last that my parents’ sleep-in was ended by it — the loud clear calls of ‘Marco’ from the blind hunter and ‘Polo’ from all the quarry in reply. The twins were so competitive — in this as in everything — that over time we had all become such appalling cheats that we had to use a blindfold. In every other pool where I’ve seen the game played, it was taken on good faith that, if you were up, you’d shut your eyes and keep them that way
The second time I was up, I trapped Monica in a corner and she shrieked and jumped the wrong way, almost knocking me over. I took off the blindfold and she laughed and said, ‘Well, there’s no doubt about that one.’
She turned her back so that I could tie the blindfold around her head, and I didn’t know whether it should go on top of the plaits or under them.
‘Let me make it easy for you,’ she said, and she lifted them out of the way
Her hair was blonde but different shades, some of it very light, some of it honey-coloured, some of it a caramelly kind of brown. She had small earrings in her ears. Bluebirds. Enamelled bluebirds on a brassy-coloured metal. I didn’t know if she would be allowed to wear those at St Catherine’s.
I passed the blindfold under one of her plaits, took it with my other hand, reshaped it and fitted it against her eyes and said, ‘Let me know if it’s too tight,’ as I tied the knot behind her head.
‘I think you’ve had practice,’ she said, and she dropped the plaits and turned to face me, with only her nose and mouth in view. ‘So, do I give you ten to get away?’ She reached her hand out to see if I was still there, and it landed on my chest. ‘I think you might have to make it a bit harder for me than that,’ she said.
Her nails were also longer than the school might like, I thought, and her hand stayed lightly on my chest for the first few numbers of the count until I dropped below the surface, pushed off from the nearest wall and swam away up the pool underwater.
I would like to have given her those earrings. That’s what I was thinking as I swam away. I wanted to be the kind of person who would know that they would be something right for her, something she would choose to wear. It was an unexpected thought. I didn’t know where it had come from or what to do with it. At the deep end, I turned at the wall and surfaced. She was still in the shallows, her arms reaching out in front of her, the twins cruising around, nonchalantly uncatchable.
Mrs Hartnett brought drinks out afterwards and we sat with towels around us on the banana lounges in the half-shade of a frangipani. Monica Bloom wrapped her towel around her shoulders and bunched it together at the front. She sat with her chin almost on her knees and only her feet showing. Katharine lay back on one of the lounges and said, ‘Bloody school,’ to all of us and yet to no one in particular.
I wanted to talk to Monica, but I didn’t know where to begin. I knew the questions, but I wanted to be past them already — all the obligatory things you should ask. Why was she here? I wanted to know that, I thought. And why now? Or maybe I had no need to know those things. Those were the kind of questions my mother would ask, but I’d done better than them already. I’d tied a blindfold on her. I’d had her hand on my chest and I hadn’t even had breakfast yet.
‘Just think,’ Erica said. ‘This is the last time we do this. The three of us anyway. The last time we go back there after
summer holidays.’
‘You’ll be doing this all year, won’t you?’ Katharine said. She waved a fly away with her hand. ‘It’ll be a year full of last times and you’ll be pointing out every one. I can tell.’
‘I’ve had lots of last times,’ Monica said then. ‘But mostly I didn’t know it. It’s the middle of the school year in Ireland now. Maybe this’ll be the last time I start somewhere new. I’d settle for that.’
She told us the last school she had gone to there was in an old stone building and never warm enough in winter. She had worn extra layers of clothes, but kept getting in trouble for it since they weren’t part of the uniform. ‘My hands were too cold to write,’ she said. ‘I used to try to keep them up my sleeve, but it’s hard to hold the pen. I wore mittens one day, but they had kittens on them and we couldn’t have that, apparently.’
The twins had been at St Catherine’s forever, since the day they started school at the age of five. They had only ever lived in this house. I had been to school in three towns before coming to Brisbane, with Moranbah the one where I had been the longest. In the forties and fifties, the Hartnetts had gone to school with the Struthers and the Turnbulls and the Wylies, and they still did, a generation later. Those names went back in gold on honour boards almost to the start of the schools those families still chose for their children.
Monica Bloom had a very different life behind her and, as she told us some if it, I’m sure only I could understand it. There were no Shermans on those honour boards, and I had made starts at four schools.
But there was little complaint in what Monica said. She straightened her legs out, but kept her towel folded over most of her, while she looked up at the sky’s deep blue and the trees full of flowers, and told us about the icicles hanging from the gutter outside her bedroom window the morning her father had driven her to Shannon airport for the flight to London, and to here.