by Nick Earls
‘But they wouldn’t have given you the job if they didn’t want you to do it,’ Andy said. ‘That’s good.’
She stirred her tea and put the spoon down on her plate. ‘I suppose that’s right.’ She held her mug in both hands and looked as if she was thinking back to the conversation in which they had offered her the job. Her hair was different, I noticed. It used to be very carefully shaped, and now it wasn’t. It was naturally wavy, and now she was allowing it to be that way.
‘Well, congratulations.’ Andy held his mug up and clinked it against hers, and I followed him.
‘Today the Racecourse Road surgery, tomorrow the world,’ she said, and I thought she was going to do that laugh again, but she didn’t.
On her first full-time day, Andy and I came home from school to find our father in the kitchen. He was cutting a whole chicken into pieces, cutting it and pulling it apart. It was raw and its pale goose-bumped skin was slippery in his hands as its joints gave way and he got some sense of the pieces it would make. I put the kettle on, and he stood there looking at the beaten bird on the chopping board, looking at a picture of the finished meal in a recipe book.
He took to the chicken with the knife again, and a drumstick skidded off the board and into the empty sink. He picked it up, brushed it with his hand a couple of times and dropped it into a casserole dish.
I made tea, and Andy and I went to our rooms with our homework. It wasn’t a time for conversation in the kitchen, and I had a feeling that day that I might never again come home to the smell of baking, or a batch of pikelet mix that was ready to go.
My mother arrived from work with a headache, saying she needed Panadol. She went to get water from the tap at the kitchen sink, and she said something that must have been about the meal that was underway. I couldn’t hear it all since I was in my room.
‘Cups is a measurement.’ I heard her say that. ‘An actual measurement. You don’t use a real cup.’
‘Well how was I to know?’ my father said. ‘It can’t be too different, can it? If they call it a cup?’ Then the talk went quieter until my father said, ‘Maybe it’d be better if you had a lie down until your headache’s gone.’
‘Right,’ she said in a clipped kind of way. ‘Right. Yes. Good idea.’ She walked out of the kitchen and down the hall past my room. Then I heard her stop, and she came back and pushed my door fully open. ‘Hello,’ she said. She had been rubbing her forehead, which is what she’s always done when she has a headache. ‘How was your day?’
‘Good,’ I told her, since it had been completely unmemorable. ‘The usual. How was day one of being the boss?’
‘I’m not really the boss.’ She was pale and the muscles in her face were clenched, but then she let them relax. ‘Well, all right, maybe I am the boss, in a way. The boss. I was . . . benevolent. Is that the word? A benevolent dictator?’
‘Like home then.’
She laughed and shook her head. ‘No respect for authority. I’ll remember that.’
She went on down the hall to Andy’s room and then to hers. I stuck with my homework and, as the last of the light faded, cooking smells started coming in from the kitchen. I heard my father taking cutlery from the drawer, and I had had enough of chemistry by then so I went into the kitchen and offered to set the table. My father was serving potatoes onto plates and his casserole was sitting steaming on the counter.
My mother walked in, stretching her arms and with creases on one cheek from sleeping. ‘How nice,’ she said. ‘Eating something made by someone else.’
She was wrong, though. The potatoes were turning to mush on the outside and the chicken sat in a slick of something watery and close to flavourless.
‘Yuk, this is disgusting,’ Andy said through his first mouthful. Everyone stopped eating. ‘Sorry, but —’
‘You can take over the job any time,’ my father said, and that was that.
It was the one time he cooked. We sat there close to silent, pushing in one mouthful after another until we had eaten all we could. We had more barbecues than usual after that, and my father would look after the meat and my mother would make a salad, but he did no more cooking otherwise. Sometimes he would buy a pie that required heating, and that night it would be dinner — just the pie, quartered, with two bottles of sauce, tomato and barbecue.
Three days after my father’s one and only chicken casserole, Monica Bloom was suspended from St Catherine’s.
SEVEN
Late on Thursday afternoon, my mother arrived home from her fourth day of full-time work. She made a pot of tea and said, ‘Madness today in there, but we got through it eventually. I had to mop the floor twice. Once it was vomit, once it was blood.’ She seemed to like the surgery when it was busier and there were stories to tell.
She took a mug of tea into Andy’s room, and I finished drinking mine in the kitchen. When she came back she said she had noticed that my father was clipping bushes at the front and it would be good if I could go and help him, good if I could tidy up the clippings and take them to the compost heap. I thought about saying that it must be Andy’s turn, but I knew she had worked all day and decided she didn’t need that. She needed time with her cup of tea, rather than Andy and me trying to outmanoeuvre each other. It was a suggestion from the real estate agent, I think. With our second open-for-inspection coming up he had talked to my parents about first impressions counting, so the front bushes needed to be neater. It made me like him less, if anything, even if it was good advice. The second impression people got of our house was of our real estate agent when he met them at the door, and I didn’t think that could be working for us.
My father was standing among the straggly cut off ends of the branches with the clippers in his hands, looking at one of the bushes as if his final decision about it hadn’t yet been made. I told him I was there to help, and he said, ‘Oh, right, thanks,’ as if I’d surprised him. ‘That’s great. Nearly done, I think.’
I brought together some clippings at the base of the bush nearest the road and I had them in my arms when Katharine appeared on the footpath walking the dogs. She asked if I had heard their news.
‘Well, not exactly news,’ she said. ‘That’s probably not the way to put it.’ The dogs strained at their leads, wanting to pull her along the street. She leaned towards me, though there was still quite a distance between us. ‘Monica’s at our place. She’s been suspended for the rest of the week.’
She told the story like a big piece of gossip, and I stood there with my arms full of branches and twigs and leaves, taking it in. I could hear the clippers going at the bush near the base of our front steps as my father kept working.
‘They were doing this thing,’ she said. ‘The boarders. This thing where you take quite a few big breaths in and out and then, when you take the last breath in, someone behind you puts their arms around you and yanks on your stomach and you black out, or nearly black out. It makes you see stars and go faint at least. They were doing it in the boarding school and the nuns told them not to. Monica and one girl kept doing it and the girl blacked right out and had a fit. Actually had a fit right there in the boarding house and wet herself and everything. On the floor, just lying there on the floor. She had to go to hospital. She might still be there.’
I don’t know what I said when she told me that. There were branches sticking into my chest and leaves pushing up under my chin and I had an image of Monica in my head. Monica with her arms around a girl, and the girl falling to the floor. A game to kill boredom, gone wrong. I didn’t realise you could do that to a person. I didn’t realise that consciousness could be so fragile.
I had seen a man have a fit once, in a shop. It was an art shop at Toombul Shoppingtown and my mother had dragged us in there when she was looking for a picture to go on one of the blank walls in our living room. He had hit the floor with a thump. It wasn’t even like someone falling, since when you fall your arms go out and you make some attempt to land well. He fell straight down, as though he had
been dropped, and then his legs started kicking at the easels and the counter, and his face went purple and his pupils huge and staring, and a trickle of blood came from his mouth. I’m not sure what happened after that. Someone put him on his side. My mother went to get water. It shocked me more than I would have expected, because he seemed so absent from his body the whole time.
I kept seeing that man as I raked up the stray leaves. That man, or a girl in a St Catherine’s uniform, her shoes kicking the metal legs of her bed as she shuddered on a wooden floor.
That night from my room, I could see Monica in the Hartnetts’ kitchen. She was standing there for only a few minutes with a drink in her hand, wearing clothes too good for just an evening around the Hartnetts’ house. She must have been dressed that way when she was picked up from school. I had a picture in my mind of her alone at the roadside outside the school, waiting with her suitcase, though I’m sure it didn’t happen like that.
It made my heart beat faster just to see her there, made it beat up into my throat. The Hartnetts’ wide kitchen windows looked over their pool and some of the garden, and she seemed to be looking out into the dark. And then her head turned, fast enough to swing her plaits — I think someone was calling her from somewhere else in the Hartnetts’ house — and she was gone.
Our Saturday open-for-inspection was lined up for late afternoon. Midday hadn’t worked so well the week before, so our agent was changing tactics.
On Friday, after school and some homework, I told my mother I would go down to the garden to pull up some weeds, and she looked surprised and said, ‘Well, thank you.’ She was peeling potatoes and she stopped but kept the peeler in her hand. ‘Some weeding would be good before tomorrow, yes.’
So, fifteen minutes or so later with a few weeds in my hand, I ambushed Katharine Hartnett while she was walking the dogs, and suggested tennis when she mentioned how much time I was putting in to the garden to help get the house ready for buyers.
‘I don’t know if they do that with their gardens in Steinbeck,’ I said to her, and she said, ‘No, they just seem to flee the dustbowl and it’s all very ugly.’
‘The agent shifted our open-for-inspection to four o’clock tomorrow afternoon, and we have to get out of the house for an hour or so,’ I told her, and from there tennis was almost automatic.
Soon she was back to her dog walking, and I had a plan made for seeing Monica Bloom. I tore a few more weeds out of the dirt and threw them under a bush and walked up the front steps.
My father was on the verandah. He had a deck of cards out and was playing patience, but from the way the cards were laid out on the table I could see it was one of the easier kinds, and one you should get out most times. He dealt the next three cards from the deck into his hand, then turned them face up on the table. He looked around, but there was nowhere for the top card to go. He counted out his next three cards. He noticed me then, and saw that I was looking at his game. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged, like someone who was down on his luck but nonchalant about it.
‘If you had another pack we could play canasta,’ I said to him. He pushed the columns of cards together, ready to shuffle and deal them again, and said, ‘We should. We should some time. It’s getting close to dinner now, though, I think.’
After dinner I did some more homework, but mainly I sat at my desk checking up through the trees towards the Hartnetts’ windows to see if Monica might appear. She didn’t though.
I was having a year that I was starting to hate otherwise, so perhaps I was thinking about her an unreasonable amount. Unreasonable for someone I had, in fact, met only twice so far. But I was entitled to think about whatever I wanted, and to hold out some hopes when something worth hoping for came along. I hoped for a job for my father, a return to normality, something with Monica Bloom. I hoped for all of these, strongly, though each hope felt different in the way it pulled at me.
And the something I wanted with Monica Bloom was for her to be thinking about me, and to want me and to tell me that, or to make a chance for me to tell her how I felt. A chance for me to unscramble the wordless kind of rush she made me feel and let her know about it.
I felt like I was living a life without any prospects, and she was the exception to that. My school results were all right and would stay that way, but we had moved to Brisbane too late for me, as far as school went anyway. I was ready to leave Moranbah, where not a whole lot seemed to happen unless you made it happen, but the idea of the city had been pretty daunting, though there was no need for it to have been. Andy, I remember, had dreams before we came here about being lost, hopelessly lost, and wandering street after street with names he had never heard of, streets that were lived in by people he had never seen before. And none of them knew our parents’ names, or the name of our street or even our suburb. They didn’t even have faces, he said. And some way into the dream, he forgot our new address, piece by piece.
We stayed in Moranbah with our mother to finish the school year, while our father came to Brisbane to make a start in his new job. The company put him up in a hotel for more than a month. They did a lot for us back then. We joined him in a serviced apartment once school had finished, and we had Christmas dinner at the hotel where he had stayed, and where many of the staff by then knew him by name. We felt very welcome.
He had been looking at houses, in a preliminary way, and told my mother he had found a very nice new brick place at Stafford Heights. She said she had talked to a few people before coming down, and that she wanted to look at places in the Ascot-Clayfield-Hamilton area. That’s what they had recommended. ‘We can get more for our money at Stafford Heights,’ my father said. There are no secrets in a place as small as a serviced apartment, so I heard most of the conversation. I heard more than I wanted to, since those were all just names to me and it wasn’t my decision. I’d be living wherever we ended up, and that was Hamilton. I never saw the Stafford Heights house.
I had a new school to think about, and that was enough. A new school that would be huge and old and rich. I imagined that the students would almost have a different accent. I imagined it like a school on television — blazers and honour boards and ivy on the walls. Some of that was true, but not the ivy.
In Moranbah we had had one high school and it was only a few years old, like everything else, and set among gum trees at one end of the main road through the town. It was co-ed, so girls were there all the time. In grade nine, my last year there, I exchanged notes with one of them — secret notes, and only about three of them each way — and my mother found the notes the girl had sent me in my room and made it deeply embarrassing. She would quote them at dinner and my father and Andy would cheer. It wasn’t meant cruelly, but I could have done without it.
‘Your girlfriend can’t spell,’ my mother would say, and everyone would laugh.
There had not even been anything to it. It was something people in my class were doing, and if you weren’t passing notes around that month you were pretty much nobody
So, that was it. They would find out nothing about Monica Bloom. They wouldn’t know she had ever crossed my mind. They wouldn’t know that I was quite caught up with the possibility of something working out with her, that it was a hope I was holding onto and a dream I was allowing myself to dream. A dream I tried to put into my head as my last thought each night, in case it would stay with me, but it never did and my actual dreams were of the usual kinds of things and not about Monica Bloom at all.
I wanted her to like me. I wanted us to have a chance. It was better to think about that than to think about my life, the life outside my head that was actually happening, and in which certainties unravelled and the world tipped over and changed before you knew it, and some oily-haired man came and sold your house to people you had never met.
I heard Andy masturbating in his room, and I pounded on the wall a couple of times with my fist and he was quieter from then on. A minute or two later, I heard his magazine hit the floor with a clunk, spine first, the
n one last groan.
I could hear only my own heartbeat after that, not even the wind, but my blood pulsed so loudly in my ears it was hard to believe it wasn’t another of those sounds that could make it through walls and tell people far more than you wanted them to know.
‘You should take Andy,’ my mother said as I passed through the kitchen with my tennis racquet in my hand. The real estate agent had unfolded his card table inside the front door and was fanning information sheets out on it.
‘But we’ve got four already,’ I told her. ‘And it’s a rematch from last time we played. There are reputations at stake.’
She frowned at me, a frown that I could read enough into. I should be a better brother. I shouldn’t be cutting Andy out of something in a way that seemed arbitrary ‘Well, you can rotate,’ she said. ‘You’ve done that before.’
So I went next door with Andy behind me, spinning his old wooden racquet in his hand and saying, ‘This cousin — what’s she like?’
‘You’re asking me now?’ I said. ‘You’ll meet her in thirty seconds and see for yourself, and I met her the day before school started and you’re asking me now?’
‘Yeah.’ He poked me in the back with the racquet. ‘Though I take your point.’
‘Twenty-two seconds and you’ll know. She’s not at all bad at tennis, so be ready for that. Tennis and bridge, apparently.’
‘Bridge the card game?’ He gave me another completely unnecessary jab in the back, and I figured he was now no more than one jab away from a serious dead arm. I hadn’t yet decided whether it would be his racquet arm or not. ‘You play bridge with this girl? You have some secret card-playing life?’