by Nick Earls
It emptied the dance floor, with the exception of Zoe and a handful of others, and I went outside. Tim Dixon was throwing up in the bushes by then, with the light of a teacher’s torch on him. I heard his girlfriend trying to put it down to something he had eaten.
I found the twins soon after that, and they were ready to go.
As we walked home, Katharine said, ‘What were you doing with Zoe Cheihk, you dirty dog?’
And I said, ‘Dancing. She’s a friend of Tim Dixon’s and he thought a few of us should dance. Right before he threw up all of his rum.’
‘God, yes,’ Erica said. ‘Imagine it. Imagine what we’ll hear at assembly about that.’
I thought she was right. I thought it was the night’s big transgression. I said nothing about Monica, not even that I had seen her. When I got home I looked at the palms of my hands and saw that my nails had been digging into them all the way.
NINE
She was hating it here, and no one knew. Hating her life. She had chosen me to tell this to, and I wanted to be part of a life that she hated less. She was the most alone I had ever seen anyone, and I wanted to tell her what she meant to me. I wanted to find the right words, and I wanted her to hear them.
Perhaps I should have been thinking just of her in the days after the dance — her loneliness, the trouble she might be in — but whenever I thought of her it was the two of us who came to mind. Maybe that means I was thinking of me, I don’t know. I hope it wasn’t just that.
It never occurred to me that the school would take the action it did.
I got home on Thursday afternoon as the next shower of rain came in. I was already wet from the last, and I had lost my umbrella or left it somewhere weeks before. My mother fetched me a towel while I took my shoes off on the verandah. Andy had caught an earlier bus that day, I think.
I was drying myself when she started to tell me about a house she had looked at on her lunchbreak. ‘It’s still Hamilton,’ she said, ‘but the east side of Racecourse Road. I walked there from work.’
The hilly part of Hamilton was on the west side of Racecourse Road, and the land on the east was flat, with old timber houses and new blocks of yellow-brick units going up. It was between the racecourses and the river, and most of it was really Doomben, I thought. She told me it was an older place that she had been looking at, with three bedrooms. It was on a bigger block than we were thinking of, and it had just been painted.
‘I really think it would do,’ she said. ‘It’s the first place I’ve seen that would.’
I took my socks off and wrung water out of them and onto the bare verandah boards. ‘I didn’t know you’d been looking.’
‘Only when I can. Do you want to take your shirt off too, or would you rather do that inside the house?’ She was looking past me as the rain picked up and the easterly wind pushed it halfway across the verandah towards us. I was cold now that I had stopped walking. ‘Did you know that the Hartnetts’ cousin is being expelled?’ she said. ‘She was caught with a boy down at the chapel at the dance, and it was the last straw apparently.’
I can’t guess how I took it. Five minutes later I couldn’t have repeated a sentence I’d said in reply, if I’d said anything at all. When I think of my mother telling me, my world closes in and I have tunnel vision with only her mouth left visible to say the words. I’m not sure that I could breathe at first. She talked as if it was interesting news and nothing more, just something she’d heard. Her voice went on in the background. She was asking for my shirt.
Monica was back at the Hartnetts’ that night. It turned out it had taken three days for the school to make contact with her parents, and it had been decided that she was better off with them. She was not coping here, so far away. She did not fit in, had no interest in fitting in. She was a disruptive influence, and not right for St Catherine’s.
I heard all this much later, I think.
All that was clear by Friday was that she was going, and she was on a Saturday flight. By Sunday afternoon she would be in Dublin.
I could have stopped us going to the chapel at the dance. I should have stopped us. I knew the rules had tightened up. I relived and changed that choice and others. I kissed her on the tennis court, I told her the perfect words at the perfect time. She was happy, she stuck to enough of the rules, she stayed. But it wasn’t to be.
I was in a fog, a haze in which straightforward hopes had gone completely wrong. I could make no sense of it at all. I could change none of this. I couldn’t put a face to any of the people who had decided it.
I couldn’t even speak about it, not to anyone.
I went over to the Hartnetts’ on Saturday and said I was studying Steinbeck, or about to, and I wondered which novel of his Katharine had read.
Mrs Hartnett said, ‘I think it was The Grapes of Wrath, but we’d better check. Do you want to borrow it if it’s the right one? She’s in the games room.’ She offered me cake, and said she’d made it this morning. ‘I didn’t know what to do really,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’ve heard about our turmoil?’
The cake sat with two slices out of it, and a knife smeared with chocolate icing. She led me down the hall. The games room was at the far end of the house.
I could hear Bill Hartnett talking as we approached, saying, ‘Of course it’ll be spring now, when you get back. You’ve done well to miss that winter. Half of it at least.’
He had a drink in his hand — it might have been a scotch — and his back was to the bar. There was no reply, and he was the only person visible as we approached the open door.
‘Kath, Matt’s here,’ Mrs Hartnett said as we walked in. ‘He wants to talk to you about Steinbeck.’
And there they all were, Katharine, Erica and Monica, in her cold-climate clothes with her cheeks flushed in the warm autumn afternoon. She looked at me, and then at the floor. Katharine said something about Steinbeck, her mother replied and she stood up and left the room. She was back in a minute with the book, and I stood there holding it as Bill Hartnett talked, I’m not sure what about.
He leaned against the bar beneath the picture of his grandfather, and he soaked time up and stood in denial of the awkwardness, the unhappiness, that was in the room. It hurt that these were the best words on offer, but not one of us, it seemed, could stop him to say something better or meaningful. The Hartnetts hardly knew their cousin and, at that moment, I thought I was probably in love with her. I had no idea where that feeling might go once she had left, no words I could use.
‘Well, it’s that time,’ Bill Hartnett said, taking a look at his watch and emptying his glass.
Monica went pale, and stood. She lifted up her suitcase, then put it down again. She ignored them all, and looked only at me. She walked across the room and stood in front of me. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out. We were almost touching. She looked right into my eyes, and still neither of us spoke. She blinked, and then blinked again.
‘Come on, love,’ Bill Hartnett said. ‘We’d better get you going.’ He had her suitcase in his hand.
She stepped away, without a word, and turned and followed him to the door. Mrs Hartnett and the twins moved after them, and said goodbye just outside. Between their backs I saw Monica go, following Bill Hartnett down the stairs.
When Katharine came inside again, she said, ‘I have the notes as well, if you want them. The Brodie’s notes for The Grapes of Wrath.’
I heard the engine start and, through the window, I saw Bill Hartnett’s car glide by down the driveway, its brake lights on and Monica with her head turned, looking back. It was dark inside the car, but that’s what I thought I saw — her head, the outline of a plait.
She had been wearing her bluebird earrings again that afternoon.
I had thought I might ask about them one day. They seemed like favourites, or perhaps they had some sentimental value.
I went home right after that, with the novel and the Brodie’s notes in my hand.
My father came to the door w
hile I was sitting at my desk, staring down at an inconsequential page of Modern Biology, wanting not to cry, and at the same time wanting to in case it might empty out any feelings I had. Monica Bloom was gone forever, and the world was the most unfair place I could imagine.
‘The Grapes of Wrath?’ he said, picking the book up from my bed. ‘Is that the one with the big guy called Lenny? I think I saw the movie. It was black and white. He likes little animals but he crushes them with his hands?’ He read the back cover. ‘I don’t know. Maybe that was a different one.’
Then he told me he thought he would show me how to shave. He said he should probably have done it before, but it’s a thing that creeps up on you and today would be as good a day as any.
He took me into the bathroom and he said that most people like foam now, but he still preferred cream.
‘I don’t mean cream whipped up by a shaving brush or anything complicated,’ he said. ‘Just from a tube. It’s easy enough, and you can take it anywhere.’
I looked at myself in the mirror and saw dusky facial hair, and that I was almost as tall as him now. I didn’t know why I would need to shave in a way that I could take anywhere.
He wet his face, though he had already shaved that morning. He squirted cream into his hand and he rubbed it on his jawline until it foamed up a little. He handed the tube to me, and I wet my face and did the same.
‘Now all over,’ he said. ‘All over the areas you want to shave, from the sideburns down to your neck under your chin. You won’t need much cream, you’ll find.’
We lathered up our faces and stood there like two Santas.
‘Your mother told me she was talking to one of your teachers the other day,’ he said, as if it was part of the shaving conversation. ‘They thought you might be having some problems at school. Not with the work, but with other things, with all the other things that go on.’ This wasn’t a conversation we were going to have, I was sure of that. ‘If you have any problems, you can always talk to me about them.’
‘I don’t have any problems,’ I told him.
‘They had you lined up for the thirds in cricket, but you never played.’
‘I stopped wanting to play cricket, that’s all.’ I couldn’t imagine taking a problem to him. ‘I’m still doing the magazine.’
I looked at him in the mirror, shaving cream foamed up all over his face, words coming back to him after all these weeks. I was not the one with problems. I was the one doing my damnedest to stay on track, get the work done, ignore the shit that was going on around me and get it done. I couldn’t tell him that any problems started when he got his face all over the news. People talked, they made the story into something it wasn’t, they kept it going behind my back. It preceded me and followed me around the school. It had done that for weeks, and after that done it less and less, but it had changed things by then. It had changed the way school worked for me, or made it clearer to me that it wasn’t my place. Not that school anyway. I would see it out until the end of the year, and then be gone.
He took a disposable razor from the packet under the sink, and told me how to shave, which direction to go, the angle the blades should be. He slid his own razor smoothly along his jawline, taking off a clean rectangular area of foam. He touched the skin with his fingertips.
‘It’s got lanolin in it,’ he said. ‘The shaving cream. It’s good for the skin. It makes it feel smooth afterwards. I always get one that does that.’
I drew the blade down my face, carefully, lifting away the hair that had started to grow. I watched myself in the mirror and thought about this becoming part of my life, an automatic habit for the rest of my days. This was only the first day of it, and I would do it forever, unless I made a decision to grow a beard. I felt tired, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for a change like that. I felt some of the emptiness I had wanted in my room, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. Next door, I heard Mrs Hartnett shouting something to Katharine, but her name was the only part that came through clearly.
‘I got a call today,’ my father said. ‘From a guy I went to uni with. He’s in the mining game. One of his engineers just had a heart attack and they’re at a crucial stage of opening up a new coal operation.’ He took my left hand and guided my fingers to the point where my cheekbone began in front of my ear. ‘With the sideburns, you can have them as long as you want — you just have to make them even. You can do that by feel as well as by looking. It’s not easy, though. No one’s perfectly symmetrical.’
I started shaving the other side, and did my best to line the levels up.
‘So, this new mine’s at a crucial stage,’ he said. ‘A really interesting stage from an engineer’s point of view. He needs someone who can start now and who has done it plenty of times before. Just for a few months. So he called me. It’d mean some time away. Two weeks on, one week off, probably I’d be back to living in a demountable somewhere in the bush. Well, not living there, but that’s where I’d stay when I was out that way.’
He was recalling earlier adventures, I could tell. Times when he was younger and Andy and I were small and he had no bean counters to answer to. We had photographs of those times, with me barefoot in red dust in some place without a name in the years before I started school.
‘It’d be good work,’ he said. ‘It’d be a good start. I’d make sure I was back in Brisbane after it, though, with whatever came along next. And while I was doing it, I’d be here one week in three and it’d all be time off.’
He wanted this, and it had been a long time since I had seen him come across something he wanted. He stood there with his face half shaved and half covered in foam, and I realised he was pitching this idea to me, looking for my support.
‘It sounds good,’ I said. ‘It sounds just right for now.’
‘I thought I might take your mother out to dinner to celebrate. This hasn’t been an easy time for her.’
Years later, he told me that he had thought for two months that he might never work again, and that he remembered this particular Saturday as one of his favourite days. I could see it in him at the time, as we stood there in the bathroom.
His life was picking itself up and moving on. I had fallen into my own void that day and here I was, telling my father his plan was good and learning to shave. We would move house soon anyway — the ink was dry on that deal — and things would not be what they once were, but they wouldn’t be bad either.
I could hear a plane flying then, and I ignored my father and listened to it until it was too far to the north and I lost its sound in the traffic and the hum of the suburb, the noise made all around us by the business of life. I didn’t know if it was Monica Bloom’s plane, but I thought it might be. Enough time had passed.
I had strong feelings in that moment, feelings that had come to me that year for the first time, and I was glad of them, even on that day when they were most about loss too. Monica Bloom and I had said only a few things to each other, really, in five meetings over two or three months. We said nothing at all at the last, but I’m sure I could have counted to a hundred while we said it. That meant all it needed to. It meant something that wouldn’t go, wouldn’t leave, even as her plane flew over the dry north west and away, even as our lives drew apart and moved on.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Months before I wrote the first word, this story began in a conversation with Bec Sparrow and Stu McBratney on my back deck. One of you, maybe both of you, said something like, ‘Hey, that sounds like it should be a novel.’ It’s not this novel — you knew it wouldn’t be — but it’s where the thinking started. I cleared the decks, let fiction in, and met Monica Bloom. Thank you both for that conversation, and for being among this story’s first readers.
Thanks also to the team of agents — Fiona, Pippa, Euan, Jill and Leslie — who keep me in business in the world beyond my backyard shed. And to the various members of the Penguin team (including Bob, Laura, Kristin, Marina and particularly Michelle) who got what I was on about and helped me
make the most of it.
And I’d like to thank Sarah, my family and friends, and to take this opportunity to point out that my father has never been state manager of a mining company, et cetera, so please don’t ask him about it. There might have been an occasional chapel kneeler made back then, and one or two trips to Bonanza Steakhouse, but my family is in all notable respects not the Shermans.
Nick Earls