Monica Bloom (12 page)

‘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 around 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.

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.