Monica Bloom (2 page)

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.

Katharine dived back into the pool and swam some laps.

‘I'm rambling,' Monica said. ‘I'm jetlagged. I still have my kitten mittens in my bag. How insane.'

When I got home my mother had my school uniforms out and was ironing a shirt.

‘You woke me with that game,' she said, and she shot steam into my collar and pressed it flat.

‘I tried to talk them out of it, of course,' I told her. ‘But it's a question of breeding. If you'd had the decency to have twins, I would have gone into it on equal terms, but they outvote me every time.'

‘You should have taken Andy,' she said, taking the next shirt out of the basket and shaking it. ‘We caught up with them two years later, remember.'

And I said, ‘Mornings aren't his thing,' and we gave each other a look that acknowledged neither of us exactly knew what Andy's thing was.

‘He's still sleeping,' she said. ‘And so's your father.' She drove the iron across the back of the shirt. She was wearing a robe, one that Andy and I had got together to buy for her the Christmas before last, and the bottom of it
flapped around with the vigour of the ironing. ‘I had too much of that Marco Polo in my head to keep sleeping,' she said. She moved the shirt around to iron the front, and she looked up. ‘Was that their cousin? The other person over there? What's she like?'

What's she like?

She stayed in my head after that first meeting, more than made sense.

Years later I would think there had been something brittle about her from the start. Or fragile. They're almost the same. But that would take hindsight, and more. And I can't honestly say that she was either of those things. Circumstances have to be taken into account too.

She was an outsider. That much is true.

Andy's hair was still wet when we got to school the next morning in our well-pressed shirts. We weren't the first there, so most of the upper lockers in the grade-twelve section were gone, but I found a free one at the far end from the houseroom door. I stacked my new books in no particular order and thought: this is the last time. Erica had put the idea in my head, and it would keep
coming back to me. Last year's owner of the locker had put stickers on the inside of the door — one a Levi's logo, the other saying ‘colour radio 4IP' A year ago he had stood on this spot claiming a locker for the last time. He might be anywhere now. I left the stickers where they were and decided to see if they could go the whole year without changing, without their corners lifting or any of their colour chipping or flaking away or fading, until they were handed on to the next day-one grade-twelver who would draw this door open on its cheap screeching hinges. I couldn't remember who had had the locker the year before.

Up the back of the houseroom, once we had all filed in and before the first meeting of the year started, Chris Clarke told us about losing his virginity in the Christmas holidays. His parents hadn't wanted him hanging around the house the whole time, so they had sent him jackarooing. She was a girl called Desley who lived out there. ‘Out there' being somewhere west of Mitchell and seven or eight hours west of here, as close as I could tell. She made all the moves, he said. One morning they went out on a couple of horses before the day had got too hot, and they did it on a blanket on a creek bank. He told us how it was, from a physical point of view. He said there was some resistance at first, as if it almost wasn't right, and then all of a sudden he was in and it was smooth. They did it four times altogether, and she had already written him one letter since he'd got home. He didn't know what to do about that.

I remembered a TV show,
James at Sixteen
, and James had done it on a blanket on a creek bank the first time, so I wasn't sure about Chris Clarke's story. Then I remembered James had done it in a sleeping-bag, so I figured it must be true after all. James had also gone through some embarrassing sequence of events involving a condom, but in Chris Clarke's creek-bank scene those had been provided by Desley, who seemed to know what she was doing.

Chris Clarke looked the same, other than some minor sunburn that particularly affected his nose, but I was sure he walked differently Maybe it was just all the time on horseback, but Chris Clarke had done it and we hadn't. And the first thing he did on the first day of grade twelve was give up the details, and the whole day it made it seem like something that might actually happen to any of us that year. Some Desley might choose us, maybe on the bus or at a dance or anywhere, and we would do it without hesitation or reflection. She would be there, taking us through it step by step and we would blank our minds and do it. I wondered if any part of it was uncomfortable or very different to what Chris Clarke had expected, but no one was asking questions.

We traded some stories, and more than likely a few lies. I said I'd gone to the coast and pashed a girl behind a boat on New Year's Eve. That was one of the lies. I'd been at the coast, I'd been at the party, but when midnight came we all just shouted ‘Happy New Year' and fireworks blazed
for ten minutes and then we went home to bed. Story of my life. I would have said her name was Amanda, if anyone had asked. It would have been a great moment, fireworks bursting in the sky and the light of the bonfire on her cheeks as she leaned in towards me and made the move.

I wasn't sure if Chris Clarke felt anything for Desley at all. My mother had made the point a couple of times — as mothers, I have since found out, often do — that it was better to wait until it was with someone you felt something for. It was a point I never openly conceded, but I liked the idea of it — feeling something for someone, and one thing leading to another. Bring on the fireworks, bring on the upturned boats.

Chris Clarke's story hadn't been much like that. It was still an impressive act though, an impressive occurrence on a holiday. We felt nothing but admiration for it.

That night we had two men from my father's company over for dinner. They had come from head office in Melbourne and were off to the mines in the morning with him, but the flight left early so it was smarter to come up the day before and put in some time in the office in Brisbane.

They came with him from the city and they shook my hand and Andy's, and took their ties off when my mother offered to look after their jackets. My father, who would normally change into one of his most casual shirts before
dinner, also kept his business shirt on. In years to come he wouldn't do that for anyone, but back then he still did, and we had a clear sense that we were ‘entertaining' when work people came over — he stayed dressed for business and my mother made three courses.

By the time Andy and I were in our late twenties it would be very different. I once brought a girl home to meet the family and before the meal was served I found my father going through the laundry basket, pulling out a dirty tracksuit top. He told me, ‘I'm not going to wear a clean tracksuit to eat,' clearly incredulous that anyone might expect otherwise. My mother was into roasting a lot by that time, and the peak of my father's hospitality on those nights was the point when he would offer the guest first pick of the carcass. Needless to say, Andy and I didn't get into the habit of introducing many girls to our parents. ‘We should make girls sign a waiver,' he said to me once. ‘A waiver that says they acknowledge we aren't responsible for the night's activities and aren't to be judged for any of it.' He was a lawyer by then.

In 1980, our family was very different to that. My mother would have spent most of the day putting the meal together, and she had new candles on the table, and fresh flowers.

‘Long pants,' she said rather too fiercely to Andy when he came out of his room wearing shorts. ‘Long pants.' She herded him back towards his door. ‘These people are from head office. These people are from Melbourne.' And
she emphasised Melbourne as if that should have been all he needed to know.

‘Melbourne people vomit if they see knees,' I told him, and he said, ‘Why is that kind of information never part of the briefing?'

The men from Melbourne arrived with my father and gave up their jackets and ties for beers. My mother brought a bowl of nuts and a bowl of cubed cheese from the kitchen and took the three of them out to the verandah, where she said it would be cooler, while she finished preparing the meal. ‘I have some crystallised ginger as well if anyone would like it?' she said, but there were no takers.