Monica Bloom (6 page)

My father's public fall seemed to work the same way as news of Paul Cameron's father's cancer. People mostly settled on the option of pretending it wasn't going on, and the safest way for them to do that was to stand back and let time pass. Conversations would go quiet as I approached, or they would not take my arrival into account and slip around me. I'm sure that wasn't my imagination.

Each time it happened, I would remember again — I would see my father, reading from his sheet of paper, explaining that it had happened on his watch, using the expression he had tried out on us in the lounge room. I was embarrassed then that I was who I was, that I now came up to any conversation with this story attached to me, that I sent out this bow wave of awkwardness. That's
what they felt, the others at school — they felt awkward. Nothing more important than that. My arrival created discomfort, but I could help it pass by moving on. I thought at first, like me, they were embarrassed, but I came to realise that that wasn't it. Embarrassment was mine alone, and perhaps some kind of disgrace too.

On the Tuesday night, after my parents had gone to bed, Andy came to the bathroom door while I was cleaning my teeth. Our father had gone into work that day It felt almost normal, though he had stopped wearing ties and we had to tell ourselves anything normal about it wasn't real. He would be gone by the end of the week, his job in new hands. Everything he had to offer his replacement would have been extracted by then.

Andy asked me what I thought would happen, and I told him I was sure nothing would. Nothing else. Things would be all right. I told him that because it had been our father's line from two days before, and also because it was all both of us had known and all that made sense that night. Our house was too solid to take away, our father too used to work not to have any.

He had been sick once, just one time that I could remember, with an ear problem that affected his balance and kept him in bed or around the house for a week. That was the strangest time we had ever had until he lost his job, and perhaps I thought we had something like that ahead of us — a week or so of being surprised by him being around the house at all hours, looking pale and
unfocused. Then all would be normal again. I couldn't see it any other way.

But he had not made a mistake before, as far as I knew. He had not been on TV explaining himself and taking blame. It still seemed wrong to me that he had had to do that. He was an engineer — that was what he knew, and what he knew well — and it seemed unfair that someone had embezzled for a while in some cunning way and my father was supposed to have known. I was sure the men we had met from Melbourne had kept their jobs.

Everything was not all right though.

A week later, at lunchtime, I was at the edge of one of the school ovals when I saw a scuffle start some distance away — two boys going up against each other, with more forming a circle around them. They were chest to chest and then grappling with each other, their shoes kicking up dust.

It was Andy's voice I heard above the rest — the one clear thing that came through — Andy shouting, with a rage and despair that took him past the brink of attack, ‘My father's not a fucking criminal.'

He took a swing at the bigger boy, but just clipped his cheek, and the bigger boy's fist hit him in the stomach and he doubled over. I was there to break it up by then, pulling other students away to get through to Andy, shouting to both of them to stop it. It had already stopped, though. There wasn't much fight left in Andy, and a
teacher was coming from the other side. In an instant, everyone else was playing handball or on to some other business, and it was just the teacher, Andy, the boy who hit him and me who were left standing there, facing each other down.

The teacher was roaring about detentions, as he would under the circumstances, and I asked if I could talk to him first, explain what was going on. It was Mr Kiefer, who had taught me German in my first year at the school. I had never been good at it — I had arrived two years too late to be good at it — but he knew me, and that was enough. He told Andy and the other boy to stay right where they were and I took him aside and told him what I had heard.

I said I was sure he was aware of the situation my family was in, and he was, and I told him about the talk that I believed had started the fight. I asked him if he would leave it to me, just this one time. I said it would be better if this became nothing. And he nodded and said, ‘Just this one time. But you come to me if there's any more of this trouble. Come to me or talk to your house master. Talk to someone. We won't have people saying things like that at this school. And your brother needs to know there's a different way of dealing with it.'

He watched as I walked back to the two of them, and when I got there he turned and walked away. The other student must have been a head taller than Andy, but I couldn't be sure since Andy was still winded by the punch
and crouching. The other guy looked untouched, and he even seemed to smile as I came over. I could feel anger rising in me as I got there, with his insolent look and my brother bent by his punch and the things I knew he had said about our father. It was a physical sensation — hot and strong and crowding in on me. I was just about ready to hit him myself, and perhaps he could tell. The smile went away and he looked down at the dirt.

‘Right, you prick,' I said to him, and the low menace in my voice surprised us all. It's where the fight in me had turned, and each word took us further from me throwing a punch. ‘I just got you out of a Saturday, and that's the last chance you're getting with this one. Kiefer knows what you said, and I will make sure he nails you if you say anything like it again.' I took a breath, and tried to sound more cool than menacing. ‘And if you do and it's in front of people, those people can be witnesses in court if it happens to be defamatory.'

It was a crazy threat to make, and an extreme one — it was just a stupid schoolyard line that he had come out with — but I couldn't and wouldn't back off. He nodded, and said nothing. I still wanted to hit him, but the urge was waning. Andy was standing straighter now.

‘Do you understand what I'm saying?' I said, each word measured out with its own share of the anger that continued to circulate in me. ‘Do you understand that this could be a whole lot of trouble for you, but that I'm getting you let you off just this one time? And that if there's
even a hint of any more of it, I will make certain you get everything that's coming your way?'

‘Yep,' he said, contrite as a bad dog. I had surprised him with my fierceness. It wasn't like me at all.

It was only then that I recognised him as some kind of friend of Andy's, someone who had been to our house, and I felt sad that it had come to this. I wasn't angry then, not any more, and I told him to go away and I said, ‘Please, think this through. Think about what it might be like.'

And he nodded and said, ‘Yep, sorry,' and he looked Andy in the face for a second or two and then turned and walked off.

Two of Andy's shirt buttons were in the dust at his feet, and I bent down to pick them up. It was just us standing there now

‘You wanted to hit him too,' Andy said, straightening out his buckled collar and smiling at me. ‘Don't try to tell me you didn't.'

‘Yeah, but I didn't hit him,' I said, in a way that would have annoyed him in other circumstances, a way that had too much big-brothering in it. Today he would take it, though. ‘He said Dad was a criminal?'

‘Yeah. He said that the only way it could all make sense was if he was in on it too. That's what his father reckons.'

So that's where we now stood. Our father was talked about in houses across town in the ad breaks during the news and over the papers at breakfast. Idle, slanderous theories were doing the rounds, and that's just how it
was. I looked for it in people's eyes after that, and in their faces. I looked for their unspoken belief in that kind of idea. I went around wanting to fight them, but I managed not to since we had to move past this as a family and fighting would do us no good.

That day, though, it was just the two of us, Andy and me, on the edge of the oval with his dusty buttons, both of us wondering, without a word said, how long this would all last and when we would be through it.

I took him to the boarding house clothing pool and borrowed a needle and grey thread from one of the volunteer mothers who was working there and I did my best to sew the buttons back onto his shirt. I didn't give our surnames, so we were only Matt and Andy, and his shirt had got caught on something and the buttons had come off. We were there with practically no story at all, and that was much easier.

‘I'm a lover not a fighter,' Andy said once the mothers had left us to it and I was working on the second button. And I said, ‘You, a magazine and a box of tissues doesn't quite add up to love, the way I look at it.'

‘Hey,' he said, ‘even the best batsmen in the world need batting practice.'

He put his shirt back on, and the clean new thread seemed almost to gleam it was so obvious, but I knew only I would see it that way.

He straightened his shirt front and said, ‘Nice work. Mum'd be proud.'

‘Wait till you see the beanie I'm knitting you for your
birthday.' I knocked some dust out of one of his sleeves, hopefully the last of it. ‘No one's going to know about this at home, though, right? They've got enough crap to deal with.'

‘I figured that,' he said. ‘This crap stays here.'

It was later that week that my mother started talking about getting a job. My father had been gone from the office for a few days by then, and he had been up on the roof emptying leaves from the gutters, but he had cracked a tile and stopped. ‘I can't believe I did something so stupid,' he said, and it affected his mood for the rest of the day. It wasn't until the next afternoon that he bought something to fix the tile and went up there again. He never got around to the rest of the leaves.

When Andy and I got home from school, my mother was sitting on the front verandah, in the shade, and finishing off the chapel kneeler she had been working on. She showed it to us — it was still empty, still just the kneeler cover, but she stretched it out between her hands and we told her how good it looked. It was the third she had made, maybe the fourth. One had been like a church window, but this one was our house crest, with a Viking boat on it and some Latin writing.

‘I'll take it to the school tomorrow, I think,' she said. ‘We're having a meeting about the fashion parade, so I can take it in then.'

She mentioned the fashion parade as though she had
talked about it before but, if she had, I had paid no attention. I knew nothing about it. It would be another fundraising initiative, for rowing boats or sets for musicals or the school in Tonga that our school supported. My mother was very involved with those sorts of things. At the last school fair she had run a stall that had raised money for something, and she had sold raffle tickets to help the Tongan school.

Last year a group of the Tongan students had even visited for a week. We had put our names down to billet one of them, but they went to other families instead. I knew my mother was disappointed about that. She said it would have been a great experience for Andy and me, but it seemed like more than that. It seemed as if she had put the work in and yet somehow been deprived of her Tongan.

When they arrived, the Tongans were introduced at school assembly. They sang a hymn we hadn't heard, and they did it in loud multi-part harmony. Then we sang our school hymn as some kind of return gesture, twelve hundred of us, and we tried harder than usual but we were still pathetic. We came from the great Anglican tradition of being a little embarrassed about hymns and the bad singing of them — singing that sounds as if you're clearing your throat and bits of hymn are inching out almost by coincidence. The Tongans were surprised how bad we were. You could tell by their expressions.

In my second week of grade twelve, the headmaster, who I had ended up with for religious education that year,
asked our class when they had last witnessed God at the school. We had to write it down and pass it to the front. The most common answer, given by seven of the students, was ‘when the Tongans came'. The headmaster was very pleased with that, and he asked us why it had been the answer for so many of us. This brought about the usual awkward shuffling, and then someone said, ‘The singing,' and someone else said one of the Tongans told him about their school's patron saint. ‘And,' the headmaster said, ‘because of the work we do with their school. It's God's work.'

No one had anything to add to that, because we couldn't see much God in it. We sponsored their headmaster and we had built them a gymnasium.

On the way out of the classroom at the end of the lesson, I heard Chris Clarke say, just to the person next to him, ‘One of those Tongan girls was so hot, and we never get girls at assembly usually. It was like she was a gift from God.' A few of us laughed and the headmaster asked what he had said, and Chris Clarke said, ‘Nothing, sir.'

He was right, though. We all knew which Tongan girl he meant, and she had been particularly hot. I don't know which family billeted her, but Andy and I had talked about her in the bus on the way home on the day of the assembly, and about how cruel it was that my mother's wish for a Tongan visitor had gone unmet.

My mother showed us her third or fourth kneeler, and it was clear she had made a very good job of it. With that, and the fashion parade and the tuckshop time she was
putting in, she would surely earn herself a Tongan this year, or whatever was on offer.

‘I think this'll be my last kneeler,' she said. ‘I've been thinking about getting a job.'

The conversation had taken a turn I didn't want it to. She looked at me for a response, but I didn't have one.