Monica Bloom (11 page)

There was something there. In my better moments I was convinced of it. That counted for a lot as my father pushed dumbly on through the meal, my mother feigned a shaky optimism about the two new potential buyers and Andy and I fought on with the pretence that all was close to normal, since that seemed to be what our parents needed from us then.

‘You were right,' Andy said. ‘She was pretty good at tennis, their cousin.'

And I said, ‘Yeah, I told you. And you should drop in to the club some time for a hand of bridge. She'd really teach you a thing or two then.'

‘Not with all that rat piss in the nuts, my friend,' he said, and my mother dropped the spoon into the casserole dish. ‘Sorry,' Andy said to her. ‘That was a reference from earlier, and you weren't there. Great dinner by the way.'

I laughed and explained nothing. Andy didn't either, but he didn't think to. He thought he'd said it all.

In the week leading up to the auction, the mood in our house seemed to sag. We were coasting towards an anticlimax, but always looking the other way, focusing on tasks that would keep the place ready, that might let us pretend there was dignity in this move, this exit from Hamilton. I knew the feeling would be very different in a family that was moving up, that had bought somewhere bigger and better and now had to finish the business of the change by selling the old place.

When we left Moranbah, it had been quite okay to leave the house. I had friends I would miss, but there was a good, positive reason to move. I understood that. We had music on while we packed boxes, and my mother talked about the kind of house we would find ourselves in Brisbane, and the people we might get to know in our new life.

We were selling the Hamilton house because we were failing to keep it, and everyone knew that. It was what the sign out the front had been telling the world for weeks. So, the best we could hope for was a good sale. That's where the best hope for dignity lay. People would say, ‘Well, at least they got a good price for their house. They bought well and sold well. They deserve better luck, and maybe it's changing now.' None of us expected that, though. It was not a time to be selling, that's what the papers said. Not unless you had to.

A couple came through midweek with the real estate agent. It might have been Wednesday evening. I was doing homework, and there was a knock on my half-open bedroom door. ‘The people are here to look at the house,' my mother said, though I knew it already because I had heard the doorbell a while before, and the talk that had gone on in the dining room and kitchen.

She pushed the door open wider and they stepped in, looking around at all the corners of the room and at the floorboards and the view from my windows. ‘Sorry to bother you,' the woman said, and the man smiled in a polite, artificial way. He was wearing a suit and might have come from work. I imagined them having two kids, maybe a few years younger than Andy and me. I told her it was fine, but we all felt the discomfort of it and no one came more than a step in from the door.

‘It's screened,' my mother said. ‘All the windows are screened.' Then they moved off down the hallway andI heard her say, ‘This is Andy's room, which is much the same as Matt's.' I don't think they went in.

My father's job that week was to find us somewhere to rent. Somewhere close by, my mother had said when we all talked about it. Close by, so that it wouldn't be too disruptive. She wanted Andy and me to catch the same buses to and from school as we had been, if possible, and she wanted to be close to her work.

We had that discussion after dinner one night. My mother had kept Saturday's paper and had marked a couple of houses she thought looked like possibilities.

‘Or maybe we should think about a flat this time,' she said. ‘It's only for a while, and that way there would be no garden to look after and there might even be a pool. I mean a big flat, a nice one. One with facilities, and a balcony facing the city.' It sounded good, the way she put it. Positive.

‘With a lift?' Andy said. ‘With a lift, and could we be on one of the higher floors? And a tennis court. Could we have one with a tennis court?'

‘Maybe we should just check into a resort,' my father said with a terseness that surprised me. I think it was the first time he had spoken.

Andy looked at my mother, and she gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. My father took the paper, and the pen that was lying on it. He looked up and down the columns of northside rental properties, or perhaps he
just stared at the page while turning the pen over and over in his hand. He sighed and smiled in a tired way, and looked up at Andy.

‘I'll do what I can,' he said.

And then he did nothing, as far as I could tell. The paper sat on the coffee table for days, still with the same two houses marked, and he told us nothing about any progress. He never mentioned going to real estate agents, he made no calls at all while we were at home.

The change in him was more and more apparent as the weeks passed, and I didn't like to think of how he had been two months or so before, back when he was working and the scandal had yet to hit. I didn't want to think there had been any change in him at all, or I wanted to believe that he was simply more thoughtful now, working in his head, planning a way out. But on the worst days he seemed lost in our lives, as if we moved around him with a speed too quick for him to track, though we were doing only the things we had always done — the things we had done since moving to Brisbane anyway — with the exception of my mother's job.

Saturday came, and the real estate agent hammered in another sign that said ‘Auction today' in large capitals, with the time of the auction handwritten in a space beneath. The house was open for inspection in the hour before, so he was back after lunch setting up for that, unfolding his table, fanning his flyers and stacking a few
business cards in a pile. The only smile I ever saw from him was on those flyers, and it hadn't come easily. Len Ovens was his name and that was the day I learned it, or the day I paid attention. I didn't remember hearing it earlier, though.

The flyer was new It had a black-and-white image of the front of the house that was too dark to show anything, other than the roof coming to a point near the middle. In the bottom-right corner, it had a smaller photo, of the same quality, of Len Ovens, with his hairline and teeth featuring in a way that made him look like a shabby vampire. Underneath it said ‘Len Ovens, JP'. In bold type under the house photo it said ‘Motivated Vendor'. That was followed by a paragraph talking the place up in the usual real-estate-agent style, then information about quarterly rates, lot numbers and registered plans. I imagined those were facts that a serious potential buyer might need.

Towards the end of the hour some people turned up — a family, some couples, groups I couldn't work out. They walked around under the house, hitting the stumps and gauging the clearance, and they went through the rooms upstairs. Len Ovens moved his table to the front verandah for the auction and asked my mother if she had any flowers, which she didn't. The auctioneer arrived in his big steely-grey Mercedes and walked up the path like a rock star.

‘Fine-looking place we've got here,' he said as Len took his briefcase and made room for it on the table.

The auctioneer's head seemed to pivot on his broad shoulders as he looked quickly around, making a show of taking it all in without ever taking a step inside the house. He shook my father's hand and turned the conversation quickly to his own Mercedes and the tax position associated with it being a luxury vehicle.

‘Of course it's all work,' he said, and laughed loudly. ‘You can't drive around to these things in just anything, can you? I've got the log books and you'd be surprised how much driving ends up being work.' He came out with another big laugh that I didn't understand and that no one shared, though my father made some attempt to — giving a laugh that went ‘huh' and nodding his head a few times.

Len Ovens and the auctioneer took my parents aside for instructions, and Andy and I walked through the spic-and-span house wondering what we were supposed to do. Andy put his ear to a wall and tapped the boards with his knuckles and said, ‘Magnificent timber. Magnificent.'

My parents found us and took us through to the back as Len gathered people up and asked them to move to the front verandah. The four of us sat around the small table that was just outside the back door, and we waited. I asked my father about the auctioneer and his car, and he told me it was to do with tax law.

‘His car is classified as a luxury vehicle,' he said, ‘for obvious reasons. So if he wants to write it off as a business expense he's probably under more scrutiny He keeps
log books that record how far he drives and why he makes each trip, and somehow he keeps them in a way that records every trip as business use, so it's a hundred per cent tax deductible.'

‘Do you do that?' I said to him. ‘That kind of thing?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

On the front verandah, the auction began. The auctioneer's voice had volume and purpose, though I couldn't make out the words from the back of the house, and the crowd's murmuring stopped. He moved into some kind of explanation.

My father thought about my question and leaned across the table. He dropped his voice to a loud, clear whisper and said, ‘Because I'm not a wanker.'

My mother looked shocked, and then that passed and she said, ‘Not that we go around calling people that every day, but, yes.'

I was glad to hear something like that come out of my father, some sign that not everything was numb, even if I didn't straight away see that small part of that big day for what it was. The rich auctioneer, cheating on his tax and taking his fee and caring not at all about what happened to us. My father, who cheated at nothing and was left sitting out the back as his home was sold because of someone else's thieving, some other books in the city that had been tricked up to look good enough as a million dollars or more had slid out of them and into the pocket
of Alex Pegler. My father had little time for cheats, particularly that year, and a slimy, small-scale cheat who boasted about it was never going to impress him.

I wanted to say, ‘Yes. Yes, he's a wanker. We all think he's a wanker.' He seemed like one to me, and I wanted to support my father, to join in on something he was feeling and let him know I was with him. But by then the word had been said as much as it could be — even though that was only once — and I hadn't fully understood the tax explanation anyway.

Len Ovens appeared behind the screen door. ‘We're getting going,' he said. ‘Don's read the conditions and we're about to start. We've got quite a nice crowd.'

So it began, and Don's voice was louder with his ‘What am I bid? What am I bid? Come on, who'll start me? Who'll start me on this fine family home that we're definitely here to sell?'

My father got up and shut the back door and then sat down again, leaning forward with his elbows on his thighs and his hands clasped. None of us talked. It seemed as if a long time passed, but it probably wasn't long at all. I tried to think about other, better, things, but I expect none of us could.

The door opened and Len Ovens was there. ‘We have a couple of bidders, but it's slowing down,' he said. ‘Don'll keep working them. We're not there yet. Not near the reserve.' He looked at my mother, and then at my father, and shut the door again.

The strain started to show on my mother's face. My father sighed deeply and leaned back in his chair.

In a couple of minutes Len was there again. ‘It looks like it's gone as far as it'll go this afternoon. One bidder dropped out and it's sitting short of the reserve. About fifteen thousand short. They're definitely interested though. They seem to be. If we pass it in now they'll have first right to negotiate.'

‘Pass it in,' my father said. The bid was nowhere near what they were looking for. ‘It's not our day.'

So it finished there and soon we walked back into our tidy house, and the crowd was gone and the auctioneer was gone and there was nothing left in the afternoon. Len Ovens was folding up the legs of his card table, and he stayed to talk to my mother a while longer on the front verandah. My father went somewhere by himself.

I said to Andy, ‘Do you want to go for a swim next door?' and he said, ‘Do you really want to talk about this just yet? They'll ask how it went, and it was obviously a dismal failure.'

He was right, and we didn't go.

My mother took us out to dinner at Bonanza Steak-house, but it was just the three of us this time, since my father had developed a headache.

‘It'll sell,' she said. ‘This'll get sorted out. An auction is a tactic. You don't always expect to sell at the auction itself. It flushes out interest.'

She told us to have whatever we wanted, and ordered a
salad and a glass of water for herself. Then she changed her mind and said, ‘Actually, I'll have a moselle. A glass of moselle. Why not?'

Nothing came of the highest bidder, but new potential buyers surfaced two or three days after the auction. Again my mother showed them around and, when they appeared at my door, I realised that the couple who had come the week before hadn't turned up on Saturday. I wondered why not. I wondered what our house had failed to do to make them come back ready to bid. I wondered if it would do it again tonight.

I told them they could come into my room for a proper look around, but they said they could see I was busy and they didn't want to interrupt.

‘But you have already,' I wanted to say. ‘Or have we been talking about enzymes of the digestive system and I didn't even know it?' Instead I said, ‘No really, it's okay,' so they walked over to the windows and looked out to the Hartnetts' and said it would be good in this room with a northerly breeze.