Monica Bloom (15 page)

‘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.

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