Monica Bloom (3 page)

Andy and I set the table and had a difference of opinion about the order of the cutlery. My mother stuck her head around the door and hissed some instructions and told Andy he should ask our guests if they would like wine with their meal. He slouched off to do it, shaking his head. The food was good on those nights, and sometimes we scored a half glass of wine ourselves, but the price to be paid was too great as far as we were concerned. Too much tension. Too much fuss going on.

He came back and reported that they wanted wine but no ice, and my mother said, ‘You didn't really ask them if they wanted ice with wine, did you?'

Andy glared at her and seethed most of the way through the prawn cocktail. My parents put ice in their wine all the time when it was just the four of us, but we pretended they didn't on nights when we were entertaining.

That night my father drank more than he normally would, or maybe it was the lack of the usual diluting effect of the ice that meant more wine ended up in his glass. The men from Melbourne, though, put their hands over their glasses when they were offered more. Andy had been sent to the kitchen to get the cask from the fridge and only my father ended up taking some. ‘Just a half,' he said, and Andy knew that meant three quarters. My father later went to the fridge himself at least a couple of times.

The men from Melbourne were bean counters, he told me a few days after their visit. It was the first time I'd heard the expression and I wondered what business a mining company would have with beans. My father was an engineer, and accountants had become a much bigger part of his life since he had become state manager two years and four months before. I'm not sure that he liked the job much, ever.

We ate our prawn cocktails, and Andy and I tried to look practised at it, since that's what these people from Melbourne would surely expect. I watched them closely, how they handled their forks, where they put their hands when they weren't eating. We had always been brought up not to lean on the table.

‘Carol makes her own thousand-island dressing,' my father said proudly. My mother's prawn-cocktail recipe was special, and its features worth bringing into conversation. ‘She'd never settle for just buying it.'

Andy asked which thousand islands they were, but no
one knew. ‘That's a lot of islands,' he said. ‘You wouldn't get a thousand islands everywhere. That must narrow it down.' I suggested Indonesia and said it was quite an archipelago, and Andy said, ‘You wouldn't come close if you tried it here. Moreton Bay has, what, four big islands and about ten small ones?'

‘Fourteen-island dressing,' my father said. ‘You should set up a stall, Carol, and give it a go. Don't know that there'd be much of a market with a name like that, though. Those people with the extra nine hundred and eighty-six islands might make it tough.'

It was his flattest, most hard-worked joke of the night, if it was a joke at all. It was intended as a joke — we could all tell from the delivery —and that certainty made it worse. He took a solo laugh at the end of it, and Andy kicked me in the shin and glared down at his plate while we waited for something better to be said and hoped our father wouldn't be the one to try to say it.

Instead he offered the Melbourne men more wine again, but they said no. One of them asked if the prawns came from here, but my mother wasn't sure. We cleared the table and Andy and I helped my mother serve the main, chicken cacciatore. My father talked work with the men while we were doing this. There were figures they needed to go through some time in the next two days. They all groaned about an internal audit and my father said, ‘I'm still getting my head around that.'

He had sweat rings spreading from his armpits by then.
It was a humid night and he had put on weight in this job but insisted he hadn't, and he refused to change his shirt size. So, he was this swollen man with a stretched shirt-front, a white shirt with dark patches spreading across it and the lines of his singlet clear underneath. He had a big moustache in those days too, thick and turned down at the ends, and it had caught some of the thousand-island dressing. The candlelight gleamed on the sweat on his face. I don't know what mood my mother had been trying for, but the result didn't feel quite right.

She brought in a pedestal fan and it clicked around on its stand and blew out one of the candles. Steam rose from the chicken cacciatore and we all sweated more. The conversation fell away. Dinner became something of an ordeal.

We knew nothing about the Melbourne kind of football, or close to nothing. They knew nothing about either of the rugby codes. One of them, the more senior of the two, collected wine and cellared it. The other had had a holiday at the Gold Coast once, in winter, and he told us he couldn't believe how warm it was in the middle of the day, though still quite cool at night. ‘That's how it is,' my father said quickly. ‘It's quite cold some nights but the winter days are great. Less cold at night on the coast, though, than here. Sometimes by several degrees.'

‘It can get pretty hot at the coast in summer,' my mother said, though this was surely self-evident, since every one of us was working up a foul sweat on this late-January
night and the Gold Coast was not much more than an hour or so down the road.

We dutifully ate the pavlova and the men from Melbourne left by taxi. They said it had been great coming over — far better than eating in the hotel or trying to find somewhere in the city. There was a breeze picking up as we stood on the steps, but it had never found its way inside.

My father washed up. Andy and I wiped everything dry and put it away.

‘Well, love, you can't show better hospitality than that,' my father said as my mother squirted wine from the cask into a glass loaded with ice cubes.

‘We should have got a bottle of wine,' she said. ‘Tonight we should have had a bottle.'

My father looked as if he felt he should reply but didn't know what to say, so he kept scrubbing away at the tomato-red slick of sauce around the saucepan.

‘That's the kind of people they were,' my mother said, and then he said, without turning round, ‘But what would we have got? Which exact bottle of wine would have been right?'

He worked the pot scrubber hard against the saucepan. Andy and I rubbed the glasses till they gleamed and arranged them in the cupboard in rows.

‘I don't know,' my mother said. ‘I've no idea.'

A few weeks into the school year, there was a dance at St Catherine's. The twins and I had been regulars at the dances there the year before, and planned to be again. Mr Hartnett felt that we had a good arrangement, he and I — that I would escort his daughters there and back. He said he felt better knowing they were leaving the house with a man in tow, though he conceded that any comfort it gave him was probably in his head.

‘I'm sure you'll keep them on their best behaviour,' he said on more than one occasion, and each time he said it he would let out a great guffawing laugh and one or both of his daughters would punch him in the arm.

So, it became automatic for the three of us to go together, and we did the same to dances at my school as well. I looked deceptively successful, turning up with two girls — an identical girl on either side — but soon enough
people knew they were my next-door neighbours and not one good rumour came from it. I was a link to St Catherine's, though, and that wasn't bad. I got to know some of their friends, which meant that anyone from my school who knew me at all would take it as a chance to meet St Catherine's girls. They would see me there early in the night at a dance talking to the twins and a couple of their friends, and they would appear at my shoulder, waiting to be introduced.

I would have done the same. School dances didn't have half the openness that parents feared. The boys spent much of the time clumped next to the tables of cordial complaining to each other about how hard it was to break into any group of girls. The girls spent their time dancing in circles with their bags and purses on the floor in the middle. One year at school I did an assignment that looked at Roman military tactics, and these girls had a clear innate understanding of defensive formations.

But it was Monica Bloom who was on my mind as we set out for the first dance of 1980. She would be there, the twins said.

I had settled into the patterns of the school year, and she had been my best secret distraction. My summer holiday had amounted to nothing before its last day and, as quadratic equations unscrambled themselves in front of me in maths in the way they were supposed to, it would be her face I would think about. Monica Bloom with her
blindfold on and her hand on my chest. In my head it became a lot, that moment a few seconds long.

I thought of going to the beach with her, or at least what that would be like. I recast my New Year's Eve lie with her in it, but kept it to myself, her hand on my chest again between the upturned boats as the fireworks burst wide open and filled up the sky over Pumicestone Passage. I imagined us running clear of the crowd, covered by the cracking fizzing sounds of the fireworks, and disappearing among the she-oaks to our own stretch of sand.

I knew there was a risk in all that, but I thought it was the obvious risk of disappointment that so often comes with so much one-sided contemplation. I hoped she had thought of me at least once or twice. I tried to remember anything I had done that might have stuck in her head and I resolved to do better next time. This time. The school dance.

I could ask one question of the twins and get away with it, I figured. Two and they would be onto me. I imagined that scene and the way the conversation would go as they needled me and drove me deeper into embarrassment, and then I imagined turning up at the dance after that and seeing Monica there with a look of complete blankness on her face, and Erica and Katharine introducing us again.

So I didn't ask my question directly. As the front door of their house shut behind us and we walked down the stone steps towards the street, all I said was, ‘Who's going tonight?' and Katharine said, ‘Stacks of people. Everyone.'

‘Everyone,' Erica said. ‘The usual people. Except Rosemary has chickenpox, so not her.'

The gate creaked as I shut it behind us. A bat stumbled out of a tree and with three big beats of its wings lifted above the powerlines and away across the road.

‘Our cousin will be there, probably,' Erica said. ‘Monica, the one you met in our pool.'

We walked down the hill, but they said nothing more about her. Nothing about how she was doing at school or how much they saw of her there. Nothing, of course, about whether or not she had mentioned me. I ran that fantasy through in my head. ‘She's talked about you quite a bit,' one of them would say. ‘She said she hoped you'd be there tonight.'

On the next hill, I could see the lights outside St Catherine's and the dark blocks of classrooms and peaked roof of the chapel. The twins talked about school, their annoying parents, my annoying friends who never lived up to their cryptic expectations. They had holidayed at a better part of the coast and bumped into a few of them, but the boys had concentrated as much on stealing beer from their fathers as they had on making the right moves and, when the twins had come back, there had been stories of vomiting into bushes and bins and nothing that appealed to them at all. Not that the people involved were actually my friends — though I did know them from school — but the twins always chose to call them that when they wanted to say, ‘Some of your friends are such
dickheads . . .' or something else that didn't flatter them. At other times, they would be looking for introductions if they liked what they saw. At no time was it completely clear what the boys in question could do that would be entirely right.

Andy and I had had a holiday of early starts catching the morning surf before the crowds came to the beach, with the days meandering through to barbecues on the back verandah of our rented house most evenings. We rode our bikes around the streets. We got ourselves lost in the swamp out the back, but found our way out again. Andy bought porn and rolled it up in a towel in his saddlebag until he could sneak it into the house. Mostly it was pretty low-grade stuff, but one day he couldn't resist a magazine with a feature headed ‘Shaved and Dangerous' and he sat there on his bunk saying, ‘Jesus Christ,' repeatedly and in a harsh whisper as a whole new world he wasn't even slightly ready for opened up to him. He tossed and turned in his sleep that night, and would only look at a page or two at a time afterwards.

The twins' heels click-clacked down the street and we walked past houses with dinner smells and TV noise coming out through their open front windows. ‘Turn that off,' someone shouted. ‘Turn that thing off now and come to the table.' We reached the intersection, crossed the street and walked past two old blocks of units and more houses and the empty school tennis courts, with their nets hanging with the tension out of them and signs that said they
were private property and should only be played on with white-soled shoes. We could hear the music now and, at the top of the hill, people were getting out of cars. I was already looking for Monica Bloom when we were still well away down the street.

I danced with the twins and then I left them with their friends on the pretext of looking for mine, and I walked through the darkened hall among groups of dancers and then outside through the crowd gathered in the lights of the courtyard. The band was loud even there, but the conversations rose above it and parents, teachers and nuns prowled the peripheries, some of them with torches.

I thought she might be anywhere, somewhere in the crowd and I might be missing her. Or maybe she was with someone already, and out of torch range. I put myself through too much of that before I bumped into Erica and had to ask her.

‘Did you say your cousin was going to be here?' That's how I put it. ‘I haven't seen her.' And Erica said, ‘Oh, yeah, I heard a few of the boarders were banned for some reason. I think she was part of that.'