Monica Bloom (7 page)

I've always had an interest in fashion,' she said. ‘I could make things. I could make clothes — one-off designer-type pieces. Or I could make jewellery. I'd like that as a job, I think.'

I could see past her into the house, through the lounge room and the dining room and into the kitchen where my father was wearing an old pair of shorts and staring out the window. My mother had never talked about having a job before, not ever. I had no views either way about whether she should or shouldn't, but that wasn't what this was about. There was no money coming in. This was fundamental. She was sitting there with her kneeler cover folded on her lap and telling us her idea that was some way short of a plan, her idea that had nothing to it, as far as I could see.

‘What kind of jewellery?' Andy said, since one of us needed to give her some response.

My father would be back at work soon — that's what we were all thinking. It's what we were all hoping. It was no good with him around the house.

My mother made no start on her jewellery, as far as
I was aware. My father took to calling his time without a job a ‘break', and he would say things like, ‘I'm going to use this break to catch up on my reading.' He joined the Hamilton Library and made one trip there, coming home with two books — fat, well-borrowed thrillers — that sat for weeks on the side table next to his seat in the lounge room. I didn't see him read them, and I think my mother took them back when they were long past due, and she probably paid a fine.

He also said he might do some gardening, grow some beans and cherry tomatoes, but that idea was lost quickly enough too. His mother had grown vegetables in their garden at Ipswich, he said. She had always done that, and she gave her vegetables out to families that needed them during the depression, which was just before my father's time. His father had been mining coal then, and kept that up for fifteen more years or so, until it got to his lungs.

One night I was woken by my parents talking loudly in the kitchen. I was in a dream when I first heard their voices, so it started as an argument between two people I couldn't see and didn't know. I was dreaming that I was flying low over a field, and it was night. No one else could fly, so that's why I kept my flights to night-time only, but the moon was bright enough. Then the two voices started up behind me, arguing, as if the scenery and the rush of the air meant nothing to them. I turned around, and woke. There was a strip of light under my bedroom door and my parents' voices were coming in from the kitchen.

‘I was always worried this house was overextending us,' my father said. ‘Always. It's much more than we've ever needed.'

‘You didn't say that at the time. You never said that.'

‘I said it as much as I could. But I knew how much you wanted it. And I wasn't planning for this.'

‘It should have been all right then,' my mother said. ‘It would have been all right. If this hadn't happened.'

‘What are you saying?'

‘Nothing. It's just, if circumstances were different . . .'

She let it tail off there and when they talked again their voices were quieter, a background murmur. I got out of bed and went to the door. I could hear them if I put my ear to the keyhole.

‘I don't know if I can do it again,' my father said, in a low voice that made me think of the word ‘defeat' from the paper a few Saturdays before — the article that started with the line, ‘Peter Sherman has mining in his blood, but it's the dollars and cents that may be defeating him.'

‘I don't know if anyone would give me the chance but, even if they did, I don't know. I'm good out there, in the mines. This was never . . .' I could picture him, sitting on a kitchen stool, and stuck for words.

I couldn't listen to any more, but I couldn't walk away, either. All I could do was stop the conversation. I rattled the doorknob and opened my bedroom door and tried to appear as if I had been sleeping until seconds before.

My parents both looked at me, like two people who had been working on some guilty secret.

‘Did you hear that on the roof?' my father said, doing his best to turn matter-of-fact. ‘We think it was a possum, but we're not sure.'

There was no noise at all and he was pointing at the ceiling quite unnecessarily, like a bad actor in a bad play. My mother was nodding. We would collude on this possum, and it would get us through the night and back into our beds. The guilty secret was mine now too.

‘Maybe that was what woke me up,' I said. ‘If it's just a possum we probably don't have to worry about it. It'll jump off somewhere.'

‘Right,' my father said, and we all knew the conversation was almost done.

I lay on my bed for a long time afterwards, looking out at the stars and the hulking dark triangle that was the roof of the Hartnetts' substantial house, and my heart went faster than usual, though I lay quite still. I was afraid, for the first time during all this. Afraid that there were plans coming unstuck that I hadn't even known about, afraid that my view of my world was just like some wallpaper that had been stuck over what my world was actually like, and that it was actually insubstantial and at risk. And I was afraid that my father wasn't who I had thought he was, because I was used to only confidence from him, and certainty. I didn't know where he might take us after this.

My mother got a job not long after, but not one involving jewellery or fashion. It was the first paying job I had ever known her to have. It was at a doctors' surgery on Racecourse Road.

I had seen where she had circled some ads in the suburban paper, and I had said nothing about it at the time. One of the better ones had read: ‘medical receptionist, part-time, must be dependable and well presented, experience preferred' and this job sounded a lot like that one. I was sure she had no experience, though just as sure she would be dependable and well-presented, but I had no idea how a job interview worked, so no sense of how the ‘must be' and ‘preferred' parts would be weighted.

One of the doctors had two sons at our school, but they were in grades eleven and nine, so we didn't really know them. My mother mentioned them when Andy and
I turned up from school on the day she was offered the job. I think she had had the interview not long before and she was dressed in her interview clothes. She had just put a cake in the oven, and already the sweet smell of it baking was throughout the house. I wondered if the school connection had worked for her at all, or not. I suspected it might have.

She told us she would start the following Monday for training and, by the week after, there would be times when she would even be in charge, when the senior receptionist was on a break.

‘Its mainly paperwork,' she said. ‘Keeping the files in order, making sure the doctors see results, making appointments, billing people. That kind of thing. And keeping the peace when the doctors are running behind and the waiting room's full of screaming kids. That's how it was today. A bit of a madhouse. I hope it's not usually like that.'

She cooked roast chicken for dinner that night, and went to some trouble with it. There was a new kind of stuffing, and she had made enough of it to do bacon rolls as well. We all drank wine, and treated her job as an uncomplicated good thing, an adventure she had chosen to go on. My father toasted her, and the four of us clinked glasses over the table. There were candles, and she looked happy, looked like someone whose sense of anticipation had just been reloaded. It was definitely one of our better nights.

But the house was to be sold anyway. There was no way around it, apparently.

‘Its not a great time to sell,' my mother said, ‘but it's better this way. Better to take control. We'll find a nice new place we can rent, and then we'll buy again when the time's right.'

‘Jesus. Moving?' Andy said. ‘Moving twice?'

My mother said nothing — didn't even pick him up on the ‘Jesus', which I'm sure she would have done the month before, though in a way more about manners than taking names in vain.

‘We're going to hell in a handbasket,' he said to me afterwards, when it was just the two of us. Then he admitted he had no idea where we were going but he had heard the expression in a movie and had been waiting for ages to use it.

I had misled him weeks before, I realised. I had misled both of us. I had said everything would be all right, that we would go on as usual, when perhaps that was never likely. It had seemed likely when I said it though — nothing had changed by then, nothing like this. I had said it because I needed to hear it, as much as because he needed to hear it. But we were past that once the decision about the house was made, and that old conversation was not to be talked about. Things were not all right, so we weren't saying that now. My parents were talking about taking control, sounding out the positives in a situation that looked far from positive to me.

I got Andy to find his football and we kicked it around in the backyard until the Hartnetts heard us and called us over for a swim. We said nothing to them that afternoon about selling the house, since neither of us had a way of telling them, or neither of us wanted to. We could swim in the pool, play Marco Polo and make it all like the holidays, before our luck had changed. We threw a wet old tennis ball around, skimmed it off the surface at each other until it deflected from Katharine's arm and was lost in the bushes. We swam until night came and our mother called over the fence to get us home for dinner.

The real estate agent's sign went up the next day.

‘This place'll go nicely,' the agent said. ‘Don't you worry.'

His hair was receding, with a prominent widow's peak — he must have been about fifty — and he wore a white shirt with a singlet under it and a dark tie. His eyes tended to be down on his papers, which my mother had been looking at when Andy and I arrived from the bus stop. She introduced us to him, and his handshake wasn't up to much, as though he wasn't sure he should be shaking our hands at all. They were talking through the wording of the ad for the newspapers, so we left them to it and went through to the kitchen to get something to eat. I don't know where my father was that afternoon, but he was nowhere to be seen.

At the end of his visit, with the right papers signed and the advertising wording agreed, the real estate agent went
down to his car and took a mallet and a sign from the boot. He paced up and down the front of the garden until he had chosen the spot, and then he banged the sign into the ground, his cowlick of hair flopping down over his face. He pushed it back into place, straightened the sign a little and turned to wave to my mother on the front verandah before going back to his car and driving off.

I watched this from under the house, and I didn't like it at all. It was momentous, and for him it was nothing. He did this kind of thing every day in these suburbs, but not in these circumstances, not for us. He had no idea what he was doing, other than banging in a sign. I wanted to stop him, to pull his sign out and tell him where to stick it until he looked me in the eye, until he said something right, owned up to what was really going on. Another part of our business was public now — we were selling, and all the world was to know.

‘It's still fucking crooked,' Andy said quietly. ‘We've got ourselves a real estate agent who can't even hit a sign in right.'

We were getting a box of sausage rolls from the downstairs freezer, and we had stopped and watched through the slats as the sign had gone up.

‘Let's eat,' Andy said, as he brushed ice from the box and onto the concrete, and looked at the picture with its perfect golden pastry and steaming sausage meat. ‘I think I need about six of these.'

We went upstairs and watched the sausage rolls cook in
the toaster oven. Andy poured tomato sauce onto a plate, then stuck his finger in the bottle and sucked it. My mother walked in with a handful of papers, and lined their edges up by tapping them on the counter. She talked about the real estate agent and his reputation with a forced kind of brightness that I tried to trust but couldn't. She asked about school, but we didn't have much to report so she told us about work instead. She was getting into the habit of comparing days when we all arrived home in the midafternoon.

‘A man came in with a garden fork through his foot,' she said, smiling. ‘I nearly vomited. He was wearing sandshoes and it went right through. Why he didn't go straight to hospital I don't know. There was blood everywhere. Everywhere.'

When Katharine Hartnett saw the sign she said, ‘But why would you have to move just because of what's going on? That's like a Steinbeck novel. We're doing one of those at school. People don't have work and they have to move. It makes no sense that you would have to.'

I told her it was complicated.

It was late one afternoon and she was walking the dogs. I had been sent out to pick up poinciana seed pods before my father mowed the lawn. I had a bucket a third full with them when she came past, saw the sign and jolted to a stop. Jolted enough that one of the dogs yelped.

‘My parents are spinning out a bit,' I told her. ‘But it'll be okay.'

‘That's in the Depression though, the Steinbeck novel,' she said. She was wearing a singlet and shorts and big sunglasses, and had worked up quite a sweat. ‘They're incredibly poor, the people who are moving. Have you read that stuff?' I told her we hadn't done Steinbeck yet and she looked at the words ‘For Sale' again and said, ‘I can't believe that sign. Surely there's another way. Where are you going? You should stay. Think of us.' She said it as a joke. ‘Think of the shitty new neighbours we might get. Don't be so selfish.'

The dogs prowled around her ankles, wrapping their leads around her legs. She stepped free and tried to disentangle them. I laughed at what she had said and apologised. I told her we might win the Golden Casket lottery any week and change our minds. There was still time.