Read Online Monica Bloom by Nick Earls - Free Book Online

— 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.
    â€˜I was always worried this house was overextending us,’ my father said. ‘Always. It’s much more than we’ve ever needed.’
    â€˜You didn’t say that at the time. You never said that.’
    â€˜I said it as much as I could. But I knew how much you wanted it. And I wasn’t planning for this.’
    â€˜It should have been all right then,’ my mother said. ‘It would have been all right. If this hadn’t happened.’
    â€˜What are you saying?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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