Read Online Monica Bloom by Nick Earls - Free Book Online Page A

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.

SIX
    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 andI 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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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