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

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.
    â€˜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 wentdown 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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 inthe 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.
    â€˜A man came in with a garden fork through his foot,’ she said, smiling. ‘I nearly vomited.