Monica Bloom Read Free

if it, I’m sure only I could understand it. There were no Shermans on those honour boards, and I had made starts at four schools.
    But there was little complaint in what Monica said. She straightened her legs out, but kept her towel folded overmost of her, while she looked up at the sky’s deep blue and the trees full of flowers, and told us about the icicles hanging from the gutter outside her bedroom window the morning her father had driven her to Shannon airport for the flight to London, and to here.
    Katharine dived back into the pool and swam some laps.
    â€˜I’m rambling,’ Monica said. ‘I’m jetlagged. I still have my kitten mittens in my bag. How insane.’
    When I got home my mother had my school uniforms out and was ironing a shirt.
    â€˜You woke me with that game,’ she said, and she shot steam into my collar and pressed it flat.
    â€˜I tried to talk them out of it, of course,’ I told her. ‘But it’s a question of breeding. If you’d had the decency to have twins, I would have gone into it on equal terms, but they outvote me every time.’
    â€˜You should have taken Andy,’ she said, taking the next shirt out of the basket and shaking it. ‘We caught up with them two years later, remember.’
    And I said, ‘Mornings aren’t his thing,’ and we gave each other a look that acknowledged neither of us exactly knew what Andy’s thing was.
    â€˜He’s still sleeping,’ she said. ‘And so’s your father.’ She drove the iron across the back of the shirt. She was wearing a robe, one that Andy and I had got together to buy for her the Christmas before last, and the bottom of itflapped around with the vigour of the ironing. ‘I had too much of that Marco Polo in my head to keep sleeping,’ she said. She moved the shirt around to iron the front, and she looked up. ‘Was that their cousin? The other person over there? What’s she like?’

TWO
    What’s she like?
    She stayed in my head after that first meeting, more than made sense.
    Years later I would think there had been something brittle about her from the start. Or fragile. They’re almost the same. But that would take hindsight, and more. And I can’t honestly say that she was either of those things. Circumstances have to be taken into account too.
    She was an outsider. That much is true.
    Andy’s hair was still wet when we got to school the next morning in our well-pressed shirts. We weren’t the first there, so most of the upper lockers in the grade-twelve section were gone, but I found a free one at the far end from the houseroom door. I stacked my new books in no particular order and thought: this is the last time. Erica had put the idea in my head, and it would keepcoming back to me. Last year’s owner of the locker had put stickers on the inside of the door — one a Levi’s logo, the other saying ‘colour radio 4IP’ A year ago he had stood on this spot claiming a locker for the last time. He might be anywhere now. I left the stickers where they were and decided to see if they could go the whole year without changing, without their corners lifting or any of their colour chipping or flaking away or fading, until they were handed on to the next day-one grade-twelver who would draw this door open on its cheap screeching hinges. I couldn’t remember who had had the locker the year before.
    Up the back of the houseroom, once we had all filed in and before the first meeting of the year started, Chris Clarke told us about losing his virginity in the Christmas holidays. His parents hadn’t wanted him hanging around the house the whole time, so they had sent him jackarooing. She was a girl called Desley who lived out there. ‘Out there’ being somewhere west of Mitchell and seven or eight hours west of here, as close as I could tell. She made all the moves, he said. One morning they went