Monica Bloom by Nick Earls

other boy to stay right where they were and I took him aside and told him what I had heard.
    I said I was sure he was aware of the situation my family was in, and he was, and I told him about the talk that I believed had started the fight. I asked him if he would leave it to me, just this one time. I said it would be better if this became nothing. And he nodded and said, ‘Just this one time. But you come to me if there’s any more of this trouble. Come to me or talk to your house master. Talk to someone. We won’t have people saying things like that at this school. And your brother needs to know there’s a different way of dealing with it.’
    He watched as I walked back to the two of them, and when I got there he turned and walked away. The other student must have been a head taller than Andy, but I couldn’t be sure since Andy was still winded by the punchand crouching. The other guy looked untouched, and he even seemed to smile as I came over. I could feel anger rising in me as I got there, with his insolent look and my brother bent by his punch and the things I knew he had said about our father. It was a physical sensation — hot and strong and crowding in on me. I was just about ready to hit him myself, and perhaps he could tell. The smile went away and he looked down at the dirt.
    â€˜Right, you prick,’ I said to him, and the low menace in my voice surprised us all. It’s where the fight in me had turned, and each word took us further from me throwing a punch. ‘I just got you out of a Saturday, and that’s the last chance you’re getting with this one. Kiefer knows what you said, and I will make sure he nails you if you say anything like it again.’ I took a breath, and tried to sound more cool than menacing. ‘And if you do and it’s in front of people, those people can be witnesses in court if it happens to be defamatory.’
    It was a crazy threat to make, and an extreme one — it was just a stupid schoolyard line that he had come out with — but I couldn’t and wouldn’t back off. He nodded, and said nothing. I still wanted to hit him, but the urge was waning. Andy was standing straighter now.
    â€˜Do you understand what I’m saying?’ I said, each word measured out with its own share of the anger that continued to circulate in me. ‘Do you understand that this could be a whole lot of trouble for you, but that I’m getting you let you off just this one time? And that if there’seven a hint of any more of it, I will make certain you get everything that’s coming your way?’
    â€˜Yep,’ he said, contrite as a bad dog. I had surprised him with my fierceness. It wasn’t like me at all.
    It was only then that I recognised him as some kind of friend of Andy’s, someone who had been to our house, and I felt sad that it had come to this. I wasn’t angry then, not any more, and I told him to go away and I said, ‘Please, think this through. Think about what it might be like.’
    And he nodded and said, ‘Yep, sorry,’ and he looked Andy in the face for a second or two and then turned and walked off.
    Two of Andy’s shirt buttons were in the dust at his feet, and I bent down to pick them up. It was just us standing there now
    â€˜You wanted to hit him too,’ Andy said, straightening out his buckled collar and smiling at me. ‘Don’t try to tell me you didn’t.’
    â€˜Yeah, but I didn’t hit him,’ I said, in a way that would have annoyed him in other circumstances, a way that had too much big-brothering in it. Today he would take it, though. ‘He said Dad was a criminal?’
    â€˜Yeah. He said that the only way it could all make sense was if he was in on it too. That’s what his father reckons.’
    So that’s where we now stood. Our father was talked about in houses across town in the ad breaks during the news