Monica Bloom by Nick Earls Page A

and over the papers at breakfast. Idle, slanderous theories were doing the rounds, and that’s just how itwas. I looked for it in people’s eyes after that, and in their faces. I looked for their unspoken belief in that kind of idea. I went around wanting to fight them, but I managed not to since we had to move past this as a family and fighting would do us no good.
    That day, though, it was just the two of us, Andy and me, on the edge of the oval with his dusty buttons, both of us wondering, without a word said, how long this would all last and when we would be through it.
    I took him to the boarding house clothing pool and borrowed a needle and grey thread from one of the volunteer mothers who was working there and I did my best to sew the buttons back onto his shirt. I didn’t give our surnames, so we were only Matt and Andy, and his shirt had got caught on something and the buttons had come off. We were there with practically no story at all, and that was much easier.
    â€˜I’m a lover not a fighter,’ Andy said once the mothers had left us to it and I was working on the second button. And I said, ‘You, a magazine and a box of tissues doesn’t quite add up to love, the way I look at it.’
    â€˜Hey,’ he said, ‘even the best batsmen in the world need batting practice.’
    He put his shirt back on, and the clean new thread seemed almost to gleam it was so obvious, but I knew only I would see it that way.
    He straightened his shirt front and said, ‘Nice work. Mum’d be proud.’
    â€˜Wait till you see the beanie I’m knitting you for yourbirthday.’ I knocked some dust out of one of his sleeves, hopefully the last of it. ‘No one’s going to know about this at home, though, right? They’ve got enough crap to deal with.’
    â€˜I figured that,’ he said. ‘This crap stays here.’
    It was later that week that my mother started talking about getting a job. My father had been gone from the office for a few days by then, and he had been up on the roof emptying leaves from the gutters, but he had cracked a tile and stopped. ‘I can’t believe I did something so stupid,’ he said, and it affected his mood for the rest of the day. It wasn’t until the next afternoon that he bought something to fix the tile and went up there again. He never got around to the rest of the leaves.
    When Andy and I got home from school, my mother was sitting on the front verandah, in the shade, and finishing off the chapel kneeler she had been working on. She showed it to us — it was still empty, still just the kneeler cover, but she stretched it out between her hands and we told her how good it looked. It was the third she had made, maybe the fourth. One had been like a church window, but this one was our house crest, with a Viking boat on it and some Latin writing.
    â€˜I’ll take it to the school tomorrow, I think,’ she said. ‘We’re having a meeting about the fashion parade, so I can take it in then.’
    She mentioned the fashion parade as though she hadtalked about it before but, if she had, I had paid no attention. I knew nothing about it. It would be another fundraising initiative, for rowing boats or sets for musicals or the school in Tonga that our school supported. My mother was very involved with those sorts of things. At the last school fair she had run a stall that had raised money for something, and she had sold raffle tickets to help the Tongan school.
    Last year a group of the Tongan students had even visited for a week. We had put our names down to billet one of them, but they went to other families instead. I knew my mother was disappointed about that. She said it would have been a great experience for Andy and me, but it seemed like more than that. It seemed as if she had put the work in and yet somehow been deprived of her Tongan.
    When they arrived, the Tongans were introduced at school