Monica Bloom by Nick Earls Page A

racquet gently by her side, her arm still idly practising. She smiled. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Balls or net?’
    I took the net.
    I turned the handle until it was slack, I unhooked the ends and laid the net flat on the ground and I bundled it up. There was a covered area under the verandah where the court didn’t need a fence and where the equipment was kept, and I dumped the net there, on a table. When I turned, Monica was standing nearby with the ball tins.
    â€˜I bet you didn’t expect to see me again so soon,’ she said.
    â€˜It’s like a bonus boarders’ weekend.’ I almost said more, but then it didn’t happen. I wanted to tell her how good it was that she was there.
    She handed me the tins, which I knew went upstairs. I put them down on the net.
    â€˜There’s another dance at school in a couple of weeks,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘You should come.’ 
    â€˜Are they going to let you go to it?’
    She laughed. ‘Jesus — I can’t be in trouble all the time. My slate’s clean now, I think. For the moment. A suspension does that, surely? You should come to the dance.’
    I almost kissed her then. I had no words in my head and I felt the urge to, strongly. I imagined it all, but I didn’t know how it would start or whether I’d be much good at it, or even if it was something she might want. The cicadas blazed away. I looked at her eyes, her mouth, in the quickly fading light. Her mouth was slightly open. I wanted to kiss her. She was close and the talk had stopped.
    Then the twins turned up with cordial and biscuits. The gate creaked open on its rusty hinges and there they were, each of them with a tray. Monica made a noise that sounded like a laugh, but just the start of one, and we both took a half step backwards and away from each other.
    She looked back at me then. ‘Katharine said she told you what happened. Why I got suspended.’
    â€˜Yeah. She told me something.’
    â€˜I couldn’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe what happened. I thought Sally was faking it when she hit the floor and, you know, started having the fit. I only did it because she was the only one who hadn’t had a go. And that didn’t seem fair. You should feel it. It’s great. It’s like you’re disappearing. You’re just falling away and away.’
    Katharine stopped a few metres from us and looked upto the windows and shouted, ‘Mum, could you put the light on?’
    â€˜She’ll be all right, though,’ Monica said, still just to me. ‘Sally. She’s okay. I called today and she’s back at school. I feel pretty terrible about it, though.’
    The light under the verandah snapped on, and she blinked and put her arm up and moved around so that she wasn’t looking right into it. Everything was bright now where we were, and the court and the world beyond it was darker than ever. Katharine and Erica pushed the net along and made room on the table for the trays.
    â€˜It was an accident,’ I said, but it felt like the last remnant of a conversation that was already gone. ‘You couldn’t guess it would happen. And she’s okay, which is good.’
    Katharine handed me a drink and said, ‘Is this Sally Barnes? Yeah, she’s fine apparently. She’s epileptic, or something, but she never told people. Something like that. What can you do?’ She took a bite of a custard-cream biscuit and shrugged.
    We sat around on the mismatched chairs — chairs that had long ago ceased to have an upstairs life — and we drank our cordial and talked, the four of us.
    â€˜It was all over the school yesterday and the day before,’ Erica said. ‘It’s like you’re some outlaw. The story’s going around, but you’ve disappeared.’
    Monica groaned at the thought of it. She didn’t want this outlaw