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jumped into the pool in the clothes she had worn for tennis. She shouted to Katharine to fetch her a towel.
    â€˜This is so much better than school,’ Monica said, and I asked her how school was going. ‘Oh, you know how it is,’ she told me. ‘You’ve changed schools. And changed places. I’ve never lived in the tropics. What was it like where you lived before? Tell me about that.’
    So I did. I told her about my Dyak nanny, though all I knew was a photo and some details from my parents. It was my most exotic story, so I led with it. I told her about the Queensland mining towns too, back when my father was an engineer and before he became the boss. We gotto Moranbah not long after it had started — a town created anew for the massive open-cut operations being set up nearby. It took school to teach us that not everywhere was like that, not everywhere was a one-purpose one-industry town, made in one go and populated only as long as coal might come out of the ground. I told her what it was like to drive through the bush, sometimes for hours, and then all of a sudden to come across a mine where everything was giant size — the trains were miles long, the coal heaps were as high as city buildings, the trucks had tyres as wide as a man and twice as tall.
    I’d never told my school friends this, I realised. Not once. But they had never asked, and Monica had.
    She told me about where she had lived — in Melbourne to start with, then in Norwich in England, then Dublin where her father had become head of department.
    â€˜I’ve done it all,’ she said of her parents’ plan for her to get the most out of other countries. ‘I’ve done everything there is to do in the bottom half of Ireland. They want to enrich me. It’s that thing about holding your own in society again. And then they make me move countries, so . . .’ She shrugged. ‘I’ve spent more weekends than you’d believe in the back seat of our car, driving around in mist and sleet seeing almost nothing of the Ring of Kerry or the Dingle Peninsula or who knows where else. Some days it was beautiful, though, I’ve got to admit that. We had a week in Cork when it never rained. That was good.’
    Inside, the radio went on. It was playing Dragon’s ‘AprilSun in Cuba’. The song’s exotic edge — perfumed nights, Havana alleyways, escape — might have been blunted by extensive airplay, but it was still there if you paid attention, if you actually listened. They wouldn’t have heard it in Ireland. I was pretty sure of that. Katherine opened a window, and the noise of it moving stiffly along its runner caught Monica’s attention and we both looked that way.
    â€˜Just thought we’d have some music,’ Katharine shouted down to us, before stepping away and back into the kitchen.
    Monica looked down at her toes, which had red polish on the nails, and then up at me again.
    â€˜My father played madrigal tapes in the car that week in Cork, though,’ she said, and the conversation was still all mine. She rolled her eyes. ‘Greatest hits of the fifteenth century. I’ll have to kill you if you tell me you like madrigals.’
    And I said, ‘I didn’t think anyone had actually liked madrigals since Henry the Eighth,’ taking a guess at the history and for the first time getting something out of the music appreciation classes we’d sat through in grade eight.
    She laughed and said, ‘Well, maybe I don’t have to kill you then. That’s good.’ She was smiling and looking right at me, and she opened her eyes a little wider then and looked quickly away. She took a breath and sighed and shrugged. She drew her legs up and hugged her knees. ‘We were supposed to take turns. That was the deal. SoMum chose Simon and Garfunkel, which was mostly okay. And I chose The Clash, “London Calling”.’ It