Me and Mr Booker Read online

  I said I hoped that would be never and Eddie told me to shut up.

  Then a week later Eddie was gone, chasing after Deirdre who’d moved to Melbourne to live with her real father and study fashion design.

  I was back at school by then. I’d decided to go back because my mother had made me promise not to ruin my last year the way Rowena had ruined hers. Rowena, she said, had wasted her potential and she didn’t know if she could bear to watch me do the same with mine. We both knew what she was really saying. What she was really saying was that she couldn’t stop me wanting things that weren’t good for me but that didn’t mean I could forget about my education. My mother valued education very highly. She said it was the only chance most people ever had to learn the habit of critical thinking, and therefore it wasn’t to be abandoned like an old coat you were tired of or some shoes that were suddenly the wrong colour.

  ‘I get the point mum,’ I told her.

  ‘Make sure you do,’ she said. ‘You’ll thank me in the long run.’

  ‘If you say so,’ I said.

  After that it was back to the way it had been before, with just my mother and me, which should have felt the same as it always had but didn’t because everything had changed and I wasn’t the same person any more. For a start I was half-crazy with worry. Because of Victor I had probably lost Mr Booker forever, and now I had to be in the same town with him and die of longing because I couldn’t see him ever again.

  Also my mother had changed. She was upset about Eddie and Deirdre because she didn’t think Deirdre was good for my brother, and she didn’t think he would ever understand why. But now that my brother had gone to Melbourne my mother knew there was nothing she could do to bring him back.

  ‘He needed a father,’ she said. ‘But Victor was never there.’

  Also, as well as worrying about Eddie and me, she worried that she could have done more to help my father, years back, when she first realised he was sick.

  ‘I shouldn’t have tried to cope on my own,’ she said. ‘I pretended things were fine when they weren’t.’

  It wasn’t the first time my mother had told me this but it was the first time I really listened because it felt like she was trying to warn me.

  ‘I was such a slow learner,’ she said, looking straight at me.

  I didn’t know what she expected me to say. I wasn’t going to tell her she’d made me see the error of my ways all of a sudden and now I was just going to give up on Mr Booker and move on, because that would have been lying.

  I said I thought she’d done her best and she thanked me and said she wished she could believe that, and then she said she thought it might help my father to come home for a while when he came back from wherever he was now, because if he had tried to kill himself once he was likely to try again and she didn’t want his death on her conscience.

  ‘We’re the only family he has,’ she said. ‘We can’t just abandon him.’

  I said I didn’t think it was possible to help my father any more than he had already been helped because he didn’t think there was anything wrong with him.

  ‘It isn’t you who’s pretending,’ I said. ‘It’s him.’

  ‘He means well,’ said my mother. ‘In his mad way.’

  ‘Jesus, Mum,’ I said. ‘What if he’d shot Mr Booker instead of just threatening to?’

  ‘He was trying to protect you,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t need that kind of protection,’ I said. ‘If I needed that kind of protection I’d get a dog.’

  I went to my room then and slammed the door and for half an hour I lay on my bed and sobbed and I wouldn’t let my mother in, even when she knocked on the door and pleaded.

  ‘Go away,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do anything without asking you first,’ she said.

  ‘Do what you like,’ I said. ‘You’re as crazy as he is.’

  It wasn’t the real reason I was crying. I was crying because I wanted to see Mr Booker so badly it was making me sick. When I looked in the mirror it disgusted me how pale and sickly I was. I looked like I had a blood disease or a tropical fever. I looked like I needed a doctor.

  Afterwards, at dinner, I told her I was sorry for what I’d said and she told me Eddie had called to say he’d tracked my father down in Queensland where he was having a holiday, driving around from place to place, wherever the road took him.

  ‘I thought he didn’t have any money,’ I said.

  ‘I gave him some,’ said my mother.

  I felt even sadder then, not just for my mother, who was never going to escape my father for as long as she lived, but also for my father because he was so lonely.

  It was true what she said about him having no other family. The only relation of my father’s I’d ever met was his mother, and that was only when she was so old she could hardly remember who anybody was. We’d gone to stay with her when her husband died, to help her decide what she wanted to do next. She lived on the coast south of Sydney in a little baby-blue fibro house one street back from the water. My father was worried that she wouldn’t be able to cope there alone so he persuaded my mother to bring her home with us. Not that the old lady really wanted to come. It was hard to know what she wanted, because she never spoke. She sat in a chair in the front room all day and stared out the window and if anyone asked her a question she nodded, or shook her head.

  She was nothing like my father to look at. He was tall and dark and she was small and fair, with little blue, filmy eyes that were so dim she couldn’t even see the television.

  ‘I have my suspicions about the real story,’ my father said one night after my grandmother had gone to bed.

  I asked him what he meant and he told me that he wasn’t his mother’s natural son.

  ‘Of course I have no proof,’ he said. ‘It’s just a feeling I have.’

  ‘So whose son are you?’ I said.

  He told me he remembered a couple that used to come and visit his parents from England every year.

  ‘They had money,’ he said. ‘And breeding. And my parents treated them like royalty.’

  ‘So you’re actually a prince,’ I said.

  ‘You never know,’ my father said.

  I stared at him and wondered if it was true that he was some kind of changeling. It would explain his strangeness. But if it was not true, that was even stranger because it meant he had fantasised all his life about a family to which he belonged more than he belonged to his real parents.

  And that wasn’t the only thing that didn’t add up about my father. There was another story he used to tell everyone, about how he’d flown cargo planes with Monty Braithwaite in some African war zone where their plane had been shot at and they’d made a lucky escape. He had a photo on his wall of the aircrew all lined up in front of a hangar in two rows and he’d always point to himself at the end of the back row, except that it looked nothing like him. At least it looked like him aged about twenty years older than he would have been at the time, with his hair receding and his eyes narrowed and around him there was a kind of halo as if the photograph had been taken at some other time and place and he had carefully cut it out and pasted it onto the body of another man. It was hard to imagine why he might bother going to such trouble, but I guessed it must have had something to do with how he felt about Monty, which was that his friend had always outdone him in every way, by being braver and richer and more daring than my father. Which might have been true, or it might have only been the way my father saw things. My mother didn’t believe a word of it. Whatever my father said on the subject of Monty Braithwaite she dismissed out of hand.

  ‘That man has never been anything but trouble as far as I’m concerned,’ she said. ‘It’s a wonder he’s not in jail.’

  I waited for Mr Booker to ring me but he didn’t so I drove around to their house to see if he was home. It was past ten o’clock at night and Mr Booker was watching television with all the windows open and the lights turned of
f. I didn’t want to go in because I was too scared to talk to Mrs Booker, so I parked my mother’s car outside the neighbour’s house and cut across the front lawn, keeping to the shadows in case she walked into the room and saw me. And then I stopped and watched Mr Booker smoke a cigarette in the blue flicker of the screen and he looked so serene sitting there that I picked up a rock out of the garden bed next to the front steps and threw it at the front door glass hard enough to crack it. I didn’t even wait to see what he would do. I just ran back to the car and drove off with my heart pounding so hard I thought it was going to break apart.

  I wrote him a letter after that and said that I needed to talk to him because he couldn’t just pretend nothing had happened and ignore me.

  I can understand that you changed your mind after what happened but does that mean you’ve decided to stay with Mrs Booker? Or does it mean that you’ve decided to put off leaving her? I need to know one way or the other. I will be at the cinema cafe at three-thirty every day from this Saturday on. Please come. À bientôt, Bambi. XX.

  I addressed the letter to his office because I didn’t want Mrs Booker to find it and read it. And then I decided to deliver it myself with a bottle of whisky as a present so I took an unopened bottle from my mother’s cupboard and wrapped it up and stuck the letter to the side of it with sticky tape. I took the bus to town and walked to Mr Booker’s office from there. I knocked on the door and when there was no answer I let myself in and put the whisky in the middle of the bare desk so he would see it as soon as he walked in.

  I thought he would at least ring me to thank me for the present but he didn’t. Mrs Booker rang instead and asked my mother if it was all right for her to come over and have a chat and my mother said yes.

  They sat in the garden all afternoon while I watched them from my room at the same time as I was trying to memorise a French passage for Mr Jolly, which started with the sentence La lutte des sexes, dis-je, est le moteur de l’histoire. When my mother asked me to I took them out a bottle of wine and two glasses and went up to the shops to get Mrs Booker another packet of cigarettes when she ran out. I don’t know exactly what they talked about but I think it had to do with Mrs Booker’s fertility problems and how Mr Booker wasn’t very keen on having any more tests done or trying any more treatments because he thought there had to be a point where you gave up and just accepted the fact that you couldn’t have everything in life.

  ‘Which is easy for him to say,’ said Mrs Booker with tears in her eyes. ‘But I’m not like that. I think that if we give up now it will be like giving up on our marriage. And I can’t do that. At least I can but I won’t.’

  My mother glanced at me while I poured more wine into Mrs Booker’s glass.

  ‘What do you think, Bambi?’ said Mrs Booker. ‘Do you think I’m crazy?’

  ‘I’m the wrong person to ask,’ I said.

  Mrs Booker drank some more wine and smiled at me, then she turned to my mother and told her how her dream was to some day have a daughter like me.

  ‘Mr Booker feels the same,’ she said. ‘We talk about it all the time. How lovely it would be.’

  My mother turned to me and raised her eyebrows, and that’s when I knew Mrs Booker hadn’t even mentioned Victor’s visit to her house or the things my father had said about Mr Booker and me.

  ‘You only see her on her best behaviour,’ my mother said. ‘She’s not always so nice.’

  ‘But you’re such good chums,’ she said. ‘That’s what I want. I want someone I can talk to. Of course I have Mr Booker, but it’s not the same. And it’s not as if we have ever talked much anyway. He didn’t marry me for my conversation. In fact he finds it an effort to talk to me, so most of the time he doesn’t bother.’

  She demonstrated for my mother and me how she would ask Mr Booker whether he thought they had done the right thing leaving England when they did and all she got was a stare and a standard answer.

  ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time. That’s his answer to everything. It seemed like a good idea at the time. What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Perhaps he doesn’t like to think too much about the past,’ said my mother. ‘Some people don’t.’

  ‘I asked him if he was tired of me the other day,’ she said. ‘And he told me it was the sound of my voice he was tired of, so I should shut up occasionally and give my mouth a rest.’

  ‘What did you say?’ said my mother.

  ‘I told him if he ever spoke to me like that again I would walk out the door and never come back.’

  ‘Do you think you ever would?’ I said, my heart leaping.

  ‘I’ve thought about it,’ she said.

  ‘I guess thinking about it and doing it are two different things,’ I said.

  My mother frowned at me then and asked me to go inside and make some coffee, so I did, and all the time I was thinking about what Mrs Booker had said and wondering if Mr Booker deserved to know how close to leaving him his wife had come. I thought maybe he didn’t know and that I should probably tell him, but then I wasn’t sure if he’d believe me or if he’d think I was putting pressure on him to make up his mind to leave her first.

  After I made the coffee I carried it outside and set it down on the table next to Mrs Booker’s chair, then I poured her a cup and stirred some fresh cream in it with two sugars the way she liked it. She was watching every move I made through her owlish glasses, like she’d never seen anyone pour a cup of coffee before. Then just as I was pouring some coffee for my mother the phone rang and she stood up to go and answer it, leaving me alone with Mrs Booker. It was very uncomfortable being anywhere near Mrs Booker when I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to her, or why she was still speaking to me after what my father had told her. I even thought she might have come round to the house to threaten me the same way Victor had gone round to threaten Mr Booker, but every time I looked at her she smiled in the little-girl way she had, which she must have thought was attractive.

  ‘I’m so sorry about the cat,’ I said. ‘I hope it didn’t suffer.’

  She stopped smiling then and looked like she was going to cry, but she took a drag on her cigarette instead.

  ‘Thank you very much for the whisky,’ she said, which made me realise that Mr Booker must have lied to her and told her the whisky was for her, something to drown her sorrows with. ‘It was very sweet of you,’ she said.

  ‘No problem,’ I said.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said.

  I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, because she might have been trying to tell me she didn’t blame me for what had happened between Mr Booker and me, or she might have been talking about Victor, or about the cat, so I decided not to answer and just pretended instead to be taking an interest in the way the clouds were scudding across the sky above us, making the breeze turn cold whenever they crossed in front of the sun.

  ‘What did your father say to you?’ said Mrs Booker eventually.

  ‘When?’ I said. I said I hadn’t seen my father since he’d disappeared. ‘Your mother says he hit you,’ said Mrs Booker.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘That was nothing. That was because I was rude to him.’

  Mrs Booker put her hand on my arm then and squeezed it as a gesture of sympathy and for a moment I thought I was going to laugh, because here she was telling me she was not about to take my father’s side against me, or to believe anything he might have said to her about what he’d seen or imagined he’d seen.

  ‘You’ll have to come to the house again,’ she said. ‘Mr Booker’s unbearable without you.’

  I turned to her then and looked straight at her and it was impossible to tell exactly how clever or how stupid she was so I gave up trying. I leaned over and put my arms around her and gave her a hug because I knew by the little paddling motions she was making with her hands that this was what she wanted me to do.

  It wasn’t until the Monday of the following week that I saw Mr Booker again. He was waiting for me at a
table up by the back wall of the cinema café where it was dark. When I walked in wearing my school uniform he looked up and smiled and gave me a little wave with his hand, making the smoke from his cigarette swirl around in front of his face so that he looked as if he was on fire. When I was close enough I could tell that nothing had changed and that he still wanted me as much as he had before, so I leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I said. ‘Ça va?’

  ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ he said.

  He smelled of aftershave and beer and he’d had his hair cut shorter than usual which made him look pink and shiny.

  ‘I didn’t know when I’d see you,’ I said.

  ‘Things have been a bit hectic around our place,’ he said.

  I sat down and watched him light me a cigarette from the tip of his own. He handed it to me and I took it with my hand shaking so badly I thought I was going to drop it.

  ‘How’s school?’ he said.

  ‘Fabulous,’ I said.

  ‘Best days of your life,’ said Mr Booker. ‘So they say.’

  ‘They lie,’ I said.

  He stared at me then and said he was sorry for not showing up at our assignation.

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I waited for you all day.’

  He said my father turning up the way he did had scared the crap out of him.

  ‘Lucky he didn’t have his gun with him,’ I said.

  Mr Booker laughed in a strangled kind of way.

  ‘My good lady wife was very grateful for the whisky,’ he said.

  ‘It wasn’t for her,’ I said. ‘It was for you.’

  He gazed at me then and reached across to take my hand. He said he’d missed me and I said I’d missed him too, and that he was the only reason I’d come back from Sydney because there wasn’t any point in being there without him.

  ‘I have a job,’ he said. ‘You seem to forget that.’

  I knew that was true. I knew it was something Mr Booker worried about and I didn’t because I’d never had to earn a living in my life and I didn’t know what it meant. Even so, there was something defensive in the way Mr Booker mentioned it now that made me think he was scared of me because I was asking him to change his life forever, which is a hard thing for any person to contemplate.