Me and Mr Booker Page 13

  ‘You’re turning kinky on me,’ I said.

  ‘You want a spank?’ he said.

  And then there was the time when he forgot to lock the door and the cleaner, whose name was April, walked in and saw Mr Booker down on his knees and me perched up on the desk with my knees wide open and no underwear on at all.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Mr Booker, when he looked around and saw April standing there with her vacuum cleaner.

  April didn’t reply. She just turned around and left the room the way she’d come in.

  After that Mr Booker drove me home and sat with me in the car out the front of my mother’s house. He asked me if my father was happy in his caravan.

  ‘He says it suits him,’ I said. ‘He says he likes the feeling that at any moment he can hitch it up to the back of his car and be off.’

  Mr Booker laughed.

  ‘I know how he feels,’ he said.

  I told Mr Booker how sad it was to watch my father tormenting my mother the way he did.

  ‘He can’t help himself,’ I said. ‘He gets off on it.’

  I told him my mother had given up trying to resist him because he was so relentless and because she was so tired.

  ‘Do you think if we were married we would be different from everyone else?’ I said.

  Mr Booker reached into his jacket for his hipflask and took a long sip of whisky, then he offered it to me and I did the same. When I looked up at him he was staring out the window in a desperate kind of way, as if he’d lost something and couldn’t think where to start looking for it.

  ‘Will you get the sack?’ I said.

  He told me to stop talking rubbish and got out of the car to open my door. Then he helped me out and we stood on the grass for a moment holding each other and I told him I would wait for him for as long as it took if that was what he wanted me to do.

  ‘How corny is that?’ I said.

  He kissed me then with the sun going down over the houses and the air turning cold.

  ‘I can’t marry you,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me something I don’t already know,’ I said.

  I waited for Mr Booker to say he didn’t want to see me any more. I realised that was what I was always trying to prepare for because I knew Mr Booker wasn’t strong, and now that the cleaner had seen us I thought he would probably decide not to take the risk of us being found out. It was dangerous, and he had more to lose now.

  ‘Do you think she’ll report you?’ I said the next time I saw him alone.

  ‘Unlikely,’ he said.

  ‘What if she does?’ I said. ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’

  ‘I lose my job, Mrs Booker leaves me, you and me run away to Acapulco, I sell my body to keep us in tortillas.’

  ‘What do I do?’

  ‘You’re happy for a while, then you’re bored and restless, and that’s when you leave me for a younger man.’

  ‘I never would,’ I said.

  ‘You say that now,’ he said.

  We were out in the country, lying on a picnic blanket. Mr Booker had driven Lorraine and Mrs Booker and me to the country races and they were down near the track where they could see the horses close up. It was a cold, brilliant day and the air was so thin we could see for miles into the distance where the hills and valleys were bare and bleached, like giant knucklebones.

  ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ I said.

  And then Mr Booker leaned across and took hold of my face with both hands and kissed me long and hard on the lips, which was a stupid thing to do because at that very moment Mrs Booker and Lorraine were heading back up the grassy slope from the racetrack and they both saw him, and after that they saw me kiss Mr Booker back, which was even worse.

  The silence that followed was like nothing I had ever experienced. It came mainly from Mr Booker. When he looked up from where we were sitting and saw his wife so close he went into a trance, like a dog playing dead, not daring to move a muscle, not even to breathe.

  these foolish things

  Nothing was said in the car going home, not even by Lorraine. Everything was saved up for later. Not that I was there to hear it. I made up a version of what happened when the Bookers got home after dropping Lorraine and me off, and I ran it through my mind like a piece of film to occupy me in the long dark days that followed.

  I can imagine Mrs Booker would have done all the talking while Mr Booker sat deep in his chair, sipping his bottomless drink, and saying absolutely nothing in his own defence. What could he say? What was there to add to Mrs Booker’s ferocious outburst, the product of weeks and months and years of despair, I don’t know who you are any more. You disgust me. I think you need professional help. Say something. Christ. No, that’s right. You just sit there and pretend it’s all going to go away. What kind of a man are you anyway?

  Now there’s a question to think about, Mr Booker must have said to himself. And the answer must have come to him not long after that, which is why he rang me to ask me to wait for him after work the next night because he had something important to say.

  I was prepared, but that didn’t help me.

  ‘How long is a while?’ I said. We were in his car. He was driving me home from the cinema where we’d watched the last ten minutes of Tokyo Story together.

  ‘Until I sort something out,’ he said.

  He drove me up to the top of the hill behind my mother’s house where there was a kiosk and we had some coffee inside where it was over-heated and there was a view of the town. I thought of making Mr Booker promise he would leave Mrs Booker by the time I finished school, or at least before the baby was born, so there would be some definite date we would both know was coming. But then I decided not to say anything because this might be the last time I would see Mr Booker for a while and I didn’t want to spoil the occasion.

  ‘Can I call you?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Will you call me?’ I said.

  Mr Booker didn’t answer. He just stared out the window at the city lights, which were shinier than normal because of the cold. They looked like a mirror that had shattered into a million pieces.

  ‘Isn’t life disappointing,’ I said. It was a line from Tokyo Story, and it made Mr Booker smile.

  ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,’ he said.

  The next weekend Monty Braithwaite turned up uninvited at my mother’s house on his way to pick up his wife from her place in the country. It was Sunday lunchtime. My mother asked him in and offered him some of the leek soup she had made that morning. The weather had turned freezing and my mother had ordered firewood in and asked my father to stack it out the back along the laundry wall.

  ‘I’ll let Victor know you’re here,’ she said, casting me a glance that said she might never come back.

  With his greying moustache and wild eyebrows Monty looked like a wolfhound. When he took out his pipe and barked at me to find him an ashtray I leapt to attention and did as I was told.

  ‘Remind me who you are,’ he said as I put the ashtray down in front of him. He had never been interested in us as children. He’d been visiting my father on and off for twenty years and never learned our names, but now that I was older he looked me over like I was livestock.

  ‘Martha,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve grown,’ he said.

  Over lunch he quizzed my father about his plans, while my mother served up the soup with some warm bread.

  ‘I don’t make plans,’ my father said. ‘You know that. I go where the wind takes me.’

  ‘Well, you’re wasting your time in this backwater,’ said Monty.

  ‘Where do you suggest he go?’ said my mother.

  ‘Somewhere where he can put his talents to work,’ said Monty.

  My father smiled and spooned more soup into his mouth. This was the reason he liked Monty, because he seemed to think my father had hidden abilities that nobody else could see.

  ‘Asia,’ Monty said. ‘That’s where the future lies. I’ve got a few
fingers in a few pies over there.’

  My father’s eyes brightened. He stared at my mother with a kind of smugness as if all along he’d known Monty would come to his rescue like this. It was just a matter of time.

  My mother offered Monty some salad and asked after his wife.

  ‘She’s taken up art,’ said Monty.

  ‘What kind of work does she do?’ said my mother.

  Monty explained that his wife bought art, rather than making it herself.

  ‘She has an eye,’ he said.

  Then he turned to me and asked me what I was going to do with my life.

  ‘I have no idea,’ I said.

  ‘Any admirers?’ he said, his hunting-dog eyes boring into me from under the shade of his eyebrows.

  ‘Dozens,’ I said.

  And then I excused myself, claiming I had homework to do. I only came out when my mother called me to say goodbye and I stood on the driveway with my parents and waved to the back of the vintage Rover Monty drove with the number plate that read 4 ME.

  ‘That man couldn’t lie straight in bed,’ said my mother.

  ‘You misjudge him,’ said my father. ‘His intentions are good.’

  He might have been talking about himself.

  On the way back to the house he put his arm around my mother’s waist and tried to tickle her and she let him, even giggling like somebody much younger than she was. It made me sick to watch them. I wanted to slap him.

  My father grew restless after that. He was always coming into the house to see if there was someone at home he could talk to.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ he said.

  ‘Out,’ I said.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said.

  I asked him why he wanted to know and he said he had something he wanted to discuss.

  ‘Discuss away,’ I said.

  He told me Monty had passed along some contacts he had in Hong Kong, in the transportation business. Small airlines nobody had ever heard of that flew cargo. He said he thought he had a chance to get his career back on track if he played his cards right.

  ‘Go for it,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want to go alone,’ he said. ‘I want my family with me. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.’

  I told him I didn’t think that was going to work and he asked me why not.

  ‘We haven’t been a family for years,’ I said. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘That’s no reason why we shouldn’t try to make up for lost time,’ he said.

  Later when I told my mother what my father had said she asked me what I thought she should do.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t,’ she said. ‘Either I say I’ll go, and then I’m responsible if it doesn’t work out because I supported the idea. Or I stay here, and then I’m responsible for it not working out because I didn’t support it.’

  I told her I thought she should do what she wanted to do and not worry about pleasing my father.

  ‘How clear-sighted you are,’ she said. She’d been drinking gin. She always had one or two, sometimes more while she was cooking dinner. She said it helped her to relax.

  ‘Hong Kong might be fun,’ she said.

  ‘Have another drink, Mum,’ I said.

  Then I told her to turn the oven off because I could smell the chicken burning.

  Of course they didn’t go. My mother couldn’t because she had to work and my father didn’t have the money to fly to Hong Kong if there was no guarantee of a job there so he stayed on in the caravan for another month then returned it to the rental company. After that he moved into a different, cheaper motel, this time on the north side of town. He said it was because of the cold but I knew it was because my mother had told him he couldn’t stay parked in the garden forever.

  ‘She’s ashamed of me,’ he said. ‘She thinks my presence lowers the tone of the neighbourhood.’

  ‘She’s right,’ I said. ‘It does.’

  And then I told him I thought his problem was that he was bored. I said I thought he should try to find some purpose in life.

  ‘You make it sound so easy,’ he said.

  ‘Other people manage,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve been thinking I missed my vocation,’ he said. ‘I should have been an actor.’

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard him say this. He had often decided that acting was his true calling. My mother always agreed. She told him she thought he had the kind of temperament that made pretending to be other people easier than being who you really were. He had a powerful imagination, she said, but he’d never found a use for it.

  ‘Why don’t you take some classes?’ I said.

  ‘I just might do that,’ he said.

  Which meant nothing. Instead he enrolled in law at the university when they advertised mid-year entry and he never even went to the first class.

  I missed Mr Booker more than I thought possible. The whole town felt deserted without him. It was a ghost town anyway, especially in the winter because nobody ever walked anywhere so the streets were empty. But now it was worse, like some kind of plague had wiped out half the population.

  For days on end I moped around trying to get used to not seeing the Bookers. My mother had heard the whole story of the kiss at the racetrack from Lorraine, but she never said anything to me until the one time I asked her what she really thought about me and Mr Booker. She said she had an opinion but it wasn’t one she was going to share with me. My mother wasn’t angry with me. I think she just felt that whatever had happened was nobody’s fault, and now that it had come to a head it was probably a good idea to end it and get on with more important things, like school.

  I couldn’t tell her how I felt about school. I couldn’t say how hard it was to concentrate in class with my head all tangled, or how bored I was by the whole build-up to the end of year exams.

  ‘It’s so unimportant,’ I told her. ‘They make it out to be this huge thing, but it’s not. What does it matter if I fail?’

  ‘It matters to me,’ she said.

  ‘So I’m studying for you?’ I said.

  ‘That’s not what I said,’ she said.

  But it was what she meant. She was practically begging me to do this one thing for her so that she wouldn’t feel she’d ruined my life by letting Victor come back, then leave again. Also it was her way of saying that whatever had happened with Mr Booker was my problem as long as it didn’t interfere with my future.

  I told her she didn’t have to worry because I wasn’t going to fail.

  ‘Just do your best,’ she said.

  ‘I am,’ I said.

  Lorraine told Geoff about Mr Booker and me as well. I knew that because I went to a party at Geoff ’s house one night and ended up talking with him and his housemate Damon in the kitchen. Damon was a poet. He said he was writing a verse novel about sex.

  ‘You might pick up some lines,’ said Geoff nudging me in the ribs, ‘to use on your boyfriend Mr Booker.’

  I blushed and told him not to believe everything he heard about me.

  ‘Is he a good fuck?’ said Geoff.

  ‘Good enough,’ I said, my face burning.

  Geoff smiled at me then and put his arm around my shoulder.

  ‘Because I’m told I’m only poor to average.’

  ‘Maybe you and Mr Booker could swap notes,’ I said.

  ‘Or maybe you and me could get a bit of practice,’ he said.

  I laughed at him and stole a sip of his wine then I went into the next room and looked for somewhere to sit down because my head was drumming from too much drink and I felt sick.

  Eventually I called Mr Booker at work to see if he wanted to meet up sometime, just for a coffee. I tried to sound like I was making a social call, but as soon as I heard Mr Booker’s voice on the line my breathing stopped and I couldn’t get enough air.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he said.

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I’m go
ing nuts here.’

  He said I could come to the university to see him before school if I wanted, but not in his office. He suggested the café on the edge of campus where he had his coffee and fags in the mornings.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, don’t you go t’anking me now,’ he said, pretending he was Irish.

  And that’s where I found him, reading the newspaper, wearing the white suit he had on when I first met him, the one he called his rabbit suit. He liked to take an imaginary fob watch out of the pocket and mutter to himself how late it was. I stopped outside the window and watched him, wishing suddenly that I had changed out of my dung-coloured sports uniform. He looked up without seeing me, and for a moment I froze on the spot because I thought he must have forgotten who I was, until he saw me and stared at me and I knew he remembered.

  He asked me if I’d had breakfast and I told him I hadn’t had time so he went and bought me some raisin toast and a hot chocolate.

  ‘You shouldn’t skip meals,’ he said, carrying the food back to the table on a tray. I watched him pour a splash of whisky into his coffee and slide his hipflask back into his breast pocket.

  ‘How have you been?’ I said.

  ‘Like the proverbial whore’s drawers,’ he said. ‘And you?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  ‘Nice hat,’ he said.

  I immediately hid my sports hat. I told him we had to wear hats if it was a Phys Ed day, which it was. I said we were doing practice for the athletics carnival.

  ‘I’m in the long jump,’ I said.

  I could tell Mr Booker wasn’t interested because he was watching me talk but he wasn’t listening to what I was saying.

  ‘Are you free at lunchtime?’ he said.

  ‘I could be,’ I said.