Me and Mr Booker Read online

  My father didn’t know what to do now he didn’t have my mother. My mother had never expected him to stay around after they split up, because he had never wanted to come to our town in the first place. He said it was my mother’s fault for dragging him there because back then he didn’t have a job and she did. He told me the place suited my mother’s suburban small-mindedness perfectly, but for him it was a prison.

  ‘Leave town,’ I said. ‘What’s stopping you?’

  He couldn’t leave, he said, because he had nowhere else to go, and because my mother and he still had unfinished business and he wasn’t going to just walk away without setting the record straight.

  I told him I thought he was wasting his time.

  ‘If I want your opinion I’ll ask for it,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you just get out while you can?’ I said. ‘You hate it here. All you ever used to talk about was how much you hated it here.’

  ‘I’ve mellowed,’ he said.

  I pulled into the car park at the back of my father’s motel. His Jaguar was parked in its usual spot. He explained that the gearbox was playing up and he couldn’t afford to fix it.

  ‘I’m thinking of asking your mother for a handout,’ he said, ‘but I suppose I’d have to queue up behind you and your brother.’

  I didn’t say anything. I parked the car and got out to help him carry the chairs up to his room on the second floor. It was down the end of a long corridor that reeked of mould. A lot of the rooms in the motel were for people like my father who paid a monthly rent and were allowed to stay as long as they liked. It was just the same as the hostel where my brother had lived in Sydney when he first moved there to study. It had the same thin doors and narrow rooms, although my father’s was on a corner, which he paid more for. He was proud of it because it gave him some status.

  He opened the door and held it for me while I manoeuvred the chairs into the room.

  ‘Where do you want them?’ I said.

  ‘By the window,’ he said.

  He cleared a space, kicking away a week’s worth of mail with his foot.

  ‘The cleaner has instructions not to touch my papers,’ he said.

  I looked around at the unmade bed and the pile of dirty clothes on the floor behind the door.

  ‘Or anything else,’ I said.

  ‘Ha ha,’ said my father. ‘Very funny.’

  He asked me if I wanted to stay a while because he had something he wanted to show me but I told him I couldn’t. I said I had things to do.

  ‘Like what?’ he said.

  I told him I was calling in at the cinema on my way home for a Christmas job interview.

  ‘Put in a good word for me,’ he said.

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.

  ‘I don’t think they take people your age,’ I said.

  ‘How old do you have to be?’

  ‘Sixteen,’ I said.

  ‘Just let me shave,’ he said.

  He walked me back to the car park and before I climbed into the car he put his arms around me and patted me on the back as if I was a kid or a friendly dog. I recognised the smell of him, of his sweat and his unwashed clothes.

  ‘See you round like a doughnut,’ he said, which made me want to cry. It was the hopeful way he said it and the way he stood waving to me as I backed out of the car park and drove away.

  When I reported this conversation back to my mother she laughed the way she did whenever we talked about my father, as if it hurt her to laugh at all.

  ‘He’s going to haunt me,’ she said. ‘For the rest of his days. He’s going to make it his mission in life.’

  ‘Then why don’t we leave?’ I said, ever hopeful.

  ‘Because he’d follow us,’ she said. ‘Wherever we went.’

  She knew what she was talking about. She had tried to leave my father before when Eddie and I were small but he had come after us and talked her out of it, and because he could be persuasive when he tried she’d moved back in with him. This had happened more than once. It was something my mother looked back on with shame, as if my father was some kind of sick habit she was never going to kick.

  ‘When I think of all the years I wasted being miserable,’ she said, ‘it makes me want to weep.’

  ‘You’re too nice,’ I told her.

  ‘Nice has nothing to do with it,’ she said. ‘I’m a fool.’

  The thing he complained about most was money. He didn’t like it that my mother had more than he did because her parents had died young and left her some.

  ‘People like you,’ he told my mother, ‘have everything handed to you on a platter, whereas people like me have to struggle to make their way in the world.’

  He told me I was just like my mother, soft, spoiled. He told me I didn’t know I was born.

  ‘I left home at fifteen,’ he said. ‘From that day on I had to fend for myself entirely.’

  ‘Good for you,’ I said.

  I was never sure if he was telling the truth because sometimes he said other things about himself that made it sound as if he couldn’t remember how old he was when he’d left home, or where he’d grown up, or what school he’d been to, or where he’d started flying. It was as if he changed the story so that it would mean something different every time.

  I told my mother I thought he was mad and she said I was probably right. I said it wasn’t only what he said, but the way he said it. It made my mother go very quiet and say only what he wanted to hear. It was sick.

  Even then her staying quiet like that would sometimes make him fly into a rage. When this happened I left the house because I couldn’t stand the sound of him shouting. But I didn’t go too far away; I wanted to be there in case he hit her again. I could still hear him from outside, just like half the neighbourhood could hear him. I imagined Alice listening through her bedroom window across the street and feeling pleased with herself, because her father would never say those things to her mother.

  My father said she was the reason his whole life had come apart. He said he wished he’d never set eyes on her. He said she was ugly.

  ‘You’re one of these women who look as though life has been one long ordeal,’ he said.

  ‘Imagine that,’ said my mother.

  In the end she’d given him half of what the house was worth that winter and told him to go.

  He moved out the weekend I went skiing with Alice and her family for the last time. That was the weekend we had to walk into the mountains in a blizzard and I nearly didn’t make it because it was dark and I was tired and I wanted to lie down in the snow instead of trudging along the road in the wind with my boots full of ice. If it hadn’t been for Alice’s father piggy-backing me all the way to the lodge, I would have curled up by the side of the road and died.

  Later my mother told me she had never been so scared of my father. She said he had waited until Sunday to start packing. And then he’d asked if she minded him staying on for a few more days.

  ‘I told him I wanted him gone before dinner.’

  She said he’d turned around without a word and walked off down the hallway and that’s when she knew it was finished.

  ‘It was the strangest thing I have ever done,’ she said.

  ‘Marrying him was pretty weird,’ I said.

  I said it to make her laugh but her eyes filled up with tears and she had to dry them on her sleeve.

  That was when I realised how hard it was going to be for my mother to hold out against Victor, because she felt so guilty for what she’d done. I don’t know why. She knew he deserved everything he got, even at the same time as she tried to forgive him for treating her like a dog. That was the power he had over her: he mixed things up in her mind so that she couldn’t think straight.

  She blamed her schooldays. ‘They used to teach us that the meek will inherit the earth,’ she said. ‘But they never told us when.’

  I worked at the cinema most nights, except Sunday and Monday, from four in the afternoon until
after eleven. The only reason my mother let me take the job was because Mr Booker said he would pick me up from work and bring me home, which wasn’t really necessary but he insisted anyway since he had put me up for the job in the first place.

  ‘I take full responsibility for the child’s safety,’ he told my mother. ‘Trust me.’

  The cinema was at the university, which was near where the Bookers lived. It was an easy job. I sold tickets and candy and when there wasn’t anything else to do I watched films, which were mostly old arthouse re-runs. Sometimes if the Bookers had been out to dinner they would come to the cinema afterwards to say hello and wait for me in the upstairs stalls where there were always spare seats. The three of us would sit in the dark, with Mr Booker drunk in the middle and acting up. He liked to put his arms around the two of us and open his mouth like one of those clowns at a funfair so we could feed him popcorn.

  If Mrs Booker left to go to the toilet, which she always did, Mr Booker would take his hand off my shoulder and put it on my thigh. Then he would creep it up and slide it inside my shirt while I watched the door so I could tell him when to stop. It was a dangerous game but that’s why he liked it so much. Maybe he was hoping he would get caught and that Mrs Booker would punish him somehow, because once when I told him to stop he didn’t and he sat through the last twenty minutes of The Graduate with his hand inside the back of my shirt. I don’t know if Mrs Booker knew it was there or not, or if she was too drunk to care.

  That was the first night I went home to the Bookers’ place to stay over. Mr Booker rang my mother to ask for her permission. He said he’d been drinking and wasn’t in a fit state to drive and he promised to have me home in the morning.

  ‘As God is my witness,’ he said, making the sign of the cross on his shirtfront. Then he handed me the phone.

  ‘Go back to bed, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Have fun,’ she said, sounding very far away. It was like she was already practising for when I left home.

  ‘See you in the morning,’ I told her. ‘Not too early.’

  Then Mrs Booker took the phone and sent kisses down the line with her lips puckered up and her eye makeup all smudged so she looked like a panda.

  Mr Booker helped her into their bed, then came and made up the living room sofa for me.

  ‘I hope it isn’t too lumpy,’ he said.

  He put on The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album and tried to teach me how to jive, but I wasn’t as good as Mrs Booker.

  ‘You’re a natural,’ Mr Booker told me.

  ‘Liar,’ I said.

  Before we went to bed he made us a pot of tea in the narrow kitchen and we sat at the dining-room table under the yellow light of a crooked table lamp that belonged to the flat. While we drank our tea he told me they’d bought a house in a new suburb whose name he couldn’t remember.

  ‘It starts with an A,’ he said. ‘Anus? Arse End?’

  ‘When are you moving?’ I said.

  ‘In a month’s time,’ he said.

  ‘What are you going to call your cat?’ I said.

  ‘Puss,’ he said.

  ‘That’s original,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he said.

  He sipped his tea and stared into his cup as if there was something wrong with it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve never done this before.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I said, although I wasn’t really sure what he was talking about.

  ‘I should hope not,’ he said.

  He looked up at me then and smiled, with his eyes out of focus because of all the whisky he’d had. He looked like he was about to fall asleep sitting up.

  ‘Bedtime,’ I said.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said.

  He tucked me into bed like I was a baby then he lay down on top of the covers beside me, still wearing his clothes, and that’s how we slept until dawn when he woke me up and kissed me on the cheek before disappearing into the bedroom so he could wake up next to Mrs Booker.

  That morning they cooked me a big breakfast of egg-and-bacon sandwiches and freshly squeezed orange juice. They said they were planning to go shopping for clothes later and they wanted me to come with them, so I rang my mother and told her I was going to be home late.

  ‘The Bookers say I need some new clothes,’ I told her. ‘They say my old ones are ugly.’

  ‘We didn’t say that,’ they shouted down the phone.

  ‘But that’s what they think,’ I said.

  They took me to get my hair cut first at the place they went to. They told a girl called Tiffany to cut my hair the same length all the way round and give me a straight fringe then watched while she did as she was told.

  ‘Are they your parents?’ the girl asked.

  I turned to the Bookers and smiled and waited for them to answer the question.

  ‘Guardians,’ said Mrs Booker.

  ‘All care and no responsibility,’ said Mr Booker.

  ‘I’ve never met them before,’ I told Tiffany, who stared at me for a moment in the mirror, looking confused, then blushed for no reason.

  Edward, the owner of the salon, came across to see if the Bookers wanted anything while they waited. He was a big man dressed in clothes that were too tight.

  ‘What have we here?’ he said, looking at me.

  ‘Our new friend,’ said Mr Booker.

  Edward raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Does she have a brother?’ he said.

  ‘Just make the coffee,’ said Mr Booker then dismissed Edward with a little wave, which made him pout and turn on his heels, pretending to be offended.

  By the time he came back the girl was already drying my hair, making it sit straight all around my head in the same kind of bowl cut my mother had given me when I was ten. I could feel the hot air of the blower burning the back of my bare neck.

  ‘Happy?’ said the Bookers.

  ‘I look like Bambi,’ I said.

  So that was what they called me from then on.

  For the rest of the day I watched them try on clothes and shoes in one shop after another, but the only things they bought were a black blouse and skirt for me because they were half price and the Bookers said I would get years of wear out of them. I decided not to change back into my jeans and T-shirt and asked the shop assistant to pack them in a bag for me.

  ‘Black suits you,’ said Mrs Booker, looking me up and down. ‘It makes you look pale and interesting.’

  I curtsied and thanked them and suggested they let me buy them a drink since I was earning enough now to pay my own way occasionally.

  ‘You can’t be a kept woman,’ said Mr Booker, ‘if you start buying us drinks.’

  ‘Who makes up these rules?’ I said.

  ‘Me,’ said Mr Booker, grinning, so pleased with himself and the way we were all getting on that he put an arm around each of us and marched us out of the shops and back to the car calling out to strangers as we went.

  ‘Evening all,’ he said. ‘Have you ever seen a finer pair of females? Am I not the luckiest man alive?’

  In the end we stayed out drinking until after dark and then we all went back to my mother’s place where she made us dinner. My mother told the Bookers they were leading me astray taking me to bars and billiard halls, but Mr Booker told her it was to further my education and she should be so lucky.

  After she’d had a few drinks herself she sat down beside Mr Booker and put her arm around his shoulder. ‘Isn’t it lovely that we’ve all met each other,’ she said.

  ‘We don’t have much money but we do have fun,’ said Mr Booker. He reached out and took my mother’s free hand and raised it to his lips while he was staring at me. Mrs Booker had already gone into the front room where she liked to play my mother’s piano and sing. We could hear her from the dining room singing a song by Diana Ross. Mr Booker started to mime the words then covered my mother’s hand in kisses until she screamed with laughter.

  bambi down the rabbit hole
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  I had never seen my mother laugh like that before, as if she was young and didn’t care about anything. My father never made her laugh. Most of the time he complained about how glum she looked. He used to tell her it wouldn’t kill her to smile once in a while, and then she’d try and he’d sneer and ask her if that was the best she could do.

  My father must have seen me with the Bookers because a few days later there was a letter from him stuck under the doormat. On the front of the envelope he’d written PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL—DELIVERED BY HAND, and then underneath was my mother’s name ATTN: J.A.FISHER.

  She made me read it out loud to her while she peeled the prawns for the recipe she was trying from one of her new cookbooks. Since my father had left, my mother had started to change everything about herself including the food she ate. It was like she’d been pretending for a long time to be someone and now she’d decided it was time to discover who she really was.

  The letter started out sounding friendly.

  Dear Jessica,

  Thank you for the chairs. They add a bit of a homely touch to my unpretentious accommodation. I trust the loss of them hasn’t inconvenienced you in any way. Due to my current lack of regular employment I have had the time to sit in one or the other of them watching the passing parade and reflecting on how it was that you and I came to ever imagine that we could make each other ‘happy’, if that word retains any meaning.

  ‘Here we go,’ said my mother, removing the prawns’ digestive tracts one by one under the kitchen tap.

  ‘Do you want to hear it?’ I said. It wasn’t the first time my father had written her a letter, as opposed to the notes he left in the letterbox. He had written two or three a month since he left. They were all like this one, a couple of pages long, written in his jerky handwriting on both sides of the paper, with notes in the margins and sentences scratched out where he’d had second thoughts. This made them seem like he had written them in a hurry, except that with all their big words and flourishes I knew he had thought about them long and hard. It was like he was writing my mother a novel.