Me and Mr Booker Read online

  it’s lovely down in the woods today

  Mr and Mrs Booker showed up an hour early on Christmas Day with a bottle of champagne and a basket full of presents. Lorraine had already left to drive to Sydney with Geoff so there was only me, my mother and Rowena at home.

  ‘It was too quiet at our place,’ said Mrs Booker. ‘So we thought we’d just come over.’

  We were all still in our pyjamas but we opened the champagne anyway and started drinking, then Mr Booker said I should get dressed so he could drive me down to the pine forest to get a tree because there was nowhere to put the presents if we didn’t have a tree.

  ‘You don’t have an axe,’ said Mrs Booker.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said. ‘They’re selling trees by the side of the road.’

  ‘That was yesterday,’ she said.

  Mr and Mrs Booker stared at each other in a sad way.

  ‘We won’t be long,’ Mr Booker said.

  ‘We need fags,’ said Mrs Booker.

  I told her I’d remember the fags, and was there anything else she needed? She shook her head and watched me get up from the sofa where I’d been sitting next to Mr Booker while he held my hand.

  ‘Your cousin gets more gorgeous every day,’ Mrs Booker said to Rowena, who was standing cradling the baby and making her giggle by pretending to drop her then catching her again, which was a game the baby couldn’t get enough of.

  Rowena glanced at me as I left the room to get changed. ‘I like Martha’s hair,’ she said, and then explained that I wasn’t her cousin, but it was a mistake a lot of people made. ‘My father was a late starter,’ she said.

  ‘The bowl-cut was our idea,’ said Mr Booker.

  When I came back into the room Mrs Booker had Amy on her knee and was staring hard at her while the baby tried to grab hold of her necklace. Everybody watched for a minute without saying anything and then Mr Booker came and lifted me off the ground.

  ‘We’re eloping,’ he said. ‘We’ll send you a postcard from Rio.’

  Then he danced out of the house with me in his arms and carried me all the way to the car in the street outside.

  We drove up behind the pine forest and sat in the car looking at the sheep paddocks over the other side of the hill where there were no houses. It was burning hot and there was almost no wind, just a stirring sometimes that made the long grass shiver. A fire had broken out on a ridge in the distance sending smoke up in a grey column that flattened out at the top and swerved over like it was avoiding something.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ said Mr Booker.

  ‘Happy Christmas to you,’ I said. ‘Where’s my present?’

  He reached across and pulled me to him and kissed the top of my head.

  We got out of the car and walked down to where there was a gate with a stile, and on the other side of that a dark track lined with pine trees. Mr Booker climbed over the fence and I followed him. It was cooler in the shade and the ground was softer where the trees had dropped needles in layers so thick they formed a carpet.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ I said.

  ‘A tree,’ said Mr Booker. ‘Look for a tree.’

  ‘They’re all too big,’ I said. There were rows and rows of trees all around us, all of them fifty feet high and so thickly planted there wasn’t any sky showing between their branches when you looked up.

  ‘Look for a small one,’ said Mr Booker.

  We followed the track for a while and then came to a dead end where the trees marched down a hillside into a gully.

  ‘Your call, Bambi,’ said Mr Booker. ‘We plunge into the woods or we go home empty-handed.’

  ‘They’re going to wonder what we’ve been doing all this time,’ I said.

  ‘I wonder that myself,’ he said. Then he headed down into the gully in his Italian leather boots and again I followed.

  At the bottom we sat down to rest on a fallen log and stared into the forest that fanned out around us in every direction like a maze.

  ‘Do you know the way out of here?’ I said. It was so quiet in the trees that our voices sounded too loud, like they were echoing back and forth in the branches.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I thought you did.’

  He said we should stay the night and hope the search party found us in the morning, and I told him I didn’t think they’d know where to look.

  ‘You should have dropped breadcrumbs,’ he said.

  ‘This is my fault now?’ I said. He must have thought I was angry or frightened because he put his arm around my shoulder and told me a joke.

  ‘What’s round and really violent?’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  ‘A vicious circle,’ he said.

  He took out his hipflask and drank from it before handing it to me.

  ‘I don’t think I can do this any more,’ he said.

  I handed him back his hipflask and watched him take another mouthful.

  ‘Do what?’ I said.

  ‘Skulk around.’

  I didn’t say anything. I was watching the ants at my feet scrambling in and out of a hole in the ground as if they were running out of time. I shifted some dirt over the mouth of the hole with my foot to see if that would slow them down.

  ‘Do you think we should stop?’ I said.

  He looked at me and shook his head. He said he couldn’t stop now even if he wanted to, but at the same time he couldn’t start lying to Mrs Booker because that was something he had promised himself he would never do.

  ‘Does she know?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  I didn’t for a moment see how that could be true.

  ‘Do you want me to tell her?’ I said. I was joking but he didn’t think it was funny.

  ‘Knock knock,’ I said.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he said.

  ‘Have you forgotten me already?’

  Then I took his hand and pushed it up under my blouse so he was holding my breast.

  ‘You deserve better,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck that,’ I said.

  Then he told me not to be coarse and put his mouth over mine so I couldn’t talk.

  There was a part of the ground that wasn’t as dusty as everywhere else. Mr Booker took off his suit and hung it over the branch of a tree and I folded my clothes next to his. Then we lay down on the pine needles and kissed some more and I started to cry, not because I was sad but because I knew that if Mr Booker decided he didn’t want to see me any more there would be nothing I could do to stop him.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he said, licking the tears from my face.

  ‘Screw you,’ I said.

  He was rough with me then in a way that he hadn’t ever been before. He flipped me over and pushed himself into me from behind and he told me to say I was his and nobody else’s.

  ‘I’m yours,’ I said.

  ‘Say it again,’ he said. ‘Louder.’

  I said it again, loud enough that my voice echoed in the trees, and he said my name over and over.

  ‘Martha,’ he said. ‘Christ. Martha.’

  And then I turned over and he lay down and I asked him if he liked it with me on top and he shut his eyes.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ he said.

  ‘Like this?’ I said, as I straddled him. He opened his eyes and looked at me like he didn’t know where he was. I had never seen anyone look so lost before.

  It was nearly an hour before we got back to the house. We came in dragging the branch we had broken off a fallen tree and took our shoes off at the door because they were so dusty. Mrs Booker was playing the piano. She looked up and smiled at us but she didn’t say anything. And that’s when I realised she must know why we were late because she stood up and walked straight past us.

  It wasn’t until she got to the doorway into the dining room that she turned around and wouldn’t look at me, only at Mr Booker.

  ‘We were starting to worry,’ she said. She had her glass in her hand and as she leaned back against the doorframe she let it tip
and spill red wine down the front of her dress. She stared down at the stain and tried to wipe it away but that only made it worse.

  ‘We couldn’t see the wood for the trees,’ said Mr Booker.

  ‘I want to go home,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Mr Booker. ‘We only just got here.’

  ‘I want to go home to England,’ she said. ‘Where it’s cold and there’s snow.’ Then she slid down the doorframe and sat on the floor and Mr Booker had to get her up and put her to bed in Lorraine’s room where he sat with her for half an hour. My mother took him in a drink then came back and told us Mrs Booker was raving.

  ‘I think it’s the baby that’s upset her,’ said my mother. ‘She’s talking about the baby.’

  ‘She’s a drunk,’ said Rowena.

  ‘There’s that too,’ said my mother.

  We didn’t wake Mrs Booker for lunch. We sat at the dining table, my mother, her cousin, Mr Booker and me and we opened our crackers and put on our party hats and ate and drank, while Amy sat on the floor and played with her Christmas presents.

  Occasionally she looked up at us and, laughing, waved her hands in the air and we waved back, and although it was just the five of us it was like we were an ordinary family.

  ‘The middle classes at play,’ said Mr Booker, raising his champagne glass in a toast.

  ‘I wonder what the poor people are doing,’ said my mother. I had never had a Christmas like that, where my mother was happy. It was our first year without my father. Every other year my mother was nervous in case my father decided to make trouble. He hated Christmas. He said it was an American propaganda exercise designed to make people spend money on more crap they didn’t need. Birthdays were the same and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

  ‘You’re in thrall to this terrible delusion of autonomy, when really you are all slaves to the might of the corporations that rule you,’ he told us.

  He never gave presents because he said he couldn’t afford them.

  ‘Your mother, on the other hand, has money to burn.’

  My mother gave us books every Christmas and birthday, and clothes when we needed them, but even these gifts my father resented. He said my mother spoiled us. He said she confused material possessions with love.

  I asked him one Christmas what he thought love was if you didn’t show it sometimes, and he said the love he had for us didn’t need to be demonstrated.

  ‘How do we know it’s there?’ I said.

  ‘You don’t,’ he said. ‘It’s like the love of God.’

  I asked him if he believed in God and he said no, and when I laughed at him he sent me to my room.

  The worst Christmas we ever had was the time we came back east from South Australia. My mother took a house for a week at Church Point near where her sister and our cousins were staying for the summer holidays. My father had quit his job as a crop-duster pilot and my mother and he were looking for a business they could run together so we wouldn’t have to travel around so much. They found a gift shop for sale and my mother bought it with the money she inherited after my grandfather died. The plan was that after the Christmas break my mother and father were going to to run it together, except that on Christmas Eve my father said he’d changed his mind. He said nothing and no one was ever going to chain him to the life of a shopkeeper. He told my mother she was welcome to sign up for a life sentence of drudgery but he had other plans.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘What are they?’

  He told her they were as yet unconfirmed, that he had a few feelers out, that Monty Braithwaite was cooking something up and would have a firm offer within the next fortnight.

  Monty Braithwaite was my father’s only friend. He was a pilot and a businessman and my father had known him for years and had never believed the rumours that he was a criminal and a cheat.

  ‘Monty inspires envy,’ my father told us. ‘Because he has independent means.’

  My brother asked if that meant Uncle Monty was rich.

  ‘His wife is,’ said my father. ‘Which is the next best thing. She’s a King,’ he said. ‘Of cake-mix fame.’

  The next day we went to my Aunt Frances and Uncle Harvey’s place for Christmas lunch. Their beach house was bigger than ours and had a swimming pool and an ocean view. My father said he didn’t want to have lunch with my aunt and uncle. He said they were dull and self-opinionated, and when he saw the house he said it looked like some drug baron’s seaside hideaway.

  ‘But then your sister never did have any taste,’ he told my mother. ‘She confuses the cost of things with their value.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said my mother. ‘If you’re going to make trouble, go home.’

  ‘Would that I had a home to go to,’ said my father. He had spent the morning complaining that my mother was wasting money renting a beach house when we still had nowhere to live.

  My mother had told him to help her look because every other time she’d found us a house he’d invented a reason to hate it.

  ‘I could live in a caravan,’ he said. ‘And be perfectly happy.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you?’ said my mother.

  They stayed away from each other all through lunch, my mother up one end of the table next to her sister and my father up the other end next to my Uncle Harvey.

  ‘So how’s the world of light fittings?’ my father asked my uncle. ‘Illuminate me.’

  I liked my Uncle Harvey. He was cheery and loud, with a face like a baby whose hair had gone prematurely white. If I came near him he would tickle me and do magic tricks with a dollar coin that he let me keep, and down at the beach he would stand with me in the surf and help me jump over the waves, which is something my father refused to do because he couldn’t swim and hated the sun.

  ‘Some of us have to work for a living,’ said Harvey.

  That was when my father decided to start a fight. But before he did, he winked at my mother. She refused to look at him, staring into her drink instead.

  ‘I absolutely see your point,’ said my father. ‘But don’t you ever wonder what it’s all for?’

  ‘Not really,’ said my uncle.

  ‘Why does that not surprise me?’ said my father.

  Across the table my brother was watching my father with a kind of pleading expression because he knew what was coming and wanted him to stop embarrassing us in front of our cousins, since this was only going to give them something else to feel superior about, along with their new toys and the pool and the house with the ocean view.

  ‘I don’t see the point in over-analysing why it is that some people have more than others, or that some people are better looking than others, or that some people get ahead while other people fall behind,’ said Uncle Harvey.

  ‘Why would you,’ said my father, ‘when clearly the system is serving you so well?’

  ‘You seem to think there’s something wrong with how well I’m doing,’ said Uncle Harvey. He was still smiling but his eyes had lost their twinkle.

  ‘Not at all,’ said my father. ‘My only worry is that people like you imagine their success in life is due to talent and hard work.’

  ‘I don’t imagine it,’ said Uncle Harvey. ‘I know it. I see it every day.’

  ‘It doesn’t occur to you that all you’re doing is exercising a privilege you never earned, in order to perpetuate a system that rewards unearned privilege?’

  ‘I never took you for a communist, Victor,’ said Uncle Harvey.

  My father laughed out loud, but it wasn’t a real laugh, it was more like a howl. He looked around the table and seemed to think everybody else should be laughing too. Except that nobody was. Only my father and Uncle Harvey. And uncle Harvey was laughing in a way that made him look angrier than I’d ever seen him before.

  ‘But of course that has never stopped you,’ he told my father, ‘from coming round empty-handed to see us and drinking all our booze and eating all our food and generally having a good time at our expense.’

  Uncle H
arvey turned to my mother then and told her he was sorry, but some things had to be said, and she agreed and said she was sorry too and that we would leave now so that they could have their Christmas lunch in peace.

  My aunt said there was no need for us to go, but my father said there was every reason, because he’d been insulted by bigger and better people than Harvey before now.

  ‘Just goes to show,’ he said. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch.’

  ‘Sit down and finish your meal,’ said Aunt Frances.

  My father told us all to stop eating and put down our knives and forks. Then he marched us out of the house and into the car with my mother bringing up the rear with my aunt.

  ‘At least take some food home with you,’ my Aunt Frances said.

  ‘I’d rather starve,’ my father called out, then he climbed into the car and slammed the door shut.

  My mother told this story to Mr Booker and then I told him how after we left Uncle Harvey’s house my father had driven us back to our house but halfway there my brother and I had started to squabble so he’d pulled up and left us by the side of the road.

  ‘I was eight,’ I said, ‘and Eddie was ten. It took us three hours to walk home. I crapped my pants. I had to be hosed down.’

  ‘We were lucky they weren’t kidnapped,’ said my mother. ‘He hid the car keys so I couldn’t go back to get them.’

  ‘You’re making it up,’ said Mr Booker.

  ‘I wish,’ said my mother. She had brightened up over lunch and decided to enjoy herself because Mr Booker was there and she always blossomed in his company, just like the rest of us.

  ‘It’s a wonder any of us in this family are sane,’ she said, then crossed her eyes and tried to join her fingers at the tips but missed.

  Mr Booker laughed and reached under the table to squeeze my knee, then crept his hand up higher so that his fingers were inside me.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ I said.

  When Mrs Booker woke up she went straight into the front room and started playing the piano and I took her in a drink and a cigarette and sat down beside her. She had a thin, breathy voice but she liked to sing so we sat together and sang songs from my mother’s Christmas songbook and when the others heard us they all came into the room to listen, except Mr Booker left after ‘The First Noel’. When I went to look for him he was out in the garden lying on the sunlounge with his eyes shut and when I came close he opened them and stared at me and smiled his lizard smile.