Me and Mr Booker Read online

  ‘What’s funny?’ I said.

  ‘It’s all too much,’ he said.

  He took my hand and kissed my fingers and told me I was lovely.

  ‘You’re a bit of all right yourself,’ I said, running my eyes over the whole stretched-out length of him.

  And then he said we should get married and I said I thought so too.

  ‘We should make babies,’ I said. ‘A girl for you and a boy for me.’

  Mr Booker threw his head back and let out a laugh then picked up his drink. I asked him how old he was and he told me he was thirty-four.

  ‘You look younger,’ I said.

  ‘How old do I look?’ he said.

  ‘Thirty-three,’ I said.

  He grinned in the wide way he grinned when he was drunk. It was like he wanted me to see how straight his teeth were.

  ‘Does it worry you?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘That I’m so ancient?’

  ‘I’m awake all night,’ I said.

  ‘I think your mother knows,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ I said. Then I leaned down to kiss him on the cheek and he took hold of my face and stared hard at me and asked if I had any idea what I was doing. I laughed and told him to stop asking me that question because what difference did it make if I did or I didn’t.

  ‘You’ll be the ruin of me,’ he said, his breath reeking of whisky.

  ‘You should have thought of that,’ I said, ‘before you took me to the woods and fucked me from behind.’

  He narrowed his eyes then, and opened his lips to slide his tongue around the edge of them like a cat cleaning feathers off its whiskers.

  ‘Did you like that?’ he said.

  ‘It was very nice,’ I said.

  ‘Shall we do it again?’ he said.

  I didn’t answer him. Instead I took hold of his earlobe in my teeth and bit down on it until he told me to stop.

  suicide is dangerous

  Three days after Christmas my father shot himself. At least that was what he told everyone. The only thing that saved him, he said, was the Jack Russell he was looking after for his friends. He didn’t even know it was there, he said. It had followed him all the way from the house as far as the dam without making a sound.

  ‘The moment I went to pull the trigger,’ he said, ‘it started yapping. Scared the living Christ out of me.’

  He told me it wasn’t something he had planned. It was just that after a couple of days alone in the farmhouse he had started to panic.

  ‘It was like I woke up one morning and everything turned black.’

  ‘What’s the dog’s name?’ I said. ‘Lucky?’

  My father didn’t smile. He had the side of his head bandaged where the bullet had grazed the skin and taken off the top of his ear. He said it felt like someone had set fire to his hair.

  ‘Bloody mongrel,’ he said. ‘Probably thought he was doing me a favour.’

  I asked my father what he had done then, and he said he’d thrown the gun in the dam and called an ambulance.

  ‘I was bleeding everywhere,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to ruin my friend’s car.’

  ‘What did your doctor say?’ I asked.

  He reached to the table by the side of the hospital bed and pulled open the drawer so he could show me the paper that came with his new pills. I pretended to read it but the type was too fine and most of the words were in foreign languages. I think he thought it would impress me with how serious his problem was.

  ‘I have a chemical imbalance in the brain,’ he said.

  ‘That’s a relief,’ I said. ‘I thought you were crazy.’

  He smiled in a lop-sided way because it hurt him to change his expression. He explained it might take a while before his dosage was sorted out but in the meantime he was happy just to stay in bed and be looked after by all the pretty nurses.

  My mother went to see him and said she thought he was looking better. She left messages for Eddie but he didn’t call back so she stopped trying.

  ‘He’s made a new friend,’ she said. ‘A fellow inmate.’

  ‘A woman?’

  ‘Thirtysomething,’ said my mother. ‘With two kids in foster care.’

  ‘So what does she see in Victor?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think it’s that kind of relationship,’ said my mother.

  ‘What kind of relationship is it?’ I said.

  ‘They take the same pills,’ she said.

  And then she told me she didn’t care so long as my father didn’t expect her to take him back because she had done that too many times before and it had always been a mistake and this time was no different.

  ‘I don’t even think he meant to kill himself,’ she said.

  I asked my father what he thought and he said my mother was probably right and then he talked about how he regretted being such a failure as a husband and father and how hard he had found it to compete with the woman my mother had turned into after she went back to work.

  ‘I don’t think she saw it as a competition,’ I said.

  ‘Well, that’s what it felt like,’ he said.

  He wanted to talk about my mother all the time then, about how she’d never supported him and had always white-anted his plans for a life on a bigger, better scale.

  ‘Your mother has no ambition,’ he said.

  I told him I didn’t want to hear it.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. You’ve always known what side your bread was buttered.’

  After that I stopped going to see him because he wasn’t saying anything on the new drugs that he hadn’t already said before on the old drugs, and because I didn’t want to meet his new girlfriend.

  ‘Her name’s Aggie,’ he said. ‘We came in on the same day. She tried to slit her wrists in the bath but her daughter found her just in time.’

  ‘Bummer,’ I said.

  When I told Mr Booker what had happened he laughed.

  ‘He what?’ he said.

  ‘He missed,’ I said.

  ‘Bollocks,’ he said.

  I told him I didn’t believe it either. We were in the car driving home from the cinema, just Mr Booker and me. I hadn’t seen Mrs Booker since Christmas but I’d talked to her on the phone and it was just like nothing had changed.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said to Mr Booker.

  ‘She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know,’ he said. ‘Which is pretty much par for the course.’

  He had decided we couldn’t go to motels any more because he was starting to be missed at work and because there was a lot of unpacking to do in the new house. Instead he drove me to a scenic tourist spot on the way home. It was up on top of a hill overlooking the houses and there were rocks there with spaces in between them wide enough to hide us. Mr Booker had brought a picnic blanket and some beer and told me we didn’t have very long while he helped me take my clothes off, which is when I could tell he was angry, but not with me.

  He came very fast and cried out, and then said he was sorry.

  ‘What for?’ I said.

  He pushed my fringe out of my eyes and asked me what I was doing wasting my time with him.

  ‘Isn’t there a queue of boys beating a path to your door?’

  ‘Not the last time I looked,’ I said.

  Afterwards, as we lay on the rocks smoking, I asked him if he thought of me while he was having sex with Mrs Booker and for a moment he went very quiet, which made me sorry I’d asked. The stone still had the heat of the day in it and when you stretched out your arms and legs it was like lying on the back of a sleeping animal. He sat up and finished his cigarette then flicked the butt out into the darkness.

  ‘You don’t care, do you,’ he said, laughing softly.

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘I just pretend I don’t.’ And then I sat up next to him and he put his arm around my shoulder and we stayed like that for a moment breathing in the heat. The air tasted of dust and dead grass
because it was so long since it had rained and up above us the moths were dancing in the arc of light thrown out by the streetlamp.

  I said I thought the town looked better at night, as if there were mysteries in it and he said he didn’t know what I was talking about.

  ‘Don’t you miss England?’ I said.

  ‘Never,’ said Mr Booker.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  He thought for a moment and then said that there was a pub he missed called the Fox and Hounds. It was opposite the church in the town square of the place where he was born and the publican’s name was Trevor Williams and he stuttered unless he was singing, so he sang everything. A pint of finest ale coming right up, and will there be anything for the young lady’s pleasure, if that’s not a rude question. Mr Booker said he would take me there one day.

  ‘You promise?’ I said.

  ‘I promise,’ he said.

  I asked him if he missed his family.

  ‘Never,’ he said.

  ‘Nobody?’

  ‘My dog Nelson,’ he said. ‘He died.’

  ‘What was so special about Nelson?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Mr Booker. ‘That was why I liked him. He had no expectations. Unlike my parents, who thought an education would see me rise out of the ranks of the great unwashed and reach the dizzying heights my cousin Andrew had reached, a job in a bank and a house in Putney.’

  I asked him whether his parents were happy he was a university teacher and he smiled.

  ‘Not especially,’ he said. ‘Now they wish I’d stayed in the village and taken over the bakery from my uncle Neville when he asked.’

  ‘I could help you run it,’ I said. ‘I have retail experience.’

  He looked at me then and told me that was the best idea I’d had all day, which for some reason gave me the feeling that there was a lot Mr Booker was never going to tell me, and that I was never going to tell him, but that it didn’t matter because it was only what happened from now on that had any real chance of making things better for anyone.

  ‘You’ve saved my life,’ he said.

  ‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve never said that to a single soul,’ he said.

  He heaved himself up and I watched him get dressed.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘It would be good if we could spend the whole night together,’ I said.

  Mr Booker didn’t say anything until we were back in the car, then he turned to me and said I should just wait and be patient for a couple more weeks because he was trying to think of a plan.

  ‘Just let me get Mrs Booker settled in her new house,’ he said.

  ‘And then what?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll tell you when I know,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not a plan,’ I said.

  He took my hand and kissed it and told me all he ever thought about was how to get us out of here and that I didn’t need to worry because everything was going to work out, and I said I thought so too, because if it didn’t I’d probably have to book in to the clinic where my father was and get some of whatever he was having.

  ‘That’s not funny,’ he said.

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ I said.

  We drank some whisky from his flask and he drove me back down the hill. All the way to the bridge he held my hand and made me change the gears while we listened to Paul Simon. And that’s when I said to Mr Booker that the kind of mysteries I had been talking about before were all the things that happened to people by accident, like being in the car on this particular night for no real reason when this song was playing, and how you would remember that for the next twenty years because it’s who you were and what you were doing and thinking about at that exact moment, and that all these random moments eventually add up to a life.

  ‘Quite right,’ he said and asked me to find him a cigarette because he was gasping for a fag. ‘Or as me old grandma used to say, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’

  My brother turned up the next day without telling anyone he was coming. Victor had been staying in a mental ward and refusing to leave for almost a month and my mother had decided it was probably better if Eddie didn’t know what had happened because there was nothing anyone could really do to help. And that was when Eddie must have finally got the message to come home. My mother was out. She was giving my father a lift back to his motel from the hospital because he’d phoned to tell her he didn’t have enough cash for a taxi.

  ‘How is he?’ said Eddie.

  ‘He’ll live,’ I said. ‘Unfortunately.’

  He told me not to talk about my father like that.

  ‘I’ll talk how I like,’ I said.

  He didn’t say anything. I handed him a cup of tea and asked him how long he was staying.

  ‘I’m not going back to New Guinea,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Time to move on,’ he said.

  I watched him drink his tea with both hands around the cup as if they were cold. Eddie’s hands were like my father’s, square with strong fingers, and he had my father’s womanish mouth. I didn’t know what else to say to him after that because I hadn’t seen him in over a year and he had never been easy to talk to in the first place.

  It was like he thought talking was a kind of wasted effort that he didn’t see the need for because it didn’t lead anywhere. The truth is I never liked it when Eddie came home. I always looked forward to it too much, so that when it happened I was inevitably disappointed. I asked him if he was hungry and he said he ate on the plane.

  ‘Mum’ll be pleased to see you,’ I said.

  ‘How do you know?’ he said. ‘She might not be.’

  He said this with a kind of sneer as if he wanted to start an argument. With his cropped hair and sunburn he looked more dangerous than I remembered him and his green eyes had narrowed somehow, maybe because he had lost so much weight and turned rangy.

  ‘She thinks you’re punishing her,’ I said.

  ‘Why would I be punishing her?’ he said.

  ‘You tell me,’ I said.

  When my mother came home and saw Eddie standing there she started to cry. She put her arms around him and held him and told him he should have said he was coming home so she could have been there to meet him.

  ‘It was a spur of the moment thing,’ he said. ‘I came to see Dad.’

  ‘He’s fine,’ said my mother. ‘I’ve just taken him back to his place.’

  She sat Eddie down then and said she just wanted to look at him because it was so long since she’d had the chance. He sat opposite her and let her look.

  ‘Are you home for good?’ she said.

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said.

  I drove him over to see my father because he’d never been there before and because I wanted the car after that to call in at the Bookers’ new house. Mrs Booker had phoned in the morning to say they had picked up their kitten and I should come over and see it when I had time because it was so sweet.

  ‘I’m calling her Baby,’ she said. ‘Because that’s what she is. She’s my substitute baby.’

  ‘I thought I was,’ I said.

  ‘Baby and you makes two,’ she said.

  Mr Booker came on the phone then and said he didn’t think the new cat was very bright because it didn’t answer to its name.

  ‘Maybe it’s deaf,’ I said.

  ‘Quite possibly,’ he said. I could tell he had been drinking from his voice. ‘How long will you be?’ he said, which sounded like he was begging.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ I said.

  It was never easy to tell what Eddie was thinking. He was so quiet in the car it was like sitting next to a corpse, except that a corpse doesn’t make a point of not saying anything. Eddie made a point of not saying anything about our mother and father splitting up. Maybe he wished it hadn’t happened. He probably thought it was a shameful thing and an embarrassment. I asked him his opinion on the way to Victor’s, as a way to b
reak the deathly silence. I said I thought it was for the best in the long run because they were making each other so unhappy.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ was all Eddie said. And then he went back to being a corpse and I kept driving in the slow lane like we were going to a funeral.

  I sat next to Eddie in my father’s room and we watched him make some coffee at the small hand basin in the corner. He still had his ear bandaged but otherwise he looked better than he had for a while because they had made him wash at the hospital and he’d had his hair cut.

  ‘At the insistence of my new squeeze,’ he said.

  ‘You gave us a fright,’ said my brother. My father had hardly looked at him since we’d arrived. It was like he didn’t remember who he was.

  ‘Not half the fright I gave myself,’ said my father.

  Then he told me again about Aggie, so Eddie would know who she was, and about how they’d met and how he’d since had the pleasure of meeting her two children.

  ‘Bethany and Blaine,’ he said. ‘Real cuties.’ He turned to my brother then and grinned in a twisted kind of way. ‘If they were any older I’d introduce you.’

  Eddie pretended he hadn’t heard. He stared at the photographs my father had on his wall. None of them were of us or our mother. They were snapshots of my father standing in front of planes he had flown, looking smart in his uniform.

  ‘Are you going to marry her?’ I said.

  ‘God no,’ said my father. ‘I’m not going to make that mistake twice. What do you take me for?’ He winked at my brother then and gave him a grin as if there was some kind of understanding between them. My brother just looked at him without saying anything.

  ‘She probably thinks you’re quite a catch,’ I said.

  ‘No doubt,’ said my father. ‘I’ll have to let her down slowly.’

  I didn’t stay after that. I told my father I was on my way to visit friends and that I was glad he was feeling better.

  ‘I suppose you and your mother thought you’d got rid of me?’ he said.