Me and Mr Booker Page 9

  It was another hour before she and Lorraine came back. By then I’d had time to think about what I was going to say to her, which was that I wanted to go and live with Rowena for a while and go to school in Sydney because I didn’t want to stay in the same town as my father any more.

  ‘What happened?’ she said.

  I told her my father had been waiting for her when I came home and I said he shouldn’t come over whenever he felt like it because he wasn’t invited and then he’d hit me.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t care. He’s an idiot. He didn’t know what he was doing.’

  And then Lorraine said we should call the police and report him.

  ‘It’s assault,’ she said. ‘He’s dangerous.’

  My mother put her head in her hands and just sighed.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m such a fool.’

  I put my arms around her and told her it wasn’t her fault and Lorraine poured us all a drink and we went outside into the garden to sit in the shade and watch the sun go down in a blaze of pink.

  ‘What if I cancelled my engagement and we all went to Sydney to live with Rowena?’

  ‘You’re just getting cold feet,’ said my mother.

  ‘I guess so,’ said Lorraine. ‘Either that or I am about to fuck up my entire life.’

  ‘Nothing’s worth doing,’ said my mother, ‘if it doesn’t run the risk of fucking up your entire life.’

  I didn’t tell my mother about Mr Booker coming to Sydney to meet me because, even though she liked Mr Booker, I knew she would think it was a bad idea. I didn’t tell Lorraine either, because I didn’t have to. She already knew about me and Mr Booker from seeing us parked at the shops once in Mr Booker’s car, so now, whenever my mother wasn’t around, she liked to ask me how my great romance was coming along and I always told her she was imagining things.

  ‘I haven’t told anyone,’ she said. ‘Should I say something to your mother?’

  ‘Not if you want to stay my friend,’ I said.

  We were in Lorraine’s room, which had been my father’s office when he was still at home. Lorraine was ironing her clothes for work. I had never seen anyone with as many clothes as Lorraine had. The room was full of them, packed into suitcases and boxes and bulging out of the wardrobe. It was like she’d decided to leave America with half of her favourite department store.

  ‘What about Mrs Booker?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘When’s he going to tell her?’

  ‘Tell her what?’

  Lorraine gave me what Geoff called her deathstar stare. She could make her whole face go slack, including her black eyes, and then freeze you with her empty gaze until you felt the temperature drop.

  ‘Maybe you could tell her,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay you.’

  Lorraine let out a yelp of laughter. She didn’t like Mrs Booker. She called her a whiner, amongst other things. She said she wondered why Mr Booker hadn’t dumped her or drowned her on the long voyage out from England.

  ‘They flew,’ I said.

  ‘A pity,’ she said.

  Then I asked Lorraine what she thought of Mr Booker and she said she didn’t really know him well enough to express an opinion.

  ‘I find the English hard to read,’ she said. ‘With Americans you find out more than you ever need to know in the first hour, but with those guys it’s like you have to wait a year before they’ll tell you their zipcode.’

  I asked how things were going with Geoff. I knew they’d been arguing about where they were going to live when they were finally married because I’d come home from work one night and found Lorraine in the front seat of her car with all the windows wound up so that nobody could hear her screaming, which is what she did whenever things with Geoff boiled over. Lorraine and Geoff were unpredictable like that. Some days they were all smiles and holding hands, and other days they weren’t speaking. The problem was Sandra. Geoff had never been married before but he’d lived for a long time with a woman called Sandra. Sandra had moved out less than a year ago but she’d left some of her work stuff at Geoff ’s house. Geoff had let her keep the key so she could get in whenever she needed to because he didn’t see the harm in it.

  ‘It’s creepy,’ said Lorraine. ‘It’s like it’s still her house.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he just move out?’ I said.

  ‘He doesn’t like change,’ she said. ‘And because it costs money to move. I mean, I’ve moved countries just to be with this guy and he won’t even move fucking house.’

  ‘Why don’t you refuse to marry him?’ I said.

  Lorraine laughed out loud again the way she sometimes did, gulping in air through her mouth and snorting it out through her nose. Geoff called it her horse laugh.

  ‘Move or I’ll shoot,’ she said, then held the iron up close to her face as if she was going to brand herself for being such a stupid cow. Lorraine had a strange sense of humour. She was the first person I ever met who talked about her labia in public, like that’s something you discuss with people you’ve only just met. She said she’d always worried that hers were too big.

  I offered to take a look but she said she was afraid I might die laughing.

  you take the high road and i’ll take the low road

  The Bookers came to the engagement party late and stayed until two in the morning. By that time they were both so drunk my mother told them they had to stay the night because they were in no state to drive. I made up the bed for them in the back room where my father had slept for the last few months he was living in the house. It still had the wardrobe he kept his clothes in and the chest of drawers he used for his socks and underwear. It had been my job to fold his washing and put it away so I knew where he kept things.

  When I was finished I waited for Mrs Booker to go to bed and then asked Mr Booker if he wanted to dance some more in the sunroom where my mother and Lorraine had rolled up the carpets to make a dance floor. He put on the Billie Holiday album Lorraine had played all night and we waltzed in slow motion while my mother started to tidy up. I told my mother Mr Booker and I would clean up for her so she said goodnight and left us alone. We turned the music down, collected all the dirty dishes and glasses and took them into the kitchen. While we washed them I told Mr Booker I was going to Sydney as soon as I could get packed because I didn’t think I could stand to stay in this place for much longer.

  ‘What about your mother?’ he said.

  ‘She can’t stop me,’ I said.

  I wrote down Rowena’s number for him and her address and then I watched him read it with a confused look on his face as if it was in a language he couldn’t understand or a place he knew he would never be able to find without a map.

  He put the note away in his wallet and poured himself another drink from my mother’s liquor cabinet then went outside on the terrace to sit in the dark. When I was done with the dishes I followed him. Geoff ’s friend Michael had brought his trumpet to the party but had stopped playing it around ten when the neighbours phoned to complain. It was on the sunlounge where Mr Booker was sitting. He picked it up so I could sit down beside him.

  ‘Play me something,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘A Mexican hat dance,’ I said.

  I took his cigarette out of his hand and watched him raise the trumpet to his lips and blow, but no sound came. That’s when he put the trumpet down and put his hand on my arm and said he wanted to run away somewhere nobody would find us and then he said he was so pissed he didn’t think he could walk.

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Everything’s spinning.’

  Mr Booker lay back on the sunlounge and closed his eyes and I lay down next to him and that’s where we slept, which was one of the two times we stayed together the whole night.

  I got a lift to Sydney with Geoff and Lorraine, who were going to see Geoff ’s parents and stay the weekend. They didn’t talk much on the trip, just played a lot of Miles Davis, because old jazz was Geof
f ’s thing, and smoked Geoff ’s cigarettes, which were Indonesian and smelled of cloves. My mother had wanted to come too but I told her I could manage on my own.

  She didn’t argue. She must have wanted to but I think she was scared that if she made it hard for me to get away from my father I would hold it against her for the rest of my life. My mother didn’t believe in confrontation. It wasn’t that she was weak, it was just that she didn’t see the point of it. She liked to tell me there were forces all around us that we couldn’t even see, and it was a question not so much of trusting them, but of accepting how helpless we were in the face of their power. Even so it must have been hard for her to watch me go; she probably thought she was losing me the same way she’d lost Eddie.

  ‘What about school?’ she said.

  ‘Rowena can help me,’ I said. Rowena was an art teacher. She was taking time off to look after Amy, but after that she had a job to go back to at her old school. Not that I wanted Rowena’s help. I didn’t even know if I was going to stay in Sydney. It would all depend on Mr Booker and what he decided. If he wanted to go back to England then we’d go there together, but I wasn’t going to explain any of that to my mother now, before it had happened, because she was sad enough about me moving to Sydney.

  ‘Ring me as soon as you get there,’ she said, her whole face wet from crying.

  ‘No, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’ll just vanish and you’ll never hear from me again.’

  It was meant to make her smile, but it had the opposite effect and she started to sob again, until Lorraine told her to stop wasting her tears on me because I’d realise within a week that Sydney wasn’t exactly Manhattan.

  ‘She’ll be back,’ said Lorraine. ‘Who’s going to cook for her the way you do?’

  ‘I don’t want you to go,’ said my mother. ‘I want you to wait until you finish school and then we can go together. I can get a new job.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ I said. ‘I have to go now.’

  I kissed her goodbye and got in the car and waved to her and Eddie as Geoff pulled out of the driveway and into the street. It was hard not to cry myself, because I was sad about leaving my mother, and Eddie made me want to cry just thinking about him. It was like he wasn’t my brother at all, just a stranger who lived in the house sometimes then left again.

  I didn’t say goodbye to my father. We drove past his place but I didn’t even turn my head to look. By then Geoff had Miles Davis cranked up so loud it was making the car shudder and I just wanted to get to the edge of town and out into the country where there were open fields and cows and the road stretched ahead for miles through the hills and valleys like a river feeling its way to the sea.

  ‘There’s still time to turn around,’ said Geoff.

  ‘Just drive,’ I said, and then I settled back in the seat and watched the sky and thought how many places I had left and never missed. Half of them I couldn’t even remember the names of, or some it was only the names I remembered and nothing else. It was the driving I thought of and all the moving between things because that was when I had felt myself waiting to change, to turn from one person into someone else, someone better at things like adding up or running or spelling words. There was always hope when Eddie and me were on the road with our parents, heading for somewhere new. It was the one and only useful thing my father had ever taught me.

  a hard rain

  I got down from the 389 bus in front of the Five Ways Hotel at eleven-thirty, a whole hour before Mr Booker said he was coming. I didn’t want there to be any risk I would miss him, and I didn’t like to stay in Rowena’s place during the day because her flatmate worked nights and had to sleep.

  Rowena was renting a basement room in a Paddington terrace from a woman she’d met on the beach. Rowena said it was just until she could go back to work and then she could find a place of her own. She said she didn’t mind me staying there as long as I liked because I could help with the baby and the flatmate was never there anyway, except to sleep, so I was someone to talk to and do things with. When I told her about Victor laying into me she said she wasn’t surprised.

  ‘He’s a bully,’ she said. ‘He always was. Your mum should have left him years ago, while she was still young. She should be married to someone who can take care of her.’

  ‘Like you,’ I said, and she laughed then stared out at the backyard where a row of Amy’s nappies were hanging in the sun to dry.

  ‘I’m doing just fine,’ she said, but I knew she wasn’t.

  It was a hot day when I went to meet Mr Booker, with no breeze coming up the hill from Rushcutters Bay. Even the blue water looked oily, like something rancid. The weather forecast said it was going to storm later in the day but there was no sign of it yet, only a stillness that made the air feel trapped under its own weight. I walked to the corner where there was a bench and some shade and watched for taxis coming around from Oxford Street, which is the way I was sure Mr Booker would take because he was arriving from the airport. I sat down there and read Mr Booker’s note again. It said his flight was due to land at twelve.

  I’m booked into the Travelodge further down the hill for the night but check-in isn’t until two so we will have to find a way to amuse ourselves until then. The Five Ways is a reasonable pub for an assignation as I recall, so I suggest we meet there and make up the rest as we go along. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. X

  At one o’clock when he still hadn’t come I went to buy a newspaper at the supermarket and some apples and a drink. I supposed Mr Booker’s plane had been delayed so I would just have to keep waiting for him.

  I waited until two o’clock and then I phoned Mr Booker’s office number to see if anything had gone wrong but he wasn’t there. Then I phoned him at home and there was no answer. After that I went into the café next door to the pub and drank some tea while I read the paper right through again for another hour, and that was when I knew he wasn’t coming.

  At three o’clock the storm clouds came over and turned everything to night. I caught the bus back to the flat in the pouring rain and Rowena said there was a message to call my mother.

  ‘Victor’s been round to see your friends the Bookers,’ said Rowena.

  ‘What for?’ I said, although I already had a good idea.

  ‘That man should be locked up,’ said Rowena.

  I rang my mother straight away and she told me that my father had gone to the Bookers’ house on his pushbike and banged at the front door demanding to talk to Mr Booker, and when Mr Booker had come out my father had said he’d seen him driving me around town and he knew exactly what was going on but that if Mr Booker ever laid a finger on me again my father would shoot him. Then Mrs Booker had run over the cat.

  ‘She what?’ I said.

  ‘It was lying in the driveway and she backed the car over it,’ said my mother.

  ‘So where are they now?’ I said.

  ‘At the vet’s,’ said my mother.

  She said she’d talked to Mr Booker but Mrs Booker didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  ‘What did he say?’ I said.

  ‘Who?’ said my mother.

  ‘Mr Booker.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When you talked to him.’

  ‘Not much,’ said my mother. ‘He said it was the first time anyone had ever called him a rake.’

  ‘Where’s Victor?’ I said.

  ‘Wrapped around a tree somewhere I hope,’ said my mother.

  I didn’t say anything after that because I didn’t get a chance. My mother told me she wanted me to come home so that we could talk. She said she’d already booked me a flight at six-thirty so I better leave now if I wanted to miss the traffic.

  ‘I only just got here,’ I said.

  ‘You’re sixteen,’ she said. ‘You have your whole life ahead of you.’ I didn’t like her saying that. It didn’t have any meaning except for the obvious one.

  Rowena said she’d drive me to the airport but I said I had enough for a
taxi and it was pointless to wake the baby. We waited out the front of the house with my bags at my feet. I hadn’t even had a chance to unpack them properly. As the taxi pulled up on the steaming road Rowena put her arms around me and hugged me and told me not to give up. I wasn’t sure what she meant, whether she meant I shouldn’t give up in general, or that I shouldn’t give up on Mr Booker, not that it made any difference. Either way it was kind of her to say it, and it wasn’t often Rowena ever said anything kind, so I was grateful.

  ‘I won’t,’ I said, although the truth was I didn’t know what I should hope for now that the one thing I had tried to start had ended up not going anywhere.

  It was a mistake going back. I knew that as soon as the captain of the plane said he was starting his descent. I looked through the window and saw the whole town below, small enough so you could see how the edges of it petered out in brown fields and bare hills, and so spread out there wasn’t any shape to it, just a whole lot of roads with houses strung along them like loose teeth. I thought of all the journeys I’d made along the roads and couldn’t remember what the point had been to any of them, because that was the kind of place it was, so dull you got in your car and drove around looking for some kind of drama where you knew there couldn’t be any and then you came home feeling crushed.

  Eddie was there to pick me up. He didn’t speak to me the whole way home. Finally I told him I didn’t know what Victor had been saying about me but if he was interested I could tell him my side of the story.

  ‘I don’t want to hear it,’ he said.

  absence makes the heart grow fonder

  My father disappeared after that and nobody knew where he went.

  Not that anyone missed him except Eddie.

  ‘Did he say anything to you?’ Eddie asked my mother.

  ‘Just that he’d had enough of this town,’ she said. ‘He’s left all his things with his friends at the farm. They’re not worried. They say he’ll show up when he feels like it.’