Forgetting Foster (3 page)

On Sundays Dad's phone stayed off and his laptop stayed shut. Sometimes they stayed in pyjamas until eleven o'clock. Mum didn't rush to make the beds. Bathing was optional. Dad made pancakes with lemon and sugar and Foster got to beat the batter.

‘It doesn't have to be completely smooth,' Dad said. ‘Some lumps are good.'

‘Okay,' Foster said, allowing Dad to peek into the bowl.

‘I said
some
lumps, Fossie. Keep going.'

‘Do you need some help?' Mum asked, wandering into the kitchen with the newspaper under her arm.

‘Honey, we're mid-ritual here!' Dad said. He sounded all cross and put-out but Foster knew it was an act. Mum whacked Dad on the bottom with the rolled-up paper and strolled back towards the living room.

‘What are we looking for, Fossie?'

‘Ribbon consistency.'

‘Good man.'

Sunday breakfast was always the same. It took a
long time. They sat at the kitchen table and ate one pancake at a time. As soon as everyone had finished Dad would get up and make three more so each serving was hot and crisp on the edges and warmed the cold lemon juice just enough to make some of the sugar crystals melt. Foster's fingers and lips would be glazed with the tart, sweet syrup until moments before they headed into town.

Going into town was one of Foster's favourite things to do with Dad. They played games in the car. I-spy, Who-Can-Spot-Ten-Red-Cars-First and Foster's favourite, the Road-Sign-Game. Dad would call out a word from a sign and Foster would have to use it in a sentence. Then they would switch. Sometimes Dad said that their alternate sentences had to string together to make a story. That was harder, but the story always teased itself out of randomness as if the road signs themselves were helping in the creation.

‘Mirror!' Dad called.

‘Ummm, there was this big mirror on the wall of the . . . the castle and . . . people who looked in it saw . . .'

‘Don't stop. This is good stuff. What did they see?'

‘Magic things!'

‘I love it! Pick the next word.'

Foster studied the streetscape. Road signs, shop
signs, signs on the sides of trucks. Some of the words he didn't know but he didn't want to pick one that was too easy. Then he saw a shop he recognised. He knew what it was called because he'd been in there with Mum a lot.

‘Tapestry!' Foster called.

‘Fantastic word!' Dad said, thumping the steering wheel. ‘So. What the magic people saw when they looked in that mirror was a . . . tapestry of their possible futures.'

‘A picture made of lots of coloured thread? And they can choose what they do next?'

‘Yes! My turn to pick. Ah . . .'

‘By following the colour they like?'

‘Yes! I choose—'

‘—but it's hard to follow colours in those big pictures that Mum does. They're all kind of together, Dad.'

‘It's magic, remember? I choose . . . Light!'

Foster paused for some time. Dad didn't rush him. Dad always said there was no point in rushing good thinking. Then Foster said, ‘But if they couldn't choose then the mirror went dark and there was no light anymore.'

‘Good twist,' Dad said. ‘Now people are looking at
a dark pane of glass? Does it still reflect? What's your word, Fossie?'

‘Why did you cry on the phone, Dad?'

‘What?' Foster saw Dad's eyes flick momentarily to the rear-view mirror. ‘I didn't cry on the phone, love.'

‘You did, Dad.'

‘No I didn't, Fossie. Let me tell you something about mirrors. They have been used to tell the future for a long, long time. Anything that reflects has been used by magic people to predict the future. And sometimes to change the future. There's a long storytelling tradition about prophets and seers looking into glass and seeing the future. So does your dark glass reflect? What's your word, Fossie?'

Foster watched all the words in the world whirl past him. The car seemed to be going too fast now for him to settle on a word. Foster felt a pain in his guts he didn't recognise. As Dad pulled the car into the car park Foster felt his story word crawl from his clutched throat into his mouth.

‘Dad? My word is liar.'

Foster's dad did a half turn in his seat. ‘Did you see that on a sign?' he asked.

Foster was sorry he'd said it straight away. Dad didn't look confused or embarrassed at all. Foster
couldn't bear the thought of Dad using the word in the next part of the story so he unclipped his seatbelt and said, ‘Come on, Dad!'

Even though they were stuffed with pancakes the first stop was always hot chocolate and shortbread. There were lots of choices of biscuits and cakes but Foster loved the way the sweet buttery lozenge of shortbread dissolved away when he held it against the roof of his mouth. They would have races too. Who could dip their shortbread in their hot chocolate the longest and get it into their mouth before the piece broke off and had to be rescued with a spoon.

The coffee shop they went to was right next door to a small second-hand bookshop. The lady who worked there knew them by name. Sometimes when they went in she would have put books aside for Dad to look at. Dad always bought something. The shop smelled good too. ‘Smell of old stories,' Dad said. The books Foster liked were on a bottom shelf at the back. His dad would sit on the floor with Foster and they would flick through the books, sometimes stopping to read parts. Week to week the books would be the same but Foster didn't care. He liked sitting on the floor with his dad, surrounded by the Sunday smells of brittle paper.

When they took their book haul home, Mum said, ‘Why do you go there? You don't know where any of those books have been.'

‘Tell her, Fossie.'

‘Because we don't know where they've been.'

‘Good man. Every one of these books has multiple stories to tell. Look at this one,' Dad said, rummaging about in the bag. ‘The last reader put notes in the margin. Fascinating!'

‘It's fascinating, Mum!' Foster said.

‘Urrghh. Go wash your hands, both of you,' Mum said. But she was smiling, and she kissed Dad as he walked past.

funny forgetting

The story about his grandma's fire was the last story Foster remembered his dad telling him before his dad started to change. It stuck in Foster's mind as the last one, anyway. It was the last story Dad told without looking confused and getting mixed up in the telling. Sometimes he would start telling one story and then trail off on some unrelated happening from before Foster was born. It didn't happen all the time. Every now and then Foster would ask Dad to tell the Grandma story again, almost like a test, and feel comforted if Dad could get through it.

‘Dad, tell me about Grandma's dragon fire again,' Foster said.

‘Dragon fire,' Dad said. ‘Did we read that one?' Foster would feel strangely embarrassed every time
his dad lost a story. He didn't want to draw attention to the lost stories.

His dad began doing funny things when he first started to forget, so no one was worried. Foster thought the funny things were funny too. Dad went out for dog food and came back with cat food, when the cat had been dead for five years. Once he forgot to take the plastic wrapper off the cheese slices before putting them into sandwiches and then couldn't work out why he couldn't cut them in half. Foster and Dad giggled about it. But then the forgetting got less funny. Like when Dad got confused on the drive home from work and had to park on the side of the road to figure out where he was. The police found him parked there, looking muddled. They thought he was drunk at first. They put him in the back of the police car and rang Foster's mum. Nobody laughed much about that.

The beginning of the forgetting was the worst because Dad knew about it. He knew something was wrong. Once the forgetting really set in it didn't seem to matter to him. But somewhere in between the funny forgetting and the not talking anymore his dad had moments, just moments, of absolute clarity which really hurt him. Foster could see that Dad
knew. He knew there were things he used to know that were going away. Mum started to get angry at the silly things Dad sometimes did and he'd go sort of pale, the colour of a second-hand book page, and make little clicking noises in his throat to cover his confusion. Foster imagined the noises were Dad's memory trying to squeeze out, like air being pinched from the stretched neck of a balloon.

His dad started walking differently. The change in his walking paralleled his forgetting, as if he were trying to make himself smaller, less noticeable. He started shuffling like a tall person trying to conceal their height. He wasn't a particularly tall person but he stooped anyway, dragging his feet so they scuffed the floor. You could hear him coming. It made Foster's mum mad. Sometimes Foster would stumble across Dad leaning against a doorframe or sitting in a corner, always still, always expressionless, and sometimes he wouldn't answer when Foster talked to him. It was scary to come across Dad without warning. The only way to be sure where Dad was at any time was if he was making his way from one part of the house to another. Then there was that rasping of his feet on the floor.

His dad would sit in the lounge room a lot fiddling
with a tin that had belonged to Grandma. It was an old biscuit tin that was probably not all that old but it had a russet tarnish around the lid which made it look like a shoddy heirloom. Foster had a trawl through that tin himself once. It was full of fusty-smelling bits and pieces that Grandma had obviously wanted to keep for some reason. A few photos, birth certificates, letters, along with some other things that seemed insignificant: feathers, a couple of shells, old movie tickets. Somehow, though, Foster knew none of the things in that tin had been accidentally placed, and his dad picked through everything meticulously, regularly, as if they were triggers to his memory. Sometimes his dad would just hold the tin in his lap, running his fingers across the lid, and then raise and lower the lid, up-down-up-down, the hinges stiff and squeaky. Foster would watch him and it was as if he were playing an instrument. He would carry that tin around with him, room to room, wherever he went.

The one place his dad never went anymore was the backyard. He used to love the backyard. They had one of the few big blocks on the street. The distance from the back door to the back fence seemed miles and miles, and at the back fence, hunkered down like
an arbour sentry, was a jacaranda. As soon as Foster could walk his dad started taking him out into the backyard to catch balls and watch clouds and play chasey with Geraldine, their drooling mutt. Dad loved Geraldine. He said mutts were best. Purebreds were full of temperament and malaise. When Foster asked what that meant Dad told him bad manners and bad health. Dad called Geraldine a genetic jigsaw of proper dogs. She had a crooked face and tender eyes. When the forgetting and shuffling got worse Foster used to hold Dad's hand and try to lead him into the backyard. But when Geraldine howled for chasey now it just seemed to upset Dad and Mum told Foster to leave Dad be. That's when Foster would run out back and climb that jacaranda, just to get away for a little while, and sometimes he'd see his dad watching out the kitchen window, his stare rasping just like his footfall.

Foster's feelings were tangling him up. No one was explaining to him how he should be feeling and he didn't understand the feeling that was bothering him now. He'd see his dad standing in that crooked way of his at the kitchen window and his pulse would clang like a screw in a tin can. When that first Sunday came and went without pancakes and shortbread, Mum
didn't explain at all, just poured Saturday cereal into a bowl for him and rubbed the top of his head. Foster suddenly recognised the thing that rolled over him and made him feel sick. It was this: Dad was going away somewhere all on his own. And Foster was already missing him.

post-its and pills

Dad eventually had to drop back to part-time work. It was a type of stress leave, apparently. Foster asked Mum what Dad was stressed about but she danced around the question in a way familiar to Foster – he was getting used to having questions answered in great detail that turned out to provide no answer at all. Dad could work from home now, Mum said. Work fewer hours, work in his pyjamas if he wanted to. Mum said this last bit with a bright smile, as if it was meant to be a fine joke, but Foster found the idea of Dad not putting on a suit the last straw. It made him cross. Foster knew all about last straws. It was Mum's way of putting a full stop at the end of something, of declaring her refusal to entertain another moment of whatever it was that was creating
the straws in the first place. So when Foster said with genuine indignation ‘Well, that would be the last straw', expecting Mum to share in his crossness, he was instead humiliated to find himself being laughed at.

Foster was pleased that at least Dad was still dressing for the doctor. They all went with him to the appointment, despite Dad's protestations about being treated like a child. Foster wasn't allowed to go into the little room where the doctor did his examining. He had to wait in the ugly waiting room that always seemed to have one dead fish in the tank in the corner. He waited a long time, long enough for the room to get really full. He had to start breathing through his mouth because of the sweet-sweaty smell of too many sick bodies pressed together like paper dolls. He wished he had asked to wait in the car.

There was no talking in the car on the way home. Foster rolled his window down and filled his cheeks with fresh outside air until Mum snapped at him to put the window back up. ‘It's too cold,' she said.

When they got home Mum and Dad went to the kitchen to talk. It was quiet talk at first but Foster had worked out that if he himself stayed really quiet he became invisible. Either that or his parents thought
he couldn't hear them. So he waited, and sure enough the volume began to rise. It seemed Dad had come back from the doctor with pills that frustrated him even more. Foster heard Dad say, ‘I'm not depressed!'