Me and Mr Booker (14 page)

I wrote him a letter after that and said that I needed to talk to him because he couldn’t just pretend nothing had happened and ignore me
.

I can understand that you changed your mind after what happened but does that mean you’ve decided to stay with Mrs Booker? Or does it mean that you’ve decided to put off leaving her? I need to know one way or the other. I will be at the cinema cafe at three-thirty every day from this Saturday on. Please come.
À bientôt
, Bambi. XX.

I addressed the letter to his office because I didn’t want Mrs Booker to find it and read it. And then I decided to deliver it myself with a bottle of whisky as a present so I took an unopened bottle from my mother’s cupboard and wrapped it up and stuck the letter to the side of it with sticky tape. I took the bus to town and walked to Mr Booker’s office from there. I knocked on the door and when there was no answer I let myself in and put the whisky in the middle of the bare desk so he would see it as soon as he walked in.

I thought he would at least ring me to thank me for the present but he didn’t. Mrs Booker rang instead and asked my mother if it was all right for her to come over and have a chat and my mother said yes.

They sat in the garden all afternoon while I watched them from my room at the same time as I was trying to memorise a French passage for Mr Jolly, which started with the sentence
La lutte des
sexes, dis-je, est le moteur de l’histoire.
When my mother asked me to I took them out a bottle of wine and two glasses and went up to the shops to get Mrs Booker another packet of cigarettes when she ran out. I don’t know exactly what they talked about but I think it had to do with Mrs Booker’s fertility problems and how Mr Booker wasn’t very keen on having any more tests done or trying any more treatments because he thought there had to be a point where you gave up and just accepted the fact that you couldn’t have everything in life.

‘Which is easy for him to say,’ said Mrs Booker with tears in her eyes. ‘But I’m not like that. I think that if we give up now it will be like giving up on our marriage. And I can’t do that. At least I can but I won’t.’

My mother glanced at me while I poured more wine into Mrs Booker’s glass.

‘What do you think, Bambi?’ said Mrs Booker. ‘Do you think I’m crazy?’

‘I’m the wrong person to ask,’ I said.

Mrs Booker drank some more wine and smiled at me, then she turned to my mother and told her how her dream was to some day have a daughter like me.

‘Mr Booker feels the same,’ she said. ‘We talk about it all the time. How lovely it would be.’

My mother turned to me and raised her eyebrows, and that’s when I knew Mrs Booker hadn’t even mentioned Victor’s visit to her house or the things my father had said about Mr Booker and me.

‘You only see her on her best behaviour,’ my mother said. ‘She’s not always so nice.’

‘But you’re such good chums,’ she said. ‘That’s what I want. I want someone I can talk to. Of course I have Mr Booker, but it’s not the same. And it’s not as if we have ever talked much anyway. He didn’t marry me for my conversation. In fact he finds it an effort to talk to me, so most of the time he doesn’t bother.’

She demonstrated for my mother and me how she would ask Mr Booker whether he thought they had done the right thing leaving England when they did and all she got was a stare and a standard answer.

‘
It seemed like a good idea at the time
. That’s his answer to everything. It seemed like a good idea at the time. What is that supposed to mean?’

‘Perhaps he doesn’t like to think too much about the past,’ said my mother. ‘Some people don’t.’

‘I asked him if he was tired of me the other day,’ she said. ‘And he told me it was the sound of my voice he was tired of, so I should shut up occasionally and give my mouth a rest.’

‘What did you say?’ said my mother.

‘I told him if he ever spoke to me like that again I would walk out the door and never come back.’

‘Do you think you ever would?’ I said, my heart leaping.

‘I’ve thought about it,’ she said.

‘I guess thinking about it and doing it are two different things,’ I said.

My mother frowned at me then and asked me to go inside and make some coffee, so I did, and all the time I was thinking about what Mrs Booker had said and wondering if Mr Booker deserved to know how close to leaving him his wife had come. I thought maybe he didn’t know and that I should probably tell him, but then I wasn’t sure if he’d believe me or if he’d think I was putting pressure on him to make up his mind to leave her first.

After I made the coffee I carried it outside and set it down on the table next to Mrs Booker’s chair, then I poured her a cup and stirred some fresh cream in it with two sugars the way she liked it. She was watching every move I made through her owlish glasses, like she’d never seen anyone pour a cup of coffee before. Then just as I was pouring some coffee for my mother the phone rang and she stood up to go and answer it, leaving me alone with Mrs Booker. It was very uncomfortable being anywhere near Mrs Booker when I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to her, or why she was still speaking to me after what my father had told her. I even thought she might have come round to the house to threaten me the same way Victor had gone round to threaten Mr Booker, but every time I looked at her she smiled in the little-girl way she had, which she must have thought was attractive.

‘I’m so sorry about the cat,’ I said. ‘I hope it didn’t suffer.’

She stopped smiling then and looked like she was going to cry, but she took a drag on her cigarette instead.

‘Thank you very much for the whisky,’ she said, which made me realise that Mr Booker must have lied to her and told her the whisky was for her, something to drown her sorrows with. ‘It was very sweet of you,’ she said.

‘No problem,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said.

I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, because she might have been trying to tell me she didn’t blame me for what had happened between Mr Booker and me, or she might have been talking about Victor, or about the cat, so I decided not to answer and just pretended instead to be taking an interest in the way the clouds were scudding across the sky above us, making the breeze turn cold whenever they crossed in front of the sun.

‘What did your father say to you?’ said Mrs Booker eventually.

‘When?’ I said. I said I hadn’t seen my father since he’d disappeared. ‘Your mother says he hit you,’ said Mrs Booker.

‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘That was nothing. That was because I was rude to him.’

Mrs Booker put her hand on my arm then and squeezed it as a gesture of sympathy and for a moment I thought I was going to laugh, because here she was telling me she was not about to take my father’s side against me, or to believe anything he might have said to her about what he’d seen or imagined he’d seen.

‘You’ll have to come to the house again,’ she said. ‘Mr Booker’s unbearable without you.’

I turned to her then and looked straight at her and it was impossible to tell exactly how clever or how stupid she was so I gave up trying. I leaned over and put my arms around her and gave her a hug because I knew by the little paddling motions she was making with her hands that this was what she wanted me to do.

It wasn’t until the Monday of the following week that I saw Mr Booker again. He was waiting for me at a table up by the back wall of the cinema café where it was dark. When I walked in wearing my school uniform he looked up and smiled and gave me a little wave with his hand, making the smoke from his cigarette swirl around in front of his face so that he looked as if he was on fire. When I was close enough I could tell that nothing had changed and that he still wanted me as much as he had before, so I leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.

‘
Bonjour
,’ I said. ‘
Ça va
?’

‘Mustn’t grumble,’ he said.

He smelled of aftershave and beer and he’d had his hair cut shorter than usual which made him look pink and shiny.

‘I didn’t know when I’d see you,’ I said.

‘Things have been a bit hectic around our place,’ he said.

I sat down and watched him light me a cigarette from the tip of his own. He handed it to me and I took it with my hand shaking so badly I thought I was going to drop it.

‘How’s school?’ he said.

‘Fabulous,’ I said.

‘Best days of your life,’ said Mr Booker. ‘So they say.’

‘They lie,’ I said.

He stared at me then and said he was sorry for not showing up at our assignation.

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I waited for you all day.’

He said my father turning up the way he did had scared the crap out of him.

‘Lucky he didn’t have his gun with him,’ I said.

Mr Booker laughed in a strangled kind of way.

‘My good lady wife was very grateful for the whisky,’ he said.

‘It wasn’t for her,’ I said. ‘It was for you.’

He gazed at me then and reached across to take my hand. He said he’d missed me and I said I’d missed him too, and that he was the only reason I’d come back from Sydney because there wasn’t any point in being there without him.

‘I have a job,’ he said. ‘You seem to forget that.’

I knew that was true. I knew it was something Mr Booker worried about and I didn’t because I’d never had to earn a living in my life and I didn’t know what it meant. Even so, there was something defensive in the way Mr Booker mentioned it now that made me think he was scared of me because I was asking him to change his life forever, which is a hard thing for any person to contemplate.

‘So what do we do now?’ I said, making sure not to sound like I was demanding an answer on the spot. It was just a general question, and I knew what Mr Booker was going to say even before he said it.

He let go of my hand and took a moment to finish his coffee.

‘If we’re sensible we quit,’ he said.

‘Is that what you want?’ I said.

He stared mournfully into his empty coffee cup. And then I said that it wasn’t what I wanted.

‘Well, that settles it,’ he said.

‘Settles what?’ I said.

I wasn’t trying to be difficult. I just didn’t see what Mr Booker meant by not calling me for days and then meeting up with me to tell me we should stop seeing each other, when he knew that wasn’t really going to happen. If I hadn’t been starting work in ten minutes I would have told him to take me back to the car so I could do things to him that would prove what an impossibility it was.

‘What days are you free?’ he said.

I told him any day after school was okay if he wanted to pick me up from the bus stop at the front of the admin building.

‘Let’s say Wednesday then,’ he said.

I told him Wednesday would be fine, and we both sat for a moment without saying anything because we knew how pitiful it sounded, us making our secret plans when we should have been in Sydney starting a new life where nobody knew us and it didn’t matter to anyone what we did.

Finally I asked Mr Booker if he and Mrs Booker had plans to get a new pet.

‘She wants another cat,’ he said.

‘What kind?’ I said.

‘A live one,’ he said.

I laughed and waited for him to say something else but he didn’t seem to want to talk.

‘I suppose you denied everything?’ I said.

He didn’t answer right away. He got up and went to the counter to order another coffee for himself and one for me, he came back to sit down, crossing his long legs under the table and lighting a second cigarette.

‘I did,’ he said. ‘I was brilliant.’

I asked him what Mrs Booker had said and he told me she hadn’t said very much at all, that she’d maintained a dignified silence.

‘All I can tell you,’ he said, ‘is that if it wasn’t for the fucking feline we’d be laughing.’

The waiter came with our coffees and placed them down on the table with a clatter.

‘Thank you, my good man,’ said Mr Booker.

The waiter slouched off without answering.

‘Did I say something wrong?’ said Mr Booker.

‘He’s new,’ I said.

Later I found Mr Booker inside the cinema and we watched the last half of
Five Easy Pieces
, from where Jack Nicholson tries to order a plain chicken sandwich at the diner and the waitress tells him they only have chicken salad sandwiches, so Jack Nicholson asks her to give him a chicken salad sandwich and hold the salad. We sat there arm in arm right through until the end of the film when all you see is a truck pulling out of the gas station and heading up the highway for Canada and you’re left waiting to see what happens next but nothing does and that’s when you know Jack Nicholson has run away. When the credits came up Mr Booker leaned across and kissed me goodbye.

‘As we begin,’ he said, ‘we have a terrible tendency to go on.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said.

‘I believe you do,’ he said. He stood up and patted my head and said he’d see me Wednesday.

hope springs eternal

I filled in the days between Wednesdays by sitting in class and pretending to pay attention when all I could really think of were my afternoons with Mr Booker. He’d found us a new motel not far from the airport so we could see the planes coming and going and hear them overhead while we lay in bed. If the planes were low enough the whole room vibrated, which Mr Booker said was the reason the place was so empty.