Me and Mr Booker (3 page)

Nobody said anything for a while then Mrs Booker told me they had decided to look for a house to buy so they could have a garden and a cat. That was when I asked them why they didn’t have children. They both looked stricken.

‘No luck in that department,’ said Mrs Booker.

‘In the meantime we’ve decided to adopt you,’ said Mr Booker.

There was something dangerous in the way he stared at me at that moment. It was so full of violence and sadness he seemed to be about to lift up the table and throw it through the window. Instead he turned away and gazed out at the view of the lake below. We were on the top floor of a hotel overlooking the silvery water and the mountains in the background. We had been sitting there for over two hours.

‘When do you want me to move in?’ I said.

Mrs Booker smiled at me, her eyes swimming with tears.

‘Your mother couldn’t live without you,’ she said.

I knew that about my mother. She was a strong woman but not so strong that she knew how to live without at least one of us at home and, since Eddie had gone, that meant I was the one.

‘She dotes on you,’ said Mrs Booker. ‘You’re her pride and joy.’

‘I’ll have to leave her sometime,’ I said.

Mr Booker turned to me then and said that he was prepared to adopt my mother as well if it would make things easier. That way, he said, we could all be one big happy family.

The next moment a waiter came and asked us if we needed anything more and the Bookers said no and asked for the bill, apologising for being the last to leave.

‘I haven’t had this much fun since grandma caught her tits in the mangle,’ said Mr Booker.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said the waiter, humouring him because he could see how drunk the Bookers were.

Mrs Booker was so drunk she asked Mr Booker to drive her home to bed.

‘Certainly, my sweet,’ he said, holding her upright as we stepped into the lift. They were like two playing cards leaning up against each other all the way down to the car park.

Their flat was just a couple of boxy bedrooms off a corridor and a low-ceilinged living room. The furniture wasn’t theirs, they said, and most of the stuff they had brought with them from England was still packed up.

I sat down at the dining room table and waited for Mr Booker to finish helping Mrs Booker into bed. She kept apologising to him. I could hear them through the half-open bedroom door.

‘I’m sorry, my darling. I’m so useless. I’m no good to anyone.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ he said. ‘Just go to sleep.’

‘Kiss me goodnight.’

I heard the sound of him pulling the curtains shut and then there was no sound at all for a moment, except the cars going by in the street below. I went out on the balcony and watched them. When Mr Booker came out to join me he put his arm around my waist, which I hadn’t expected, and we stood there together staring at the view. It was nothing much, just the street and the car park opposite and on the other side of that the shopping centre, which was the middle of town but just looked like every other suburb.

‘At least you’re close to everything here,’ I said. ‘Not miles away like we are.’

He turned to look at me and there was something faraway in his expression, as if he had lost his train of thought. I knew he was going to kiss me because his arm pulled me closer to him and he leaned in so that his mouth was next to mine.

‘Do you mind?’ he said. ‘I’ve been wanting to do this all day.’

‘Do what?’ I said. I wasn’t trying to sound stupid, but I didn’t know what else to say.

It wasn’t my first kiss. I had kissed two different boys from my school before, David Simmons and Luc Carriere, just to see what it was like, but their kisses were nothing like Mr Booker’s. Mr Booker’s kiss was frightening. It was like he was trying to swallow me whole. When I couldn’t breathe any more I pushed him away.

‘Do you think this is a good idea?’ I said. I could feel my whole body going faint from lack of oxygen.

‘Do you have a better one?’ he said.

In the car on the way back to my mother’s place he turned up the radio and we drove along with Dionne Warwick blaring out the windows. He said he remembered Motown from when he was still wet behind the ears like me. When we pulled up outside the house he turned off the engine. I waited while he lit a cigarette then I reached over to take it from him so he had to light another for himself.

‘What do we do now?’ I said. I wasn’t used to smoking. I wasn’t used to the sickening kick it gave me in the bottom of my chest or the way it made my hands shake.

‘Act as if nothing has happened,’ he said. He was smiling. I could tell he was still drunk from lunch, which is why he had driven so slowly. He had to think about everything he was doing. Even the sight of his smoking cigarette seemed to make him stop and wonder what to do next. Then he remembered and made a little chuckling sound in his throat.

‘Do you think you can do that?’ he said.

‘I can try,’ I said.

‘Jolly good,’ he said. ‘Pip pip.’

I laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m just easily amused.’

‘That much is obvious,’ he said, taking my hand and lacing his fingers through mine. Then he told me I should go inside before he did something stupid. But I didn’t want to move because he still had my hand and he was holding onto it so tightly.

I sat there beside him in the car and smoked my cigarette and told him that he shouldn’t go round kissing people at random because it would get him into trouble.

‘You think so?’ he said.

‘It’s a definite possibility,’ I said.

And then he said that he would try to control himself in the future because the last thing he wanted was trouble.

I watched him take a last swig from the hip flask he carried with him wherever he went. He shook it and held it upside down to lick the rim. He showed me how to blow perfect smoke rings. They drifted across in front of me and out the window where the breeze made them ripple and snake away.

‘Do you know any other tricks?’ I said.

‘Too many to name,’ he said.

And then he didn’t say anything while the sun sank lower and the car filled with pink light.

It wasn’t as if I knew what I was doing sitting there. I didn’t. It was just that I knew Mr Booker was happy I had decided to stay in the car and I also had the feeling that he was happier with every minute that passed because it meant I wasn’t scared of him, or of anything he could do to me.

‘How is this going to work?’ he said finally, stubbing out his cigarette and flicking the butt out the window.

I said I didn’t have a clue.

‘Now you tell me,’ he said.

the tea ceremony

Without any encouragement from anyone my father had started inviting himself round to my mother’s house. He left notes in the letterbox, saying he wanted to pick up some of his tools or a book or a piece of furniture he claimed was his, and that my mother should call him to arrange a suitable time.

‘He’s lonely,’ my mother said.

‘That’s his problem,’ I said. I hated my father by then. I hated the way he treated my mother as if she was simple. He kept hoping she might change her mind about the separation, even after all the things he’d done to make her kick him out. Not that she wanted to go on fighting.

‘If only he could find someone else,’ she said.

‘She’d have to be nuts,’ I said.

In the end she asked him over for afternoon tea. It was a Sunday afternoon. Lorraine was there too. She was boarding with us while she decided whether to marry her friend Geoff or not. Lorraine was an English teacher. Most of my mother’s friends were teachers, but usually they were younger than my mother because her older friends all had husbands and families and my mother just had me. Lorraine was only twenty-five.

‘Do you have trouble keeping the little fuckers in line?’ asked my father. We were all sitting out on the terrace while my mother poured tea and offered around milk and sugar.

‘No,’ Lorraine said. ‘Why would I? Poetry is their favourite subject.’

My father realised she was joking and laughed, showing all of his crooked teeth. He didn’t look all that well since he’d moved out. He had put on a lot of weight and let his hair grow long and his skin was the colour of cheese because he spent so much time indoors. I wondered what he did all day. He wasn’t working as far as I knew. His last job had been selling real estate but it hadn’t been a success. He had no interest in selling anything, he said. Let alone real estate. He boasted to Lorraine that he’d never bought into the middle-class wet dream of home ownership.

‘I left it to my wife to sell us down that particular river,’ he said.

My mother smiled in a bored kind of way. It was nothing she hadn’t heard before. Everything he said was something he had said over and over again to her, or to me if my mother wasn’t listening. He liked to lecture her about things he thought she was too blind to see for herself.

‘We can’t all live in motels,’ I said.

He ignored me and sipped his tea. Then he turned to Lorraine again.

‘Of course I didn’t have the benefit of a higher education, so it was a bit more difficult for me to get my foot on the aspirational ladder, so to speak.’

Lorraine was uncertain how to answer. I don’t think she really knew what my father was talking about, only that it wasn’t directed at her so much as at my mother, who was trying her best to stay out of the conversation, and that this was the reason my mother had asked Lorraine to join us, so she could act as a kind of decoy.

‘It’s never too late,’ Lorraine said.

‘For what?’ said my father.

‘To go back to school,’ said Lorraine, trying to sound cheerful. ‘My mother’s gone back to train as a dental technician.’

‘A dental technician?’ said my father. ‘That sounds like a thrill a minute.’ He smirked at Lorraine because she was beautiful and American and that was enough for him to turn against her now as if her whole race was an offence to him.

‘That’s what I told her,’ said Lorraine. ‘But she has her heart set on it for some reason.’

‘Perhaps she wants to sink her teeth into something,’ said my father, waiting for everyone to laugh. When nobody did he scowled at my mother and told her he had come to reclaim a couple of chairs from the room he had used as a study, which was now Lorraine’s.

‘I sometimes have guests around to my humble abode,’ he said, ‘but I have nowhere for them to sit.’

‘Take whatever you like,’ said my mother.

He seemed disappointed, as if he’d been expecting some resistance or even a fight. He had always complained before that my mother gave in too quickly. A few times he had told me he was sorry he hadn’t married a woman with a bit more backbone, somebody who could have stood up to him and dished him up a bit of his own medicine. I told him that I thought maybe there were some people who just wanted a peaceful life.

‘Are you sure you can spare the chairs?’ he said.

‘Positive,’ said my mother. ‘I’ll help you load them into your car.’

He explained that he didn’t have his car, and that he was hoping for a lift home. My mother looked at me.

‘Good practice for you,’ she said. She never cared that I wasn’t supposed to be driving around without a licence, because how else was I ever going to improve? Even then I knew that was an indication of just how much of my mother’s attention was taken up by Victor. She didn’t need to invent anything else to worry about.

My father didn’t know what to do now he didn’t have my mother. My mother had never expected him to stay around after they split up, because he had never wanted to come to our town in the first place. He said it was my mother’s fault for dragging him there because back then he didn’t have a job and she did. He told me the place suited my mother’s suburban small-mindedness perfectly, but for him it was a prison.

‘Leave town,’ I said. ‘What’s stopping you?’

He couldn’t leave, he said, because he had nowhere else to go, and because my mother and he still had unfinished business and he wasn’t going to just walk away without setting the record straight.

I told him I thought he was wasting his time.

‘If I want your opinion I’ll ask for it,’ he said.

‘Why don’t you just get out while you can?’ I said. ‘You hate it here. All you ever used to talk about was how much you hated it here.’

‘I’ve mellowed,’ he said.

I pulled into the car park at the back of my father’s motel. His Jaguar was parked in its usual spot. He explained that the gearbox was playing up and he couldn’t afford to fix it.

‘I’m thinking of asking your mother for a handout,’ he said, ‘but I suppose I’d have to queue up behind you and your brother.’

I didn’t say anything. I parked the car and got out to help him carry the chairs up to his room on the second floor. It was down the end of a long corridor that reeked of mould. A lot of the rooms in the motel were for people like my father who paid a monthly rent and were allowed to stay as long as they liked. It was just the same as the hostel where my brother had lived in Sydney when he first moved there to study. It had the same thin doors and narrow rooms, although my father’s was on a corner, which he paid more for. He was proud of it because it gave him some status.