Me and Mr Booker (9 page)

‘Not really,’ said my uncle.

‘Why does that not surprise me?’ said my father.

Across the table my brother was watching my father with a kind of pleading expression because he knew what was coming and wanted him to stop embarrassing us in front of our cousins, since this was only going to give them something else to feel superior about, along with their new toys and the pool and the house with the ocean view.

‘I don’t see the point in over-analysing why it is that some people have more than others, or that some people are better looking than others, or that some people get ahead while other people fall behind,’ said Uncle Harvey.

‘Why would you,’ said my father, ‘when clearly the system is serving you so well?’

‘You seem to think there’s something wrong with how well I’m doing,’ said Uncle Harvey. He was still smiling but his eyes had lost their twinkle.

‘Not at all,’ said my father. ‘My only worry is that people like you imagine their success in life is due to talent and hard work.’

‘I don’t imagine it,’ said Uncle Harvey. ‘I know it. I see it every day.’

‘It doesn’t occur to you that all you’re doing is exercising a privilege you never earned, in order to perpetuate a system that rewards unearned privilege?’

‘I never took you for a communist, Victor,’ said Uncle Harvey.

My father laughed out loud, but it wasn’t a real laugh, it was more like a howl. He looked around the table and seemed to think everybody else should be laughing too. Except that nobody was. Only my father and Uncle Harvey. And uncle Harvey was laughing in a way that made him look angrier than I’d ever seen him before.

‘But of course that has never stopped you,’ he told my father, ‘from coming round empty-handed to see us and drinking all our booze and eating all our food and generally having a good time at our expense.’

Uncle Harvey turned to my mother then and told her he was sorry, but some things had to be said, and she agreed and said she was sorry too and that we would leave now so that they could have their Christmas lunch in peace.

My aunt said there was no need for us to go, but my father said there was every reason, because he’d been insulted by bigger and better people than Harvey before now.

‘Just goes to show,’ he said. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch.’

‘Sit down and finish your meal,’ said Aunt Frances.

My father told us all to stop eating and put down our knives and forks. Then he marched us out of the house and into the car with my mother bringing up the rear with my aunt.

‘At least take some food home with you,’ my Aunt Frances said.

‘I’d rather starve,’ my father called out, then he climbed into the car and slammed the door shut.

My mother told this story to Mr Booker and then I told him how after we left Uncle Harvey’s house my father had driven us back to our house but halfway there my brother and I had started to squabble so he’d pulled up and left us by the side of the road.

‘I was eight,’ I said, ‘and Eddie was ten. It took us three hours to walk home. I crapped my pants. I had to be hosed down.’

‘We were lucky they weren’t kidnapped,’ said my mother. ‘He hid the car keys so I couldn’t go back to get them.’

‘You’re making it up,’ said Mr Booker.

‘I wish,’ said my mother. She had brightened up over lunch and decided to enjoy herself because Mr Booker was there and she always blossomed in his company, just like the rest of us.

‘It’s a wonder any of us in this family are sane,’ she said, then crossed her eyes and tried to join her fingers at the tips but missed.

Mr Booker laughed and reached under the table to squeeze my knee, then crept his hand up higher so that his fingers were inside me.

‘Speak for yourself,’ I said.

When Mrs Booker woke up she went straight into the front room and started playing the piano and I took her in a drink and a cigarette and sat down beside her. She had a thin, breathy voice but she liked to sing so we sat together and sang songs from my mother’s Christmas songbook and when the others heard us they all came into the room to listen, except Mr Booker left after ‘The First Noel’. When I went to look for him he was out in the garden lying on the sunlounge with his eyes shut and when I came close he opened them and stared at me and smiled his lizard smile.

‘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.