Forgetting Foster (15 page)

Foster and Dad were in charge of the balloons and streamers. Foster told Dad what to do, including how to make the fart noises with the balloon necks. Mum tolerated that, but when Dad let go of a balloon
that slew through the air like a coil of flatulence and came to rest with a slap in Mum's hair she wasn't very happy. She had arranged her hair over her bad eye for pictures again.

Dad was having a good time. As people arrived Aunty stood next to him while Mum answered the door. Sometimes she linked arms with him. Once she held his hand. Foster couldn't understand why he felt uncomfortable. There was something in the air. A quiet that didn't quite belong with balloons and streamers. It wasn't that people weren't making any noise. It was that the people making it seemed immediately apologetic about it. Greetings were punctuated with an awkward hush. Laughter was bitten in half. And when Dad said, ‘Look at all the presents! Is it Christmas?' nobody laughed at all.

Foster couldn't wait for the present opening to begin. It was the first time he could remember being more excited about what he was giving than what he was getting. There were some big presents there too. He looked around for his friends and saw them all standing in a knot around the red sausages. He walked over. That's when he heard it.

‘Which one's the crazy one?' Oliver asked.

‘That's his dad over there,' Blinky said, pointing.

‘He doesn't look crazy,' Charlie said.

‘He's not,' Foster said. They all turned to look at him.

‘But you said he was,' Louis said. ‘You said at school.'

Foster had said it. He stood there, between red sausages and shame, remembering all the times he had joined in at school to shift the target of the teasing onto his dad rather than himself. He'd had a brief respite when another boy's dad had gone to jail, but somehow that ended up giving the boy an unexpected standing and Foster's crazy dad had quickly been reestablished as the bigger disgrace. Foster tried to think of a way out but all he wanted to do was cry. He tried to casually reach for a red sausage but it came across as more of a snatch.

‘It's an illness,' he said.

‘Your dad thinks it's Christmas. That's crazy,' Oliver said. Everyone laughed.

Foster was so full of things to say that he couldn't squeeze a single word out. He was like the sauce bottle in the fridge when it got that drip booger crusting the opening. He would squeeze and squeeze knowing the bottle was full until eventually the contents would explode from the tip, always on an angle so that sauce
shot across the room and he got in trouble for making a mess. He was pretty sure if he said anything right now it would be that messy.

Lately Foster had been able to turn off his sadness. It used to be that his sadness was a noisy thing. That breathing while choking on mucous and tears produced a racket. But lately he could cry without tears even spilling out. His eyes would get a bit fat and just as his lashes began to rime the tears would disappear. He'd watched himself in the mirror. It was as if he could suck them back in, drain them back to where they came from. Sadness returning to sadness's origin. It was in his face though. All that noise he reabsorbed would flush out his skin terribly, and make him shake. His soundless crying could be very noisy indeed. He knew he was wearing that face when he saw Mum looking at him from across the room.

He walked away from the red sausages as Mum started to walk towards him. She had just settled Dad into a chair. He had been quite excited when everyone was arriving, but had since quietened in a way Foster recognised. He was getting confused. He was looking frightened. Aunty was sitting on the arm of the chair, where Mum said you weren't supposed to sit, with her
hand on his shoulder. Dad was picking at the threads in the upholstery.

‘What's wrong?' Mum asked. She intercepted Foster in the hall, hand on his shoulder. ‘Where are you going?'

‘To my room to get a game for us to play.'

‘Oh, okay. I thought you looked upset.'

‘No.'

‘Well, don't be too long. You wanted this party, so your friends are your responsibility.'

Foster nodded. He waited for Mum to turn and walk away before running to his bedroom and shutting the door. Then he dragged the table next to the door across, just enough to prevent anyone being able to open it. He knew he would get in a lot of trouble for that but he didn't know what else to do with his feelings.

Your friends are your responsibility.
Foster knew he was responsible. He was responsible for what they thought and what they said. Because he had thought it and said it himself. For all the times his heart was under the peg basket with the General there were just as many times he had chosen saving himself over defending his dad. Foster lay down on his bed and imagined never having to leave his room again.

on with the show

At first he thought the raised voices were just party voices. But only for a moment. Foster pushed himself up onto his elbows and stared at the back of his bedroom door, trying to untangle the sounds he could hear from the hall. Far away at first but then closer and closer to his bedroom door. They weren't happy sounds. It was yelling and pleading, which was okay because Foster had become accustomed to yelling and pleading. But private yelling and pleading was different to putting on a show for friends who already thought Dad was crazy. He crawled off the bed and moved quietly towards the door. He didn't know why he was doing it quietly because no one would have been able to hear him over the noise on the other side. He pulled his table back and wrapped his fingers
around the doorhandle. Just as he was turning it he heard Dad, right on the other side, say, ‘Who are they? Why are they here?'

Foster carefully opened the door. Dad was standing with his back to him. Mum was halfway down the hall looking a bit wild. At the end of the hallway, in a swarm that spilled out into the kitchen, were party guests. Drinks in hands, bobbleheads zigzagging for a better view, and in the middle Aunty trying to steer people towards the front door with her phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder. Oliver waved at Foster awkwardly as he was manoeuvred out of sight, Aunty's hand firmly on his shoulder. Foster heard her opening the front door.

‘I know what you're trying to do,' Dad said. ‘I know what's going on.'

‘No one's trying to do anything,' Mum said, softly, conciliatorily. It was her make-everything-all right voice. It didn't work very well lately. ‘Nothing's going on, Malcolm. These are your friends.'

‘They're not. You've changed them. They want to hurt me. Everything's changed.'

Aunty was getting cross. She was taking the drinks out of people's hands now, hissing, ‘
Party's over!'
People were getting cross back, too. Mum took a couple of
steps towards Dad, which seemed to frighten him even more. He put his hands up in front of himself, his body rigidly poised for defence. Then he stepped forwards and Mum stepped back. The crowd was thinning. Foster could hear Aunty shepherding the last of the guests out to their cars. He was thinking about climbing out of his window and making his way back in through the front door. He felt oddly vulnerable as a bookend to Dad's increasing fear. That's when Mum said, ‘Close your door, Fossie.'

Dad immediately spun around with his arms still raised and gasped, his face twisted with the shock of discovering someone behind him. Foster skidded backwards into his room, his arms windmilling to maintain balance. Dad's expression was dragged like a mad cat through alarm and panic and rage in the few seconds that hovered unmoving in the thickened air. Then he turned and bolted for the bathroom.

Foster ran out of his room and would have thrown himself at Mum had she not countered with a side step, heading towards the bathroom door herself. She moved so fast that Foster tripped slightly, forced into a running stop when his velocity was not halted by Mum's firm grasp. Foster could see out the open front door now. Aunty was shoving Blinky into the
back of his parents' car. Foster thought it looked like a shove, anyway, and when she turned around, even from this distance, Foster could see the party wreckage on her face. She was striding back to the house with military arms while Blinky's dad was still talking at her. She was just a few steps from the front door when the sound of shattering glass ricocheted down the hall. Foster yelped at the shock, which was quickly followed by a long and distressed scream from the bathroom.

Aunty was running by the time she made it to the hallway. She clipped Foster on the way past but she kept going. Foster was really irritated by now. On top of being plain frightened by the chaos, he was having trouble staying on his feet. Foster watched appalled as Mum pounded on the bathroom door, begging Dad to unlock it. Dad was screaming, stopping only to bemoan the stranger in the bathroom with him and the blood.

‘Blood? There's blood?' Aunty called to him through the door. Then to Mum, ‘I'm calling an ambulance.'

‘Who's in there with you?' Mum was calling. ‘Hello? Hello? Please open the door!'

‘No one's in there with him,' Aunty said. Then she was giving the address to someone on the phone.

Foster was mesmerised. Every one of his senses
was tingling and yet he felt strangely detached. He couldn't seem to move his deadened limbs, yet his skin was crawling and his chest alight. He felt he had to move to survive this. The front door was right there. Still open. He knew he had to run. But he couldn't. Then he had the loneliest thought he had ever had. He would stand here, unseen and unheard, and be consumed by this havoc inside him as surely as Grandma had been consumed by dragon fire. He would likely die of it.

The noises were terrible. Everyone's noises were terrible. The ambulance siren, which at first hovered like distant smoke and then became as loud as a kick in the head, did nothing to induce the calming relief of help being on the way. It was when the siren shut off in the driveway, and they were all slapped by the sudden silencing of it, that a moment of quiet landed. But it didn't last long.

The ambulance men rushed in. Foster thought they looked like soldiers. He hadn't noticed before, but Mum was on her knees trying to pick the lock on the bathroom door with a knife. She stood suddenly, sweaty and panting, knife pointed directly at the ambulance man in front of her and said, ‘I think he might have hurt himself.'

‘Why don't you go and look after the young one,' he said, easing the knife from Mum's shaking hand. Aunty grabbed her arm then and pulled her away.

They shouldered the bathroom door open. Foster had only ever seen that done in the movies. It wasn't as easy as it looked in the movies either. It took several tries and when it finally gave way the doorframe cracked like a lightning strike.

The men were in the bathroom with Dad for a while. He yelled at them a lot but they kept talking in quiet, calm voices. Dad was getting tired. Mum was crying. Aunty was leaning against the wall. Eventually one of the ambulance men went and got a trolley and they helped Dad climb up onto it and then strapped him down. Foster could see bandages on Dad's hands and there was blood on his clothes.

As they wheeled Dad down the hall and towards the front door Foster backed up until he was on the verandah. That's when he noticed how many people there were out on the street. Some of the party guests hadn't left at all. They were still sitting in their cars waiting, and watching. Miss Watson was on the footpath. Foster waited to feel humiliated, or angry, or protective. He waited to feel something. He watched Dad being loaded into the ambulance and realised the
dead in his limbs had crawled through his entire body and snatched his heart. He would have to feel about this later.

blood and glass

Mum went with Dad in the ambulance. Aunty stayed behind with Foster, who had to be coaxed back into the house from his rigid position on the verandah. Cars and people began to leave once the ambulance had left. It left quietly, sirens and lights dormant. Foster knew that meant Dad was going to be okay. They weren't planning on running any traffic lights to speed up the journey to the hospital. Foster had seen ambulances do that, and had been in the car with Mum when she'd mounted a footpath to get out of the way of a wailing ambulance. She'd said that meant the person inside was very, very sick. But Foster's relief at the lack of a loud, flashy-light departure was immediately flummoxed when he saw the bathroom.

He didn't know how long he had been standing in the hallway. He didn't even remember Aunty closing the front door. But by the time he wheedled his limbs into motion and made his way down the hall, Aunty was already in the bathroom cleaning up.

The bathroom mirror was broken. A few pieces were still attached to the frame, sharp and sinister as monster teeth, but the rest were scattered on the tiles, some bejewelled with tremulous baubles of bright blood. There was blood on the walls and on the side of the bathtub, more on the floor and on the underside of the basin. Aunty was carefully lifting the pieces of mirror and laying them onto sheets of newspaper, some of which had become soaked at the edges. She looked up at Foster, her fingertips slick, and said, ‘Oh, Fossie, I thought you were in your room. Don't watch this.'

‘Is that Dad's blood?'

Aunty began folding the edges of the newspaper together, wrapping the glass as carefully as Foster had wrapped
The General.

‘Don't worry,' she said. ‘All he did was cut his hands a bit.'

‘Why?'

‘Because the glass is sharp.'

‘No, I mean why did the mirror break?'

‘I . . . I'm not sure.'

‘Did Dad break the mirror? Is that how he cut his hands?'

‘I think so.'

‘Why did Dad break the mirror?'

‘Fossie, please. Go and find something to do and we'll talk about this later.'

‘You have blood on you.'