Forgetting Foster (6 page)

‘Maybe we could make him look like a teacher or something,' Foster said. No one seemed to be listening to him. Miss Watson was making huffing noises about forking out for the taxi fare.

‘Yes, yes, of course,' Mum said, retrieving her purse. She didn't have enough cash on her though. She handed over what she had and said, ‘I'll have to owe you the rest, Miss Watson. I'm so sorry.'

‘Well, I'll need it back as soon as possible.'

‘Of course you will, and I'll bring it to you as soon as I can. It's just that I only have enough money to pay you for the babysitting right now. I'm terribly sorry.'

‘And I'm afraid that will be more too, of course. I did stay longer today due to your . . . situation.'

Everyone looked a bit stiff-necked then. Foster felt like Miss Watson expected Mum to say more and Mum did not know what more to say. He noticed the good side of Mum's mouth was beginning to drop, which happened sometimes when she was very upset or very tired. It made Foster feel sour in the tummy. Miss Watson broke the silence with, ‘I
am
on a pension, Mrs Sumner.'

That's when Aunty, leading Miss Watson to the front door, said, ‘Yes, well, thanks very much, Myra. I'd finish you off myself but I don't have any cash on me either. We'll make sure you get exactly what's coming to you.'

‘Wait. The taxi,' Mum said. ‘I need to get in touch and thank the taxi driver.'

Miss Watson turned and said, ‘I already did that, Mrs Sumner.'

‘But I need to know what happened. Where he was,' Mum persisted.

‘I don't remember the name of the taxi company, Mrs Sumner.'

‘You didn't get a receipt?' Aunty asked.

‘No,' Miss Watson said.

There was another one of those silences which made Foster look up from grooming his dad. Then he said, ‘It looked like a police car, Mum. It had stripes down the side and big numbers on the doors.'

‘I know who that is,' Aunty said. She took Miss Watson's elbow then, the same way the taxi driver had taken Dad's, and opened the front door. Miss Watson pulled herself from Aunty's fingers and looked directly at Foster.

‘You be a good boy,' she said. Then she left.

‘What a bitch,' Aunty said, pushing the door shut. Then, ‘I'll put the kettle on. Want to help me, Fossie?'

Foster watched Aunty moving about the kitchen in a snappy, efficient way, popping tea bags in mugs, filling the kettle, shaking the milk. Foster thought about all the other times the kettle had been put on to either celebrate something or get serious about
something. It was the first thing grown-ups did. It was the herald of the post-battle analysis, be it good or bad. ‘I'll put the kettle on' meant something was going to be talked about. He heard the TV being switched on in the lounge room, then Mum walked in and sat down at the kitchen table.

‘I have to be at work soon,' she said.

‘Took a Saturday shift?'

‘Yes. I thought . . . but now I'm not sure . . .' Mum glanced back towards the lounge room.

‘Well, you've got time for a cup of tea. I'll make it. You go call the taxi company.' Aunty handed Mum a piece of paper. ‘Pretty sure this is the company. If not, just call them all. Whoever it was will sure as hell remember this fare!'

Someone did remember the fare. Mum told them all about it. Dad had ended up so far from the shop he walked away from that she couldn't work out how he got there. He must have taken the footbridge that crossed the highway and he must have moved fast. It never occurred to Mum, or Aunty, that he would take that footbridge. It should have. He was walking home. Not to his home now, but to the house he grew up in.

‘Oh my God,' Aunty said.

Dad had told Foster stories about that little house
he grew up in. It was always full of people. His brothers and sister were older than him so their friends were always around. He said it was one of the last houses he knew of that had a combustion oven, so it was hot inside during summer. It was on those broiling summer days that he and his elder brothers would walk the long way from their house to the river. There was no highway then, and no footbridge. When they got there they would swim and pick fat bearded mussels off the rocks, which they took home in buckets of briny water. Grandma would throw them in a big pot with just a smidgen of that brackish river swill and they would sit in the backyard and suck them out of their shells with nothing but a little salt and lemon juice.

‘Sometimes,' Dad had said, ‘you'd get some of that silky tuft from the shell stuck between your teeth, but we didn't care. They were so sweet. Better than lollies!'

Dad had been wandering down the street only a couple of blocks from his old house when the taxi driver saw him. He had stopped and asked if Dad was all right. ‘I thought he'd been the victim of a crime,' he told Mum. So the driver had put him into the taxi and was going to take him to a police station when Dad gave his address. It wasn't until they were well
on their way home that Dad became angry with the taxi driver for taking him so far out of his way. No amount of explaining on the part of the taxi driver could calm Dad. The taxi driver told Mum he hoped he had done the right thing. Mum told him she was very grateful.

‘He was going home for mussels,' Foster said. Aunty smiled.

‘Well, I haven't spent nearly enough time with my brother lately so I think I'll stay for a visit while you're at work if that's okay,' she said. Then, getting up so fast her chair scraped across the floor and almost toppled backwards, she said, ‘Jesus, I didn't lock the front door when—'

‘I did,' Mum said. ‘And thank you.'

That night Foster and his dad helped Aunty make dinner. They sat around the kitchen table and grated carrots and opened tins of tomatoes and Aunty made a big pot of meat sauce that filled the house with the fragrance of home. And for the first time in a long time Dad told a story. He told the story of the river and its lavish harvest of mussels in shells as black and shiny as ebony armour. They colonised the crags formed by dragon talons and birthed the pearls that adorned the sea princess's crown.

bottoms in the big shops

Dad missing, even for such a short period of time, suddenly made those funny things he'd been doing lately less funny. Things like putting his clothes on inside out. Or storing fruit in the oven. Things they would usually jolly him about, things they all giggled about and tried not to take too seriously, suddenly became suspicious signposts on the road towards Dad possibly making a break for it again. Mum wouldn't leave Dad at home alone with Foster when she had to go out so Foster was roped in on drives to the shops, drives to the pharmacy, drives to the library. Anytime Mum faced the possibility of having to get out of the car and leave Dad for even a minute, Foster became the wingman, the babysitter. He resented it. Dad seemed blissfully unaware of any change in the
behaviour of those around him, and Foster resented that too. Mum said that trying to get Dad in and out of the car, trying to get him to follow her around, was excruciating. She actually used that word on the telephone to someone. She said it was worse than dealing with a toddler.

Foster got lost once when he was little. He didn't realise he was lost at first. They were all at the Big Shops, as Mum called them, a complex as vast as a town, where you wouldn't see the sky for hours. For all the space inside, Foster always felt like he was being squeezed out of it by limbs and music and walloping voices, all competing for air and leg room. Foster used to like the Big Shops, before he became old enough to have to wait in the car with Dad. He liked all the voices and the rushing about. It was what he imagined the inside of a beehive would be like.

Foster remembered not being terribly concerned when he did realise he was lost. In fact he didn't even register it in that way. He felt utterly blameless. After all, his mum had lost
him
. It only took a moment. He had turned away from them to follow the foghorn bellow of a child being denied something they wanted and when he turned back the bottom immediately in front of him was neither Mum's nor Dad's. He
instinctively took a step backwards, having an inkling this sort of closeness to strangers was not okay, and then watched as the strange bottoms walked away, leaving a hole in the crowd empty of any clothing he recognised. He spun around a few times and then, completely confident that his parents would find him and find him quickly, he took the opportunity to have a wander about.

He didn't notice the time passing at first. There were lots of things to see. When a lady leaned down next to him and asked ‘Are you lost?' he told her ‘No' without hesitation. His first feelings of concern coincided with feeling hungry. It had been a long time since breakfast and they were going to have lunch at the Big Shops. It was then he decided to change his approach to the situation, and rather than just looking at all the things there were to see he would also start looking for his parents. Anger didn't take too long to settle in after that. They had lost him and clearly weren't looking very hard for him. Maybe they had decided to have lunch before searching. Maybe they hadn't even realised they had lost him. Maybe he had turned invisible.

His strolling gave way to trotting, and then running. He started pushing on people to get them out of his
way. He wanted to go back to the place the strange bottoms first appeared but had wandered far enough away to not even be sure of the direction. He had pressed his back up against a shop window, just outside the lashing drive of the foot traffic, when he finally saw Mum striding towards him, using her hands to part knots of shoppers, his dad only steps behind her.

It was the relief he felt at seeing them that allowed him to recognise how frightened he had been. His palms were slick on the window glass. He was smiling when Mum finally reached him. Still smiling when she gripped him by the upper arm, hoisted him to tippy-toe, and slapped him hard across the back of his thighs.

Foster remembered the humiliation to this day. The rest was just a blur. His dad quickly stepping in, his mum's tears, her apology, the looks on people's faces. Being pulled through the crowd like a naughty boy. Because his mum had lost him.

And now that Mum had also lost Dad, Foster was being treated like a naughty boy again.
Get in the car, sit in the car, wait here, don't argue, I won't be long, I'll be right back.
It wasn't fair. She said he was too young to leave at home alone, but Foster suspected Dad was too crazy to leave alone in the car. He was even being
treated like a naughty boy by Miss Watson from next door. And all because this was all so ‘excruciating', whatever that meant.

Foster began to hope his dad would try another escape. He was even tempted to provoke it and go with him. Dad had proven he was capable of finding his way home. So maybe this time they could stay away just a bit longer, long enough perhaps for Mum to be searching in the dark. They could watch for headlights coming their way and then dive into shrubs to avoid detection. That would be a real adventure. Foster wouldn't be invisible anymore, not after a thing like that.

‘Wait here. I'll be right back,' Mum said, cracking the car windows a bit and locking them in.

Dad immediately started trying the back doors.
Rattle-thump. Rattle-thump.
Foster knew where the child-lock was. He knew how to unlock it. He imagined Mum coming out of the pharmacy and finding the car empty, just like she deserved. The thought pleased him.

Instead he got onto his knees and swung around to face his dad, who was still wrestling with the back doorhandles. He said, ‘It's all right, Dad. Want to play a game with me?'

‘Hiya, Fossie!'

‘I spy with my little eye, something beginning with . . .'

christmas socks and cornflakes

Aunty always believed that Dad had married down. Foster didn't know what that meant but he had heard it said. He heard Aunty say it to someone he didn't know at a Christmas lunch once and he heard Mum repeat it to Dad in an angry way. Foster always imagined ‘down' to be a place, a destination, so he assumed Dad had gone down somewhere to marry Mum, down to a place Aunty clearly didn't like. But Dad had married Mum in a church. Foster had seen the pictures. And everyone liked church. Except Aunty, apparently.

They didn't go to church very often. Mainly Christmas and Easter, or if a baby was born and had to be blessed. That's why they went to church on the day Dad wet his pants. Someone Foster didn't know
had had a baby and in Foster's family they got babies blessed lickety-split. At least that's what Dad used to say. ‘Get that kid in a font fast! Lickety-split!' Mum would laugh. When Foster had asked what the hurry was, Dad said the family threw so many bad seeds they had to get the finger of God on board as soon as possible. Mum said, ‘Malcolm!' in a shocked way, but she was still laughing. Foster didn't understand the whole gardening reference but he laughed too. And Dad winked at him.

Getting ready to go out took longer than it used to and Foster was relied upon to get ready without much help because Mum had to help Dad. Foster didn't mind. He liked getting ready to go out somewhere special. There was a tasty anticipation in it. They hadn't been out all together for a while now, unless it involved Dad and Foster staying in the car, so Foster was excited. Mum didn't seem excited.

Their bedroom door was shut but Foster could hear them. Dad had been looking forward to getting the finger of God on the baby for weeks now. Every time Mum reminded him of the upcoming event Dad would hear it as if for the first time and be very pleased. He would ask whose baby it was over and over and Mum would tell him again and again, each
time with the same enthusiasm. But now it sounded as if Dad didn't want to get dressed. Foster could hear Mum pleading with Dad, a brittle edge of frustration sharpening her tone every now and then. Foster had been ready for a while, sitting at the kitchen table making little creases in the skin of an apple with his thumbnail. Mum walked in looking pretty. Foster thought she always looked pretty, but on occasions when photographs might be taken she arranged her hair on one side like a curtain of ribbons to gently rest against her bad eye. She smelled of hairspray and Red Door. That was her perfume. Sometimes, just lately, Foster would quickly squirt himself with it before he left for school so he could smell Mum all day.