Me and Mr Booker (13 page)

I’m booked into the Travelodge further down the hill for the
night but check-in isn’t until two so we will have to find a way
to amuse ourselves until then. The Five Ways is a reasonable
pub for an assignation as I recall, so I suggest we meet there and
make up the rest as we go along. I think this is the beginning of a
beautiful friendship. X

At one o’clock when he still hadn’t come I went to buy a newspaper at the supermarket and some apples and a drink. I supposed Mr Booker’s plane had been delayed so I would just have to keep waiting for him.

I waited until two o’clock and then I phoned Mr Booker’s office number to see if anything had gone wrong but he wasn’t there. Then I phoned him at home and there was no answer. After that I went into the café next door to the pub and drank some tea while I read the paper right through again for another hour, and that was when I knew he wasn’t coming.

At three o’clock the storm clouds came over and turned everything to night. I caught the bus back to the flat in the pouring rain and Rowena said there was a message to call my mother.

‘Victor’s been round to see your friends the Bookers,’ said Rowena.

‘What for?’ I said, although I already had a good idea.

‘That man should be locked up,’ said Rowena.

I rang my mother straight away and she told me that my father had gone to the Bookers’ house on his pushbike and banged at the front door demanding to talk to Mr Booker, and when Mr Booker had come out my father had said he’d seen him driving me around town and he knew exactly what was going on but that if Mr Booker ever laid a finger on me again my father would shoot him. Then Mrs Booker had run over the cat.

‘She what?’ I said.

‘It was lying in the driveway and she backed the car over it,’ said my mother.

‘So where are they now?’ I said.

‘At the vet’s,’ said my mother.

She said she’d talked to Mr Booker but Mrs Booker didn’t want to talk to anyone.

‘What did he say?’ I said.

‘Who?’ said my mother.

‘Mr Booker.’

‘When?’

‘When you talked to him.’

‘Not much,’ said my mother. ‘He said it was the first time anyone had ever called him a rake.’

‘Where’s Victor?’ I said.

‘Wrapped around a tree somewhere I hope,’ said my mother.

I didn’t say anything after that because I didn’t get a chance. My mother told me she wanted me to come home so that we could talk. She said she’d already booked me a flight at six-thirty so I better leave now if I wanted to miss the traffic.

‘I only just got here,’ I said.

‘You’re sixteen,’ she said. ‘You have your whole life ahead of you.’ I didn’t like her saying that. It didn’t have any meaning except for the obvious one.

Rowena said she’d drive me to the airport but I said I had enough for a taxi and it was pointless to wake the baby. We waited out the front of the house with my bags at my feet. I hadn’t even had a chance to unpack them properly. As the taxi pulled up on the steaming road Rowena put her arms around me and hugged me and told me not to give up. I wasn’t sure what she meant, whether she meant I shouldn’t give up in general, or that I shouldn’t give up on Mr Booker, not that it made any difference. Either way it was kind of her to say it, and it wasn’t often Rowena ever said anything kind, so I was grateful.

‘I won’t,’ I said, although the truth was I didn’t know what I should hope for now that the one thing I had tried to start had ended up not going anywhere.

It was a mistake going back. I knew that as soon as the captain of the plane said he was starting his descent. I looked through the window and saw the whole town below, small enough so you could see how the edges of it petered out in brown fields and bare hills, and so spread out there wasn’t any shape to it, just a whole lot of roads with houses strung along them like loose teeth. I thought of all the journeys I’d made along the roads and couldn’t remember what the point had been to any of them, because that was the kind of place it was, so dull you got in your car and drove around looking for some kind of drama where you knew there couldn’t be any and then you came home feeling crushed.

Eddie was there to pick me up. He didn’t speak to me the whole way home. Finally I told him I didn’t know what Victor had been saying about me but if he was interested I could tell him my side of the story.

‘I don’t want to hear it,’ he said.

absence makes the heart grow fonder

My father disappeared after that and nobody knew where he went.

Not that anyone missed him except Eddie.

‘Did he say anything to you?’ Eddie asked my mother.

‘Just that he’d had enough of this town,’ she said. ‘He’s left all his things with his friends at the farm. They’re not worried. They say he’ll show up when he feels like it.’

I said I hoped that would be never and Eddie told me to shut up.

Then a week later Eddie was gone, chasing after Deirdre who’d moved to Melbourne to live with her real father and study fashion design.

I was back at school by then. I’d decided to go back because my mother had made me promise not to ruin my last year the way Rowena had ruined hers. Rowena, she said, had wasted her potential and she didn’t know if she could bear to watch me do the same with mine. We both knew what she was really saying. What she was really saying was that she couldn’t stop me wanting things that weren’t good for me but that didn’t mean I could forget about my education. My mother valued education very highly. She said it was the only chance most people ever had to learn the habit of critical thinking, and therefore it wasn’t to be abandoned like an old coat you were tired of or some shoes that were suddenly the wrong colour.

‘I get the point mum,’ I told her.

‘Make sure you do,’ she said. ‘You’ll thank me in the long run.’

‘If you say so,’ I said.

After that it was back to the way it had been before, with just my mother and me, which should have felt the same as it always had but didn’t because everything had changed and I wasn’t the same person any more. For a start I was half-crazy with worry. Because of Victor I had probably lost Mr Booker forever, and now I had to be in the same town with him and die of longing because I couldn’t see him ever again.

Also my mother had changed. She was upset about Eddie and Deirdre because she didn’t think Deirdre was good for my brother, and she didn’t think he would ever understand why. But now that my brother had gone to Melbourne my mother knew there was nothing she could do to bring him back.

‘He needed a father,’ she said. ‘But Victor was never there.’

Also, as well as worrying about Eddie and me, she worried that she could have done more to help my father, years back, when she first realised he was sick.

‘I shouldn’t have tried to cope on my own,’ she said. ‘I pretended things were fine when they weren’t.’

It wasn’t the first time my mother had told me this but it was the first time I really listened because it felt like she was trying to warn me.

‘I was such a slow learner,’ she said, looking straight at me.

I didn’t know what she expected me to say. I wasn’t going to tell her she’d made me see the error of my ways all of a sudden and now I was just going to give up on Mr Booker and move on, because that would have been lying.

I said I thought she’d done her best and she thanked me and said she wished she could believe that, and then she said she thought it might help my father to come home for a while when he came back from wherever he was now, because if he had tried to kill himself once he was likely to try again and she didn’t want his death on her conscience.

‘We’re the only family he has,’ she said. ‘We can’t just abandon him.’

I said I didn’t think it was possible to help my father any more than he had already been helped because he didn’t think there was anything wrong with him.

‘It isn’t you who’s pretending,’ I said. ‘It’s him.’

‘He means well,’ said my mother. ‘In his mad way.’

‘Jesus, Mum,’ I said. ‘What if he’d shot Mr Booker instead of just threatening to?’

‘He was trying to protect you,’ she said.

‘I don’t need that kind of protection,’ I said. ‘If I needed that kind of protection I’d get a dog.’

I went to my room then and slammed the door and for half an hour I lay on my bed and sobbed and I wouldn’t let my mother in, even when she knocked on the door and pleaded.

‘Go away,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘I wouldn’t do anything without asking you first,’ she said.

‘Do what you like,’ I said. ‘You’re as crazy as he is.’

It wasn’t the real reason I was crying. I was crying because I wanted to see Mr Booker so badly it was making me sick. When I looked in the mirror it disgusted me how pale and sickly I was. I looked like I had a blood disease or a tropical fever. I looked like I needed a doctor.

Afterwards, at dinner, I told her I was sorry for what I’d said and she told me Eddie had called to say he’d tracked my father down in Queensland where he was having a holiday, driving around from place to place, wherever the road took him.

‘I thought he didn’t have any money,’ I said.

‘I gave him some,’ said my mother.

I felt even sadder then, not just for my mother, who was never going to escape my father for as long as she lived, but also for my father because he was so lonely.

It was true what she said about him having no other family. The only relation of my father’s I’d ever met was his mother, and that was only when she was so old she could hardly remember who anybody was. We’d gone to stay with her when her husband died, to help her decide what she wanted to do next. She lived on the coast south of Sydney in a little baby-blue fibro house one street back from the water. My father was worried that she wouldn’t be able to cope there alone so he persuaded my mother to bring her home with us. Not that the old lady really wanted to come. It was hard to know what she wanted, because she never spoke. She sat in a chair in the front room all day and stared out the window and if anyone asked her a question she nodded, or shook her head.

She was nothing like my father to look at. He was tall and dark and she was small and fair, with little blue, filmy eyes that were so dim she couldn’t even see the television.

‘I have my suspicions about the real story,’ my father said one night after my grandmother had gone to bed.

I asked him what he meant and he told me that he wasn’t his mother’s natural son.

‘Of course I have no proof,’ he said. ‘It’s just a feeling I have.’

‘So whose son are you?’ I said.

He told me he remembered a couple that used to come and visit his parents from England every year.

‘They had money,’ he said. ‘And breeding. And my parents treated them like royalty.’

‘So you’re actually a prince,’ I said.

‘You never know,’ my father said.

I stared at him and wondered if it was true that he was some kind of changeling. It would explain his strangeness. But if it was not true, that was even stranger because it meant he had fantasised all his life about a family to which he belonged more than he belonged to his real parents.

And that wasn’t the only thing that didn’t add up about my father. There was another story he used to tell everyone, about how he’d flown cargo planes with Monty Braithwaite in some African war zone where their plane had been shot at and they’d made a lucky escape. He had a photo on his wall of the aircrew all lined up in front of a hangar in two rows and he’d always point to himself at the end of the back row, except that it looked nothing like him. At least it looked like him aged about twenty years older than he would have been at the time, with his hair receding and his eyes narrowed and around him there was a kind of halo as if the photograph had been taken at some other time and place and he had carefully cut it out and pasted it onto the body of another man. It was hard to imagine why he might bother going to such trouble, but I guessed it must have had something to do with how he felt about Monty, which was that his friend had always outdone him in every way, by being braver and richer and more daring than my father. Which might have been true, or it might have only been the way my father saw things. My mother didn’t believe a word of it. Whatever my father said on the subject of Monty Braithwaite she dismissed out of hand.

‘That man has never been anything but trouble as far as I’m concerned,’ she said. ‘It’s a wonder he’s not in jail.’

I waited for Mr Booker to ring me but he didn’t so I drove around to their house to see if he was home. It was past ten o’clock at night and Mr Booker was watching television with all the windows open and the lights turned off. I didn’t want to go in because I was too scared to talk to Mrs Booker, so I parked my mother’s car outside the neighbour’s house and cut across the front lawn, keeping to the shadows in case she walked into the room and saw me. And then I stopped and watched Mr Booker smoke a cigarette in the blue flicker of the screen and he looked so serene sitting there that I picked up a rock out of the garden bed next to the front steps and threw it at the front door glass hard enough to crack it. I didn’t even wait to see what he would do. I just ran back to the car and drove off with my heart pounding so hard I thought it was going to break apart.