by Cory Taylor
It is not that I wish to apportion blame in the matter. I don’t. I just want you to understand how ill-equipped I was to satisfy your yearnings for all the trappings of middle Australia’s version of the American nightmare. I am referring of course to a house, a car, a garden, a dog and a few offspring with which to replace ourselves. The fact is I never wanted these things for myself, and I wasn’t prepared to work at some job I hated in order to provide them for you. No surprise then when you decided to go out and earn your own living. I’m not suggesting you weren’t within your rights to establish your financial independence in this way. You were, and well done to you for being so good at it. What happened next you know very well. I was unfortunately unable to compete. At least, had I tried to pursue my flying career with any kind of conviction, it would have meant us moving again and, since you had already decided you didn’t want to move any more, ostensibly for the sake of the children, this would have placed me in the invidious, but alas familiar, position of having to choose between my family and my profession. Forgive me if I am going over old territory here but it is necessary if I am to explain to you my current position, which is that I find that I am losing ground financially at such a rapid rate I fear where it may end.
‘He wants money,’ I said, looking up from the letter.
‘Surprise surprise,’ said my mother. His previous letters had all asked my mother for money. She had written back to say she didn’t have any. She asked me how much he was asking for this time. I skimmed the last page of the letter looking for a figure, when I came across a mention of me and the Bookers in a passage my father had circled and marked with an asterisk and a couple of exclamation marks.
I thought you should be aware, I recently witnessed Martha cavorting in the street with a fairly spivvy-looking pair in their thirties at least. She looked like a prostitute with her pimp.
As to the aforementioned loan arrangement (at this stage merely a proposition), I would be happy to pay half of any legal fees you may incur should you wish to sign a formal agreement. I leave the amount of the loan to your discretion, but $25,000 or thereabouts would go a long way to keeping the proverbial wolf from the proverbial door.
I stopped reading and looked up at my mother who was stirring the prawns in a frypan. We both watched them curl up and turn pink.
‘What am I?’ she said. ‘The Bank of England?’
‘Kill him,’ I said. It had been a joke between us since before my father moved out. It was what I always said to make my mother laugh when there didn’t seem any real reason to.
She added tomatoes to the pan and swirled them around in the oil with their blood-red juices.
‘What with?’ said my mother. She was trying to stop herself from crying, or at least to make it look like it was the heat from the pan that was making her eyes water. I picked up a kitchen knife and made some stabbing movements in the air to see if I could get her to smile, and when she did I put the knife down and folded the letter away. I asked my mother what she wanted to do with it and she told me to put it on her desk with the others.
‘I think you should burn them all,’ I said. I was stung by what my father had written about me and the Bookers. It was the kind of thing he was always saying about my mother’s friends, but this was the first time he had said it about me. I told my mother she should set fire to an effigy of my father on the front lawn and do a war dance around the flames.
‘One day,’ she said.
Later, while we were having dinner, she asked me if I thought my father was normal.
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘I wonder if he actually likes women,’ she said, ‘or whether deep down he thinks we’re all filthy whores. Have you seen the way he looks at Lorraine?’
Then she told me the story about how on their honeymoon my father had ripped up her wedding dress in a rage and thrown the pieces out the porthole of the ship they were travelling on. All because he found a bon voyage card from a man he didn’t like called Ralph Wesker, someone my mother had known before she met my father. She’d told me the story before but it didn’t matter. It didn’t hurt to hear it again.
‘After that I had to promise never to mention Ralph Wesker’s name again. So I never did. But then I spent years thinking it was him I should have married instead of your father.’
‘So why didn’t you?’ I said.
‘Because he was a Jew.’
I had heard this before too, how my grandmother had taken my mother aside and forbidden her to see Ralph Wesker ever again.
‘What did she have against Jews?’ I said.
‘God knows,’ said my mother. ‘She’d never met a Jew before she met Ralph.’
‘Why didn’t you tell her to mind her own business?’ I said.
‘That’s what I wonder myself,’ said my mother. ‘Maybe it was her fault I turned into such a wimp.’
She smiled at me then and I saw how beautiful my mother must have been when she was twenty-four and just married. Her face was strong and delicate at the same time. She was like a pedigree cat with eyes the colour of seawater.
‘Were you in love when you married Victor?’ I said.
‘I don’t remember,’ she said.
‘How could you forget something like that?’ I said.
‘Because at some point it didn’t matter any more whether I was or I wasn’t,’ she said. And then she said she thought it was like that for the Bookers. She said she thought they were just going through the motions, like a lot of married people do, particularly when there are no children to distract them.
‘But he seems to light up when you walk in the room,’ she said.
‘I haven’t noticed,’ I said.
My mother must have known it was a lie because she just looked at me and told me to be careful. I said I would, and then I thought of telling her that Mr Booker had called me to ask if I would like to have lunch with him at the university one day, just him and me. But I decided not to, in case it made her worry.
In hindsight I think it was a mistake not to say anything to my mother. I think her advice might have been helpful to me at that point. Not that my mother was the type to tell Eddie and me what to do. She used to say she had enough trouble salvaging her own life, let alone telling other people how to live theirs. Still, she might have saved me a lot of trouble if she’d just said what needed to be said, which was that a man like Mr Booker was no good for a girl like me, and that I should wait a while until I found somebody better, except that I wouldn’t have listened because by then I was deaf to any sort of common sense.
Mr Booker’s cramped office was on the second floor. His name was on the door, which was already open when I arrived. I didn’t know anything about his work because he never talked about it unless it was to complain about how tired it made him feel to watch all the brown-nosing that people had to do to get ahead.
‘I find it takes all my strength just to stay in the one spot,’ he said.
I knocked and waited for him to answer before I went in. It made me nervous to see him without Mrs Booker. It meant that something had changed. I knew what it was. I knew that Mr Booker wanted to kiss me again but there hadn’t been a good time because Mrs Booker was always there. I didn’t mind. I wanted to tell him I had already imagined him kissing me again so many times that I was waiting for it to happen, and for him to do other things to me after that, none of which I could name.
‘Good God in Heaven,’ he said, when he saw me come through the door. ‘If it isn’t Bambi.’
He stood up and came around the desk and I thought he was going to shake my hand but he put his arms around me instead and pulled me towards him and we stood there like that for a while, holding each other and not saying anything. He smelled of aftershave and soap and I could hear his blood thumping next to my ear like surf pounding on the beach.
The room was almost bare, except for the furniture and shelving all along the back wall, which was empty except for a few books and papers. His desk was ba
re as well apart from a pile of essays he was marking and an old hardback copy of Alice in Wonderland with his name written inside it. We moved apart and he sat down at his desk. I picked the book up and looked at the pictures.
‘Is this what you’re teaching?’ I said.
‘It’s what I’m reading,’ he said. ‘It helps.’
Then he read to me from the paper he was marking.
‘A common type of criminal portrayed in Hollywood movies is the cereal killer. C-e-r-e-a-l.’
He looked up from the page and put two fingers to the side of his head like a gun then threw the paper across the desk so that it landed on the floor in front of me. I picked it up and handed it back.
‘Take me away from all this,’ he said, looking at me with his dark eyes. They were so steady and serious it was hard for me to look back. I turned away and stared out of the window instead while my heart raced so fast it made me dizzy.
‘Sex raises its ugly head,’ he said.
I laughed out of nervousness and turned to look at him again but his expression hadn’t changed.
‘You think I’m joking,’ he said.
‘You don’t know what I think,’ I said.
We didn’t have lunch at the university. He drove me out to see the house they had bought and stopped the car in the driveway so that I could have a look. It was small and white with lots of windows and a garden full of gum trees.
‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘Do I have my own room?’
‘I dare say some arrangement can be made in the staff quarters,’ he said.
‘Would this involve actual work?’ I said.
‘Light duties,’ he said. ‘You can walk the cat.’
We drove to a roadside shopping centre where we bought some food and a bottle of champagne and then we pulled in at a motel and I waited in the car while Mr Booker went to the office to check us in.
The room was dark when we entered it and the first thing Mr Booker did was turn on a light. He looked around for a moment without saying anything then went into the bathroom to examine the shower and to wash his face. When he came out he said he was sorry it wasn’t the Ritz but they were booked up that week.
‘It’s fine,’ I said. I was standing by the bed waiting for him to tell me what to do next.
He told me to get some glasses from the bar fridge while he opened the bottle. My hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t hold the glasses steady so he took them from me, grasping them in one hand while he poured the champagne with the other, then he put everything down and took hold of my arm. He was smiling but in a nervous way, and when I asked him if he wanted me to take my clothes off he laughed.
‘Whatever you feel is appropriate, my sweet,’ he said.
So that’s when he helped me to take my clothes off, and then he took off his suit and pushed me down onto the pink bed, which is when I told him I had never done it before but that I didn’t want him to stop on account of that.
‘Not a chance,’ he said, taking my nipple in his mouth.
‘You don’t mind?’ I said.
He took my hand and pushed it down so that I was holding his erection, which was very hard, but at the same time so soft to touch it was like water.
‘I guess not,’ he said.
Then he said he was sorry if it hurt but he would try to be gentle, and he was, so it didn’t.
Even so there was a lot of blood, which is something I hadn’t expected because nobody had ever told me how sex worked. My mother had tried once but I had told her I already knew everything from the classes they gave us at school, which wasn’t true because the classes were about health and how to prevent pregnancy, but there wasn’t anything in them about sex in motel rooms with married men.
Not that it mattered what I knew or didn’t know because Mr Booker showed me what to do. And I’m a quick learner. He kept asking me if what he was doing was good. Most of the time I nodded and didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to talk. I just wanted to look at Mr Booker and see how much pleasure he was feeling. And also because I wanted to feel the same amount of pleasure myself, since that was why I was here. It wasn’t because I loved Mr Booker. I didn’t, at least not then. The reason I was here was that I wanted him in a way I barely understood. And I knew he wanted me in the same way because he had wanted me in that way from the first moment he saw me. It wasn’t something that he had ever tried to hide.
His body was as smooth and white as a woman’s, and had a sort of loveliness that I don’t think Mr Booker was aware of. His limbs were big and loosely put together like a runner’s, except that he didn’t exercise so his muscles weren’t as taut as they probably were when he was younger. Beside him my body looked brown and as thin as a boy’s, with boyish hips and a straight waist and almost no breasts. He told me I should eat more and fed me the chocolates and strawberries we’d bought on our way to the motel, and after that we finished the champagne and he asked me if I wanted to do it again.
The second time was when I cried out because of the pleasure and the pain that was mixed up with it, and finally just because of the pleasure.
After that we went to motels two or three times a week, whenever Mr Booker could get away from work. I didn’t tell Mr Booker this but the rooms made me think of my father’s place. It was like all the times we got undressed I could feel my father watching us from beside the window where there was always a chair, even though I could see it was empty.
And I felt Mrs Booker watching us too, her mind filled with murderous thoughts. For this reason whenever Mr Booker was helping me out of my clothes I had a sense of danger, which became part of the pleasure I felt, and made it stronger, so strong sometimes that I wanted to cry as soon as he touched me. It was the power he had over me, and at the same time the power I had over him was that I knew how lonely he was. I could see it in the way he watched me moving hard up next to him so that there was no space between us. It was as if he couldn’t believe his luck.
What I did say one time, when Mr Booker was walking around the room naked except for his wristwatch, was that my father thought he looked like a pimp.
Mr Booker picked up the champagne bottle off the dresser and took a swig before he said anything.
‘He’s just jealous,’ he said, taking another swig while pinning me under him so I couldn’t get away. He put his lips to mine and let warm champagne slide from his mouth into mine.
He asked me if my father had a woman in his life and I said that I didn’t think he was interested.
‘He’s interested,’ said Mr Booker. ‘There isn’t a man alive who isn’t interested. What else is there?’
I said I knew what he meant, that all I ever thought about was him, which was true. It was like a sickness, something in the blood that made me faint every time I remembered what he had done to me the previous hour, or day, where he had put his fingers, or his tongue, or Arthur, which was the name he gave his penis. He rolled off me then and watched me while I lit us both a cigarette.
‘It’s as if I had to come twelve thousand miles across the world just to find you,’ he said.
‘Is that a line from a movie?’ I said.
‘If it isn’t it should be,’ he said.
And then he kissed me the way he had kissed me the first time so that I could hardly breathe and when he stopped I could see tears in his eyes. And that’s when I told him I was in love with him and didn’t know what to do about it because he was already married to Mrs Booker and we’d met too late.
‘I didn’t know what I was getting myself into,’ I said.
‘Of course you didn’t,’ he said. ‘You’re too young.’
I took a long drag on my cigarette then and blew the smoke at the sky-blue ceiling.
‘Are you going to hold that against me?’ I said.
‘As the bishop said to the actress,’ he said.
I asked him why he liked that joke so much and he said it was an English thing, and that its subtlety was probably lost on pimply-faced colonial
minors like me.
‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ I said.
That was how he liked to talk, without really saying anything, as if everything was a game because he had decided to make it one. It meant that he didn’t have to talk about himself. In all the time I knew him I learned almost nothing about him. All I knew was that he was the only child of an office clerk and that his mother liked to knit him sweaters that he hated wearing because they made him itch, and that his parents had been over fifty before they bought their first car. In the only photograph of him I ever saw, he was nine or ten and walking beside his mother somewhere by the sea, except it wasn’t the sea I knew from all our fiery summer holidays. This sea was a cold grey line behind him. He was wearing a woollen jacket with matching shorts and a kind of school cap on his head. It looked like there was a bitter wind blowing because his mother had her coat clutched to her breast and her hand to her felt hat to stop it from flying away.
Ilfracombe, he said it was. He told me you could see Wales from there if it was a clear day, and I thought I had never heard anything so magical, because I was like that then. Anywhere foreign seemed like paradise.
He saw his first movies with his mother—she was obsessed with them. It was what she did, he said, to forget who she was for a couple of hours, and where’s the harm in that? Except that his father objected. It wasn’t good to forget who you were, he said, or where you came from. Mr Booker disagreed. Mr Booker thought it was, for people like his mother, their only hope.
‘She was illegitimate,’ he said. ‘She never knew her father. She thought he was dead until he turned up drunk one day and tried to kick down the door.’
He wanted to know about me, he said, but I told him there was nothing to know, that I had no secrets, that deep down I was superficial.
‘Bollocks,’ he said. ‘You’re a whole continent waiting to be discovered.’ He traced his finger along the line of my ribs and down over my hip, stopping at the small round scar on the outside of my right thigh.