by Cory Taylor
‘I know,’ I said. My mother seemed strong but when you put your arms around her you felt how small she was and how light.
bye baby bunting, daddy’s gone a-hunting.
At the end of September, on a Wednesday morning, Mr Booker rang to say he wouldn’t be picking me up from school that afternoon because Mrs Booker was indisposed.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
‘I’ll tell you when I see you,’ he said.
It was two whole days before I heard from him again. By then I’d already found out from Lorraine that Mrs Booker had lost the baby, which made it sound like an accident or something, the same way someone loses their wallet or their house keys.
‘How terrible,’ said my mother. ‘She must be devastated.’
Lorraine said she’d seen Mrs Booker a couple of days after it happened and she was in a pretty bad way.
‘It was a girl,’ said Lorraine. ‘Daphne.’
‘Lovely name,’ said my mother.
I didn’t say anything. As much as I could see how sad it must be for the Bookers, part of me was glad the baby was dead, which was a shocking way to think, I knew that, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d never liked the baby from the start.
‘How’s Mr Booker?’ asked my mother, as if she’d read my thoughts. Lorraine and she were looking through patterns for Lorraine’s wedding dress. Lorraine had given up on the idea of knitting one because it would end up being too hot and heavy. She’d decided to sew one instead, something simple and cheap. She didn’t want to blow money on the wedding, given that she’d finally persuaded Geoff they needed to rent a new house together, in a new neighbourhood, with new furniture and a new bed so that Sandra’s old one could be sold or sent back to Sandra.
‘He doesn’t say much,’ said Lorraine. ‘Stiff upper lip and all that.’
I tried calling Mr Booker at work the next day but his phone just rang and rang and nobody answered.
When he called me back on Friday he was more cheerful than I expected.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘Can’t be helped,’ he said. ‘Or as my old mum used to say, The Lord giveth and The Lord taketh away.’
He’d been drinking. I could always tell from his voice if he’d been drinking. When he was drunk he had a kind of silkiness in the way he talked, as if he was singing the words in some smoky room somewhere with an audience of precisely no one. He asked me if I could borrow my mother’s car and take him for a drive.
‘What’s happened to the Datsun?’ I said.
‘Out of commission,’ he said.
He told me the story while I drove him out through the pine forests and into the country. He said that he and Mrs Booker had had an altercation.
‘A what?’ I said.
‘A discussion,’ he said.
‘What about?’
‘Hard to say for sure,’ he said. ‘She misses England.’
‘Why doesn’t she go back?’
‘Exactly what I suggested she do,’ he said.
He told me how Mrs Booker had packed her bags and left in the car for the airport, except that she’d taken a wrong turn and ended up travelling the wrong way down a dual carriageway straight into oncoming traffic.
‘Holy shit,’ I said.
‘And then she inserts the car into the crash barrier, which is when the police ring me. They want to do her for dangerous driving, but by now she’s having contractions in the back seat of the paddy wagon.’
‘That’s horrible,’ I said.
‘There’s worse to come,’ said Mr Booker, then he took hold of my hand and asked me to pull over by the side of the road because he desperately needed to pee.
I waited in the car for him, and when he didn’t come back straight away I went to find him. He was sitting in the long grass with his legs stretched out, staring at the view over the sheep paddocks to the hills in the distance, which at this time of the afternoon were orange and lavender. He patted the ground next to him and I sat down.
‘Is that the reason she lost the baby?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘But it was a contributing factor.’
Neither of us said anything for a while until Mr Booker told me the car was a write-off.
‘Maybe you can find another one the same,’ I said.
‘I doubt that there is one the same in the entire known universe,’ he said. And then he told me Mrs Booker wanted a bigger car next time, a sedan or a station wagon.
‘Even now?’ I said.
He stared at me and smiled in a crooked way.
Which is when I leaned across and kissed him and pushed him back onto the ground and we would have done it then and there except that Mr Booker stopped all of a sudden and lay back staring at the purple sky.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
‘I’m fucked if I know what we’re doing,’ he said.
‘I’ll remind you,’ I said, climbing on top of him and pulling my top off over my head.
He looked up at me and smiled.
‘It’s the blind leading the fucking blind,’ he said.
‘Or the other way round,’ I said.
After we were finished he thanked me. We were sitting up again and brushing the grass and dust off our skin and clothes.
‘No problem,’ I said.
He leaned over and took my head in his fine hands and stared at me.
‘What?’ I said.
‘You’re fucking gorgeous,’ he said.
‘Why do you do that?’ I said.
‘Do what?’ he said.
‘Act like a fool,’ I said.
‘It’s got me where I am today,’ he said. And then he bent forward and bit my lip so hard it started to bleed.
if you can’t stand the heat
Eddie came back to town and took a job as a taxi driver. He moved out of my mother’s house and into a two-bedroom flat, and for a while after he got out of hospital my father stayed with him. I went to visit because my mother said I should.
‘It’s only until I’m back on my feet,’ Victor told me. ‘And it helps Eddie to make ends meet.’
I watched him trying to cook dinner for my brother so he could have a proper meal before he started his shift. My father wasn’t used to cooking. He took the bread knife to cut the meat and didn’t use a cutting board so that the knife cut into the bench top and left wounds.
‘What are you making?’ I said.
‘My signature dish,’ he said. ‘Steak and onions.’
‘Do you want some help?’
‘I can manage perfectly well,’ he said. He still had bandages on his hands from the fire. They were bloody from the steaks.
I made us both a cup of sour coffee and sat down at the dining table in the alcove next to the kitchen. It looked out on the garden where the grass had grown two feet high and everything else was dead.
‘How are you feeling?’ I said.
‘What’s it to you?’ he said.
I told him if he didn’t want me there I’d leave.
‘I suppose your mother sent you over,’ he said. ‘To check up on me.’
‘Something like that,’ I said.
‘No doubt she’s got better things to do with her time than come and see me in person,’ he said.
I said I didn’t want to talk about my mother. I asked what drove him to set fire to his room.
‘I didn’t do it deliberately,’ he said. ‘It was an accident.’
‘That’s not what the motel manager says.’
‘The man’s delusional,’ he said.
I told him a lawyer for the motel had been ringing my mother trying to get money out of her for the repairs.
‘How did he get her number?’ said my father, refusing to look at me.
‘That’s what she’d like to know,’ I said.
‘No doubt he’s been going through my mail,’ said my father.
‘He says you owe him rent,’ I said.
‘He can take me to court,’ said my father.
&n
bsp; I asked him if the doctors had discussed his medication with him and he said they had.
‘I made the mistake of halving my dosage a few weeks back,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a good idea.’
He covered the plate of steak with a sheet of newspaper to keep the flies off it and came to sit down. His clothes looked like he’d slept in them and he needed a bath and a shave. He started to tell me how grateful he was to Eddie for taking him in.
‘It isn’t easy for him,’ he said.
‘He volunteered,’ I said.
‘Well, if you want the honest truth I flatly refused to go knocking at your mother’s door again begging for charity,’ he said. ‘I know when I’m not welcome. She made her feelings towards me crystal clear the last time I needed her help.’
‘That’s a good thing,’ I said. ‘At least you know where you stand.’
Which was what I honestly felt. I was happy for my mother that she’d finally managed to convince Victor to stay away from her. I thought that maybe this time he might see a way to take charge of his own life.
I stayed for an hour and listened to my father talk, mainly because there was no way of stopping him. He talked like he didn’t care if I was listening or not, like talking was the only way he had to fill up his time. I knew that the days were too long for him and that sleeping was his only other outlet, because that was how it had been all the other times he’d been stuck at home with no job. He mostly talked about my mother, about how he had thought there was nothing wrong until my mother said there was.
‘It came as a total surprise to me,’ he said.
I said I didn’t know how that could be, because even I knew there was something wrong.
‘I think most of the neighbourhood knew,’ I said. ‘You practically shouted it from the rooftop.’
‘I think your mother mistook healthy disagreements for personal attacks,’ said my father.
‘They didn’t sound very healthy to me,’ I said.
Then I told him I was leaving because I needed to get the car back home, but really I was leaving because Eddie was up now and had come into the kitchen to eat. I didn’t want to sit there and talk to my brother while my father cooked the steak because all we ever said to each other was whatever lies we could think up on the spot to hide what we were really thinking.
‘Thanks for the coffee,’ I said to my father.
‘Are you still seeing that creep Hooker?’ he said. This was for my brother’s benefit. It was my father’s way of showing he still took an interest in my welfare.
‘I think you mean Mr Booker.’
‘Whatever his name is,’ he said.
‘I run into him from time to time,’ I said. ‘It’s a small town.’
‘I had them in the cab the other day,’ said my brother. ‘Pissed as newts at three in the afternoon.’
‘Sounds about right,’ I said.
‘Forgotten where they’d parked their car,’ said my brother. ‘Then they sat in the back and had an argument about whether it was light blue or dark blue.’
‘Why don’t you have any friends your own age?’ asked my father.
‘Why don’t you have any friends?’ I asked.
I left and drove home the long way around the lake. The one thing I liked about the town were the mountain views that appeared ahead of you when you were driving. If you had music on very loud with the windows wound down and you were smoking, it was like you were in a film about your own life, about how you’d escaped your fate somehow and this was the scene where you were getting out of town to make a fresh start. I was playing my mother’s Joni Mitchell album, and while I was singing along there was nothing else but the song and the road I was on and the horizon under the cloudless sky. I wasn’t happy in my film, but I wasn’t sad either. I was like someone suspended between being one way and being another, at a moment when all things are still possible. But of course they never are, at least not for very long. Everything settles into one set of facts sooner or later. If it didn’t nothing would have any shape or meaning. I said this to Mr Booker once and he said the point is to resist the facts as long as possible.
‘How romantic,’ I said.
‘It’s the most romantic thing I know,’ he said.
But then I started waiting again because it was the only thing I was good at. Mostly I waited for Mr Booker to call me every week and tell me when he wanted to see me. His afternoons had become unpredictable, he said, because it was getting close to the end of term and his students were asking for appointments so they could discuss what was going to be in the exams, or what they should write for their final assessments.
‘I tell them it doesn’t really matter,’ he said. ‘But they fret nevertheless.’
‘Maybe I should stay here and study under you next year,’ I said.
‘Or on top of me,’ he said. ‘Whichever you prefer.’
He was giving me a lift to the library in his new car, which was a navy-blue Mazda he’d bought cheap from a friend. There wasn’t time for us to go anywhere on the way because I had an exam the following day and I needed to do some revision and because Mr Booker was going to a fancy-dress quiz night with the secretary of his department and her husband, who was a roofing-tile salesman. Mr Booker was dressed as a Beatle. He’d combed his hair forward in a fringe and hired a satin military jacket and a pair of round tinted glasses, his rose-coloured spectacles, he called them. Mrs Booker wasn’t up for it, he said, because she was nursing a hangover.
‘I thought she quit,’ I said.
‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions,’ said Mr Booker.
‘How is she?’ I asked. ‘I mean, does she ever say anything about us? Or is that something you don’t talk about?’
‘One of the many things,’ he said. And then he sighed and we drove for a while without talking until I told him that my mother was going to sell her house and move somewhere else.
‘Good for her,’ he said.
‘I don’t know if I should go with her or not,’ I said.
‘Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch,’ he said. It wasn’t meant to mean anything. It was just the way Mr Booker talked when he was excited about something, blurting the first thing that came into his head. A lot of what he said was like that, like lines of a long poem that was writing itself in his brain the whole time.
‘If you say so,’ I said.
I asked him what he thought I should do once I’d finished school. I said I was worried about my future. He put his hand on my thigh and told me the future was overrated.
‘I’m serious,’ I said.
‘So am I,’ he said.
I said what I was really waiting for him to do was elope with me to Rio like he kept promising.
‘You’re all talk,’ I said.
‘Not a bit of it,’ he said, looking at me with a tender expression. ‘Ask me again in a week’s time.’
‘What’s happening in a week’s time?’ I said.
‘My good lady wife’s off on some course,’ he said. ‘She’s decided to concentrate on her career.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’ I said.
‘I couldn’t get a word in,’ he said. ‘You kept interrupting, blathering on like a bum on a bicycle.’
I asked him how long Mrs Booker was going to be away and he said two nights.
‘Alone at last,’ I said.
‘No need to sound so pleased,’ he said.
I laughed at him then and he squeezed my knee.
‘Fancy a filthy weekend?’ he said.
‘You really know how to make a girl feel special,’ I said.
‘What do you say we stock up on champagne and truffles and bunker down for the duration?’
‘What do I tell my mother?’ I said.
‘You’ll think of something,’ he said.
Mr Booker pulled up outside the library and waited with the engine running.
‘That’ll be fun,’ I said.
‘You think so?’ he said.
‘What do you think?’ I said.
‘I think you should cut your losses,’ he said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I said.
‘You’re just a kid,’ he said.
‘You say that like it’s news,’ I said. ‘What am I supposed to say when you say something like that?’
‘Nothing at all,’ said Mr Booker. Then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and waited for me to climb out of the car. He tooted the horn as he drove away. The last thing I saw as he disappeared around a bend was his hand waving to me out of the driver’s side window.
The other thing I was waiting for was seeing Mrs Booker again because I hadn’t seen her after the day at the races but I knew we were bound to run into each other somewhere. I actually wanted it to happen sooner rather than later so I could get it over with, like a maths test or a visit to the dentist. Not that I had any idea what I was going to say to her when we met, or what she was going to say to me, because I realised that I really didn’t know Mrs Booker very well. I knew her a lot less well, for instance, than I knew Mr Booker. For obvious reasons.
In the end I saw her at a birthday party for my mother’s friend Hilary. It was on a Friday and I’d just sat my last exam so I was in the mood to go out and have a good time. My mother said she’d take me to the birthday and I could have something to eat there before I went to the end-of-exam party at Katie Hollis’s place, just a few streets away.
I saw Mrs Booker as soon as I walked in, and she saw my mother and me. It was hard not to because there were only about twenty people in the room. Even so she tried to make it seem like she was looking at the book in her hand and not paying us any attention, which I was grateful for because it gave me time to get a glass of wine and make small talk with Philip about the English paper.
‘Did you do the Gatsby question?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘The Eliot.’
‘Are you a fan?’ I said.
‘Totally,’ he said. ‘The man’s a genius.’
‘Better than Fitzgerald?’
‘Well, it’s the less-is-more rule, isn’t it,’ he said.
I had no idea what he was talking about but I stood there listening because it meant I could seem occupied and avoid Mrs Booker.