by Cory Taylor
‘In my beginning is my end. It takes Fitzgerald a whole novel to say something similar.’
‘Is that a bad thing?’ I said.
‘It’s not exactly bad,’ he said. ‘It’s just I prefer brevity.’
Philip walked away from me then, in the abrupt way he had of ending a conversation, and I saw him walk out into the courtyard at the back of the house where he sat down on his own and started to eat his plate of finger food one bite at a time.
That was when Mrs Booker came to stand beside me and pour herself another glass of vodka.
‘Hello, stranger,’ she said.
I turned to her and made an effort to smile even though my face felt like all the muscles in it had lost their way. I could tell she was drunk because she kept trying to slide her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose and not quite succeeding.
‘What brings you to this neck of the woods?’ she said.
‘I’m on my way to an end-of-exam party,’ I said.
‘What are you celebrating?’ she said.
‘The end of exams,’ I said.
‘That would make sense,’ she said, taking me by the arm and leading me over to a chair so she could sit down and search for a cigarette in her bag. When she offered me one I took it.
‘I’m celebrating too,’ she said. She didn’t look like she was celebrating. She was dressed all in black as if she was in mourning.
‘What are you celebrating?’ I said.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’
She stared straight ahead and smoked her cigarette. I sat next to her, perched on the arm of the sofa, waiting for whatever it was she wanted to tell me next.
‘I’m sorry about the baby,’ I said finally. ‘Lorraine told me it was a girl.’
Mrs Booker didn’t reply straight away, but then she looked at me out of her smudged glasses and asked me what else Lorraine had told me.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘What a fucking nerve,’ she said. I wasn’t sure if she meant Lorraine or me so I kept quiet.
‘I suppose you’re satisfied?’ she said.
‘Sorry?’ I said.
It was strange how calm she was. She hadn’t even raised her voice. It was like she was talking about the weather.
‘All I can tell you,’ she said, ‘is be careful what you wish for.’
I waited for a moment longer then I thanked her for the advice and got up to walk away, which is when Mrs Booker grabbed hold of my arm and shouted loud enough for the whole room to hear.
‘I hope you rot in hell,’ she said. ‘All of you. I don’t care if I never see any of you again.’ And then she looked at me and pointed with her cigarette. ‘But especially you,’ she said. ‘You’re nothing but a harlot.’
I almost laughed because that wasn’t the worst thing Mrs Booker could have said to me. She could have said a whole lot of other, more accurate things, but she didn’t, she just sat back in her chair and finished her drink and then she got up and left the party and didn’t turn around, even when someone in the room started to clap.
When I told Mr Booker what Mrs Booker had said he took hold of my hand and kissed it and said he was sorry his wife had made a public spectacle of herself. We were sitting in the café where he ate breakfast in the mornings.
‘A harlot,’ I said. ‘That hurt.’
‘Like being slapped in the face with a feather,’ he said. He took a drag on his cigarette then swallowed the smoke.
‘She was pretty angry,’ I said.
‘She’s perfectly within her rights,’ he said.
‘Why are you standing up for her?’ I said.
‘Because she’s just an innocent bystander,’ he said, reaching for his coffee.
‘Is that what you really think?’
Mr Booker sipped his coffee and smiled at me over the rim of his cup.
‘Harlot,’ he said.
‘Dirty old man,’ I said.
‘What I don’t get,’ I said, ‘is why she doesn’t leave you. If it was me I would’ve left you ages ago.’
‘She’s a nicer person than you are,’ he said.
‘I can be nice when I try,’ I said.
I thought the reason Mrs Booker stayed with Mr Booker when it was only making both of them more desperate with every passing day had nothing to do with niceness. It was more like she’d decided if she couldn’t be happy then neither would anybody else. She’d make sure of it.
home sweet home
I lied to my mother about where I was going for the weekend. I said there was a school break-up party at a house in the country and I was going there with some girlfriends.
‘Who?’ she said.
I told her some names.
‘How are you getting there?’ she said.
I told her I was getting a lift with Bella Larwood.
‘Who’s Bella Larwood?’ she said.
‘You’d like her,’ I said. ‘She was sports captain. She was in the state finals for discus.’
For a moment I thought my mother was going to refuse to let me go but she relented.
‘I’ll call you when we get there,’ I said.
‘Make sure you do,’ she said.
And then I packed my bag and caught the bus into town and Mr Booker picked me up at the bus stop like we’d arranged and took me back to his house.
It was like we were on our honeymoon. Mrs Booker had cleaned the house and bought a whole lot of groceries so that Mr Booker wouldn’t have to shop or go hungry. She’d even cooked him a pot of soup and a beef stew and left them in the fridge with labels on them to tell him what they were and when to eat them.
‘That’s very thoughtful of her,’ I said.
‘She’s making an effort,’ said Mr Booker. He was walking around the kitchen wrapped in a bath towel and nothing else. I couldn’t help staring at him. His skin was slick from the shower and his dark curls were dripping droplets of water onto his pale shoulders and back.
‘You keep saying that,’ I said.
‘Saying what?’
‘You keep defending her.’
‘That’s because she hasn’t done anything wrong,’ he said.
‘Is that your way of making yourself feel better about fucking other people?’
‘What other people?’ he said. ‘Are there more of you?’
‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘It’s too weird.’
‘You will,’ he said. ‘When you’re older. You’ll be amazed how much weirdness there is out there.’
I didn’t answer him. It wasn’t exactly an argument we were having, but it was close, and I didn’t want it to get any worse because I could tell Mr Booker didn’t like me to talk about his wife. Some other subjects were off limits too. The baby, for instance, even though all the furniture the Bookers had bought for it, and all the sheets and baby blankets and clothes and toys, were still in the room opposite the main bedroom. Some of the stuff was in its packaging, and the cot was covered in plastic wrapping to keep the dust off.
After we’d eaten the beef stew I helped Mr Booker wash the dishes and then he suggested we take a walk to get some ice-cream because we hadn’t been out of the house all day. So we got dressed and walked to the shops and back, which took us almost an hour. It was a perfect night to be outside because the summer had already started but it was only hot during the day. After the sun went down everything cooled off except the breeze, which was warm and sweet from all the wattle blossoms.
Mr Booker and I had been drinking champagne and then wine and then whisky so we weren’t exactly thinking straight. That was why we stopped in front of someone’s house and sat down on the nature strip and watched a family at the dining table. There was a husband and a wife and three children, and after a while the mother got up out of her seat and carried the two younger children out of the room, leaving the father with the eldest, a boy. The two of them sat opposite each other and ate without speaking, until the father noticed us looking into his house and stood up. He came to the window and
squinted into the dark then made a motion with his hand to move us on, even though we weren’t doing anything except just sitting on the nature strip.
‘I think we better go,’ I said, and I helped Mr Booker to his feet.
‘He’s asking us in for a drink,’ said Mr Booker.
‘I don’t think he is,’ I said. The man had moved to where he could shout to us through an open window.
‘Can I help you with anything?’ he said.
‘No, thank you,’ I said, pushing Mr Booker in the back so that he would start to walk in the direction of home.
‘We’re lost,’ Mr Booker shouted. ‘We’re lost in the desert. We’re dying of fucking thirst out here.’
I took him by the arm and dragged him along behind me, while the man watched us through his window until we were a safe distance away.
‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ said Mr Booker, gesturing at all the houses around us, sitting neatly in their squares of garden.
‘You tell me,’ I said.
‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘that nobody gives a shit. Where I grew up we all knew each other. We were all in and out of each other’s houses. I even caught Mrs Davies giving the coal man a hand job one day. That was a laugh. She offered me money to keep my mouth shut.’
‘How much?’
‘A quid,’ he said. ‘It was a small fortune to me. I took it and told my cousin anyway and he told Mr Davies who wasn’t too pleased.’
‘And the moral of the story is?’
‘Keep your hands to yourself,’ said Mr Booker.
‘Good advice,’ I said.
When we got home Mr Booker made some coffee and said we should try to stay awake for the English football at midnight and before that there was a re-run of Seven Samurai on television.
‘I tell my students if they watch nothing else all year in my course they should watch that film because there isn’t a wasted moment in it.’
And so we sat up in our sofa bed, where Mr Booker had decided we should sleep instead of messing up the main bedroom, until two in the morning. I could tell how pleased Mr Booker was that I was there because he kept reaching out for my hand and picking it up to kiss it, as if he was checking that I hadn’t left.
The next day I helped him clean the house and I walked down the road to find a neighbour’s bin to dump our empty bottles in. On the way back I saw Mr Booker standing in the doorway of his house watching me. He was wearing nothing but his underwear and I suddenly realised how old he was compared to me, how his whole stance, the way he leaned on the doorframe and smoked his cigarette and shifted his weight from one leg to the other, made him seem like he was already an old man. Which is when I realised how other people must see him, Mrs Booker, Lorraine, Geoff, people who were nearer Mr Booker’s age than I was, how they must look at him and me and wonder what the reason was for whatever had happened between us, when all it proved was love is not something you see coming. It is just there all of a sudden, like a door opening up in a blank wall.
‘I don’t want to go home,’ I told Mr Booker when he said it was time for him to pick up Mrs Booker from the airport.
‘You have to,’ he said.
‘I’m tired of this,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to have to always sneak back home to my mother. It’s so undignified.’
That made Mr Booker smile.
‘I know what you mean,’ he said.
I wanted to tell him that I was sick of waiting for him to leave his wife but I could tell just by looking at his expression that he knew this already, and that there wasn’t anything else I could tell him that he hadn’t already thought of, except maybe my idea that this was the beginning of the end of everything.
I once asked Mr Booker if he regretted anything he’d done in his life and he said he should have left England sooner, when he was young, and then he told me to get away from my parents and their problems as soon as I could. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad,’ he said.
‘I’ll drop you home,’ he said while we were getting into the car.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Just take me into town and I’ll get the bus. I don’t want my mother to see us.’
It was Eddie I was more worried about. He was out in his taxi ten or twelve hours a day. He was the one who was most likely to see me, and then he’d tell my father.
‘Whatever’s best for you,’ said Mr Booker.
‘Will I see you on Wednesday?’ I said.
‘With bells on,’ he said.
But I didn’t see him. On Wednesday morning Mr Booker rang to say he had to go to the dentist that day for an infected tooth. And I didn’t see him the next week either because he said he had a moderation meeting.
‘What’s a moderation meeting?’ I said.
‘A total fucking waste of time,’ he said. ‘I’d rather swallow razor blades.’
‘Don’t go,’ I said.
He said he had to, then he suggested that I take the Friday night off from my job at the cinema where I’d gone full-time now that school was finished. He told me Mrs Booker was going to her first tango class on Friday night and he didn’t want to hang around in town like a spare dick at a wedding waiting for her to finish just so he could drive her home.
He picked me up outside the cinema and I could tell something had changed as soon as I got in the car. Not that Mr Booker said anything, it was just that he was nervous and fidgety. He asked me to light a cigarette straight off the one he was already smoking and when I handed it to him I could see that his hands were shaking.
‘Are you okay?’ I said.
‘Never better,’ he said, but I could tell he was lying.
He drove us to a restaurant he’d discovered in a new shopping centre on the edge of the town and he parked the car right out the front.
‘What is this?’ I said.
‘A little slice of Ireland,’ he said.
From the front the place looked like a doctor’s surgery, but inside there was an Irish band playing and the tables were cordoned off from each other into little cubicles to make it seem cozy, and the lights were so dim it was hard to see where you were going.
‘Drink?’ said Mr Booker, heading straight for the bar. I asked for a glass of red wine and found an empty cubicle where I hid in case the barmaid saw how young I was and refused to serve me alcohol.
Mr Booker came back with a tall beer and a bottle of wine with two glasses.
‘There we are, my sweet,’ he said. ‘I recommend the bangers and mash.’
I said I wasn’t hungry, that I’d had dinner at home with my mother.
‘You need to build yourself up,’ he said, pouring me a glass of wine and watching me drink it.
‘What are you looking at?’ I said.
‘You,’ he said.
‘You’re making me nervous,’ I said.
We sat and drank for a while without saying anything then Mr Booker went back to the bar and bought himself another beer and a whisky and a packet of peanuts, and then, when he sat down again, he said he had something to tell me that I shouldn’t take the wrong way.
‘What is it?’ I said.
He told me that he and Mrs Booker were going to England for Christmas to be with Mrs Booker senior who was suffering from some peculiar ailment.
‘It’s either that or she comes out here,’ he said. ‘Which she doesn’t fancy because of the heat.’
‘When are you coming back?’ I said, trying to sound as if it didn’t matter to me one way or another.
‘We haven’t got a date,’ he said.
‘Before the wedding?’ I said.
‘Possibly not,’ he said.
‘Pity,’ I said. ‘It should be fun.’
‘Can’t be in two places at once,’ he said. ‘As you well know.’
I poured myself another glass of wine and drank the whole thing down and then I waited for the warmth of it to snake right through me before I said anything else.
‘Take me with you,’ I told him, when the wine had reac
hed my face. I was smiling but not because I meant to.
‘I’d love nothing more,’ he said.
‘But you won’t,’ I said.
‘Can’t,’ he said.
‘Same difference,’ I said.
Mr Booker sipped his whisky and lit us both a cigarette. He passed me mine, then said he would write to me while he was away and buy me a present.
‘We’re talking a matter of weeks,’ he said.
‘I might not be here when you get back,’ I said.
‘Where will you be?’ he said.
‘Depends if my mother can sell the house,’ I said.
‘Let me know,’ he said.
‘How?’ I said. ‘I don’t know where you’ll be.’
‘I’ll give you my parents’ address,’ he said. ‘You can write to me there.’
It occurred to me then that Mr Booker had probably known for a while that he and Mrs Booker might not be coming back from England but he’d waited this long to say anything to me, which was why he was so nervous. I wanted to reach across and hit him and tell him I was not going to just stay where I was and wait like a faithful dog for him to decide to come back to me but I knew he wouldn’t listen because he was drunk and because he didn’t want to hear it. So I just stood up and walked out of the restaurant and kept on walking past the car and up onto the dark road where I turned in the direction of town. After about ten minutes Mr Booker stopped to pick me up and we drove to the top of the mountain behind the university, where we parked and climbed over into the back seat of the car.
‘You couldn’t do this in the Datsun,’ I said and he told me to be quiet so I stopped talking and let him do whatever he wanted and he wasn’t nervous at all. He was in a hurry like the time before when we were hiding in the rocks and he kept on saying I was his.
‘Do you know that?’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said.
the song of the road
My mother sold the house at the end of November, but the new owners didn’t want to move in until after New Year so we had a few weeks to pack.
I helped as much as I could even though by then I had two jobs, one in a newsagency three days a week and the other at the cinema four evenings a week. I was saving my money. I wanted to have as much as I could by the end of summer so I could buy a ticket to anywhere that I liked. I knew Alice was going to America to ski because she’d called me to see if I was interested in going too. But I wasn’t. And Kate Hollis had asked me to go to Japan with her to teach English but Kate Hollis was not a very cheerful person when you got her on her own, in fact she was morbid, so I said I had to wait until my mother had decided where she was going to live before I made any plans.
