Me and Mr Booker

by Cory Taylor

  And then my mother said Rowena had started looking for a place in Sydney to buy, so maybe I could go and live with her when she found somewhere and my mother would come later.

  ‘Where will you stay in the meantime?’ I said.

  My mother told me she’d already booked herself a room at the university where they had accommodation for visiting scholars.

  ‘You’re not a visiting scholar,’ I said.

  ‘They’re a bit short,’ she said.

  ‘So you’re going to live by yourself?’ I said.

  ‘Just until I find a job in Sydney,’ she said. ‘I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be like my student days.’

  My mother had always said her days at university had been the happiest of her life because she’d been free of my grandmother at last and able to do as she pleased for the first time. She did a little dance around the room and then went back to packing up her books. She had Cat Stevens turned up loud while we worked, and it was strange how light-hearted she was, as if every box she filled and sealed up with packing tape ready for the truck was one more weight off her mind.

  At dinner she told me it was the twentieth time she’d moved and the easiest.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘No kids or animals,’ she said. ‘And no Victor in the background making things difficult.’

  ‘Don’t speak too soon,’ I said.

  My father had already been around once with Eddie to pick up stuff from the garage that my mother was throwing away.

  ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ he said.

  He was looking better than he had in a long time. He said it was all the exercise he was doing now he was only driving occasionally and riding his bike more. He said he cycled to work at his new job sorting mail at the post office during the Christmas rush.

  ‘I think I’ve found my metier,’ he told my mother.

  She poured the tea then told Victor and Eddie to help themselves to cake.

  ‘I won’t,’ said my father. ‘I’m watching my weight.’ But then five minutes later he took a slice and ate it in one bite.

  ‘I sort, therefore I am,’ he said, brushing the crumbs from his new moustache.

  ‘It’s the one and only thing I like about moving house,’ said my mother. ‘You’re forced to separate the things you need in your life from the things you don’t need in your life.’

  ‘Meaning me,’ said my father.

  ‘You said it,’ said my mother.

  There was a silence then while everybody ate their cake, including my father who had helped himself to a second slice, then Eddie said he was thinking of taking off pretty soon himself, maybe getting a lift up to Queensland with his friend Mikey Kerrigan to see if there was work in the mines. He glanced at my father, and then at my mother.

  ‘No need to stay on my account,’ said Victor, after clearing his throat.

  ‘Not straight away,’ said Eddie. ‘I can find someone to rent the room if you want.’

  ‘Not necessary,’ said my father.

  And then they finished their tea and went to pack up the Jaguar, which had a long dent down the driver’s side where the paint had come off, exposing the bare metal underneath.

  ‘You should have seen the other guy’s car,’ said my father.

  My mother and I waved to them as they drove away and my father shouted out the window, ‘I shall return.’

  ‘Something to look forward to,’ said my mother, forcing herself to look like she was smiling.

  I saw Mr Booker twice before he went to England. The first time was for breakfast in the café. He asked me to meet him there so he could give me his parents’ address in England. They were living in a caravan park on the coast of Devon, he told me.

  ‘We went there for our summer holidays a couple of times,’ he said. ‘And they liked it so much they retired there.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, taking the piece of paper he handed me.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ he said in his Irishman’s voice. ‘But don’t you make an old man happy just by lookin’ at yer.’

  He asked me how the packing was going at home and I said we’d done as much as we could now before the removalist came on Christmas Eve to take most of what my mother owned into storage. I told him the rest was going later when Rowena found us a house.

  ‘So you’re away to Sydney then?’ he said.

  ‘Again,’ I said. ‘Unless I just take off somewhere overseas.’

  ‘Where would you go?’ said Mr Booker.

  ‘Paris,’ I said. ‘Maybe you could meet me there.’

  Mr Booker lit a cigarette then smiled at me through coils of smoke.

  ‘There’s a thought,’ he said, but I could tell he wasn’t serious by the way his gaze shifted from mine and landed on the table where his half-eaten breakfast was waiting for him.

  ‘Do you want that?’ I said.

  For a moment he must have thought I meant did he want to meet up in Paris because he didn’t say anything. It was only when I reached for the plate of food that he realised his mistake and laughed.

  ‘Go for your life,’ he said.

  The second time I saw him was when he asked me to go to the motel one last time and I said I would but that I couldn’t stay very long because I had to work.

  ‘A quickie then,’ he said. ‘For the road.’

  ‘A quickie,’ I said.

  The smell hit me as soon as I walked through the door, air freshener mixed with damp dog. But at least the sheets were crisp and clean. Mr Booker suggested we take a shower together because it was so hot, so we did and afterwards we sat up in bed smoking, with the white sheets covering us, and he told me his travel dream.

  ‘I’m on a railway station platform and my bags are on the train, all of them except one, the most important one, because it has all my letters in it.’

  ‘Letters to who?’ I said.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘I mean in the dream I can’t remember. And then the train starts to pull away and I can’t run after it until I find where I’ve left the one bag.’

  I told him I’d had a dream where I’d packed up all Victor’s things and left them outside in the rain, including a plane he’d been secretly building in his room.

  ‘What kind of plane?’ said Mr Booker.

  ‘The kind with propellers,’ I said.

  ‘A model,’ he said.

  ‘Not a model,’ I said. ‘A real plane. I left it parked out in the driveway and then he came home and complained that the driveway was too short for him to take off.’

  ‘You have to go,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what I tell him,’ I said.

  ‘No, I mean you have to go,’ said Mr Booker showing me the time on his watch. I was meant to be at work already.

  I would like to be able to tell you that when the time came to say goodbye to Mr Booker at the door of the motel room I was as placid as a lamb and resigned to my fate and not in the least hysterical, except that the opposite is true. I had said goodbye to Mr Booker before, but this time I knew there was a possibility I might not see him again for a long time and it made me sick with self-pity. It was like the feeling I’d had when the Bookers had come to my mother’s house for the first time and had seemed to fill it with light, only now I had the opposite feeling, that by going back to England Mr Booker was taking the light with him and plunging everything into shadow. I told Mr Booker he couldn’t go. I said if he left me I would die of loneliness.

  ‘Nobody dies of loneliness,’ he said. ‘Believe me. I know.’

  ‘You’re so full of shit,’ I said. I was crying and trying to bury my face in his shirt and he was trying to hold me off so that my tears and snot wouldn’t damage his silk necktie.

  ‘I wish I could change things,’ he said, his voice so faint I could hardly hear it.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said.

  And then he wrestled himself free and walked out the door. I ran out after him and shouted down the stairs that he could go fuck himself for all I cared,
and he was a creep, just like my father said, and I should have screamed child abuse the minute he first laid a hand on me. But I don’t think Mr Booker heard a word of what I was saying because by this time I could see him getting into his car and waiting for me to pull myself together, which I had to do pretty fast because by then I was seriously late for my shift at the cinema and I knew Donna, my supervisor, would be counting the minutes until I got there so she could dock my pay.

  The day the Bookers left town I took my mother’s car for a drive and parked it near their house so I could see them leave. I don’t know why I decided to do this, but it was probably so I could make sure Mr Booker was really leaving since a part of me didn’t believe he could just vanish like that whenever he felt like it. He’d told me their flight was at one in the afternoon so I waited from ten o’clock to make sure I didn’t miss them, and at eleven the taxi pulled up and the Bookers came out of their house with their luggage. I watched them stow their bags in the boot of the car and climb into the back seat. As I watched the taxi drive away I had the feeling that my head was filling with water, which is how I imagined it must feel to drown.

  wedding bells

  My father turned up to Geoff and Lorraine’s wedding even though nobody had invited him. He didn’t want to waste Eddie’s invitation, he said, brandishing the envelope at my mother, who was standing in the garden with Hilary when he arrived. Eddie had already gone to Queensland and my father was living in the flat on his own. He looked very smart in navy trousers and a sports jacket and his hair was washed, but there was something wall-eyed about the way he stared at the other guests that made me and my mother nervous.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she told Lorraine. ‘I’ll tell him to leave if you’d like.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Lorraine. ‘Let him be.’ She was wearing the wedding dress she’d made herself out of an old silk kimono, which was deep crimson and long with a high collar. With her black hair all piled up on top of her head she looked taller and more glamorous than ever.

  ‘You scrub up all right,’ my father told her while he was helping himself to punch at the drinks table.

  ‘Special occasion,’ said Lorraine.

  ‘You don’t say,’ said my father. I watched the way he looked at her as she walked off and I saw a kind of longing in his expression as if he’d decided to like Lorraine all of a sudden.

  ‘I thought you hated parties,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe you don’t know everything there is to know about me,’ he said.

  ‘I know enough,’ I said.

  The wedding wasn’t big, about fifty guests and a celebrant who did the honours under an arch of white roses on my mother’s front lawn, and after that they had organised the reception at a friend’s farmhouse twenty minutes out of town.

  My mother drove out there with my father and me. He sat in the back seat and talked non-stop about a woman he’d met at work who was from Brazil and needed help with her English.

  ‘So I’ve taken her under my wing,’ said my father, and then explained that it wasn’t a romantic involvement. ‘In case you were worried.’

  ‘Why would that worry me?’ said my mother. ‘You’re a free man.’

  ‘I intend to be,’ said my father. ‘Soon enough.’

  He said he planned to travel up to Yamba on Christmas Day to have a look at a yacht he’d seen advertised.

  ‘Where’s Yamba?’ said my mother.

  ‘On the central coast,’ he said. ‘If it’s the right boat I might buy it and stay up there to learn how it handles. Just do little practice runs up and down the coast. What do you think?’

  ‘Sounds good,’ said my mother.

  ‘I thought perhaps you might like to come,’ said my father.

  My mother glanced at him in the rear-view mirror and didn’t say anything. We were at the turn-off to the farm by then and had joined the line of cars heading down the dirt track to the house.

  ‘You don’t have to answer straight away,’ said my father.

  ‘Thank you for asking,’ said my mother, ‘but I’ll pass.’

  ‘I thought you might want a break from all this,’ said Victor.

  ‘Not really,’ said my mother. ‘At least I do want a break, which is why I’ve sold the house.’

  My father went silent after that and waited for my mother to park the car in the paddock beside the farmhouse where all the other cars were stopped.

  ‘The offer remains,’ said my father.

  My mother and I sat in the car and waited for my father to get out. We watched him stride away towards the party marquee.

  ‘What was that about?’ I said.

  ‘No idea,’ said my mother.

  The party went all night but my mother and I didn’t stay. We left around eleven, just after my father had gone home in a car with the science master from Lorraine’s school and his wife. Before we went we found Geoff and Lorraine and told them how much we’d enjoyed the wedding and how beautiful the food had been. Lorraine organised us all in a line so we could have a photograph taken, squeezing my mother and me between Geoff and her.

  ‘Smile,’ said Geoff, who was standing beside me with his arm around my waist. Suddenly I felt his hands slide down the back of my skirt and into my pants and I was too drunk to stop him. It wasn’t much of a surprise but it made me realise why it was that I had to leave town as soon as I could, and why I was never coming back, not for anything.

  In the car on the way home I started to cry.

  ‘Are you okay?’ said my mother. ‘Has something happened?’

  I said I was tired.

  ‘Have you had much to drink?’ she said.

  ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘I forget.’

  She reached across and stroked my hair and said how grown-up I looked in my skirt and top. I was wearing the skirt the Bookers had bought, because I hadn’t had a chance to wear it much before then, and on top I was wearing a red shirt with no sleeves and a black silk scarf Rowena had given me for my birthday.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  Then I told my mother I’d decided to take her advice and go to university in Sydney. I said I wanted to study French so that I could go to France on exchange and become fluent, and I also wanted to study Japanese because I liked the look of the writing and because everybody said Asia was where the future was.

  ‘Great,’ said my mother. ‘I’m so pleased. I didn’t like the idea of you drifting.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I said, which was true. I was frightened that if I didn’t have something to do all day I’d end up in the same situation as Victor, who had only disappointments in his life, and I definitely didn’t want that to happen to me. Also I wanted to show Mr Booker that I was starting something on my own and that I’d finished waiting around for him to make up his mind about us as if I wasn’t his lover but a problem for him to solve.

  Of course all I was really doing was telling my mother what she wanted to hear. I owed her that at least, to convince her I had direction. It was what my mother herself had wanted so badly and never had. Otherwise why had she told me over and over again not to waste a moment of my time because I would never get it back?

  ‘Life’s too short,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘So you keep saying.’

  She drove for a while without talking and then she asked me if I missed Mr Booker very much.

  ‘All the time,’ I said.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  And then it must have been very hard for my mother not to say any more. I could feel how hard she was concentrating on the road, which was dark and winding and deserted, and I imagined I could hear her secret thoughts sinking into the velvet night like stones.

  Later, before I went to bed, I went in to say goodnight to my mother. She was sitting at her mirror wiping face cream off with tissues, like an actor at the end of a play. I put my arms around her shoulders and breathed in the smell of the cream and the soap she used.

/>   ‘Are you going to be okay? I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘If I go,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  Then I asked her if she ever thought she might find somebody else, another man, somebody who would keep her company, but she just laughed.

  ‘I’m over men,’ she said. But I didn’t think she meant it because there was something in the way she stared at us both in the mirror, then looked down at the tissues in her hand that was ashamed of what she’d said, as if it was a loss or a painful defeat. Which made me think of what Mr Booker had told me once, about how everything is sex because there isn’t anything else people think about and long for and remember afterwards with so much hope and regret. You don’t hear people on their deathbed, he told me, saying how the one thing they wanted more of in life was books about film history, you hear them say they wanted more sex.

  My mother thanked me for thinking of her and told me she really wasn’t lonely, if that’s what I was worried about.

  ‘I’m alone,’ she said, ‘but it’s not the same thing.’

  ‘If you say so,’ I said, kissing her on the cheek. And then she turned and put her arms around me and hugged me tight and told me to be happy.

  ‘I’m trying my best,’ I said.

  love letters straight from the heart

  I wrote to Mr Booker to tell him my address in Sydney, which was in Newtown. I said I was moving there at the beginning of January and I would let him know the phone number as soon as I found out what it was. I hope you’re having fun, I wrote. I’m not. There’s no one to talk to when you’re gone. You’re my only friend. I think I see you everywhere, on every street corner, and then I remember that you’re not here and I die. I love you, Bambi X. And then I decided not to send it because I thought that if Mr Booker wanted to know where I was he could find out for himself when he was ready, just by asking someone we both knew, or by calling my mother if it came to that. It would be a test of how much he loved me, or if he loved me at all.