Me and Mr Booker (5 page)
In the end we stayed out drinking until after dark and then we all went back to my mother’s place where she made us dinner. My mother told the Bookers they were leading me astray taking me to bars and billiard halls, but Mr Booker told her it was to further my education and she should be so lucky.
After she’d had a few drinks herself she sat down beside Mr Booker and put her arm around his shoulder. ‘Isn’t it lovely that we’ve all met each other,’ she said.
‘We don’t have much money but we do have fun,’ said Mr Booker. He reached out and took my mother’s free hand and raised it to his lips while he was staring at me. Mrs Booker had already gone into the front room where she liked to play my mother’s piano and sing. We could hear her from the dining room singing a song by Diana Ross
.
Mr Booker started to mime the words then covered my mother’s hand in kisses until she screamed with laughter.
I had never seen my mother laugh like that before, as if she was young and didn’t care about anything. My father never made her laugh. Most of the time he complained about how glum she looked. He used to tell her it wouldn’t kill her to smile once in a while, and then she’d try and he’d sneer and ask her if that was the best she could do.
My father must have seen me with the Bookers because a few days later there was a letter from him stuck under the doormat. On the front of the envelope he’d written
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL—DELIVERED BY HAND
, and then underneath was my mother’s name
ATTN: J.A.FISHER
.
She made me read it out loud to her while she peeled the prawns for the recipe she was trying from one of her new cookbooks. Since my father had left, my mother had started to change everything about herself including the food she ate. It was like she’d been pretending for a long time to be someone and now she’d decided it was time to discover who she really was.
The letter started out sounding friendly.
Dear Jessica,
Thank you for the chairs. They add a bit of a homely touch to my unpretentious accommodation. I trust the loss of them hasn’t inconvenienced you in any way. Due to my current lack of regular employment I have had the time to sit in one or the other of them watching the passing parade and reflecting on how it was that you and I came to ever imagine that we could make each other ‘happy’, if that word retains any meaning.
‘Here we go,’ said my mother, removing the prawns’ digestive tracts one by one under the kitchen tap.
‘Do you want to hear it?’ I said. It wasn’t the first time my father had written her a letter, as opposed to the notes he left in the letterbox. He had written two or three a month since he left. They were all like this one, a couple of pages long, written in his jerky handwriting on both sides of the paper, with notes in the margins and sentences scratched out where he’d had second thoughts. This made them seem like he had written them in a hurry, except that with all their big words and flourishes I knew he had thought about them long and hard. It was like he was writing my mother a novel.
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 bare 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.