‘Christ,’ he said. ‘What are we playing at?’
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘We can’t do this any more,’ he said. ‘We have to stop.’
‘So you keep saying,’ I said.
‘I’ll tell her,’ he said. ‘Just give me a couple of weeks.’
I stayed all afternoon watching a film of
Waiting for Godot
in French on the Bookers’ new television.
‘Compulsory viewing,’ said Mr Booker. I sat on the floor with my back against the chair where he was sitting while Mrs Booker slept on the new sofa. Mr Booker kept stroking the top of my head and translating what the actors were saying because they were talking too fast for me.
‘What shall we do now? I don’t know. Shall we leave?’
‘It sounds sadder in French,’ I said.
‘Everything sounds sadder in French,’ said Mr Booker.
‘Ma
petite
Bambi.’
He leaned over and kissed the top of my head and at the same moment Mrs Booker woke up and stared at us but didn’t say anything. She sat herself up and smiled at me and said she’d just had a dream that Mr Booker and she were at an airport about to leave for somewhere when they suddenly remembered they’d left the cat in the taxi. Not their cat. One they were looking after for somebody else.
‘So we couldn’t go,’ she said. ‘We had to go back and look for the cat. All I knew was that the taxi driver had put it in a black suitcase. That’s when I woke up.’
She looked at Mr Booker then with an expression on her face that was so full of confusion and unhappiness that he got up and went to sit next to her. He put his arms around her and when she started to whimper he patted her on the back and told her not to be daft.
‘It was a dream,’ he said. ‘What the fuck is there to cry about?’
Later, after he had put Mrs Booker to bed, he walked me to my car and told me it might be easier if I didn’t come over or call him for a few days because he would have to try to keep things as simple as possible.
‘What are you going to tell her?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m not very good at this. It’s not something I’ve had any practice at.’
And then he didn’t say any more and started shaking his head and I told him what I’d been thinking, which was that I might not go back to school after the end of term, that I might go down to Sydney and stay with Rowena for a while because I’d saved enough money to last at least three or four weeks if I wasn’t paying rent.
‘You could come later,’ I said. ‘When you’ve sorted everything out.’
He stopped shaking his head and stared at his bare white feet on the grass while he listened.
‘We don’t have to stay in Sydney,’ I said. ‘We could go anywhere.’
He looked at me and grinned, doing a little dance on his toes.
‘I can resist anything but temptation,’ he said.
‘I’ve been wanting to leave for a long time,’ I said. ‘Years actually.’
He opened the door for me so that I could climb in, then he stood leaning against the car and staring in at me.
‘What do you want me to say?’ he said.
I didn’t know how to answer. I told him it was just an idea but that I was tired of waiting for my life to start and that as soon as I met him it was like I could finally stop waiting and make something happen.
‘I just wanted you to know that,’ I said. ‘That’s all. In case you think it’s just the sex.’
‘Heaven forbid that it’s just the sex,’ he said. And then he leaned into the car and kissed me on the mouth and I tasted the wine on his tongue and smelled the animal sweat on him, which was the best smell I knew.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘Don’t mention it,’ I said.
I didn’t contact the Bookers for nearly three weeks and then it was my mother who rang them to see if anything was wrong.
‘Apparently Mrs Booker has been sick,’ she told me. ‘Nothing life-threatening.’
After that I went twice to Mr Booker’s office to see if I could talk to him because I was worried that he’d changed his mind about telling Mrs Booker. The first time he wasn’t in his office, but the second time I saw him just as he was leaving to give a talk at the cinema.
‘Come in, my sweet,’ he said when he saw me at the door.
He was afraid to look at me and kept turning on the spot as if he was trying to remember where he’d put something.
‘How have you been?’ I said.
‘Fair to middling,’ he said, then looked at me and patted his pockets as if he had suddenly found what he was looking for.
‘I’m just on my way out,’ he said, smiling at me in a shy kind of way like he’d only just met me.
‘I’m glad,’ I said. ‘I was worried.’
‘No need to worry on my account,’ he said, grinning.
He asked me to come along to make up the numbers since he didn’t think a British Experimental Film Fund retrospective was going to fill the front stalls. He was nervous. I could tell by the way he kept checking his clothes. Before he left the room he took some whisky out of his filing cabinet and swigged a mouthful straight from the bottle.
‘How’s Mrs Booker?’ I said.
‘Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,’ he said.
He took another mouthful of whisky, put the bottle back, then led me out of the room and down the corridor. I asked him if he and Mrs Booker were coming to Lorraine’s engagement party on the weekend and he said they were looking forward to it. We walked down the stairs and across to the cinema hand in hand, with him taking long strides and me, like a kid, trotting to keep up.
I didn’t see how drunk he was until it was time for him to give his talk. He stood up and dropped his papers on the ground and had to bend over to pick them up. For a moment he swayed as he was trying to right himself. He had to hold on to the lectern to stop himself from falling down while he got his notes in order.
‘The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things,’ he said.
There was polite laughter and then a silence that went on for too long while everyone waited for him to start properly.
‘Standing here before you today,’ he said, ‘I have to admit to feeling a fraud.’
Nobody was sure whether to laugh again or not, until Mr Booker explained that he was no expert on experimental film and that he was only given a few days notice to come up with some erudite introductory remarks for today’s conference session, which he had endeavoured to do in between moving and trying to house-train a deaf cat.
‘At least we think it’s deaf because it hasn’t said a word since we picked it up from the knackers last Tuesday.’
And then he said that experimental film was hard to define, because in a sense all films were experiments, like all lives were experiments, arguments for life being a certain way, when there are a whole range of other ways it might be, and what the filmmaker does, just like a person does in his or her own life, is to make choices one after another, with each choice cutting down the number of options for the next choice and so on, until the inevitable denouement. In a conventional film, he said, it will feel at the end as if no other pathway remains for the characters but the one they have chosen by their actions. In films that are less conventional the end may not feel as satisfying. There may be surrealist leanings at work, or just narrative ineptitude.
I had to leave then because Eddie needed the car, and all the way home I thought about what Mr Booker had said. It wasn’t that he had meant me to hear it because he couldn’t have known I would be there when he gave his talk, but in a way I thought it was for me because he had stared at me all the time he was speaking. And what he wanted me to know was that he had come to a place where he had to make a choice, which wasn’t easy for him to do, because all of the other choices he had made had narrowed down his options and made him the person he was.
I had never thought that Mr Booker and I were bad people. All I knew was that we had crossed some line and that it was not going to be possible to get back on the other side of it. And I realised that the cause of us having crossed over the line had a lot to do with how much Mr Booker drank and why. Not that I could tell you the answer to that question even now, any more than I could say why it was that nobody, including me, ever tried to stop him.
Eddie was at the front door when I came home with the car.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’ he said.
I said I was sorry. I told him I’d forgotten he wanted the car.
‘I told you this morning,’ he said. ‘What happens if you get caught driving without a licence?’
‘It hasn’t happened yet,’ I said.
‘It’s like you just do whatever you want,’ said Eddie.
‘Making up for lost time,’ I said.
He was with a girl I recognised from high school. Her name was Deirdre Toomey. He had told everyone before he went to New Guinea that he was going to marry Deirdre one day because she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. I told him I thought she was overrated. I still thought so. She stood in the doorway behind my brother with a fake smile on her face and her manicured hand on his shoulder.
‘Hey Martha,’ she said in her high voice. Her lovely face was round like a plate and shallow as if there was no kind of thought behind it except the idea of its own loveliness.
‘Hey Deirdre,’ I said.
I handed Eddie the car keys and went inside the house. My father was there. He was looking excited, probably because of Deirdre. He had always liked Eddie’s girlfriends, especially the blonde, giggly ones. He said they made him feel that if he had his time over again he would do things very differently, play the field instead of settling down, because everybody knew the first rush of raw hormones wore off pretty quickly and then you were left with the problem of how to keep the interest going for what seemed like an eternity now that people lived so long.
‘You just missed Deirdre Toomey,’ he said. I came and sat down at the table with him and helped myself to a slice of the teacake my mother had left out.
‘As long as he doesn’t knock her up and expect your mother to come to the rescue,’ he said.
‘How’s your ear?’ I said. He wasn’t wearing a bandage any more, just a dressing on the top of his wound.
‘I tell people I chopped it off for love,’ he said.
‘Does anyone believe you?’ I said.
He smiled awkwardly, as if it was still painful to move his face. Then he asked me where my mother was and I said she’d gone out with Lorraine to get some food for the party.
‘What party?’ said my father.
‘Lorraine’s getting engaged,’ I said.
‘Who’s the poor sap?’ said my father.
‘No one you know,’ I said.
He helped himself to some more cake and asked if I’d make him a cup of coffee.
‘Not too much milk,’ he said.
I went into the kitchen and came back with some coffee and a carton of milk. I put them in front of him and sat down again. I didn’t know why he was here, waiting for my mother to come home, when she hadn’t invited him.
‘How’s Aggie?’ I said.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Making good progress.’
‘Is that what you’ve come to tell Mum?’ I said. ‘Because if it is I don’t think it’s such a good idea. I don’t think your new girlfriend is any of Mum’s business.’
‘I don’t recall asking for your opinion,’ said my father, stiffening. ‘And while we’re having this conversation I think you take far too much of an interest in your mother’s affairs. What I discuss or don’t discuss with her is for me to decide.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m just telling you for your own sake,’ I said. ‘So you don’t make too many wasted trips.’
I got up from the table then and started to go to my room when my father called me back. I knew what was coming. I knew I shouldn’t have talked to him the way I had and that now there would be trouble, because that was all my father ever wanted, to make enough trouble so that my mother would have to pay him some attention.
‘What?’ I said.
My father told me to sit down. I said I didn’t want to sit down, that I could listen to what he had to say standing up.
‘Just because I have ceased to live in this house doesn’t mean I no longer have any authority over you,’ he said. ‘I’m your father.’
‘Like I need reminding,’ I said.
‘How dare you,’ he said, shouting now, his face turning plum-coloured in the way it always did when he was angry.
I started down the corridor and he got up from his chair and followed me to my room. When I tried to shut my door he put his foot in the jamb, which made me laugh because it was the kind of thing people did in movies.
‘How dare you turn your back on me.’
I told him to take his foot out of the door so I could close it because I didn’t like being yelled at. The next instant he had me by the hair and was shoving me back against the wall of my room with one hand while he slammed the door open with the other. And then he slapped me across the head three or four times while I struggled to get away from him.
‘Why do you keep coming back here?’ I said, trying to sound calm, even though my head was pounding. ‘Why can’t you just leave us alone?’