‘I think it’s the smell,’ I said. The room stank of air freshener. It made you wonder what other smells the owners were trying to disguise.
‘Dogs,’ he said. ‘They let dogs in.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘It’s a dog motel?’
‘Don’t be daft,’ he said. ‘They sleep with their owners.’
‘In the beds?’ I said.
‘If they’re so inclined,’ said Mr Booker.
And then another plane took off and the room filled with noise and Mr Booker mimed speech, as if the noise was too loud for me to hear what he was saying.
‘What did you say?’ I said, when the plane was far enough away.
‘Woof woof,’ he said.
Mr Booker liked to make up long stories about where he would take me when we finally got away together. It was his way of delaying the moment when he had to get dressed and go home.
‘Italy,’ he said. ‘You’d like it there. I could teach English in some regional university with very low standards and you could learn Italian and how to stuff ravioli. We could spend the summers on the Adriatic coast with our friends who own a yacht.’
‘What are their names?’ I said.
‘Giovanni and Rita Mortadella,’ he said.
‘That’s a sausage,’ I said.
‘They’re in sausages,’ he said. ‘That’s how they made their millions.’
‘Can they sail us to France on the weekends so I can practise my tenses?’
‘If you ask them nicely,’ said Mr Booker.
‘When do we leave?’ I said.
‘You have to finish school first,’ he said.
‘You sound like my mother,’ I said.
Mr Booker lit two cigarettes and handed one to me, and then he looked at me for a moment with a kind of dazed expression while he took a long sip of his drink. We never went to the motel without a bottle of something to drink, usually champagne, except that day it was red wine because the weather had turned chilly.
‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘I’m not taking you anywhere until you pass your exams.’
‘I can study by correspondence,’ I said. ‘That’s what people who live on yachts do. You can be my tutor and read Shakespeare to me in bed.’
‘Get thee to a nunnery,’ said Mr Booker, leaning over to kiss me on my face and on my head then pushing his tongue between my teeth. ‘Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?’
‘What if I refuse?’ I said.
‘Then I’ll bite your bum,’ he said, sliding down in the bed and nipping at my flesh very gently while he made soft little doggy noises.
On the weekends I told my mother I was going to the library to study so I could borrow her car. I’d drive straight past the library and keep going for miles with the radio on, doing big loops from the town centre to the new suburbs they were building further and further out like space stations, then back again. I liked to stay out all day because when I was home I just waited for the Bookers to call or come over. Recently they’d been staying at their house all weekend doing housework and fixing up the garden, so some weekends we didn’t hear from them at all.
Sometimes I longed to see Mr Booker so much I drove to the street behind where the Booker’s house was. I stopped the car on top of a slope shielded by some trees where I could see their yard but they couldn’t see me, and then I waited for them to appear. They never did, except once when they came home in the rain from grocery shopping and unloaded some plants from their car in the driveway. They dragged them out onto the lawn and stood next to them under their umbrellas. They were pointing while they talked and they were laughing. It shouldn’t have surprised me but it did. I always imagined Mr and Mrs Booker were like my parents, so unhappy together that they could barely speak in a civil tone when they were alone. And then, when I saw them in their yard, I realised that there were so many ways they knew to make it seem that they were fine. And I also realised that this is what they were best at, because they did it all the time and so naturally that even they were convinced it was true.
And there was something else that occurred to me later, when I was driving home crying for no reason except that I was disappointed. It was the idea that I was the one to save Mr Booker like he already said I had, not from Mrs Booker exactly, although she was part of it. It was more that I could save him from the kind of half-life he was living, where nothing was real and everything was an effort to appear to be normal.
My mother told me she thought I had done the right thing deciding to come back from Sydney.
‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘I wish I’d stayed.’
I told her she should think about moving herself. I said I didn’t think it was good for her to hang around here when neither Eddie nor I could stand the place. I told her the day I finished school I was leaving like Eddie had and never coming back.
‘I can’t just up stakes and go,’ she said. ‘My job’s here.’
I said I thought that was everyone’s excuse for not getting out when they had the chance.
‘It’s the kind of place where you have to make your own fun,’ she said.
‘It’s a hole,’ I said, and my mother just smiled and went on with her knitting. She and Lorraine had joined a knitting group. Once a month on Fridays they all met and swapped patterns. Lorraine was even thinking of knitting her own wedding dress, that’s how keen she was.
My father sent my mother a postcard from Port Douglas with his tight scrawl all over the back of it. My mother read it out to me while we were standing by the letterbox.
Dear J, Have been thinking of late that you and I were doomed from the moment the kids came along. From that day onwards I had to vie with them for your affection. It was a hard ask and I never had a chance, in the light of which I now think it is time we formally ended our liaison and made a fair and equitable financial arrangement so that each of us is properly equipped to go our separate ways. Yours as ever, Victor
She handed it to me and I turned it over to look at the picture of the beach on the front.
‘What’s he doing in Port Douglas?’ I said.
‘Clearly not enough,’ said my mother.
I asked her what she was going to say to him, and she said there wasn’t much she could say since there was no return address on the card and nothing to let her know when, or if, he was coming back.
Two weeks later we saw him. He was crossing the street in front of us at a set of traffic lights just down the road from his motel. My mother saw him first and leaned her head on the steering wheel. Then she let out a long, low moan.
‘Are you all right?’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not. I was a minute ago, but now I’m not.’
I watched my father striding along the footpath away from us with his hands thrust deep into his pockets and his jacket tied around his waist. He was whistling. He probably thought it made him seem carefree and happy, when really it made him seem as if he had a knife in his pocket ready to use on the first person who looked at him sideways.
‘Well, there’s a sight for sore eyes,’ I said.
‘Fuck,’ said my mother, who never swore.
He was staying at the farm, the scene of the shooting, when I saw him next. He’d called and asked me to drop over some riding boots he’d left behind when he moved out. His friends were letting him sleep in their garage, which had a room in the back with a bed, a kitchen and a window that looked out over the paddocks towards the willow trees along the river.
‘You’ve fallen on your feet,’ I said.
‘I pay my way in services rendered,’ he said.
He told me he was helping his friends to run riding classes for disabled children in exchange for bed and board.
‘I’m a glorified jackaroo,’ he said. ‘Just like the old days.’
The happiest days of his life, he said, had been when he was working on a sheep station in South Australia just after he’d finished school.
‘I should never have left,’ he said. ‘I should have married the boss’s daughter like he wanted me to.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ I said. It was the first time I’d heard this story. I wondered if it was true or if he was making it up.
‘I met your mother,’ he said. He spoke without any sentiment, as if it was a kind of mathematical fact on which a whole set of other unalterable, regrettable facts rested.
He seemed to have forgotten his postcard from Port Douglas because he didn’t mention it. He told me that he’d made a mistake not coming back home sooner. He said he’d wanted to stay up north for a while, at least for the winter, but it was a bad idea to be too long in a place where he had no history.
‘I thought that was the whole point of running away,’ I said.
He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Something about him was different. I’d always told people my father was mad, without really knowing what that meant. It was more a way to explain to my friends how someone could have the kind of personality he had, which was calm sometimes and then so full of anger it was like a completely different person had taken his place. Now, when I was in his tiny room with him, I could feel a shift had taken place, a change in the balance inside his head so that it was leaning to the wild side, and that influenced the look in his eyes. He was like someone who can’t see anything in front of him except a dark tunnel.
‘I forgot where I was,’ he said. ‘There were a couple of days when I literally had no idea. I thought at one point I was back in the hospital. The hotel staff in Port Douglas were very kind. They called the doctor in.’
‘Are you okay now?’ I said.
‘I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,’ he said, laughing in his fake way.
He didn’t mention the Bookers either, or the fight we’d had in the house. It was as if he’d forgotten everything he’d said and done that he didn’t want to remember. And now he was just living moment to moment like someone with amnesia. He even talked to me as if I knew nothing about him.
‘I think the farmer’s worried I’ve got designs on his wife, but I’ll have to explain to him that I’m not interested. Not that she isn’t a very attractive woman, she is.’
‘What’s happened to Aggie?’ I said.
He looked confused for a moment as if he didn’t know who I was talking about, and then his expression went dreamy.
‘Oh, that sad bitch,’ he said. ‘Ships that pass in the night.’
He wanted to show me the horses. Most of them were down by the dam but one or two saw us coming and trotted across to the fence to see what my father had for them. He fed them a couple of apples and stroked their noses, which seemed to make him abnormally calm.
‘Horses know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘They have an extra sense.’
I looked into the velvet eye of the one closest to me, a short, big-bellied pony with steamy breath that smelled of chaff, and realised this was probably the reason I had always been nervous of horses.
‘They sense your fear,’ said my father. He’d told me this before, when I was six or seven and I’d always wished he hadn’t because it didn’t seem fair that I could try as hard as I liked to act fearless and still never fool the horse because it could see straight through me.
A few days later I came home from school and found the Jaguar parked in the driveway. My father was sitting in the front seat waiting for somebody to come home, and in the back seat he had all his belongings packed in suitcases and plastic bags. When I asked him what he was doing he said he’d had to leave the farm on short notice.
‘What did you do?’ I said.
‘I’d rather not go into it,’ he said.
I said my mother would be another hour or so getting home but that I guessed it would be okay to wait for her inside if he wanted to.
‘That’s big of you,’ he said.
I left him in the kitchen and went into my room. When my mother came home I heard them talking for an hour or more in low voices, as if their conversation was a private conspiracy and nothing to do with me, except that in the end they called me into the room and my mother said they had some news.
‘What news?’ I said, expecting her to say she’d agreed to a divorce, since my father was looking pleased with himself in a seedy kind of way.
‘I’m moving in,’ he announced. ‘On a temporary basis.’
My mother explained that my father was not moving back into the house but was going to hire a caravan and park it in the garden for a while, so that he could save some money on rent and food.
‘He’ll pay his share of the electricity,’ she said. ‘And he’ll leave as soon as he’s able.’
I didn’t say anything. In contrast to my father my mother was looking white with fatigue. I stared hard at her and waited for her to say something but she kept quiet.
‘It’ll be like old times,’ said my father.
‘Christ,’ I said. ‘I hope not.’
He parked the caravan in the garden next to the clothesline and only came into the house to shower and wash his clothes. As part of his agreement with my mother he started looking for work and sooner than anyone expected he found a part-time job delivering parcels for a courier company. I taught him how to iron his uniform because he said he didn’t want to depend on anyone for favours. Those days were over, he said.
Rowena said it was the saddest thing she had ever heard.