Later I sat down on the sofa next to Mrs Booker while Mr Booker danced my mother around the floor. I must have been very drunk by then because I leaned into Mrs Booker’s shoulder and rested there next to her, feeling her warmth. I was wondering what she would say to me if I told her that Mr Booker and me had been in her bed that day doing things that made me tremble just from thinking about them. I wanted to see the look on her face when she realised that the baby hadn’t changed Mr Booker. If anything it had made him more reckless. But of course I kept quiet because there was no point in telling her things she must know already.
‘You need another haircut,’ she told me. She was stroking my head while she talked. ‘I’ll get Mr Booker to make us all an appointment.’
‘That would be lovely,’ I said. ‘If you’re feeling up to it.’
‘I’m feeling amazing,’ she said. ‘I’m feeling so good it’s dangerous.’
She moved my head down to her stomach and told me to say something.
‘What for?’ I said.
‘Because it can hear,’ said Mrs Booker.
Mr Booker was watching us now. He was drunk too, but he was still watching what was going on. He grinned at me in an expectant kind of way as if this was my cue to be happy at this turn of events, the way he was. And that’s when I had a clear vision of the Booker baby in there, still tiny, but definitely alive and testing its little limbs, growing more real by the hour and less like something dreamed up.
‘Hey kid,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’
I must have been shouting, because Mrs Booker put her hand over my mouth and told me to keep my voice down.
‘Only calm things,’ she said. ‘Talk to it softly.’
So under the noise of the music I whispered to the baby and told it my name and a few other things about myself and when I was finished Mrs Booker leaned down and kissed me on the top of my head.
‘I can tell you’re going to be great friends,’ she said.
And that was when I decided I hated the baby, which had nothing to do with who it actually was, or would be after it was born. It wasn’t an emotion with any clear cause. I hated the baby because it was there.
For a while it was back to how it had been in the beginning when the Bookers and I had first met, only it was better. Now Mr and Mrs Booker were kinder to each other and Mrs Booker wasn’t sad any more, and neither was Mr Booker, at least not in the same way. A weight had lifted off him. He’d proved something to himself and to everyone else. It must have been that he’d laid to rest any doubts about his manliness, which made him proud. He still drank too much, but now it was less out of sorrow and more because he had something to celebrate.
He liked us to go out together, me and Mrs Booker and him. We went shopping for baby clothes and baby furniture, being careful to avoid Victor because he’d started to complain to my mother again about her friends, specifically about the Bookers, who he called a pair of jumped-up nobodies. On the weekends we went for lunches in country pubs outside of town, and Mr and Mrs Booker came to the cinema during the week when I was working and we watched films together like we had before. That winter the cinema was showing some plays that had been made into movies, so we saw
Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Wolf
and
A Streetcar Named Desire
and
Romeo and Juliet,
and whenever Mrs Booker went to the toilet, which she did more often now that she was pregnant, Mr Booker put his hand on my back under my work shirt then crept it round so that he was holding my breast. And like before he didn’t seem to care very much if he got caught. It was only me always watching and managing to wriggle free of him before Mrs Booker came back that saved us.
‘You want to get us into trouble?’ I said.
‘Nothing could be further from my thoughts,’ said Mr Booker.
Which was true. He seemed to think we were invincible.
Even so, neither of us talked about running away any more since we’d silently agreed that there wasn’t any point in thinking beyond when the baby was born. That was bound to change everything. And in the meantime I could tell Mr Booker was happy to let things go on as they were, since it wasn’t doing anyone any harm.
‘That’s what you think,’ I said. He was sucking on my nipple so that it stood up straight and sent little singing darts of feeling into other parts of me. We had just dropped Mrs Booker home and then driven to the lake where you could park near the water under the trees. He had his head up inside my jumper and when he came up for air his hair was sticking up all over his head from the static.
‘You look like you’ve had a fright,’ I said.
‘There were two of them!’ he said.
When I asked him where he thought all of this was leading he looked at me and smiled like I’d said something funny.
‘It’s all good clean fun,’ he said.
‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ I said. ‘A married man with a baby on the way?’
‘Inexcusable,’ he said.
‘We should stop,’ I said.
‘Just say the word,’ he said, planting kisses one at a time on my cheeks and eyes and forehead.
‘The word,’ I said.
There were more and more times when he showed up at the front of my school earlier than Wednesday, because he said he couldn’t wait until Wednesday to see me. It was as if he’d decided to pay me more attention while he still could, or while I was still willing, because I think he must have sensed that I was worried about the future, even if he wasn’t. If it was a Monday he would take me to his office where he locked the door and lifted me up onto the bare desk because he said just the sight of me sitting there in my Woolworths underwear was more than he could bear.
‘You’re turning kinky on me,’ I said.
‘You want a spank?’ he said.
And then there was the time when he forgot to lock the door and the cleaner, whose name was April, walked in and saw Mr Booker down on his knees and me perched up on the desk with my knees wide open and no underwear on at all.
‘Fuck,’ said Mr Booker, when he looked around and saw April standing there with her vacuum cleaner.
April didn’t reply. She just turned around and left the room the way she’d come in.
After that Mr Booker drove me home and sat with me in the car out the front of my mother’s house. He asked me if my father was happy in his caravan.
‘He says it suits him,’ I said. ‘He says he likes the feeling that at any moment he can hitch it up to the back of his car and be off.’
Mr Booker laughed.
‘I know how he feels,’ he said.
I told Mr Booker how sad it was to watch my father tormenting my mother the way he did.
‘He can’t help himself,’ I said. ‘He gets off on it.’
I told him my mother had given up trying to resist him because he was so relentless and because she was so tired.
‘Do you think if we were married we would be different from everyone else?’ I said.
Mr Booker reached into his jacket for his hipflask and took a long sip of whisky, then he offered it to me and I did the same. When I looked up at him he was staring out the window in a desperate kind of way, as if he’d lost something and couldn’t think where to start looking for it.
‘Will you get the sack?’ I said.
He told me to stop talking rubbish and got out of the car to open my door. Then he helped me out and we stood on the grass for a moment holding each other and I told him I would wait for him for as long as it took if that was what he wanted me to do.
‘How corny is that?’ I said.
He kissed me then with the sun going down over the houses and the air turning cold.
‘I can’t marry you,’ he said.
‘Tell me something I don’t already know,’ I said.
I waited for Mr Booker to say he didn’t want to see me any more. I realised that was what I was always trying to prepare for because I knew Mr Booker wasn’t strong, and now that the cleaner had seen us I thought he would probably decide not to take the risk of us being found out. It was dangerous, and he had more to lose now.
‘Do you think she’ll report you?’ I said the next time I saw him alone.
‘Unlikely,’ he said.
‘What if she does?’ I said. ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’
‘I lose my job, Mrs Booker leaves me, you and me run away to Acapulco, I sell my body to keep us in tortillas.’
‘What do I do?’
‘You’re happy for a while, then you’re bored and restless, and that’s when you leave me for a younger man.’
‘I never would,’ I said.
‘You say that now,’ he said.
We were out in the country, lying on a picnic blanket. Mr Booker had driven Lorraine and Mrs Booker and me to the country races and they were down near the track where they could see the horses close up. It was a cold, brilliant day and the air was so thin we could see for miles into the distance where the hills and valleys were bare and bleached, like giant knucklebones.
‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ I said.
And then Mr Booker leaned across and took hold of my face with both hands and kissed me long and hard on the lips, which was a stupid thing to do because at that very moment Mrs Booker and Lorraine were heading back up the grassy slope from the racetrack and they both saw him, and after that they saw me kiss Mr Booker back, which was even worse.
The silence that followed was like nothing I had ever experienced. It came mainly from Mr Booker. When he looked up from where we were sitting and saw his wife so close he went into a trance, like a dog playing dead, not daring to move a muscle, not even to breathe.
Nothing was said in the car going home, not even by Lorraine. Everything was saved up for later. Not that I was there to hear it. I made up a version of what happened when the Bookers got home after dropping Lorraine and me off, and I ran it through my mind like a piece of film to occupy me in the long dark days that followed.
I can imagine Mrs Booker would have done all the talking while Mr Booker sat deep in his chair, sipping his bottomless drink, and saying absolutely nothing in his own defence. What could he say? What was there to add to Mrs Booker’s ferocious outburst, the product of weeks and months and years of despair,
I don’t know who
you are any more. You disgust me. I think you need professional help. Say
something. Christ. No, that’s right. You just sit there and pretend it’s all
going to go away. What kind of a man are you anyway?
Now there’s a question to think about, Mr Booker must have said to himself. And the answer must have come to him not long after that, which is why he rang me to ask me to wait for him after work the next night because he had something important to say.
I was prepared, but that didn’t help me.
‘How long is a while?’ I said. We were in his car. He was driving me home from the cinema where we’d watched the last ten minutes of
Tokyo Story
together.
‘Until I sort something out,’ he said.
He drove me up to the top of the hill behind my mother’s house where there was a kiosk and we had some coffee inside where it was over-heated and there was a view of the town. I thought of making Mr Booker promise he would leave Mrs Booker by the time I finished school, or at least before the baby was born, so there would be some definite date we would both know was coming. But then I decided not to say anything because this might be the last time I would see Mr Booker for a while and I didn’t want to spoil the occasion.
‘Can I call you?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Will you call me?’ I said.
Mr Booker didn’t answer. He just stared out the window at the city lights, which were shinier than normal because of the cold. They looked like a mirror that had shattered into a million pieces.
‘Isn’t life disappointing,’ I said. It was a line from
Tokyo Story
, and it made Mr Booker smile.
‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,’ he said.
The next weekend Monty Braithwaite turned up uninvited at my mother’s house on his way to pick up his wife from her place in the country. It was Sunday lunchtime. My mother asked him in and offered him some of the leek soup she had made that morning. The weather had turned freezing and my mother had ordered firewood in and asked my father to stack it out the back along the laundry wall.
‘I’ll let Victor know you’re here,’ she said, casting me a glance that said she might never come back.
With his greying moustache and wild eyebrows Monty looked like a wolfhound. When he took out his pipe and barked at me to find him an ashtray I leapt to attention and did as I was told.
‘Remind me who you are,’ he said as I put the ashtray down in front of him. He had never been interested in us as children. He’d been visiting my father on and off for twenty years and never learned our names, but now that I was older he looked me over like I was livestock.
‘Martha,’ I said.
‘You’ve grown,’ he said.
Over lunch he quizzed my father about his plans, while my mother served up the soup with some warm bread.
‘I don’t make plans,’ my father said. ‘You know that. I go where the wind takes me.’