‘Well, you’re wasting your time in this backwater,’ said Monty.
‘Where do you suggest he go?’ said my mother.
‘Somewhere where he can put his talents to work,’ said Monty.
My father smiled and spooned more soup into his mouth. This was the reason he liked Monty, because he seemed to think my father had hidden abilities that nobody else could see.
‘Asia,’ Monty said. ‘That’s where the future lies. I’ve got a few fingers in a few pies over there.’
My father’s eyes brightened. He stared at my mother with a kind of smugness as if all along he’d known Monty would come to his rescue like this. It was just a matter of time.
My mother offered Monty some salad and asked after his wife.
‘She’s taken up art,’ said Monty.
‘What kind of work does she do?’ said my mother.
Monty explained that his wife bought art, rather than making it herself.
‘She has an eye,’ he said.
Then he turned to me and asked me what I was going to do with my life.
‘I have no idea,’ I said.
‘Any admirers?’ he said, his hunting-dog eyes boring into me from under the shade of his eyebrows.
‘Dozens,’ I said.
And then I excused myself, claiming I had homework to do. I only came out when my mother called me to say goodbye and I stood on the driveway with my parents and waved to the back of the vintage Rover Monty drove with the number plate that read 4 ME.
‘That man couldn’t lie straight in bed,’ said my mother.
‘You misjudge him,’ said my father. ‘His intentions are good.’
He might have been talking about himself.
On the way back to the house he put his arm around my mother’s waist and tried to tickle her and she let him, even giggling like somebody much younger than she was. It made me sick to watch them. I wanted to slap him.
My father grew restless after that. He was always coming into the house to see if there was someone at home he could talk to.
‘Where’s your mother?’ he said.
‘Out,’ I said.
‘What are you doing?’ he said.
I asked him why he wanted to know and he said he had something he wanted to discuss.
‘Discuss away,’ I said.
He told me Monty had passed along some contacts he had in Hong Kong, in the transportation business. Small airlines nobody had ever heard of that flew cargo. He said he thought he had a chance to get his career back on track if he played his cards right.
‘Go for it,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to go alone,’ he said. ‘I want my family with me. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.’
I told him I didn’t think that was going to work and he asked me why not.
‘We haven’t been a family for years,’ I said. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed.’
‘That’s no reason why we shouldn’t try to make up for lost time,’ he said.
Later when I told my mother what my father had said she asked me what I thought she should do.
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t,’ she said. ‘Either I say I’ll go, and then I’m responsible if it doesn’t work out because I supported the idea. Or I stay here, and then I’m responsible for it not working out because I didn’t support it.’
I told her I thought she should do what she wanted to do and not worry about pleasing my father.
‘How clear-sighted you are,’ she said. She’d been drinking gin. She always had one or two, sometimes more while she was cooking dinner. She said it helped her to relax.
‘Hong Kong might be fun,’ she said.
‘Have another drink, Mum,’ I said.
Then I told her to turn the oven off because I could smell the chicken burning.
Of course they didn’t go. My mother couldn’t because she had to work and my father didn’t have the money to fly to Hong Kong if there was no guarantee of a job there so he stayed on in the caravan for another month then returned it to the rental company. After that he moved into a different, cheaper motel, this time on the north side of town. He said it was because of the cold but I knew it was because my mother had told him he couldn’t stay parked in the garden forever.
‘She’s ashamed of me,’ he said. ‘She thinks my presence lowers the tone of the neighbourhood.’
‘She’s right,’ I said. ‘It does.’
And then I told him I thought his problem was that he was bored. I said I thought he should try to find some purpose in life.
‘You make it sound so easy,’ he said.
‘Other people manage,’ I said.
‘I’ve been thinking I missed my vocation,’ he said. ‘I should have been an actor.’
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard him say this. He had often decided that acting was his true calling. My mother always agreed. She told him she thought he had the kind of temperament that made pretending to be other people easier than being who you really were. He had a powerful imagination, she said, but he’d never found a use for it.
‘Why don’t you take some classes?’ I said.
‘I just might do that,’ he said.
Which meant nothing. Instead he enrolled in law at the university when they advertised mid-year entry and he never even went to the first class.
I missed Mr Booker more than I thought possible. The whole town felt deserted without him. It was a ghost town anyway, especially in the winter because nobody ever walked anywhere so the streets were empty. But now it was worse, like some kind of plague had wiped out half the population.
For days on end I moped around trying to get used to not seeing the Bookers. My mother had heard the whole story of the kiss at the racetrack from Lorraine, but she never said anything to me until the one time I asked her what she really thought about me and Mr Booker. She said she had an opinion but it wasn’t one she was going to share with me. My mother wasn’t angry with me. I think she just felt that whatever had happened was nobody’s fault, and now that it had come to a head it was probably a good idea to end it and get on with more important things, like school.
I couldn’t tell her how I felt about school. I couldn’t say how hard it was to concentrate in class with my head all tangled, or how bored I was by the whole build-up to the end of year exams.
‘It’s so unimportant,’ I told her. ‘They make it out to be this huge thing, but it’s not. What does it matter if I fail?’
‘It matters to me,’ she said.
‘So I’m studying for you?’ I said.
‘That’s not what I said,’ she said.
But it was what she meant. She was practically begging me to do this one thing for her so that she wouldn’t feel she’d ruined my life by letting Victor come back, then leave again. Also it was her way of saying that whatever had happened with Mr Booker was my problem as long as it didn’t interfere with my future.
I told her she didn’t have to worry because I wasn’t going to fail.
‘Just do your best,’ she said.
‘I am,’ I said.
Lorraine told Geoff about Mr Booker and me as well. I knew that because I went to a party at Geoff ’s house one night and ended up talking with him and his housemate Damon in the kitchen. Damon was a poet. He said he was writing a verse novel about sex.
‘You might pick up some lines,’ said Geoff nudging me in the ribs, ‘to use on your boyfriend Mr Booker.’
I blushed and told him not to believe everything he heard about me.
‘Is he a good fuck?’ said Geoff.
‘Good enough,’ I said, my face burning.
Geoff smiled at me then and put his arm around my shoulder.
‘Because I’m told I’m only poor to average.’
‘Maybe you and Mr Booker could swap notes,’ I said.
‘Or maybe you and me could get a bit of practice,’ he said.
I laughed at him and stole a sip of his wine then I went into the next room and looked for somewhere to sit down because my head was drumming from too much drink and I felt sick.
Eventually I called Mr Booker at work to see if he wanted to meet up sometime, just for a coffee. I tried to sound like I was making a social call, but as soon as I heard Mr Booker’s voice on the line my breathing stopped and I couldn’t get enough air.
‘Are you okay?’ he said.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I’m going nuts here.’
He said I could come to the university to see him before school if I wanted, but not in his office. He suggested the café on the edge of campus where he had his coffee and fags in the mornings.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Oh, don’t you go t’anking me now,’ he said, pretending he was Irish.
And that’s where I found him, reading the newspaper, wearing the white suit he had on when I first met him, the one he called his rabbit suit. He liked to take an imaginary fob watch out of the pocket and mutter to himself how late it was. I stopped outside the window and watched him, wishing suddenly that I had changed out of my dung-coloured sports uniform. He looked up without seeing me, and for a moment I froze on the spot because I thought he must have forgotten who I was, until he saw me and stared at me and I knew he remembered.
He asked me if I’d had breakfast and I told him I hadn’t had time so he went and bought me some raisin toast and a hot chocolate.
‘You shouldn’t skip meals,’ he said, carrying the food back to the table on a tray. I watched him pour a splash of whisky into his coffee and slide his hipflask back into his breast pocket.
‘How have you been?’ I said.
‘Like the proverbial whore’s drawers,’ he said. ‘And you?’
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘Nice hat,’ he said.
I immediately hid my sports hat. I told him we had to wear hats if it was a Phys Ed day, which it was. I said we were doing practice for the athletics carnival.
‘I’m in the long jump,’ I said.
I could tell Mr Booker wasn’t interested because he was watching me talk but he wasn’t listening to what I was saying.
‘Are you free at lunchtime?’ he said.
‘I could be,’ I said.
‘Do you want to have lunch with me?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he said.
Then he said he had to go to a committee meeting on plagiarism, which was bound to be original, but if I would meet him afterwards it would help him to bear up.
And that’s how I started seeing Mr Booker again, which I now think was a mistake but it was the only thing to do at the time because by then we belonged to each other.
‘This thing,’ said Mr Booker, ‘is bigger than both of us.’
He was backed up against the wall of our airport motel room with his pants around his feet and his cock in his hand and I was wearing my sports uniform minus the shorts.
‘Stop boasting,’ I said, then I kissed him and took him inside me and started to cry because it had been a long time and I’d forgotten how good it felt.
It was my mother who decided we needed a holiday. She said it would double as a present for my seventeenth birthday since I’d already told her I didn’t want a teenage party. My mother said Lorraine could look after the house while we went to Sydney for the September break and I could choose somewhere fancy to go for a celebratory dinner.
‘We could do with a change of scene,’ said my mother.
She said it was Victor she wanted to get away from. Everywhere she went she ran into him. It was like the town wasn’t big enough for both of them. I knew what she meant. It wasn’t the kind of place where you could ever get lost. All the streets were wide open and familiar. There wasn’t anywhere to go that wasn’t tied up to something you remembered without even wanting to. It was like some kind of train ride you were on that you couldn’t get off. You had to just stay on and keep seeing the same places over and over again until you went crazy.
‘How about it?’ she said. ‘Just you and me.’
I couldn’t refuse, even though two weeks away from Mr Booker seemed less like a holiday and more like punishment to me. I called him at work to tell him I was going but he couldn’t talk because he had a student with him.
‘Bon voyage,’
he said. ‘Send me a postcard.’
My mother was so pleased to be leaving. It was a long time since she’d had a holiday, and the first time for years that she’d travelled anywhere without my father. As we drove out of town she cheered.
‘See you later, suckers,’ she said. ‘We’re gone!’ Then she started singing along to Handel on the radio
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
which is when I realised that my mother didn’t like where we were living any more than I did.
While we were driving she told me she was thinking she should look for a job in Sydney, where she could be closer to her sister and to Rowena and the baby.
‘What do you think?’ she said.
‘Sounds good to me,’ I said.
‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic,’ she said.
‘It’s your life,’ I said. ‘You don’t need my permission.’
‘Then you could go to university in Sydney,’ she said.