I told her I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go to university. I said she shouldn’t factor me into any of her decisions because I wasn’t making any firm plans at this stage, which was as honest as I could be with my mother without telling her that I was seeing Mr Booker again. I didn’t want her or anyone else to know that. I wanted them to imagine that it was over between us, because that way it was nobody’s business but mine, and also because I was so ashamed of the way I needed Mr Booker and how he needed me. We were like two animals burrowing into each other to keep warm.
Rowena’s new house was in Leichhardt. She was housesitting for an architect and his wife who were living in Europe for four months and didn’t want tenants in the place. Rowena knew them because she’d walked their dogs for a while. They were harlequin poodles, which Rowena explained was a rare breed because normally poodle-breeders killed any pups that were not all the one colour. Daisy and Dixie had big splashes of black on their white coats.
‘They look like they’re fake,’ said my mother.
‘They’re real,’ said Rowena.
The dogs followed us into our part of the house, which was behind the kitchen, like a separate wing with its own bathroom and two foldout sofas to sleep on.
‘The guest quarters,’ said Rowena.
‘Is this fun or is this fun?’ said my mother.
She gave Rowena some wine and the clothes she had bought for Amy, who was asleep in her playpen in the living room. She’d grown since Christmas. Rowena said she was starting to have opinions.
‘Avocados are yum but pumpkin is yuck,’ she said.
Rowena and I went down to the main street to shop for food while my mother stayed home with the baby. Rowena showed me the Italian baker where she bought her bread and the Lebanese delicatessen where she liked to buy tahini and hummus and haloumi cheese and I pretended I knew what these things were because I didn’t want her to think I was ignorant.
‘This is why I love the inner west so much,’ she said. ‘Paddington is so white bread now.’
‘Totally,’ I said.
While we waited to be served she pointed out the best olive oils to me, and her favourite balsamic vinegar. She wasn’t exactly showing off but I could tell she was enjoying demonstrating to me how this kind of shop was normal for her.
‘Do you think she’d seriously move up here?’ she said, when I told her what my mother had said in the car.
‘It’s the only way she’ll ever get away from Victor,’ I said.
‘I’ve asked her to buy a house with me,’ said Rowena. ‘When I go back to work. Then do it up to sell.’
And that’s what they talked about for the next week and a half while Rowena drove us around in the architect’s Saab with the poodles on the back seat beside me and the baby. They must have looked at twenty different houses, not because they could afford to buy any of them. My mother even told Rowena that if she couldn’t find a teaching job in Sydney she might re-train as an interior designer because it was something she’d always wanted to try.
‘If I had a rich husband,’ she said, ‘I’d have quit teaching years ago.’
‘But then you’d have missed the chance to martyr yourself to Victor for the past twenty years,’ said Rowena.
‘True,’ said my mother, turning around to smile at me.
‘What’s so funny?’ I said.
‘Would you have missed Victor if I’d walked out when you were born?’
‘What, like I miss him now, you mean?’ I said.
I wrote Mr Booker a letter after a few days telling him everything I was doing, and saying how much better it was in Sydney. And I drew him a picture of me and my mother on the beach shivering in our swimsuits, because it was still too cold and windy to go in. I drew icebergs in the water so he would get the idea.
He didn’t write back, but I didn’t expect him to. I called him once when Rowena and my mother were out but he said it was a bad time so could I just wait and he’d call me when I got home.
‘Did you get my letter?’ I said.
‘I did indeed,’ he said, and then he went quiet and I wasn’t sure if he was still on the line.
‘Are you there?’ I said.
‘Where else would I be?’ he said.
‘Do you think of me as much as I think of you?’ I said. ‘I think of you all the time.’
‘You know better than to ask me that,’ he said.
‘No, I don’t,’ I said. ‘Or I wouldn’t be doing it.’
And then he said he had to go and give a lecture.
‘What about?’ I said.
‘The French New Wave,’ he said.
‘Mon dieu,’
I said.
He finally laughed, but I knew that something was bothering him. I spent the rest of my holidays worrying that he was going to tell me we were finished for good and that he was only waiting for me to get back so he could break the news to my face.
Actually, what was worrying Mr Booker wasn’t anything to do with me. Later, when I asked, he told me he’d had trouble at work, complaints from some of his students about him missing appointments and cancelling tutorials.
‘I know who they are,’ he said. ‘It’s this especially untalented little group who think they deserved higher marks for their essays, so they banded together and formed a protest movement to circulate petitions and write formal letters of complaint.’
‘Why don’t you just re-mark their essays?’ I said.
‘Somebody else already did,’ he said. ‘He marked two of them down and the rest stayed the same.’
‘So you won?’ I said.
‘I did,’ he said, ‘but not without some damage to my reputation, heretofore unsullied.’
‘If they could see you now,’ I said.
He reached out and gave me a slap on my shoulder, which was hard enough to sting. We were having a lunchtime drink at a pub on the outskirts of town where there was a miniature English village in the garden. We’d been there a couple of times before with Mrs Booker, and Mr Booker liked it because the inside was decorated like a real English country pub, with brasses on the wall and pictures of fox hunting, and because they sold Guinness on tap.
‘Do you like your job?’ I said.
‘Beats working down the mines,’ he said.
‘Seriously,’ I said. Trying to have a real conversation with Mr Booker was always hard because he was never going to tell me what he thought about anything, not truly, as if nothing mattered very much, especially the things that did.
‘You think I’m joking?’ he said.
He took a drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke up towards the ceiling.
‘What would you do if you had so much money you didn’t have to work?’
‘I’d buy my old mum a little ’ouse to live in,’ he said in his Michael Caine voice, ‘and then I’d buy meself and the missus a bloody great hacienda down in Spain so we could lie about all day in the sun.’
‘So you wouldn’t work at all?’ I said.
‘Four letter fuckin’ word,’ he said.
‘And would you have other mistresses, apart from me?’ I said.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I’d keep yous all together.’
‘Like a harem?’ I said.
‘Exactly right,’ he said. ‘Like a harem.’
‘Sick,’ I said.
‘You asked,’ he said.
We went back to my place after that because my mother and Lorraine were both at work and I wanted to save us time since Mr Booker was on his way to pick up Mrs Booker from her school and I wanted to go to the library to study for my mock exams. It was the first time we’d ever been alone in my mother’s house and it felt as if we were casing the place like robbers. I didn’t want to take Mr Booker to my bedroom with its single bed and prissy curtains, so I took him to the front room instead. I poured us both some whisky and we lay down on the sofa in front of the fireplace where I’d sat so many times with Mr and Mrs Booker at my mother’s parties. Now that it was just Mr Booker and me it was so quiet I could hear the birds in the garden and the neighbour sweeping the leaves off her pebblecrete driveway, which she did every day because she liked to keep the place immaculate.
Mr Booker had just started to unzip my jacket when the phone rang.
‘Don’t answer it,’ he said. ‘It’s the vice squad.’
So I didn’t and I let it ring while Mr Booker pulled my shirt up over my head and kissed my breasts but it was so hard to concentrate with it ringing through the empty house like it was about to blow up that eventually I had to tell Mr Booker to wait while I answered it.
‘Is Mum there?’ said Eddie. He sounded like he’d been running.
‘She’s at work,’ I said. ‘What’s up with you?’
‘I’ve just had a call from the motel where Dad’s living,’ he said. ‘He set fire to his room.’
I wanted to laugh but I couldn’t because it would have upset Eddie even more, so I made faces at Mr Booker instead while Eddie explained that Victor had been taken to hospital for treatment on his burns.
‘How much damage did he do?’ I said.
‘How would I know?’ said Eddie.
‘I thought the motel would have told you,’ I said.
‘They didn’t,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you worried about how he is?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
I asked him what he wanted me to do and he said he was flying up and could someone please come and pick him up from the airport.
‘How’s Deirdre?’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen her.’
He stopped talking after that and hung up. I went and put my shirt back on. At the same time I told Mr Booker I had to go because my father was in hospital.
‘I’ll take you,’ he said.
I said it was okay because I had my mother’s car.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘What for?’ I said.
He lit two cigarettes at once and handed one to me.
‘Is he all right?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s a nutcase.’
Mr Booker put his arms around me and held me.
‘Pauvre
Bambi,’ he said, and then he just rocked me to and fro like I was a baby.
‘I’m fine,’ I told him. ‘It doesn’t run in the family.’
Mr Booker let go of me then and smiled. He told me I was pure gold. At the front door I kissed him and said he should come back another day when my mother was out and we could resume where we’d left off.
‘Where have you been all my life?’ he said.
‘In all the wrong places,’ I said.
On the way home from the airport Eddie told me that Deidre and he weren’t together any more.
‘That’s too bad,’ I said.
‘It’s a relief,’ he said. But when I looked at him he didn’t look relieved, he looked as sad as I’d ever seen him look, and very tired.
‘Don’t give up hope,’ I said. I was just telling him the same thing that Rowena had told me when Mr Booker hadn’t shown up in Sydney even though he’d promised he would.
‘Don’t patronise me,’ he said. ‘I don’t need any cheap sympathy from you.’
I didn’t say anything else after that because there wasn’t any point in trying to talk to Eddie. It was like trying to talk to a wall.
The first place we went was the hospital. My father wasn’t badly hurt, just some minor burns to his hands. He was asleep when we went in. Eddie went off to find something to eat while I sat beside Victor’s bed and watched him. He was lying on his back with his mouth open and his jaw so slack so that his skin hung in folds around his jowls. With his bushy whiskers he looked like a bull walrus, the kind that seem harmless and sleepy, which is what makes them so dangerous.
I flicked through the magazine he had been reading. It was about sailing. It had pictures of yachtsmen in it, men who had sailed by themselves around the world, trying to beat records and getting lost or wrecked in storms along the way. My father’s other dream, apart from becoming a famous actor, was to sail across the Pacific Ocean solo, except that he’d never learned to swim and he’d never had the money to buy the kind of boat he needed to make the trip.
‘It’s how I’d like to die,’ he said. ‘When the time comes. Just set off one day and never come back.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ I said.
My mother arrived from work and sat down on the other side of his bed.
‘What happened?’ she said.
I told her what Eddie had told me and she just stared at my father then covered her face with her hands as if she couldn’t bear to look at him any more.
‘You don’t need to stay,’ I said. I told her the nurses had said my father was sedated and might sleep for hours.
She waited until Eddie came back, leaping to her feet when he came in the door and throwing her arms around him. He didn’t like being hugged. He stood there stiff as a board and waited for my mother to let go.
‘I’ve just spoken to one of the doctors,’ he said as soon as my mother released him. ‘He says they can keep him here for a few days.’
‘Thank you,’ said my mother.
Then Eddie said he’d call by the motel and see if there was anything worth salvaging there.
‘That would be a help,’ my mother said.
Eddie dropped my mother and me home and then drove back to the motel.