‘I’ve brought them along to show them a bit of local colour,’ she told my mother.
My mother told the Bookers to come in and get acquainted.
‘Drink?’ she said, showing them into the kitchen where I’d lined up the drinks on the bench with the ice and the glasses so everyone could help themselves.
‘A woman of my own mind,’ said Mr Booker, which made my mother smile and take his arm and ask him where he and Mrs Booker had been hiding.
‘We weren’t sure if the natives were friendly,’ said Mr Booker.
‘Only some of them,’ said my mother. ‘You’re among friends.’
When they came back into the living room I saw Mr Booker properly for the first time. He was dressed all in white with a red handkerchief tucked into the pocket of his suit. As he took it out to wipe the sweat from his face I noticed his hands, which had a kind of fineness even though they were so big, and his eyes, which were the colour of chocolate and dreamy as a baby’s.
‘This is my daughter Martha,’ said my mother.
‘Charmed,’ said Mr Booker, staring at me the same way I was used to being stared at.
Mr Booker was English. So was his wife. They came from the same small town somewhere on the border with Wales. They had the same voice. They even looked alike. The same curly black hair and glowing skin, the same way of walking and smoking cigarettes, as if they’d been watching each other and perfecting the same gestures all their lives. Nothing they did was awkward. Mrs Booker in particular had a coiled cat-like way of moving that was an invitation to stare. She hid her eyes behind her smoky glasses, because it was her perfect body she wanted you to admire. They could have been brother and sister. Mr Booker explained to my mother that they had left England looking for adventure.
‘Britain’s finished,’ he said.
‘They’re just rearranging the deck chairs,’ she said.
They talked over each other, as if they were trying to make a good impression.
‘Well,’ said my mother’s friend Lorraine who was American and loud, ‘if it’s adventure you’re after you’ve come to the right place.’ Everybody laughed, given how quiet it was where we lived. A cemetery with lights was what Lorraine called it.
After that I sat and watched them. It was like the sun had come out from behind the clouds, making everything glow. That was the kind of charm they had. Now that I knew them I was sorry for all the time when I hadn’t.
And Mr Booker watched me, even when it seemed he was looking at Mrs Booker or at the other people in the room he watched me, and everything I said made him turn his eyes in my direction so he could pretend to be surprised that I was still there. And he kept saying my name.
‘Yes Martha? I’m listening, Martha. You have my full attention, Martha.’
‘Are you making fun of me?’ I said.
‘Would I ever, Martha,’ he said. ‘What do you take me for?’
Later on I went with them to the shops to buy some more beer and cigarettes. They had a golden Datsun two-seater with real leather trim and a bench running along under the rear window where I lay half on my back with my legs stretched out, breathing in their smell. I told them about my mother and father.
‘They broke up,’ I said. ‘So now I am emotionally scarred for life. At least that’s my excuse.’
‘For what?’ said Mrs Booker.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It hasn’t happened yet.’
They thought that was funny. They glanced at each other and smiled and Mr Booker said he looked forward to finding out some day.
‘So do I,’ I said.
At the shops I waited in the car with Mrs Booker while Mr Booker went in to buy the beer. I told her I liked the perfume she was wearing. She reached into her handbag, took out a tiny bottle and unscrewed the lid. Then she turned around and took hold of my wrist, turning it upwards so she could dab a drop of the perfume on my skin, filling the whole car with its scent. It was nothing really, but at the time it gave me a strange thrill, as if Mrs Booker already had plans for me without knowing exactly what they were, as if we were all somehow made for each other.
‘It’s French,’ she said, touching her gilt-framed glasses. They covered half her face and turned darker in sunlight so that she looked like a blind person.
‘Naturally,’ I said.
When Mr Booker came back he loaded the beer into the boot then threw the cigarettes in the window. Mrs Booker lit two cigarettes straight away and handed one to Mr Booker, then they sat for a moment, breathing in clouds of smoke and letting it leak from their mouths in loops and coils like tendrils of hair. Mr Booker was watching me in the rear-view mirror, not saying anything, but smiling in a friendly way. It was hard to tell how old he was, or Mrs Booker. They looked young, but because they dressed so formally—he in his white linen suit and she in her sheer stockings even though it was summer—they seemed to belong in the past, which made them feel old, the way black-and-white films feel old even when they’re not.
Mr Booker said he didn’t want to go straight back to the party because this was an opportunity for me to guide them around town and show them the sights.
‘That won’t take long,’ I said.
‘Let’s go for a spin, my lovelies,’ he said, as if he were an actor. I repeated the sentence just the way he had said it, not because I was making fun of him but because I liked the way he made English sound like a foreign language.
‘Where to?’ said Mrs Booker.
He didn’t answer. He passed his cigarette to me. I took one drag and handed it back.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Now it’s got my spit all over it.’
‘As the actress said to the bishop,’ said Mr Booker.
I didn’t understand the joke, but I pretended I did.
‘Don’t be coarse,’ said Mrs Booker, slapping her husband’s thigh. That’s when I laughed, because he grabbed hold of her arm and held it in mid-air for a moment.
‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. ‘You don’t know where I’ve been.’
For an hour we drove around town. They pointed out the university where Mr Booker taught film history, and the school where Mrs Booker taught grade two. They pointed out the flat they lived in, up on the fourth floor of a building that looked like a car park.
‘Chateau Booker,’ they said, talking over each other again.
I pointed out the motel where my father was staying.
‘He seems happy enough,’ I said. ‘He never liked houses. That’s why we moved around so much.’
I listed all the places we’d lived, as far back as I could remember.
‘What’s wrong with houses?’ said Mr Booker.
‘Don’t ask me,’ I said. I told them how he kept a bedroll in the boot of his car so he could go out and sleep in the bush whenever he felt like it.
I pointed out my father’s car parked in its usual spot, a plum-coloured Jaguar he’d bought second-hand after my mother gave him some money if he promised never to ask her for any more.
‘He likes the open road,’ I said.
‘What ho,’ said Mr Booker. ‘Toot toot.’
On the way back to the party we came through the pine forests that skirted our suburb. In the afternoon heat the trees gave off a waxy smell as if they were melting. When we came down over the hill all the houses around us shone like reflections in glass. I asked if England was anything like this and they said no because it was never this hot, or it hadn’t been for years.
‘I’d like to go there one day,’ I said.
‘What for?’ said Mr Booker.
‘To look for my roots,’ I said.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr Booker glancing back at me to see if I was serious.
It wasn’t true. I had no particular reason to want to go to England except that I’d seen it on television. I just wanted to go anywhere that wasn’t here.
‘England or America,’ I said. ‘Either is fine. Or Paris.’
‘Make up your mind,’ said Mr Booker.
I told him not to rush me and he paused for a moment before glancing at me in the rear-view mirror.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he said.
They stayed at the party for another two hours, drinking and dancing. I had never seen anyone dance as well as Mrs Booker. It was because she had done ballet, she told me, starting when she was four years old. And then, when all of my mother’s other friends had gone home, they said they should do the same. My mother thanked them for coming and said how much she enjoyed meeting them.
‘Come again soon,’ she said. ‘Whenever you feel like it.’ After drinking champagne in the heat all afternoon she looked like she needed to sleep. She had taken her shoes off to dance and her hair had come loose from the paisley headband she wore to keep it flat.
‘Thank you,’ said Mr Booker.
‘We’ve had a wonderful time,’ said Mrs Booker.
‘We’ve decided to steal your daughter,’ said Mr Booker. ‘If you have no objections.’
My mother laughed and draped her arm across my shoulder as if she was protecting me, then changed her mind and let me go. The next moment Mr Booker leaned down and kissed me on the cheek, whispering loudly enough in my ear for everyone to hear.
‘You’ve been warned,’ he said.
And then we all walked up the driveway to their car, arm in arm. My mother and I waved to them as they pulled out into the road and drove away.
‘What wonderful people,’ said my mother after they had vanished around the corner. She was happy her party had gone well, that so many people had come. She said you couldn’t have enough friends. The more the merrier.
Like I said before, my father had never liked my mother’s friends. He said they were all phonies. He blamed the women for turning my mother against him.
‘As if I needed any help,’ my mother said.
Later Mr Booker told me it was the hat I was wearing that day that gave me away. I said it was my father’s hat, the one he’d worn when he was mowing the lawn, which was a job that had fallen to me after my father left. I said I had worn it to hide my hair because it had grown too thick and untidy. He said he remembered the green skirt I was wearing and the boy’s shirt with the press-down buttons and the red plastic sandals on my feet.
‘You looked like an underage tart,’ said Mr Booker.
‘You say the nicest things,’ I told him, then curled round to lick his balls the way he liked me to.
I spent a lot of time with the Bookers that summer because there was nothing else to do, and because I didn’t want to hang round with Alice any more. Alice was my friend from school. She lived across the road and I used to go to her place all the time to get away from home.
That was before my father left. After he left Alice’s parents told me I was taking up too much of Alice’s time. I could tell they were confused about how my mother was going to get on now that she didn’t have a husband. When I told them that my mother was happy she didn’t have a husband they looked at me strangely, as if I’d said something rude. After that I stopped going round there, and a couple of months later Alice’s parents decided to send her to boarding school in the country.
By the time Alice came back for the summer we had nothing to say to each other. Partly because she had started seeing her sister’s ex-boyfriend, who did so many drugs everyone called him The Space Captain, and partly because she felt sorry for me as my parents had split up and I didn’t have a boyfriend. I thought about telling her that I didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for me, but Alice had a mean streak and I didn’t want it to come out on my account.
I don’t think the Bookers felt sorry for me. It was more that they were looking for some company themselves. And everybody else they knew had children. Maybe they thought they were being kind, but then it turned into something else. I can’t say what exactly, but we all seemed to feel it almost from the start.
Mrs Booker would ring my mother and ask her if it would be all right to take me out to lunch, and of course my mother would say yes. She liked the Bookers. She liked their good manners and the way Mr Booker gave her presents of flowers and chocolates and kissed her hand when they came to pick me up.
‘They have style,’ she said.
When I told the Bookers this they beamed.
‘We do our best with what we’ve got,’ said Mr Booker.
It was true. They made a big effort. They dressed up even if it was only to go to the pub, which made lunch seem like a special occasion.
Sometimes it was. I remember one time it was their wedding anniversary. They had been married eleven years. They had met on a train when they were both students in Manchester.
‘The first thing I noticed were her legs,’ said Mr Booker.
‘The cheek,’ said Mrs Booker.
He said he had watched her climb aboard the train in front of him in a skirt up to her armpits and her legs were the longest he had ever seen.
‘It was lust at first sight,’ he said.
‘We were married three months later,’ said Mrs Booker. ‘In a registry office.’
‘Totally cuntstruck,’ said Mr Booker.
Mrs Booker slapped his arm and told him not to be vulgar.
‘Just stating the facts,’ he said. Then he had the waiter bring a third bottle of wine.