‘He’s split up with Deirdre,’ I told her.
‘Thank God for that,’ said my mother. ‘Does that mean he’s coming home?’
I told her he hadn’t said anything about what he was going to do.
‘Because I don’t think he should,’ said my mother. ‘I think he should stay away and not feel like he has to come back and be responsible for us all every time Victor screws up. He’s got his own life to live.’
‘And I haven’t,’ I said.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said.
I asked her what she was going to do about Victor when he came out of hospital.
‘I hope you’re not going to say he can come back here,’ I said.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Because if you do I’ll leave,’ I said.
She laughed and told me she was sorry she was so slow to catch on.
‘I’m thinking of putting the house on the market,’ she said.
‘When?’ I said. She told me not to get ahead of myself. There was work to do on the garden first and a few repairs to the house itself. Also, she said, she wouldn’t do anything until I’d finished my last exam.
‘Where do we live after that?’
‘Somewhere more interesting,’ said my mother, sounding like she really meant it, except that I was never sure she would keep her nerve once Victor got talking to her. He was so good at convincing her that she owed him something.
‘Don’t tell Eddie,’ she said. ‘I don’t want your father getting wind of anything or he’ll be round here wanting a cut.’
‘You already gave him his share,’ I said.
‘That won’t stop him,’ said my mother.
She laughed then, but not with any joy, and I told her not to worry about it, that I’d be off her hands pretty soon.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said, looking up from where she was mashing potatoes for dinner.
‘I know,’ I said. My mother seemed strong but when you put your arms around her you felt how small she was and how light.
bye baby bunting, daddy’s gone a-hunting.
At the end of September, on a Wednesday morning, Mr Booker rang to say he wouldn’t be picking me up from school that afternoon because Mrs Booker was indisposed.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
‘I’ll tell you when I see you,’ he said.
It was two whole days before I heard from him again. By then I’d already found out from Lorraine that Mrs Booker had lost the baby, which made it sound like an accident or something, the same way someone loses their wallet or their house keys.
‘How terrible,’ said my mother. ‘She must be devastated.’
Lorraine said she’d seen Mrs Booker a couple of days after it happened and she was in a pretty bad way.
‘It was a girl,’ said Lorraine. ‘Daphne.’
‘Lovely name,’ said my mother.
I didn’t say anything. As much as I could see how sad it must be for the Bookers, part of me was glad the baby was dead, which was a shocking way to think, I knew that, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d never liked the baby from the start.
‘How’s Mr Booker?’ asked my mother, as if she’d read my thoughts. Lorraine and she were looking through patterns for Lorraine’s wedding dress. Lorraine had given up on the idea of knitting one because it would end up being too hot and heavy. She’d decided to sew one instead, something simple and cheap. She didn’t want to blow money on the wedding, given that she’d finally persuaded Geoff they needed to rent a new house together, in a new neighbourhood, with new furniture and a new bed so that Sandra’s old one could be sold or sent back to Sandra.
‘He doesn’t say much,’ said Lorraine. ‘Stiff upper lip and all that.’
I tried calling Mr Booker at work the next day but his phone just rang and rang and nobody answered.
When he called me back on Friday he was more cheerful than I expected.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘Can’t be helped,’ he said. ‘Or as my old mum used to say, The Lord giveth and The Lord taketh away.’
He’d been drinking. I could always tell from his voice if he’d been drinking. When he was drunk he had a kind of silkiness in the way he talked, as if he was singing the words in some smoky room somewhere with an audience of precisely no one. He asked me if I could borrow my mother’s car and take him for a drive.
‘What’s happened to the Datsun?’ I said.
‘Out of commission,’ he said.
He told me the story while I drove him out through the pine forests and into the country. He said that he and Mrs Booker had had an altercation.
‘A what?’ I said.
‘A discussion,’ he said.
‘What about?’
‘Hard to say for sure,’ he said. ‘She misses England.’
‘Why doesn’t she go back?’
‘Exactly what I suggested she do,’ he said.
He told me how Mrs Booker had packed her bags and left in the car for the airport, except that she’d taken a wrong turn and ended up travelling the wrong way down a dual carriageway straight into oncoming traffic.
‘Holy shit,’ I said.
‘And then she inserts the car into the crash barrier, which is when the police ring me. They want to do her for dangerous driving, but by now she’s having contractions in the back seat of the paddy wagon.’
‘That’s horrible,’ I said.
‘There’s worse to come,’ said Mr Booker, then he took hold of my hand and asked me to pull over by the side of the road because he desperately needed to pee.
I waited in the car for him, and when he didn’t come back straight away I went to find him. He was sitting in the long grass with his legs stretched out, staring at the view over the sheep paddocks to the hills in the distance, which at this time of the afternoon were orange and lavender. He patted the ground next to him and I sat down.
‘Is that the reason she lost the baby?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘But it was a contributing factor.’
Neither of us said anything for a while until Mr Booker told me the car was a write-off.
‘Maybe you can find another one the same,’ I said.
‘I doubt that there is one the same in the entire known universe,’ he said. And then he told me Mrs Booker wanted a bigger car next time, a sedan or a station wagon.
‘Even now?’ I said.
He stared at me and smiled in a crooked way.
Which is when I leaned across and kissed him and pushed him back onto the ground and we would have done it then and there except that Mr Booker stopped all of a sudden and lay back staring at the purple sky.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
‘I’m fucked if I know what we’re doing,’ he said.
‘I’ll remind you,’ I said, climbing on top of him and pulling my top off over my head.
He looked up at me and smiled.
‘It’s the blind leading the fucking blind,’ he said.
‘Or the other way round,’ I said.
After we were finished he thanked me. We were sitting up again and brushing the grass and dust off our skin and clothes.
‘No problem,’ I said.
He leaned over and took my head in his fine hands and stared at me.
‘What?’ I said.
‘You’re fucking gorgeous,’ he said.
‘Why do you do that?’ I said.
‘Do what?’ he said.
‘Act like a fool,’ I said.
‘It’s got me where I am today,’ he said. And then he bent forward and bit my lip so hard it started to bleed.
Eddie came back to town and took a job as a taxi driver. He moved out of my mother’s house and into a two-bedroom flat, and for a while after he got out of hospital my father stayed with him. I went to visit because my mother said I should.
‘It’s only until I’m back on my feet,’ Victor told me. ‘And it helps Eddie to make ends meet.’
I watched him trying to cook dinner for my brother so he could have a proper meal before he started his shift. My father wasn’t used to cooking. He took the bread knife to cut the meat and didn’t use a cutting board so that the knife cut into the bench top and left wounds.
‘What are you making?’ I said.
‘My signature dish,’ he said. ‘Steak and onions.’
‘Do you want some help?’
‘I can manage perfectly well,’ he said. He still had bandages on his hands from the fire. They were bloody from the steaks.
I made us both a cup of sour coffee and sat down at the dining table in the alcove next to the kitchen. It looked out on the garden where the grass had grown two feet high and everything else was dead.
‘How are you feeling?’ I said.
‘What’s it to you?’ he said.
I told him if he didn’t want me there I’d leave.
‘I suppose your mother sent you over,’ he said. ‘To check up on me.’
‘Something like that,’ I said.
‘No doubt she’s got better things to do with her time than come and see me in person,’ he said.
I said I didn’t want to talk about my mother. I asked what drove him to set fire to his room.
‘I didn’t do it deliberately,’ he said. ‘It was an accident.’
‘That’s not what the motel manager says.’
‘The man’s delusional,’ he said.
I told him a lawyer for the motel had been ringing my mother trying to get money out of her for the repairs.
‘How did he get her number?’ said my father, refusing to look at me.
‘That’s what she’d like to know,’ I said.
‘No doubt he’s been going through my mail,’ said my father.
‘He says you owe him rent,’ I said.
‘He can take me to court,’ said my father.
I asked him if the doctors had discussed his medication with him and he said they had.
‘I made the mistake of halving my dosage a few weeks back,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a good idea.’
He covered the plate of steak with a sheet of newspaper to keep the flies off it and came to sit down. His clothes looked like he’d slept in them and he needed a bath and a shave. He started to tell me how grateful he was to Eddie for taking him in.
‘It isn’t easy for him,’ he said.
‘He volunteered,’ I said.
‘Well, if you want the honest truth I flatly refused to go knocking at your mother’s door again begging for charity,’ he said. ‘I know when I’m not welcome. She made her feelings towards me crystal clear the last time I needed her help.’
‘That’s a good thing,’ I said. ‘At least you know where you stand.’
Which was what I honestly felt. I was happy for my mother that she’d finally managed to convince Victor to stay away from her. I thought that maybe this time he might see a way to take charge of his own life.
I stayed for an hour and listened to my father talk, mainly because there was no way of stopping him. He talked like he didn’t care if I was listening or not, like talking was the only way he had to fill up his time. I knew that the days were too long for him and that sleeping was his only other outlet, because that was how it had been all the other times he’d been stuck at home with no job. He mostly talked about my mother, about how he had thought there was nothing wrong until my mother said there was.
‘It came as a total surprise to me,’ he said.
I said I didn’t know how that could be, because even I knew there was something wrong.
‘I think most of the neighbourhood knew,’ I said. ‘You practically shouted it from the rooftop.’
‘I think your mother mistook healthy disagreements for personal attacks,’ said my father.
‘They didn’t sound very healthy to me,’ I said.
Then I told him I was leaving because I needed to get the car back home, but really I was leaving because Eddie was up now and had come into the kitchen to eat. I didn’t want to sit there and talk to my brother while my father cooked the steak because all we ever said to each other was whatever lies we could think up on the spot to hide what we were really thinking.
‘Thanks for the coffee,’ I said to my father.
‘Are you still seeing that creep Hooker?’ he said. This was for my brother’s benefit. It was my father’s way of showing he still took an interest in my welfare.
‘I think you mean Mr Booker.’
‘Whatever his name is,’ he said.
‘I run into him from time to time,’ I said. ‘It’s a small town.’
‘I had them in the cab the other day,’ said my brother. ‘Pissed as newts at three in the afternoon.’
‘Sounds about right,’ I said.
‘Forgotten where they’d parked their car,’ said my brother. ‘Then they sat in the back and had an argument about whether it was light blue or dark blue.’
‘Why don’t you have any friends your own age?’ asked my father.
‘Why don’t you have any friends?’ I asked.
I left and drove home the long way around the lake. The one thing I liked about the town were the mountain views that appeared ahead of you when you were driving. If you had music on very loud with the windows wound down and you were smoking, it was like you were in a film about your own life, about how you’d escaped your fate somehow and this was the scene where you were getting out of town to make a fresh start. I was playing my mother’s Joni Mitchell album
,
and while I was singing along there was nothing else but the song and the road I was on and the horizon under the cloudless sky. I wasn’t happy in my film, but I wasn’t sad either. I was like someone suspended between being one way and being another, at a moment when all things are still possible. But of course they never are, at least not for very long. Everything settles into one set of facts sooner or later. If it didn’t nothing would have any shape or meaning. I said this to Mr Booker once and he said the point is to resist the facts as long as possible.