‘How romantic,’ I said.
‘It’s the most romantic thing I know,’ he said.
But then I started waiting again because it was the only thing I was good at. Mostly I waited for Mr Booker to call me every week and tell me when he wanted to see me. His afternoons had become unpredictable, he said, because it was getting close to the end of term and his students were asking for appointments so they could discuss what was going to be in the exams, or what they should write for their final assessments.
‘I tell them it doesn’t really matter,’ he said. ‘But they fret nevertheless.’
‘Maybe I should stay here and study under you next year,’ I said.
‘Or on top of me,’ he said. ‘Whichever you prefer.’
He was giving me a lift to the library in his new car, which was a navy-blue Mazda he’d bought cheap from a friend. There wasn’t time for us to go anywhere on the way because I had an exam the following day and I needed to do some revision and because Mr Booker was going to a fancy-dress quiz night with the secretary of his department and her husband, who was a roofing-tile salesman. Mr Booker was dressed as a Beatle. He’d combed his hair forward in a fringe and hired a satin military jacket and a pair of round tinted glasses, his rose-coloured spectacles, he called them. Mrs Booker wasn’t up for it, he said, because she was nursing a hangover.
‘I thought she quit,’ I said.
‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions,’ said Mr Booker.
‘How is she?’ I asked. ‘I mean, does she ever say anything about us? Or is that something you don’t talk about?’
‘One of the many things,’ he said. And then he sighed and we drove for a while without talking until I told him that my mother was going to sell her house and move somewhere else.
‘Good for her,’ he said.
‘I don’t know if I should go with her or not,’ I said.
‘Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch,’ he said. It wasn’t meant to mean anything. It was just the way Mr Booker talked when he was excited about something, blurting the first thing that came into his head. A lot of what he said was like that, like lines of a long poem that was writing itself in his brain the whole time.
‘If you say so,’ I said.
I asked him what he thought I should do once I’d finished school. I said I was worried about my future. He put his hand on my thigh and told me the future was overrated.
‘I’m serious,’ I said.
‘So am I,’ he said.
I said what I was really waiting for him to do was elope with me to Rio like he kept promising.
‘You’re all talk,’ I said.
‘Not a bit of it,’ he said, looking at me with a tender expression. ‘Ask me again in a week’s time.’
‘What’s happening in a week’s time?’ I said.
‘My good lady wife’s off on some course,’ he said. ‘She’s decided to concentrate on her career.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’ I said.
‘I couldn’t get a word in,’ he said. ‘You kept interrupting, blathering on like a bum on a bicycle.’
I asked him how long Mrs Booker was going to be away and he said two nights.
‘Alone at last,’ I said.
‘No need to sound so pleased,’ he said.
I laughed at him then and he squeezed my knee.
‘Fancy a filthy weekend?’ he said.
‘You really know how to make a girl feel special,’ I said.
‘What do you say we stock up on champagne and truffles and bunker down for the duration?’
‘What do I tell my mother?’ I said.
‘You’ll think of something,’ he said.
Mr Booker pulled up outside the library and waited with the engine running.
‘That’ll be fun,’ I said.
‘You think so?’ he said.
‘What do you think?’ I said.
‘I think you should cut your losses,’ he said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I said.
‘You’re just a kid,’ he said.
‘You say that like it’s news,’ I said. ‘What am I supposed to say when you say something like that?’
‘Nothing at all,’ said Mr Booker. Then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and waited for me to climb out of the car. He tooted the horn as he drove away. The last thing I saw as he disappeared around a bend was his hand waving to me out of the driver’s side window.
The other thing I was waiting for was seeing Mrs Booker again because I hadn’t seen her after the day at the races but I knew we were bound to run into each other somewhere. I actually wanted it to happen sooner rather than later so I could get it over with, like a maths test or a visit to the dentist. Not that I had any idea what I was going to say to her when we met, or what she was going to say to me, because I realised that I really didn’t know Mrs Booker very well. I knew her a lot less well, for instance, than I knew Mr Booker. For obvious reasons.
In the end I saw her at a birthday party for my mother’s friend Hilary. It was on a Friday and I’d just sat my last exam so I was in the mood to go out and have a good time. My mother said she’d take me to the birthday and I could have something to eat there before I went to the end-of-exam party at Katie Hollis’s place, just a few streets away.
I saw Mrs Booker as soon as I walked in, and she saw my mother and me. It was hard not to because there were only about twenty people in the room. Even so she tried to make it seem like she was looking at the book in her hand and not paying us any attention, which I was grateful for because it gave me time to get a glass of wine and make small talk with Philip about the English paper.
‘Did you do the
Gatsby
question?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘The Eliot.’
‘Are you a fan?’ I said.
‘Totally,’ he said. ‘The man’s a genius.’
‘Better than Fitzgerald?’
‘Well, it’s the less-is-more rule, isn’t it,’ he said.
I had no idea what he was talking about but I stood there listening because it meant I could seem occupied and avoid Mrs Booker.
‘In my beginning is my end. It takes Fitzgerald a whole novel to say something similar.’
‘Is that a bad thing?’ I said.
‘It’s not exactly bad,’ he said. ‘It’s just I prefer brevity.’
Philip walked away from me then, in the abrupt way he had of ending a conversation, and I saw him walk out into the courtyard at the back of the house where he sat down on his own and started to eat his plate of finger food one bite at a time.
That was when Mrs Booker came to stand beside me and pour herself another glass of vodka.
‘Hello, stranger,’ she said.
I turned to her and made an effort to smile even though my face felt like all the muscles in it had lost their way. I could tell she was drunk because she kept trying to slide her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose and not quite succeeding.
‘What brings you to this neck of the woods?’ she said.
‘I’m on my way to an end-of-exam party,’ I said.
‘What are you celebrating?’ she said.
‘The end of exams,’ I said.
‘That would make sense,’ she said, taking me by the arm and leading me over to a chair so she could sit down and search for a cigarette in her bag. When she offered me one I took it.
‘I’m celebrating too,’ she said. She didn’t look like she was celebrating. She was dressed all in black as if she was in mourning.
‘What are you celebrating?’ I said.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’
She stared straight ahead and smoked her cigarette. I sat next to her, perched on the arm of the sofa, waiting for whatever it was she wanted to tell me next.
‘I’m sorry about the baby,’ I said finally. ‘Lorraine told me it was a girl.’
Mrs Booker didn’t reply straight away, but then she looked at me out of her smudged glasses and asked me what else Lorraine had told me.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘What a fucking nerve,’ she said. I wasn’t sure if she meant Lorraine or me so I kept quiet.
‘I suppose you’re satisfied?’ she said.
‘Sorry?’ I said.
It was strange how calm she was. She hadn’t even raised her voice. It was like she was talking about the weather.
‘All I can tell you,’ she said, ‘is be careful what you wish for.’
I waited for a moment longer then I thanked her for the advice and got up to walk away, which is when Mrs Booker grabbed hold of my arm and shouted loud enough for the whole room to hear.
‘I hope you rot in hell,’ she said. ‘All of you. I don’t care if I never see any of you again.’ And then she looked at me and pointed with her cigarette. ‘But especially you,’ she said. ‘You’re nothing but a harlot.’
I almost laughed because that wasn’t the worst thing Mrs Booker could have said to me. She could have said a whole lot of other, more accurate things, but she didn’t, she just sat back in her chair and finished her drink and then she got up and left the party and didn’t turn around, even when someone in the room started to clap.
When I told Mr Booker what Mrs Booker had said he took hold of my hand and kissed it and said he was sorry his wife had made a public spectacle of herself. We were sitting in the café where he ate breakfast in the mornings.
‘A
harlot
,’ I said. ‘That hurt.’
‘Like being slapped in the face with a feather,’ he said. He took a drag on his cigarette then swallowed the smoke.
‘She was pretty angry,’ I said.
‘She’s perfectly within her rights,’ he said.
‘Why are you standing up for her?’ I said.
‘Because she’s just an innocent bystander,’ he said, reaching for his coffee.
‘Is that what you really think?’
Mr Booker sipped his coffee and smiled at me over the rim of his cup.
‘Harlot,’ he said.
‘Dirty old man,’ I said.
‘What I don’t get,’ I said, ‘is why she doesn’t leave you. If it was me I would’ve left you ages ago.’
‘She’s a nicer person than you are,’ he said.
‘I can be nice when I try,’ I said.
I thought the reason Mrs Booker stayed with Mr Booker when it was only making both of them more desperate with every passing day had nothing to do with niceness. It was more like she’d decided if she couldn’t be happy then neither would anybody else. She’d make sure of it.
I lied to my mother about where I was going for the weekend. I said there was a school break-up party at a house in the country and I was going there with some girlfriends.
‘Who?’ she said.
I told her some names.
‘How are you getting there?’ she said.
I told her I was getting a lift with Bella Larwood.
‘Who’s Bella Larwood?’ she said.
‘You’d like her,’ I said. ‘She was sports captain. She was in the state finals for discus.’
For a moment I thought my mother was going to refuse to let me go but she relented.
‘I’ll call you when we get there,’ I said.
‘Make sure you do,’ she said.
And then I packed my bag and caught the bus into town and Mr Booker picked me up at the bus stop like we’d arranged and took me back to his house.
It was like we were on our honeymoon. Mrs Booker had cleaned the house and bought a whole lot of groceries so that Mr Booker wouldn’t have to shop or go hungry. She’d even cooked him a pot of soup and a beef stew and left them in the fridge with labels on them to tell him what they were and when to eat them.
‘That’s very thoughtful of her,’ I said.
‘She’s making an effort,’ said Mr Booker. He was walking around the kitchen wrapped in a bath towel and nothing else. I couldn’t help staring at him. His skin was slick from the shower and his dark curls were dripping droplets of water onto his pale shoulders and back.
‘You keep saying that,’ I said.
‘Saying what?’
‘You keep defending her.’
‘That’s because she hasn’t done anything wrong,’ he said.
‘Is that your way of making yourself feel better about fucking other people?’
‘What other people?’ he said. ‘Are there more of you?’
‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘It’s too weird.’
‘You will,’ he said. ‘When you’re older. You’ll be amazed how much weirdness there is out there.’
I didn’t answer him. It wasn’t exactly an argument we were having, but it was close, and I didn’t want it to get any worse because I could tell Mr Booker didn’t like me to talk about his wife. Some other subjects were off limits too. The baby, for instance, even though all the furniture the Bookers had bought for it, and all the sheets and baby blankets and clothes and toys, were still in the room opposite the main bedroom. Some of the stuff was in its packaging, and the cot was covered in plastic wrapping to keep the dust off.
After we’d eaten the beef stew I helped Mr Booker wash the dishes and then he suggested we take a walk to get some ice-cream because we hadn’t been out of the house all day. So we got dressed and walked to the shops and back, which took us almost an hour. It was a perfect night to be outside because the summer had already started but it was only hot during the day. After the sun went down everything cooled off except the breeze, which was warm and sweet from all the wattle blossoms.