Mr Booker and I had been drinking champagne and then wine and then whisky so we weren’t exactly thinking straight. That was why we stopped in front of someone’s house and sat down on the nature strip and watched a family at the dining table. There was a husband and a wife and three children, and after a while the mother got up out of her seat and carried the two younger children out of the room, leaving the father with the eldest, a boy. The two of them sat opposite each other and ate without speaking, until the father noticed us looking into his house and stood up. He came to the window and squinted into the dark then made a motion with his hand to move us on, even though we weren’t doing anything except just sitting on the nature strip.
‘I think we better go,’ I said, and I helped Mr Booker to his feet.
‘He’s asking us in for a drink,’ said Mr Booker.
‘I don’t think he is,’ I said. The man had moved to where he could shout to us through an open window.
‘Can I help you with anything?’ he said.
‘No, thank you,’ I said, pushing Mr Booker in the back so that he would start to walk in the direction of home.
‘We’re lost,’ Mr Booker shouted. ‘We’re lost in the desert. We’re dying of fucking thirst out here.’
I took him by the arm and dragged him along behind me, while the man watched us through his window until we were a safe distance away.
‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ said Mr Booker, gesturing at all the houses around us, sitting neatly in their squares of garden.
‘You tell me,’ I said.
‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘that nobody gives a shit. Where I grew up we all knew each other. We were all in and out of each other’s houses. I even caught Mrs Davies giving the coal man a hand job one day. That was a laugh. She offered me money to keep my mouth shut.’
‘How much?’
‘A quid,’ he said. ‘It was a small fortune to me. I took it and told my cousin anyway and he told Mr Davies who wasn’t too pleased.’
‘And the moral of the story is?’
‘Keep your hands to yourself,’ said Mr Booker.
‘Good advice,’ I said.
When we got home Mr Booker made some coffee and said we should try to stay awake for the English football at midnight and before that there was a re-run of
Seven Samurai
on television.
‘I tell my students if they watch nothing else all year in my course they should watch that film because there isn’t a wasted moment in it.’
And so we sat up in our sofa bed, where Mr Booker had decided we should sleep instead of messing up the main bedroom, until two in the morning. I could tell how pleased Mr Booker was that I was there because he kept reaching out for my hand and picking it up to kiss it, as if he was checking that I hadn’t left.
The next day I helped him clean the house and I walked down the road to find a neighbour’s bin to dump our empty bottles in. On the way back I saw Mr Booker standing in the doorway of his house watching me. He was wearing nothing but his underwear and I suddenly realised how old he was compared to me, how his whole stance, the way he leaned on the doorframe and smoked his cigarette and shifted his weight from one leg to the other, made him seem like he was already an old man. Which is when I realised how other people must see him, Mrs Booker, Lorraine, Geoff, people who were nearer Mr Booker’s age than I was, how they must look at him and me and wonder what the reason was for whatever had happened between us, when all it proved was love is not something you see coming. It is just there all of a sudden, like a door opening up in a blank wall.
‘I don’t want to go home,’ I told Mr Booker when he said it was time for him to pick up Mrs Booker from the airport.
‘You have to,’ he said.
‘I’m tired of this,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to have to always sneak back home to my mother. It’s so undignified.’
That made Mr Booker smile.
‘I know what you mean,’ he said.
I wanted to tell him that I was sick of waiting for him to leave his wife but I could tell just by looking at his expression that he knew this already, and that there wasn’t anything else I could tell him that he hadn’t already thought of, except maybe my idea that this was the beginning of the end of everything.
I once asked Mr Booker if he regretted anything he’d done in his life and he said he should have left England sooner, when he was young, and then he told me to get away from my parents and their problems as soon as I could. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad,’ he said.
‘I’ll drop you home,’ he said while we were getting into the car.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Just take me into town and I’ll get the bus. I don’t want my mother to see us.’
It was Eddie I was more worried about. He was out in his taxi ten or twelve hours a day. He was the one who was most likely to see me, and then he’d tell my father.
‘Whatever’s best for you,’ said Mr Booker.
‘Will I see you on Wednesday?’ I said.
‘With bells on,’ he said.
But I didn’t see him. On Wednesday morning Mr Booker rang to say he had to go to the dentist that day for an infected tooth. And I didn’t see him the next week either because he said he had a moderation meeting.
‘What’s a moderation meeting?’ I said.
‘A total fucking waste of time,’ he said. ‘I’d rather swallow razor blades.’
‘Don’t go,’ I said.
He said he had to, then he suggested that I take the Friday night off from my job at the cinema where I’d gone full-time now that school was finished. He told me Mrs Booker was going to her first tango class on Friday night and he didn’t want to hang around in town like a spare dick at a wedding waiting for her to finish just so he could drive her home.
He picked me up outside the cinema and I could tell something had changed as soon as I got in the car. Not that Mr Booker said anything, it was just that he was nervous and fidgety. He asked me to light a cigarette straight off the one he was already smoking and when I handed it to him I could see that his hands were shaking.
‘Are you okay?’ I said.
‘Never better,’ he said, but I could tell he was lying.
He drove us to a restaurant he’d discovered in a new shopping centre on the edge of the town and he parked the car right out the front.
‘What is this?’ I said.
‘A little slice of Ireland,’ he said.
From the front the place looked like a doctor’s surgery, but inside there was an Irish band playing and the tables were cordoned off from each other into little cubicles to make it seem cozy, and the lights were so dim it was hard to see where you were going.
‘Drink?’ said Mr Booker, heading straight for the bar. I asked for a glass of red wine and found an empty cubicle where I hid in case the barmaid saw how young I was and refused to serve me alcohol.
Mr Booker came back with a tall beer and a bottle of wine with two glasses.
‘There we are, my sweet,’ he said. ‘I recommend the bangers and mash.’
I said I wasn’t hungry, that I’d had dinner at home with my mother.
‘You need to build yourself up,’ he said, pouring me a glass of wine and watching me drink it.
‘What are you looking at?’ I said.
‘You,’ he said.
‘You’re making me nervous,’ I said.
We sat and drank for a while without saying anything then Mr Booker went back to the bar and bought himself another beer and a whisky and a packet of peanuts, and then, when he sat down again, he said he had something to tell me that I shouldn’t take the wrong way.
‘What is it?’ I said.
He told me that he and Mrs Booker were going to England for Christmas to be with Mrs Booker senior who was suffering from some peculiar ailment.
‘It’s either that or she comes out here,’ he said. ‘Which she doesn’t fancy because of the heat.’
‘When are you coming back?’ I said, trying to sound as if it didn’t matter to me one way or another.
‘We haven’t got a date,’ he said.
‘Before the wedding?’ I said.
‘Possibly not,’ he said.
‘Pity,’ I said. ‘It should be fun.’
‘Can’t be in two places at once,’ he said. ‘As you well know.’
I poured myself another glass of wine and drank the whole thing down and then I waited for the warmth of it to snake right through me before I said anything else.
‘Take me with you,’ I told him, when the wine had reached my face. I was smiling but not because I meant to.
‘I’d love nothing more,’ he said.
‘But you won’t,’ I said.
‘Can’t,’ he said.
‘Same difference,’ I said.
Mr Booker sipped his whisky and lit us both a cigarette. He passed me mine, then said he would write to me while he was away and buy me a present.
‘We’re talking a matter of weeks,’ he said.
‘I might not be here when you get back,’ I said.
‘Where will you be?’ he said.
‘Depends if my mother can sell the house,’ I said.
‘Let me know,’ he said.
‘How?’ I said. ‘I don’t know where you’ll be.’
‘I’ll give you my parents’ address,’ he said. ‘You can write to me there.’
It occurred to me then that Mr Booker had probably known for a while that he and Mrs Booker might not be coming back from England but he’d waited this long to say anything to me, which was why he was so nervous. I wanted to reach across and hit him and tell him I was not going to just stay where I was and wait like a faithful dog for him to decide to come back to me but I knew he wouldn’t listen because he was drunk and because he didn’t want to hear it. So I just stood up and walked out of the restaurant and kept on walking past the car and up onto the dark road where I turned in the direction of town. After about ten minutes Mr Booker stopped to pick me up and we drove to the top of the mountain behind the university, where we parked and climbed over into the back seat of the car.
‘You couldn’t do this in the Datsun,’ I said and he told me to be quiet so I stopped talking and let him do whatever he wanted and he wasn’t nervous at all. He was in a hurry like the time before when we were hiding in the rocks and he kept on saying I was his.
‘Do you know that?’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said.
My mother sold the house at the end of November, but the new owners didn’t want to move in until after New Year so we had a few weeks to pack.
I helped as much as I could even though by then I had two jobs, one in a newsagency three days a week and the other at the cinema four evenings a week. I was saving my money. I wanted to have as much as I could by the end of summer so I could buy a ticket to anywhere that I liked. I knew Alice was going to America to ski because she’d called me to see if I was interested in going too. But I wasn’t. And Kate Hollis had asked me to go to Japan with her to teach English but Kate Hollis was not a very cheerful person when you got her on her own, in fact she was morbid, so I said I had to wait until my mother had decided where she was going to live before I made any plans.
And then my mother said Rowena had started looking for a place in Sydney to buy, so maybe I could go and live with her when she found somewhere and my mother would come later.
‘Where will you stay in the meantime?’ I said.
My mother told me she’d already booked herself a room at the university where they had accommodation for visiting scholars.
‘You’re not a visiting scholar,’ I said.
‘They’re a bit short,’ she said.
‘So you’re going to live by yourself?’ I said.
‘Just until I find a job in Sydney,’ she said. ‘I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be like my student days.’
My mother had always said her days at university had been the happiest of her life because she’d been free of my grandmother at last and able to do as she pleased for the first time. She did a little dance around the room and then went back to packing up her books. She had Cat Stevens turned up loud while we worked, and it was strange how light-hearted she was, as if every box she filled and sealed up with packing tape ready for the truck was one more weight off her mind.
At dinner she told me it was the twentieth time she’d moved and the easiest.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘No kids or animals,’ she said. ‘And no Victor in the background making things difficult.’
‘Don’t speak too soon,’ I said.
My father had already been around once with Eddie to pick up stuff from the garage that my mother was throwing away.
‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ he said.
He was looking better than he had in a long time. He said it was all the exercise he was doing now he was only driving occasionally and riding his bike more. He said he cycled to work at his new job sorting mail at the post office during the Christmas rush.
‘I think I’ve found my metier,’ he told my mother.
She poured the tea then told Victor and Eddie to help themselves to cake.
‘I won’t,’ said my father. ‘I’m watching my weight.’ But then five minutes later he took a slice and ate it in one bite.