‘No,’ I said.
And then it must have been very hard for my mother not to say any more. I could feel how hard she was concentrating on the road, which was dark and winding and deserted, and I imagined I could hear her secret thoughts sinking into the velvet night like stones.
Later, before I went to bed, I went in to say goodnight to my mother. She was sitting at her mirror wiping face cream off with tissues, like an actor at the end of a play. I put my arms around her shoulders and breathed in the smell of the cream and the soap she used.
‘Are you going to be okay? I said.
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘If I go,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ she said.
Then I asked her if she ever thought she might find somebody else, another man, somebody who would keep her company, but she just laughed.
‘I’m over men,’ she said. But I didn’t think she meant it because there was something in the way she stared at us both in the mirror, then looked down at the tissues in her hand that was ashamed of what she’d said, as if it was a loss or a painful defeat. Which made me think of what Mr Booker had told me once, about how everything is sex because there isn’t anything else people think about and long for and remember afterwards with so much hope and regret. You don’t hear people on their deathbed, he told me, saying how the one thing they wanted more of in life was books about film history, you hear them say they wanted more sex.
My mother thanked me for thinking of her and told me she really wasn’t lonely, if that’s what I was worried about.
‘I’m alone,’ she said, ‘but it’s not the same thing.’
‘If you say so,’ I said, kissing her on the cheek. And then she turned and put her arms around me and hugged me tight and told me to be happy.
‘I’m trying my best,’ I said.
love letters straight from the heart
I wrote to Mr Booker to tell him my address in Sydney, which was in Newtown. I said I was moving there at the beginning of January and I would let him know the phone number as soon as I found out what it was.
I hope you’re having fun,
I wrote.
I’m not. There’s no
one to talk to when you’re gone. You’re my only friend. I think I see you
everywhere, on every street corner, and then I remember that you’re not
here and I die. I love you, Bambi X.
And then I decided not to send it because I thought that if Mr Booker wanted to know where I was he could find out for himself when he was ready, just by asking someone we both knew, or by calling my mother if it came to that. It would be a test of how much he loved me, or if he loved me at all.
Eventually I threw the letter into the fire and burned it along with all my old school books, except for the French ones. My mother came out to join me and we watched the fire burn brighter and brighter from all the paper I kept adding to it, the maths tests and reading reports and history essays on the causes of the Second World War.
‘Aren’t you sad to think it’s all over?’ said my mother.
‘Heartbroken,’ I told her, pretending to wipe the teardrops from my cheeks.
A few days later my mother received a letter from my father, which was postmarked Port Macquarie. She made me read it aloud to her while she went through her wardrobe and sorted out which clothes she was giving away to the Salvation Army.
Dear J, enclosed is a photograph of the boat I told you about the last time we met. I am sorely tempted to buy it and I was wondering if you might want to come in as an equal shareholder with me. The plan would be to sail her up and down the east coast with paying passengers aboard. I even thought you might be interested in joining the crew as chief cook and bottle washer. Please let me know ASAP as I have given the seller a small deposit to take the vessel off the market but he can only wait two weeks at the most. Yours as ever, Victor
P.S. Unfortunately the dame on the deck is not included in the asking price of $59,950, marked down from $65,000.
I showed my mother the newspaper cutting stapled to the letter. It showed a smiling woman wearing a bikini, standing at the front of a small yacht in full sail. She was waving with one hand and clinging onto the rigging with the other. My father had made a note in the margin beside her that read
I’m just a girl who can’t say no!
My mother read the letter through again in silence and stared hard at the photograph before folding them both neatly and putting them back in the envelope. She shoved it into the top drawer of her dresser where she stashed all of Victor’s letters in a shoebox.
‘One day,’ she said, ‘they’ll make for interesting reading.’ ‘He can’t even swim,’ I said.
Rowena came down for Christmas then stayed on until after New Year because the owners of the poodles were back from overseas and she couldn’t move into the Newtown house until it was settled. She showed me photographs of the new place, which I hadn’t even seen yet. I’d stayed home the day my mother flew to Sydney to look at it and sign the contract. It was pretty old, but the street was quiet and a lot of the other houses had been renovated, Rowena said, so it was an up-and-coming part of the neighbourhood. She showed me on a map how close it was to the university if I decided to study in Sydney.
‘There’s a bus stop on the corner,’ she told me.
‘Great,’ I said, trying to sound as excited as Rowena was. I saw what my mother had done now. She’d made it so that I couldn’t stay at home with her even if I’d wanted to. She’d made it so I had to start a new life whether I was ready or not. I also realised this must be partly because she wanted me to get right away from Mr Booker. My mother wasn’t stupid. She knew what was good for me even if I didn’t.
She smiled at me and I smiled back, then she handed me my Christmas present wrapped up in newspaper. I already knew what it was, a bedcover stitched together out of knitted squares that she and Lorraine had made for me in their knitting group.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ I said, leaning over to kiss her.
For Rowena and the baby she’d knitted matching sweaters the colour of fire engines.
We all left for Sydney together with our suitcases piled into the back of Rowena’s rent-a-car. My mother was coming for a quick holiday so she could lie on the beach and forget about packing and work until term started again. She sat in the back with Amy, and I sat with Rowena in the front with a bag full of clothes at my feet and we drove out of town with ‘Ruby Tuesday’ turned up loud and all of us singing along. Even Amy was crooning, waving her arms in the air and swaying to the beat.
‘She’s a Stones fan from way back,’ said Rowena.
There wasn’t time to turn around and see where we’d come from. I didn’t want to anyway because we were just getting to my favourite bend in the road where you passed a petrol station and a truckies’ café and after that you were in the countryside and out of sight of the suburbs. I always felt better when I saw the fields and the trees and the farmhouses, as if they were real and the town was a bad dream I’d just woken up from.
It was a long time before I saw Mr Booker again. My mother mentioned that he was back from England but I didn’t ring or write because I was trying to forget all about him, which wasn’t easy. It was so hard that sometimes I thought I never would and that he would be a part of me forever, like Victor was a part of my mother even though she hated him. And then I started to wonder whether this was what I was talking about when I told the Bookers that my parents splitting up had scarred me for life—there must have been a reason why I let Mr Booker kiss me that first time. I could have said no. Looking back, that would have been the sensible thing to do.
I went to the university like I told my mother I would, but after the first semester I decided to defer. I still had all the money I’d saved from my summer jobs and I’d earned some more from working at a video rental store part-time while I was studying. I decided to go to Paris and do a short immersion course to improve my French then to travel around the country working casual jobs. It wasn’t much of a plan but it was enough to convince my mother that I wasn’t wasting my time. I told her that, at the very least, I’d be learning the language.
‘Find a French lover,’ said Rowena. ‘France must be full of them.’
‘I’m over men,’ I said.
‘Tell me about it,’ said Rowena.
I don’t remember how Mr Booker found out what flight I was on, but I think Lorraine must have told him, and then he rang me in Sydney and said he was coming up for a conference and would it be okay if he gave me a lift out to the airport. I was so surprised and happy to hear from him that I said yes without thinking, and then I wished I hadn’t.
‘Why?’ I said on the phone.
‘Why not?’ he said.
‘Do you know where I live?’
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
So I told him.
‘How have you been?’ I said.
‘Pas mal,’
he said.
‘Et toi?’
‘Ça va,’
I said, then I told him I had to hang up because the baby had woken up and Rowena was out.
‘See you Tuesday,’ he said.
‘See you Tuesday,’ I said.
He pulled in at the front of Rowena’s house where we were standing with my bags and he jumped out of the car, which is when I saw that he was still the same: elegantly dressed, bouncy, his hair glossy, his skin scrubbed and scented. He hadn’t changed. He bowed to Rowena and kissed her hand, then did the same to me. After that he lifted my bags into the boot of the car and waited with the passenger door open while I finished saying goodbye to Rowena and Amy.
They kept waving to me all the way to the end of the street and I kept waving to them until Mr Booker turned the corner and they disappeared.
‘Excited?’ said Mr Booker.
‘I am,’ I said.
‘Do you know anyone in Paris?’ he said.
‘One person,’ I said. I told him that I had the number of an exchange student I’d met at the university. ‘She’s back there studying business.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Paris is a big town. You need someone who knows their way around.’
‘I guess so,’ I said.
Mr Booker didn’t say anything for a while then he asked me to light him a cigarette and to help myself to one too.
‘I gave up,’ I said.
‘So did I,’ he said.
I lit two cigarettes and handed one to him and we smoked without talking until Mr Booker asked me if I liked living in Sydney and I told him it was better than where I’d lived before.
‘But you’d know that,’ I said.
‘Indeed,’ he said.
‘I thought you might have stayed in England,’ I said. ‘When I didn’t hear from you.’
‘My good lady wife would have been happy to stay,’ he said. ‘She prefers it there.’
‘And you?’ I said.
‘I can’t stand the place,’ he said. ‘Too many ghosts.’
‘You’re still married then?’ I said.
‘Wonders will never cease,’ he said.
I stared at him and he stared back at me and we waited for the traffic to move forward ahead of us before either of us spoke.
‘How’s your mother?’ said Mr Booker. ‘I don’t see her. I don’t get out much of late. I’m kept on a fairly tight rein.’ With his free hand he pretended to be hanging from a noose.
‘She’s fine,’ I said. ‘Now that Victor’s decided to leave her alone.’
He asked me where my father was and I told him Victor had gone on the road. The last anyone heard, I said, he was heading for Broome in Western Australia.
‘What for?’ said Mr Booker.
‘What does it matter?’ I said. ‘As long as he doesn’t come back.’
The last time I’d seen my father, I said, was when he turned up at the Newtown house on my mother’s birthday.
‘I told him we were having a party so he comes with half a bottle of wine he’s had in his car for two months and a load of washing.’
What I didn’t tell Mr Booker was how badly the afternoon had turned out.
‘I don’t care if I never see him again,’ I said.
‘You don’t mean that,’ said Mr Booker.
‘Yes, I do,’ I said.
I was too early for check-in so Mr Booker suggested we go to the bar and have a drink. I don’t remember much of what he said while we drank. It was all about the problems he was having at work and how joyfully everybody in the university embraced its culture of mediocrity, which is why he was so well suited to the place.
‘Could you have ever done something different?’ I said.
‘Like what?’ he said.
‘Used car salesman?’ I said.
‘Too much like hard work,’ he said.
The bar had a view of the planes taking off and landing and we sat by the window watching them.
‘You don’t have to stay,’ I said.
‘Fuck-all else to do,’ he said, taking a gulp of his whisky and turning it around in his mouth before he swallowed it. ‘The conference doesn’t start until tonight. It’s bound to be jolly.’
He said how much he liked airports. He told me his favourite smell was freshly polished airport floors mixed with the burning rubber and diesel stink that leaked in from outside every time a door was opened. And his favourite moment was the moment just after take-off when there is absolutely no turning back.