Me and Mr Booker by Cory Taylor

Author:Cory Taylor [Taylor, Cory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC043000, FIC048000, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781921834189
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2011-02-27T11:00:00+00:00

absence makes the heart grow fonder

My father disappeared after that and nobody knew where he went.

Not that anyone missed him except Eddie.

‘Did he say anything to you?’ Eddie asked my mother.

‘Just that he’d had enough of this town,’ she said. ‘He’s left all his things with his friends at the farm. They’re not worried. They say he’ll show up when he feels like it.’

I said I hoped that would be never and Eddie told me to shut up.

Then a week later Eddie was gone, chasing after Deirdre who’d moved to Melbourne to live with her real father and study fashion design.

I was back at school by then. I’d decided to go back because my mother had made me promise not to ruin my last year the way Rowena had ruined hers. Rowena, she said, had wasted her potential and she didn’t know if she could bear to watch me do the same with mine. We both knew what she was really saying. What she was really saying was that she couldn’t stop me wanting things that weren’t good for me but that didn’t mean I could forget about my education. My mother valued education very highly. She said it was the only chance most people ever had to learn the habit of critical thinking, and therefore it wasn’t to be abandoned like an old coat you were tired of or some shoes that were suddenly the wrong colour.

‘I get the point mum,’ I told her.

‘Make sure you do,’ she said. ‘You’ll thank me in the long run.’

‘If you say so,’ I said.

After that it was back to the way it had been before, with just my mother and me, which should have felt the same as it always had but didn’t because everything had changed and I wasn’t the same person any more. For a start I was half-crazy with worry. Because of Victor I had probably lost Mr Booker forever, and now I had to be in the same town with him and die of longing because I couldn’t see him ever again.

Also my mother had changed. She was upset about Eddie and Deirdre because she didn’t think Deirdre was good for my brother, and she didn’t think he would ever understand why. But now that my brother had gone to Melbourne my mother knew there was nothing she could do to bring him back.

‘He needed a father,’ she said. ‘But Victor was never there.’

Also, as well as worrying about Eddie and me, she worried that she could have done more to help my father, years back, when she first realised he was sick.

‘I shouldn’t have tried to cope on my own,’ she said. ‘I pretended things were fine when they weren’t.’

It wasn’t the first time my mother had told me this but it was the first time I really listened because it felt like she was trying to warn me.

‘I was such a slow learner,’ she said, looking straight at me.

I didn’t know what she expected me to say.

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