Forgetting Foster Read online

  Also by Dianne Touchell

  A Small Madness

  Creepy & Maud

  First published by Allen & Unwin in 2016

  Copyright © Dianne Touchell 2016

  The moral right of Dianne Touchell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the United Kingdom’s Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin – Australia

  83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Allen & Unwin – UK

  Ormond House, 26–27 Boswell Street,

  London WC1N 3JZ, UK

  Phone: + 44 (0) 20 8785 5995

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.murdochbooks.co.uk

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (AUS) 9781760110796

  ISBN (UK) 9781743368992

  eISBN 9781952534256

  Teachers’ notes available from www.allenandunwin.com

  Cover and text design by Ruth Grüner

  Typeset by Ruth Grüner

  For William George Touchell

  Contents

  spontaneous bacon combustion

  hole in the head

  spontaneous human combustion

  suits and sympathy

  stories and shortbread

  funny forgetting

  post-its and pills

  bats in the belfry

  eggs and emancipation

  taxis and templars

  missing mussels

  bottoms in the big shops

  christmas socks and cornflakes

  pee and prayer

  itchy feet and isolation

  cake and class news

  not-so-nice necessities

  bullying and broken things

  cold-shouldered courage

  earworms and eavesdropping

  apples and anger

  going away and getting back

  sausage rolls and strangers

  candour and contradiction

  signs sans wonders

  dog collars and day care

  locked in, locked out

  tilting and taking sides

  temporary tattoos

  distraction by design

  red sausages and shame

  on with the show

  blood and glass

  my stranger, my self

  tender meat

  march hares

  the general

  acknowledgements

  about the author

  spontaneous bacon combustion

  Foster smelled it first. A bitter-hot smell like microwave popcorn popped too long. Except Dad wasn’t making popcorn. Dad was making bacon sandwiches.

  Foster walked into the kitchen. He could see blue flames licking the sides of the pan, the shiny white enamel blackening, long sooty fingers crawling towards the lip. A soupy gloom of darkening smoke rolled up and up until it hit the range hood like a solid mass and spilled into the space above Foster’s head. It formed clouds he could taste.

  ‘Dad?’

  Dad wasn’t in the kitchen. You weren’t supposed to leave pans on the stove unattended. That’s what Mum always said.

  ‘Dad!’

  Foster wasn’t allowed to touch the stove. He knew how to turn it off but he didn’t want to get told off. He took a couple of steps forward, arced himself up onto tippy-toes, and was suddenly and shockingly backhanded by the whooshing heat of the oil in the pan catching fire. Foster ran from the room as the smoke morphed into a pillar of bright orange.

  ‘Dad!’

  Foster ran down the hall instinctively slapping doors ajar until he got to the last room on the left. Dad was standing at the side of his and Mum’s bed sorting socks from the clean laundry pile. He wasn’t doing a very good job.

  ‘Dad! Bacon!’ Foster pulled at his dad’s arm, the smell of smoke indistinguishable from the stinging choke of his own panic. It was the smoke alarm that yanked Dad out of his sock-coma. He ran to the kitchen, Foster immediately behind him. Foster pressed himself against the pantry door, the relentless squawk of the smoke alarm pulling his breath tighter and faster. Dad clamped the lid on the pan and threw it in the sink. He grabbed a tea towel and started flapping it about wildly, throwing open the kitchen window with such force it skidded out of the track and cracked as it landed against the frame. Foster slid down the pantry door onto the kitchen floor and squished his ears with his fists. The smoke alarm kept going and going, Dad finally silencing it by harpooning it with a broom handle. Then Dad slid down onto the floor next to Foster.

  The wall was black. There were some little blisters in the paint and mucky grease skid marks down the front of the stove and cupboards. The smoke alarm dangled from the ceiling, splinters of plastic littered around the discarded broom like flower petals. Foster held Dad’s hand and their breathing gradually slowed together.

  ‘Mum’s going to be mad,’ Foster said.

  hole in the head

  He could no longer remember the first thing his father forgot. It came on slowly, his dad’s forgetting. Like a spider building its web in a doorway. For a while Foster could walk straight through it. He felt it cling to him each time he broke it down, each time he picked the broken bits of it from his face. But then it would reappear in the same place, so fine it was impossible to see unless his eyes were trained on its exact position. Eventually it was like a veil, this forgetting. He could no longer break it, only part it to gain a quick peek of his dad on the other side of his lost stories.

  His name was Foster Hirum Wylie Sumner and he was seven years old. His dad told stories. Lots of them. At night before bed, while Foster was brushing his teeth, at the kitchen table, in the car. His dad told stories as if they were real, and long after Foster grew to realise they were just stories, he still craved them. He often asked for his favourite ones to be repeated.

  ‘There are stories in everything,’ his dad told him. ‘They are all around you, waiting to be discovered. You just have to look for them.’

  On story day at school, when mums and dads were invited to come to class to read aloud, it was always his dad who came, even though he had a suit job. Hardly any dads came. It was mostly mums in jeans. But his dad would come from work in the middle of the day carrying a briefcase with a lock that popped like a dodgy knuckle, and inside would be Foster’s favourite books from home. Sometimes his dad would just make a story up on the spot and even with no pictures everyone was still and quiet, his dad’s voice dusting the room like bow resin, rising and falling to the rhythm of battle cries, dragons and triumphant heroes. He would walk the room while he spoke, using his hands and eyes as punctuation, circumnavigating the clusters of desks, boys’ faces following like awe-struck marionettes. Dad would always kiss him goodbye afterwards. Foster wasn’t embarrassed. His dad held more authority in that classroom than the teacher, Mr Ballantyne, for the brief tim
e he was there. He would shake Mr Ballantyne’s hand before he left and all the boys would clap. Foster thought he would burst with the pride of it.

  Foster’s dad encouraged Foster to tell his own stories. ‘Tell stories to whoever will listen, and then listen to theirs,’ he would say. Foster liked to tell stories about knights with great quests who would battle baddies and save ladies because he knew they were his dad’s favourites. Sometimes they would tell a story in tandem. His dad would stop mid-sentence, and look at Foster with his eyebrows kinked in and a pressed-lip smile and Foster would know it was his turn to tell the next bit. He saw this as a great trust. Sometimes his mum would listen and laugh at the funny bits and gasp at the scary bits but when they asked her to join in she’d say she didn’t want to spoil the story.

  Foster lived inside his head a lot. His dad said this was a good thing because there was so much to see there. His mum wanted him to join the local cricket team or something.

  ‘Know thyself,’ Dad said.

  ‘What’s that mean, Dad? Mum talks about her thighs a lot and she thinks I should play cricket.’

  His dad’s laugh was always astonishing, especially when unexpected. He could crack a hole in the air with the bigness of it. It trailed off into snorty giggles before he said, ‘What?’

  ‘Heard her on the phone,’ Foster said. ‘She’s on another diet.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Mum said. ‘I’m right here.’

  ‘Maybe you should play cricket, Mum.’

  ‘Knowing thy-self,’ Dad continued, chuckling, ‘is about being happy inside your own head. It means not letting other people tell you what stories are right and what stories are wrong. And it’s an aphorism that extends to dieting.’ Dad leaned across and curled a wisp of Mum’s hair behind her ear.

  Foster was pretty sure he knew himself pretty well. He liked books and toy soldiers and tadpole hunting and the beach. He liked going to school. He liked the routine, the unremarkable sameness of school days with lessons and bells and his best friend Blinky to eat lunch with. There were things he didn’t like. He didn’t like asparagus or the smell of dog food or prickly grass under his bare feet. He knew these things as surely as he knew the day his mum had put fresh sheets on his bed and the moment his dad had a new story to tell: just by feel. He was unprepared for how much a change in someone else could wilt the pieces of himself he thought he knew best.

  Foster sometimes forgot things. Mostly at school when he was supposed to be remembering. When remembering mattered most. But he forgot things other times too. Sometimes he forgot to flush the toilet or to hang his towel up after a bath. Twice he’d forgotten to return a library book on time. It never bothered him when he forgot things because the things eventually came back. Or someone would remind him. His dad called it having a hole in his head.

  ‘Got a hole in your head today, Fossie? Better go find those library books.’

  Everyone had a hole in their head at some time. Foster had thought it stayed the same size though. Not becoming bigger and bigger until even a reminder could no longer nudge the forgotten thing back into place.

  So it began as only a little worry when his dad started to forget things. Foster wanted to ask him about it but he wasn’t sure what to say. And once in a while there would be a small return of the storyteller, just for a moment in the car or in the bath, and Foster would think he was being silly and the forgetting had gone away for good.

  spontaneous human combustion

  Rumour had it that his grandma was the victim of spontaneous human combustion. Apparently a little fire started somewhere inside her while she was sitting alone, crocheting squares to be stitched together to make a blanket. It must have been a little fire initially because if she’d gone up like a torch she would have taken the whole house with her. She didn’t, which his dad said was just as well because it was the only asset she had. So this little fire started and ate away at her with a gentle fierceness, melting her into her mattress, and leaving behind one foot still immaculately tied into a brown lace-up brogue. Foster watched his own limbs carefully after that, and even sniffed himself occasionally to make sure there were no tendrils of invisible smoke curling out from his pores. He asked his dad why she didn’t have time to beat herself out. His dad speculated that the fire was somehow magical and impermeable to the quenching effect of smothering like a normal fire. Grandma had, after all, kept dragons at the bottom of the garden, and fairies lived in their scale-creviced hides like pretty fleas. His dad said the fireflies he sometimes saw weaving about the apple blossom were actually fairies plaiting the eyelashes of the dragons so that when they yawned the ribbon of flame that escaped them wouldn’t set their lashes on fire. So perhaps, his dad said, one of the dragons that sat at the end of Grandma’s bed at night, protecting her from thieves and bad dreams, had sneezed and accidentally set her alight. It would have been very quick, like one of those pinwheel fireworks he loved so much. Grandma would have spun and spun and spun, faster and faster, and all the colours of her soul would have flown to the magical place where dragons rest and fairies weave.

  ‘Why was there a foot left behind?’ Foster asked.

  ‘She was spinning so fast it just flew off,’ his dad replied. ‘You don’t need two feet hen you’ve earned wings.’

  ‘Stop it, Malcolm,’ his mum said. ‘You know she was smoking in bed.’

  Foster felt bad when his grandma died. He’d never known anyone who had gone away permanently before and he didn’t like the bruised feeling it gave him in the chest. It was a bad way to go too and he worried that Grandma might have been frightened. It had been on the news and the police had walked about her house in white jumpsuits and Foster heard the word ‘misadventure’ a lot. He supposed this meant Grandma had been planning an adventure and missed out on that on top of everything else, which made her dying even sadder, really. But then his dad had told him about the dragon fire and it made him feel better.

  Foster’s mum had almost died but that was a long time ago and Foster knew of it mostly from the way she looked and the stories his dad told him. Foster’s mum had an unusual face. Foster grew up with this face so it never bothered him. It was the face that leaned over him at night to smell his breath in the random tooth-brushing check; it was the face that kissed his forehead after ministering to the slashed knee he got falling off his bike; it was the face that greeted him in the car after school. Foster knew her face was different to his, and his dad’s, but it wasn’t until he started school and saw the way other people looked at it that he began to feel self-conscious.

  ‘Can you take me to school instead of Mum?’ Foster asked his dad.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Kids at school say Mum looks weird,’ Foster confessed quietly. ‘They make fun of her.’

  ‘Do they make fun of her, or do they make fun of you?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Umm . . .’

  ‘Mum’s got a different face because she had an accident.’

  ‘I know,’ Foster said. ‘Tell me the story again, Dad.’ His dad put down the book they were sharing, took a breath that raised his shoulders high and said, ‘Once upon a time there was a princess imprisoned in a castle surrounded by a moat filled with giant sea snakes. She was the most beautiful lady in the kingdom. Knights came from far and wide and wrote songs about her and battled the snakes that prevented her escape. But she was waiting for her prince. She became so sad she decided to call upon the old magic of her forefathers. This was a dangerous thing to do. Old magic was rarely used because when it gave you power it took something in return. But she was lonely. A spell was given to her: the snakes would remain in the moat and she could walk from the confines of her prison across the drawbridge in safety.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ his mum said. Foster looked up to see her standing in the doorway, listening.

  ‘Yes!’ his dad continued. ‘But at the moment she stepped onto the bank, the moment she gained her freedom, her face would forever bear the mark of the snakes she had charmed in order to escap
e. She walked slowly across the bridge and hesitated only a second before placing her toe on free ground. It was then she felt a great slithering inside her head and all at once, one side of her face was paralysed. She hid her face, sure that she would forever be completely alone.’

  Foster could almost feel the cold air shimmying off the dark water of the moat, clinging to his face.

  ‘Then she heard a restless horse approaching and knew it was her prince. She stood before him, frightened and ashamed, but he saw in her crooked face a courage and strength that eclipsed any beauty he had ever seen. He knelt before her and offered her his fealty for the rest of her life.’

  ‘What’s fealty?’ Foster asked.

  ‘Room and board in exchange for laundry and cooking skills,’ his mum said. Dad laughed.

  ‘What happened to them after that?’ Foster asked.

  ‘They lived happily ever after,’ his dad said.

  ‘Forever and ever?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ Mum said. But Foster saw she was smiling.

  Foster heard other stories about his mum’s face. He overheard conversations that had words in them he didn’t understand. Words like ‘coma’ and ‘traumatic injury’. He asked his mum what a coma was and she said it was like being in a prison of sleep, so his dad’s story satisfied him and when asked at school about his mum he repeated it to a wide-eyed audience.

  ‘Your mum is not a princess,’ Blinky said. ‘You shouldn’t tell lies.’

  ‘It’s not a lie,’ Foster said. ‘It’s a story.’

  ‘It’s a stupid story!’

  Foster wasn’t worried when the stories first began to dwindle because it happened in a creeping-up sort of way. Dad seemed too distracted to concentrate. The quiet dinner tables became more and more frequent. Then his mum seemed to catch whatever bug it was that shushed his dad up. Foster knew that could happen. Whenever one of them got a cold his mum would always say, ‘Now it’ll go through all of us!’ with a sort of good-humoured resignation, and she was usually right. So when Mum too grew quiet, and a bit sad, Foster thought, he began to worry about this thing, whatever it was, going through him too. He began telling stories to himself, and his toys – just a preventative thing, much like the vitamin C tablets Mum gave him to prevent colds. They never worked.