Forgetting Foster Read online

  ‘How are you? Nice to see you!’ A lady sitting two rows ahead had spun around and fired an unforgiving whisper in their direction. It carried like water in a sieve, splashing into the spaces between people and causing some to startle and shift.

  ‘Ruby!’ Dad’s voice, at a volume Foster recognised at once as inappropriate, a volume Mum often described as ‘an outside voice’ when Foster used it, hit the back of every head in the church like a bullet.

  There was a short and distinct swishing sound as everyone spun around and then resettled. Mum placed her hand firmly on Dad’s knee.

  ‘No, it’s me, Caroline!’ the lady replied in a hissy whisper.

  ‘Who?’ The shifting and resettling of guests was unmistakably less tolerant this time. Some of the faces that turned lingered longer, and were thunderclouds.

  ‘Shoosh, Malcolm!’ Mum said. Then to the Ruby-Caroline, ‘Not now,’ with a desperate, pleading smile.

  The Ruby-Caroline looked annoyed. As if she thought Mum was telling her off. Foster knew Mum wasn’t meaning to tell her off. Even after the Ruby-Caroline had turned to face the front again she occasionally flicked her head around and rolled her eyes in a harrumphing way.

  ‘Wait! That’s Caroline!’ Dad bawled into the ceremony. Then he started to laugh. The sort of greeting-laugh you hear between grown-ups when they suddenly come across people they usually avoid and can’t think of a way to get out of it. Then to Mum, equally loudly, ‘I’ve never liked her.’

  Aunty immediately got up and moved to the pew Ruby-Caroline was occupying. She scooched in next to her and started whispering in her ear. Half the room was looking at them all now. Foster was embarrassed. Mum was shoving Dad along the pew with her hip and Dad was getting cross. Foster had to anchor himself to his seat with one hand to avoid being shoved onto the floor. Mum leaned across Dad and hissed, ‘Move, Foster!’ Foster began the humiliating slide to the end of the pew, feeling the way the Ruby-Caroline had looked. Although as she spun in her seat to have a look now, her eyes were snappy with smug curiosity. Foster felt sorry for her then, even though she seemed so pleased with herself. Foster sometimes did that, put on his pride face when he was really hurt. Sometimes withholding the show of hurt was the only defence left. And here was the Ruby-Caroline being both told off and told she wasn’t liked. She leaned over to Aunty and said something then that made Aunty look like she’d been slapped with a wet fish.

  Aunty appeared and pulled Foster to his feet with the same force she’d only just deposited him with. She then leaned across and took Dad’s hand to ease him to his feet. Dad looked confused and upset. Mum was sliding along the pew herself when she suddenly arced upwards as if she’d sat on a tack, a resounding Urrrgghh! flying from her squared mouth as if she were the choir soloist. She had skidded into the puddle Dad had left behind.

  Foster was burning inside and out as he watched Mum ease her way over the slick spot. She caught herself mid-skid as her heel lithely slid through the urine that had dripped onto the floor. When she reached Foster her skirt was wet.

  ‘It’s all right, Fossie,’ she said, resting her palm on his cheek. He realised then that he wasn’t moving. His joints had locked. Aunty had already led Dad away, but Foster couldn’t stop staring at the pee on the floor. He could smell it now too.

  ‘You should know better!’ An old lady had appeared from nowhere, like the finger of God, and had a talon-like grip on Foster’s shoulder. Then to Mum, ‘Do you need any help, dear? It’s all just attention-seeking, you know.’

  ‘No, thank you, we’re fine,’ Mum said. She was easing Foster towards the door when it suddenly and sickeningly occurred to him that Mum was letting the old lady believe that he was the one who had peed. He looked up at his mum and felt a shame that rolled his bowels. He got ready to go out by himself, he made his own sandwiches, he picked up his toys. He didn’t pee his pants. In that moment he hated her.

  itchy feet and isolation

  When they got home Mum put Dad in the bath while Aunty put the kettle on. Foster sat on the floor in the hall just outside the bathroom door and listened to the calm talk and low laughter. It had been all quiet fury in the car on the drive home. Aunty had been angry at the Ruby-Caroline, which felt unfair to Foster. She seemed like a nice lady who just wanted to say hello. She didn’t know Dad was going to use his outside voice in the most inside of inside places and then pee himself. But Aunty fumed as she drove, occasionally spitting out half sentences in a kind of hiss-whinny Foster knew was the dead-end of cranky.

  ‘Stupid woman! If she’d just shut the . . . Idiotic!. . . told her not to . . . and you know what she said to me?’

  ‘I think Linda’s upset,’ Dad said to Mum. ‘Why are you upset, Linda?’

  ‘She’s not upset,’ Mum said.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Aunty said quietly. Then louder, ‘And why can’t I be upset? Why are we all walking on eggshells around Malcolm? Why can’t I be angry? He won’t remember I’ve been angry anyway!’

  ‘Mum, can I put the window down, please?’ Foster tapped the window release energetically: frantic Morse, no result.

  ‘I didn’t even want to go,’ Mum said. ‘You’re the one who insisted.’

  ‘You can’t just hide him away, for Christ’s sake. He needs to get out,’ Aunty replied.

  ‘Can I have the window down, Aunty?’

  ‘Why is Linda upset?’ Dad asked again.

  ‘Besides, he had a good time. Malcolm, you had a good time, didn’t you?’ Aunty flicked her eyes to the rear-view mirror, before adding, ‘Jesus, he’s sitting on a towel, isn’t he?’

  ‘It smells bad in here,’ Dad said. Aunty released the window lock and opened two windows halfway.

  Foster used to be allowed in the bathroom with Dad. Now Mum said he needed privacy. Which was strange because he’d just peed in a church. Dad used to tell some of his best stories while bathing. Foster would sit on the bathroom floor with his soldiers made cavalry by way of horses fashioned from toilet rolls and toothpicks. He would wage wars on the cold tiles, his horses carrying the injured back to the safety of a talcum powder beach. Dad had once told Foster that in terrible battles people sometimes lost their arms or legs but would feel as if the missing pieces were still there.

  ‘Can a man with no legs have itchy feet then?’ Foster had asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Dad had said. ‘It’s called a phantom feeling. This is how remarkable your brain is, Fossie. It can recreate the feeling of something it knows should be there, but isn’t. Your brain can fill in all sorts of holes. Make you experience things you thought were gone forever. Like telling a story.’

  Foster hugged his knees, back against the closed bathroom door, and listened to his parents’ voices on the other side. He imagined Dad’s profile, half a face that looked a bit empty lately, and felt a stab of ghost feeling. A funny ache that told him the stories were still inside Dad somewhere, like an amputated foot that still itches.

  ‘Fossie?’ Aunty stood in front of him in the hallway. She held out her hand and said, ‘Well, we didn’t get to stay for cake, did we?’

  ‘Was there cake?’

  ‘There’s always cake.’ Aunty pulled Foster to his feet and gripped his chin between thumb and forefinger. Her hand smelled sharp and robust, like the cleaner Mum used on the kitchen sink. ‘So,’ she continued, ‘want to go get some cake?’

  ‘Why did Dad pee in church?’ He hadn’t been sure he was going to say it until it was said. He had a feeling that it wasn’t something that he was supposed to ask at all. Nobody had mentioned it. Foster thought someone should at least mention it. He felt speaking it out loud had halved the thing already, and placed the blame squarely where it belonged. He could still feel the old lady’s talons.

  ‘He just got confused,’ Aunty said.

  ‘Did he think he was on the loo?’

  ‘Sort of. It’s nothing for you to worry about.’

  Mum had said that a lot lately too. It’s nothing for you to worry about. Fost
er found this response unsatisfying. It was the way a grown-up said they didn’t want to talk about it. At least, they didn’t want to talk about it with him. He knew they talked about it later, away from him, in places he used to be invited and now was not. Like the bathroom.

  ‘So,’ Aunty said. ‘Do you want to come with me for cake?’

  Foster wanted cake very much, but he eased his face out of Aunty’s fingers and said, ‘No.’

  When he got to his room he slammed the door.

  There was cake later. Aunty went and got it and when she came back the three of them, Mum, Dad and her, sat at the kitchen table and ate it. Foster cracked his door open just a bit, so it didn’t make any noise. He could hear the rustle of cellophane and the chink of forks on china and the low voices and no one came to get him. Even though he’d sent himself to his room he felt the exclusion like an arrow.

  cake and class news

  Somehow it got to school. Someone had been at the church, some grown-up Foster didn’t know. But that grown-up knew someone who knew someone who had kids and all of a sudden Foster found himself on the receiving end of some peculiar attention he couldn’t account for. Boys would sniff him as they went past and then giggle. There were some jokes about restricting fluids from the older boys. Foster laughed along at first because everyone else was laughing and he didn’t understand. He didn’t want to be kept outside the joke. He had been kept outside a lot lately, so if there was a joke, and people laughing, he was happy to laugh along too. But then Jack, who got picked on a lot because he was smaller than everyone else and had a facial tic, told Foster, ‘They’re laughing at you. They reckon you peed your pants in church.’

  ‘I know that, stupid,’ Foster replied. But he hadn’t known. The knowledge stung, but he wasn’t about to make his humiliation worse by admitting he was stupid as well. ‘It wasn’t me, anyway,’ he continued. Foster tried to sound casual and hoped his sudden breathlessness didn’t make his panic show.

  ‘Who did then?’

  ‘Dad. He’s sick, you know.’

  ‘I thought he was just mental.’

  ‘He’s not mental!’ Foster said, thinking about the smell in the car. ‘He just got confused.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Where he was.’ Foster turned on the tone Aunty used. Firm and instructive.

  ‘Did he think he was on the loo?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Foster replied. ‘It’s nothing for you to worry about.’

  ‘Not worried,’ Jack said. ‘Don’t care. You’re the one with the mental dad.’

  Foster was going to say something but couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make things worse. He was wretched about the whole thing. He concentrated on the cake he hadn’t been invited to share, because it gave him something real to be cross about.

  When they walked into class and sat down, Foster saw Jack lean over to Blinky and whisper in his ear. Then both boys turned around laughing, Blinky’s eyelids fluttering like a bee’s wing. Foster felt bad-dream breathless, made all the worse because he knew he was already awake.

  Dad had once told Foster a story about a queen who was part bee and part lady. She had wings that beat so fast their thrum was like the ping of a harmonic on a guitar string. Her name was Melaina, a name Foster thought as musical as the sound of her trembling wings. She lived in the underworld, probably the same place Mum’s moat serpents came from. Dad didn’t actually say that but Foster imagined the underworld to be full of dark things that trap princesses and inspire heroes. But Melaina was very sad. After dark she would take flight among sleeping humans and bring them a draught of honey laced with her melancholy. Dad said that’s where bad dreams come from. And when she finished whispering her sadness into the ear of a soundly sleeping boy she would leave a fine dust of golden pollen on his eyelashes, like a sticky gauze. That’s why it was so hard to wake up from a nightmare, Dad said. She was not to be feared, but pitied. Dad sat on the edge of Foster’s bed on the night of that story until he fell asleep again. Dad didn’t sit on the edge of Foster’s bed much anymore.

  ‘Foster Sumner!’

  Blinky and Jack were still looking at Foster but so was the whole class now. Mr Ballantyne was looking too.

  ‘Yes?’ Feeble, but it was the first thing to come out of Foster’s mouth.

  ‘Wakey-wakey, Foster, I said,’ Mr Ballantyne continued. ‘It’s your turn to give class news. What would you like to share this morning?’

  Foster had forgotten about class news. Usually Mum helped him think of something to bring to class that he could talk about. Once he’d brought in a praying mantis the size of Mum’s palm. She’d found it sunning itself on the kitchen windowsill and scooped it up, fingers kinked to gently tent the twiggy limbs. It rocked back and forth on her hand, its huge head thrusting like a pigeon breast. Mum had put it in a shoebox with some leaves from the garden and said, ‘Now that’s news, Fossie.’

  But Foster didn’t have any news today.

  ‘I don’t have any news today,’ he said. That’s when he heard someone quietly say, ‘Oh, he’s got news.’ Everyone started to laugh. Foster had to hold hard to that untasted cake to stop himself from crying. He hadn’t cried at all, not really. Not even at the most terrible things, like Dad going missing or the church puddle.

  ‘Settle down, everyone. No news at all, Foster? That’s all right. Maybe next week.’ Mr Ballantyne moved on to the next person, who had shells that used to be the home for living things. Sometimes the thing inside died, and sometimes it got too big and had to move into a bigger shell. You wouldn’t know the shell had nothing inside unless you got right up close and gave it a shake.

  By recess, everyone knew it was Foster’s dad who had forgotten where he was and wet his pants, and although Foster was in the clear, so to speak, the snickering and nasty jokes continued. He began by laughing along with it all, as if he didn’t care what they thought or said. But the laughing along didn’t feel good, and Foster felt if he laughed too hard he might break open. He needed something else. So from his sadness and his desperate need to hide from everything, Foster pictured his dad eating cake, while he himself had to go to school. The result was anger. Foster decided his best way through the day was to join the ranks of the bullies against the real cause of his humiliation: Dad.

  ‘It really stank!’ he said, the small crowd around him beginning to grow. ‘I was like, “Put the window down! Put the window down.” ’ Boys around him were shrieking with laughter. ‘Mum sat in it. She had it all over her dress . . . he just stood there like a baby. Mr Wet Pants!’ Boys echoed the phrase, a sing-song slur bouncing off shiny concrete verandahs.

  ‘What’d you do then?’ someone asked.

  ‘Got out of there, stupid!’ Foster said. Suddenly all the boys were laughing at the stupid one who didn’t know what Foster did then.

  Soon the small gathering broke apart as boys headed to the after school pick-up area. Still the chuckling and repeating of the story as smaller and smaller groups of boys hurried away to waiting cars, taking the news of the General’s greatest battle loss further and further afield. Foster now a part of the laughter instead of the object of it, popular by choosing the side of disgust over shame. He was one of the group again. It should feel better than this. Foster couldn’t understand why it didn’t feel better.

  Foster was the last one to be picked up. Mum was often late these days. As he waited, one of Jimmy Maher’s friends spun past on his bike and called out, ‘Maybe next time he’ll shit himself!’

  Foster laughed hard, and waved. When he was finally alone, he cried. For the first time. He’d turned the tears into something else by the time Mum pulled the car up next to him though.

  not-so-nice necessities

  Foster didn’t like it when Mum had a weekend shift at the meat factory. He knew she preferred nights to weekends because the money was better and Aunty was available, but she took the shift because she wanted to get ahead. That’s how she explained it to Foster. ‘We nee
d to get ahead a little,’ she said as she picked up the phone to call Miss Watson.

  ‘Not Miss Watson,’ Foster said.

  ‘Oh, Fossie, please,’ Mum said. ‘I know she’s boring but it’s just for a few hours.’

  ‘Why do you pay her? She doesn’t do anything.’

  ‘She keeps you safe,’ Mum replied. ‘Please, help me by not arguing.’

  The phone call to Miss Watson was always a long one, or at least longer than Foster thought it needed to be when Mum was only after a yes or a no. Miss Watson seemed to do most of the talking. Mum seemed mostly embarrassed and way too grateful. Especially given Miss Watson always came. Once again Miss Watson arrived within the hour. With her book.

  She sat in the lounge with Foster and Dad while Mum did those final little things Mum always did before leaving the house. There seemed to be more and more of those little things lately, and it all seemed a bit haphazard, as if she was delaying leaving until the last possible moment. She checked things twice, sometimes three times over: the back door lock, the kettle, the stovetop. She opened the fridge several times. She said ‘Yes, yes, yes’ to herself as she did these things, then stood in the centre of the room and smiled with a puffy sigh. Foster grew more and more anxious as Mum completed her little things before leaving. Every safety check another step closer to him and Dad being left alone with Miss Watson.

  Miss Watson had often explained Dad’s demeanour after having spent time with her as confusion and just missing Mum. ‘He’s just missed you today, that’s all’ she would say when Mum would return home to find Dad pale with distress. He would be harder to settle, harder to distract. And Foster would watch Mum stare questions at Miss Watson as she shoved payment for her time into her knobby fist, wanting something from her other than what looked like judgement of her own battle between necessity and guilt.