Forgetting Foster Read online

  ‘Hi, Malcolm!’ Aunty said, leaning over his dad and kissing him on the side of the head. Dad smiled his warm smile.

  ‘Didn’t know you were popping in, Linda. Why didn’t you tell me she was popping in?’ he said to Mum, who was making Aunty a cup of tea, her back to Dad.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she said without turning. Foster knew she was lying and it irritated him. Mum was keeping secrets from Dad, secrets other than wanting to hit him. He strolled out of the kitchen and into the hall, meandering in a way that usually wound Mum up something awful when she had asked him to do something like go and get ready for bed, but again she didn’t notice. By the time she looked up to see if Foster had left the room he had secreted himself just out of view in the foyer beyond the hall. He could hear Mum settling Dad into the lounge chair he spent most of his day in, heard her turn on the television, heard her turn it up, heard her rest Dad’s mug on the table beside him. She must be going to say things more important than the spill risk from either of them. Dad had scalded himself once on a cup of soup. It was bad enough that Mum had to get a tube of cream from the pharmacy. After that she always stuck her finger in Dad’s hot drinks before serving them.

  From where Foster stood he could peek into either room, but he dared not.

  ‘This tea isn’t hot,’ Aunty said.

  ‘Sorry. Habit.’

  ‘I think you should call the police,’ Aunty said.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. That’s just what we need. An escalation response.’

  ‘She assaulted him!’

  ‘I’m all right now. If I’d known you were going to react like this I would never have told you.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re all right now.’

  ‘That’s not fair. I have so little time to actually feel anything. I just react, react, react all the time. Trying to stay on top of everything. The other day I found food stashed in weird places all over the house.’

  ‘So what? Pick your battles. Let him hide some food.’

  ‘Some of them were dairy products.’

  ‘Oh.’ Aunty paused before saying, ‘Don’t ask for my help if you don’t want my help. Don’t tell me my brother got slapped by your babysitter if you don’t want me to respond to that. If you want to look after him and everything else all by yourself then don’t complain to me about it.’

  ‘You don’t understand!’ Foster could hear the fogging up in Mum’s voice. She was crying. It gave him a pain in his throat. He wanted to march in there and defend her. He wanted to tell her that he had seen Dad hide the milk and had wanted to put it back but it had frightened him. That hidden milk had been a burden to him, but he figured that if it stayed hidden then no one would know or care. He hadn’t expected it to start smelling like it did.

  ‘What is it that I don’t understand?’

  ‘It’s just that . . .’ Foster heard Mum take a deep breath. ‘You see, he used to look after me. He looked after me. You weren’t around much for that so you don’t understand what this is like for me.’ Foster heard Mum’s telling-off voice in that last bit.

  Foster’s every sense was so intently concentrated on listening to the conversation and remaining undetected that he didn’t notice Dad coming up behind him until it was too late. Dad’s outside voice bellowed, ‘This is cold!’ cracking the vault of Foster’s focus so unexpectedly that he screamed and spun around. In doing so he caught Dad’s mug of tea with one flailing arm, slapping it out of Dad’s hands, splashing tea up the wall and sending the mug spinning across the floor.

  ‘Foster!’ Everyone was suddenly standing around him, looking down at him, their shock at the commotion coming together into a tight knot of angry faces. Even Dad looked angry and it was all his fault.

  ‘Foster! Have you been listening?’ Mum wasn’t crying now. She’d dried up fast. Now she was yelling. ‘What are you doing here? I told you to go to bed!’

  ‘Everyone calm down,’ Aunty said. ‘It’s just a bit of tea.’

  Foster felt all that unresolved church pee indignity roll just like the kettle water right up to his eyeballs.

  So he screamed back. ‘It’s not my fault! I didn’t do anything!’ He ran down the hall to his room. Before he slammed the door on the three startled grown-ups he added something he hoped would hurt his mum good, ‘And I knew about the milk!’

  apples and anger

  It was the third time Mum had forgotten to make Foster’s school lunch and Foster didn’t want anyone to know because it embarrassed him. He didn’t have any money either. He sat cross-legged on the lawn with the others as they peeled open their salad rolls and sticks of stringy cheese, and he turned down the offer of an apple from someone he hardly knew out of hard pride. He wanted to be able to tell Mum he hadn’t eaten all day.

  Foster didn’t care about school much anymore, so it didn’t matter to him whether he ate or not. He liked the misery of feeling hungry, always thinking it would distress his mum more when she heard about it than it did him when he was feeling it. Dad was always very particular about school lunch. Mum said if Dad was so particular he was welcome to make it for Foster himself. Dad said that a good lunch on school days made Foster’s brain work better. If his brain worked better he would learn more. And learning was the key to good stories. Foster no longer cared about learning or stories. Watching all the learning and stories shatter like broken glass inside his dad, when his dad had been having good lunches all his life, made Foster feel like he’d been lied to from the get-go. This morning his dad couldn’t remember why he was sitting at the kitchen table, even though his toast was right in front of him. So much for decent meals. Still, Foster sat in the car all the way to school waiting for Mum to remember to give him some money for lunch and then felt both crushed and satisfied when she drove away leaving him with nothing.

  Foster had his grump on, what Aunty called a puss-face, and as a result the handful of friends he usually wandered about with had quietly detached themselves from him and his grump. Being generally a well-behaved boy, at first his occasional naughtiness in the classroom and the playground earned him some status as a smart-mouth. The other kids liked a smart-mouth just about as much as his mum and teachers hated one. It was new to Foster, so he started by pushing the small boundaries: he was late to class even though he’d been dropped off on time; he said he’d forgotten his reading book when really it was shoved in the bottom of his backpack, with a few pages torn out for good measure. Then, as his friends became bored with the small stuff, Foster grew in confidence. He developed a dull-eyed broodiness and began answering every question asked of him, at school and at home, with ‘I don’t remember’. It seemed to work well for Dad.

  Mum hated ‘I don’t remember’ more than anything else. She was particularly annoyed because Aunty seemed to enjoy it. Aunty would laugh when Foster turned to her full of nervous swagger to say ‘I don’t remember’. She would chastise him but Foster could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She was too giggly. And when she told Mum to pick her battles, which she said a lot lately, Mum would walk out of the room.

  So, between Mum’s rage and the teacher’s disappointment and Aunty’s enjoyment, Foster found himself getting lots and lots of attention. Almost as much attention as Dad.

  Aunty was around more lately. Mum was taking on extra shifts. Foster heard her telling Aunty it was just until Dad’s superannuation was released, just until she was approved for a carer’s allowance, just until there were some services in place. ‘Just until, just until, just until . . .’ Aunty said. Aunty always said she didn’t mind looking after Foster and Dad but her didn’t minds came with comments that even Foster could smell the criticism in.

  Mum and Foster weren’t long home from school, a drive Foster had spent torturously alternating between angry silence and a repetitive sing-song performance of I-haven’t-eaten-all-day, which he had been rehearsing since he turned down that apple.

  ‘Foster, make yourself something to eat,’ Mum said.

  ‘You make me so
mething to eat.’

  ‘Please, Fossie. You are quite capable of making yourself a sandwich.’

  ‘I don’t remember how.’

  ‘Puss-face,’ Aunty said, and laughed. ‘I’ll make him a sandwich.’

  ‘Don’t you dare.’ Mum had been fussing about, peeling off jewellery and dropping it on the kitchen table when she stopped suddenly and said it. Her fingers were still poised at one earlobe, about to remove an earring. Foster knew Mum must have been out to see people today. She only ever wore her jewellery when she was going out to see people and they were always people connected with the just untils. Aunty looked bewildered for a moment, and then her face settled into the bemused expression she wore most of the time in their house.

  ‘Oh, pick your battles,’ she said.

  ‘I’m picking this one. The last thing I need on top of everything else is a perfectly capable child reverting to a sulking, attention-draining baby.’

  ‘Of course,’ Aunty replied, ‘because you’ve got a husband already doing that.’

  ‘How dare you!’ Mum walked across the kitchen to the fridge, never taking her eyes from Aunty. She got out a bottle of white wine and poured some into a coffee mug.

  ‘Don’t you have to go to work?’ Aunty asked. ‘Isn’t that why I’m here? Because you need to work just until? If you’re not going to work, if you’re going to sit here and drink and take yourself this seriously, I’ll go home to my dog.’

  Foster sat at the table. He was invisible again. He raised his arms and began swinging them from side to side. Like a drowning man. Like one of those sports fans he saw on the TV.

  ‘Why are you always criticising me?’ Mum said. ‘You make things more difficult! Just like Fossie! Why is everyone making everything more difficult for me? Foster! What are you doing? Put your arms down!’

  ‘I haven’t eaten all day,’ Foster said, arms rigid in the air.

  ‘Look,’ Aunty said, peeling the coffee mug out of Mum’s fingers, ‘you go and get ready for work. I’ll make a sandwich for Fossie, and then if you want me to go home so you can do all of this by your humour-less self, I will. You don’t want help with the doctor, you don’t want help with the accountant, you don’t want help with social services, you just want me to appear on demand and suck up my own fury that my brother will suffer the more you suffer. And you are suffering. Because you don’t want help.’

  ‘I have to get ready for work,’ Mum said. Aunty’s eyes had drifted until she was no longer looking directly at Mum. Both Foster and Mum noticed and followed her gaze. A shaft of sunlight had fallen into the house, straight through the foyer that led to the hall. It shouldn’t have been there. That light was all wrong and within seconds they all realised why.

  ‘The front door,’ Mum said as she was running.

  They caught Dad at the letterbox this time.

  going away and getting back

  Foster was very little when Mum had her accident. She didn’t actually have the accident herself. Someone else had the accident and cleaned her up in the process. That’s how Aunty described it anyway. Someone had cleaned up Mum. Foster’s only knowledge of cleaning up on the road was those street sweepers that they sometimes got stuck behind when they were driving. The ones with the big round brushes that would spin and spin right up against the kerb, sucking the lunch wrappers and cigarette packets up into the truck’s wide belly. Foster liked the noise they made and would strain in his seat to try to get a better view. Mum would get irritated when she was stuck behind the sweeping truck. She would always say ‘Why are they cleaning up the road at this time of day?’

  One day Foster said, ‘That’s what happened to you, Mum, isn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean, Fossie?’

  ‘Aunty said you got cleaned up on the road.’

  ‘Did she, now?’

  Foster didn’t have a lot of clear memories of that time. He knew Mum didn’t come home for a long time and Dad looked after him for a long time. Not unlike what was happening now, Dad became distracted and depressed and took a lot of time off work. There were other people around but Foster couldn’t remember who they were. He remembered going to the hospital and being plonked onto a hospital bed beside someone he didn’t recognise, a big, ugly doll with tubes and wires growing out of it, and then being given an orange juice in a silly plastic cup that was difficult to drink out of. Actually, he didn’t know if he remembered that or if he had been told about it. Dad had said that he spilled that orange juice. Everyone had found that funny. Just like Dad’s spills were funny at first, Foster supposed.

  Foster didn’t remember missing Mum. There was an awareness of her being gone but always the assumption that she was coming back. Time was vague – it had washed about him like bathwater going down the drain, bathwater Foster knew would magically appear the following night as if it had never left.

  When Mum eventually came home she had a walking frame and the different face. Foster didn’t remember Mum using the walking frame. He only remembered Dad putting him on the seat built into it and giving him rides around the house while Mum was sleeping. Sometimes strangers came to the house, strangers who were not quite guests but something else or something more. They used slow, loud voices on Mum and fast, quiet ones on Dad.

  Dad told Foster lots of stories when Mum came home. At night when the TV was turned down low and only left on for the flickering light it provided, Dad would make up all sorts of adventure stories, his face appearing and disappearing in the irregular illumination. Foster couldn’t remember most of them but he really liked the one about The Amazing Human Brain, a superhero like no other. He asked for that story again and again. It didn’t matter how injured The Amazing Human Brain was or how much it forgot how to do, it had an unparalleled strength that clawed back everything that was lost. Change was fuel to this superhero. The Amazing Human Brain thrived on it. Even with all these changes, everything would ultimately settle back into its proper place. Mum was home. The bathwater kept appearing.

  Everything about Mum got better and better, except her face. Dad told Foster she worked very hard to get everything back. Foster wasn’t sure where everything had gone in the first place but Mum’s ability to get it all back just confirmed for Foster that change didn’t have to be bad, and it didn’t have to change him.

  These days the strangers who came to the house used the slow, loud voices on Dad and the fast, quiet ones on Mum. The strangers started coming after Mum and Aunty had the fight that ended with them corralling Dad at the letterbox and wrestling him back inside the house. And it was a wrestle. It brought Miss Watson out of her house. Dad was yelling as if he didn’t know who Mum and Aunty were. Foster thought it was funny until Mum started to cry. Miss Watson stood on her verandah, blood-red concrete on limestone pillows, as if she were a statue on a plinth. Her mouth was a tight line and she looked very disapproving but somehow satisfied.

  That’s when Foster started hearing the word ‘services’ a lot. At first he thought they were going back to church and he made the decision right then and there that if they were, he wasn’t going with them. But as the word continued to be used and no one asked him to put his good clothes on, he realised this must be some other kind of services. The services turned out to be the strangers.

  This time in the midst of strangers and busyness there were no walking frames to ride, no stories to be told. Foster watched Mum become a whirling dervish, but there was no devotion in it. Dad said a dervish was always devotional. Mum just looked panicked and tired.

  Foster had come to believe that people who went away came back eventually, even if they looked a bit different when they climbed back into themselves. The slow erosion of this conviction was making him panicked and tired as well.

  sausage rolls and strangers

  The morning the two servicing strangers came for the meeting, Mum cleaned the house more thoroughly than usual and put on a dress she usually only wore when she was going out. She also arranged her hair in a pretty way and p
ut make-up and jewellery on. Foster didn’t know why, but somehow the wearing of a going-out dress inside the house made this morning more important than other mornings. Foster waited on tenterhooks for some sort of instruction, some direction on a par with the appearance of lipstick and earrings. He was really irritated when the only thing Mum said to him was, ‘You’ll have to play quietly in your room for a while this morning.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I asked you to.’

  ‘Why?’

  There was a loud knock on the door then. Aunty had taken a screwdriver to the doorbell and disabled it because its rattling bellow seemed to set something off in Dad. He’d get all antsy and start wandering around the house looking for tools. Mum had hidden all his tools. They used to sit on the bottom shelf of the laundry cupboard in red tins shiny as fire engines, but had to be hidden away when Dad started taking the kitchen cabinet doors off while Mum was in the shower.

  ‘I’ll get it!’ Dad called. Mum followed him to the front door and they both returned to the kitchen with Aunty. Aunty placed the large cardboard box she was carrying onto the kitchen table. Foster could smell the warm pastry immediately.

  ‘I asked you to pick up a cake!’ Mum said.

  ‘Well, I got sausage rolls,’ Aunty said. She looked Mum up and down then and said with a slight smile, ‘I see you want to look like you’re coping.’

  ‘Can I have a sausage roll?’ Foster asked.

  Mum looked Aunty up and down. Then she said, ‘You could have made a bit of an effort.’

  ‘This is me having made an effort. And I brought sausage rolls. As far as effort is concerned I’m exhausted.’ Aunty kissed Dad then. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together.

  ‘Let’s have sausage rolls!’ he said.

  ‘I want one too,’ Foster said.

  ‘Not yet,’ Mum said, retrieving a large platter. ‘When they get here. Foster, you can take some to your room.’