Me and Mr Booker Read Free

like to go there one day,’ I said.
    ‘What for?’ said Mr Booker.
    ‘To look for my roots,’ I said.
    ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr Booker glancing back at me to see if I was serious.
    It wasn’t true. I had no particular reason to want to go to England except that I’d seen it on television. I just wanted to go anywhere that wasn’t here.
    ‘England or America,’ I said. ‘Either is fine. Or Paris.’
    ‘Make up your mind,’ said Mr Booker.
    I told him not to rush me and he paused for a moment before glancing at me in the rear-view mirror.
    ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he said.
    They stayed at the party for another two hours, drinking and dancing. I had never seen anyone dance as well as Mrs Booker. It was because she had done ballet, she told me, starting when she was four years old. And then, when all of my mother’s other friends had gone home, they said they should do the same. My mother thanked them for coming and said how much she enjoyed meeting them.
    ‘Come again soon,’ she said. ‘Whenever you feel like it.’ After drinking champagne in the heat all afternoon she looked like she needed to sleep. She had taken her shoes off to dance and her hair had come loose from the paisley headband she wore to keep it flat.
    ‘Thank you,’ said Mr Booker.
    ‘We’ve had a wonderful time,’ said Mrs Booker.
    ‘We’ve decided to steal your daughter,’ said Mr Booker. ‘If you have no objections.’
    My mother laughed and draped her arm across my shoulder as if she was protecting me, then changed her mind and let me go. The next moment Mr Booker leaned down and kissed me on the cheek, whispering loudly enough in my ear for everyone to hear.
    ‘You’ve been warned,’ he said.
    And then we all walked up the driveway to their car, arm in arm. My mother and I waved to them as they pulled out into the road and drove away.
    ‘What wonderful people,’ said my mother after they had vanished around the corner. She was happy her party had gone well, that so many people had come. She said you couldn’t have enough friends. The more the merrier.
    Like I said before, my father had never liked my mother’s friends. He said they were all phonies. He blamed the women for turning my mother against him.
    ‘As if I needed any help,’ my mother said.
    Later Mr Booker told me it was the hat I was wearing that day that gave me away. I said it was my father’s hat, the one he’d worn when he was mowing the lawn, which was a job that had fallen to me after my father left. I said I had worn it to hide my hair because it had grown too thick and untidy. He said he remembered the green skirt I was wearing and the boy’s shirt with the press-down buttons and the red plastic sandals on my feet.
    ‘You looked like an underage tart,’ said Mr Booker.
    ‘You say the nicest things,’ I told him, then curled round to lick his balls the way he liked me to.

random acts of kissing
    I spent a lot of time with the Bookers that summer because there was nothing else to do, and because I didn’t want to hang round with Alice any more. Alice was my friend from school. She lived across the road and I used to go to her place all the time to get away from home.
    That was before my father left. After he left Alice’s parents told me I was taking up too much of Alice’s time. I could tell they were confused about how my mother was going to get on now that she didn’t have a husband. When I told them that my mother was happy she didn’t have a husband they looked at me strangely, as if I’d said something rude. After that I stopped going round there, and a couple of months later Alice’s parents decided to send her to boarding school in the country.
    By the time Alice came back for the summer we had nothing to say to each other. Partly because she had started seeing her sister’s ex-boyfriend, who did so many drugs everyone called him The Space Captain, and partly because she felt sorry for me as my parents had split up and