Forgetting Foster (11 page)

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 put 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.'

‘When who gets here?' Dad asked.

‘Nothing for you to worry about,' Mum said.

‘Why do I have to go to my room?'

‘The social workers are coming, Malcolm, remember?' Aunty asked.

‘I don't want anyone in the house today,' Dad said. He looked sullen and annoyed. ‘Why wasn't I told about this?'

‘You were told,' Aunty said. ‘They won't stay long.'

Mum arranged the sausage rolls on the plate, flakes of buttery pastry sticking to her fingers, delicious-smelling slivers crumbling onto the table. She was muttering, like she did a lot lately, but Foster still heard it, ‘. . . asked you to bring cake . . .'

Foster was picking up pastry crumbs with a wet finger when there was another knock at the door.

‘I'll get it,' Aunty said.

‘No, I'll get it,' Mum said. ‘Fossie, go to your room.'

‘Why do I have to go to my room?' Foster demanded, somewhat soothed by the fact that Aunty was shoving three sausage rolls wrapped in a paper towel into his hands.

‘Foster, I have no idea,' Aunty said. ‘But just do it. Make Mum happy, huh?'

‘I'm going with him,' Dad said, reaching over and grabbing sausage rolls with both hands.

‘Actually, I think it'll make her happy if you stay,' Aunty said. They could hear fast, quiet voices in the lounge. Foster took his bounty and headed down the hall. Halfway to his room he stopped. Without thinking too much about it he walked back and stood just out of view in the foyer. With his hands full he used his mouth to manipulate one end of a sausage roll into it. Chewing slowly he peeked into the lounge room.

There were two of them. A man and a woman. The woman was very thin and wore a skirt that stretched tight as a drum across her thighs, so tight he doubted she could have crossed her knees. She had her ankles crossed instead. She was running her palms across her lap, smoothing the skirt. The man was fat. He was fat all over in the way Foster imagined jolly people would
be fat. He wore a suit and tie. The suit jacket had no chance of ever being buttoned and Foster could tell the tie was too short. Dad would never wear a tie that short. The man seemed to have bosoms as well. Foster stifled a giggle with a swallow.

They were soon joined by Aunty and Dad. Then Mum walked in, placing cups of tea and coffee on the little table usually covered with dirty dishes and magazines, now polished to a high shine. She had to make several trips to bring in all the drinks, then the sausage rolls. She put the sausage rolls down as if she were sorry about them. Foster heard her suck her tongue into a
tsk
.

‘Thank you for coming,' Mum said. ‘This is my husband, Malcolm. My sister-in-law, Linda.'

‘Linda,' Fat Man said, leaning forward to shake Aunty's hand. ‘Malcolm,' he said, leaning forward to shake Dad's. Fat Man's hand was left hanging awkwardly in midair before it was retracted. That's when Foster saw Dad still had two fists full of sausage rolls. Mum reached across to take them, but Dad pulled his hands away roughly and said, ‘Get your own! Plateful there!'

Mum sat again, looking uncomfortable.

‘Don't blame you, Malcolm,' Fat Man said. ‘I love
sausage rolls.' With that he picked one up and took a hearty bite.

Thin Lady said, ‘We understand you have a seven-year-old son? It would probably be useful if he sat in on this. Get some understanding of where things are going?'

Foster didn't want to give Mum the opportunity to make excuses for him not being there, so he stepped out of hiding straight away and said, ‘Okay.'

Mum looked uncomfortable again, as if she was about to take a test.

Dad smiled his happiest smile though and said, ‘Hiya, Fossie!'

candour and contradiction

They stayed for an hour. Foster watched the clock hands crawl around the face wishing he had gone to his room and refused to come out. His boredom for the duration of that crawling hour trumped all his previous annoyance at being left out. Dad was bored too. Foster could tell, because he got up several times without excusing himself and wandered off. Even Foster knew not to do that. Aunty would go after him and bring him back, and even though Thin Lady said it was quite all right if Malcolm wanted to go and do something else, Mum got a bit tetchy about that suggestion so the regular Dad-retrievals were put up with for her comfort. Foster thought they should just let him go take some doors off or something.

They talked a lot about Mum getting enough help and enough rest and about setting things in place now for when things began to deteriorate even more. Aunty asked about residential care, which elicited a surprisingly fervent ‘No, no, no, no' from Mum, along with a hurried but firm explanation that that sort of thing was surely a long way off. Aunty took pamphlets anyway. Foster whiled away some of the time flicking through them, looking at pictures of well-dressed, happy old people doing craft and playing board games. It occurred to Foster that there were no people in the pictures like Dad. No one wearing a suit.

Soon the sausage rolls were gone. Foster and Dad kept shoving them down. Foster waited for a cross word from Mum about ruined appetites, and was surprised by the fact that she didn't seem to care. She was all high-strung, as Aunty called it, because everyone was finding talking directly to Dad hard work. When they did ask him a question he'd answer the one that was in his head, rather than the one that was in the room. So Mum did a lot of answering for him, which Foster thought was a bit rude. She wasn't giving Dad enough time to think and she was making him look stupid. The only time Foster was really
interested in what was going on was when Fat Man asked him a question. Foster was really cross when Mum started to answer for him as well.

‘Foster is doing just fine. He's been very good, very understanding and—'

Foster flicked all the pastry crumbs sticking to his clothes onto the floor and said, ‘You said I was making things more difficult.'

‘Oh, Fossie, I did not,' Mum said with an embarrassed smile.

‘Yes, you did. Remember? You said Aunty was too. Didn't she, Aunty?' Foster waited for Aunty to come to his support.

Aunty hesitated before saying, ‘Well, not exactly. That's a bit out of context.'

Foster didn't know what context was but he continued anyway, speaking right at Fat Man, who had asked the question after all. Mum didn't know how Foster was doing anyway. It's not like she asked him.

‘I miss Dad's stories. Mum is cross a lot. She never cooks really good stuff anymore. She works a lot. And I have to watch Dad when he used to watch me.'

Foster felt a bit breathless when he finished speaking. Mum looked devastated.

‘That's in context!' Aunty said, laughing.

‘That can't feel very good, Foster,' Fat Man said.

‘It's okay.'

‘Do you want to talk more about that?'

‘No.'

‘Are you sure? Because we can talk about that if it's bothering you.'

‘Not bothered.'

‘Well, let's look at it this way. What's one of your favourite things that Mummy used to cook?'

‘I don't remember.'

‘Sure you do! What's your favourite thing to eat for dinner?'

‘I don't remember.'

‘Oh, for crying out loud!' Mum said, suddenly standing up. The whole room snapped to attention. Foster had been enjoying the chat with Fat Man, had been planning on dragging it out a bit longer. He felt very visible in the spaces between each of the questions Fat Man asked. Every eye in the room had been on him, and not in the sideways way people usually looked at him lately. That sideways look that was really just a way of estimating his distance from a grownup conversation so the volume could be adjusted to exclude him. But Mum had all the attention now, and for someone who had just stood up and yelled into a
quiet room she was looking as if she didn't want it anymore.

‘What's wrong?' Dad asked.

‘Nothing. Nothing, Malcolm. I'm just going to take these cups out.' She quickly placed the empty cups on the platter. One fell over.

‘I'll help you,' Aunty said, leaning forward to stand the cup up.

‘I don't need any help.'

‘You don't say.'

‘Foster, perhaps you could go and have a play now,' Thin Lady said. ‘Let the grown-ups talk for a bit?'

‘I'm going with him,' Dad said. ‘Who are you people, anyway? When are you leaving? I don't want you here.'

‘The kitchen's that way,' Aunty said, pointing. Mum was still standing in the middle of the room, platter in her hands.

They all started moving then. All at the same time. Mum to the kitchen, Aunty right behind her, Dad down the hall, Foster right behind him. In a matter of seconds Fat Man and Thin Lady were left alone in the room, everyone else having scattered as if on the tailwind of a fart. Dad used to say that whenever a room cleared quickly. Foster thought it was funny.