Read Me and Mr Booker for Free Online

never wanted these things for myself, and I wasn’t prepared to work at some job I hated in order to provide them for you. No surprise then when you decided to go out and earn your own living. I’m not suggesting you weren’t within your rights to establish your financial independence in this way. You were, and well done to you for being so good at it. What happened next you know very well. I was unfortunately unable to compete. At least, had I tried to pursue my flying career with any kind of conviction, it would have meant us moving again and, since you had already decided you didn’t want to move any more, ostensibly for the sake of the children, this would have placed me in the invidious, but alas familiar, position of having to choose between my family and my profession. Forgive me if I am going over old territory here but it is necessary if I am to explain to you my current position, which is that I find that I am losing ground financially at such a rapid rate I fear where it may end.
    ‘He wants money,’ I said, looking up from the letter.
    ‘Surprise surprise,’ said my mother. His previous letters had all asked my mother for money. She had written back to say she didn’t have any. She asked me how much he was asking for this time. I skimmed the last page of the letter looking for a figure, when I came across a mention of me and the Bookers in a passage my father had circled and marked with an asterisk and a couple of exclamation marks.
    I thought you should be aware, I recently witnessed Martha cavorting in the street with a fairly spivvy-looking pair in their thirties at least. She looked like a prostitute with her pimp.
    As to the aforementioned loan arrangement (at this stage merely a proposition), I would be happy to pay half of any legal fees you may incur should you wish to sign a formal agreement. I leave the amount of the loan to your discretion, but $25,000 or thereabouts would go a long way to keeping the proverbial wolf from the proverbial door.
    I stopped reading and looked up at my mother who was stirring the prawns in a frypan. We both watched them curl up and turn pink.
    ‘What am I?’ she said. ‘The Bank of England?’
    ‘Kill him,’ I said. It had been a joke between us since before my father moved out. It was what I always said to make my mother laugh when there didn’t seem any real reason to.
    She added tomatoes to the pan and swirled them around in the oil with their blood-red juices.
    ‘What with?’ said my mother. She was trying to stop herself from crying, or at least to make it look like it was the heat from the pan that was making her eyes water. I picked up a kitchen knife and made some stabbing movements in the air to see if I could get her to smile, and when she did I put the knife down and folded the letter away. I asked my mother what she wanted to do with it and she told me to put it on her desk with the others.
    ‘I think you should burn them all,’ I said. I was stung by what my father had written about me and the Bookers. It was the kind of thing he was always saying about my mother’s friends, but this was the first time he had said it about me. I told my mother she should set fire to an effigy of my father on the front lawn and do a war dance around the flames.
    ‘One day,’ she said.
    Later, while we were having dinner, she asked me if I thought my father was normal.
    ‘What do you mean?’ I said.
    ‘I wonder if he actually likes women,’ she said, ‘or whether deep down he thinks we’re all filthy whores. Have you seen the way he looks at Lorraine?’
    Then she told me the story about how on their honeymoon my father had ripped up her wedding dress in a rage and thrown the pieces out the porthole of the ship they were travelling on. All because he found a bon voyage card from a man he didn’t like called Ralph Wesker, someone my mother had known before she met my father. She’d told me the story before but it didn’t matter. It didn’t hurt to