The Forrests

12. Take It to the Next Level





Driving home from the campground Andrew said, ‘I think I need glasses.’ Their children and Lou were in the back seats and Dot looked over at him from the passenger’s side and thought oh yes, that would be right. He was hunched over the steering wheel, frowning, and the skin of his face had lined and thickened, and the hair was maybe more dry or thinner or something but the head, the shape of the head was the same.

Suddenly the traffic in front of them stalled and he nearly drove into the back of another car. The bend in the road that they inched around finally revealed a lane closed, police cars, an ambulance, the puckered metal of a wreck.

‘Don’t look, darlings.’

Of course, they did. There was a medical sheet over a stretcher on the side of the road, but you couldn’t tell if anyone was under it.



At the public baths, the sounds of shouting and water sloshing against the pool’s sides ricocheted through the hangar-like space. Holding Hannah’s little hand, Dot stepped down from the raked benches and through steamy air to the soft, faintly gelatinous water that puddled over the top metal step down into the cordoned-off recreational pool. Tepid at first, the water cooled as more of her body was immersed, and she floated her daughter through to a gap in the playing children and drew her in towards her, their skin touching under the water, slippery cold and warm at the same time. She held Hannah by the wrists and whooshed her in a semicircle back and forth, then supported her back while she kicked with shonky glee, her eyelashes spiky and wet.

‘Evelyn!’ The name came from the general mass of bodies in the water and might have been just a random shout if it hadn’t happened again, more clearly, and a woman broke through a pair of dunking pubescent boys and space-walked towards Dot. ‘Evelyn Forrest! Oh my god. Is this your little girl? She’s so cute!’

‘I’m Dorothy, Eve’s sister. This is Hannah. Say hello, Hannah.’

‘I can hold my breath. Watch this.’ The girl puffed her cheeks out and plunged her face beneath the water.

‘Oh you’re Dorothy, of course you are. You’re not twins, are you?’

Dot hitched up the straps of her swimsuit. ‘How are you?’ Hannah came up gasping. ‘Well done, darling.’

‘Really well.’ The woman waved an arm towards the big pool. ‘My boys are huge now, they’re in squad practice, for my sins. Five a.m. every day! They love it but talk about nearly get a divorce. How old’s your girl?’

‘How old are you, Hannah?’

‘I’m five. But I’m short for my age.’

‘She’s three.’

‘Look at those eyes, she’s so like you. Freaky. Have you got any others?’ She craned her neck.

‘At school. Seven, eleven and thirteen.’

‘Four, wow. You don’t look it.’

‘I’ve been on a diet for about two years.’

‘Well they wreck our bodies. I miss babies, I adore babies, but no more.’ She made a scissoring gesture with her fingers. ‘No. Way. O. Ver. Hey so the reunion! Did you get the email?’

‘No, I . . .’ Hannah pulled at the neck of Dorothy’s swimsuit and Dorothy moved her hand away. ‘No, darling.’

‘I can see your boobies.’

‘Stop it.’

The woman was still talking. ‘. . . can you believe we’re so frigging old? You’ve got to come, I’ll flick you the thing, we’re all going.’

‘Really?’

‘God yes, if you don’t go everyone knows it’s because your life is shit.’

‘How old are your boys?’

‘She said the S word,’ said Hannah.

‘Thirteen and fourteen. Monsters. I mean, we were fourteen! Oh my god the laundry I have to do. The smells. The secretions. I look at them sometimes and think a girl is going to kiss you?’ She throttled herself with one hand and leaned back until she had fully sunk then came up choking for real, spluttering, and Dorothy pounded her between the shoulder blades till she stopped. ‘God knows what I just swallowed. Such an egg. Sorry.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘No more sight gags. So. Are you in the book? I’m going to stalk you. We need all the moral support we can get.’

She was either the Tollerton girl or Amanda Marshall. One of them went out with Peter Smythe and the other one went out with Paul Baxter. Peter could do one-arm push-ups for fifteen reps and Paul was the school beer pong king. The woman in the pool now looked like the woman who was either the Tollerton’s or Amanda’s mother, who had worked part-time as a guidance counsellor and who specialised in passing out sanitary pads the size of light aircraft. Mrs Tollerton. Mrs Marshall.

Hannah said, ‘Mama, I want it,’ and lunged towards a randomly floating orange flutter board, so that Dorothy had to follow or let go of her. At the dring of an electric bell the woman spun towards the pool’s edge and marched through the water, arms extending and retracting as though pulling partners towards her in a square dance. She called something over her shoulder as she reached the metal steps. ‘Tell Evelyn.’



Maya Kumar’s house was in a new subdivision near the school. The taxi dropped Dot at the end of the road and she walked the wide clean path past half-built houses on bare sections, under street lights endowed with pretty curves and hexagonal glass bulb-protectors, as though they were flowers that had grown there since Victorian times. Light blazed orange from the open front door to Maya’s house and several cars were parked on the street, cars that looked modest but more reliable than the rusting Beetles and shark-like Holdens of the school days. There was one black-tinted four-by-four.

Dorothy put a bottle of wine on the kitchen bench.

Maya kissed her. ‘It’s so great you’re here. Mandy said you’d pike out. Also, I told her about Eve. She didn’t know. We’re all so sorry.’

Something about this environment, the pressing sense of a past with Evelyn in it, made the stock response impossible.

‘Wait, I’ll get you a drink. My husband has vanished for the night, wise move.’ Maya had married one of their old teachers, which for a while had been a scandal. She’d quickly got him out of teaching and into computers. ‘Can you believe he was younger then than we are now?’

In the large picture window beyond the kitchen, Amanda Marshall stood silhouetted, a man at her side. Dorothy caught her eye and waved and Amanda resumed animated chat with the man as though she hadn’t seen. Through the window was a view of the school’s top field. Maya slid a wine glass into Dot’s hand. Her perfume smelled of jasmine and gardenias. It was time to brave the living room, where about twenty people in small groups stood dotted around, not all identifiable without staring. Many of the women had moved to the short, bran muffin hairstyle of the forty-plus.

An air of the Principal’s office hung over the closest group as they stood in silence, casting around for what to do with olive pits and dirty paper plates. Someone said, ‘We live at the end of the train line now, isn’t that awful?’ A conversation started about children. None of them were sending their kids to the school where they’d all met.

‘Not even me,’ said Maya, ‘and I could probably hit the roof of the common room if I threw something from here.’

‘You should try it,’ Dorothy said. ‘Maybe an egg.’

Maya glanced around and spoke as though to herself. ‘I wonder if this is everyone.’

Later, when Dorothy was talking to Nicky something and Elaine Woods-now-Rogerson, she heard, ‘Is Daniel coming?’ and the women’s words churned and bubbled over the floor, all the sound of the party underwater except Maya’s response.

‘Yes of course! He’d better be.’

Jason’s group exchanged information about Philip Lloyd, who had become a dealer in Australia. ‘Really?’

‘A car dealer,’ said Jason’s wife, who had been a few years behind their group at school, ‘not a drug dealer.’

Jason said Daniel was definitely out of jail and someone else said he’d never actually been in jail and a third person said apparently he’d found God since getting off the smack. ‘The NA God, where everything’s a pathology. You can’t sneeze without wanting to make it with your mother.’

‘I always wanted to make it with your mother,’ said a man Dot knew but couldn’t name.

Jason laughed. ‘Yeah well we’re about to move her into a unit at the bottom of our garden so come round any time.’

‘Where’s your dad?’

‘He passed away last year.’

‘God, sorry.’

The conversation shifted to choosing funeral directors and Dorothy drifted on. A man who didn’t look familiar sat in the corner of a black leather sofa and a woman with great legs sat next to him and held a champagne glass to his lips. Down the hall in a room that might have been a study four or five people murmured and laughed over a wall display of photographs from their time at school. The outgoing cluster squeezed past Dot in the doorway. The room was empty now. The photos were on the walls. Evelyn would be there, and Daniel, and Michael, and Ruth. Her email to Michael about the reunion had bounced back. From the living room came the opening chords of a song that was number one for the summer she learned to drive. Someone shouted, ‘Maya, we’ve got the whole night to get through, pace yourself!’

Dorothy stepped back from the photo room and into a girl of five or six. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Can’t you sleep?’

‘The music’s annoying me,’ the girl said.

‘Come on. I’ll take you back to bed.’

The girl led the way up the stairs, along a hallway and into her bedroom, which was decorated with richly coloured taffetas and sparkling hanging mirrors that sent spangles floating over the walls. ‘Wow,’ Dorothy said. ‘This is amazing.’

‘It’s like a princess,’ the girl said. She hopped into bed and leaned over to turn on the slowly rotating nightlight.

Dot blocked one ear with a finger and listened. ‘You can’t really hear the music from here.’

‘Yes but it was when I got a drink of water,’ the girl said. ‘From the bathroom.’

‘I see. Do you think you’re going to be able to sleep now?’

The girl plonked her head down on the pillow. ‘Yes.’ She clutched a plush toy puppy to her and closed her eyes. The lids trembled. Stars from the nightlight wandered over the bed, stretching and shrinking on the contours of her face.

‘Goodnight,’ said Dot. ‘Do you want me to send Mummy up?’

The girl nodded, her eyes emphatically shut. ‘Yes.’

The woman with the legs asked if Dorothy knew where the bathroom was.

‘There’s one upstairs. I think it’s all right to go up.’

‘Can you show me?’ Her name was Monique and she was the second wife of a boy from school, the boy who had now become the man sitting on the black couch being fed champagne. Monique was a decorator. On the way up the smoothly carpeted stairs, no fuzz gathered in the angles of the risers, she speculated on the cost of the leadlight windows, the oak ceiling beams, the glass bricks in the kitchen, the marble bench tops and the under-floor heating in the bathroom, asking Dorothy to guess how much the house was worth.

‘I know nothing about real estate, sorry. There are children sleeping,’ Dorothy whispered.

Monique drew her into the bathroom by the elbow. The women smiled at each other in the mirror. Monique’s smile was toothy, almost goofy, and her eyes glinted.

‘Who’s that guy you’re with again?’ Dorothy asked.

‘Ian Abernethy.’

‘I don’t remember him.’

‘He doesn’t remember anyone. He’s had an accident. Rock climbing. No helmet.’

‘The guy on the sofa? That’s him? Oh. I’m so sorry.’

‘Yeah, but he wanted to come, he’s doing pretty well apart from can’t use his arms for some stuff or really walk. And he talkth like thith.’ She was rootling in her silver leather shoulder bag and pulled out a small envelope and from the envelope took a pill, which she bit in half. She ran some water into a tooth mug and swallowed the half that was still in her mouth, waving her fingers in front of her lips and making a face. She offered the other half to Dorothy, who said, ‘No thanks.’

Monique shrugged and popped the second half in her mouth, gulping some of the water that flowed from Maya’s shiny bathroom mixer tap. She pulled at the ends of her hair and wet her fingers in the small ring of water collected around the plughole of Maya’s basin. ‘Design flaw,’ she said, and brushed a finger over each eyebrow. Then suddenly she was at the toilet and lifting the lid and pulling her skirt up and her knickers down. Dorothy slipped out the door and stood on Maya’s thick carpet and saw herself reflected in the full-length mirror on the landing opposite. From the bathroom there was the light scooshing sound of Monique’s pee hitting the water in the bowl, followed by the whirlpooly flush.

They stood in the doorway to Maya’s bedroom counting the pillows on the bed. ‘It’s like how many jellybeans are in the jar,’ Dorothy whispered.

‘Any more than four pillows is disgusting,’ said Monique. ‘What’s next, soft toys? Let’s get a drink.’

Master bedroom: one of the phrases Daniel used to use to make her squirm. They heard Maya coo, ‘Goodnight,’ in her daughter’s doorway, and ducked into the bedroom and pulled the door shut. Dorothy flapped her hands to indicate that they should go out and front up, but Monique gripped her shoulders, holding her in place. A pulse thudded in Dot’s ears, as though there was wine instead of blood in her veins. In breathing silence they listened for the sound of Maya going back downstairs but the carpet muffled any footsteps. Monique thrust her head forward and kissed Dorothy on the mouth, and she ducked away, Monique’s lips smearing her chin, and shook her head. ‘Don’t.’

‘OK.’ Monique thumbed the lipstick off Dorothy’s face.

After a few seconds Dot opened the door a crack and they darted down the empty hallway to the stairwell landing, where they paused for breath. ‘I have soft toys on my bed,’ she said. ‘I used to.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Monique. She scowled in the landing mirror. ‘You were the weird shit Blu-Tacked above the desk type.’

‘Really? Can you tell?’ Dorothy checked her reflection for lipstick remains.

‘Oh sure. I’ve decorated your fifteen-year-old bedroom a million times over and I know all about it girl, I can tell you those stains never come off the wall, you’ve got to completely repaper.’

‘You can look at me now and tell?’

‘Come on, you love it. Your little symbols carved in the wardrobe door with a compass.’

Dot leaned over the banisters. People stood in the hallway below, talking. She waved to a girl from one of her classes. ‘God, she’s a cosmetic surgeon now. I’ve done nothing with my life but have children,’ she said to Monique.

‘You’re one of those women, your husband only has to look at you, right? We’re not going to have kids. Ian could, still, but oh dear, I won’t say it! Let’s get you a drink.’

Dot sat next to Ian Abernethy and introduced herself. He nodded and smiled and said ‘Yes’ when she offered him a sip of her wine. She held the glass up to his lips and dabbed at the edges of his mouth with a paper napkin after he sipped. The song that came on made her heart beat faster. There was music that for years had been out of bounds because of its time-machine properties, its ability to land her in a place from before. That kitchen with the paint samples brushed on the walls, Donald in his bouncer on the table. Her parents’ front room, lying behind the sofa with the thickly lined curtains pulled, the seared smell of cold ash. Driving through a landscape of low scrub, a bottle of Coke between her thighs, a pack of cigarettes on the passenger seat, the element-orange glow of the cigarette lighter after it popped from the control panel, the sky behind clouds in thin towers. In front of them some people were shouting and jigging, and others including Monique were properly dancing, and the music was too loud to talk. Ian said something and Dorothy pointed at her ear and shook her head. He pushed his head forward towards the dancing people. She leant over close to him and spoke into his ear. ‘You think I should dance?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wow, Ian, you smell amazing,’ she said. ‘I could drown in that smell, I could just spend all night smelling you, what is that stuff?’

He smiled and shook his head. She sniffed his neck. ‘That is incredible. OK. I’m going to dance.’

He took another sip of wine and she left the glass balanced around the corner of the sofa behind Ian’s unmoving feet. Dorothy had just started dancing when the music stopped and Amanda Marshall clapped her hands and shouted, ‘So are we going to this thing or what?’

‘What,’ shouted a boy who had become a man with a red face and a solid, protruding butt, roundly muscled in beige cotton trousers. He was wearing hard shoes and had once cried when he missed a penalty kick at the inter-school final.

‘He dashed the tears from his face,’ Dorothy said to Ian. She was sitting next to him again. The energy was gathering, and Daniel wasn’t here. He had to come. He had to. Around them people were on the move, placing wine glasses on Maya’s low, generous windowsills and between the vases of papery poppies on the table. Women bent and picked up handbags and someone inched into the room hidden behind a giant armful of coats, which the guests extracted one by one.

Maya was in the kitchen, holding plates streaked with hummus and baba ganoush under the running tap. The tap sprayed out softly as though there was a shower nozzle over it. Dorothy bent down to look. There was a shower nozzle, and the tap itself was on a bendy stainless-steel concertina-like tube so it could be moved around. Maya made the water swirl and bubble in a circle over the plates. Dot handed her another one off the dirty stack.

‘Did you have some food?’ Maya asked.

‘No, I’m fine. I ate with the kids.’ Feeling suddenly that there might still be cheese sauce on her top or a globby seed from the raspberry jam sticking to her hair she bent down to check herself in the side of the espresso machine. The unfaced marble of the sink bench was rough beneath her fingers. ‘So is everyone going on to the school?’

‘Yeah. We’ve got to show up otherwise it’s that whole thing again, like last time.’

‘What happened last time?’

‘You were here.’

‘No. Have you got any tea towels?’ Dot pulled the handle of one of Maya’s kitchen drawers, and it opened so glidingly that she staggered backwards and had to clutch Maya’s arm for balance and Maya nearly fell on her. ‘Sorry.’

‘I’ll just leave them to drain.’

The drawer sat open like a projected tongue. Dot bumped it shut with her hip.

‘Whoa, Big Chill!’ Mandy grabbed Dot’s hands and swung their arms around in a kind of dance. ‘Yeah, I’m the younger dark-haired one they all want to f*ck.’

Dorothy extracted her hands under the guise of doing a cosmic sort of dance move then crossed the expanse of the kitchen to the water jug. The genteel doorbell chimed. She poured a glass and held it to her lips, lightly bit the rim.

‘That might be him,’ Maya said. ‘F*cking late as ever.’

The party noise obscured any footsteps that might have sounded up the polished hall. Daniel would be wearing trainers anyway. Here came the figure appearing in the kitchen doorway and it was a middle-aged woman, no, Dorothy was a middle-aged woman, this was an older woman with short greyish-blonde hair and wearing a brightly coloured dream coat. There had been a production of that musical when they were at school and although, or because, their father disdained ‘Lloyd Webber’ the Forrest children all auditioned, but Ruth was the only one who got a part. Maya greeted the woman, who was here to mind the sleeping daughter, and clapped her hands and said, ‘Doors are closing!’

‘Is everyone here?’ Dorothy asked. ‘Who you invited?’

‘Too late now,’ Maya said. ‘We’re O for outta here. Time to kick this party to the kerb.’ Horror struck her face and she said, ‘Oh – sorry – I didn’t mean,’ and shook her head and shouted, anger in her voice now, ‘Come on, you guys.’

Dorothy said, ‘It’s all right.’

‘Did you see the photos?’ Maya asked. ‘I was going to do an In Memoriam but then I couldn’t find a good picture, and I didn’t know if I should, and . . .’

‘Oh Maya,’ Dorothy said. ‘Thanks. It’s fine.’

In the hallway by the stairs a small table housed a telephone and its charger. Dot stepped up onto the bottom stair to make room for Monique and Ian in his wheelchair. ‘Coming through,’ Monique sang out. ‘Don’t want to run you over.’

The night was warm, close, and the Victoriana lamplight was soft and tawny. The new houses rose like cardboard cut-outs from their blank sections. Apart from one carload of boys and their wives, crushed into the back sitting on knees, heads bent under the low ceiling of the Ford station wagon, everyone walked down the gently curving slope like a wedding procession. In the boot of the Ford a couple who were both married to other people did fake waggly-tongue kissing as the car drove away. People whooped at them. The car suddenly braked and the couple jerked forwards and everyone laughed. The man with hard shoes and Dorothy helped Monique lift Ian into her car and collapse the wheelchair and stow it in the boot. ‘Actually, John,’ Monique said, placing a slim hand on his arm, ‘would you mind driving us?’

Dot waved them off and said, ‘Just checking in with the kids.’

The car disappeared around the corner, leaving the smell of exhaust and the optical print of tail lights. At home, Andrew answered the phone, TV commercials playing loudly in the background. ‘Sorry hang on.’ He pressed the mute button on the remote, cursing as the low battery did nothing to the volume.

‘They only sound louder,’ Dot said. ‘How’s Donald’s temperature? Should I come home?’

‘You mean bottle out? No.’

‘We’re just leaving Maya’s now.’

‘No rush.’

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘And yet there you are.’

‘Ha.’

‘Aha.’

She hung up the phone and checked that it was hung up, and checked that it was hung up again and put it back in her bag. Must have been about a year ago she’d left the phone with Daniel’s number in it at the toy library, lost the SIM card, all her contacts. At the bulbous end of the cul-de-sac there was a turning circle like the bottom of a test tube, the place children would ride tricycles and sell lemonade to foot traffic made up of people their parents already knew. A path ran off the end of the cul-de-sac and the last light in the street cast a muzzy white triangle as far as the grassy wasteland beyond. From here she could see over to the floodlit top field and the school buildings and possibly the dark shapes of people walking along the road towards the school gates, before they were obscured by a lump in a hill.

The light petered out at the end of the path, where a wire fence blocked access to the undeveloped hills. A sign was planted in front of the fence and Dorothy stood on the edge of the light, on the point where it gave way to nature, and reached one hand out to touch the high tensile fence wire. An electric shock snapped up her arm and she yelped as the arm flung back, and shook it and staggered down the path a little bit, laughing soundlessly.

Time had passed since everyone else had arrived at the reunion. Blisters stung on her toes, pulpy and jammed into the ends of her shoes, from running down to the school in high heels. The registration people outside the hall had never heard of her. Through the double doors came music that they had danced to a hundred years earlier, at the graduation ball. Dorothy dropped Maya’s name and Mandy’s but the younger woman said, ‘We’ve had to step up security since your day.’

‘Yes,’ she said, leaning forward on the desk, her face close to the woman’s, ‘I did have a day. A school day. I went here. My whole family went here. Why would I make that up? Do I look like a terrorist?’

The woman’s gaze drifted over to something behind her and a voice said, ‘Yes. I think so.’

It was Daniel. He was wearing a black suit, smiling, and his teeth were peggy and brown. Those dark eyes, oily like coffee beans, looked at her while he spoke to the woman. ‘Someone put my name down,’ he said. ‘Daniel Hill?’

‘Danny Hill. You scumbag.’ The chemistry teacher clapped a hand on his shoulder.

‘Hello, Mr Crosby.’ He was still looking at Dorothy. His face made her want to pull her jacket up to hide her own. ‘Hi, Dot.’

‘They don’t recognise me,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it.’

The suit was second-hand and smelled it, and the worn lapel felt rough against her face when they hugged. Some crying fell out of her. He held her shoulders. ‘We don’t have to go in if you don’t want,’ he said.

‘No no we should. It’s just – like the water closed over our heads, you know. We’re just gone. Doesn’t matter.’

The three of them walked through the doors into the school hall. Mr Crosby headed for the bar. There was a student band playing music that wasn’t quite loud enough. Light splintered around the room from a disco ball. Faces, bodies loomed and receded. Someone said, ‘Weren’t there more of you, didn’t you have a sister?’ and Daniel hung back and when she began to explain about the accident a group of guys swallowed him. The woman’s mouth flew open and she whispered, ‘Oh no,’ and Dorothy hugged her. ‘It’s OK.’

In the middle of the dance floor Monique was giving Ian a kind of lap dance in his wheelchair. ‘Wow,’ Dot said, and the woman pulled out of the hug and looked at her with a furrowed brow, performing confusion.

‘Check it out.’ Dorothy pointed to Monique. ‘I can’t work out if that’s really amazing or a bit cruel.’

‘Probably only so much Viagra can do,’ the woman said. ‘I’m so sorry about your sister.’

‘Thanks. Me too.’ She squeezed the woman’s arm and said, ‘I’m just going to the bar. Do you want anything?’

The barman filled the softish plastic tumbler to the brim with white wine. It dimpled under the pressure of Dot’s thumb and fingers and she tried to hold it lightly with both hands, sipping wine and looking out over the edge. Danny was in a corner by the stage, flanked by three or four men whose past boy-faces floated somewhere beneath the surface of their current faces. He finished saying something then looked around the room. All the wine in her glass disappeared down Dorothy’s throat and she swallowed a lurch of joy. Mandy Marshall and the now-Rogerson girl danced over and Mandy squeezed Dot’s waist and shimmied up and down. To now-Rogerson she said, ‘Remember Dorothy? Freak or unique?’ She leaned right in. ‘You were rocking that swimsuit at the pool!’ Her breath was a mist of vodka. ‘Have you had any work?’

‘No.’

‘I know someone. Comes to your living room.’ She pulled at the skin of her temples so that her face went taut.

Now-Rogerson said, ‘Really? Call me next time. John’s given me the all-clear.’

‘Just a minute,’ Dorothy said. ‘I’ve got to find the loo.’

As she left them, now-Rogerson said, ‘Did she even go to our school? I don’t remember her at all.’

‘Remember the Forrest girls?’

‘There were more than one?’

Danny was in the queue when she came out of the toilets. The lifeless smell of drains mingled with the mothball scent of the chemical blue plugs they used in the bottom of the urinals. ‘So I saw you at the funeral,’ he said.

‘I know.’ He had left straight after the pall-bearers slid Eve’s coffin into the hearse that was to take her to the crematorium. The image that stayed in Dot’s mind was of the back of the car, the brake light that glowed red on the rear windscreen when the engine started. Later she had scanned the mourners, an arm around Lou’s shoulder, wanting to introduce her to Daniel, certain that this was important. But he wasn’t there.

Dan was openly staring. ‘You’ve got like, a billion kids.’

‘Yeah.’ Guilt twanged in her, but she didn’t know if letting his flippancy pass was a betrayal of her children or a protection. ‘You?’

He shook his head. ‘Nope. How’s Andrew?’

‘He’s good. Busy.’

‘How’s Nathan?’

‘He’s all right, he’s OK, yeah. Doing well.’ A muscle in Dot’s upper arm started twitching and she held onto it, felt the jumping tic beneath her hand. ‘Are you . . . with anyone?’

‘I was f*cked up that day. I shouldn’t have left early. I should have talked to you, talked to your parents.’

‘God, Daniel, I hated that we lost touch.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I mean, what happened?’ Probably he was sober, this close to recovery, and the thought made her woozier, drunk.

‘Dottie, I never properly made amends.’

She shook her head. ‘For what?’

‘Well, you know. All of it. My sort of vanishing. And then Eve.’ He ducked his head to the left, to the right. ‘Maybe we should talk about this somewhere else.’

‘You don’t have to tell me about that. I’d rather you didn’t.’ She had taken his denim jacket to a fundraising fair for the girls’ hockey club, her stall with the clothes rack and boxes of old children’s books and vinyl, and sold it to one of the hockey dads for next to nothing and watched him walk away with it on, and then seen him wear it at Saturday games for ages afterwards until she no longer thought hey, that’s Daniel’s jacket when they were talking. He’d bought it, and wore it so often, she guessed, because they had a thing going on between them, a flirtation, and him in Daniel’s jacket was a part of that she could never explain. After a while, prolonged exposure, an embarrassed dance at the prize-giving, the strange sexual energy had evaporated and they were just people in the same community again, without the heat.

‘I didn’t want to hang around because. It was a time for her and Nathan. And family. You guys together.’

‘You are our family,’ Dot said.

‘I know, but.’ Daniel shrugged.

Don’t shrug, she wanted to shout. Shrugging is not an option.

‘Maybe it wasn’t that,’ he said. ‘Maybe I was just too chicken.’

An awful sense suffused her that he hated himself. No. Please let him not be stuck in that loop. ‘Listen, Daniel, you don’t have to make amends.’ It was easier if she looked at the wall behind him but there was his face, those dark, dark eyes, and the time on him, the years all over him, emanating like a heat mirage. ‘If it’s part of your programme or whatever. You don’t owe me anything. We were just kids.’

He frowned. ‘That’s not true.’

‘Hey look,’ she said. ‘You’re still taller than me.’

‘You must have stopped growing.’ His hand reached up and held her arm – a soft, slow shock. Her whole body expanded. She would kiss him right here if he leaned down. ‘Feel your arm,’ he said, squeezing the jerking muscle. ‘That is so weird.’

Feedback screeched from the hall. ‘I love that sound,’ Dorothy said. ‘So.’ She exhaled as though blowing out a candle. ‘How long have you been back for?’

He let go of her. ‘This last time, couple of years.’

‘Do you see much of Maya?’

‘Not really. I used to hook her up sometimes. In the bad old days.’

‘Before.’

‘Rehab.’

‘Right.’

‘But it’s all good now.’

‘All good?’

‘Jesus, Dorothy, you’re kind of drilling into me!’

‘Sorry. I don’t mean to. It’s just that phrase.’

He levelled a look at her. ‘So, you are a mum. You’re like, fecund.’

Blood began to rise beneath her skin. ‘You’re a shunt.’

‘Ointment,’ he said.

‘Diphthong.’

‘Tumescent.’

‘Gristle. Slack.’

‘Do you feel old?’

The question surprised her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I never think of that. Do you?’

He tilted his head. ‘I feel like I’m dying.’

They stared at each other. His grin faded. The urgent need to say something, to touch him, pressed on her, and she didn’t have the words. She shifted her weight and stepped a foot to the inside of his, her leg almost between his, then the door to the bathrooms opened and someone said, ‘Are you going in?’

He put a palm to the door. ‘Yes.’

‘I’ll wait by the bar,’ she told him, sliding her foot away, at the same time as he quickly said, ‘Hey I’m going to head home. But maybe we could meet up?’

A billion kids was who she was to him, he would never know. Daniel didn’t want the power any more, and she would just be giving it over in order to what, to break through the G-force of her family life, to jerry-build a rocket ship and climb into it and blast off. Some people took drugs. Some people went rock climbing.

‘Do you work?’ And yet here she was, punching her cell phone number into his phone.

Daniel nodded. ‘I’m a drug counsellor.’ He shut the door. At that moment the band started playing a song from when she was fifteen, a song her body heard before her brain did. The music was like lying on the runway as a jumbo jet took off just above you, scraping the air.

Her shoes lay emptied on the wooden floorboards and she thrash-danced up and down, everything around her streaking lines of movement and light. In a split second of self-consciousness she could feel her middle-aged face moving as she jumped so she thrashed her head back and forth to hide behind her hair, threw herself into the music even deeper to forget. The impact of a shove, and she went sprawling into Ian’s wheelchair and saw the chair spin before she hit the ground and drink got spilled on her and someone shouted, ‘Piss off.’ Dot scrambled to her knees to check on Ian, leaning over the arm of his chair, apologising. He shook his head. Monique intervened.

Dorothy’s knee ached as she scooped up her shoes and walked straight for the exit, panting, bouncing her palm against the wall that was hung with display boards and enlarged photographs and posters advertising the decades-old Battle of the Bands and the school magazine. Five or six unfamiliar people were smoking cigarettes under the sheltered entranceway to the hall. A taxi swung into the school gates and pulled up outside the hall and Dorothy limped towards it, the shoes in her hand, and leaned in to the open passenger window.

‘Rogerson?’ the driver asked.

‘Yes.’





In the children’s bedroom the curtains were still drawn shut. Donald had a devil dress-up cape on and a torch in his hand and was repeating to Hannah in a sing-song voice, ‘I’m going to eat you.’

‘Come on darlings, breakfast time,’ Dorothy said, picking up toys on the way to the windows. ‘Feed the fish. And then you need to get ready for school.’ Her body operated in space, not her. The tangibility of the mini stegosaurus and cloth doll, the need to remove them from the floor before someone turned an ankle or broke the wing off a kitset aeroplane, the silver light in her eyes after pulling the curtains, the lid of the fish-food jar to replace, the rumpled pillows and sheets to straighten, bedside books to pile, the papery skin of oatmeal that lined the saucepan as porridge thickened on the stove, the facts of rubbish day and buying a board for Amy’s science project and letting gorgeous, leggy Grace cycle off without laying anxiety shit all over her independence and knowing already how much she was going to miss that girl and school bells and bus timetables and volunteer morning with crossing duty, these things saved her.

Hannah swivelled enthralled eyes to her mother. ‘Go away.’



The bus driver tried to close the back doors before Dorothy could get the pushchair through. ‘Wait,’ she called out. The buggy rocked side-to-side as she stepped down onto the footpath and Hannah complained in her dream. Halfway across the road they had to pause as more traffic passed, a pulse in the base of Dorothy’s throat knocking when the cars drove too close to the wheels of the stroller. At last she was walking to the other side.

Indoors wouldn’t do; the café was empty and hushed, no music playing. On the pavement she moved one of the outside tables along, the heavy legs scraping the asphalt, so there was space next to it for the buggy. Hannah continued to sleep. Dorothy squeezed the wooden chair over, sat with the café’s wall at her back and watched people pass by. A waitress came, a young woman in a tank top with a tropical bird tattooed on her shoulder. Dot ordered coffee. ‘I’m so jittery, coffee’s probably a mistake.’

‘Go crazy,’ said the waitress. ‘Go wild.’

Dot twisted the ends of a sugar sachet, picked up another and shook it like a tiny maraca. A man carried a cardboard box down the street. A toddler and her mother crossed the road holding the handles of her toy pushchair between them. Hannah still loved to be swung between her and Andrew’s hands whenever they walked through the park. No, Daniel could not be in her life. She was almost afraid of seeing him in daylight. In the far distance a helicopter traversed the sky, a snub-tailed dragonfly. The coffee came. The presence of the waitress, her care in placing the cup on the table, turned the volume up on the world. ‘This is the BirdMan café, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And there isn’t another one, round here.’

‘Another BirdMan café?’

‘Never mind, sorry, I’m just confused.’

Dorothy drank her coffee and looked at the newspaper. She checked her phone but there were no further messages. Yes it was Wednesday. Yes it was the right date. Where was he? When Hannah woke she would have a sore neck and be thirsty. Every now and then someone came round the corner and Dorothy’s solar plexus gripped although her fingers retained their placid immobility over the paper on the table. She was a body divided into parts.

The waitress cleared the cup, its lining of froth dregs like the scurfy foam left on the mudflats when the tide went out. It was time to collect Donald from school. She paid for the coffee with cash Andrew had given her that morning. The older woman at the bus stop helped her lift the awkward buggy up the steps. Hannah woke up when the bus rumbled out into the traffic and said, ‘Are we there?’



Andrew ran water into the saucepan for pasta and Dorothy stood behind him, eating peanut butter on a rye cracker, her mouth glued up. He lifted a single long hair from the pyramid of grated cheese on the chopping board and let it float to the floor.

‘Gross.’

‘Sorry,’ she tried to say.

He turned, smiling. ‘What?’

She thunked her head into his chest. ‘I can’t talk.’

He wrapped his arms around her and they swayed for a few moments. Footsteps padded down the stairs and Donald appeared in the doorway in his pyjamas, scowling.

‘What’s up?’ Dorothy smoothed the boy’s hair back off his face.

‘I’m scared.’

‘Why?’

‘I scared myself today with the devil.’

‘It’s just dress-ups,’ Dorothy said. ‘We don’t believe in the devil in this house.’

‘Why have we got that costume?’ He stretched his arms wide and she leaned down into the tight embrace, slid her arm around her son’s back and hugged him, speaking into his hair. ‘For Halloween. I’ll put it away until then.’

‘Yes.’ Donald nodded, his eyes shiny. ‘Get it out of my room.’

Dorothy hoisted him into her arms and said, ‘Come on, heavy boy. Say goodnight to Daddy.’

‘Again,’ said Andrew.

After kissing the little children one more time, closing the door on Amy in bed with her headphones and a book, removing Grace’s plate of leftovers from the essay notes on her desk, Dorothy stood at the top of the stairs with the orangey-red devil cape folded over her arms. She put the hood part with its squishy black horns over her head but couldn’t do up the Velcro at the collar because it was too small. The fabric rustled as she walked down the stairs. She stood in the kitchen waiting for Andrew to turn around from the sink.

‘Are they all good?’ he asked.

‘Yeah.’ The ringing of the telephone cracked the air. She headed towards the living room, the ongoing sound, was halfway to the door when he spoke again.

‘That might be Louisa. She wants to come and stay.’ He lifted his arm high to drain the pasta, and the kitchen filled with the starchy, salty smell of steam.

Dorothy walked slowly to the phone, the cape swishing.

‘Is this Mrs Dorothy Forrest?’

‘Yes. Ms.’

‘Hello, ma’am, how are you this evening?’

‘Fine.’ She waited.

‘Ma’am, this is Peter calling about your Internet provider at home there. Just a courtesy call wondering if you or anyone in the house is looking to upgrade their ISP at no cost at this present time?’

Inside the hood her head grew hot and she pushed the cape off, to the floor. Andrew called something from the kitchen. She said into the phone, ‘No, sorry.’ She hung up and then rang on again to check the dial tone. It was broken, stuttering to indicate that someone had left a message.

‘Sorry,’ Dot mouthed to Andrew as she sat at the table with the phone pressed to her ear. The message was from Donald’s after-school karate teacher, a reminder about the upcoming exams.



The car park at the public baths was flooded and they waited in the Honda for the rain to ease up before making a dash for the indoor pools. Another song from years ago came on the radio. Dorothy turned it up and listened, the red digital minutes ticking closer to the swimming lesson’s start time. Through the aching shone a shaft of pleasure: Hannah was a quick learner; by the third chorus she was singing along.

The song ended and Dot turned the engine off and stood by the door with rain soaking her back as the stuck little buckle wouldn’t unclasp down by Hannah’s hip. Once her daughter was free Dorothy lifted her under an arm and kicked the door shut and locked it and dropped the keys by the tyre and lowered, squatting under the weight of the child and the swim bag, and walked her fingers forward along the wet asphalt without letting go of the girl until she hooked up the key ring and pushed down into the ground with her feet in order to stand. Hannah was on a funny angle and Dot righted her with a hip then ran through the puddles, swerving to the left as a car backed out of a parking space towards them and jerked to a stop.

They arrived at the entrance desk. The swim-bag handle was crooked cuttingly into Dot’s elbow, and water seeped all up the legs of her jeans. She placed Hannah upright on the floor and mopped at the girl’s head, and shook droplets from her own hair like a dog. Hannah ran to the sweets dispenser, a transparent globe of red and yellow candy drops, and jiggled the coin return and asked for money. Dot took the membership card from between her teeth and slid it through the barcode scanner, then waddled through the automatic glass doors into the swampy air of the pool room, suddenly sniffing from the chlorine, nudging Hannah forward with her knees, steering her daughter now to the changing cubicles at the end of the Olympic-length pool, smudging wet cords of hair away from her eyes.

In the dim, bare changing rooms Hannah was asking for lollies but she couldn’t have one now. Dorothy helped her out of her fleece-lined jacket and sweatshirt and T-shirt and pulled the elastic-topped trousers down and then up again so that she could see to get Hannah’s shoes off, and lifted her to sit on the bench so the socks wouldn’t get wet on the Petri dish floor. Dot unpeeled the socks from Hannah’s hot muppety feet and bunched them into the shoes and pulled the trousers down again and there she was, standing, all prepared with her swimsuit on underneath, her lung-shaped ribcage, the swelling diaphragm. Dorothy planted a kiss on her shoulder. Through the door, at the end of the pool, the large racing clock and the clock next to it that displayed the time were visible, and they were late.

‘Let’s go,’ Dot said, and jammed the girl’s clothes on the top of the swim bag and held her hand past the giantesses getting changed, the slap of Lycra against their freckled skin, past a topless woman blow-drying her glossy black hair and through the other doors to the children’s pool and the class. She stretched the thick rubber-goggles band over the back of Hannah’s head without snagging her hair, and lowered the suctioned lenses softly over her blinking eyes. The instructor reached up, arms dripping, and took the girl by the torso and flew her above his head and slowly feet first into the water. Next to Dorothy a baby began to wail, his voice piercing the white noise of the swimming pool. The baby’s mother comforted him, rubbing along the ridged gums where he was teething, while Hannah plunged face first into a starfish shape, her body slightly jack-knifed, her bottom sticking up and her feet kicking randomly, never breaking the surface of the resisting water. All around the air was thick with splashing, shouting and the smell of chlorine, and in another learners’ lane a woman of about Dorothy’s age free-styled her way up the length of the pool, her arms whaling at the skin of the water as though she was fighting it. Dorothy called to her daughter, ‘That’s great darling.’