The Forrests

13. Spells





Could you be in your forties and still hate your father? Did Dot really hate Frank or was this some kind of habit to keep her infantilised, a hotline to childhood? Dreams about Eve came on her unawares, the grief in them freshly ripped. Grace got a boyfriend, a sweet teenager with hair falling in his eyes and a fireworks obsession, Hannah made the transition to school, and Dot started getting more loaded than all of their friends at gatherings, so that people remarked on it, smirking as they issued invitations. ‘Party’s started!’ they’d shout on opening the door to her and she envisaged a future where she took that on herself, started dressing in fun colours and wacky shoes, became the woman with a loud voice, bumping and grinding off the table of canapés. Out of party mode, the bossy parent in her emerged and she couldn’t leave Donald or Hannah’s teachers to do their work in peace. They were called in for a meeting with the principal and a Board member, boundaries gently but firmly set. On the way home Andrew shouted at her, That was f*cking humiliating. Sort yourself out.

So she went to the BetterSelf Program and gave them a lot of her money, no, it was Andrew’s money, which they couldn’t strictly spare. That’s right, Andrew was the one flecking spit from shouting, and she was the one going to a course on how to behave. His paintings had been through a black phase and now he worked on hyper-realist portraits of politicians, which surprisingly no one wanted hanging in their living rooms. By this time her father, the erstwhile hate object, was deaf over there in upstate New York, nothing more than a trench coat, a pair of spectacles, a thinned blond comb-over and a giant flesh-coloured hearing aid. ‘Hearing-assistant device’, her mother called it, her mother who could never have been the woman who’d dragged her kids to a commune in the night, that wild beast who had stood down the bottom of a deep hole in the earth in her rubber boots and kept digging. Lee’s cells had turned over what, four and a half times since then, if regeneration was a seven-year cycle, if that could explain it. No, Dorothy could not phone her father to make amends or – no, hang on, that was the other thing – but she could not make the call to apologise or, what was she supposed to do?

Could she extend her hatred to men in general? The other day she heard people on the radio talk about masculinity studies. Sorry, what? What? There must have been something in her ear. Perhaps her husband’s finger was in her ear.

The Program people had confiscated their cell phones. Red plastic-coated wire baskets at the door. They sent them out to pay phones in the street to make their life-changing calls. It was her second day in the Program and so far she hadn’t been brought up on stage, hadn’t been dismantled in front of everyone and told that her story, her life narrative, was nothing more than an illusion or a lie. But Andrew was looking after the children for the long weekend, he had stayed home from a hunting trip so she could do this, his friends had probably called him whipped to his face and she was in deep. So instead of wimping out she waited her turn at a phone booth, smoking a cigarette because she was not yet broken down enough to not need a cigarette or a drink ever again. The tall woman ahead of her emerged, her face watery and joyous as though a mask had been removed and her skin was feeling air for the first time.

The telephone receiver was thick and green in Dot’s hand. The booth smelled of cigarette smoke and so did she. She pulled out her address book, which was so old and out of date that there were people in it who were no longer alive, including Eve. Loose leaves of the address book fell out into her bag as she looked for the right page. The spine was broken. She’d used it to call her mother last night – two numbers always transposed in her mind and when she tried to ring her parents she could never remember which ones they were. Michael had finally been in touch with them and Lee had passed on his number, which was scrawled now next to her parents’ in a green felt pen that had been the only thing to hand and the ink had nearly dried out, just lasting long enough to faintly record these digits, and afterwards there had been the intense satisfaction of throwing the pen and its lid in the rubbish bin without bothering to connect one with the other, there being nothing left to protect.

The old handwriting in the address book gave Dorothy pause, the receiver by her ear. Perhaps subconsciously she had known that this day would come, although that morning she had been told that there was no such thing as fate, and no stories in anybody’s lives other than the ones they invented. Maybe she had invented herself into this place. The cord coming off the receiver was covered in a flexi kind of metal coil. The square buttons were silver. No dial, no black cubed pair of activators like the sort she and Evelyn used to be able to tap to make their prank phone calls for free. Everything was greasy. There he was. Michael. She sighed, nervously – she had been breathing hugely ever since the announcement that the time had come to make this call. Her hands felt sickly, needed a shake-out. She punched in the numbers. If he’d moved again or wasn’t home, would that be a get-out clause, or would they make her take it to the next level? Part of her hoped they had some other level in mind and that this would be the skin-lifting experience of promise. Public ecstasy. But this was before she got into 5Rhythms.

The phone rang into her brother’s flat. He picked up and her gut seized. Did she hear right what they were meant to do? Or was she the only person in the world of the Program laying herself on the line? ‘Michael? It’s me. Dorothy.’

‘Dorothy.’ There was a pause. ‘Oh yeah.’

‘Um, you probably get these calls a lot but I’m doing BetterSelf . . .’

‘What?’

‘The Program. It’s a personal-growth thing.’

Another, longer pause, in which he might have been silently laughing. He finally said, ‘So what are “these calls”?’

‘Oh, we’re meant to contact someone we’ve . . .’ Could she describe their relationship as broken? Was it a rift? A falling out, or just the distance of time? ‘How are you?’

‘I’m OK.’ His voice sounded really different. Not the renewed accent of her parents but weird, like he was talking through a neck brace.

‘So, I got your number from Mum. Where are you?’

‘Friend’s place. The landlord sold my flat. I mean I was sleeping in the f*cking warehouse. Until those guys screwed me and the f*cking company tanked. You heard about that, right? Cos you didn’t call me. “How are you getting on, Michael, are you OK, do you need any help?” ’

Lee had told her he’d been importing Turkish carpets. She couldn’t resist: ‘I heard there was a hole in the rug business.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Could we maybe meet up?’

‘What for?’

‘Just to talk, to see each other. You’re my brother.’

‘Hang on.’ She could hear him talking to someone else. He came back on the phone and said, ‘Hang on, I’ll just be a minute.’ The other person’s voice got louder. Michael got louder too – did he say ‘You’re a f*cking thief’? The background went silent and it was hard to tell if she was hearing the sound of Michael breathing or the cars driving past. Lately one of her ears had felt a bit muffled.

‘Michael?’ Part of her brain tried to calculate how long she had been out here and how much longer she had to achieve the act of reconciliation. It was possible he had hung up.

‘Yeah I’ll meet up,’ he said. ‘Not here. There are arseholes here.’ Her head jerked away from the blast of sound.

‘Do you want to come to my place? You could see the kids. Grace is fourteen now. Or you could come during the day?’ When Andrew would be at work. Yes. That routine.

He didn’t want to come to her place, but named a pub on the other side of the city, gave some cursory directions. ‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Oh, well we’ve got the rest of the – the course doesn’t finish till tomorrow night – but – yes, definitely, tomorrow afternoon.’

‘OK.’

The street outside the conference centre was empty and she ran up the stairs to the foyer two at a time in a panic that they would have started without her. In the morning a woman had come in late and she’d been brought up on stage and called out on her commitment issues shit in front of everyone until she cried. Dot was the last person through the doors. She slid into her white seat just as the Speaker approached the podium. A bruised feeling swelled and his words were lost and when once again tears wouldn’t stop leaking down her face the woman in the next seat passed Dot a tissue and patted her knee and said, ‘Never mind, things will change.’





Hare Krishna Hare Krishna

Krishna Krishna Hare Hare

Hare Rama Hare Rama

Rama Rama Hare Hare



She took the kids to eat at Gopal’s. It was cheap! They pushed dhal around their plates, hating it. Amy caught her mother in conversation with a serene-faced woman in a pale-apricot sheet, a white bindi between her eyes, and said as she dragged her away, ‘Don’t you dare become one of those. How could you do that to me.’





Dot and Andrew met Nathan at a restaurant bar and the three of them perched on high wooden stools. He showed them photos of Louisa with his new girlfriend, an actress whose accounts he’d been doing for years, and who had become well known. ‘You’ve probably seen Lou more recently than this. But here’s Estelle.’

The pictures quickly replaced each other on the small screen as Andrew moved his thumb.

‘Nice gear, dude,’ said Andrew of the camera. They started talking about the tricks it could do.

There she was, her famous face shining right at the camera, her arm slung over Louisa’s shoulders, and then she was gone, and there was a picture of Louisa in a T-shirt Dorothy had given her, joke-posing like a model. ‘Go back?’ Dot said.

‘There.’

Estelle was tiny, one of those people with a miniature body and big facial features that seemed to be drawn to acting. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ Dot said.

‘Apparently so.’

Andrew’s thumb kept swiping the photographs along, so that looking at them caused a kind of motion sickness.

Dorothy hugged Nathan. ‘You know . . .’ She wasn’t sure if it was her right to say it. ‘You know Eve would have been happy for you.’

He squeezed her hand. Tucked the camera back in his jacket pocket. Dot waited until the maître d’ directed them to a table then mumbled an excuse and shut herself in a rest-room cubicle and cried. Footsteps clacked into the room. They paused. She bit down on the length of her index finger. A few more steps and the hingey sound of the door opening and closing again. By the basins, she dried her face on the roller of thick blue paper towels. She stood for some moments longer, listening, looking down at the running water.



Three hundred and fifty people came to Nathan and Estelle’s wedding, including Dot and Andrew and their kids. After the al fresco dinner there was a display of belly dancing, and the guests were given tambourines to shake along while waiters cleared the plates. ‘Three hundred and fifty tambourines,’ said Donald, who played percussion in his school orchestra. ‘This is going to be awesome.’

The new bride made a speech to Louisa. Dorothy clutched Grace’s hand as Lou then stood before everyone in her vintage bridesmaid dress and glasses, a pink streak sprayed in her hair, and thanked Estelle for becoming her second mother. In turn, Estelle thanked Evelyn – the spirit of Evelyn, her arms out in an all-encompassing gesture, as though Eve hovered everywhere under the blazing white pontoon lights – for having given birth to Lou. She waved a balletic arm at Dorothy and Andrew, and the guests who couldn’t see them through the thicket of other guests called for them to stand up, which they did, halfway, briefly, and Dorothy nodded her thanks to Estelle and sat down again wiping her eyes with one of the linen table napkins. The other people at their small round table smiled and one of the strangers patted Dorothy on the arm and said, ‘It’s so great you’re here.’

‘My lady and me, twenty-seven years. It’s a thing,’ their tablemate said while they stood to watch the fireworks whistling, fizzing gold, traffic-light red in the sky, ‘being married to the same person, the same person for so long.’

‘The problem isn’t that they’re the same,’ Andrew said, ‘it’s that they change.’ The night had become cool, and he put his suit jacket around Dorothy’s shoulders for a cape. Their children had banded together with other kids and were leaping on the slope of grass, going crazy at the fireworks, even Grace and Lou exploding with squeals and applause, falling to their knees, rolling around getting juicy green stains on their brave teenage party dresses. One of the boys hit another one in the face by mistake and Dot inhaled, poised to run to the scene, but Grace was there, calming them, crouching down to hug a teary child and send him off to play again, not looking around for adult approval, just doing it. What had happened to that insecure toddler Eve had predicted such dark things for? Dorothy softened, watching her daughter. They were the lucky ones.

‘Excuse me, guys,’ one of the wait staff said, his hands gripping their plastic table and lifting one side off the ground, ‘we’re just setting up the limbo dancing here.’

‘Any time you want to leave,’ Andrew said to Dot.

‘My wife is awesome at the limbo,’ said the other guest, and he walked into the crowd of firework-lit faces to find her.





It had happened a couple of months after the school reunion, when she’d long stopped waiting for the call. One afternoon the phone had rung and it was actually Daniel. He was sorry for standing her up in the café, said a young man he sponsored ended up in hospital that day. He’d been thrown, had lost his bottle, wanting to see her was the old him, part of his disease. But he was going on tour now, to Sarajevo, and had something of Eve’s to hand over.

‘Post it,’ she said. She walked the phone to the window and checked down the street.

‘OK, that was an excuse. A Trojan horse. I want to see you.’

‘Now what is this, some kind of honesty high?’

‘Did you tell Andrew you were going to meet me at the café?’

Dorothy helped Hannah climb down from the table and wiped tomato sauce from her face with the paper towel. ‘I didn’t meet you at the café.’

‘Did you tell him though?’

‘No.’

‘How are your kids?’

‘Great. Amy’s broken her arm.’

‘Amy? She’s the second one?’

‘Yes. She came off a flying fox.’

‘Please, Dottie.’

Hannah was staring into the distance, scratching her bottom. Worm pills. Dorothy squeezed her above the knee and the girl imploded with giggles. ‘If we are going to meet I’m going to tell Andrew.’

‘Good.’

Instead she backed out of the room when Hannah wasn’t looking, hid in the bathroom and shut the door while they agreed a time and date for Daniel to come over, even though the only other human being in the house was three years old and not really listening. The phone disconnected. For a second Dorothy saw that the room she was in, and the bath, the cabinet, the towel rail, were made of cardboard. Through the window the bleached sky busted in. She ran to Hannah, slung her onto the sofa with an alphabet book and began to read it out loud. By the time the book was finished, home had solidified, become three-dimensional again, and when Andrew came back from polytech she had already given the children dinner and cleaned up, and it was six o’clock so the open bottle of wine was par for the course. Amy and Grace were breaking their brains over algebra and Donald knew all of his spelling words. She and Eve used to think their mother insane for making a cake each time she raised her voice to Frank. Now Dorothy opened the oven door and stuck a wooden skewer into the tin. Of course she wouldn’t tell him. She dropped the skewer in the sink; it had come away gooey with warm, unset batter.



When Daniel called out hello and pushed the door open it was as though a character from a dream, an animated cartoon, had entered the waking world. But she was the one who’d told him to come now, while Andrew was at work and Hannah playing at a friend’s, the one who’d felt alive – alive to the glimmering leaves, the light in the sky, the smoky colours in her children’s hair, the smell of the daphne bush and lavender, the gliding closeness of birds, everything. Now here he was, real on the couch. Unasked, he’d removed his shoes in the hall. She hated it when people did that – totally unnecessary – but she’d disappeared into the kitchen as soon as he came in, so hadn’t seen it happening, just the resulting socks. He didn’t look around the house and this lack of interest miffed her but was also a relief. The fewer things he touched the better.

She put lunch on the table and thought she wasn’t hungry but as soon as she tasted the bread realised that she was. Daniel draped his suit jacket over the arm of the couch and sat at the table in his shirtsleeves, ate and drank easily, relaxed in his body, and she searched his eyes for evidence of the past, of anything other than this innocuous moment – her mind flipping back and forward over what it meant. No, it meant nothing, had nothing to do with her life. Yes, it was a good thing to have him here with the dandruff on his shoulder and debunk the whole fantasy. She should get him round another time for dinner; they could all talk about the old days. Ask him to babysit the kids while she and Andrew went out. They could be movie friends, sneak off to daytime sessions when Hannah was at preschool and he was between saving needy addicts. Yes.

While they ate he told her about the clown school and afterwards, performing for kids in refugee camps, the travel, the drugs, rock bottom, coming home. She prompted him for stories. Daniel wouldn’t say much about the harder things he’d seen, but there was still plenty to tell. He had sat in the YWCA in Nairobi, watching as a tall thin woman lowered sugar cubes into her cup of tea: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. He’d dropped his wallet, passport, credit cards, everything, into a hole-in-the-ground toilet in Indonesia and had to lower himself in to fish them out. Cuban families had welcomed him into their peeling Havana apartments and fed him cured meats and rum. He had slept, or tried to sleep, on the deck of a ferry travelling to a remote Greek island, velvety water black beneath him, hard bright stars above, been abandoned by friends to card games in Marseilles when the luck was not going their way, got stranded on the wrong side of the river in St Petersburg as the bridges were pulled up for the night.

She wanted to know more about the low he hit, was greedy for disaster and humiliation, the appalling behaviour, smoking coals left in his wake. He mentioned a couple of women and she thought poor them, no wonder they hate you, and then she thought what a couple of crazy bitches and then she thought oh, I just want to be special and she cleared the table and said nothing.

‘So what about you? You were practically a teenage mother,’ he said.

‘Not quite.’

‘I wish I had kids.’

‘You still could.’

‘Yeah, no.’

She tried to imagine her life without its family life. Half-awake in her father’s arms, being carried up the stairs to bed. Keeping lookout while Evelyn squatted for a wee in the long grass by the estuary at the commune. The living room at home full of Lee and her women friends, jigging on the spot, watching them swing their hips with their eyes shut, arms fronding the air. A baby’s slow turn inside her, like an astronaut. Her son’s hilarity at his own sense of humour. The mailman paused on his bicycle by their letterbox. Daniel lay on the sofa, clutching a cushion to his chest. ‘You look as though you’re at the shrink,’ she said.

He put the cushion on the floor next to him and patted it. ‘Come and sit with me.’

Maybe there was food in her teeth. Dorothy had a long drink of water and wished people still smoked. Hannah would be eating lunch at her friend’s house, creamed corn or whatnot, and after that the play-date would come to an end and the mother would drop her back. At the thought of her sweet, shy three-year-old minding her table manners at someone else’s house, a pang slowly shot through her.

‘Did you bring the thing from Eve?’

‘Come here.’ He patted the cushion. ‘Come here and I’ll show you.’

She knelt on the cushion next to his head. No accident she was wearing a skirt. Close up he looked pretty rough, his skin leached of youth, his hair quite grey. She wanted to touch his hair, feel the skull beneath it. He smelled great. ‘What is it?’ she said, inches from his body, waiting for a message, or a trinket, or a piece of paper, not for him to open his hand and show her the scar on the pad below his thumb, a shiny purple whorl of cigarette burn and say, ‘This.’

She held his hand. Bent back the fingers slightly. The burn scar was like a tiny eye. She wanted to kiss it. The cords of his wrist, the embossed veins ran up into his shirtsleeve. She pushed her fingers up beneath the cuff, felt the hair on his forearm, the twisting muscles. He leaned his head against hers.

‘Nothing can happen here,’ she said.

‘I know.’ Daniel lay back, shifted onto his side and pulled her up onto the couch towards him. ‘Come here,’ he said again. ‘Come and lie on this lovely Chesterfield with me.’

‘I think you mean davenport.’

‘Lofabed.’

‘Lofabed?’ She laughed. ‘I never heard that one.’ They lay next to each other but there wasn’t really room. ‘There isn’t really room. My body’s changed.’ She was worried she might cry. ‘I’m older. I’m not the same.’

‘Here. Come on, beautiful. This way.’



Later he asked if she remembered the commune, the gold chocolate coins, the rabbit. ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘How in real time we probably weren’t there for very long. But I feel like part of me is still in that place. Alternative self still running around with those frogs and all that.’

‘I remember the shotgun,’ she said, propped up on her elbows beside him on the floor. She didn’t remember the rabbit.

Daniel moved a hand down her back, up the side of her waist, cupping her breast. ‘Oh my god,’ he laughed, ‘I can’t believe I’m actually here.’

The kitchen clock ticked. By some act of grace, time played it slow. ‘So, this is what I imagine,’ Dorothy said. ‘When we’re old, and that stupid passport of yours is lost in a fire.’ She saw it, the last ship he would ever be on, drifting charred and blackened up the coast, bumping the sand on a rain-soaked night, tumbling Daniel out, choking on seaweed and saltwater, onto the earth. ‘Then you’ll come back to me, all aged and useless, and nobody else will want to know, and I’ll make you feel better.’

‘Like this? Like it is now?’

‘Yes. Except you’ll be old and scrawny.’

‘You’ll be fat,’ he said. ‘A big fat babushka.’

‘And you’ll dine out on your famous northern lights and young women sashaying in cobbled town squares and swimming races in f*cking Niue or whatever, and we’ll all say oh that’s just Uncle Daniel with his stories, and it won’t matter that you have nothing left.’

‘I’ll have nothing left?’

She sat up, then stood up. Blood rushed from her head. ‘Hannah’s going to be back.’

He nodded. ‘I know.’

She turned aside to clip up her bra and saw in her peripheral vision a blur of movement. Daniel had stood, and begun to juggle the contents of the fruit bowl. Fruit circled the air above his palms. An apple left his grasp, flew high in the air to smash against the ceiling and thudded along the scuffed floor. He kept juggling, his eyes locked on Dot’s face. A mandarin followed with an orange splat. Now a banana, boomeranging off to the corner of the room – another waxy green apple – a whole bunch of comical grapes, rising, turning like a heart to fall and land squashily on the bumpy rag rug. She had a hand to her mouth, shaking her head. From his pocket Daniel tossed her an apple. It was mottled with bruises but she bit into it. He presented her with his empty hands, a clown mouth turned down at the corners, a shrug.

Minutes later, when he was leaving, he reached his hands up to hang onto the lintel and she put her face to his chest then stepped away, the gesture too much like the way she was with Andrew. She had the sudden sense that there was a mask over Daniel’s face she’d never be able to pull back.

‘Hey, Dottie,’ he said. ‘What if you’re not here when I come back? When I’m all had it?’

She nudged him out the door. In the pathway he paused, made a show of examining his fingers, wiping them on his trousers. ‘You need to dust that doorway,’ he said. After he’d gone down the path and the coast was clear she took a quick shower and rearranged the living room. For a second she studied her face, which was exactly the same, and opened all the windows and the doors and waited for her youngest to be delivered home.