The Forrests

14. Leash





Her brother was waiting when they came home with the industrial cleaner, brick sealant, gloves and goggles. The dog trotted at her side and stopped by an unfamiliar car to sniff the tyres and Michael ambled over. ‘Hi,’ he said, not looking at Andrew.

Andrew said, ‘Morning, Michael.’

‘Hi, Andrew. How’s the painting?’ Michael sniffed. He said ‘Andrew’ and ‘painting’ the way nine-year-old Hannah said ‘Duh-uh’.

They stood under the branches of the oak in the Boddys’ front yard, and the air was steamy and the pavement still dark in patches from the night’s rain.

‘Where have you been?’ Michael asked.

‘Hardware store. Look.’ Dot pointed at the clinker-brick fence outside their house, where hot pink spray-paint ran across the centre in a broken, wobbly line, ending in a coded symbol. ‘We’ve been tagged again.’

Michael stepped back to study it. ‘Jesus,’ he said.

Andrew said, ‘Let’s do this later. I’ll get the pressure thing. Hose thing.’

‘Amy’s going to the skate park after school. And Grace is coming for dinner.’ She took the hardware-store bags from her husband, feeling judged by Michael’s gaze, that he was noting the way she and Andrew didn’t kiss goodbye.

‘See you.’ Andrew pressed the remote unlocking system on the car – a descending three-note twiddle the birds in their street had learned to reproduce – and she raised an arm and waved as he drove past and tooted, sluicing the windscreen free of rain spots and stuck leaves. She and Michael got covered in a fine spray of liquid disinfectant from the windscreen wipers, and the dog barked.

Michael’s eyes followed the departing car. He was talking about the job Andrew had found him in the transport department at the polytechnic, what a worry it was, the supervision wasn’t good enough, yesterday afternoon he had seen toast crumbs all over the office floor, a crusty wipe cloth on the kitchen bench.

‘That’s OK,’ she said, ‘that’s normal. Too clean is a worry, OCD. Are the people nice? To work with?’

‘You know, I’m calling human resources. I’m going to report them.’

‘But Michael, for what?’

‘And could you keep an eye out for those little bastards across the road, they’ve been in my rubbish.’

‘Mike, Andy’s only just got you this job. There are no jobs, do you know that? Don’t make trouble for no reason.’

A neighbour walked past, holding her umbrella so that the handle looked like a hook emerging from her sleeve in place of a hand. Dorothy smiled at her and nodded and reined in the straining, sniffing dog.

‘Also, while I’m at work can you move my car? It sits there too long and some idiot reports it stolen.’ Andrew described Michael’s car as ‘an eyesore’. Tangy floor mats, the flaming embrace of the petrol smell from the can he kept in the boot. ‘I’ll leave the car key in your letterbox.’

‘No, I’m teaching later. Just leaving the car for a day is OK, come on.’

‘Can you help me or can’t you?’ Getting louder now.

‘Michael, don’t shout at me. I haven’t got time to move your car.’

‘You always do this! How long does it take!’

‘Stop it.’

Michael had jettisoned everyone else in his life: their parents, his ex-girlfriend, Daniel long ago. The slights and disagreements were clutched and nurtured, too complex to understand. You couldn’t point out that he was the common denominator. He was demanding and rude and most of the time Dorothy thought he hated her, but having him live next door was a family duty she was glad to fulfil, especially now, in what everyone had taken to calling ‘these times’. He needed her. In the winter he’d got stuck in the bath and it was only when she dropped some mending round, coming through the unlocked back door with a pair of folded jeans the size of a tablecloth, that she heard him yelling. Together she and Andrew unwedged him and for a while she’d made him go on a diet, bringing pots of low-GI casseroles, but nobody could make her brother do anything he didn’t want. Dial-a-Pizza pulled up outside his place almost every night.

Now he came very close to her. ‘They are watching, and waiting, and they are going through my rubbish.’

‘Michael. You need to take your meds.’ Meds: she hated that fake flak-jacket word, but it was her brother’s language, a way to butch out the shitty passive business of being a patient, someone who needed help. ‘I’m coming in with you.’

‘No you’re not.’ He turned abruptly and galumphed the few metres to his house ahead of her, surprisingly fast given his bulk, and she stumbled over the dropped bags of cleaning product and into the hot muscular flank of the dog and raced to his door but he got in first and was too wide to overtake. The door slammed in her face.

‘The police helicopter was out this morning.’ She yelled it through the wood, held a finger in the air and spiralled it. ‘Did you hear? Keep your doors locked.’

On the news they’d reported an escaped prisoner, a double murderer. How did they escape? That was what Dorothy wanted to know. Buddleia tumbled from the brick wall, purple flowers spilling into the air.

She shouldn’t have mentioned the helicopters. It was the last time she saw Michael for a while.



Light gathered in the valley of the bank, hung pale brown in the long fronds of grass. On another hill the grass furred in the wind, pinkish gold. The path took Dorothy from her house to an unsealed track that tailed off, and along the bank to the fringed beginnings of the woods. A very few wild flowers dotted the slopes with red and purple, the sparse colours fleeting, as though they would disappear if looked at too long, and cabbage white butterflies butted the grass feathers with greenish wings. The person emerging from the thin leggy trees – birches, bark lined with cracking peel, the trees inside sloughing their skin – was a scarecrow of purple clothes beneath a mushroomed umbrella, a shock of grey hair. Dorothy’s dog ran up to the figure, its black hide shimmering over the muscles that crossed beneath the skin. The figure made a half-beckoning hand gesture towards the dog, the umbrella buffeting in the wind.

The brushing grass against her calves whispered louder, its smoky scent intensifying as Dorothy walked towards the woman and the woman walked towards her without looking up, the world behind her head blocked by the umbrella, her stare somewhere on the ground. With a plunging certainty Dorothy recognised her. Rena. Her mother’s friend from Hungry Creek. ‘Hello,’ Dorothy said loudly, passing. The woman stalled and smiled frowningly and said, ‘Hello. You’re . . .’

‘Dorothy Forrest. You knew my mother. At the commune.’

Rena’s face was wrinkled, blue in the glow from the umbrella. Her gaze sizzled, and the smell of recently fritzed marijuana clung to her. ‘Dorothy. Look at you. My god.’

Each made a small, aborted movement towards the other, stopping short of a hug. Yes, Rena looked older, but not by that much – surely not by the same number of years as Dorothy had aged. It was forty-odd years ago. Rena must be seventy.

‘I’m looking for your brother Michael,’ she said. ‘Do you know where he is?’ She had the determined gaze of the embattled, and Dorothy got the dumb, shameful feeling that she was resisting knowledge, the salient detail. What did this woman want with Michael? The dog had its nose in something under a tree, and Dot smelled or imagined the smell of a rotting animal, a poisoned squirrel or rabbit, and called to the dog in a deep, stern voice and it returned, breathing quickly through its open mouth, its lips squid-ink black and wet, the tongue a happy pink. ‘Really? You’re looking for Michael?’

‘I need to talk to him about something.’

Dorothy gestured towards the street. ‘Have you tried him at home?’

‘We need him to sign something and,’ Rena turned as though he might be coming up the path behind her, ‘the phone’s just ringing and he isn’t at the work number Lee gave me, either.’

‘He isn’t at work?’

‘No. His car’s still there. I don’t know.’ She laughed wheezily. ‘He might be stuck in the toilet again.’

‘It was the bath. Did Lee tell you about that?’ She hated the thought of her mother and Rena clucking over Michael. That awful, female power.

‘Have you got a key? When did you last see him? Someone should probably break in and check he’s not in trouble.’

‘Ha ha. Well I’m just . . .’ Dorothy patted the dog, who was whining. ‘I’ll be home later. The cedar house over there. If you need anything.’ She continued down the path a bit and thought once upon a time that witch saved my mother’s life, turned and called, ‘I mean would you like to come for lunch?’

But Rena was walking on.

The trees thickened and lace-holes of light swayed on the damp forest floor. Dorothy trod on fallen nuts, small broken forks of twigs, acorns that rolled glossily away from her progressing feet, looking boiled and indestructible. God, she was sweating, under her arms – the anxiety sweat of menopausal hormones, or of instinct. The woods continued ahead, thick with the crackle of insects. She looked over her shoulder as though Rena might be coming after her. The dog was somewhere. A couple wearing red-and-orange jackets of stiff, waterproof fabric chafed past, pausing in their conversation to exchange hellos. Light pearled in the raindrops that hung on the underside of branches, like the bellies of glow-worms.



An old van stood parked outside Dorothy’s house, not the same van that had taken them away all those thousands of nights ago, but close enough. Its windscreen framed a dream catcher and a couple of dead flies lay in the dust on the thin ledge of dash. The memories wouldn’t hold, they were unlatched, she felt blurred by some other place and time she couldn’t really see. If Evelyn were here, or Daniel, she could ask them what was wrong about Rena. Easier not to grasp at the evaporating past, easier to focus on what was in front of her now.

A trio of figures formed a tableau on her porch. Rena introduced Dorothy to her daughter Mei, and Mei’s daughter Susan, a girl of about eight, dressed in a hand-knitted jumper and white cotton knickerbockers. Mei must have been one of the younger children at the commune, or perhaps back then she wasn’t born yet. They all backed away from the dog when it loped up the steps and skittered to a stop right by them, claws audible on the wooden boards. The girl’s hair was in braids that might have been slept on, gaps appearing between the woven strands, a sparkled hairclip perched over one ear. The dog lapped noisily at its water dish and Dorothy opened the house and welcomed the small group inside, the hallway giving onto the cedar-panelled kitchen, autumn sun warm through the windows, setting the glazed bowls on the table alight. The women smelled of wet wool and old citrus fruit, and Dorothy lit the scented candle on the shelf.

The girl, Susan, sat down and reached across the scrubbed wooden expanse, lying nearly flat on it to arrange the bowls, the largest in the centre, smaller ones in orbit. ‘There are some books in Hannah’s room,’ Dorothy said. ‘Do you want to see?’

Susan shook her head. ‘No thanks.’ Her voice was husky.

‘She’s a wee bit older than you, I think. My kids are at school. Well, my eldest’s at university.’ Dorothy looked at Rena, expecting some reaction to this evidence of the passing of time, but the woman was impassive, maybe blissed out.

‘I’m eight. How old are you?’ the little girl asked.

‘I’m forty-nine.’ She’d just had a birthday; it was the first time she’d said this new number out loud. On that birthday morning she had lain in bed, listening to the shower running over Andrew’s body, the mattress rising to hold her like an open palm, feeling closest of all to Eve. Later she lit a candle for her sister. Yes, she wanted a postcard from Daniel that never came, just as she wanted the phone call out of the blue, the unexpected knock on the door. It was easier to admit these things than pretend the ache did not exist.

Susan smiled. Her two front teeth were new adult ones, rectangular, wavy-ended. ‘It was my mum’s birthday yesterday.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’ Mei shrugged. ‘The big three-o.’

The kettle hissed and Dorothy shook the teapot upside down over the sink until the sodden teabag inside was spat out. She set the tea and four mugs on the table. ‘Out of milk, sorry. But there’s apple cake.’ Dense earthy slabs, the smell carried on the steam from the mugs of tea.

‘Is this your birthday cake?’ asked Susan.

‘Yeah, why not. I remember an amazing chocolate cake at the commune. Vinegar and eggs. Does it still exist, Hungry Creek?’ Dot asked Rena. ‘Are you living there?’

‘Can we borrow a ladder?’ said Rena, coming out of her trance with a static fizz. ‘There are louvres in a downstairs window but it’s too high to get them out.’

‘Sorry?’

‘To Mike’s house. We need to get in.’

The sides of the tea mug were stinging hot. It wobbled slightly as Dot replaced it and liquid slopped onto the table. ‘No. You can’t break in.’

‘Have you got a key?’

‘No. But if he’s not there he’s not there.’

‘I’m worried. What if something’s happened?’ Rena stared at Dorothy, direct. The bones in her face were still strong and beautiful. She looked capable of anything. ‘Like when he got stuck? Like if he hasn’t got his medication?’

‘My mother shouldn’t talk about things like that.’

The girl Susan placed her hands over her ears, closed her eyes and began to hum a song.

‘What if he’s lying there unable to move? Unable to reach the phone?’ Rena said. ‘It’s the louvre window or we bust the front door.’

‘Sorry, but I don’t understand why it’s so urgent.’

Rena jabbed at her own chest. ‘I’m dying.’ It was almost a shout, full of terror.

‘Oh my god,’ Dorothy said. ‘Rena, I’m so sorry.’ She reached across the table to place her palm over the woman’s wide, veiny hand.

‘I need to know if he wants my place at Hungry Creek. She doesn’t.’ A thumb jerked towards her daughter, who was examining the papers on the bench – school permission notices, children’s swimming certificates, a gas bill.

‘So men . . .’

‘Yeah hell, we let men in years ago. If he wants it, there’s an interview process. But I need to know now. We’ve got to get back there tonight. So if he’s home and just not answering the phone or whatever, I want to know. Susan, you’re small enough, your mum can give you a leg-up through the window.’

‘I can tell him to call you.’ Dorothy was still wearing her puffer jacket and another bolt of her own body heat surged through her. ‘Well, I’ve got to go out again,’ she lied. ‘Rena, I’m so sorry.’

The flat battery on the smoke alarm beeped. Something else to do later.

Outside the house Dorothy waited for them to get into the van.

‘Oh, we’ll just hang around a bit to see if Michael shows up,’ Rena said.

Dorothy stared at her. Was she really having a stand-off with a dying hippy? The dog waggled around the back door of Dot’s car, ready to jump in. She imagined, if she drove off on her fake errand, anything to get away from Rena, the child being pushed through the gap between the bathroom louvres. Rena waiting while the girl walked through the dark house with her hands covering her ears, a house that was strange to her. Past Michael’s closed doors and drawn curtains. Looking for the front door, or the back door, any door to open onto the world outside, hoping not to pass an arm on the floor flung out of a doorway. Michael’s enormous body sprawling from the end of it.

‘Aren’t you worried he’s in there,’ Rena persisted, ‘stuck again? I mean, do you look after him or what? You know he’d be crazy not to take Hungry Creek. The world’s going to hell. I’m glad I won’t be around to see it.’

Across the road, a leaf zigzagged the air at dream speed and settled on the roof of Michael’s car, joining the yellowing layer that covered the bonnet too.

‘All right. I’ll do it. Come on,’ Dorothy said to the dog, and clicked her tongue.



The louvre panes were heavy, their edges bumpy and rough, and she had to push down hard on each one to slide it out into the bathroom, gripping tight so as not to have it drop and smash on the floor or the toilet that sat just below, lid down. The glass was thick and possibly unbreakable but still Dorothy was careful as she slid a removed pane out between the remaining slats and lowered it into Rena’s ready palms. Mei held either side of the ladder’s ridged metal rails. The top of the ladder leaned into Michael’s weatherboard wall. Susan was a small distance away, at the street corner of the house, with the dog. If she was on lookout, nobody put the language on it.

‘Michael,’ Dorothy called through the widened gap in the window, a mouth missing some teeth. ‘Hello? Michael?’

From the road came the swoosh of a car passing without slowing down. Far away someone was mowing a lawn. The man’s legs would be catching blades of grass and bits of grit that would smear if touched, the way things did after the rain. She called again, and listened, and a weak response seemed to come from somewhere inside.

The top half of her body fitted through the gap and she could easily reach the cistern, which she balanced on while she tried to hoist her hips over the window ledge. The flush button was in the middle of the cistern lid and an edge of a finger pressed it and the water gushed loudly. She was doubled, half in and half out of the window. Her mind was on holding herself up with her arms and not collapsing like an enormous tracksuit-clad snake into the bathroom, and also on the bottom half of her body sticking out the window and the possibility that Rena, Mei or Susan would have a digital video camera or filming capabilities on a cell phone. She leaned down to flip shut the lid and seat of the toilet and tipped forward, one arm outstretched, and lunged, like an acrobat shinning down her partner’s body, from balancing on the cistern lid to the closed toilet seat to the floor and now her whole self was balanced on her hands in the small bathroom, and something happened with her feet and her legs thudded to join her so that she was sideways half on the floor half on the toilet and now she stood upright, panting.

‘I’m in,’ she called. ‘Michael? Are you home? I’m in the house.’ No reply. ‘I’ll let you in the back,’ she called to Rena. She pulled at the filmy white shower curtain that surrounded the bath. No Michael, just matching pink plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner. Dorothy peeled the leg of her tracksuit away from her left calf and felt the white-flaked skin where she had scraped it on the window ledge, pinpricks of blood dotting through over the shin bone. The bathroom door was closed. Suddenly she needed to pee and she did, and flushed the toilet again although the slow cistern hadn’t refilled. There was a toothbrush on the basin ledge. The empty space behind her reflection in the mirror made her shudder.

A bit of light pierced the shady hallway, and she walked towards the kitchen at the back of the house. She startled – a peculiar split second of announcing silence, the echo before the sound – and the telephone rang. It was intensely loud and she picked up and said, ‘Michael’s house.’

‘May I speak with Lord Waldegrave?’

Dorothy laughed. ‘No, sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong number.’

‘Oh. My apologies.’ The man hung up.

Mei’s dark head and Rena’s grey one passed the kitchen window. She put down the phone and a light tapping came at the back door and a woman’s voice quietly called her name. She turned the lock but the handle wouldn’t move. ‘It’s snibbed,’ she said through the crack in the door, or where there would have been a crack if the door hadn’t fitted tightly into its frame. ‘The lock needs a key.’

There was a wooden block attached to the wall next to the door, a curlicued pokerwork line burned into it, just like the key holders they had made in woodwork at high school. With a rushing sound a wave of rain swept against the house and the women shouted at her to hurry. Two keys dangled from the block’s nails, one small and flat like a key to a padlock and the other a slightly rusted cartoon key. Neither of them fitted the back door.

‘He’s not here,’ she said into the door. The rain was sparser now, spattery. Mei looked through the window at Dot and pointed two fingers towards the front of the house.

Aside from the burned knife by the stovetop, the kitchen was clean, a bowl of soft local apples on the table. The fridge lurched into a hum. The milk inside was sour. She leafed through the letters next to the telephone. The same city council rates bill she had in her own house, the gas company bill, a flyer advertising gardening services, lawn mowing, tree surgery, Turk of America, Kilim Monthly. And among these, letters addressed to Sir Michael de Waldegrave Esq., Lord Forrest Waldegrave, Waldegrave House, Sir Van Der Waldegrave, The Manse. An A4 envelope with the sender recorded as Who’s Who. Who’s Who. The phrase owled around inside her head, talons out.

Dorothy leaned against the bench for a few seconds then reached down to pick up the envelopes that had fallen onto the floor. From here she could see a spray of sauce flecks on the skirting boards, a swept line of crumbs in the corner, a squashed kidney bean. She opened the cupboard and a meal moth flew out. The women were knocking hard on the front door, ringing the doorbell. She checked the empty living room, then the bedroom before opening the door; the bedding was rumpled, the bed half made, and a pillow lay on the carpet next to a roach-studded saucer. The house hung with the stale stench of pot. Outside, the dog barked.

‘He’s not here,’ she said, and walked out the front door and shut it behind her. Rena pushed at the door but it had automatically locked; there was no handle.

‘No,’ Rena said. The dog was out of sight, still barking, after a cat perhaps. The four of them stood on Michael’s doorstep and Rena said, nodding towards the side of the house, where the bubbled glass louvres would be stacked against the weatherboards, spotted with rain, and the bathroom window blackly open, ‘Why’d you do that? We’re going to have to go in again.’

‘Why? He’s not there. He’s probably gone away.’

‘He would have told you.’

‘For god’s sake. He isn’t there. Leave it.’ Dot stood by Michael’s letterbox, facing away from the house across the road.

‘Come on, Granny,’ said Susan. ‘I want to go.’

Over by Dorothy’s house the sound of the dog barking was incessant.

‘What do you want to do?’ Mei asked her mother. She stroked a hand down the crimped slope of Rena’s shaggy hair and pulled her into an embrace. Rena rubbed her eyes into Mei’s shoulder, while Susan patted her grandmother’s back with a small, childish touch. When the old woman lifted her head and rolled it on her neck and sighed, the edges of her eyes were red. ‘If he doesn’t care,’ she said to Dorothy. ‘I’m dying. I need to know from him before I finalise the will. If he doesn’t care, it’ll go somewhere else.’

‘Mum,’ Mei said gently, ‘please don’t keep saying that.’

‘What, I’m dying? What’s the matter, it’s not enough that I’m dying, now I’m forbidden to say I’m dying? It’s the lying that gives you cancer, Mei, I’ll tell you that much.’ They were all speaking loudly now, over the maddening relentless sound of the dog.

‘OK.’ Dorothy stepped back towards them. ‘Does he know how to get hold of you? Why don’t you give me your number, in case he’s lost it. I’m sorry, I’ve got to see what’s bothering the dog. She brings rodents in the house.’

‘I’ve been leaving messages for a week.’ Rena’s voice was losing some of its resolve.

‘Can you wait a bit longer?’

‘OK.’

In the glove box of the van they found a piece of paper from a notepad with a real estate agent’s face on the right-hand corner, and Susan had a pink glitter pen in the back seat. The girl buckled herself in and picked up a comic book. Rena wrote her number on the paper, and Urgent across the top. ‘I need to see him,’ she said quietly. ‘Can you tell him that, Dorothy? Even if he doesn’t want what I can give. I need to see him before I die. I have to make amends.’

‘Oh, Rena.’ Dorothy took the note. She didn’t want to ask for what. ‘Michael’s had a hard life.’ She hugged the older woman, her velvety purple jacket, inhaled her smell of citronella. Ribby Mei stepped forward to be held too. From the van’s back window, through a rubbed hole in the condensation, Susan blinked.

‘Happy birthday for the other day,’ Mei said.

‘Oh yeah. Thanks. Same to you.’

The dog arrived at Dorothy’s side, half-jumping up at her. ‘Down!’ she said, but the dog kept barking as they drove off.

Halfway up the path to her house Dorothy smelled burning. The kitchen was on fire.



Late the next night, after Hannah was in bed, some kind of dreamy folk music emanating from Donald’s room and Amy on the back steps locked in a phone call with a friend, arguing over her new veganism – ‘Vegetables are nature’s meat’ – Andrew answered a short hard rapping on the door. Dot heard male voices. Sometimes she hid from unexpected visitors, as though her agoraphobic self had reappeared. She and the kids made it a game, soundlessly gleeful as one extended a smooth leg and nudged the door of the television room so that it swung slowly to a soft close. But now she emerged from the blackened, soaked, foul-smelling kitchen into the hall, apron on, dishcloth and grater in hand. It was Michael’s bulk in the doorway, and Andrew said, ‘Mike’s back. He says his house has been broken into.’

Her brother was sweating, breathing hard, distress on his face.

‘Where have you been?’ she asked.

‘Do you have to know everything? F*ck man, this neighbourhood is totally unsafe.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Andrew said. He was shattered from sitting up all night guarding the open back door while they aired the kitchen. Half sleeping with his head on a pillow on the table, a tennis racket propped up next to him where another person would have had a shotgun.

‘Come in,’ said Dot. ‘We had a bit of an accident.’ She wasn’t sure how Michael was going to react. Her older brother sat on the living-room sofa with his elbows on his knees. A crane fly stroked the window with one of its fine, hairlike legs. In a blur it batted across the glass sideways and settled again, resuming its thin lines.

‘They found that guy,’ said Michael, ‘the one that escaped from Mount Eden. I was helping look for him.’

Dorothy picked up Donald’s homework book and held it to her chest.

‘Michael,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen Rena.’

‘Rena.’ It was as though she’d slapped him. Before she could mention the woman’s illness, or the commune, or the inheritance that waited there, her brother lowered his big head to his arms and wept.