The Forrests

16. Fire





It said he was in a relationship. He listed himself as ‘retired’, a joke, and ‘spends most of his time travelling’, which might also have been a joke except for the photographs from a recent trip to Rio, for the carnival. The same elfin-featured girl was in most of them, looking to be about twenty-one, long brown limbs draped over Daniel, her short blonde hair catching the light. That would be right. She’d have been the one to design this page. Although Daniel had known how to use the Internet to his advantage, it only operated for him as an old-fashioned Rolodex might. Follow Daniel on Twitter! Poke Daniel! Send Daniel a gift today!

Daniel’s page showed a photo of a man who looked older, but not old.

Dot left the tablet on the bench and paced the room.

Across the dry garden, between the house and the road, wisps of dirt rose as if the earth was smouldering. There came a sudden rattle of rain. Hannah and Destiny ran towards the house from the cruddy old car, towels tenting their heads, shrieking. It was crazy at the beach, they said, the wave-tips ultraviolet through the storm light, the sky so dark it looked like an eclipse.

The kids went round the house shutting windows and putting lights on, and the wind noise picked up, and from her bedroom Dot watched distant cars driving with headlights on, grass flattened on the hills, trees trembling. Andrew lay on the bed watching rugby. A battle long lost, the screen on the chest of drawers, and the truth was she didn’t mind, enjoyed late-night cop shows and documentaries, a replacement for sex or conversation. If she wanted to read there was the living-room couch and sometimes she woke in the small hours of the morning under the thin woollen throw, neck stiff, the gadget hot on her stomach.

‘Going to be a storm,’ she said. Andrew hummed acknowledgement. She patted his foot before she left the room, and he twitched away, a reflex.

In the hot living room, which smelled of pine needles and Christmas lilies, the girls had laid out a Ouija board. Dorothy let Hannah pull her down to sit with them on the carpet. Silver baubles knocked against each other when she brushed against the spiky Christmas tree. ‘I thought you’d outgrown this.’ The board had taken a thrashing during Hannah’s occult phase, but since she became a surfer it languished in her bedroom cupboard.

Hannah shouted over her shoulder, ‘Donald, come on!’ To her mother, ‘Destiny’s grandma died ten years ago today. We’re going to call her up.’

‘Have you got any dry clothes? Go and change before you start wakening the spirits.’ They wore their summer wetsuits, the tops peeled down, bikinis underneath, hair tangled and damp. ‘You’ll catch cold.’

Weather like this should bring Eve, this storm that licked up water and dirt and flung them around in muddy flames. A funnelled tower of cloud massed across the hills. Wind scalloped the puddles. She stared at that olive tree across the road. A bulge in the trunk would swell and burst. Her sister would shake out of the bark, make her way here through the rain. Dot remembered, as she did every Christmas, her mother’s schoolfriend – the woman who gave away her son. Years later the grown stranger standing outside the house, hoping to be taken in.

If only she had made more mistakes. If only time would deliver her a young man waiting on the driveway, his hand extended to be shaken.

Grace stuck her head through the door. ‘Mum, Louisa’s here.’ She looked at the Ouija set-up, the arc of letters and the stone planchette. ‘Can you get rid of that? We’re not going to do it any more.’

‘Good thinking.’ She folded it into the drawstring bag.



Lou hadn’t changed out of her pink nurse’s uniform. ‘Ta-dah, the home movies,’ she said, brandishing a USB stick from her pocket. ‘Finally.’

‘How was work?’

‘Bit tough.’ She was doing a long stint on the coma and neuro wards. ‘No change for Tina. Baby’s first Christmas.’

Tina was a teenage mum Dot had worked with at the maternity home. Nearly a year ago she had given birth, and hours later had a brain haemorrhage. She was still alive, in that way. ‘That way’, Dorothy explained to her children when they moaned about their unjust world, meant on a respirator, in a nappy, fed through tubes, drained by tubes, unable to see or hold her baby. The other mums, the girls whose babies came around the same time, had visited at first. Now hardly anyone came. Their lives had moved on.

Thunder and lightning broke, and the rain roared. The hall lights flashed out and on again. The family piled onto Dot and Andrew’s bed and watched the Forrest home recording that Ruth had reformatted and sent to Lou. Stop-motion children jumped into and out of a cardboard box, appeared and disappeared behind tree trunks, and waved halves of themselves beside a long mirror. Someone had added a soundtrack, a sort of Laurel and Hardy tune that made the past seem even more remote.

‘Is that you?’ Grace asked of a cartwheeling figure.

‘God, look at our haircuts. There I am.’ Streaking across the shot, Daniel leggily after her, the camera not interested, trained on the cardboard box on the lawn, the box that rose and was cast aside to reveal Eve, now in close-up saying something unrecorded, dropping the box to the ground and walking back into the house, bending to pat the cat. In the dim bedroom, Louisa reached for Dorothy’s hand.

The camera followed Evelyn up the steps and into the house. Blackness fell as it crossed the threshold indoors, then the world revealed itself again in adjusted light. Eve stood at the kitchen sink drinking a long glinting glass of water. She set the empty glass down and looked straight at the camera once before she started to perform, a hand behind her head in a parody of a swimsuit model, cat-walking the hallway. The camera followed her up and down, up and down, swinging past its own reflection in the hall mirror: flashes of their father, a young man. Behind Eve the front door opened. Daniel burst into the hall and star-jumped for the camera, tongue sticking out, skinny-ribbed, his knees big lumps on sticklike legs.

Dorothy snuck a look at Andrew. His eyes were closed, head back on the pillows, his breath loud and heavy. The image on the screen cut to an outdoor public swimming pool where light blazed on the surface of the water. A teenage Michael ploughed through with a powerful stroke. They watched, mesmerised, until a few seconds later the image fizzed out in a power cut. Another pop came when Donald drew the cork from a bottle of wine. ‘May as well,’ he said, ‘seeing as charades is f*cking inevitable.’ Dorothy lit candles through the house. She recited the names. One for each wick as it caught alight.

Amy sat next to a mound of broad bean husks, and a dark, glossy pile of silverbeet and plump tomatoes from the garden. Dot looked in the pantry. Rice and chickpeas. Her daughter shook the pale-brown china bowl with broad beans in it as though prospecting for river gold. ‘Never looks as much once you’ve shelled them.’

Dot pulled the tablet towards her to look at that recipe site. A cold wave broke through her as the resume bar progressed along the screen – Daniel’s web page – she hadn’t closed it down. Now the surf report was up and who knew where he had gone. The page wasn’t there. Daniel free, at large in the world.

‘Amy,’ she said, ‘is this you?’ But when she looked over Amy had gone, a bowl of pale green beans, and Hannah leaned on the kitchen table, reading her old witchcraft manual. ‘ “Widdershins,” ’ she sounded, ‘ “Widdershins.” ’

The house creaked and began to turn.

‘What, darling?’ Dorothy said.

Hannah looked at her. ‘There’s someone calling.’

Dorothy said, ‘Stop!’ And although Daniel said, quietly, from Rio, Come on, darling, that wasn’t the word, everything did.





After a fifth and final goodbye hug, Dot drove the rental car around the corner, parked it outside a university building, held onto the steering wheel and sobbed for Hannah’s small room there at the hostel, a room that to her eyes still looked empty without shelves of books, though there was the band poster she’d brought from home, the big plastic eyes on the stuffed toy puppy Hannah had had since she was a baby and her brave smile as she sat perched on the edge of the single bed, back straight and knees together as though good posture was the key to independence. Dorothy growled through clenched teeth and shook the steering wheel. There was a loud knock on the car window, and she startled. The boy was maybe twenty, with wild hair and cheeks that were rosy all the way down to his chin. She unwound the window and took her glasses off to wipe her eyes.

‘You all right?’

Dorothy wiped a sleeve over her face. ‘Yes, thanks. I just dropped my youngest daughter off for her first semester. I’m fine.’

A guitar was slung across his back. He adjusted the strap. ‘Yeah, my folks lost their shit pretty bad too. Thought you might have been robbed or something.’

Dorothy smiled. ‘Thank you. I’m in therapy.’

The young man laughed as though she was joking, then lifted his head, a response to some whistle only he could hear, and in the rear-view mirror she watched him lope over the road to his gathered friends.





At the maternity home she set up the charcoals and the glitter dust, all the art therapy doodahs, while one of the teenagers painted Jo’s fingernails and Carla gelled her hair. Jo drew a line inside her lower eyelid with kohl pencil and sighed, satisfied at what she saw in the pocket mirror. The gesture was reminiscent of a teenage Eve, only Jo was eight and a half months pregnant. Through the steel-framed windows came the kissing noises of insects in the courtyard, its gravelled surface already dried and laced with dust.

‘It’s hot today,’ said Dot. A bead of sweat ran down the side of her ribs as she pinned Jo’s ‘portrait of a future self’ to the wall next to the printing screens. The girl had drawn her whole body, no longer pregnant, holding hands with a child of about three. She’d detailed the Gothic font tattoos over her breastbone, and she was wearing her Dickies and wifebeater, and there was no man in the picture.

‘See that?’ Jo said, beaming. ‘Pride of place.’

‘Whoop-de-shit.’ Sondra screwed her self-portrait into a fist and thrust it at Dorothy’s face. Dot stumbled back into the guillotine table, and the girl jammed the picture into the ridged bin in the corner of the room, the black-plastic bin that smelled waxily of crayons and vegetable dye.

‘Sondra, come on.’ Dorothy retrieved the paper and smoothed its creases. The girl had drawn a fly scribbled on its back, zigzag legs doing all the work of rendering its f*ckedness, and a squashed red oval alongside. ‘What’s that?’ Dot asked.

‘A bean.’

‘A bean?’

Sondra shrugged.

‘Is it a foetus?’

‘No, it’s a bean.’

Dorothy handed her a brown-paper bag that she’d saved from the grocery store. ‘OK, so we’re doing paper-bag portraits.’

‘Oh man.’

You could feel the mood spread through the group. Some days it was like this, past hurts and grudges seeped up and the coming babies, their dreadful inevitability, were a muffled chorus of curses from inside. The fabric scraps and junk art materials were housed by the sink. Dorothy jiggled a box jammed between shelves, trying to winkle it free. Behind her, Jo cried out. Arms raised, Sondra turned in a slow circle, the winning boxer after a prize fight. The scissors were in one hand, sharp ends out. In the other, a dark length aloft: a hank of Jo’s hair.

Dorothy slapped the box down hard on the guillotine table. ‘Sondra,’ she said, ‘this hair f*ckery was over. Damn it, you’re going to see Carmen now. Put the scissors down.’

Sondra drew her arm back as if to throw them at Dot. Everyone flinched. But she tossed the hair at Jo’s face. ‘Have it, whore.’ The scissors, dropped, clattered on the lino.

‘Go back to your rapey old boyfriend –’

Dorothy pulled Sondra’s strong, squidgy arm towards the door. The girl shook her off. ‘Don’t touch me.’

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Dorothy shouted, ‘Shut up,’ although no one was talking.

It was Louisa. ‘Aunty Dot?’

She never called during work hours. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I have news,’ Lou said, her voice alight, brimming. Dorothy held a hand up and waited till the girls were silent. ‘Tina’s awake. She’s woken up.’

‘Tina’s awake,’ said Dorothy, staring at Jo. The girl raised her head. The room stilled. All of them knew Tina. Some had been friends from high school, her life before.

‘You can come and see her.’ Even Lou sounded as though she didn’t quite believe it. ‘Bring the girls tomorrow.’

A tiny jewelled lizard ran up the window frame, fast as poison.



Just as dusk dropped into night and the frogs were at their most riotous, a strange car pulled into the drive. Momentarily she thought it was the police, or the King Cobras – that was the sort of vehicle they used, thickset – and felt a wash of guilt run down her body. She didn’t move from the window. If, say, Sondra’s boyfriend and his gang ever did come looking for the girl, if they decided her running away was unacceptable, she would lose all power when the doors slammed, be numb while the sunglasses peered through the mosquito mesh of the door, and open-palmed, acquiescent, when they pushed that door open and filled her house with their bandanas and black jackets. But it was Andrew getting out of the sedan, alone. She felt a queer, impotent ellipsis when the other doors remained closed and no children piled out of the car after him. This is a time for the rediscovery of you. A privilege. Many people I see don’t get this chance.

He leaned partway into her hug, gave her a shoulder pat, physical contact is important; you are telling him he is cherished, and stepped back to splash water on his face at the kitchen sink.

‘Is that new?’ she asked.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘What do you reckon?’

‘Was it very expensive?’

‘Not really.’

‘How much?’

‘Not that much.’

She spoke to his back. ‘Guess what. Tina’s come out of the coma.’

‘Huh?’ Not all your interests have to be the same. ‘Give me a hand.’

They lugged a heavy black speaker system into the house.

‘Are these new too?’

‘Yep.’

‘Why?’

‘Dorothy, the old speakers are shit. Have you noticed? The sound’s tinny.’ He liked the retro stuff. It might be valuing the past. Not clinging on.

Andrew connected the thick, taillike cords from the back of each machine into the bedroom power point. She brought a dish of salami and cheese crackers, and opened a couple of beers and they drank them. ‘Where did you get that? The sound system?’

‘There’s a mall down the road, Dot.’

He’d had a show of his paintings at the local gallery, where Jennifer had sold half of them. It didn’t make him any nicer. Adjust your expectations, bitch. OK. That last part was her.



When she got up in the morning, wrapped in her printed sarong, Andrew was prone on his karate mat in the awning’s shade, reading. She stepped into the shadows and put a foot in the centre of his back, over his bumpy spine.

‘Is that foot clean?’

‘Shall I stand on you?’

‘Could I handle it?’

‘I doubt it.’ She stepped off and sat on the edge of the deck.

After coffee, he walked her down the hill to the maternity home, and traffic trundled past. Appreciate the little things. Green light from the palm leaves surrounded his head. ‘So I hear there’s another nuke ship out there,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the invisible harbour. A bird purred from the bushes by the roadside.

‘Yeah, apparently junk. It’s circling while they find a place to process it. Debt cancellation.’ She was repeating what stood in for news, what presented itself as news these days although nobody trusted the source. Maybe debt would be cancelled; maybe it wouldn’t.

‘I thought it was a Chinese deal.’

‘Could be. Law firms, tax havens, whatever.’ Knowledge had been replaced by phrases that induced a vague paranoia. Like everyone they knew, Dot and Andrew had stopped looking out into the frames of the world. They crossed the road to dodge a couple of beige dogs that were snarling and chewing at each other’s necks.

‘So. When are we going to talk about what we’ve got to talk about?’

Dorothy fanned herself with a piece of paper from her bag. It was going to be a scorcher. ‘What do you want to talk about? Jennifer? I’ve got nothing to say about Jennifer. I’m running late.’

‘You agreed we would talk.’

‘Here on the road? Is this why you’re here? I’m late for work.’

‘OK, you’ve got your work. Sure.’

‘Do some paintings. Or go and see Jennifer. I like Jennifer. Say hi from me.’ Lying is counterproductive. Or Fake it till you feel it. Or Speak your truth. Or Have high expectations. Or How about a reality check or Listen to yourself or Get out of your own way.

‘ “Do some paintings”? That’s a f*cking emasculating thing to say.’

‘Sorry.’ A fly zipped past her ear. ‘We’ll talk when I get back. Later. If you’re there.’ Through the low shop-buildings a view cracked open of the city and the sky above it, clouds banked in deepening shades of grey against each other, piles of rocks in the sky.



As Dot crossed the courtyard, Sondra intercepted her with the news that Jo’s waters had broken, the baby was coming early, maybe too early, and they’d taken her to hospital. ‘It’s my fault.’

Dorothy hugged her close. ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘It’s because I cut her. Now the baby’s going to be deformed.’ Dee-formed, that was how she said it.

‘Listen, she’ll be fine. Where’s Carmen? Are we still going to see Tina?’

The central hospital was a van ride away. Carmen, the maternity home director, organised them, Dorothy and the girls, all except Jo who was doing the hard yards in the birthing unit on another side of town. Sondra was not allowed to go. Dorothy hated Carmen’s kind of discipline. She left the girl lying on her bunk bed, reading. ‘Do you want my iPod?’ Sondra said nothing. Dot laid it on the blanket near her feet.

The van’s air conditioner was broken. The mothers sat on the splitting vinyl seats with legs apart, fanning themselves.

‘Has she seen her baby?’ Dot asked.

‘I think so.’

‘Imagine it, having a newborn, then next thing you know you wake up and you’ve got a kid who’s nearly one.’

‘Sounds like normal life,’ Carmen said. ‘Boom.’

Dorothy shut her eyes; let her body be rocked by the vehicle’s bad suspension.

‘Hey, Dorothy,’ one of the girls in the back called over the engine, ‘what would you draw on the paper bag? Your self-portrait?’

She thought about it. ‘Breathe into this?’

The girl squinted. ‘What?’

At the hospital she would find a moment to call Andrew, suggest they go for a walk later or dinner. This was an adjustment period, without the kids. A new way of being. It was natural they had no clue how to handle it.

The smell of the hospital was just the same. Emerging from the lift into the neurology ward, Dot felt her mouth parch up. Almost expected to see the same nurses or that man with half a head, leering round a corner. But this was a happy time, she told herself, the girls’ chatter filling the foyer. ‘Tina!’ someone yelled out, the vowels bouncing off the walls. A nurse approached. It was Lou.

‘In here.’ She grabbed Dorothy’s hands and kissed her cheek. ‘I know, I know.’

‘It’s a blessing,’ said Carmen.

‘It’s a miracle.’

Tina’s body was obscured by the crowd of girls. Dot made her way to the corner by the window, where there was breathing room.

‘She’s not talking yet,’ said Lou.

‘Tina,’ Carmen said softly, almost singing. ‘Tina, Tina, you woke up.’ She leaned forward and Dot could see the smooth, relaxed arm. The girls crooned quiet hellos and patted the bed or the body tenderly. For a few moments the air in the room held this gentle wakening energy, more like a ward with newborn babies than here where people were submerged, semiconscious.

Lou stood with Dorothy at the window. In the car park a girl pushed a young boy around in a wheelchair, careening around cars and bollards, the boy’s arms stretched above his head. With no warning, the girl jerked the wheelchair to a stop and the boy tumbled out. For a second both children froze. Then he got to his feet and walked straight up to the girl and whacked her arm. The car park dissolved into an asphalt blur, the children out of sight.

A gull-like cry came from the bed, and one of the girls called out, ‘She’s pulling her tubes.’

Lou cleared them back to the corridor and passing the bed Dorothy saw Tina, her arms and legs jerking, her plump, unlined teenager’s face awake, her eyes open. A doctor pushed the door shut. ‘Come on, out of here.’

‘Let’s go,’ said one of the girls, her pointed finger on the button, holding the lift doors open.



It was lunchtime when they got back, and Dot and the girls set pots of chicken and rice out on the communal table beneath the vine-braided trellis. Their usual loud, rude talk warmed up again now they were sitting down, far from the hospital’s constraints. She and Andrew hadn’t even kissed in months. Focus on the positive. But maybe that was a positive. Confused! The table was dappled by shifting blobs of light that filtered through the vine, patches of whiteness in the paddle shapes of stegosaurus fins. As a child their son had been a dinosaur obsessive; before Donald could tell the difference between letters and numbers he knew a baryonyx from a coelophysis. Tendrils and crinkle-edged leaves curled above their heads. Beyond this shade, the courtyard light banged whitely up from ashy gravel. Heat pulsed. Sondra handed Dorothy her iPod. Free of make-up, her face looked peeled, huge as she leaned forward, awkwardly, and said thanks. Dorothy took her bowl to the kitchen with some others to scrape the dark-grey, splintered bones with squashed purplish ends into the rubbish bin.

Several hours later, Jo was still in labour.

‘They induced her,’ said Sondra, ‘her water broke and nothing’s happened so they gave her the shot.’

‘Going to hurt like hell now,’ said Carla, the youngest girl. ‘And they get the forceps in there too.’

‘That suction thing,’ Sondra said, ‘like the plumbers have.’

‘The ventouse,’ said Dot.

‘Gives the baby the pointy head. My nephew got one of those, but he turned back to normal.’

‘They’ll probably have to cut her open,’ Carla said. ‘Caesarean time.’ She ran a pointed fingernail down the middle of her belly. Pottery clay sat drying in half-squidged lumps on the art table, its surface taking on a webby bloom. The girls’ talk whittled into silence. After a time, through the walls between them and the administrator’s office, came the faint trilling of the telephone. They held still and then, a few long seconds later, they heard Carmen cheer.



Dorothy walked home as fast as she could, wheezing from asthma and all right all right age. Cries and thuds came from the neighbour’s kids, playing stickball in the street – a balding tennis ball rolled by her feet and with a grunt she scooped it up and lobbed it back to the pitcher who caught it flawlessly, like it was coming home into his hand.

The house was warm and smelled of toast. There he lay on the bed watching a cycle of BBC World News. Your husband. Dorothy held the stitch that gripped her side. On the screen, weather maps swirled. ‘Jo’s had the baby,’ she said, a hand on her chest from the urgent walk and from the burning knot of this news. ‘She’s fine. He’s a boy.’ She took a piece of toast from Andrew’s plate and ate a corner.

‘Hey. That’s mine.’

‘I’ll make you some more. Have one of these.’

She’d picked up a packet of biscuits on the way home and now she tossed it next to Andrew on the bed. Keeping his eyes fixed to the news, he pulled and pulled at the cellophane wrapper and finally she took it off him and used her back teeth, feeling a dangerous tug on her gums as she wrenched the packet away from her mouth.

‘Ruth called this morning,’ he said.

‘How is she?’

‘Oh, she’s in NA and SLAA and OA and a group for compulsive shoppers. Got a lot of language. Had a lot to say about intimacy. Rationalisation. Narcissism. Ownership. Addiction.’

‘Jesus.’ These were Ben’s terms, it appeared, part of his ultimatum. There would be no more solo trips to Europe or New Zealand; there would be no more Hank. Poor Ruth. ‘How was your day?’

His eyes searched the room as though the answer was written in the air. ‘Night school hasn’t opened yet.’

In the kitchen she slid bread into the toaster and pressed the lever down. It was broken and she had to push it again and again, metal rasping against metal, and finally hold it in place with a heavy chopping board. Propped by the bread bin was an internationally posted envelope with her name on it. The handwriting made the room tip. She tore it open while she took spreadable butter from the fridge and honey from the pantry, too many things in her hands, the paper resistant, thickly glued, she tore right through the return address. The bread began to toast. The crumb smell streaked the air like charcoal. Eve’s gaze. Her appetite had vanished; if anything she wanted a drink. From the envelope she took a printed rectangle of card that bore a photo of Daniel and a woman who looked about thirty. Dark-haired. Not the Rio blonde. The pressed text was notification of their wedding, the date already passed. Daniel’s note said Dottie – I finally did it – you’re right, it’s the best thing ever, and ended with kisses and love, D. ‘You’re right’? Her name was Maria. ‘You’re right’? When had she ever said ‘It’s the best’? WHEN HAD SHE EVER SAID THAT? Dorothy crammed the card back into the envelope. The stamps were from Spain.

‘Andy,’ she said – the word just came out of her mouth. In the window behind him the image from the screen was reflected: another weather map. She stood in the bedroom doorway and decided to do it before there was time to think. ‘Turn off the TV.’ In the kitchen the toast popped. The dark, cooked smell made her feel a bit sick. Her husband raised a godlike arm towards the screen and it fell silent. Unconsciously – really, Dorothy? – she lifted the words from Daniel. ‘Andy, you’re right. It’s for the best. We’ll get a divorce.’

The invisible cage around him atomised. You could almost see it break up into particles and float away. ‘Dottie.’ He looked amazed. ‘We’re having the talk.’

The phone rang, and they looked at each other until she said, ‘It’s OK. Answer it.’ While he was talking, she went out on the deck and sat on his karate mat, then stood again and tried to do downward dog, and felt blood rush to her face and straightened up and walked to the edge of the kwila boards, her head thudding, and made herself stop, not move. The yellow leaves prinkling that dark green tree. Look. Orange droplets of rust on the wind chimes.