The Forrests

17. Hungry Creek





The comment thread was a comfort, largely because the older divorcees who posted there were much unhappier than her, and seemed to struggle with language. ‘Life is so cool to be sad and depressed.’ ‘God loves your wrinkle and your failing hearing.’ ‘YOU OWN NO ONE NO ONE OWNS YOU.’ But Dot knew she should wean herself off. Someone had written ‘I haven’t been lonely once.’ She closed down the connection and returned to the world – Grace’s small living room – the chaos of morning.

Her grandson was making goofy faces at the crockery cabinet’s reflective glass doors. ‘Frankie!’ An echo of words hung in the room – his mother had spoken, given an instruction – the sense evaporated. He sprawled on the floor and commando-crawled towards the mound of clothes on the sofa. His wrists landed on the cushions as though pulling himself towards a desert oasis. Lightly he popped to his feet, plucked underpants from the pile and flung them high into the air, where they somersaulted before he caught them. He did it again. ‘Hey, Dodo, look.’

She was already looking. How could she ever wrench her gaze from this perfect boy, her grandson, his shiny shiny eyes. Dot began to fold the washing. This time Frankie bobbed up beneath his pants like a soccer player heading the ball. His mother said the same thing as before, more loudly, and he spun towards the sound and the underpants fell to the floor. Dorothy cheered as the boy kicked them down the hall, swerving invisible oncomers. Grace gave her a look. ‘Are you sure you want to come with us?’

‘Yes. I can help with Meg. If you have to talk to them separately or something.’

‘I won’t have to talk to them separately.’

Meg was being auditioned for a commercial, if you could describe a baby screen test as an audition. The kids were good-looking. It helped pay the rent.

Frankie emerged from the bathroom wearing the underpants and tossed his pyjamas in the air so they fell in a small heap of primary colours beside the hallway runner. He put his legs through the sleeves of the pyjama top and hobbled towards Dorothy, eyes glowing. ‘I’m a cheese boy.’

‘Time to get dressed.’

‘Dodo, did you know that ten is not the highest number?’

‘What is?’ She lifted him under the arms, swung him onto the sofa beside her, and tugged a T-shirt over his head, feeling the old momentary resistance as his skull crowned through the double-stitched collar.

‘Eleven,’ Frankie said. ‘Or a hundred.’

‘What about a hundred and one?’

He stared. ‘What about a hundred and two?’

‘That’s how old Dodo is,’ said the boy’s father.

‘Aha,’ said Dorothy. ‘Today, I feel it.’

‘We should do something for your sixty-fifth.’

‘Hmm, maybe.’ She just had to keep putting Grace off until being sixty-five passed.

Amsi held the shorts out and Frankie succumbed to the inevitable. He balanced with a hand on his father’s shoulder and held one thin, knobble-kneed leg raised and lingering, crooked in space over the open waistband of the shorts. ‘Come on, you’re going to be late for school.’

Finally dressed, the boy climbed from the sofa to a kitchen chair, balanced his way over three more chairs, their legs grating on the floorboards with his shifting weight, then leapt to the hall carpet in a drop-and-roll move. He sat up and picked at the double-knotted laces of his shoes. Amsi leaned against the wall, calm, the air-traffic controller on his morning off, and watched. ‘Do you want a hand?’ he asked his son.

‘I can do it.’

Over the boy’s head Amsi spoke to Dorothy. ‘So how’s the apartment-hunting?’

Grace walked Meg down the hall towards them, holding the baby’s hands as she proceeded in small, jerky lurches.



One segment of footpath outside the house had been repaved and three paw-prints were caught in the concrete, claws out as though freshly made for all time. Dorothy sat in the back of the car because Meg cried if she was not in the front. When the engine turned over, music shrieked from the speakers. Grace cut the sound. The baby burbled and clapped her hands, and a rubbish truck ground towards them on the other side of the road, and the car passed through the dull smell of its contents and on, around the corner, up the feeder ramp and right onto the motorway that roared past the house for hours each night.

The waiting area was full of girls with curly dark hair between twelve and twenty-four months, and their mothers, or maybe nannies. Dot had never seen so many curly-headed toddlers; there must have been fifteen. She’d brought a book, but the place was too noisy. One lone man sat with his daughter on his knee, and she twinkled her hands and sang a wordless nursery rhyme as he jigged. ‘I wonder why they call everyone at the same time.’ Dot leaned forward over the low reception table so he would know she was addressing him. ‘It’s like Oz in here.’

He gave a shrug that was more like a mime of a shrug, as though they were in a nightclub or the kind of place where talk was pointless.

‘My granddaughter’s in there now,’ she said. ‘Do you come to many of these?’

‘Sorry?’ He held his daughter’s chest with one arm as he leaned forward and cupped an ear.

‘Do you come to many auditions? Does your daughter do a lot of this?’

He nodded. Then he sat back against the white faux-leather couch. The room was very hot and the adults’ voices were loud and artificial. She had done it herself, talking to Mister Unfriendly, soared into that upper register that denoted false cheer. Dorothy looked down at her shirt and saw that the buttons were uneven. Starting from the top button she fixed it, then examined the polish on her fingernails, chipped in the shapes of tiny treasure islands, the miniature repeating asterisks in the striated skin on the backs of her hands. Next to her sat a short woman, a Filipina nanny possibly, of indeterminate age. ‘I suppose this sort of thing pays well,’ Dorothy said. ‘Being in a television ad.’

‘Yes,’ said the nanny. ‘It’s a sick world.’

Dot smiled. ‘You can say that again.’

Grace came out of the casting room, the baby in her arms. Dot stood, reaching out to take her, and Grace said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Mum, your shirt.’

Oh, weird, the buttons were undone; her bra was awful, a flesh-coloured satiny thing that appeared capable of standing upright in doubled mountainous peaks if unhooked and cast to the floor. Then the roll of stomach below the bra, the protruding curve of oatmeal flesh that looked, to Dorothy, as though it belonged to somebody else. Halfway up, the curve was cut across by the transparent black waistband of her tights, with a thick raised seam wiggling indecently down the middle and disappearing into the waistband of her skirt. ‘Oops,’ Dorothy said, her voice raised for the benefit of the room.

There was no time between being a child, really bemused by bodies like this, and having one of your own, no time at all, and on the way to the car she would explain this to Grace, who looked good still, though she wore a lot of make-up and you could always see a pink elastic thong strap when she crouched down to help the kids with whatever. Not that she herself was even too decrepit; some women her age dated men of thirty, though she suspected those men were unknowingly gay. And Carmen from the maternity home had only just come out. Hope for everyone. Rather than alarmed she should be grateful. This was what she would say to Grace, that daily, in amongst all of the yeah everything, she tried to be consciously grateful. So what if she had learned it from the Internet? And she knew, she could tell, that Grace loved her kids, and her flinty, faintly desperate women friends, and her sexy old husband bringing those planes home safely day after day after day, even if she didn’t love the motorway whine and the oil refinery and half of Amsi’s colleagues sucking up the stress leave every year.

‘When will you know?’ she asked as they waited to cross the road to the car.

‘Oh, we didn’t get it.’ Grace rooted in her massive pink bag with one hand, the baby balanced on her hip with the other. ‘They cast the parents as white.’

‘They might change their mind.’ Of course they would. If it were down to her she would gobble Meg right up, her brother too.

‘God damn it, where are they?’ Grace stared at her mother, one arm half swallowed by the bag. ‘Did you give the keys back to me?’

‘Did I?’

‘After you went back for the nappies.’ Grace stood on her toes and peered down the street. ‘Where’s the car?’

‘The car’s down there.’ Dorothy gestured, loosely, to the line of parked cars.

‘Where? I can’t see it.’

They walked forward along the noisy street, the air thick with midday summer heat, as though in a trance. Meg pulled the floppy cotton hat from her damp curls and waved it, then dropped it. Dorothy bent to pick it up. Flat pods of melted chewing gum blemished the footpath. Sunlight badoinged off storefronts’ plated glass. She should have unpeeled her tights in the bathroom at the casting place, shoved them in the bin that was sickly sweet with other people’s grandchildren’s nappies.

They walked on and the spot where she had thought the car was parked moved ahead of them, like the moon used to when she was small, and they were driving at night, all of them, the dark back of her mother at the wheel, the bony pressure of a brother’s or sister’s head against her shoulder, black hills on the black night out the window. A plane slowly tore the sky overhead and Meg pointed upwards, crying, ‘Daddy.’ She thought he flew them.

Dorothy tried to remember putting the keys in her skirt pocket or in her bag, or locking the car or unlocking the car. She looked at the floral, plastic-coated nappy bag slung next to the bright pink bag over Grace’s shoulder and envisaged it sitting in the well below the passenger seat, or on the bench seat in the back. Certainty was ungraspable.

When she had come back from the car Meg was next on the list to be called in, and there was hissed panic in the white-tiled, corporate bathroom as Grace fumbled the nappies out of the bag and balanced the baby half on a raised knee and half on the bench that housed the basins, and Dorothy handed her a perfumed plastic bag and wipes in the wrong order, a nurse in surgery f*cking up her first day. Grace had lobbed the taped parcel of dirty nappy across the room and into the swing-top bin, and Dorothy applauded her daughter’s aim, left standing in the bathroom with the baby-changing implements all around her feet, the door that Grace and Meg had bolted through already sliding shut.

‘Are you sure we haven’t gone past the car?’ she said now. ‘Are you sure we came out in the right direction?’

Grace growled between her teeth, a surprisingly underworld sound.

‘Let me take her.’ Dorothy hoisted Meg into her arms. The child’s towelling playsuit was moist with sweat. They were all sweating. On Grace it looked like a sprayed sheen of lacquer. ‘Poor little thing, what a big morning.’

The road took a slight bend, which seemed to speak to them as they approached, the curve of lined buildings leaning in confidingly, You didn’t come this far, and they turned and walked back towards the casting agency, the distance shorter in reverse. On the other side of the road, a bus pulled out into the traffic and revealed the boxy profile of Grace’s car. ‘Thank God,’ Grace said.

When the traffic stopped for the lights they picked their way between idling cars, Grace darting her head forward and leading, Dorothy raising one arm to wave thanks to the drivers for letting them cross. The baby was heavy, and soggy, and the skin of their arms glued together and made a very faint sucking noise like worn-out Velcro when it peeled apart. Dot dabbed at the creases in the girl’s neck with a tissue from the floral bag. The keys were dangling from the lock on the driver’s side. ‘For f*ck’s sake,’ said Grace.

‘Oh dear,’ said Dot. ‘God, really?’

‘It’s not funny,’ said Grace. She nudged past her mother with a hip in order to unlock the passenger door. From a gilt-curlicued boutique, a very tall young woman in tight jeans emerged, a man with corrugated grey hair behind her. They swung rectangular shopping bags from plush tassels and spoke together in a language that might have been Russian. As they passed Dot, and Grace, and the baby, the young woman said something sideways to the man and threw her head back merrily and laughed. Grace threw the car keys to the gutter. ‘You used to laugh whenever I lost my temper. Laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. I hate my life,’ she cried. Tears broke from her.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I take you seriously!’ But Dot had a memory. Having to leave the dinner table when one of them – who? – pushed yet another plate away, knocking over yet another glass of water, and she was unable to control her erupting giggles at the sheer f*cking hopelessness of it all, the child wailing louder, real tears now, betrayed. She had stood in the hallway, wheezing with laughter, waiting till all this didn’t seem just completely ridiculous again.

Dot clicked Meg into the car seat and handed her a plastic bottle of water from the bracket in the door. The little girl drank then waved it around so that droplets sprayed everywhere, spotting Dorothy’s shirt. ‘Get in the back,’ Dot said.

Grace was under the wheel, retrieving the keys, sniffing. ‘But you’re not allowed to drive. It hasn’t been six months yet.’

Without seeing anything, Dorothy stared at Meg. There was an unspoken rule not to mention the loss of her licence and Grace had just broken it. Five months ago she’d been busted for speeding. In court she had been described as a recidivist and held in contempt for expostulating to the judge, ‘Don’t be so f*cking stupid.’ Turned out there was no statute of limitations on driving offences, and over the decades her unpaid fines had racked up a lot of interest. The lawyer, who promised to get her out of the charges and minimise the costs, proved to be overly optimistic. ‘A danger to road safety’ was the phrase heard. Could there be, Dorothy wondered, a statute of limitations on regret? A question to keep to herself.

‘We need to get the fan on. Sit down and have some water.’ Dorothy inched between the car in front and the dinged, flaky bonnet of Grace’s car. She sat behind the steering wheel and started the engine, and switched the air conditioner to high. After a few moments frigid air blew around them. ‘Bliss,’ said Dot.

‘This is bad for the planet,’ said Grace.

‘I know.’

Back at the house, Grace laid Meg down in the cot. The baby rolled onto her front and put her thumb in her mouth, exhausted. ‘You’re a good mother,’ Dorothy said when her daughter was back in the kitchen.

‘You can’t stay here any more.’ Grace’s voice wobbled.

Dorothy opened the pantry door, took out a small cardboard packet of raisins and lifted the flap with her thumbnail, loosened a few of the sticky black blobs and put the box next to the container of lunch that waited for Meg to awake. ‘You’re always so well prepared,’ she said.

‘I wanted to last till you could drive again. Or found an apartment. But you’re not even looking.’ Grace tipped sideways and donked her head on the wooden bench. ‘Sorry, I know you’re not a project.’

‘Darling,’ said Dorothy. ‘I’m sorry. Please don’t feel bad. You’ve been so generous. All of you children, I know it’s not easy having your divorced mother living with you.’

‘Dad’s dating again, did you know that? He joined some online group. Why don’t you? It’s perfectly acceptable now.’ His relationship with Jennifer had not survived the divorce. Dorothy saw her once, walking her dog, also curly and golden, on the beach at Takapuna. That sickening moment as she approached, Dot waiting for the encounter to pass, afraid she might just flip out and throw herself writhing to the sand. Dot had said hello. Jennifer pretended not to hear. She’d yelled it to the woman’s back, the arm that casually swung one of those plastic ball-throwers, a long thin scoop that made her think of a speculum. Hello, Jennifer. Tossed on the wind.

‘Good for him.’

‘That guy, what about him, that photo by your bed?’

‘He lives in Spain. He’s married. He’s just an old friend.’

‘We think you’re frightened of being on your own. Us kids. That’s what we think.’

‘Right. I see.’ She could tell Grace was waiting for her to say something more. The warm, dark smell of raisins wrinkled through the air.



The commune had expanded from the few prefabs and A-frames it consisted of over fifty years ago. Dorothy didn’t remember the way it looked; nothing would be exactly the same except the stern rocks, covered in lichen. She longed to lie on the ground with Eve, looking at Daniel wand the baseball bat, practising his swing.

They found Michael in the vegetable patch at the top of a dusty path, and the children squinted at his white ponytail, his missing-toothed smile, and solemnly accepted handfuls of soft, cloud-shaped raspberries fresh from the canes. Dorothy showed them the sunflowers while he walked Amsi and Grace around the beans and lettuces and thick-veined leaves of some other vegetable, perforated with snail holes. ‘We really have to go,’ Grace said, and the boy ran back down the hill, tumbling into gravity’s embrace, the adults coming after. There were brief goodbyes – Frankie’s fierce squeeze, his head thudding into her pillowy middle, the show hug of the little girl, reaching out from Grace’s arms to pat her cheeks, then the young family shut their car doors and drove off, taking the cattle stop slowly, leaving Dorothy standing there, the poker-worked sign that announced the commune’s presence swinging from its hooks. She began the walk back up through the fine dry earth and trees to Michael, and the luggage she had left with him.

In the empty cabin she was given her suitcase looked too flash, out of place, and her knapsack leaned like a person against the end of the wire-wove bed. ‘Smells a bit musty,’ Michael said, ‘but no one’s lived here since Rena died.’

Dorothy opened the stiff, small window opposite the bed. A bee drifted in. ‘How did she die?’

‘Happy. At peace. It’s a long time ago now.’ He stood in the middle of the double-bed-sized room, looking around with his overly healthy eyes, large still but solid, muscular in a flannel shirt, torn shorts, wrinkly knees, tanned skin encasing the natural man. Of course, she’d meant, ‘Did she die in this room?’

‘Michael,’ she began, and he said, ‘Mike. Mike will do.’

‘Mike. Thank you for this. It’s only till I get my driver’s licence back. And my teaching registration lapsed while I was at the maternity home. As soon as I get a job I can find somewhere in town. Of course there’s always the pension.’ A joke. The older she got, the further away they moved the pension age.

‘What happened to your house?’

‘We sold it ages ago, to put the kids through school. We’ve been renting. I had those fines; it’s slowed me up. But I don’t want to take anything on until there’s some cash flow.’

‘I don’t really understand what went on there.’ That gap in his front teeth was disconcerting, made him look a bit simple. One must have been knocked out.

‘I haven’t got much money. There’s no getting around it. I just have to start again.’ The bee crawled up the lichened door frame. ‘Mike,’ she said, wanting to take his hands in hers, instead sitting on her own hands on the wire wove, feeling the mattress sink nearly to the floor, ‘do you believe people can start again? Do you think it’s possible, at my age?’

‘Of course,’ he said, clear eyes floating. ‘That’s what this place is all about.’ With that he shut the door. The knapsack slowly keeled over onto its side, and the springs holding the wire hexagons of the bed-base to the rusting frame let out a violent creak as she reached to snatch the canvas bag upright. The small wooden cross above the bed slid onto a diagonal, like the needle of a compass.



It was Mike’s night to cook so she helped him, and the mostly young people he lived with all welcomed her and thanked them both for the food. They explained that ‘Dorothy’ had the word rot in it, therefore here she would always be Dot. Their names were Thane, Jared, Karen and a couple that might have been adopted by deed poll – Hope and Faith. ‘Do you remember Name?’ she asked Mike. ‘Was she here when you came back?’

He didn’t remember her. Karen said she must have been long gone. The roll call of former commune dwellers remained unrecorded. Prayers were chanted. Dot shut her eyes as everyone did, feeling warm channels of breath running in and out through her nostrils, until she heard the small sounds of cutlery against enamel plates, a wooden bread board being pushed across the table, a serrated knife sawing crusts. She produced the bottle of red wine from her knapsack but it didn’t stay on the table. Later she saw it on the storeroom floor, next to a big box of potatoes, their oval spheres dark and fragrant with earth. She was looking for the ginger to slice for a pot of tea, and groped around the rough wooden battens just inside the door for a light switch before remembering there was no power.

Back in the eating area Mike sat with his arm round Karen’s waist – she had an animated, sparkly face, was probably in her forties, with dark hair in a low ponytail, the ponytail Mike had now between his loosely curled fingers, thin ribbons between his paler brown hands. The ginger root was fibrous, the knife slicing through first the ridged skin and then the hard inner flesh, ringed like a felled tree stump, and the fine tough hairs in the centre. When she poured water from the whistling steam kettle into the teapot the slices lifted and bobbed near the surface, and the warm, bracing scent released into the air and mingled with the herby smell of Thane’s joint.

Michael caught Dorothy looking at him, worried. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I don’t do that any more.’

Karen snuggled in and kissed his cheek.



In the morning, when it was just light, Dot placed eggs one by one in the recycled ice-cream container, minute pore-like squirkles in the beige shells, some of them streaked with droppings or dried gunge. The eggs were fragile and weighted at the same time, the curved shells touching lightly against their neighbours in the plastic tub, each one thick with its own liquid contents. The coop smelled of straw, which smelled of feathers, which smelled of bird-shit, which smelled of sticks. There were seven eggs in total and the next day there would be a similar number, and the day after that and the day after that. You would not ever be alone at the commune.

The eggs rolled and knocked slightly against the smooth walls of the plastic tub, blueness glowing onto them around the edges, light shifting over her as she carried the container across the yard to the kitchen, dewy grass cold and ticklish on her bare ankles where the path ran out.

For a while the commune had financed itself from the orchard, Faith told her, but that income ran down over the past few years, with industrial greenhouses reaching tentacles across the countryside and the new supermarket a closer drive for most people in the town, and stocking organic produce anyway. A homeopathic-remedies venture was not cost-effective. She had seen the dark-blue glass bottles on windowsills and lined up along skirting boards, sprouting lumpy beeswax candles or pale at the shoulders with thick dust. Michael went into cider and exploded the storage shed. It was agreed that the commune would no longer try to make money, but grow only the means of their own survival. No extra cash meant relying on their own skills for everything. ‘All right if you’re bunging a diff in a car,’ said Mike, who was washing the breakfast dishes, scrubbing hard at the encrusted rings where fruit from a batch of muesli had burned to the oven tray. ‘Not so hot if you need a crown replaced.’ That explained the missing tooth.

Thane’s partner had objected, and she moved out and started up a craft market in the city, the success of which mystified the remaining commune dwellers, given that it sold ironic macramé and peg dolls, nothing that would actually be any use. ‘What’s it for?’ Faith asked the air, scattering sunflower seeds over her plate of stewed rhubarb. ‘What’s a block of wood that looks like a piece of soap for?’ The rhubarb lay in coiled wet ropes in her earthenware bowl like someone’s hair.

‘What about Daniel?’ Mike asked. ‘You in touch?’

Flickered with adrenalin, caught out as always at the mention of his name, she told Mike that last she heard he’d gotten married. Adulthood was like this – your voice calm, your face normal, while inside, turmoil, your heart still seven, or twelve, or fifteen.

‘So, not since I wrote to congratulate them.’ Daniel’s reply had intimated a possible move back home, nostalgic in my old age . . . but María’s family are here. It hadn’t been the time to mention her divorce. Since then, whenever the urge to contact Daniel came over her, she resisted. He had a different life. A vine had grown over the kitchen window and been cut back, leaving a tattoo of broken black swirls. Dorothy picked at the insistent tendril that crawled under the windowpane, its bright greenness probing the room, pale green shoots emerging like arrowheads, or the tops of the spades suit in a deck of playing cards.



There’d been some serious upgrades to the ablutions block since their childhood, with pump bottles of lavender soap and warm indoor showers. The water gleaming on Rena’s young body in the sun. Cobwebs clung stickily in Dot’s hair. She pulled at them in the tin-plate mirror but something that her fingers transferred, oils or heat or dirt, made them glue up and harden. When she flossed her teeth the taste of blood came into her mouth. It was normal, when first among new people, to feel more alone; of this she was sure. Just a little bit longer: first to feel at home here, then to leave. Her hibernation from the world could not be permanent. She didn’t have the capacity of a Michael or a Thane.

Dimly she noticed shouting from outside and dropped her toilet bag to the floor. Waves of panic crashed through the sheet iron and the non-tanalised wood although the words were unclear; sounds ran together the way dogs sometimes barked, unbroken.

She saw the car before she saw Mike. He lay on the ground beneath it, under the front wheel, his leg pinned, and Thane stood over him by the open driver’s door, one arm reached into the car, hand on the steering wheel. Mike’s face was bright red – burning red. People stood around, someone clutching her own head, someone with his palms raised. Mike roared, and his body twisted as he pulled away from the leg. Dust eddied around him. Hope, or was it Faith, had a length of wood, was holding it like a batter at the plate, shouting at Thane. All this was processed as Dot ran to Michael, spoke to Thane, and tried to lift the car. Squatting at the knee she heard her jeans rip, the arse of her jeans, something went pop in her pelvic floor or near it, and she wasn’t able to budge the tyre. Her heart wrenching. Now Thane lifted too, helping, inches of searing air between the rubber tread and the leg and Mike dragged himself out from its shadow. The leg was f*cked, and he retched into the dust. A two-legged metal jack lay next to him on its side.

Blood streaked his jeans but there was no severed artery. The problem, Karen said when Mike was lying across the back seat and Thane was trying to start the car, was the distal tibia, which was splintered and crushed. She cupped the side of Mike’s face with her palm. ‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘Something has happened to your lateral condyle. It might be split or it might be pulped. We don’t know. They’ll give you an anaesthetic and find out. Maybe the neck of the fibula is broken. These things sound worse than they are. They might put a pin in your lower tibia. Or you might go into traction, depending on the knee, but the knee looks OK. They’re going to bolt you together,’ she said. ‘You’ll be the bionic man. Screws and rods, the works.’

Dorothy asked her to come to the hospital with them but Karen said no, put a kiss on her palm and pressed it to Mike’s good leg. ‘I can’t go into the city. Sorry. I’ll be here waiting.’ That I know my boundaries tone of the recovered person, the once damaged. It was a truth about life for those people that love had its limit. Survival came first. At last Thane had the car in gear and shouted at Dorothy to get in.

She sat in the back with her brother, holding the tourniquet she’d made out of her shirt as tight as she could above his knee, her knuckles and the pads of her fists green-white. She was hunkered down in the space behind the passenger seat to do it, hold him steady. He looked old.

‘He going to lose the leg?’ Thane said it stridently, as though she couldn’t hear him although he was just there, driving, inches away. Where was Thane from? Who was Thane?

‘No,’ she said.

The car slowed, and she raised up on her knees to get blood back into her legs, and the world floated through the window – white roadside flowers, the bank dotted with purple and pink wild flowers, the raffia-petals of cornflowers or anemones, the road dust yellow and the faint sweet smell of cows. ‘We need to get there fast,’ she said, and then there was a bump and Michael moaned and the car slowly, carefully, tilted and lowered over the cattle grid, her brother breathing in pain with every rise and fall. Dot released one stiff hand from the knotted shirt. She held his enormous open hand that was like a catcher’s mitt. Michael closed his eyes slowly and mouthed something.

‘It’s better than it looks,’ she said, a tiny portion of her mind surprised that she could lie. They drove past a brindled cow, conch-shaped eyes either side of its head. Straggly agapanthus.

‘There was a leak,’ said Thane. ‘Up the front here, antifreeze or something.’

‘What colour?’

‘Green, dark green kind of.’

‘Not the oil?’

‘Don’t know, skid plates, makes it hard to see where the leak comes from. That’s how come he was under the car. We’ve lent our jack stand to the farmer down the road, there was just a scissor jack.’ Thane’s voice was unmoored. He was losing it.

‘It looked like you were running him over.’

‘No.’

‘What about what’s-her-name, with the baseball bat?’

‘Yeah, she tried to lever the car but it didn’t work.’

‘Are you worried about the leak? Will we make it?’

The engine groaned as the car climbed a hill, a stock truck crawling in front of them, the hot smell of wool and live animals jammed together in the dark. Mike’s eyes were closed and his lips slightly parted over his harlequin teeth. He wasn’t wearing shoes. She couldn’t look at the foot that she had twisted back into place when he briefly passed out. The other foot, the good foot, was brown and cracked and the toenails had aged, coarse and square and yellowed. Dark hair sprang along the ridge of the foot-bone and on the lower knuckles of the toes. Michael’s face was clammy beneath her hand. She moved her hand away a bit and he grunted and rolled his head towards it. Stubble bristled her palm. ‘F*ck, Thane, can you go any faster, how useless is this car?’

‘I’m going to be sick,’ said Thane. ‘It’s the adrenalin, it’s draining from me. I feel faint.’

‘You f*cking hippy. It’s no better back here.’

‘No, you have to drive.’

‘Get out then.’ She shouted it.

He stopped right there in the road and in a slamming of doors they swapped places. ‘I’m not licensed,’ she said into the rear-view mirror.

‘Just drive fast,’ he said. ‘Drive as fast as the car can go.’

And the road spooled into them like a retracting tape measure.



Michael and his foot survived, and Ruth fell back into line with her marriage to Ben. Andrew married again: Beth, the widow of a man he used to work with at the polytech. He’d gone to the man’s funeral, he told Dorothy, and Beth had wept into his lapel and said, ‘Thank god you’re here. You’re the only one he liked in that whole place.’ ‘Can you believe it?’

There would never be mutual visits, holidays together, but in the evenings, when she’d closed up the art room at the hospice and gone back to her quiet apartment, Dot and Andrew often spoke on the phone about their children and grandkids: about Amy’s struggle through the ranks of retail management and Donald’s coming out which had been no surprise, and what to do with crazy Hannah ditching an engineering internship for the ludicrous short-term goal of touring with a band, and how in hell any of them were ever going to afford their own home, and wasn’t it good that Grace was back at work now Meg and Frankie were both in school. Together they thanked god for the barely surviving public education system and the fact that Hannah seemed to quite like slumming it and Donald was the one with the business mind, his software-development business in profit. Sometimes Andrew even bitched to Dot about Beth’s sullen sons, who were taking their own sweet time to accept the marriage. ‘They’re still grieving their dad,’ Dorothy said, and Andrew said, ‘I know that. Jesus, I don’t need you to analyse the world for me, Dorothy, just listen. Be a friend.’

But it wasn’t Andrew she turned to when the eggs began to burn or her glasses disappeared. They should come with a sonar locator, she thought, there would be money in that, just as you could ring a cell phone to find it you should be able to do the same with house keys, remote controls, wallets. What was it Donald said, the Internet of Things? She lived alone. Only Diego, the caretaker who’d become a friend, saw the lists, but then the lists would appear in odd places, not on the fridge but tucked in the back of the bathroom cabinet, not taped to the front door but rolled into a wine glass. Lists were only useful if you could find them, and then only if you could read them, and reading was no problem apart from the giant hole torn in one afternoon when the recipe for spinach soup escaped her and she went blank, the bench spread with potato peelings. Spinach stalks. Onion peel. What to do with these? The cookbook was useless, the instructions made absolutely no sense, may as well have been in Mandarin. She slammed the book shut and wanted to weep. It was much later that night, tossing some apple skins into the compost bucket, that she discovered the white cubes of peeled and diced potato, the fresh green leaves nestled there in the dark.