The Forrests

18. Daniel





It was a new grocery store; new for Dorothy. She had taken a bus, also new, one of the yellow double-ended ones with a concertina segment in the middle that held two carriages together. Those buses belonged somewhere with wide roads and manicured roundabouts, not here with the narrow bricolaged streets and everyone parking arsy-versy where they pleased. All they did here was jam the traffic, but the council before the current council had ordered them and everyone was stuck with the decision, it would have been ‘bad management’ to reverse it, buy their way out, and this was all any ruling body seemed to do these days, live under sufferance with the choices of the previous administration, or at least make it sound that way. Dorothy sat in the back half of the bus, so when it turned she would feel a momentum swing, a surge of uncontrol. The window by her head was streaked with a whitish substance, as if an egg had been thrown at it and the glair dried in the sun. Out of the narrow streets, outside suburban stand-alone houses, trees flared with spring blossoms and magnolia, rhododendrons, daphne. Through the sliver of open window the scent of the daphne passed faintly, like something imagined. A tree stood bare-branched, surrounded by its fallen scarlet petals as though it had given an enormous sigh and shed everything. Dot scrolled the pages of her book, another book she couldn’t read without her glasses and magnifying glass; all very well enlarging the font but not when it ended up three words per line. How did women go about the world on their own without books? You saw it, but she would never understand.

The grocery store was identical to the one on her corner, down to the point-of-sale promotions and the black-wheel streaks on the linoleum by the refrigerators. Dorothy had not eaten breakfast in the hope of generating some kind of hunger, but now the grabby feeling in her stomach wouldn’t focus itself on anything. It was just before noon. The women shopping looked identical to the women in her neighbourhood. Their shoes were thrashed but clean. So sad. The phrase came into Dot’s mind while she sniffed leathery oranges from the fruit bins, a two-note descending sing-song like the poor f*cker caged bird in the downstairs apartment. So sad. So sad. Who had said that lately? Of what? Perhaps the women behind her on the bus. Women, it had to be noted, were everywhere. There in the reflection of the fridge doors was a woman not unlike Dot, same height, same age, who looked as if she didn’t care about food any more either, though she was wearing a thick blue sweatshirt and tracksuit pants, so where her body began was obscured. Yes, definitely a double reflection, not a trick of the light, nor Dot’s usual surprise that the old woman caught ghostily in a shop window as she passed it was, in fact, herself.

Their reflections smiled at each other and the mirror woman’s face became a walnut, deep creases from her mouth running all the way up to her temples. Dot leaned forward and pulled the heavy door open, its suction straps unpeeling like black liquorice, and the other woman’s reflection swung closer as the door moved. The refrigerator puffed hot air around Dot’s ankles and her fingers grew cold. She turned cheeses over looking for the ones that had further until their expiry date, the ones they always kept in the back. Cheese was a guaranteed pleasure. One of these days she would wake up and discover herself to be a giant mouse.

In one corner of the grocery store the fluorescent overhead lights were out. Dot had the feeling this had happened in the exact same corner in her local store – or perhaps it was the synaptic shudder of déjà vu. Diego made her take aspirin every day now, and that shit must be doing something. Here everything looked soft, grey, old. The edges of the cardboard cake-mix boxes were matt and worn, as though overly handled. A cloying smell rose from a tray of thin green aubergines that lay limply on pulpy-looking ridged blue cardboard. The baking soda she was looking for was not there. Her local store was also out. Why must this be? If they had to deal with the pigeons she had to deal with, they would ensure constant supplies of baking soda. In her neighbourhood people bought it because it was cheaper than toothpaste; here perhaps it was being used to bake cakes. Dot circumnavigated the store again, to check that there wasn’t a shelving anomaly, and she should have registered as odd that the other woman was keeping pace with her at a distance of a couple of yards, but these places were full of weirdos. By the mysterious locked door in the back wall of the shop, a door to the staff toilet or stack room or an asphalt, oily car park, a teenage boy with acne practised impressive dance moves with his arms. At the pick-and-mix candy bins two blonde women with ponytails tonged hearts into a plastic bag, one by one. A pale tabby cat slunk a figure eight through Dot’s ankles. The baking soda was nowhere to be seen. A young man in a blue store jacket passed her carrying a box of long-life milk cartons, and Dot followed him to the shelf where he was stacking them. He wore a nametag but the lettering was too small for Dot to read. She asked him where she might find the baking soda but he seemed unable to understand, or perhaps to hear her. There was nothing in his ears. She patted his arm and he turned to face her, and she asked him again, and he leaned in, but she may as well have been speaking Martian. She mimed measuring baking soda into a teaspoon and stirring a cake, then cleaning her teeth, then sprinkling baking soda on the windowsill to keep the pigeons away. She mimed being a pigeon, pecking at the baking soda and hopping back in fright. The man was apparently an imbecile. Disgusted, Dot walked away and over to the biscuit aisle where she threw the packet of digestives into her bag. She didn’t even like them, the way they fell apart into the bottom of a cup of tea, but her teeth couldn’t handle the old crackers any more.

The mistake was in stopping at the checkout to pay for a magazine that specialised in arts and crafts, which she wanted to use for work, and staring the checkout girl down when she glanced at the biscuits glowing radioactively on top of the book and spare jumper in Dot’s bag. Dorothy got cold easily in springtime. Feeling the cold was what you called it once you were her age, oh yes, I feel the cold. But the sun was lighting up the street outside with its whiteness, and she walked out the door and towards that light, and was a few paces out of the store when there was a hand on her upper arm and someone said, ‘Excuse me.’ It was the lady from the shop with the blue sweatshirt and the wrinkles.

‘Yes?’ Dot thought perhaps she was going to ask for directions. She had one of those faces. I’m not from around here – I just have one of those faces, she prepared to say.

‘Did you pay for those biscuits?’

‘What biscuits?’ Pure coldness thumped through her body.

‘Those.’ The woman pointed a coral-nailed finger towards the bag.

Dot faked a double take. ‘Oh my god. Where did they come from?’

‘You put them in your bag in there.’ She gestured towards the store. ‘Could you come with me, please?’

‘Well, I could. But truly, this was a mistake, I must have put them there by accident. Are you sure I wasn’t charged for them?’ Dot made a show of fumbling in her jacket pocket for the receipt. It was Diego’s jacket, cut like a suit jacket, but made of denim, with deep pockets. He left it at the apartment last time he came to fix the microwave, and Dorothy wore it everywhere now. There were black grease stains down the sides and it smelled of a man’s sweat, which was quite frankly a tonic. They should bottle that stuff. Dot pulled out some gum and her bus pass, but seemed to have done something else with the receipt.

‘Please, madam. Come with me.’

And just like that they were back inside the shop. The blonde ponytails stood and stared as the woman put her gnarled hand on Dorothy’s shoulder and marched her towards the mysterious door in the back of the store, and Dot kept her chin in the air. The dancing boy was gone. A small key from a plastic chain that was connected to the woman’s sweatshirt pocket opened the door. Through the door was a short corridor, with a fire door at its end, a horizontal metal safety bar across it. On the left-hand side of the corridor was an open cleaning cupboard, and the smell of bleach burned the air. There was another door to the right, and the blue sweatshirt knocked on it.

A man sat behind a desk. Much younger guy. His hair was cut short, neat, and he had a sort of pubic beard that was trimmed thinly around his jaw line and up towards the corners of his mouth. The shaved skin in the middle was blue with stubble. Repellent as it was, the beard made Dot think about whoever had to kiss this man, or whether anyone did. He smelled keenly of a blue, minty aftershave. She wanted to grab him and shake his shoulders and tell him, ‘You’re human! Don’t fight it!’ But now was not the time.

‘This lady has shoplifted a packet of biscuits.’

‘Inadvertently,’ Dot said.

‘I saw you. It was quite deliberate.’

‘No really. It was a mistake.’ She rolled out a phrase of Diego’s that she’d always hated: ‘A senior moment.’

The man with the beard chuckled. ‘Really? Oh dear.’

‘I’m mortified,’ Dot said. ‘I would of course like to pay for the biscuits. But I assure you, I am not a criminal.’

‘May I see some identification?’

She handed him her bus pass. He opened a drawer and took out a ring-binder folder. In it were pages and pages of photocopied returned cheques, photo IDs, student cards, sample signatures with the word FORGED stamped over the top, and even mug shots. If they had a reference here to the photocopy of her bus pass ID – the one pinned to the corkboard of villains and recidivists by the checkout tills of her local grocery store – Dorothy was cooked. He held the bus pass in one hand and flicked through the pages with the other.

‘Doesn’t much look like you,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t do you justice.’

Dot blinked, slowly. ‘Thank you.’ Not that photo, but another one, years – decades – ago, there had been a day when she had gotten a new staff ID shot taken for the school where she was working. There she was smiling for the camera, dressed ironically like a ‘lady teacher’, but in the photograph when it was printed she just looked like a lady teacher. That was a day, yes, she remembered that day.

Sex with Diego would be epic. Dorothy knew this because he told her once, when he was having a beer at her place after he fixed the balcony rail. ‘Sex with me, darling, it’s epic,’ he said, his legs stretched out before him, the bottle balanced on his solid, convex stomach.

‘Good for you,’ she said. She had the old photo albums out and was selecting, binning and gluing photos without being able to study them too closely. His presence was a buffer against falling into the pictures and the long crawling out again. ‘Good for your ladies.’

‘You want to ask me to scan those for you. I’d do it as a favour.’ He swivelled right and left in the squidgy chair and thrust a look at her.

‘Diego,’ Dot laughed. ‘I’m ancient.’

‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,’ he said.

‘No knocking will occur. But thanks. I don’t get many offers these days.’

‘Your loss, darling,’ he grinned.

‘I’m sure.’ Wind came through the open window and shifted the photos around. On the balcony the ladder rattled against the eaves.

Epic sex. Jesus. She would have liked to see him naked, but that was as far as it went. On the whole being unleashed from sex was a tremendous relief. But this was something, standing in front of the store manager’s desk while he looked for evidence of criminality, and her heart quickened.



In the apartment Dorothy put some music on and knocked on the window glass to shoo the pigeons off the sill. With summer coming, and open windows, her great fear was that a bird would fly into the room, panicking and crapping everywhere. The happiness she felt on the bus home leaked away with the passing afternoon and now Dot was cross for having given in to the cheap thrill. She pretended her children were too far-flung to be ashamed, but Diego would mind, and he would be the one to come and get her if she ever had to make the call from the police cells. His face clouded with disapproval. Another crazy lady. Dot couldn’t afford to lose him. She took out her magnifying glass to read the craft magazine.

Later she worked on a funding application to buy new sand trays for the hospice, reading patient testimonies – ‘sacred multidimensional depths of psychic consciousness . . . self-witnessing . . . silent reflection . . . I grew so much personally . . . I am at home . . .’ until it was dark. She got up to put on the lamp and saw a strange man in the doorway of the locksmith’s looking up at her apartment building. Just a couple of glances, but the feeling flew up from the street like a sparrow – he was looking at her.

The man was young, in his twenties, and though it was hard to tell from this third-storey window, he seemed to be tall. In the brief seconds of his presence she noticed his shoulders braced, how he stood on the balls of his feet, hopping slightly. Yes, he reminded her of Donald, her son, as though he’d stepped through the computer screen of their last conversation and into the neighbourhood. His hair was long around his face. He wore a suit jacket, sneakers and jeans. Maybe he was there to score, or to meet a person who never showed up. Maybe he was just getting some keys cut. They watched each other. He wasn’t Donald but he was somebody’s son – an adopted-out child. Then he was lost to the mass of children playing football down the middle of the road. Gaps in their calling and kicking let in the sound of old men nattering outside the newsagent’s. She liked the old men’s voices. The way they went on. Go for it, she thought, standing by the minimal breeze and listening to their gorgeous unwinding gossip. Don’t stop. Go for gold.

The cloud of footballers passed and the new locksmith, a middle-aged woman, was there in place of the man, staring up. Dot ducked too fast and her knee went. Slowly she lowered herself fully to the ground, trying not to curse aloud. The music had long stopped and the floor felt cold through her jumper. The knee pulsed a sweet, nauseous pain up her thigh into her hip. ‘Bastard,’ she said, ‘bastard, bastard.’ Dot crawled to the kitchen, dragging the lame leg behind her. Rum first, then the liniment cream, then, when she had manoeuvred herself through to the bedroom to lie down, curled, giving in to the ache, a pill.



In the morning the knee felt a lot better. Diego came to drop off some magazines from the Laundromat downstairs, old ones with the covers ripped off, for Dot to take to work. When he saw that her knee was strapped he insisted on accompanying her the two blocks to the hospice. The spring air was perfumed, inhalable. Diego carried the magazines in a plastic bag and the fabric off-cuts for quilting in a giant checked carrier bag over his shoulder, and Dot told him about the mandala paintings the patients were doing and the woman who had decided her life essence should be expressed by pictures of Princess Diana.

He shook his head. ‘Such a sad day when that lady died. There will never be another like her.’

‘What would be in your mandala painting, Diego?’

‘In mine?’ He laughed. ‘You trying to put me in my grave? Heaven hopes it is a long time before they wheel me in to sign the entry papers to that place.’

Dot looked at his profile against the moving colours of the mosaic wall outside the school buildings. ‘No, Diego, I don’t think you’re ever going to die.’

He shrugged. ‘Well, some day.’

They reached the hospice and the smoked automatic reception doors parted, waiting for Dot to enter. Diego placed the bags just inside the lobby and nodded at the young receptionist. ‘Morning, darling.’

Dot touched his arm, suddenly longing for him to stay. ‘Will you come in today? You know they love it when you do.’

‘Ah, no, today I’ve got a lot of people to see.’

‘OK. Lucky ladies.’

‘Oh yes,’ he smiled, ‘and lucky me.’



After work she made some packet soup and ate a digestive biscuit, then went down to the locksmith’s. The new owner looked curiously at Dot. ‘I’m just about to close up.’

‘Oh, sure. How are you finding the neighbourhood?’

The owner nodded. ‘Pretty good. People always need keys.’

There was a moment while she waited for Dorothy to get the message that her day was over. Dot backed out again into the street. The Turkish men stood in the brightly lit empty shop they used as FC headquarters and talked, and teenagers leaned against the round doors of the industrial-sized washing machines in the Laundromat chatting into cell phones and flirting with each other. There was a sound like thunder but it was just the roller doors coming down on the greengrocer’s and the mechanic’s. The neighbours were cooking curry and a seductive smoky smell came from the kebab shop. A woman in a summer dress walked a giant dog, an exquisite thing, grey and huge and thinly wolfish, the length of the street, its gait casual, disdainful. It seemed that everyone on the block stopped to watch its hollow haunches pass by. Pigeons cooed, roosting in the plane trees. The evening fuzzed, as though molecules of air had thickened to hold the last of the light. Over to the west, laky streaks lined the sky, and the hills in the distance were the colour of morello cherries.

‘There was a man here yesterday. I wondered if I might know him. He was standing where you are just now, and looking – up there.’ Saying ‘at my apartment’ seemed impossible, would seal the impression that she was delusional, or paranoid.

The locksmith shrugged. ‘Yeah? I don’t remember.’

‘Yeah. I thought – maybe – never mind.’

‘I can’t give out the names of clients.’

‘No, of course.’

Back in the apartment, she ate another biscuit and thought about the young man who looked like Donald. That story of her mother’s – the lost son in the driveway. He was her sign. Her young man, appearing through the window. Her message, her past mistake. She sat for a long time while the light melted from the room. One phone call. Not to interrupt his life or ask for anything. One phone call, just to hear his voice.

From the kitchen drawer, Dorothy took the softened, split-cornered card that carried the last phone number she’d had for Daniel. It was morning in Spain. She switched on the overhead lamp. With the phone pressed hard against her ear she leaned forward, head on her forearms and elbows on the bench, in the posture of someone waiting for seasickness to pass. The dial tone was a single metallic note that could have been a fault. She didn’t know whether or not to hang up but then a woman answered. Dorothy was embarrassed by her lack of the language. She had to blurt straight into English. ‘Excuse me . . .’

The woman said something in Spanish.

‘Do you speak English . . . is this still the right number for . . .’

‘Hello,’ the woman said, with a heavy accent. ‘How may I help you?’

‘I’m looking for an old friend . . .’

‘Daniel doesn’t live here now.’

‘Oh. I’m so sorry to bother you.’

‘He is back in New Zealand.’ And the woman, who might have been his wife, gave her Daniel’s number.



They agreed to meet in the park, and to rearrange on the day if there was rain, and now it was showery in bursts, and Dorothy wasn’t sure whether or not this counted. She could manage a raincoat, carry an umbrella, but the shoes were a problem, she had never in her whole life solved the question of what shoes to wear in the rain. Anything nice would be ruined, and nowadays if her feet got wet she invariably came down with flu, ached all over, oh my knee etc, but the shiny and water-resistant trainers the kids had given her last Christmas to encourage her fitness, love it or lose it, Donald had mumbled, were criss-crossed with hideous pink and silver stripes and lay unworn in the bottom of the closet. Not that she wasn’t grateful. Perhaps she had never been nice enough about receiving presents, feeling too often that the object was hard evidence of how little the giver really knew her. Getting older had made Dorothy more mindful of her flaws, and that there were many more than she would ever know. Self-improvement had its limits. She took knee-length rubber boots from her sack of redundant gardening kit, scrubbed the dried clumps of dirt off them with a steel brush and pulled them on.

Over the phone she’d told Daniel about the end of her marriage. After a long pause, during which she walked from the living room to the bedroom and back again, he asked, ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘You’d only just got married,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to be a downer.’

‘A downer? For f*ck’s sake, Dottie. A downer?’

She couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Bad timing, it was bad timing. And then once I was on my own – I don’t know. It seemed important, to be on my own.’ The words came unanticipated, but she realised they were true. ‘It took me a while. But I like it.’

On the way to the park she noticed moss growing between cracks in the pavement, and the plane-tree branches budding with pale leaves. The light was indecisive, shifting between bright and low, and it disoriented her, made her hurry in case of being late, so that when she reached the floral clock, tightly coiled in this early spring but still marking time between the green minutes, the Roman hours, it took Dorothy a moment to be able to read that she was early. Raindrops scattered the bench like melting glass beads, and she was glad of the waterproof coat. Young people, black-jacketed students, passed in pairs, and cyclists wheeled sedately by. It was silly to sit in the cold this long but she fell into a kind of meditation or prayer, the wind against her cheek, gloved hands clasped, there beneath the shaking branches of a Moreton Bay Fig.

Through this middle-distance gaze an elderly man and a teenage boy walked slowly along the path. Daniel, old. Everything in her body went hot. Not the cold pulse rush of outside the grocery store – hot thuds. A squall came and the man and boy ducked under the band rotunda and Dot fanned her face with her hand, another old lady having an episode out in the rain. It was crucial to stay calm, looking at the wet sheet of a band flyer plastered against the rubbish bin and to think of spreading protective paper over tables, on the floor, of her day tomorrow asking people who knew they were dying whether they wanted to make something with clay or with fabric.

Daniel and the boy looked out through the subsiding drizzle, not seeing her.

‘Daniel,’ she called. Then louder, ‘Daniel.’

Across the bending path she watched him make sense of her – of what he was seeing. ‘Dottie?’ And he took in the full impact of the years, the decades. She rose, shedding raindrops. He stepped down from the shelter, using his umbrella to stabilise the descent, and slowly, awkwardly came closer until he was standing right here. Behind the lenses of his specs his eyes were dark and bright. His breath rose and fell. When he stooped to kiss her cheek the sides of their glasses knocked together.

‘I wear these orthotics but it’s too many gymnastics,’ he said, ‘my feet are no good. You should see some of those old clowns, really crippled, popped shoulders, dodgy hips – it’s not natural.’

‘We’re all old clowns now.’ She had touched him. He was there. ‘Daniel. It’s good to see you. Who’s the boy?’ she asked, nodding towards the band rotunda where the teenager was sluicing water from the railing with a finger, headphones on.

‘That’s Oscar. He’s my son.’

Oscar was fourteen, in school and living with Daniel. ‘His mother’s had some troubles,’ Dan said. They were walking now, the boy, who’d responded to the introductions with a grunt, alongside.

‘This is – María?’

‘No. María’s in Spain.’ He waited till Oscar was ahead a few paces and explained that a year ago he’d got the call. It was the first he’d known that he had a child. The boy’s mother – ‘We were never really together’ – was in a bad way. ‘Christ, it was my parents all over again but worse, meth, and so. She was a lot younger than me. Stupid. I mean me.’ He’d wanted to bring Oscar to Spain, wasn’t ready to live in Auckland again, the rain and isolation, but legally it was too complicated. ‘I pursued it for a long time, but just as we were getting close María said she really didn’t want to go through with it.’ They’d been trying for a baby for years. He tried to persuade her to see this as their blessing, a child they could care for, raise together. But she couldn’t. ‘It wasn’t what she had planned. I couldn’t give her what she wanted. Too old, everything.’ Daniel looked as sad as she’d ever seen him. He wore the hair he had left cropped close, white flecked with grey. The bones of his face were prominent, exposed; spoke of the cost of living.

‘How’s Oscar?’

Daniel shook his head. ‘I can’t believe him. You know?’ They stopped there on the path, the thick arms of the Magnolia grandiflora bearing succulent flowers, the lemony white startling. ‘We’ve only got a few years before he leaves home, but – to have this. It’s pure chance. How life can change if you’re lucky to be around for it.’ Daniel called to his son. ‘Slow down, we’re senior citizens here.’ When the boy reached them he said, ‘Tell her, Oscar, we do all right?’

‘Yep.’

‘Some people think I’m your grandfather.’

‘That is pretty awkward.’

‘We go to soccer, he plays, I shout, we have our little things we like. I’m teaching him to cook.’ He nodded in Dorothy’s direction. ‘I learned to cook from her sister. She would have nailed that octopus.’

Oscar smiled. ‘It was kind of chewy. Daniel likes Spanish food. Do you like octopus?’

‘Depends how it’s done. Sometimes.’

‘You can try mine. When I’ve improved.’

Dorothy smiled at the boy. ‘You look so like your dad,’ she said, taking her time over it, loving the sentence. ‘Like he used to look.’

Above them a bird made a sound and Daniel mimicked it, up-down, up-down.

‘I had this bird once,’ Oscar said. ‘It was a blue bird, with a green tail, I think it was a parrot. I used to bring it insects.’

Daniel raised his eyebrows. ‘Really,’ he said. ‘A parrot.’

‘Are you going to stay in Auckland?’ she asked him.

‘Oh yes.’ Daniel cocked his head, smiled at her. ‘You?’

She laughed. ‘Yes. My kids are all here.’

They had reached the edge of the park, where it met the road. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘So –’ He stepped back as a helmeted cyclist whizzed past, spraying water. ‘Hey,’ he called after the muscled figure. ‘Do you mind?’ The cyclist stood on his pedals and turned, a feat of balance, and threw them the finger. ‘F*cking arsehole,’ Daniel said. ‘Sorry, Oscar.’

‘Dad.’

Daniel took Dorothy’s forearm, holding her back while Oscar walked on. His voice was light with surprise. ‘Stop a second.’ He whispered in her ear. ‘He doesn’t usually call me Dad.’ They paused for a moment, and her eyes drifted shut at the feel of Daniel’s mouth up against her face, the warmth of his breath. ‘What were we talking about?’ he murmured. ‘Oh. Yeah.’

She couldn’t move away. ‘We were talking about . . .’

‘You live here. And I live here.’

‘Yes.’

‘So,’ he said, pulling away to look at her. ‘So,’ and he began to shake a bit with laughter, water leaking from the corners of his eyes. ‘We’ve got all the time in the world.’

A big dark-windowed car bounced down the street with music booming out of it and Oscar and Daniel and Dot all looked at its headlights flashing in time with the bouncing.

‘That’s so cool,’ said the boy.