The Forrests

2. Bloom





When Ruth finally opened the front door because the knocking and the bell ringing just would not stop, the couple standing in the doorway cast a long shadow down the length of the hall.

‘We’re here to see Mr Forrest.’

Frank had left without breakfast, taken the bus into town, and Lee was on dawn shift at the delicatessen. Ruth stood, breathing hard from trombone practice, and shouted at the stairs behind her, ‘Dorothy! Evelyn!’

Michael paused in the hallway, muddy football boots swinging from their laces by his side. ‘What do they want?’

‘You’re so rude. Dad or Mum.’

‘They’re out.’ He slammed the kitchen door.

Ruth gave her public smile to the man and the lady, and bellowed again. ‘Dorothy! Eve!’

The lady spoke. ‘Or anyone in the family over eighteen?’

‘Michael,’ Ruth shouted. ‘Come back!’

The kitchen door pulsed with his disdain. Last week Michael had bounced back home after another attempt to leave. His flatmates always stole from him, you could never trust people, and he was like a lodger from a foreign country now, someone who appeared at mealtimes but didn’t talk and who gazed at you, if you addressed him, with implacable confusion.

‘Sorry,’ said Ruth. Over the rooftop across the road the sky was charged with light, shining through an invisible skin about to burst open.

From the bedroom upstairs Evelyn peered through the window, past the branches of the plane tree, but could see only the unfamiliar white Datsun parked outside, a sparrow on the bonnet. She returned to the mirror and finished spraying her hair, flipped it in a backcombed tangle over her shoulders. Daniel, rumpled in his dressing gown, ambled in, a thin joint lit between his fingers. ‘They’re calling for you,’ he drawled.

‘You should get dressed.’

‘I’m not well.’

‘Go back to bed then.’

‘I’m bored.’

Ruth cried, ‘Dorothy!’ then, less convinced, ‘or Eve!’ The sound reverberated.

Evelyn pulled her bottom eyelid down to draw kohl along the inside. ‘It’s far too early for this kerfuffle.’

‘There are two of them. It must be serious.’

He stopped outside the bathroom and knocked on the door. ‘There’s someone downstairs for you,’ he said, his mouth up close against the surface. The words travelled through the grains and particles of wood and into the steamy air of the bathroom where they disintegrated and Dot, drying herself with a sharp-smelling, slightly damp towel, heard a murmur. She put her bathrobe on and opened the door. Steam escaped. Daniel jerked his head in the direction of the stairs. ‘Someone there for you.’

‘For me?’

‘Think so.’ He pinched out the joint and left it on the basin ledge. ‘Warm in here.’ His gaze combed the room, took in the leavings of the female body, cotton-wool discs hardening with old nail-polish remover, the hairbrush bristles puffed with a cobweb of fine blonde hair, a cardboard tampon wrapper unfurling in the toilet bowl.

‘Have my bath. Haven’t you got a lecture?’

‘Lectures are a colossal waste of time.’

‘I know, but you’ve got to go.’

‘I actually think I’m going to rebel.’ He undid the cord on his dressing gown. ‘Go away now.’

Ruth appeared at the top of the stairs, her face red. ‘What are you doing? One of you get down here.’

As Dorothy passed the bedroom Evelyn swung out, braced in the door frame, her almond eyes through the sludgy make-up doing their trick of radiating heat. ‘Thanks,’ she whispered.

The trombone started up again. ‘God,’ cried Eve. Dorothy walked down the stairs, hair wet, air from the open front door coming up chilly beneath the bathrobe, the towel smelling not very nice in her hand. The man and the woman were in the hallway now, and the man gently shut the front door behind him and the woman turned from examining the family portrait that hung next to the hallway mirror. In the portrait, for which the Forrests had sat some years ago, the painter – a goateed friend of Frank’s with white bristles on the backs of his hands – had given the children rosy cheeks and shiny eyes, as though they had that minute run in from playing outdoors, and made Frank look dignified with his collar unbuttoned and their mother wear a pale-blue sweater and a string of fake pearls, her smile soft. I have become a wife again. The children, created from short little dabs and longer streaks of paint, clustered around their parents, eyelashes thick and dark and spiky, Michael’s nose straight and fine, a white gleam brush-stroked down the centre. Daniel should have been in the picture. Sometimes at night Dorothy thought she could make out his shape behind her shoulder, hidden beneath a layer of paint. The woman sighed as her gaze left the painting and fell on Dot. ‘Miss Forrest?’

A hand on the bottom newel post of the banister. ‘Yes.’

‘May we talk with your parents?’

‘They’re not here.’

There were teenagers somewhere, behind doorways, breathing. From upstairs, the glug of draining bath water.

‘May we talk to you?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

Dot opened the door to the front room. The loose rosette jiggled on the protruding screws so that she put a hand to it to stop the sound. It was dark; the couple stood tentative in the space before she drew back the heavy tasselled curtains and the room came into view. Nestled in a wooden bowl, dried petals of potpourri sweetened the air.

‘That smells nice,’ said the woman.

‘My sister’s got a stall at Cook Street Market.’ Dot gestured for the man and woman to sit on the grey corduroy sofa, and moved the ashtray with the acrid remnants of her father’s one luxury cigarettes onto the bookshelves on the other side of the room.

The front door slammed. Michael passed the window in his work overalls. Dorothy tucked the bathrobe in around her legs and sat on the cracked maroon leather of her father’s chair. The woman wore an olive-green skirt suit; the man was in a double-breasted pinstriped jacket and trousers, with a brown tie. His hair had been stuck down with some sort of cream but tufts of it pushed upwards, giving him the look of a boxer on his day off. He gripped his briefcase between his calves.

‘What’s it about?’ Dorothy asked.

‘We’re from the collection agency.’ There was a pause in which he might have extended a hand for shaking, but didn’t. ‘May I confirm your age, Miss Forrest?’

‘I’m eighteen. Sorry, I’m not sure what you want?’

The woman gave a small shake of the head. ‘We’re here to take possession of your father’s car. Where is he?’

‘He’s out.’ Sun glinted across Dot’s line of vision and she straightened her back to look over it. ‘Why do you need his car?’

‘Does he have it with him?’

‘Probably.’ Her mother had driven it to work. She’d be home before long. Dot imagined running to the street corner, intercepting her – ‘Hide the vehicle!’

The man spoke. ‘All right. Miss Forrest, we need you to sign a walking possession agreement.’

The woman nodded at the dead green screen of the television in the corner. ‘Is there a second TV in the house?’

‘Debt has been incurred,’ said the man, ‘and we are here to remove property as payment.’

Parts of Dot lifted and floated around the room. ‘Debt.’ A moment went by. She blinked. ‘Can you do that?’

‘There is a series of complaints. Court costs arising from various unpaid fines dating back several years, water bills, hire purchase payments. Consolidated’ – this nasal recitation – ‘and to be dealt with by us.’

‘Court costs.’

She leaned forward with the powerful, irrational urge to explain the joy of driving hard out with no headlights while Daniel sat in the passenger seat singing, the music as loud as the 8-track would go. The way the intense, furious guitar calmed the air, released what pressure was inside him, or inside her. The blinding joy of it, even when dread trickled down like an egg cracked over her scalp that first time she realised the flashing lights and the siren of the cop car were actually directed at her.

The man was checking the file. ‘Yes, we have the car registered in your father’s name and the fines are addressed to him.’

Now the broken bits of Dot reassembled, stuck back together like guilty tar. When eventually the envelopes had come with Frank’s name on them, the Crown insignia in the top left corner, Ministry of Justice, she knew. Opened the first one and intercepted all the rest. They were her secret, even from Daniel. It would spoil everything to tell him: what they had was freedom, possibility; not another Forrest mess, this, reminders. Multiplying fines. Court summonses. She’d been vigilant, torn them up and thrown the shreds in the bin, shoved the day’s newspaper or the cornered toast crusts on top. Now, on the sofa, in the dust and potpourri and stuffy heat, smelling the nasty stink of panic from under her arms, Dorothy wanted to punch herself. What had she thought was going to happen? This was the world.

The man popped open the clasp of his briefcase. ‘Here are the papers.’ He rose and deposited a form and a pen in Dorothy’s lap – a whiff of minty cologne – explaining that today they would take her signature. He pointing out the agreed daily charge. The rate of interest. The debt had to be resolved or they would come back to remove – he gestured – ‘this television, any non-essential furniture, books, your family car, the paintings, any other goods that fall within our rights’.

‘I won’t sign it.’ She wrapped the bathrobe sash around her hand until the fingers went purple. The shoulders of the robe were cold with the water from her hair. ‘Why have you come now when my father’s out? It’s not his fault. You can’t take our things.’

‘Dorothy.’ The woman spoke softly. ‘I’m afraid that we can.’

‘Do you have a brother or sister also eighteen or over? We just need the one signature.’

‘What happens if I don’t sign it?’

‘We come back until payments are made.’ The same adenoidal tone. ‘You won’t like that.’

There was a tap on the door. She darted to it, held herself between Evelyn and the room. ‘What’s going on?’ Eve asked between her teeth. She was wearing Dorothy’s fake-leopardskin coat. She never asked.

‘Real estate agents. I’m about to get rid of them.’

Her sister raised an eyebrow. ‘Good job. See you then.’

Daniel pulled Dorothy into the hallway, his eyes locking hers. ‘Hang on.’ It was obvious he was stoned. It would be so good to bring him into the room. She held on to his lapel. ‘Are you sure you’re OK? Who are they?’

‘Estate agents. I told Eve.’

‘Shall I take them on a tour?’ He tugged her dressing-gown sash. Had forgotten Eve was right there.

‘No.’ She moved away. ‘No it’s fine.’

So Evelyn and Daniel nodded, and she watched them patter down the path, arms hugged across their bodies, hair flung as though by static in the wind, before she went back into the room to sign the paper.



After the man and woman were gone and Ruth had left for school, Dorothy washed again in cold water and got dressed. Soon their mother would be home with bags of stale pastries, faintly smelling of that fancy imported cheese, Camembert and Gruyère, boiling from another outrage pulled by the posh woman she worked for, a coiffed bitch in a fob-watch chain necklace and raised shirt collar who patronised Lee because despite her genteel bearing she badly needed the job which for a woman like her was only just on the acceptable side of retail, the European vocab dressed it up but really she was a salad hand, a till monkey, because they were broke, broke, and it was the imminent return of this fury that finally propelled Dot out towards the bus stop.

The morning street was alive with disco from a portable radio, a couple of men in super-tight jeans peering over a car engine, a woman holding her toddler’s hands as he slowly put one foot in front of the other along a low brick wall. The mother lifted the boy down and wiggled her hips in time to the music and the sound of dance floors carried on the wind over the whole street, even reaching inside the wooden shelter. A Falcon full of young men drove past and whistled.



Except for the usher, a young man in a blue jacket doing something unseen with ticket rolls or sweet packets behind the desk, the cinema foyer was empty, the day’s first screening a few minutes away. Dorothy sat on a chair upholstered in grey tartan, a splodge of stain showing up on one of the paler checks. The sport section of yesterday’s newspaper was folded on the next chair: half a headline and a photo of half a man running towards the camera, a ball tucked under his visible arm. The cameraman probably had one of those telephoto lenses, the ones that trumpeted out of the camera’s cubed rectangle, too long, disproportionate, exposing what the human eye couldn’t see.

At the sound of hydraulic doors Dorothy looked up. Her father came into the foyer eating a chocolate-coated ice cream in a cone. There was a moment, alone with his pleasure, where he didn’t register Dot, and she was struck mute, longing to leave him in peace, this happy cloud. Don’t look over. Then he did, and finished his mouthful. ‘Dottie. What are you doing here?’

Her palms buzzed as she showed him the copy of the form they had given her, a thin ghost paper, the collection company’s logo in a faint banner across the top, and at the bottom the tracing of her name. Aside from Dot’s Post Office bank account this was her first time signing an official document and the curves and loops looked like someone’s idea of a signature, not a proper adult one.

Frank scanned the paper and took bites of ice cream. She waited. ‘Driving fines? Goddamn it, Michael,’ her father said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Michael didn’t take the car. It was me.’

Again that feeling, the way he looked at her, as though she’d only just materialised in front of him. At last Frank sat down. She put the newspaper on the floor between them; her fingers felt dirty with a sense of whoever had touched it before. For a while, she told her father, a couple of years ago, when she was fifteen, she used to take the car at night. She didn’t mention Daniel. Now her face burned and the clog in her throat was hard to talk over as she apologised.

‘Is Evelyn in on all this too?’

An elderly couple entered the foyer, one stick between them, and crossed the perilous carpet to the ticket desk.

‘She never came. She doesn’t know about it. Dad –’

‘Look, I’m just catching up.’

‘I’ll leave teachers’ college. I’ll work full-time and pay you back.’

‘Right,’ he said. His voice was dry, a bit splintery. ‘You’d better leave this with me.’ He spoke to the sheet of paper. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I’ll take care of this now.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ The more she apologised, the worse she felt.

‘Don’t worry. It’s more than those fines,’ he said. ‘There’s been – we haven’t been as careful as we could.’ He rubbed a flat hand over his mouth. Don’t cry. ‘It’s more than that.’

‘Are we going to be OK?’ Would their things be taken? Could they pay the rent? Where would they go? Not possible to ask out loud.

‘Dottie,’ her father said. ‘We’re going to be great. Things are great. Sure we have some obligations but everyone –’ In the middle of his sentence the tannoy bonged and the usher announced that the feature would begin in one minute. As though summoned in a dream he stood and wiped his ice-cream hand on his suit jacket. ‘I’ll sort them out. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Thanks, Dad,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ She kissed the side of his head, the sun-spotted skin over his temple where the hair was receding. She felt the need for more words from him but he was already moving through the foyer, towards the doors opened onto the dark screening room. He waved her away with the back of a hand and nodded graciously – not a care in the world – to the usher who now stood at the cinema entrance, his patient blue arm held out for Frank’s ticket.



In a stationery shop down the road she leafed through the women’s magazines, searching out advice columns. There was an advertisement for bedding that used the word Manchester. Daniel would like that. Creepy language was their joke after visiting his mother in her unit: doily, shunt, fecund. She could slide a shuddery sort of word into every exchange. Martin’s recovering from surgery but he’s going to need a bag. Gina’s youngest has phlegm on the lung. Cut a section from his bowel. Ganglia. Aorta. My gout. Dorothy had sat on the flat couch next to Daniel, ignoring the needling claws of the cat that had colonised her lap, wanting so much for his mother to like her.

None of the agony aunts mentioned money, the lack of it, the plunging of one’s family into the poorhouse, what to do if your mother was enraged and your father was a wastrel, how to leave home without breaking your older sister’s heart, how to stop your sister from stealing everything, how not to tell her about you and Daniel even though it was probably perfectly bloody obvious to everyone, if they were looking, which they maybe were not because their own lives were full too of the one foot in front of the other, the confusion about how best to proceed. Nothing about brothers, mental health of, or younger sisters, possible alien host factor, or why Marc Bolan had to die or why there were so many born-again Christians at Teachers’ College or whether she would go to jail or what to do next. If she changed the names there would likely be an opinion on whether [Daniel] truly loved [her], but it would depend on the magazine, whether he was her soulmate or just using her for sex.



They were all at dinner for the first time in weeks. Dorothy waited for what her father might do. The grilled-cheese roll was making her feel sick; she passed it to Daniel, who nodded thanks, and poured herself another red wine from the cask. Frank must have told Lee. It would come out about the night drives, the fines, everything. Eve took her plate to the sink, lit a cigarette and stood by the open back door, blowing smoke out into the night air. The fact that Lee wouldn’t meet Dot’s eye wasn’t necessarily unusual but she wished, just wished, someone would speak. Get it over with.

‘So those people who came this morning,’ she found herself beginning.

‘I had a letter today,’ Lee cut across her. ‘From an old schoolfriend. She’s got a fine life now, done very well for herself. Nice neighbourhood, three beautiful children, architect husband on the town council and she’s on the school board, though she doesn’t have to work.’

Frank snorted.

‘And you know what just happened? Just last year, when she’s forty-five years old? He shows up. The baby she had at seventeen and adopted out and never told anyone about. Her husband doesn’t even know. The baby’s father, whoever he is, doesn’t know. And the boy, in his late twenties now, comes back.’

As Lee was talking, Dorothy saw it, only the hallway was their hallway, the street outside their own. A few days before Christmas she walked down the hall and saw the wobbly shape of a strange man through the bubbled-glass front door. She slung the bolt on. Opened the door. Through the safety of the gap, she asked if he was lost. She could see now he was no threat, a slight man, narrow shoulders, wearing a coat that didn’t look enough for the weather. ‘ “Are you lost, honey?” and he said to her, “You don’t know me. But I think I am your son.” ’

‘She had a baby when she was seventeen?’ Ruth asked.

‘Seventeen.’

Dot felt it like an electric jolt, that lost baby transformed into a young man wearing a suit especially for the visit, a man who had brushed his hair and shaved and cleaned his teeth that morning knowing what he was about to do.

A friend of Frank’s tooted from the street, his car idling. Their father pushed his chair back and took his plate to the sink and stepped into the hallway and stumbled over the box that waited for the antique dealer’s assessment. It contained a fox-fur shrug, three crystal decanters, a couple of picture frames with the family photos removed, a blue vase made of Danish glass, Georgian candelabras, several round and rectangular silver trays, an incomplete set of silver cutlery with mother-of-pearl handles, a tangled rhinestone necklace, the thick lacquered folder that housed an ancestor’s coin collection and the Kodak Instamatic camera, the device on which Frank had recorded their childhoods, its black nose sticking out between the twisty stalks of the candlesticks as though it was coming up for air.