The Forrests

4. Instinct





Andrew had been surprised the first time he saw Dorothy pluck her eyebrows or floss her teeth, but the cheese toasties and wine on the couch while they listened to albums together was the right kind of intimacy, and maybe a few clipped toenails on the bathroom floor was the price you had to pay. He had never before lived with anyone he was sleeping with. The fact of her being there, lesson plans spread over the table when he came back from work, the ponytail swing as she rose to hug him, was astounding.

They lay in bed in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. It was an old apartment building, the bed covered in sunlight, the sheets a buttery yellow. And finally, after he asked and asked again, she told him a lot of juicy detail about her sex life with the man before him, which included, in a roundabout and quite tortured rendition, so that it took Andrew ages to work out what she was saying, she and this bean, this joke, this guy whose name she wouldn’t say, trying out tying each other up.

‘Not at the same time,’ she said. ‘Obviously.’ The sound of traffic rushed through the rooms like wind through leaves. Andrew sat up, thought for a minute and announced that he wanted to f*ck her.

‘You did just f*ck me.’

‘With something else.’

She lay there breathing, her eyes on his, and it was apparent that after what she’d just told him she had to go along with it. He banged in and out of the bathroom and the kitchen, everything he looked at, plates and bowls and her bunches of dried flowers, uselessly shaped. That was the part he remembered later, the bouncing panic, returning to the room terrified she would be laughing at him, unprepared for the erotic charge of her body lying there on the bed in the goldy heat being f*cked with some implement or another. And he remembered his cheeks hot with the sense of expansion, of these are the ways we can be with each other, there are not any limits.

There was no food in the apartment. While a record spun on the stereo, Dorothy and Andrew sat on the floor with their bank statements spread in front of them, covering her yoga mat.

Coffee, lunch and bus money lived in a ceramic mug Dorothy had made at high school, and they shook all the coins onto the bench and counted them, and jogged down the three flights of stairs, Andrew’s coat pockets clanking, and walked the long road of car dealerships and square concrete churches to the nearest grocery shop, which was closed. Dorothy began to weep. The f*cking, the disclosures and the hunger overwhelmed her. ‘I’m sorry I told you about that guy,’ she sobbed. ‘I thought that’s what you were meant to do when you got engaged. Tell each other everything.’ In truth she was afraid that she had talked about Daniel simply for herself, to bring him closer, never mind that it hurt.

He sat down next to her on the red wooden bench outside the grocer’s and put his arm around her shoulders, stroking her head. Her hair ran like water through his fingers. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. A square-bodied woman in a coatdress crossed the chipped bark in front of them carrying a paper bag with pointy green leeks sprouting from the top and he called out to ask her where she had got her shopping from.

They walked in silence.

‘I know,’ he said when the Sunday market appeared just around the corner, ‘we’ll plant a garden on the windowsill.’



Dorothy waved as Andrew drove off. They’d have to get a new car; he’d ripped out the back seat for his canvases. He tooted from the traffic lights and she blew him a kiss. The interior of Evelyn’s flower shop was clouded and cool from the mist spray, and the scents of tuberose and potting mix made time heavy, dream-like. Surely smells weren’t usually this intense. She toured the displays of roses, geraniums, the hyacinths with their obscenely bulging soil.

‘Your friend isn’t joining you today?’ asked Kimiko.

‘Andrew? He’s gone back to work.’ She was dying to say it: you mean my fiancé.

Evelyn wiped flakes of green florist foam off her hands onto her legs and swizzled the apron off and flung it on the stalk-stained cutting board. ‘She means Daniel. He’s been popping in.’

Oh Daniel. Dorothy hadn’t seen him since he’d got back from Melbourne. ‘This smells amazing,’ she said, inhaling the air above a small potted lavender, waving it under Eve’s nose.

She veered away. ‘Sends me to sleep. I was at the flower markets at dawn.’

The sisters took paper-bag sandwiches down to the harbour and sat on the jetty with their legs over the edge. Six feet below swelled the choppy bottle-green sea, chunks of water buffeting the splintered pylons, the salt smell deep as petroleum, filthy, alive. Evelyn unpeeled her sandwich and tweezed out the alfalfa sprouts with her fingertips and dropped them in the sea. Birds swooped. Dorothy told her the news that she was pregnant. Eve’s face fell open and she placed the sandwich into her lap and wiped her fingers on the fabric of her coat. ‘And you’re happy about it?’ she asked, picking at a couple of pilled spots on the sleeve.

‘Yes,’ said Dorothy, amazed that she could ask, slightly frightened at the gap between them that the question exposed. ‘Of course. We’re going to get married.’

‘Will you keep teaching?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Can I come to the scan with you?’ Eve hugged her sister fiercely, water rising in the side of Dot’s vision so that she felt she might fall in. They sat close together, foreheads touching. A cormorant plunged into the dark sea. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Eve said. Eye make-up had run on her cheek, and when she exhaled one laughing breath translucent snot bubbled out of her nose. ‘Why do I always get dumped? Sorry, sorry.’

Dorothy passed her the inadequate, one-ply paper napkin from her sandwich bag.

‘How’s Andrew?’

‘He’s excited.’

‘Have you told Frank and Lee?’

‘Not yet.’

Evelyn quizzed her more, about where she would live, they couldn’t stay in Andrew’s flat, and how would they live, would she go on the benefit, and what names she liked and what would the baby look like, questions Dorothy had no answer to. The wind died down and the sisters leaned forward to look at their reflections in the smoothly undulating, repetitive water, giant feet and small blurred heads. Evelyn held Dorothy by the shoulder and fake-shoved her as if to push her in, and they squealed and giggled and crab-crawled back away from the sea to the relative safety of the middle of the timbered jetty.



Daniel refused to be drawn on how long he would stay before leaving again, working his way, woofing or whatever. It was not enough that he had to be off-hand about his Melbourne ex-girlfriend, Tammy, a f*cking performance artist, which probably meant stripper, or that he had to be so cool about the record shop he had worked in and the squat he’d lived in with this and that band and the frequent use of the adjectives underground and independent before anyone’s job title so that she had already decided to refer to his closest friend, some heroin-addicted PhD candidate, as Underground Pat. Now he made allusions to a job on a cargo ship leaving for South America, but for all that he clearly liked saying the place names he hadn’t decided. Paranaguá. Montevideo. Zárate.

‘I don’t know the date.’

‘You’ll be the date. All those sailors. They’d love you.’

They sat on the wall outside the library. Daniel’s satchel strap cut a thick diagonal across his body. He dug a ready-rolled cigarette from the pocket of his jacket. Tiny brown curls of tobacco dangled from the end of the cigarette paper and when touched by the flame from his match they illuminated bright orange and disappeared. He inhaled, and exhaled. She held her fingers out for a puff.

‘You shouldn’t be smoking,’ he said.

‘Just one.’

‘Why’d you do it, Dottie?’ The darkness in his eyes really did seem to flicker – coal, jet, a hot shiny chestnut.

Dorothy passed the cigarette back to him and their hands touched momentarily. ‘Which part?’

He looked at passers-by from under his brows. ‘Karate boy.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Sorry. He’s a good guy.’

‘Yeah, he is. Anyway, what were you doing? You just . . . went away.’ The memory of those months after he’d gone made her pity her former self, a twenty-one-year-old girl who was small in Dot’s mind as though she’d been photocopied on a reduction setting, when really it was the same body she inhabited now, four years on, no different in size. The bricks were damp. She slid off, the edge of the wall scraping against her thighs, and picked at the mossy bits with a thumbnail. The sun shone through stacked, strangely cornered dark clouds, and down the street an empty parking space glittered with window glass, like shattered mentholated sweets.

‘It was horrible,’ she said. ‘When you left.’

‘Dottie.’ He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t really handle it.’

‘No.’

Their knees were touching. She felt the air between them densely electric. It sent her moral compass on the spin, tocking lazily, directionlessly around as though she would do anything, he only had to say.

Daniel waved at someone down the road and the young man ambled towards them, curly hair and stone-washed jeans, and they raised chins at each other and started talking about the support act for the gig that was on that night. It was a skill she had noted since Daniel’s return, that he could pick up with people right where he left off. Dorothy bit into the apple that thank god was in her bag because she was constantly hungry and accidentally dribbled a little bit of juice on her T-shirt, and the boys kept talking and the guilty burn of the cigarette still tingled in her mouth.



Her parents kept laughing, like they just couldn’t believe it. Frank would shake his head and say how proud he was and then he’d set himself off again.

‘But you’re a baby.’

‘I’m twenty-five.’

She blamed Michael. Home still at nearly thirty, he had warped their expectations. Dorothy sat between him and their mother on the reunited family sofa, Andrew across the room on a kitchen chair. The doorbell rang and Ruth let Andrew’s parents in, each of them with new partners, awkwardly joking from their collision on the doorstep. Dot greeted them and went to sit with Andrew because it was hard for him, everyone in the same room, his defensive father and the sullen policewoman stepmother, his mother overcompensating, her second husband oblivious, his mind on a hiking track somewhere, filled with tussock. ‘Lovely,’ said Andrew’s mother. ‘So what time is our booking at Chang’s?’

‘It’s not Japanese, is it? I don’t like Japanese food,’ said the stepmother, staring at the peace-sign badge on Dorothy’s cardigan. ‘What is that?’

‘She’s allergic to fish.’

‘It’s Chinese. Andrew,’ said his mother, ‘are you still vegetarian?’

‘Yes.’

‘A vegetarian!’ said the stepmother. ‘Whatever happened to a good steak?’

‘Arrest me,’ Andrew whispered in Dot’s ear, and she whispered back, ‘Fifteen to life.’

His mother shrugged and laughed around the room. ‘And yet he’s so tall!’



‘Listen, darling,’ Lee said to Dot as the Lazy Susan spun clockwise, moving the bowls of pak choi and flecky chilli sauce and pale, glistening chicken around, ‘let’s invite some of the Americans.’ Frank was negotiating a possible return to the States. Someone remote had ‘passed’ and there was more ‘moolah rolling about’. Dorothy wished she wouldn’t talk like that, as though money wasn’t real. Ruth wanted to move with their parents; she had always longed for that place she could not remember. ‘They won’t come,’ Lee said, ‘but you’ve got to invite them.’

‘Can I think about it?’ She wanted to be a good daughter. But no thanks, none of this I pay, I say. She and Andrew would front the wedding themselves. He’d taken a job in the caretaking division at the polytechnic, since no one was interested in showing or buying his paintings. Everyone had their own definition of survival.

They were interrupted by the ting of Frank’s chopstick against his glass. Wine lurched close to the lip as he raised the glass and made a toast to the engaged couple and welcomed Andrew’s parents into their family, although he called Andrew’s mother by the stepmother’s name. She hooted gaily. ‘Wrong wife, dear, wrong wife!’ Evelyn hid her face behind Dot’s shoulder and snorted. Dorothy, the zip of her dress tight up her side, held back the laugh that threatened to rip out.

Andrew lifted his drink. ‘Thank you,’ he said, cutting Dot’s father off from a relaunch. ‘Thanks, everyone!’ One arm in the air, the other around his fiancée’s thickening middle, his lean face lifted, shadowed by the twisty red tassels that hung down.

At some point someone mentioned the new anti-nuclear policy and Andrew’s stepmother said loudly, ‘Totally ridiculous,’ and Frank, who hated any talk of politics, began to sing a tune from My Fair Lady. Other diners looked over. ‘My family,’ Dorothy said to Andrew’s father and stepmother, who were acting as though nothing was happening except the urgent need to get a pork bun split between them, the stepmother’s chopsticks sawing at the white fleshy dough. On the other side of the round table Michael sat next to the outdoor-enthusiast stepfather, and they were deep in conversation, ignoring the musical interlude too. Andrew’s stepfather was a gesticulator, and he flung a hand back into the approaching waiter’s white shirt so that the waiter dropped a tray of bowls and everyone startled at the crash apart from Frank, who continued singing without pause. Dorothy and Evelyn helped pick up the broken pieces. The zip on her dress did bust a little bit, she felt it split and straightened up carefully, hands full of china. Andrew’s mother bobbed her head along to the song. When it finished she clapped, solitarily. More crispy spring rolls arrived, the wrappers like stiff brown paper spiralled at the ends, and there was the judder of the tinted glass door to the street opening and a wave of cold night air and Daniel was making his way to the table, hands thrust into the pockets of his denim jacket, hair hacked short in a home-made job, scruffy and uneven.

Evelyn flushed. Dorothy saw it. ‘Hi,’ she said, through a smile that couldn’t be controlled.

Lee rose from her seat and embraced Daniel warmly, ruffling his new hair. He sat down next to the stepmother, thrust a hand towards her and said, ‘You must be the cop.’

She scowled. ‘And you are?’

‘I instruct Andrew in the ancient art of karate.’ He gave a little bow.

‘Shut up, Daniel,’ Dorothy said, and made the proper introductions.

‘Oh,’ he said, staring at her waist as though it was finally dawning on him. ‘You’re pregnant.’ He nodded at Andrew and half stood from his chair, roughly aiming a congratulatory hand-slap that missed.

Dorothy wondered if he was high. She said to Evelyn, fixed on her sister’s pinkness, the way she ran her fingers along her collarbone while she looked at Daniel as though nobody could see, ‘We had the scan today. Andrew wanted it to be just us.’ And then Evelyn’s sweet smile melted and Dot said, ‘I’m sorry. I should have told you. I’m sorry.’

‘What are you eating?’ Daniel asked. Without thinking Dorothy leaned across the table towards him and held her chopsticks forward, the piece of gingery chicken wedged between them. Her arm outstretched. It was just for a second but she knew the table froze. Family members poised motionless, watching. Daniel held Dorothy’s gaze, his eyes dark and steady as he ate the mouthful from her chopsticks.

‘Did anyone go to the Queen concert?’ Andrew’s mother asked.

Quickly Dot sank back into her chair, stared down at her bowl.

‘I did,’ said Michael.

Daniel went to the bathroom and after half a minute Dorothy followed, but the hand-stained white sliding door to the men’s toilet was locked. She thought about knocking. Out of control, she felt out of control and wanted to shout those three words through the door. She ducked her head round the corner to see if they were visible, and realised Andrew had a clear sightline to where she stood.

When Dot came out of the women’s bathroom Daniel was back in his seat, eating rice with a ceramic spoon. She shifted her mother along and sat next to Andrew, who looked intently at her, then away, with a sharp turn of his head.

‘What?’ she said.

A chair fell on its side. Andrew’s stepmother stood and retched into the potted palm behind the table. She rounded on them, eyes wide, her lips hugely swollen. Hives bloomed from her neck up her cheeks. A terrible noise came from the back of her throat, a hiss like a feral cat, and she pushed the table with the heels of her palms, retching again. ‘Fhihh.’

‘Oh my god,’ said Andrew’s father, scrabbling through his wife’s handbag. ‘Where’s your EpiPen?’ He tipped the bag upside down and spilled the contents over the table – a lipstick rolled off the edge and onto the floor, a receipt floated onto a plate and absorbed the dark liquid of a beef sauce – then he snatched the pen about the size of a vivid marker and popped the lid and yanked up his wife’s skirt and jammed it through the black tights into her leg. A long look at the control-top pants. All of them held still while he counted to ten in one-thousands. The stepmother’s breathing came fast and shallow, but the internal war was calming as the epinephrine moved through her blood. Andrew’s mother offered her a glass of water and she held it with both trembling hands and drank.

The stepmother and Andrew’s father left for the ER and the remaining parents fake-argued about the bill and drove off, stale mints from the duck-egg blue bowl at the till dissolving to granules in their mouths. The restaurant staff stood in their wake holding foil-covered plastic boxes of leftovers, concerned in white jackets.

‘Are you OK?’ Dorothy asked Andrew. ‘I think we better go.’

He slid away from the hand she’d put on his forearm.

Daniel passed the leftovers to Ruth. ‘You should take these home,’ he said.

‘Thanks. Eve? Can you give me a lift?’

Evelyn was the only one with a car. She focused on Daniel’s chest as she asked whether anyone else needed a ride home, a hand twisting the rope of her long blonde plait.

‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m into walking after that.’

Dorothy hugged her sisters goodbye and watched them walk away towards the parking building, their matching light sashay, Eve’s arm suddenly around Ruth’s slim waist and Ruth doing the same thing back, the two of them holding onto each other as they rounded the corner, heads close. This is what happens, Dot told herself. You end up with men. It’s normal.

Michael crossed the road for a soft drink from the all-night service station and the strange girls passing had bare arms and legs and riding-up dresses in the chilly night. Dorothy was saying something, commenting on the short tight dresses, the bare thighs, when without warning Andrew pushed Daniel hard in the chest right there on the street outside the Chinese restaurant. Daniel pushed back. Andrew recovered his balance, lunged and wrapped an ankle around Daniel’s. They went down together and for a moment the two of them lay on the pavement violently hugging. But Andrew extricated himself fast, then cursed and kicked their old friend, this waif and stray, in the side as he began to rise from all fours on the ground.

‘Stop it,’ Dorothy yelled. ‘Just stop,’ and Daniel scrambled up against the wall outside the restaurant, tiled slippery white below spray-blasted concrete.

Michael jogged across the road between oncoming cars and yelled, ‘What the f*ck.’

‘What are you doing?’ Dorothy cried, and Andrew said, ‘I know, I f*cking saw you,’ and he was shaking and strung out. ‘I saw you, I know,’ and she shouted, ‘Saw what, there’s nothing to see.’

Daniel examined his palm where it was grazed from the rough concrete wall, and licked it.

Michael pushed Andrew’s shoulder and he staggered backwards. A couple of bouncers from the club on the corner approached. Dorothy remembered the time Andrew had sent a random car tyre hurtling down the road; that was how they walked, unexpectedly heavy, not quite in control of their velocity.

‘We’re good,’ Michael said, ‘we’re OK, thanks.’

‘You all right, miss?’ one of the big men directed at Dorothy, and when she said, ‘Yes. Thanks. Sorry,’ they moseyed back to their spots either side of the Irish tavern doors, where bass thumped beneath people shouting to be heard.

Daniel was still, watching them, a couple of fingers now up to his gums as though holding onto something. ‘Ha,’ he said, and wheezed. A finger came away bloody and he wiped it on his jeans. He shook his head at Dorothy. She moved towards him but his face made her stop. She held out the blue-and-grey plastic inhaler from her bag and said, ‘Do you need this?’

‘No.’

‘Why the f*ck,’ she said to Andrew.

‘Sorry,’ he said. He kicked the wall and his foot skidded on the tiles. A gritted-teeth roar came from him and he walked off down the street saying, ‘All right, I get it. All right.’

‘Anger management,’ said Daniel, and Dorothy said, ‘Don’t,’ and after she had half run, half walked down the road after Andrew, Daniel raised his arms priestlike to Michael and said, ‘That guy is a master of the f*cking obvious.’



Outside her family house, in the passenger seat of Andrew’s spray-painted car, Dorothy sat with an arm over her head like a bird’s wing, ducked down under the dash. That hard rolling sound was Michael wheeling the rubbish bin back to its spot by the front door. He hadn’t seen them. It had to be in and out, get the last of her old stuff and leave. When Lee heard about the fight she rang up to say she was ‘very disappointed in Andrew’. It was too late. Dot had chosen. They’d walked all the way home together after the Chinese restaurant and he’d asked her please don’t see that guy any more. She peered out, slowly straightening up as her brother double-checked that the front door was locked and headed down the street, away from the car, past the bus stop, to disappear round the corner.

‘He’s gone,’ said Andrew, and he opened his car door and stepped one leg onto the pavement. He held his palm out and Dorothy put her small silver house key in his hand. He entered the house. She exhaled, as nervous as if he were breaking in. Fluffy yellow pollen floated thickly from the plane tree. Dorothy got out and leaned against the car. Sunlight flared off the windowpane of her bedroom upstairs then vanished as Andrew lifted the sash and threw a bundle of her old clothes onto the pavement. Half of them would be too small now that her body was changing. She gathered the things and threw them across the back seat. A bra stuck in the hedge; Dorothy tore out a small branch as she yanked it free. Andrew was the one up there helping her get out and the baby was inside her and Daniel wouldn’t be in the house anyway, he didn’t live there any more, nor did Evelyn, nor did she. The owner, Osborne, was selling it. The estate agent’s sign showed a fish-eye photograph of the front room that made it look larger than it was, and a shot of the house from across the road at night-time, every light behind the plane tree blazing with comfort.

Instinct made her duck as a dark shape fell from the window – a box that bounced and shed its contents over the small front yard – old schoolbooks and childhood stuff – Daniel’s exercise books, the kid’s microscope Michael had saved up for – ‘No,’ Dorothy called, but now Michael’s guitar landed on the end of its neck, the body thwanging on the ground. ‘No,’ she shouted. She threw herself into the driver’s seat and leaned on the horn. In the silence that followed, the upstairs window closed. Papers and parts of toys had scattered everywhere and Dorothy collected them, hugged them to her, dropped them in the squashed cardboard box, pushed it onto her pile of clothes inside the car. In the driver’s seat she pulled the seat belt across and stepped on the clutch and turned the key, shaking.

Andrew appeared by the car window. A moment passed in which the two of them watched each other through the glass. She was afraid of him. And then he was the one who looked frightened. Slowly she released the gearstick into neutral and unwound the window.

‘Oh my god,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’ He knelt on the ground by the car, his eyes red, his voice solid. ‘I’ll buy a new guitar. Please. Help me take those things back inside. Please, Dorothy. Help me.’

On the other side of the road a neighbour emerged from her front door, pulling her dressing gown tight around her, a telephone receiver in her hand. She walked a step towards them, as far as the cord would allow. Dorothy got out of the car and waved to the woman and called that she was Frank and Lee’s daughter, the Forrests’ daughter, everything was all right.