The Forrests

7. Dandelion Clock





On the drive to the cabin the sky began to set and darken, the colour of wet concrete. Rain prickled the windscreen. ‘Great,’ said Andrew. ‘Stuck inside with the perfect robot child for a week.’

Dorothy squeezed his leg, the hard muscle above his knee, and moved her hand up his thigh a bit. ‘I like these jeans.’

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hi.’ She kissed his shoulder. In the back seat Amy, the baby, started to cry. ‘I’m thirsty,’ said Grace, and Dorothy swivelled around to pass her the king-size Schweppes bottle filled with water. Grace dropped it and Dot unbuckled her seat belt and said to Andrew, ‘Don’t crash,’ and squeezed through the gap between the front seats to the back and sat with one hand stroking the side of the baby’s breathtakingly soft face and the other hand propping up the bottom of the heavy bottle so that Grace could drink from it. ‘Lou’s only little,’ she said to Andrew. ‘Give her a chance. She’ll turn weird and difficult soon enough.’

‘You’re probably right,’ said Andrew. ‘Look at the parents.’

‘Do you mean Aunty Eve and Uncle Nathan?’ said Grace.

‘No,’ said Dorothy, hitting Andrew in the arm. ‘We’re talking about someone else.’

‘Lou means toilet,’ said Grace.

‘It’s a pretty name,’ Dorothy said. ‘Be nice.’

Things had changed for Grace with the baby’s arrival. Maybe it was the week Dot spent away from her, with bird-like, premature Amy in the NICU. Maybe it was simply the fact of another child. The parenting books had a lot to say about introducing new siblings. The word sibling was deceptively bloodless. Grace threw stuff and she wouldn’t take a daytime sleep. She railed against the wind or the sun or the straps on her pushchair and she let food fall half chewed from her mouth and always removed her clothes and shoes once she’d been dressed. She liked being read to, and attempting skew-whiff jigsaw puzzles and perching on the kitchen bench while Dorothy baked, and she liked sitting up against her mother’s side while she breastfed the baby and hitting her lightly in the face.

An electronic jazz riff on the radio announced a traffic report and Andrew turned it up and the newsreader said that a tropical storm was heading east and could develop into a hurricane. Residents were advised to prepare hurricane kits and a flash-flood warning was issued. ‘Motherf*cker,’ said Andrew.

‘What do we do?’

‘Everyone’s still driving.’ It was true; the traffic out of town had slowed but all three lanes were moving, the red and yellow car lights glistening through the grey rain.

The car shook in the wind as it edged forward and the windscreen was a blur, carved by the metronome of the wipers, the shifting of water from side to side. The traffic slowed to a crawl and Dot said to Andrew, ‘OK really don’t crash,’ and undid the clasp over Amy’s belly and lifted her into her arms and rucked up her T-shirt and clicked the plastic toggle to release the cup of her bra.

‘This is my one f*cking week off, man,’ Andrew shouted at the traffic.

‘Hold my hand, Mummy,’ said Grace, and once the baby was plugged into that rhythmic sucking and the milk was drawing from all the way under Dot’s arm, through the breast and into Amy’s mouth, the fine hair at the nape of her neck damp with sweat, she could free a hand and find Grace’s palm.



Nathan’s newspaper said that the storm might move further east and pass them, that there might not even be lightning and thunder, no need for the canned food, torches, extra nappies and colouring-in books they’d picked up on the way. He showed them a satellite image of the storm, a startling spiral with a tiny hole at its centre through which you could imagine seeing the surface of the earth, the whorl around the eye terrifying to look at, a pocket-size image of force, magnetic suction, and Andrew said, ‘Come on, how is that not a hurricane.’

‘Maybe we’re just out of its path,’ Nathan said. ‘No radio range so we just got to wait and see.’

‘Nathan,’ Dot said, touching his upper arm, ‘I’m so sorry about your father.’

He nodded. ‘Thanks. Yeah, it’s been rough on my mum.’

Evelyn came out of the bedroom, closing the door quietly behind her, and crossed the room on tiptoe towards them, streaky blonde hair tumbled over her shoulders, smudged eyeliner, bare feet and a long cotton sundress. Beside her, Dorothy could feel Andrew tense up, and she was conscious of her nursing bra, coffee-stained T-shirt, the roll of flesh over her waistband. Eve whispered, ‘Louisa’s asleep,’ and opened her arms wide to embrace Dot and the baby on her hip in slow motion, her touch like feathers.



The pool was a natural crater in some rocks, sealed roughly in patches with concrete, filled with rainwater and sterilised with salt. The rocks were mossy. Even for an adult it was hard to clamber out, pulling up on the slippery round edges that sloped too gradually for hands and feet to get any real purchase. Rain pocked the irresistible surface. The water was the temperature of blood, warmer than the air above. After the first dip Dorothy emerged on all fours, knees bright red from the effort of gripping the rock.

‘Primordial slime,’ Nathan said. ‘You’re like the first stage of mammalisation.’

‘Is mammalisation a word?’

‘Mammalial.’

‘That might be something to do with breasts.’

‘Oh yes.’

Dot wrapped herself in a towel and sat on the covered porch watching the rain come down, and Grace came and sat on her knee, the child’s head fitting perfectly underneath her mother’s chin.

They were on hyper-alert about the kids: Grace, Louisa and even Amy, although she could not yet crawl. The fence had to be locked at all times. At least one adult per child. No running on the wet rocks. Don’t give them water wings, a polystyrene flutter board, they won’t ever learn to float. Everyone knew someone who had let the child run ahead to the water, who had gone back to answer the phone, whose pool gate had swollen in the rain and wouldn’t shut properly, who had been helping another child with a grazed elbow that needed sterilising when – And the images were there and you couldn’t erase them and it was then that you wondered why have the children in the first place, loss was too possible, you can’t be a parent, surely this can’t be what a parent is?

The men cooked, raggedy T-shirts beside the barbecue, smoke gathering under the awning, a current of air drawing it out and dispersing it over the pool. The storm had passed and the atmosphere felt rich, charged with negative ions as though just breathing it could get you high. After a few wines Evelyn said to Dot, ‘I thought Andrew was a vegetarian?’

‘Used to be.’

‘That was a cool thing for him to do. Brave. I mean anyone can be a vegetarian now. Except Nathan.’ She drained her glass and poured another one, started in on that.

‘How are things?’

‘Great! How’s Andrew’s work?’

‘The caretaking, or the painting?’

‘. . . Both.’

‘He’s doing abstracts now.’

‘It’s great that he keeps with it.’

Dorothy bit her thumbnail. ‘What are you thinking about any more kids?’ she asked. ‘Louisa’s so gorgeous. She’s being lovely with Amy.’

‘To be honest,’ Evelyn said, ‘I’m not sure. Nate would like to have another but I don’t get why he’s so keen.’

‘Maybe, since his dad . . . ?’

‘I don’t know.’ Her vague voice, the habitual hand over her mouth. ‘Sometimes I wonder if it’s better to just have one kid and try to do that right.’

‘Bit late for me now,’ Dot said. Her breasts hardened and ached; she pressed down on them before milk could spot her new sundress. Was the baby alive? Ah her brain.

Through the shambles of early parenthood Eve had retained her knack of making things lovely, wild flowers pluming from a milk jug, herbs scattered over the salad. Their mother’s floating-skirts phase was in here somewhere, but Eve’s grace was her own. Yet even though she and Nathan touched each other, kissed in passing with an ease and enthusiasm Dorothy envied, and even though they had Louisa, a seamless child, Evelyn carried this twisting, claret undercurrent, the thing that set her finger tapping on the table when her husband told a story.

Standing now, Eve supported herself with a palm on the table before, Dorothy knew, she would walk unevenly to the fridge for another bottle.

‘Did I ever tell you about that guy I caught trying on my knickers?’

Dorothy laughed so suddenly she spat some wine. ‘No.’

‘Yeah, well he had erection issues which he said were my fault, demoralising et cetera, and we started using sex toys and then he tried using his Sega Light Phaser on me. You don’t recover from that. As a couple, I mean. But he wasn’t the worst, there was one, ohohoho no. No no no no no. But at least he could have straight sex, not like those ones that will only –’

‘Come on, girls, it’s ready,’ Nathan called.

Evelyn leaned into Dot. ‘He doesn’t like me to talk about the past,’ she said. ‘He likes to think I was a virgin, like him.’

Dorothy couldn’t wait to get alone with Andrew.

‘His Sega?’

‘Mark III.’

‘You’re shitting me.’

‘Mate, I shit you not.’

Sometimes they talked like people they were not. Language just came out their mouths, it didn’t belong to them.

‘Where are my war stories, man,’ Dot complained. ‘You never f*ck me in your karate gear. What’s the name of that move? Crushing the demon?’

He stopped laughing. ‘That’s different.’

‘I was joking.’

‘OK. I get it. But.’

‘Seriously.’ She turned away from him in the bed and spoke it to the darkness. ‘We’re running out of kindness. If we don’t have sex soon we’re going to be f*cked.’

‘Yeah I want to, I do.’ That tone in his voice, like he was trying to convince himself.

‘Are you really going hunting tomorrow?’

‘Have to. Otherwise Nathan will think I’m some kind of pansy who can’t bonk his wife or shoot a boar.’ Sleepily, he murmured, ‘At least he doesn’t make me feel like I’ve got the most boring job in the world.’ Nathan was an accountant. Dorothy reached an arm back to pat Andrew’s hip. Yes, he was the one in her life.

Rain truckled outside, heavier drops collecting and falling from the guttering. It was time to go and check whether the baby had a pulse and whether the blanket was too close to her mouth.



The mothers took the children for a walk over some fields, Louisa staggering ahead beside the hedgerows, Grace issuing orders from her pushchair, the baby strapped against Dorothy’s chest. Around dawn the rain had stopped and the green world glistened. Water hung in the cow parsley, the same colour as the thin circle of moon Louisa was calling to. Mud tugged at their feet. On a hill a clutch of crows burst from a tree like black stones. Dot pulled at the corduroy baby sling to make sure Amy’s maroon lips were parted, put a finger in front of them to feel the short hot exhale of her breath.

‘Keep pushing,’ Grace shouted in her cracking voice. Everything around them was part of the same feeling but Dot could only see one element at a time – the moon, the high bird, the nodding flowers – and tried to take them in all together, sense how the parts melded into this hot noticing, this sweating under the weight of the babies, the sun bearing down.

‘Keep pushing, stupid lady.’

‘Grace,’ said Evelyn, ‘don’t talk to your mother like that.’

‘It’s OK,’ Dot said. She stepped back from the buggy, fingers red and puffy from gripping the handle, and sat on the damp earth, lay down on her back so that the baby was balanced on her chest, the straps of the sling falling loose. The grass bore her weight until the world turned and she could feel herself hanging upside down in space, glued to the underside of the earth. ‘I don’t care, she can say what she likes.’

‘Yes but you should care.’

‘Yes but I plainly don’t.’ Dorothy plucked the soft transparent sunburst of a dandelion head. ‘This place reminds me of the commune.’

Evelyn was silent for a moment, then she said, ‘Have you heard from Mum lately?’

‘No. Grace’s birthday.’

‘Sometimes it amazes me that everything I’m going through with Lou, the intensity, the attachment, the way they take over your life, the sort of total love, she had with all of us. It’s so odd when you can’t remember it. Ever sitting with her the way you sit with Grace. We must have seen her pregnant with Ruth, and feeding her, and bathing us and all that, but I don’t remember it. Do you?’

‘No. We were too young to have memories.’

‘But even later.’ Eve removed her fingers from her lips and gave a little smile, a conscious effort to brighten. ‘She was good at helping us with our homework and stuff.’

‘I think she was different with Daniel. Close, or whatever.’

‘Oh my god what a gorgeous day.’ The words erupted from Evelyn with bizarre energy, and she flung her arms to the sky as if to jump forward in time.

Dot sat up and made a cushion for the baby out of the padded sling, unclipped her bra and began to feed her. Thank god.

Eve laughed. ‘You look like a gypsy.’ She drew a camera from her overstuffed daypack and snapped a picture of Dorothy as she squinted up at her, mouth open, nose wrinkled, before understanding that her sister wasn’t going to photograph the view.



The baby wouldn’t sleep; there were mosquitoes in the room and Dot held her under a square of muslin while Eve grated carrots for the salad. The men came in from shooting wild goat and sat on the grass untying their muddy boots. Later, back in Auckland, an envelope would arrive from Nathan containing photos of them both on quad bikes with brown hairy carcasses, hides intact but split and hollowed dark in the middle, roped on board. For now the meat hung in the local farmer’s cool store; the cabin did not have enough refrigeration. Dorothy kissed Andrew.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he said.

‘I’m studying your face for signs of blood lust.’

He smiled sheepishly and shrugged. ‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ She kissed him again. ‘We should – you know. Later. I’m going to go and check on Grace.’ After all the day’s anger the girl lay stonelike in bed, immobile as her mother leaned closer and closer, as she reached a finger to stroke her cheek – was it cold? too cold? Could that pillow fall on her?

Dot leaned in the doorway by the pool, the baby hot against her neck, Amy’s long body so sweet in the rabbit suit, her legs dangling bare and warm from the dry, light nappy.

‘. . . like what,’ Andrew was saying, ‘like that’s because you’re just looking for an end, for an end to your single life. I don’t know, married, it’s one way of living.’

Nathan laughed.

‘I mean, as soon as you have a wife and a kid this whole world opens up. Sexy airhead mothers. Pre-school teachers, nurses.’ The evening light was going, the pool spread darkly in front of him. Soon Dot would light the outdoor candles, but not yet. ‘The midwife that delivered Amy gave me her number. How sick is that!’

Dorothy laid the sleeping baby down in her travel cot and went to join the others playing drunk touch-rugby by the pool. Andrew tackled her to the ground and Nathan leapt on the grass next to them both and wrestled the ball out of her arms, banging her breast with his elbow. It burned. She kicked out at him and he ducked away and Dot charged up and went in low and pushed Andrew into the pool, roaring. He crashed into the water and came up coughing, laughing, and called out, ‘Watch it or I’ll root you with my Joy Pad.’ The greeny dark night spread flat, a sheet held taut by two people. Andrew disappeared under the surface again in an ostentatious, teenage-boy plunge. Bubbles rose. Dot turned around, taking a few moments to get her balance and see Evelyn in the night, where she was, she and Nathan hanging in space, their feet just touching the ground.

‘That’s great,’ Evelyn said to Dot, or Nathan said to Evelyn. Dot was confused. Soon after that Eve and Nathan went inside. Dot looked down at the oily surface of the pool, the mossy rocks, and imagined engineering a moment with her sister as she rinsed the dishes, finding the right words to say to brush away the indiscretion. But when she followed them inside the cabin was empty and all the doors off the living room were closed. Andrew came to bed smelling of beer and waterweeds, leaving the sheets damp wherever he turned over.



Early in the morning Dorothy sat with her legs in the pool, kicking slowly, her body the same temperature as the water, walking in space. The cabin was quiet and glowed in the lemony light that the sun cast over the garden, the outdoor tables and chairs, the slippery rocks. Over towards the edge of the property, silhouetted eucalypts stretched dark explosions of leaves into the sky. She’d pumped off the milk that might have gotten laced with wine, though if Amy had drunk it maybe she would have slept better. Thinking of the baby made her afraid of everything that could go wrong. She knew in her heart it must have been her fault Amy was so ill when she was born. They were still only inches away from that having happened. She let the fear in, sweating, and then it passed.

Dot was going to make coffee when Grace came out of the bedroom, pulling at the sticky tabs on the sides of her nappy. ‘Morning, darling,’ she said.

Grace dropped the nappy on the floor and walked on, naked. Dot picked it up and found a plastic shopping bag for it and tied a knot in the top and shoved it to the bottom of the kitchen bin, past the scrapings of last night’s salad and spaghetti. She went back to the veranda and saw Grace walking straight towards the pool. ‘Grace,’ she called. The child sat down on the edge and tipped herself forward and disappeared.

Under the water Grace sat cross-legged on the bottom of the pool, her face a surprised O, her body shimmering and pink. She was all Dot saw, just sitting there, chubby and wavering, as she lunged through the heavy water to reach her. Grace was easy to grip onto and they emerged together. Dot sat her on the edge and scraped herself out to sit next to her. Grace’s chest moved up and down. She was breathing. Dot clambered to her feet, her body very heavy, and lifted her daughter and held her upside down. She was breathing normally. There was nothing else to do. A towel was draped over a deckchair and she swaddled Grace in it and carried her to the veranda where they sat on the painted wooden floorboards, breathing. Dot’s eyes stung from the salt water. She wiped away the blood that ran from her calves, mixing with the pool water and threading down over her veined feet. Behind them the house was quiet.



‘The thing is,’ Evelyn said later from the pool, where she was breast-stroking lazy, sensual laps, ‘if you don’t get Grace’s behaviour under control she’s going to take it into kindy and school, and she’s going to have a real problem making friends.’

‘But she’s only like that with me.’

‘And you’re OK with that.’

‘No, but I am too tired to do anything about it.’ Jesus damn it. The baby was fine now, she wasn’t meant to play that card. Dorothy called over to the veranda, where Andrew had the baby on his hip. ‘Does she need a feed?’

‘How are you two going?’ Evelyn was giving her The Gaze, and Dot wondered how they had come this far. The urge to tell her sister about Daniel’s latest postcard was physical in her mouth, as though the words themselves were made of pebbles or candy, but she restrained it, knowing Eve didn’t like to hear news of him from her. His postcards, from Paris now, arrived like bullets in the post. Randomly, sometimes not for two or three months, then one a week, even two in a day, short notes, funny, pissed off, a simple update. Often the messages were so cryptic she doubted her ability to decipher the handwriting: Dozen oranges hurled at me today. Frank would approve. What mattered was not so much the message as the sending. From the other side of the world, speaking and dreaming in a different language, he still thought of her.

‘What about teaching?’ Evelyn asked.

‘Maybe. One day, yes. I mean, we need the money, but then we’d have to pay childcare and it basically costs as much as I would earn.’ She had a gut feeling that Amy wouldn’t be her last baby; babies were what she wanted, and Andrew too, but paying for them was the trick. He had vowed to get out of the polytech’s caretaking division and find an art gallery by the end of the year. Even if he sold a painting. Just one. ‘Evie,’ Dot said. ‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’

Her sister leaned her chin on her arms, which were folded over the edge of the pool, ghostly legs kicking slowly far beneath her. Water slicked her hair back from her face and you could see she was older, lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Evelyn and Nathan lived in the eastern suburbs, with a sea view, in a bigger house. It was the way things were. ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘Nathan’s been so angry since his father died.’

‘Really? I haven’t seen it.’

‘Well, I know Andrew’s got his mood issues.’

Dorothy lay on her stomach, propped up on an elbow, close, and reached the other hand into the water, fanning the weighty liquid with her fingers. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry about the whole Joy Pad thing.’

‘That’s OK.’ Evelyn crinkled a smile, water in her eyelashes. ‘We’re all grown-ups here.’

She pushed off and then there were the soft sounds of her moving through the water, Andrew talking nonsense to the baby, Nathan and Louisa playing a game passing leaves back and forth like money. Maybe Eve was right about Nathan’s anger. Everybody knew someone who’d been in the room you never wanted to go into. Whether it was cancer or what, there was a room, and it was bad enough but it was nowhere near as bad as the room you didn’t come out of. The room they took the families into, to tell them the news. There was an actual door, she’d seen it. Painted grey, with the words FAMILY ROOM in metal letters by the handle.

Something heavy landed on Dorothy’s back, pressing her breasts painfully into the ground. Her daughter. Grace’s knees were in her shoulders, her forearms around Dot’s throat, choking her mother’s windpipe. Dot rolled to the side but the girl clung on tight. ‘Mummy, Mummy,’ she rasped in her kitten voice.

Pulling back onto her haunches, scraping her already-scraped knees, Dot swung Grace round into her arms and held her there. ‘Baby,’ she said, and Grace smiled up at her, gaps between her square little teeth, her face so open, needing nothing but love. ‘You’re my mummy,’ Grace said.

Together on the ground beside the pool they rocked back and forth. Grace’s arms were short and squeezy in Dorothy’s brown, bevelled grown-up’s arms. From the other side of the pool Louisa and Nathan waved, and though Dot couldn’t focus that far, in her mind there were the blue eyes of her sister’s child, bluer than the sky, or the pool, or the Mexican drinking glasses on the mosaic table, just watching them calmly.

‘Baby girl, baby girl.’ Dorothy held Grace and caressed her hot cheek, her damp hair.