The Forrests (13 page)

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

THE TEXT ON
the questionnaire swam and blurred as Evelyn looked at it, or at the air that hovered above it. She’d thought the run-through with the press officer’s secretary, the woman who would be her immediate boss, had covered everything. It wasn’t much of a job, for god’s sake. Obediently she’d sat by the desk waiting for the interview and watched the door handle turning, the door opening a crack. In the corridor the secretary conducted a loud, careless conversation with a colleague – ‘I’m recruiting the phoners, you wouldn’t believe how many people want to do it, such an exciting job,
not
.’ Evelyn thought, then, of the photocopied paper notices that had begun to appear nailed to trees and lamp posts in her neighbourhood advertising jobs for housewives, work from home, earn $30 per hour, surely a figure of complete bullshit. Who rang those numbers? Data entry, cold calling, persuading people to be surveyed. Her sister would do it, but Dorothy was out of her gourd on oestrogen, progesterone, always with the baby at her breast or another one on the way.

The secretary had come in sipping coffee from a polystyrene cup, then biffed it in the wastepaper basket, the rim stained with her lipstick, the bitter smell drifting over, making Evelyn’s mouth water. She’d folded her hands in her lap and smiled at the woman, jumped through the hoops.

And then this arrived in the mail a week later and required her signature before the job could be formally offered. The document ran to seven pages. There was new stuff here.

‘How’re your taxes?’ the secretary had asked, and Evelyn laughed. Nathan was an accountant. He did TV producers, musicians, people who paid at the last possible minute, and he was not grand enough that he could fiddle things. For all his bad Hawaiian shirts he wouldn’t dream of filing a late return or failing to include every taxable penny paid to his assistant.

‘And this gap in your employment history?’

Explained of course by Louisa, now at school, enabling this model mother, this parent helper, yes, the secretary could see the list of relevant although unpaid volunteer experience, to return, usefully, to the workforce. ‘I used to be a florist.’

‘And what is it about the candidate that makes you want to serve him?’

Evelyn had prepared for this. She wanted to live in a world – no, world was too loose, too New Age – she wanted to live in a society where the small had as much weight as the big. As much importance. Maybe the candidate stood for the same values? She wanted to play a role. Besides, her friend Tania already worked for him and had told Evelyn this would be an in.

‘Have you ever been hospitalised? If so, for what condition?’ Tonsils, at thirteen. Done less and less these days, isn’t it? The secretary had a daughter who suffered, rounds of antibiotics every winter, but the doctors refused to whip them out.
Penicillin allergies, me too
. They both knew the words Erythromycin, quinsy. Eve remembered her mother in the chair by her hospital bed, the blissful rarity of having Lee all to herself.

‘And have you ever been treated by a psychiatrist or psychologist? If so, for what condition?’

No, she had not been treated for drug addiction or alcoholism. No, there was no health-related reason she might not be able to perform the job of telephoning people for donations. Driving violations, only parking. Violations were not going to be a problem. Minor violations.

And the credit report was fine, and she had never been arrested. Evelyn fought the shameful urge to reveal her father’s subterranean credit rating, those Ministry of Justice envelopes, the embossed crest against her fingers. In some unspoken way his failure was the children’s fault. Proof: now that Frank, Lee and Ruth lived in the States, they were fine. Survivors, no longer pulled under by the thrashing octopus of family.

Yes definitely, the interview had gone well. Her stockings hadn’t laddered, she had pitched the political details right, and that evening she’d sat with Nate on the back steps, distant clouds under-lit a brilliant peach by the low sun, and believed she was entering the world again, coming back into her own skin after five years of being nothing but a mother. A mother,
a mother
, she scolded herself, not
nothing but
. Soon there’d be a phone call – ‘Come in, get
started, you’re just who we need!’ – but instead here was the final-stage questionnaire, letter-headed, watermarked paper, beneath her hands on the kitchen table, a thick black line at the bottom of the seventh page waiting for a verifying signature. Please return along with all relevant documentation. She slid it back into the white A4 envelope, also bearing the insignia of the candidate’s office, and folded the lip of the envelope down. But since the flap had been opened, the glue had dried up and left chewy little traces and it would not stick.

On Sunday they went with friends to Mission Bay, the water warm enough to paddle in, shelly orange sand sticking in tidemarks along the edges of their bare feet. Nathan and Louisa threw pebbles into the sea. A bird strutted up to Evelyn, all sinew, and thrust its face towards her. It batted huge wings and hopped at the sandwich in her hand. She lifted it above her head but the bird kept coming, ruffling and jumping at her, and Eve shrieked and threw the sandwich away and the bird followed it, everyone laughing. Later, when the others had run back to the playground, Nathan asked what stage the application was at. Evelyn’s hair striped about her face. ‘Still waiting,’ she said, pulling a strand from her mouth, ‘for them to send that final questionnaire.’

If you keep or have ever kept a diary that contains anything that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family or the candidate if it were made public, please describe.

That night they made love. Drifting into the relaxed, soft-limbed sleep that followed, Evelyn knew, from friends and their problems,
that their married sex life was a kind of luck. If Nathan cared about his male pattern baldness and his bad posture, she didn’t. Like Dorothy, she had married a provider, no accident. Of course Andrew was permanently pissed off about that role. A small, sharp feeling turned over in Eve’s gut. She had to admit life was easier now that she was more happily married than Dot, who kept having babies to plug that gap, the love gap. The unworthiness of that feeling burned for a moment before she willed her mind away.

Then as though her subconscious was playing a joke, getting her back for the smugness about her marriage, she dreamed about Daniel on the mountain, and she stood on the snow and he leaned forward from the gently rocking chairlift and kissed her, in that way that Nathan never could.

Evelyn was walking from the bathroom to the kitchen behind Louisa, brushing her daughter’s hair as she tried to pull away, when Nathan called out, ‘Is this about the job?’

He had the questionnaire in one hand and a piece of toast in the other. The top kitchen drawer, a no-go zone full of Sellotape and miniature wooden pegs and zoo passes on lanyards and mosquito spray and emergency candles and vivid markers and sunglasses and gift ribbon and keys, where she had hidden the questionnaire, was open. ‘I thought they hadn’t sent it yet?’

The radio news presenter was talking about him, the candidate Evelyn wanted to work for, and she said, ‘Shh,’ hoping to hear something to use in the final final interview, assuming there would be one, assuming they would get over this questionnaire issue. But it was just an item about polls. The job had
nothing to do with polls; it was entry-level donation hunting, removed from the candidate by six or seven layers, depending on whether or not you counted the press secretary’s secretary as a superior. But there was still this process. She had to be legitimate. Nobody wanted a diversion.

Nathan handed the questionnaire over. ‘We should do this tonight. You’ve got to get back to them sharpish.’

After a late-morning bike ride along the waterfront,
just because she could
, Evelyn went upstairs, drew down the rope ladder from the ceiling and climbed up it, swinging from side to side until she found her balance, through the hatch into the attic. On one side of the wide, low-roofed space was an old mattress and wire-wove base, and Nathan’s teenage skis and poles that he fantasised Louisa might one day use, and the last VHS player and boxes of the photo albums and records of wedding and funeral services and the bone mahjongg set that he had inherited when his father died and his mother moved into the home. The rest of the attic was full of cardboard boxes, reconstituted fruit boxes and wine boxes and appliance boxes and shoeboxes, containing all of their lifetime-accumulated shit. To walk across the space Evelyn had to bend nearly double. She was reminded of the old house in Westmere. The dress-up box, the ancient comics, the warm feathery smell, the black cartridge-paper pages in the album of that coin collection, the shapes of the coins, decagons, wavy circles, tiny silver coins with holes in the centre, the layers of cracked yellow sticky tape over the spine. One day, Eve told herself, her chest would no longer squeeze at the thought of her parents. When she had properly adjusted her expectations.

Near the back of the stacks, under a heavy, collapsing box of folded hippy bedcovers, soft and quilted with Indian paisley prints and hand-stitched stars, was the box that held her diaries from the years before she met Nathan. Here was a journal with a dark-red cover and no dates. A photo fell out and she drew her breath sharply. Daniel had taken it and although the sight of herself, the nakedness, her body, made her stomach pitch there was at the same time as this sick feeling a pang of amazement that he had loved her like that once. But this picture, and the diary it came from. They would never be connected to the questionnaire, come on, they so didn’t matter. She was unrecognisable! Why not pretend it was Dorothy, although then she would have to explain why such a photo of her sister might be here in her belongings. Explain to whom? Nobody was ever going to go looking in her attic, this was a symptom of narcissism, bored-housewife syndrome, she was paranoid.
Nobody cares! You’re an invisible person!
But still she rifled through the diary pages knowing that the negative would not be there, that she didn’t have it. Her mouth felt muffled and silenced, like it remembered, and she stretched it open and moved her tongue around in the air because she could, making a long
aahhh
sound with the breath that rose over the vocal cords. But the silence had gone inside, where it was meant to be. It was the secrets that made you all alone. Eve remembered blankness, bliss.

On the patio she took the domed hatch off the gas barbecue, removed the slightly greasy grill, lit it and fed the diaries into it, pages at a time, without stopping to read the entries. They frightened her, these words in her handwriting that may as well have been written by someone else, a woman who was capable of having those thoughts and doing those things.

Smoke curled up like long planed wood shavings; the air became sweet and particulate. She sprinkled the little bits of torn photograph onto the fire and they burned a cold greeny blue. While everything disappeared she swept the early autumn leaves into a pile. Please list any membership you have had with any political, social, fraternal or religious organisation or private club including any type of tax-exempt organisation over the past ten years. Please include dates of membership and any positions you may have held with the organisation. What would Daniel look like now, nearly ten years on, how much had he changed? Would the decade that had made her a woman have made him a man? On the other side of the high, vine-covered fence two of her neighbours stopped and talked invisibly about the cost of keeping their dogs.

‘Is that you, Evelyn?’ one of them called. ‘Having an early bonfire?’

‘Just making my spells.’

‘Should we be worried?’

‘Should Nathan be worried?’

‘Ha ha,’ she called back. ‘Watch out.’

Another neighbour, after years off the cigarettes, had lately started smoking again, standing on his front step after dinner because he wasn’t meant to do it in the house. Eve got it now. A need could resurface. Cinders rose from the small fire in a cloud, catching in the rough, unsanded wood-grain of the fence. While the handwriting burned Evelyn went into the house to find the questionnaire. A gust of wind blew ash across the patio in front of her. She came back and added the questionnaire to the flames, watching it scroll and brown at the edges, its thick-paged whiteness threatening to smother the
fire altogether. She imagined time reversing, smoke sucked down from where it clung to the vine leaves into the burning photograph.
Nathan
, she thought.
Nathan cares
.

Tell us about your political philosophy. There are different groups of Liberals, for example, Progressive Liberal, Socialist Liberal, Free Market Liberal. Evelyn made Louisa’s supper, the stir-fried rice dish that was fun to do because it was so occupying, chopping the onion and garlic and celery and mushrooms and peppers, and because of the challenge of getting Louisa to eat it. Evelyn was picking grains of rice out from between the floorboards beneath the table all night but she didn’t mind. She bathed Lou and combed her hair, checking for head lice because so many of the school parents couldn’t be bothered, or were too busy working, to do it. At first she had felt horror on seeing the clinging white eggs in the fine web of Louisa’s hair, the black shadows crawling along her scalp. And now head lice were normal, part of life.

When Lou was in her pyjamas Evelyn read her a story, supervised brushing her teeth and took her to bed, where she listened to what her daughter had to say, finally, about the day, able to reveal her fights and victories now that she was cosily tucked up and it was all nearly over. In this way the hours between five and seven disappeared magically into the child’s existence, and Evelyn was able to lose herself, just as in those preschool years of newsprint and glue for papier mâché and rolling sheets of beeswax into candles and cutting out strings of paper dolls, which were meant to be identical but the ones at the back of the folded paper, where the scissor blades had further to reach, were always a little bit fuzzy around the
edges. These years in the house had erased something, too, holes worn through the paper with all that rubbing. She emerged into the hallway and blinked in the hollow light.