The Forrests (23 page)

He put the cushion on the floor next to him and patted it. ‘Come and sit with me.’

Maybe there was food in her teeth. Dorothy had a long drink of water and wished people still smoked. Hannah would be eating lunch at her friend’s house, creamed corn or whatnot, and after that the play-date would come to an end and the mother would drop her back. At the thought of her sweet, shy three-year-old minding her table manners at someone else’s house, a pang slowly shot through her.

‘Did you bring the thing from Eve?’

‘Come here.’ He patted the cushion. ‘Come here and I’ll show you.’

She knelt on the cushion next to his head. No accident she was wearing a skirt. Close up he looked pretty rough, his skin leached of youth, his hair quite grey. She wanted to touch his hair, feel the skull beneath it. He smelled great. ‘What is it?’ she said, inches from his body, waiting for a message, or a trinket, or a piece of paper, not for him to open his hand and show her the scar on the pad below his thumb, a shiny purple whorl of cigarette burn and say, ‘This.’

She held his hand. Bent back the fingers slightly. The burn scar was like a tiny eye. She wanted to kiss it. The cords of his wrist, the embossed veins ran up into his shirtsleeve. She pushed her fingers up beneath the cuff, felt the hair on his forearm, the twisting muscles. He leaned his head against hers.

‘Nothing can happen here,’ she said.

‘I know.’ Daniel lay back, shifted onto his side and pulled her up onto the couch towards him. ‘Come here,’ he said again. ‘Come and lie on this lovely Chesterfield with me.’

‘I think you mean davenport.’

‘Lofabed.’

‘Lofabed?’ She laughed. ‘I never heard that one.’ They lay next to each other but there wasn’t really room. ‘There isn’t really room. My body’s changed.’ She was worried she might cry. ‘I’m older. I’m not the same.’

‘Here. Come on, beautiful. This way.’

Later he asked if she remembered the commune, the gold chocolate coins, the rabbit. ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘How in real time we
probably weren’t there for very long. But I feel like part of me is still in that place. Alternative self still running around with those frogs and all that.’

‘I remember the shotgun,’ she said, propped up on her elbows beside him on the floor. She didn’t remember the rabbit.

Daniel moved a hand down her back, up the side of her waist, cupping her breast. ‘Oh my god,’ he laughed, ‘I can’t believe I’m actually here.’

The kitchen clock ticked. By some act of grace, time played it slow. ‘So, this is what I imagine,’ Dorothy said. ‘When we’re old, and that stupid passport of yours is lost in a fire.’ She saw it, the last ship he would ever be on, drifting charred and blackened up the coast, bumping the sand on a rain-soaked night, tumbling Daniel out, choking on seaweed and saltwater, onto the earth. ‘Then you’ll come back to me, all aged and useless, and nobody else will want to know, and I’ll make you feel better.’

‘Like this? Like it is now?’

‘Yes. Except you’ll be old and scrawny.’

‘You’ll be fat,’ he said. ‘A big fat babushka.’

‘And you’ll dine out on your famous northern lights and young women sashaying in cobbled town squares and swimming races in fucking Niue or whatever, and we’ll all say oh that’s just Uncle Daniel with his stories, and it won’t matter that you have nothing left.’

‘I’ll have nothing left?’

She sat up, then stood up. Blood rushed from her head. ‘Hannah’s going to be back.’

He nodded. ‘I know.’

She turned aside to clip up her bra and saw in her peripheral vision a blur of movement. Daniel had stood, and begun to juggle the contents of the fruit bowl. Fruit circled the air above his palms. An apple left his grasp, flew high in the air to smash against the ceiling and thudded along the scuffed floor. He kept juggling, his eyes locked on Dot’s face. A mandarin followed with an orange splat. Now a banana, boomeranging off to the corner of the room – another waxy green apple – a whole bunch of comical grapes, rising, turning like a heart to fall and land squashily on the bumpy rag rug. She had a hand to her mouth, shaking her head. From his pocket Daniel tossed her an apple. It was mottled with bruises but she bit into it. He presented her with his empty hands, a clown mouth turned down at the corners, a shrug.

Minutes later, when he was leaving, he reached his hands up to hang onto the lintel and she put her face to his chest then stepped away, the gesture too much like the way she was with Andrew. She had the sudden sense that there was a mask over Daniel’s face she’d never be able to pull back.

‘Hey, Dottie,’ he said. ‘What if you’re not here when I come back? When I’m all had it?’

She nudged him out the door. In the pathway he paused, made a show of examining his fingers, wiping them on his trousers. ‘You need to dust that doorway,’ he said. After he’d gone down the path and the coast was clear she took a quick shower and rearranged the living room. For a second she studied her face, which was
exactly the same
, and opened all the windows and the doors and waited for her youngest to be delivered home.

HER BROTHER WAS
waiting when they came home with the industrial cleaner, brick sealant, gloves and goggles. The dog trotted at her side and stopped by an unfamiliar car to sniff the tyres and Michael ambled over. ‘Hi,’ he said, not looking at Andrew.

Andrew said, ‘Morning, Michael.’

‘Hi, Andrew. How’s the painting?’ Michael sniffed. He said ‘Andrew’ and ‘painting’ the way nine-year-old Hannah said ‘Duh-uh’.

They stood under the branches of the oak in the Boddys’ front yard, and the air was steamy and the pavement still dark in patches from the night’s rain.

‘Where have you been?’ Michael asked.

‘Hardware store. Look.’ Dot pointed at the clinker-brick fence outside their house, where hot pink spray-paint ran across the centre in a broken, wobbly line, ending in a coded symbol. ‘We’ve been tagged again.’

Michael stepped back to study it. ‘Jesus,’ he said.

Andrew said, ‘Let’s do this later. I’ll get the pressure thing. Hose thing.’

‘Amy’s going to the skate park after school. And Grace is coming for dinner.’ She took the hardware-store bags from her husband, feeling judged by Michael’s gaze, that he was noting the way she and Andrew didn’t kiss goodbye.

‘See you.’ Andrew pressed the remote unlocking system on the car – a descending three-note twiddle the birds in their street had learned to reproduce – and she raised an arm and waved as he drove past and tooted, sluicing the windscreen free of rain spots and stuck leaves. She and Michael got covered in a fine spray of liquid disinfectant from the windscreen wipers, and the dog barked.

Michael’s eyes followed the departing car. He was talking about the job Andrew had found him in the transport department at the polytechnic, what a worry it was, the supervision wasn’t good enough, yesterday afternoon he had seen toast crumbs all over the office floor, a crusty wipe cloth on the kitchen bench.

‘That’s OK,’ she said, ‘that’s normal. Too clean is a worry, OCD. Are the people nice? To work with?’

‘You know, I’m calling human resources. I’m going to report them.’

‘But Michael, for what?’

‘And could you keep an eye out for those little bastards across the road, they’ve been in my rubbish.’

‘Mike, Andy’s only just got you this job. There are no jobs, do you know that? Don’t make trouble for no reason.’

A neighbour walked past, holding her umbrella so that the
handle looked like a hook emerging from her sleeve in place of a hand. Dorothy smiled at her and nodded and reined in the straining, sniffing dog.

‘Also, while I’m at work can you move my car? It sits there too long and some idiot reports it stolen.’ Andrew described Michael’s car as ‘an eyesore’. Tangy floor mats, the flaming embrace of the petrol smell from the can he kept in the boot. ‘I’ll leave the car key in your letterbox.’

‘No, I’m teaching later. Just leaving the car for a day is OK, come on.’

‘Can you help me or can’t you?’ Getting louder now.

‘Michael, don’t shout at me. I haven’t got time to move your car.’

‘You always do this! How long does it take!’

‘Stop it.’

Michael had jettisoned everyone else in his life: their parents, his ex-girlfriend, Daniel long ago. The slights and disagreements were clutched and nurtured, too complex to understand. You couldn’t point out that he was the common denominator. He was demanding and rude and most of the time Dorothy thought he hated her, but having him live next door was a family duty she was glad to fulfil, especially now, in what everyone had taken to calling ‘these times’. He needed her. In the winter he’d got stuck in the bath and it was only when she dropped some mending round, coming through the unlocked back door with a pair of folded jeans the size of a tablecloth, that she heard him yelling. Together she and Andrew unwedged him and for a while she’d made him go on a diet, bringing pots of low-GI casseroles, but nobody could make her brother do anything he didn’t want. Dial-a-Pizza pulled up outside his place almost every night.

Now he came very close to her. ‘They are watching, and waiting, and they are going through my rubbish.’

‘Michael. You need to take your meds.’
Meds
: she hated that fake flak-jacket word, but it was her brother’s language, a way to butch out the shitty passive business of being a patient, someone who needed help. ‘I’m coming in with you.’

‘No you’re not.’ He turned abruptly and galumphed the few metres to his house ahead of her, surprisingly fast given his bulk, and she stumbled over the dropped bags of cleaning product and into the hot muscular flank of the dog and raced to his door but he got in first and was too wide to overtake. The door slammed in her face.

‘The police helicopter was out this morning.’ She yelled it through the wood, held a finger in the air and spiralled it. ‘Did you hear? Keep your doors locked.’

On the news they’d reported an escaped prisoner, a double murderer. How did they escape? That was what Dorothy wanted to know. Buddleia tumbled from the brick wall, purple flowers spilling into the air.

She shouldn’t have mentioned the helicopters. It was the last time she saw Michael for a while.

Light gathered in the valley of the bank, hung pale brown in the long fronds of grass. On another hill the grass furred in the wind, pinkish gold. The path took Dorothy from her house to an unsealed track that tailed off, and along the bank to the fringed beginnings of the woods. A very few wild flowers dotted the slopes with red and purple, the sparse colours fleeting, as though they would disappear
if looked at too long, and cabbage white butterflies butted the grass feathers with greenish wings. The person emerging from the thin leggy trees – birches, bark lined with cracking peel, the trees inside sloughing their skin – was a scarecrow of purple clothes beneath a mushroomed umbrella, a shock of grey hair. Dorothy’s dog ran up to the figure, its black hide shimmering over the muscles that crossed beneath the skin. The figure made a half-beckoning hand gesture towards the dog, the umbrella buffeting in the wind.

The brushing grass against her calves whispered louder, its smoky scent intensifying as Dorothy walked towards the woman and the woman walked towards her without looking up, the world behind her head blocked by the umbrella, her stare somewhere on the ground. With a plunging certainty Dorothy recognised her. Rena. Her mother’s friend from Hungry Creek. ‘Hello,’ Dorothy said loudly, passing. The woman stalled and smiled frowningly and said, ‘Hello. You’re …’

‘Dorothy Forrest. You knew my mother. At the commune.’

Rena’s face was wrinkled, blue in the glow from the umbrella. Her gaze sizzled, and the smell of recently fritzed marijuana clung to her. ‘Dorothy. Look at you. My god.’

Each made a small, aborted movement towards the other, stopping short of a hug. Yes, Rena looked older, but not by that much – surely not by the same number of years as Dorothy had aged. It was forty-odd years ago. Rena must be seventy.

‘I’m looking for your brother Michael,’ she said. ‘Do you know where he is?’ She had the determined gaze of the embattled, and Dorothy got the dumb, shameful feeling that she was resisting knowledge, the salient detail. What did this woman want with
Michael? The dog had its nose in something under a tree, and Dot smelled or imagined the smell of a rotting animal, a poisoned squirrel or rabbit, and called to the dog in a deep, stern voice and it returned, breathing quickly through its open mouth, its lips squid-ink black and wet, the tongue a happy pink. ‘Really? You’re looking for Michael?’

‘I need to talk to him about something.’

Dorothy gestured towards the street. ‘Have you tried him at home?’

‘We need him to sign something and,’ Rena turned as though he might be coming up the path behind her, ‘the phone’s just ringing and he isn’t at the work number Lee gave me, either.’

‘He isn’t at work?’

‘No. His car’s still there. I don’t know.’ She laughed wheezily. ‘He might be stuck in the toilet again.’

‘It was the bath. Did Lee tell you about that?’ She hated the thought of her mother and Rena clucking over Michael. That awful, female power.

‘Have you got a key? When did you last see him? Someone should probably break in and check he’s not in trouble.’

‘Ha ha. Well I’m just …’ Dorothy patted the dog, who was whining. ‘I’ll be home later. The cedar house over there. If you need anything.’ She continued down the path a bit and thought once upon a time that witch saved my mother’s life, turned and called, ‘I mean would you like to come for lunch?’

But Rena was walking on.

The trees thickened and lace-holes of light swayed on the damp forest floor. Dorothy trod on fallen nuts, small broken forks
of twigs, acorns that rolled glossily away from her progressing feet, looking boiled and indestructible. God, she was sweating, under her arms – the anxiety sweat of menopausal hormones, or of instinct. The woods continued ahead, thick with the crackle of insects. She looked over her shoulder as though Rena might be coming after her. The dog was somewhere. A couple wearing red-and-orange jackets of stiff, waterproof fabric chafed past, pausing in their conversation to exchange hellos. Light pearled in the raindrops that hung on the underside of branches, like the bellies of glow-worms.