The Forrests (33 page)

But it wasn’t Andrew she turned to when the eggs began to burn or her glasses disappeared. They should come with a sonar locator, she thought, there would be money in that, just as you
could ring a cell phone to find it you should be able to do the same with house keys, remote controls, wallets. What was it Donald said, the Internet of Things? She lived alone. Only Diego, the caretaker who’d become a friend, saw the lists, but then the lists would appear in odd places, not on the fridge but tucked in the back of the bathroom cabinet, not taped to the front door but rolled into a wine glass. Lists were only useful if you could find them, and then only if you could read them, and reading was no problem apart from the giant hole torn in one afternoon when the recipe for spinach soup escaped her and she went blank, the bench spread with potato peelings. Spinach stalks. Onion peel. What to do with these? The cookbook was useless, the instructions made absolutely no sense, may as well have been in Mandarin. She slammed the book shut and wanted to weep. It was much later that night, tossing some apple skins into the compost bucket, that she discovered the white cubes of peeled and diced potato, the fresh green leaves nestled there in the dark.

IT WAS A
new grocery store; new for Dorothy. She had taken a bus, also new, one of the yellow double-ended ones with a concertina segment in the middle that held two carriages together. Those buses belonged somewhere with wide roads and manicured roundabouts, not here with the narrow bricolaged streets and everyone parking arsy-versy where they pleased. All they did here was jam the traffic, but the council before the current council had ordered them and everyone was stuck with the decision, it would have been ‘bad management’ to reverse it, buy their way out, and this was all any ruling body seemed to do these days, live under sufferance with the choices of the previous administration, or at least make it sound that way. Dorothy sat in the back half of the bus, so when it turned she would feel a momentum swing, a surge of uncontrol. The window by her head was streaked with a whitish substance, as if an egg had been thrown at it and the glair dried in the sun. Out of the narrow streets, outside suburban stand-alone houses, trees flared with spring
blossoms and magnolia, rhododendrons, daphne. Through the sliver of open window the scent of the daphne passed faintly, like something imagined. A tree stood bare-branched, surrounded by its fallen scarlet petals as though it had given an enormous sigh and shed everything. Dot scrolled the pages of her book, another book she couldn’t read without her glasses and magnifying glass; all very well enlarging the font but not when it ended up three words per line. How did women go about the world on their own without books? You saw it, but she would never understand.

The grocery store was identical to the one on her corner, down to the point-of-sale promotions and the black-wheel streaks on the linoleum by the refrigerators. Dorothy had not eaten breakfast in the hope of generating some kind of hunger, but now the grabby feeling in her stomach wouldn’t focus itself on anything. It was just before noon. The women shopping looked identical to the women in her neighbourhood. Their shoes were thrashed but clean. So sad. The phrase came into Dot’s mind while she sniffed leathery oranges from the fruit bins, a two-note descending sing-song like the poor fucker caged bird in the downstairs apartment. So sad. So sad. Who had said that lately? Of what? Perhaps the women behind her on the bus. Women, it had to be noted, were everywhere. There in the reflection of the fridge doors was a woman not unlike Dot, same height, same age, who looked as if she didn’t care about food any more either, though she was wearing a thick blue sweatshirt and tracksuit pants, so where her body began was obscured. Yes, definitely a double reflection, not a trick of the light, nor Dot’s usual surprise that the old woman caught ghostily in a shop window as she passed it was, in fact, herself.

Their reflections smiled at each other and the mirror woman’s face became a walnut, deep creases from her mouth running all the way up to her temples. Dot leaned forward and pulled the heavy door open, its suction straps unpeeling like black liquorice, and the other woman’s reflection swung closer as the door moved. The refrigerator puffed hot air around Dot’s ankles and her fingers grew cold. She turned cheeses over looking for the ones that had further until their expiry date, the ones they always kept in the back. Cheese was a guaranteed pleasure. One of these days she would wake up and discover herself to be a giant mouse.

In one corner of the grocery store the fluorescent overhead lights were out. Dot had the feeling this had happened in the exact same corner in her local store – or perhaps it was the synaptic shudder of déjà vu. Diego made her take aspirin every day now, and that shit must be doing something. Here everything looked soft, grey, old. The edges of the cardboard cake-mix boxes were matt and worn, as though overly handled. A cloying smell rose from a tray of thin green aubergines that lay limply on pulpy-looking ridged blue cardboard. The baking soda she was looking for was not there. Her local store was also out. Why must this be? If they had to deal with the pigeons she had to deal with, they would ensure constant supplies of baking soda. In her neighbourhood people bought it because it was cheaper than toothpaste; here perhaps it was being used to bake cakes. Dot circumnavigated the store again, to check that there wasn’t a shelving anomaly, and she should have registered as odd that the other woman was keeping pace with her at a distance of a couple of yards, but these places were full of weirdos. By the mysterious
locked door in the back wall of the shop, a door to the staff toilet or stack room or an asphalt, oily car park, a teenage boy with acne practised impressive dance moves with his arms. At the pick-and-mix candy bins two blonde women with ponytails tonged hearts into a plastic bag, one by one. A pale tabby cat slunk a figure eight through Dot’s ankles. The baking soda was nowhere to be seen. A young man in a blue store jacket passed her carrying a box of long-life milk cartons, and Dot followed him to the shelf where he was stacking them. He wore a nametag but the lettering was too small for Dot to read. She asked him where she might find the baking soda but he seemed unable to understand, or perhaps to hear her. There was nothing in his ears. She patted his arm and he turned to face her, and she asked him again, and he leaned in, but she may as well have been speaking Martian. She mimed measuring baking soda into a teaspoon and stirring a cake, then cleaning her teeth, then sprinkling baking soda on the windowsill to keep the pigeons away. She mimed being a pigeon, pecking at the baking soda and hopping back in fright. The man was apparently an imbecile. Disgusted, Dot walked away and over to the biscuit aisle where she threw the packet of digestives into her bag. She didn’t even like them, the way they fell apart into the bottom of a cup of tea, but her teeth couldn’t handle the old crackers any more.

The mistake was in stopping at the checkout to pay for a magazine that specialised in arts and crafts, which she wanted to use for work, and staring the checkout girl down when she glanced at the biscuits glowing radioactively on top of the book and spare jumper in Dot’s bag. Dorothy got cold easily in springtime.
Feeling the cold
was what you called it once you were her age, oh yes, I feel the cold. But the sun was lighting up the street outside with its whiteness, and she walked out the door and towards that light, and was a few paces out of the store when there was a hand on her upper arm and someone said, ‘Excuse me.’ It was the lady from the shop with the blue sweatshirt and the wrinkles.

‘Yes?’ Dot thought perhaps she was going to ask for directions. She had one of those faces. I’m not from around here – I just have one of those faces, she prepared to say.

‘Did you pay for those biscuits?’

‘What biscuits?’ Pure coldness thumped through her body.

‘Those.’ The woman pointed a coral-nailed finger towards the bag.

Dot faked a double take. ‘Oh my god. Where did they come from?’

‘You put them in your bag in there.’ She gestured towards the store. ‘Could you come with me, please?’

‘Well, I could. But truly, this was a mistake, I must have put them there by accident. Are you sure I wasn’t charged for them?’ Dot made a show of fumbling in her jacket pocket for the receipt. It was Diego’s jacket, cut like a suit jacket, but made of denim, with deep pockets. He left it at the apartment last time he came to fix the microwave, and Dorothy wore it everywhere now. There were black grease stains down the sides and it smelled of a man’s sweat, which was quite frankly a tonic. They should bottle that stuff. Dot pulled out some gum and her bus pass, but seemed to have done something else with the receipt.

‘Please, madam. Come with me.’

And just like that they were back inside the shop. The blonde
ponytails stood and stared as the woman put her gnarled hand on Dorothy’s shoulder and marched her towards the mysterious door in the back of the store, and Dot kept her chin in the air. The dancing boy was gone. A small key from a plastic chain that was connected to the woman’s sweatshirt pocket opened the door. Through the door was a short corridor, with a fire door at its end, a horizontal metal safety bar across it. On the left-hand side of the corridor was an open cleaning cupboard, and the smell of bleach burned the air. There was another door to the right, and the blue sweatshirt knocked on it.

A man sat behind a desk. Much younger guy. His hair was cut short, neat, and he had a sort of pubic beard that was trimmed thinly around his jaw line and up towards the corners of his mouth. The shaved skin in the middle was blue with stubble. Repellent as it was, the beard made Dot think about whoever had to kiss this man, or whether anyone did. He smelled keenly of a blue, minty aftershave. She wanted to grab him and shake his shoulders and tell him, ‘You’re human! Don’t fight it!’ But now was not the time.

‘This lady has shoplifted a packet of biscuits.’

‘Inadvertently,’ Dot said.

‘I saw you. It was quite deliberate.’

‘No really. It was a mistake.’ She rolled out a phrase of Diego’s that she’d always hated: ‘A senior moment.’

The man with the beard chuckled. ‘Really? Oh dear.’

‘I’m mortified,’ Dot said. ‘I would of course like to pay for the biscuits. But I assure you, I am not a criminal.’

‘May I see some identification?’

She handed him her bus pass. He opened a drawer and took out a
ring-binder folder. In it were pages and pages of photocopied returned cheques, photo IDs, student cards, sample signatures with the word
FORGED
stamped over the top, and even mug shots. If they had a reference here to the photocopy of her bus pass ID – the one pinned to the corkboard of villains and recidivists by the checkout tills of her local grocery store – Dorothy was cooked. He held the bus pass in one hand and flicked through the pages with the other.

‘Doesn’t much look like you,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t do you justice.’

Dot blinked, slowly. ‘Thank you.’ Not that photo, but another one, years – decades – ago, there had been a day when she had gotten a new staff ID shot taken for the school where she was working. There she was smiling for the camera, dressed ironically like a ‘lady teacher’, but in the photograph when it was printed she just looked like a lady teacher. That was a day, yes, she remembered that day.

Sex with Diego would be epic. Dorothy knew this because he told her once, when he was having a beer at her place after he fixed the balcony rail. ‘Sex with me, darling, it’s epic,’ he said, his legs stretched out before him, the bottle balanced on his solid, convex stomach.

‘Good for you,’ she said. She had the old photo albums out and was selecting, binning and gluing photos without being able to study them too closely. His presence was a buffer against falling into the pictures and the long crawling out again. ‘Good for your ladies.’

‘You want to ask me to scan those for you. I’d do it as a favour.’ He swivelled right and left in the squidgy chair and thrust a look at her.

‘Diego,’ Dot laughed. ‘I’m ancient.’

‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,’ he said.

‘No knocking will occur. But thanks. I don’t get many offers these days.’

‘Your loss, darling,’ he grinned.

‘I’m sure.’ Wind came through the open window and shifted the photos around. On the balcony the ladder rattled against the eaves.

Epic sex. Jesus. She would have liked to see him naked, but that was as far as it went. On the whole being unleashed from sex was a tremendous relief. But this was something, standing in front of the store manager’s desk while he looked for evidence of criminality, and her heart quickened.

In the apartment Dorothy put some music on and knocked on the window glass to shoo the pigeons off the sill. With summer coming, and open windows, her great fear was that a bird would fly into the room, panicking and crapping everywhere. The happiness she felt on the bus home leaked away with the passing afternoon and now Dot was cross for having given in to the cheap thrill. She pretended her children were too far-flung to be ashamed, but Diego would mind, and he would be the one to come and get her if she ever had to make the call from the police cells. His face clouded with disapproval. Another crazy lady. Dot couldn’t afford to lose him. She took out her magnifying glass to read the craft magazine.

Later she worked on a funding application to buy new sand trays for the hospice, reading patient testimonies – ‘sacred multidimensional depths of psychic consciousness … self-witnessing … silent reflection … I grew so much personally … I am at home …’ until
it was dark. She got up to put on the lamp and saw a strange man in the doorway of the locksmith’s looking up at her apartment building. Just a couple of glances, but the feeling flew up from the street like a sparrow – he was looking at her.

The man was young, in his twenties, and though it was hard to tell from this third-storey window, he seemed to be tall. In the brief seconds of his presence she noticed his shoulders braced, how he stood on the balls of his feet, hopping slightly. Yes, he reminded her of Donald, her son, as though he’d stepped through the computer screen of their last conversation and into the neighbourhood. His hair was long around his face. He wore a suit jacket, sneakers and jeans. Maybe he was there to score, or to meet a person who never showed up. Maybe he was just getting some keys cut. They watched each other. He wasn’t Donald but he was somebody’s son – an adopted-out child. Then he was lost to the mass of children playing football down the middle of the road. Gaps in their calling and kicking let in the sound of old men nattering outside the newsagent’s. She liked the old men’s voices. The way they went on. Go for it, she thought, standing by the minimal breeze and listening to their gorgeous unwinding gossip. Don’t stop. Go for gold.