The Forrests (34 page)

The cloud of footballers passed and the new locksmith, a middle-aged woman, was there in place of the man, staring up. Dot ducked too fast and her knee went. Slowly she lowered herself fully to the ground, trying not to curse aloud. The music had long stopped and the floor felt cold through her jumper. The knee pulsed a sweet, nauseous pain up her thigh into her hip. ‘Bastard,’ she said, ‘bastard, bastard.’ Dot crawled to the kitchen, dragging the lame leg behind her. Rum first, then the liniment cream, then, when she had
manoeuvred herself through to the bedroom to lie down, curled, giving in to the ache, a pill.

In the morning the knee felt a lot better. Diego came to drop off some magazines from the Laundromat downstairs, old ones with the covers ripped off, for Dot to take to work. When he saw that her knee was strapped he insisted on accompanying her the two blocks to the hospice. The spring air was perfumed, inhalable. Diego carried the magazines in a plastic bag and the fabric offcuts for quilting in a giant checked carrier bag over his shoulder, and Dot told him about the mandala paintings the patients were doing and the woman who had decided her life essence should be expressed by pictures of Princess Diana.

He shook his head. ‘Such a sad day when that lady died. There will never be another like her.’

‘What would be in your mandala painting, Diego?’

‘In mine?’ He laughed. ‘You trying to put me in my grave? Heaven hopes it is a long time before they wheel me in to sign the entry papers to that place.’

Dot looked at his profile against the moving colours of the mosaic wall outside the school buildings. ‘No, Diego, I don’t think you’re ever going to die.’

He shrugged. ‘Well, some day.’

They reached the hospice and the smoked automatic reception doors parted, waiting for Dot to enter. Diego placed the bags just inside the lobby and nodded at the young receptionist. ‘Morning, darling.’

Dot touched his arm, suddenly longing for him to stay. ‘Will you come in today? You know they love it when you do.’

‘Ah, no, today I’ve got a lot of people to see.’

‘OK. Lucky ladies.’

‘Oh yes,’ he smiled, ‘and lucky me.’

After work she made some packet soup and ate a digestive biscuit, then went down to the locksmith’s. The new owner looked curiously at Dot. ‘I’m just about to close up.’

‘Oh, sure. How are you finding the neighbourhood?’

The owner nodded. ‘Pretty good. People always need keys.’

There was a moment while she waited for Dorothy to get the message that her day was over. Dot backed out again into the street. The Turkish men stood in the brightly lit empty shop they used as FC headquarters and talked, and teenagers leaned against the round doors of the industrial-sized washing machines in the Laundromat chatting into cell phones and flirting with each other. There was a sound like thunder but it was just the roller doors coming down on the greengrocer’s and the mechanic’s. The neighbours were cooking curry and a seductive smoky smell came from the kebab shop. A woman in a summer dress walked a giant dog, an exquisite thing, grey and huge and thinly wolfish, the length of the street, its gait casual, disdainful. It seemed that everyone on the block stopped to watch its hollow haunches pass by. Pigeons cooed, roosting in the plane trees. The evening fuzzed, as though molecules of air had thickened to hold the last of the light. Over to the west, laky streaks lined the sky, and the hills in the distance were the colour of morello cherries.

‘There was a man here yesterday. I wondered if I might know him. He was standing where you are just now, and looking – up
there.’ Saying ‘at my apartment’ seemed impossible, would seal the impression that she was delusional, or paranoid.

The locksmith shrugged. ‘Yeah? I don’t remember.’

‘Yeah. I thought – maybe – never mind.’

‘I can’t give out the names of clients.’

‘No, of course.’

Back in the apartment, she ate another biscuit and thought about the young man who looked like Donald. That story of her mother’s – the lost son in the driveway. He was her sign. Her young man, appearing through the window. Her message, her past mistake. She sat for a long time while the light melted from the room. One phone call. Not to interrupt his life or ask for anything. One phone call, just to hear his voice.

From the kitchen drawer, Dorothy took the softened, split-cornered card that carried the last phone number she’d had for Daniel. It was morning in Spain. She switched on the overhead lamp. With the phone pressed hard against her ear she leaned forward, head on her forearms and elbows on the bench, in the posture of someone waiting for seasickness to pass. The dial tone was a single metallic note that could have been a fault. She didn’t know whether or not to hang up but then a woman answered. Dorothy was embarrassed by her lack of the language. She had to blurt straight into English. ‘Excuse me …’

The woman said something in Spanish.

‘Do you speak English … is this still the right number for …’

‘Hello,’ the woman said, with a heavy accent. ‘How may I help you?’

‘I’m looking for an old friend …’

‘Daniel doesn’t live here now.’

‘Oh. I’m so sorry to bother you.’

‘He is back in New Zealand.’ And the woman, who might have been his wife, gave her Daniel’s number.

They agreed to meet in the park, and to rearrange on the day if there was rain, and now it was showery in bursts, and Dorothy wasn’t sure whether or not this counted. She could manage a raincoat, carry an umbrella, but the shoes were a problem, she had never in her whole life solved the question of what shoes to wear in the rain. Anything nice would be ruined, and nowadays if her feet got wet she invariably came down with flu, ached all over, oh my knee etc, but the shiny and water-resistant trainers the kids had given her last Christmas to encourage her fitness, love it or lose it, Donald had mumbled, were criss-crossed with hideous pink and silver stripes and lay unworn in the bottom of the closet. Not that she wasn’t grateful. Perhaps she had never been nice enough about receiving presents, feeling too often that the object was hard evidence of how little the giver really knew her. Getting older had made Dorothy more mindful of her flaws, and that there were many more than she would ever know. Self-improvement had its limits. She took knee-length rubber boots from her sack of redundant gardening kit, scrubbed the dried clumps of dirt off them with a steel brush and pulled them on.

Over the phone she’d told Daniel about the end of her marriage. After a long pause, during which she walked from the living room to the bedroom and back again, he asked, ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘You’d only just got married,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to be a downer.’

‘A downer? For fuck’s sake, Dottie. A downer?’

She couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Bad timing, it was bad timing. And then once I was on my own – I don’t know. It seemed important, to be on my own.’ The words came unanticipated, but she realised they were true. ‘It took me a while. But I like it.’

On the way to the park she noticed moss growing between cracks in the pavement, and the plane-tree branches budding with pale leaves. The light was indecisive, shifting between bright and low, and it disoriented her, made her hurry in case of being late, so that when she reached the floral clock, tightly coiled in this early spring but still marking time between the green minutes, the Roman hours, it took Dorothy a moment to be able to read that she was early. Raindrops scattered the bench like melting glass beads, and she was glad of the waterproof coat. Young people, black-jacketed students, passed in pairs, and cyclists wheeled sedately by. It was silly to sit in the cold this long but she fell into a kind of meditation or prayer, the wind against her cheek, gloved hands clasped, there beneath the shaking branches of a Moreton Bay Fig.

Through this middle-distance gaze an elderly man and a teenage boy walked slowly along the path. Daniel, old. Everything in her body went hot. Not the cold pulse rush of outside the grocery store – hot thuds. A squall came and the man and boy ducked under the band rotunda and Dot fanned her face with her hand, another old lady having an episode out in the rain. It was crucial to stay calm, looking at the wet sheet of a band flyer plastered against the rubbish bin and to think of spreading protective paper over
tables, on the floor, of her day tomorrow asking people who knew they were dying whether they wanted to make something with clay or with fabric.

Daniel and the boy looked out through the subsiding drizzle, not seeing her.

‘Daniel,’ she called. Then louder, ‘Daniel.’

Across the bending path she watched him make sense of her – of what he was seeing. ‘Dottie?’ And he took in the full impact of the years, the decades. She rose, shedding raindrops. He stepped down from the shelter, using his umbrella to stabilise the descent, and slowly, awkwardly came closer until he was standing right here. Behind the lenses of his specs his eyes were dark and bright. His breath rose and fell. When he stooped to kiss her cheek the sides of their glasses knocked together.

‘I wear these orthotics but it’s too many gymnastics,’ he said, ‘my feet are no good. You should see some of those old clowns, really crippled, popped shoulders, dodgy hips – it’s not natural.’

‘We’re all old clowns now.’ She had touched him. He was there. ‘Daniel. It’s good to see you. Who’s the boy?’ she asked, nodding towards the band rotunda where the teenager was sluicing water from the railing with a finger, headphones on.

‘That’s Oscar. He’s my son.’

Oscar was fourteen, in school and living with Daniel. ‘His mother’s had some troubles,’ Dan said. They were walking now, the boy, who’d responded to the introductions with a grunt, alongside.

‘This is – María?’

‘No. María’s in Spain.’ He waited till Oscar was ahead a few paces and explained that a year ago he’d got the call. It was the
first he’d known that he had a child. The boy’s mother – ‘We were never really together’ – was in a bad way. ‘Christ, it was my parents all over again but worse, meth, and so. She was a lot younger than me. Stupid. I mean me.’ He’d wanted to bring Oscar to Spain, wasn’t ready to live in Auckland again, the rain and isolation, but legally it was too complicated. ‘I pursued it for a long time, but just as we were getting close María said she really didn’t want to go through with it.’ They’d been trying for a baby for years. He tried to persuade her to see this as their blessing, a child they could care for, raise together. But she couldn’t. ‘It wasn’t what she had planned. I couldn’t give her what she wanted. Too old, everything.’ Daniel looked as sad as she’d ever seen him. He wore the hair he had left cropped close, white flecked with grey. The bones of his face were prominent, exposed; spoke of the cost of living.

‘How’s Oscar?’

Daniel shook his head. ‘I can’t believe him. You know?’ They stopped there on the path, the thick arms of the
Magnolia grandiflora
bearing succulent flowers, the lemony white startling. ‘We’ve only got a few years before he leaves home, but – to have this. It’s pure chance. How life can change if you’re lucky to be around for it.’ Daniel called to his son. ‘Slow down, we’re senior citizens here.’ When the boy reached them he said, ‘Tell her, Oscar, we do all right?’

‘Yep.’

‘Some people think I’m your grandfather.’

‘That is pretty awkward.’

‘We go to soccer, he plays, I shout, we have our little things we like. I’m teaching him to cook.’ He nodded in Dorothy’s direction. ‘I learned to cook from her sister. She would have nailed that octopus.’

Oscar smiled. ‘It was kind of chewy. Daniel likes Spanish food. Do you like octopus?’

‘Depends how it’s done. Sometimes.’

‘You can try mine. When I’ve improved.’

Dorothy smiled at the boy. ‘You look so like your dad,’ she said, taking her time over it, loving the sentence. ‘Like he used to look.’

Above them a bird made a sound and Daniel mimicked it, up-down, up-down.

‘I had this bird once,’ Oscar said. ‘It was a blue bird, with a green tail, I think it was a parrot. I used to bring it insects.’

Daniel raised his eyebrows. ‘Really,’ he said. ‘A parrot.’

‘Are you going to stay in Auckland?’ she asked him.

‘Oh yes.’ Daniel cocked his head, smiled at her. ‘You?’

She laughed. ‘Yes. My kids are all here.’

They had reached the edge of the park, where it met the road. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘So –’ He stepped back as a helmeted cyclist whizzed past, spraying water. ‘Hey,’ he called after the muscled figure. ‘Do you mind?’ The cyclist stood on his pedals and turned, a feat of balance, and threw them the finger. ‘Fucking arsehole,’ Daniel said. ‘Sorry, Oscar.’

‘Dad.’

Daniel took Dorothy’s forearm, holding her back while Oscar walked on. His voice was light with surprise. ‘Stop a second.’ He whispered in her ear. ‘He doesn’t usually call me Dad.’ They paused for a moment, and her eyes drifted shut at the feel of Daniel’s mouth up against her face, the warmth of his breath. ‘What were we talking about?’ he murmured. ‘Oh. Yeah.’

She couldn’t move away. ‘We were talking about …’

‘You live here. And I live here.’

‘Yes.’

‘So,’ he said, pulling away to look at her. ‘So,’ and he began to shake a bit with laughter, water leaking from the corners of his eyes. ‘We’ve got all the time in the world.’

A big dark-windowed car bounced down the street with music booming out of it and Oscar and Daniel and Dot all looked at its headlights flashing in time with the bouncing.

‘That’s so cool,’ said the boy.

THEY TOOK DONALD
by surprise, the cards and emails, the number of people his mother kept in touch with. The traffic of words had slowed lately, but there was still the occasional former student writing of a success, an ex-hospice colleague having a party, a young woman visiting with her child who wondered whether she could come and stay. Donald asked Matt what he thought. ‘Sure, write back, she can stay with us. Be good practice, having a baby in the house.’

‘The girl is like ten. I think her mother was from the house of fallen women.’