The Forrests (36 page)

The young criminal sat on the end of the bed. He had changed out of his blue coat; he wore a grey sweatshirt with an image on the front that Dorothy couldn’t make out. ‘Are you in a gang?’ she
asked him. ‘The Dead Rabbits? Did you get done for tagging? Did a businessman push you up against the sprayed concrete wall of your old school, his arm across your windpipe? Did a cop car pull over? Did your friend run off?’

He dipped the foam cube on a stick in water and ran it around the inside of her mouth. The first time she did that for Eve her hand shook with nerves. She closed her eyelids in silent acknowledgement. There was a terminal narrative. It was a story until it stopped being a story and until then they kept wanting to know. Give up, the doctor told Donald, kindly. Surrender your need for the detail; there is only one way this is going to end.

Her sister talked about being a child and eating honeysuckle, picking off the flowers and sucking at the backs of their petals to inhale the flavour, which was like honey

The sound was like a box being pushed around on the floor in a downstairs room. It was like a dog clearing its throat. It was like a car with engine failure being pushed over gravel. The white barred sides of the bed were up and someone explained to someone that if Miss Forrest tried to get out of bed in the night she would hit the ground. The space between the bars was dusky, shadowed. She lay in the cot with baby Grace, just to be another body breathing with her, helping her fall asleep. This was the blanket, hairy beneath her fingers, and the smooth sheet under her cheek. Her sister was reading poetry out loud. Dorothy thought about telling her that thing she had been meaning to say but the effort of making sounds was

Her sister’s voice, and she said, ‘I’ve got to go, Mum. I’ll be back tomorrow.’

‘Time for some fresh air,’ the criminal said, and he wheeled
her out into the remembrance garden, past the living room where an old man saw squirrels on the curtain rails and heard his own bedroom slippers walk around at night without him. His wife visited him every day, while he, poor man, was rubber-banded into an armchair and spent his hours leaning forward to stand and being pulled back into the cushions by the band’s resistant force. Up, down.

One of her favourite things to see was a freighter on the horizon. Or cargo barges lying like waiting crickets in a still harbour.

Women in blue jackets unloaded boxes of food from a van into the hospice kitchen. She wondered for maybe the hundredth time in her life why cartoon chickens advertised their own edibility by doing the thumbs-up with their wings. Her son came, a tall man in a suit, and brought her a baby. The baby was in her arms – someone else was holding him as well, there were cautious adult hands attached to that body, not just her twiggy wrists – the baby’s face was clear, wide, his gaze roving the air, his body light as though hovering in space, just touching her lap. Donald lifted the baby and she kissed the top of his downy head. Caramel.

The growth on the rocks in the fishpond was like those canned Halloween cobwebs she sprayed on the windows for the children each October.

Rain fell straight into the pluming water fountain. The drops of fountain water slowed as they reached their peak and turned and fell, and turned and fell. Across the pond stellata flowers shone yellow-white against the pearly sky, the branches black in the rain. A marmalade cat pawed the dirt under the tree, turned and settled, and rested, its face content.

The young criminal smiled at her and walked over the miniature horseshoe bridge, towards the cat. The cat was enormous, the world a willow pattern on a flat plane. Slowly the cat blinked, rose and walked away, glancing back once, shaking itself before disappearing indoors. The young man smiled at Dorothy.

She leaned forwards in the chair and paddled her feet on the ground, inching out from under the awning so that the rain fell first on her bathmat-like slippers, now on her knees, on her hands, her lap, her hair. Rain hit the permanent wave they’d given her and some of the drops found their way through the jolly grey curls and down to the skin of her scalp. It was a balm.

Daniel stood in the smoked-glass doorway off the living room, where dances were sometimes held. His tallness was stooped with age, and he said to Dorothy, ‘Something something.’ She turned her head and Daniel shifted his weight, he had a stick, and like a tall three-legged creature he stepped closer, shuffle tap, shuffle tap, step ball change

His hand was large and worn, and his eyes were topped by peppery brows, the hairs ticking upwards as though surprised, and past the marks and wrinkles, deep behind all that those eyes were there and they were so warm and dark, and they really did flicker, and he sat back slowly in the rain with her

The tide was a long way out and they stepped down over the rocks carpeted with tiny blue-black mussel shells onto the mudflats, the sky high and ashen above. For a while they were walking close to the cliffs, beneath trees that captured light and held it clustered between their leaves, then braver they ventured out towards the moored boats that sat nakedly on the gunmetal-grey mud, near
each other but not so close that they could swing and collide in a storm when the water was deep. The mud smelled rich and salty, and green algae lay streaked across it like handwriting. Some of the surface was ruffled and this was where the mud was softest and it sucked at their sneakers so that they took big quick steps like slapstick astronauts, and Daniel talked about things that he pretended to find amusing but secretly loved. He laughed away his view of the world as a way of holding onto it. She would remember to tell him that, later.

They rounded a large yellow sailboat, its belly traced with mould, and a creek opened up in the mudflats, light reflected on its silvery water. The sandy banks of the creek were cut by the water into perfect angles. On the other side, shoots of some kind of estuary plant stood straight up towards the sky. Their feet were under the mud, they were sinking and doubled over with laughter, reaching down into the cold gritty mud to pull their feet out, to push at the heels of their mud-soaked sneakers, get the things off, now, feet and ankles caught, the mud spotted with wormholes and bubbles, and they both tipped over on their knees just as the rain started. The wind blew in a great thickening rush. A dandelion clock tumbled past mid-air, thin black-tipped wisps floating from the pored seed-head that rose, released, like the microphone thrown by the singer from the band they heard that time, and she remembered the fierce, elated way he flung it high into the air to turn and fall, an invitation, towards the upturned faces of the crowd.

THANKS TO MY
friends and family, and to those who read early drafts, including Lisa Samuels, Travis Gasper and Damien Wilkins, Chris Morgan Jones and Suzy Lucas, and Gillian Stern, Georgia Garrett and Alexandra Pringle, for their generous advice. Thanks to Brita McVeigh and Fergus Barrowman for the serendipitous reading suggestions that also shaped this book.

Versions of two chapters have appeared as extracts in the
NZ Listener
and
Metro
magazine. A version of Daniel and Dorothy’s conversation in ‘Spells’ appeared as part of a story ‘Jack, Internationally’ broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Emily Perkins is the author of
Not Her Real Name
, a collection of short stories which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the novels
Leave Before You Go
,
The New Girl
and, most recently,
Novel About My Wife
, winner of the Believer Award. Emily Perkins lives in New Zealand.