Read The Forrests Online

Authors: Emily Perkins

Tags: #Literary, #Fiction, #General

The Forrests (4 page)

BOOK: The Forrests
7.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

A new rule: whoever reached the table first won the role of leader, got the juiciest chop, the largest helpings. They stopped bringing friends home; even Daniel spent some time at his mother’s instead. Nobody wanted to be first at the table. The kids all hovered at the backs of their chairs while Lee cried that the food was getting
cold
and their father glowered, until one of them whooped for distraction and pushed a brother or sister into their seat, or until everyone stuck their thumbs to their foreheads and the last one had to reluctantly sit down and direct the rest. They developed a technique of doing nothing without being given precise instructions. ‘Hold this plate for a minute’ meant that after sixty seconds the plate was dropped to the floor. Frank thought this was progress.

A dramaturge position came up at the Mercury Theatre where ‘you know they are doing
Peer Gynt
’ but he lost out to a man who also came from New York City, armed with a long CV and letters of recommendation that had Frank ranting as he emptied the rubbish bin.

‘What does nepotism mean?’ Dorothy asked, and her father roared ‘Argh’ at a soggy patch on the side of the brown-paper Kleensak tearing, the shoulder of an empty cereal box poking through.

‘What’s that?’ Lee asked Daniel, who’d just put an envelope on the kitchen bench, secured beneath the notepad that advertised the minicab company.

‘My rent,’ he said. ‘And they’re looking for someone to answer the phones. At work.’

‘I could do that,’ said Dorothy.

‘Don’t be stupid, you’re ten. And Danny, you’re not paying rent, don’t be silly. I’ll talk to your mother.’

‘It’s OK,’ he said.

‘I’m eleven,’ Dorothy said.

Lee took the envelope off the bench and pressed it against Daniel’s chest. She kissed him on the side of the head. It was the first time Dot had seen her mother kiss him and it struck her that it was different from watching her kiss Michael, or Evelyn, or Ruth. It was a parental kiss, but more as if she meant it, hard enough to make Daniel’s neck sway under the pressure. ‘You don’t have to,’ Lee said, her voice a bit hoarse. ‘Frank, I’m begging you.’

‘What?’ The rubbish sack in his arms, the back door open. He gave a laugh, incredulous. ‘Take a job at a cab company?’

‘OK, kids, go outside.’

‘It’s night-time.’

‘All right then. Go to bed.’

As he left the room, Daniel placed the envelope on the bench, and nobody said anything about it.

For once Michael was home instead of hanging out, as he’d been doing since their return from the commune, with that bunch of older boys outside the zoo or at the Transport Museum tram station. When they walked past, arms interlinked, on their way
back from school, Eve and Dot could see behind his dangled hand the lit cigarette, and they saw him drinking red cans of beer. Now the children gathered in the girls’ room and sat on the two single beds side by side, trying to read and listening through the quiet of the house for the sound of raised voices, or slamming doors. The silence expanded. Ruth snuggled up beneath the crocheted blanket at the foot of Dorothy’s bed and fell asleep, or pretended to be asleep so that nobody would move her. Outside, the plane tree leaves scraped the window and a car drove past. After a while the front door did slam, and there was the hyphenated splutter of their car’s attempt to start in the cold night. Michael looked up from his
Mad Magazine
. Eve met his pink-rimmed gaze. As she was about to reach for her brother – felt it in her muscles, the movement anticipating the touch of his skin – he wiped a brusque forearm over his face and looked down again at the page. The bed creaked when Daniel stood. Without saying anything he went down to see if Lee was all right. A few minutes later he came back and said, ‘She’s OK,’ and one by one the children all fell asleep on the beds, top and tailing, spooning, still in their clothes.

2.
BLOOM

WHEN RUTH FINALLY
opened the front door because the knocking and the bell ringing just would not stop, the couple standing in the doorway cast a long shadow down the length of the hall.

‘We’re here to see Mr Forrest.’

Frank had left without breakfast, taken the bus into town, and Lee was on dawn shift at the delicatessen. Ruth stood, breathing hard from trombone practice, and shouted at the stairs behind her, ‘Dorothy! Evelyn!’

Michael paused in the hallway, muddy football boots swinging from their laces by his side. ‘What do they want?’

‘You’re so rude. Dad or Mum.’

‘They’re out.’ He slammed the kitchen door.

Ruth gave her public smile to the man and the lady, and bellowed again. ‘Dorothy! Eve!’

The lady spoke. ‘Or anyone in the family over eighteen?’

‘Michael,’ Ruth shouted. ‘Come back!’

The kitchen door pulsed with his disdain. Last week Michael had bounced back home after another attempt to leave. His flatmates always stole from him, you could never trust people, and he was like a lodger from a foreign country now, someone who appeared at mealtimes but didn’t talk and who gazed at you, if you addressed him, with implacable confusion.

‘Sorry,’ said Ruth. Over the rooftop across the road the sky was charged with light, shining through an invisible skin about to burst open.

From the bedroom upstairs Evelyn peered through the window, past the branches of the plane tree, but could see only the unfamiliar white Datsun parked outside, a sparrow on the bonnet. She returned to the mirror and finished spraying her hair, flipped it in a backcombed tangle over her shoulders. Daniel, rumpled in his dressing gown, ambled in, a thin joint lit between his fingers. ‘They’re calling for you,’ he drawled.

‘You should get dressed.’

‘I’m not well.’

‘Go back to bed then.’

‘I’m bored.’

Ruth cried, ‘
Dorothy!
’ then, less convinced, ‘or Eve!’ The sound reverberated.

Evelyn pulled her bottom eyelid down to draw kohl along the inside. ‘It’s far too early for this kerfuffle.’

‘There are two of them. It must be serious.’

He stopped outside the bathroom and knocked on the door. ‘There’s someone downstairs for you,’ he said, his mouth up close against the surface. The words travelled through the grains and
particles of wood and into the steamy air of the bathroom where they disintegrated and Dot, drying herself with a sharp-smelling, slightly damp towel, heard a murmur. She put her bathrobe on and opened the door. Steam escaped. Daniel jerked his head in the direction of the stairs. ‘Someone there for you.’

‘For me?’

‘Think so.’ He pinched out the joint and left it on the basin ledge. ‘Warm in here.’ His gaze combed the room, took in the leavings of the female body, cotton-wool discs hardening with old nail-polish remover, the hairbrush bristles puffed with a cobweb of fine blonde hair, a cardboard tampon wrapper unfurling in the toilet bowl.

‘Have my bath. Haven’t you got a lecture?’

‘Lectures are a colossal waste of time.’

‘I know, but you’ve got to go.’

‘I actually think I’m going to rebel.’ He undid the cord on his dressing gown. ‘Go away now.’

Ruth appeared at the top of the stairs, her face red. ‘What are you doing? One of you get down here.’

As Dorothy passed the bedroom Evelyn swung out, braced in the door frame, her almond eyes through the sludgy make-up doing their trick of radiating heat. ‘Thanks,’ she whispered.

The trombone started up again. ‘
God
,’ cried Eve. Dorothy walked down the stairs, hair wet, air from the open front door coming up chilly beneath the bathrobe, the towel smelling not very nice in her hand. The man and the woman were in the hallway now, and the man gently shut the front door behind him and the woman turned from examining the family portrait that hung next to the hallway mirror. In the portrait, for which the Forrests had
sat some years ago, the painter – a goateed friend of Frank’s with white bristles on the backs of his hands – had given the children rosy cheeks and shiny eyes, as though they had that minute run in from playing outdoors, and made Frank look dignified with his collar unbuttoned and their mother wear a pale-blue sweater and a string of fake pearls, her smile soft.
I have become a wife again
. The children, created from short little dabs and longer streaks of paint, clustered around their parents, eyelashes thick and dark and spiky, Michael’s nose straight and fine, a white gleam brush-stroked down the centre. Daniel should have been in the picture. Sometimes at night Dorothy thought she could make out his shape behind her shoulder, hidden beneath a layer of paint. The woman sighed as her gaze left the painting and fell on Dot. ‘Miss Forrest?’

A hand on the bottom newel post of the banister. ‘Yes.’

‘May we talk with your parents?’

‘They’re not here.’

There were teenagers somewhere, behind doorways, breathing. From upstairs, the glug of draining bath water.

‘May we talk to you?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

Dot opened the door to the front room. The loose rosette jiggled on the protruding screws so that she put a hand to it to stop the sound. It was dark; the couple stood tentative in the space before she drew back the heavy tasselled curtains and the room came into view. Nestled in a wooden bowl, dried petals of potpourri sweetened the air.

‘That smells nice,’ said the woman.

‘My sister’s got a stall at Cook Street Market.’ Dot gestured for
the man and woman to sit on the grey corduroy sofa, and moved the ashtray with the acrid remnants of her father’s
one luxury
cigarettes onto the bookshelves on the other side of the room.

The front door slammed. Michael passed the window in his work overalls. Dorothy tucked the bathrobe in around her legs and sat on the cracked maroon leather of her father’s chair. The woman wore an olive-green skirt suit; the man was in a double-breasted pinstriped jacket and trousers, with a brown tie. His hair had been stuck down with some sort of cream but tufts of it pushed upwards, giving him the look of a boxer on his day off. He gripped his briefcase between his calves.

‘What’s it about?’ Dorothy asked.

‘We’re from the collection agency.’ There was a pause in which he might have extended a hand for shaking, but didn’t. ‘May I confirm your age, Miss Forrest?’

‘I’m eighteen. Sorry, I’m not sure what you want?’

The woman gave a small shake of the head. ‘We’re here to take possession of your father’s car. Where is he?’

‘He’s out.’ Sun glinted across Dot’s line of vision and she straightened her back to look over it. ‘Why do you need his car?’

‘Does he have it with him?’

‘Probably.’ Her mother had driven it to work. She’d be home before long. Dot imagined running to the street corner, intercepting her – ‘Hide the vehicle!’

The man spoke. ‘All right. Miss Forrest, we need you to sign a walking possession agreement.’

The woman nodded at the dead green screen of the television in the corner. ‘Is there a second TV in the house?’

‘Debt has been incurred,’ said the man, ‘and we are here to remove property as payment.’

Parts of Dot lifted and floated around the room. ‘Debt.’ A moment went by. She blinked. ‘Can you do that?’

‘There is a series of complaints. Court costs arising from various unpaid fines dating back several years, water bills, hire purchase payments. Consolidated’ – this nasal recitation – ‘and to be dealt with by us.’

‘Court costs.’

She leaned forward with the powerful, irrational urge to explain the joy of driving hard out with no headlights while Daniel sat in the passenger seat singing, the music as loud as the 8-track would go. The way the intense, furious guitar calmed the air, released what pressure was inside him, or inside her. The blinding joy of it, even when dread trickled down like an egg cracked over her scalp that first time she realised the flashing lights and the siren of the cop car were actually directed at her.

The man was checking the file. ‘Yes, we have the car registered in your father’s name and the fines are addressed to him.’

Now the broken bits of Dot reassembled, stuck back together like guilty tar. When eventually the envelopes had come with Frank’s name on them, the Crown insignia in the top left corner,
Ministry of Justice
, she knew. Opened the first one and intercepted all the rest. They were her secret, even from Daniel. It would spoil everything to tell him: what they had was freedom, possibility; not another Forrest mess, this, reminders. Multiplying fines. Court summonses. She’d been vigilant, torn them up and thrown the shreds in the bin, shoved the day’s newspaper or the cornered
toast crusts on top. Now, on the sofa, in the dust and potpourri and stuffy heat, smelling the nasty stink of panic from under her arms, Dorothy wanted to punch herself. What had she thought was going to happen? This was the world.

The man popped open the clasp of his briefcase. ‘Here are the papers.’ He rose and deposited a form and a pen in Dorothy’s lap – a whiff of minty cologne – explaining that today they would take her signature. He pointing out the agreed daily charge. The rate of interest. The debt had to be resolved or they would come back to remove – he gestured – ‘this television, any non-essential furniture, books, your family car, the paintings, any other goods that fall within our rights’.

‘I won’t sign it.’ She wrapped the bathrobe sash around her hand until the fingers went purple. The shoulders of the robe were cold with the water from her hair. ‘Why have you come now when my father’s out? It’s not his fault. You can’t take our things.’

‘Dorothy.’ The woman spoke softly. ‘I’m afraid that we can.’

‘Do you have a brother or sister also eighteen or over? We just need the one signature.’

‘What happens if I don’t sign it?’

‘We come back until payments are made.’ The same adenoidal tone. ‘You won’t like that.’

There was a tap on the door. She darted to it, held herself between Evelyn and the room. ‘What’s going on?’ Eve asked between her teeth. She was wearing Dorothy’s fake-leopardskin coat. She never asked.

‘Real estate agents. I’m about to get rid of them.’

Her sister raised an eyebrow. ‘Good job. See you then.’

BOOK: The Forrests
7.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Don of the Dead by Casey Daniels
Run Away by Victor Methos
Cry For Tomorrow by Dianna Hunter
Sea of Christmas Miracles by Christine Dorsey
The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov
Frisky Business by Tawna Fenske
The Warriors by John Jakes