The Forrests (5 page)

Daniel pulled Dorothy into the hallway, his eyes locking hers. ‘Hang on.’ It was obvious he was stoned. It would be so good to bring him into the room. She held on to his lapel. ‘Are you sure you’re OK? Who are they?’

‘Estate agents. I told Eve.’

‘Shall I take them on a tour?’ He tugged her dressing-gown sash. Had forgotten Eve was right there.

‘No.’ She moved away. ‘No it’s fine.’

So Evelyn and Daniel nodded, and she watched them patter down the path, arms hugged across their bodies, hair flung as though by static in the wind, before she went back into the room to sign the paper.

After the man and woman were gone and Ruth had left for school, Dorothy washed again in cold water and got dressed. Soon their mother would be home with bags of stale pastries, faintly smelling of that fancy imported cheese, Camembert and Gruyère, boiling from another outrage pulled by the posh woman she worked for, a coiffed bitch in a fob-watch chain necklace and raised shirt collar who patronised Lee because despite her genteel bearing she badly needed the job which for a woman like her was only just on the acceptable side of retail, the European vocab dressed it up but really she was a salad hand, a till monkey, because they were broke, broke, and it was the imminent return of this fury that finally propelled Dot out towards the bus stop.

The morning street was alive with disco from a portable radio, a couple of men in super-tight jeans peering over a car engine, a woman holding her toddler’s hands as he slowly put one foot in
front of the other along a low brick wall. The mother lifted the boy down and wiggled her hips in time to the music and the sound of dance floors carried on the wind over the whole street, even reaching inside the wooden shelter. A Falcon full of young men drove past and whistled.

Except for the usher, a young man in a blue jacket doing something unseen with ticket rolls or sweet packets behind the desk, the cinema foyer was empty, the day’s first screening a few minutes away. Dorothy sat on a chair upholstered in grey tartan, a splodge of stain showing up on one of the paler checks. The sport section of yesterday’s newspaper was folded on the next chair: half a headline and a photo of half a man running towards the camera, a ball tucked under his visible arm. The cameraman probably had one of those telephoto lenses, the ones that trumpeted out of the camera’s cubed rectangle, too long, disproportionate, exposing what the human eye couldn’t see.

At the sound of hydraulic doors Dorothy looked up. Her father came into the foyer eating a chocolate-coated ice cream in a cone. There was a moment, alone with his pleasure, where he didn’t register Dot, and she was struck mute, longing to leave him in peace, this happy cloud.
Don’t look over
. Then he did, and finished his mouthful. ‘Dottie. What are you doing here?’

Her palms buzzed as she showed him the copy of the form they had given her, a thin ghost paper, the collection company’s logo in a faint banner across the top, and at the bottom the tracing of her name. Aside from Dot’s Post Office bank account this was her first time signing an official document and the curves and loops looked like someone’s idea of a signature, not a proper adult one.

Frank scanned the paper and took bites of ice cream. She waited. ‘Driving fines? Goddamn it, Michael,’ her father said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Michael didn’t take the car. It was me.’

Again that feeling, the way he looked at her, as though she’d only just materialised in front of him. At last Frank sat down. She put the newspaper on the floor between them; her fingers felt dirty with a sense of whoever had touched it before. For a while, she told her father, a couple of years ago, when she was fifteen, she used to take the car at night. She didn’t mention Daniel. Now her face burned and the clog in her throat was hard to talk over as she apologised.

‘Is Evelyn in on all this too?’

An elderly couple entered the foyer, one stick between them, and crossed the perilous carpet to the ticket desk. ‘She never came.

She doesn’t know about it. Dad –’

‘Look, I’m just catching up.’

‘I’ll leave teachers’ college. I’ll work full-time and pay you back.’

‘Right,’ he said. His voice was dry, a bit splintery. ‘You’d better leave this with me.’ He spoke to the sheet of paper. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I’ll take care of this now.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ The more she apologised, the worse she felt.

‘Don’t worry. It’s more than those fines,’ he said. ‘There’s been – we haven’t been as careful as we could.’ He rubbed a flat hand over his mouth.
Don’t cry
. ‘It’s more than that.’

‘Are we going to be OK?’ Would their things be taken? Could they pay the rent? Where would they go? Not possible to ask out loud.

‘Dottie,’ her father said. ‘We’re going to be great. Things are great. Sure we have some obligations but everyone –’ In the middle
of his sentence the tannoy bonged and the usher announced that the feature would begin in one minute. As though summoned in a dream he stood and wiped his ice-cream hand on his suit jacket. ‘I’ll sort them out. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Thanks, Dad,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ She kissed the side of his head, the sun-spotted skin over his temple where the hair was receding. She felt the need for more words from him but he was already moving through the foyer, towards the doors opened onto the dark screening room. He waved her away with the back of a hand and nodded graciously – not a care in the world – to the usher who now stood at the cinema entrance, his patient blue arm held out for Frank’s ticket.

In a stationery shop down the road she leafed through the women’s magazines, searching out advice columns. There was an advertisement for bedding that used the word
Manchester
. Daniel would like that. Creepy language was their joke after visiting his mother in her unit:
doily
,
shunt
,
fecund
. She could slide a shuddery sort of word into every exchange.
Martin’s recovering from surgery but he’s going to need a bag. Gina’s youngest has phlegm on the lung. Cut a section from his bowel. Ganglia. Aorta. My gout
. Dorothy had sat on the flat couch next to Daniel, ignoring the needling claws of the cat that had colonised her lap, wanting so much for his mother to like her.

None of the agony aunts mentioned money, the lack of it, the plunging of one’s family into the poorhouse, what to do if your mother was enraged and your father was a wastrel, how to leave home without breaking your older sister’s heart, how to stop your sister from stealing everything, how not to tell her about you and
Daniel even though it was probably perfectly bloody obvious to everyone, if they were looking, which they maybe were not because their own lives were full too of the one foot in front of the other, the confusion about how best to proceed. Nothing about brothers, mental health of, or younger sisters, possible alien host factor, or why Marc Bolan had to die or why there were so many born-again Christians at Teachers’ College or whether she would go to jail or what to do next. If she changed the names there would likely be an opinion on whether [Daniel] truly loved [her], but it would depend on the magazine, whether he was her soulmate or just using her for sex.

They were all at dinner for the first time in weeks. Dorothy waited for what her father might do. The grilled-cheese roll was making her feel sick; she passed it to Daniel, who nodded thanks, and poured herself another red wine from the cask. Frank must have told Lee. It would come out about the night drives, the fines, everything. Eve took her plate to the sink, lit a cigarette and stood by the open back door, blowing smoke out into the night air. The fact that Lee wouldn’t meet Dot’s eye wasn’t necessarily unusual but she wished, just wished, someone would speak. Get it over with.

‘So those people who came this morning,’ she found herself beginning.

‘I had a letter today,’ Lee cut across her. ‘From an old schoolfriend. She’s got a fine life now, done very well for herself. Nice neighbourhood, three beautiful children, architect husband on the town council and she’s on the school board, though she doesn’t have to work.’

Frank snorted.

‘And you know what just happened? Just last year, when she’s forty-five years old? He shows up. The baby she had at seventeen and adopted out and never told anyone about. Her husband doesn’t even know. The baby’s father, whoever he is, doesn’t know. And the boy, in his late twenties now, comes back.’

As Lee was talking, Dorothy saw it, only the hallway was their hallway, the street outside their own. A few days before Christmas she walked down the hall and saw the wobbly shape of a strange man through the bubbled-glass front door. She slung the bolt on. Opened the door. Through the safety of the gap, she asked if he was lost. She could see now he was no threat, a slight man, narrow shoulders, wearing a coat that didn’t look enough for the weather. ‘ “Are you lost, honey?” and he said to her, “You don’t know me. But I think I am your son.” ’

‘She had a baby when she was seventeen?’ Ruth asked.

‘Seventeen.’

Dot felt it like an electric jolt, that lost baby transformed into a young man wearing a suit especially for the visit, a man who had brushed his hair and shaved and cleaned his teeth that morning knowing what he was about to do.

A friend of Frank’s tooted from the street, his car idling. Their father pushed his chair back and took his plate to the sink and stepped into the hallway and stumbled over the box that waited for the antique dealer’s assessment. It contained a fox-fur shrug, three crystal decanters, a couple of picture frames with the family photos removed, a blue vase made of Danish glass, Georgian candelabras, several round and rectangular silver trays, an incomplete set
of silver cutlery with mother-of-pearl handles, a tangled rhinestone necklace, the thick lacquered folder that housed an ancestor’s coin collection and the Kodak Instamatic camera, the device on which Frank had recorded their childhoods, its black nose sticking out between the twisty stalks of the candlesticks as though it was coming up for air.

FRANK WAS WAITING
at the bottom of the escalator with his thinning hair, and Eve hugged the familiar leanness of his body underneath the woollen jumper, the angled plates of his shoulders. ‘I thought Dorothy was coming?’ he said.

‘She said to send her love. She’s got a classroom placement.’

‘Yes, yes. She must be very busy.’

‘She said to say sorry. She sends her love.’

‘You’ve got thin, Evie.’

‘Have I?’

They waited for her suitcase at the conveyor belt together. The other travellers were middle-aged suits. Sales reps maybe, or farmers. Evelyn lurched towards the wrong suitcase twice before hers passed, the same bright blue as the others, the colour that reminded her of the hospice where she often delivered flowers.

‘Your mother ties a ribbon around the handle.’

‘I should do that.’

The airport was tiny, and a station wagon was just outside. Not his; the car belonged to the person whose house he was minding. The dog panted in the boot, a handsome dog, black and tan and watching intently as they approached. Her father opened the boot and pushed a hand towards the dog, holding it back when it rose as though to get out.

‘Hey. Boy,’ Evelyn said, unable to remember this latest dog’s name though her father might have mentioned it in one of his recent late-night calls. It circled itself and sniffed at the suitcase, growling slightly. She buckled herself into the passenger seat and Frank drove them away from the signs directing traffic towards the city. The car smelled doggy. Evelyn pulled the inhaler from her bag, unwound the Walkman cord from around it, shook fluff out of the mouthpiece and blew into the top to dislodge any random scraps.

‘Are you still smoking?’ her father asked.

‘No. A little bit. I just went through a break-up.’

He patted her knee. ‘You’ll live.’

‘Woo hoo,’ she hooted at a truck full of live sheep as they overtook it.

They were quickly on a country road, muzzy hills in the distance the only relief from the flatness of the floodplain. Frank drove down the middle of the narrow road, getting faster and faster. He took a bend at speed and she grabbed the handle above the window and braced her other hand above the glove box. She turned to check on the dog, who was whining, and the car swung again. ‘Dad. You’re driving too fast.’

The road crossed a river, tumbling silvery grey beneath them. A man in waders was planted downstream to the left and she put
a palm to the car window, wanted to stop, talk to him, pass time there with the sand flies and the river stones, the khaki box with compartments, coloured feathers, hooks. The road rushed on, lined with poplars feathering the sky, and the world was pale, grey and white and green. The speed on this stretch dizzied her eyes.

Evelyn’s body lifted from the seat as they bounced along the unsealed drive, and when the car reeled into its spot outside an old building she took a second of stillness to catch up with herself. The dog leaped from the car and disappeared round the side of the house, a flash of black.

‘So this is it.’

The house was made of wooden weatherboards and the corrugated-iron roof bowed in the middle. The no-colour paint on the windowsills and door frame was crackled, and as soon as she stepped inside there was a grapey, rotten smell that got stronger as she followed her father to the kitchen.

‘Have you had lunch?’ He boiled the scuffed white plastic kettle. She told him about Kimiko and the florist shop, about the volleyball team. The tea was strong with a rainbow film floating on the surface. The phone rang and Frank went to another room to answer.

Everything in the bathroom, next to the kitchen, was freezing: the toilet seat, the tap that left a rusting smudge on her hands, the clean-tasting water. When she returned to the kitchen her father was still not back. Evelyn looked in the cupboard for biscuits and a smudgy grey meal moth flew out, into her face. There were three opened packets of biscuits, one of them mouldy and the other two soft. She had a bowel-deep urge to get into the borrowed car and drive away, but instead did what was needed: in the bottom of the
cupboard she found a large brown rubbish bag, propped it open and shook the weevil-infested flour and the clumpy bran flakes into it, and dropped two half-empty jars of crusted peanut butter and one of crystallised honey on top of the pile.