The Forrests (11 page)

Andrew would come back from work each night and kiss his wife and cuddle the baby then disappear into the garage where his painting was set up.

‘Is it me?’ Eve wondered, and Dottie said, ‘No, it’s not you. He needs to do some painting every day. It keeps his head together.’

‘Like the karate.’

‘Yes.’

‘Whatever it takes.’

‘Yes.’

Sometimes they met in a café and just as Dorothy’s pot of tea or heated-up pie was served Grace would squall until Dot, refusing Eve’s help, took her outside. Mostly Evelyn wound up eating and drinking alone, reading the newspaper or watching her sister pace the footpath as she joggled the baby, and then Dot would flurry in all apologies and close to tears, slurp her tea, have a mouthful of cake and announce she had to go.

Despite being a colonised baby domain, some weeks Dorothy’s house was the only really human place Eve found herself. She had to admit that her social life was out of control. She also had to admit that social life was a euphemism. Her random fucking was out of control. They lived in a small place. Sooner or later she was
going to fuck her way into a corner and would have to leave town. This was what she said to her sister one afternoon in the tiny back garden, Grace fatly in her nappy on a blanket, eating pieces of cut-up peach with her fingers, crawling to swipe at the Disney ball and watch it roll.

‘A corner,’ Eve said. ‘I can see it. There will be no one left.’

‘Well why are you doing it? I worry about you.’

‘It’s not that bad. I’m exaggerating. One day I’ll meet someone lovely.’

‘Not in a bar.’

‘Dorothy, nice men go to bars too. Anyway, I met this guy last night who was really sweet and so funny –’

‘And that’s another thing, you always go to their place. What if some psycho? It’s completely self-destructive.’

‘Do you want to hear the story or not?’

Of course Dorothy did. At least one of them was having a life. Andrew worked until six every night and early in the morning he went to the gym. More than anything in the world she hated that gym. No, perhaps she hated karate more than the gym, because that was what he did there. If Andrew didn’t do karate, if he didn’t go to the gym, he got strung out, so she tried to love karate, but mostly she tried not to drink alone. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Nothing too grisly.’ More than once Eve had recounted some sexual disaster explicitly as she held the baby in her arms, which made Dot wince although Grace was too young to understand.

‘I might be off intimate detail for life.’ Evelyn went on to tell Dot how this man had talked non-stop, how he constantly described what he was doing to her or worse, what she was doing to him – ‘You’re
squeezing my balls’ – until it had stopped being amusing and gone way past turning her on. He kept going even when she asked him point blank to stop. Finally, after ‘I’m reaching for the condom’ she’d jumped out of bed and yelled ‘LA LA LA’ in his face.

‘What did he do then?’

‘He asked me to leave. So I did – “I’m pulling my knickers on now, I’m getting into my jeans, you’re lying on the bed staring, I’m looking for my shoes, I’m not giving you my phone number, you’re storming out of the room, you’re slamming the bathroom door, I’m picking up my bag, I’m LEAVING YOUR HOUSE.” ’

‘Shh.’ Dot gestured at the fence, the closeness of the neighbours. ‘And what does Kimiko think? When you come home at three in the morning?’

‘I’m very quiet. I’m a good girl, Dot. She doesn’t mind as long as I’m at work on time.’

‘Fresh as a daisy.’

‘Ha.’

‘Seriously, you should be careful.’ An aeroplane inched across the sky. Dot looked at her sister, the tawny hair, the energy rising off her like tendrils of smoke, her undeniable fuckability, and said, ‘Do you regret coming back?’

‘Not yet. Sometimes. Yes. It’s only been a few months but it’s been like forever.’

‘You know Daniel’s in South America. Guatemala or something. Or is that Central? He sent a postcard, don’t tell Andrew. Wait, I’ll get it.’

The mention of his name made Eve want to rip a hunk of grass from the earth. This could not be done, and nothing could
be said to her sister. Better to bury Daniel because face it, she’d had no right to him and she’d wanted him for so long and followed him across the world and by anyone’s standards she probably deserved to have him leave her but she could never, never tell Dot. How to know whether the secrecy – really the
lying –
came from love, or shame, or the sheer envy of having been the one left out by those two for all that time? They’d never talked about it but she
knew
, like she knew about Michael being a pot fiend when their parents insisted it was just that he was shy. Could she judge whether or not Daniel had been worth it? She was frightened that, if she looked in her heart, she would discover that he was, and would have to face up to what that meant, now he was gone. ‘Actually, I should get home. I’m on dinner. What should I make?’

‘Pasta? I don’t know, you’re the cook.’

‘Yeah. Daniel doesn’t send me postcards.’ Partly it was what Dorothy would expect to hear, if she were to maintain the pretence, and partly it was true, and it hurt, and it felt good to say it.

‘He probably doesn’t know where you live. How would he know where you are?’

Dot’s voice had risen the way it did when she felt defensive. Huh. Eve lifted Grace high in the air and drew her in, giggling, for kisses and cuddles. ‘Bye bye, lovely one,’ she said.

Grace stopped laughing. She gazed over Eve’s shoulder and said, ‘Bye bye.’

Dorothy’s hand flew to her mouth.

‘Oh my god,’ said Eve.

‘Did you hear that? Say it again.’

‘Bye bye,’ Evelyn said, and Grace said, ‘Bye bye, Evie.’

‘She’s talking!’

The baby girl looked from her mother to her aunt and back again with a wide crescent smile, amazing connections firing in her brain. ‘Bye bye.’

ON THE DRIVE
to the cabin the sky began to set and darken, the colour of wet concrete. Rain prickled the windscreen. ‘Great,’ said Andrew. ‘Stuck inside with the perfect robot child for a week.’

Dorothy squeezed his leg, the hard muscle above his knee, and moved her hand up his thigh a bit. ‘I like these jeans.’

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hi.’ She kissed his shoulder. In the back seat Amy, the baby, started to cry. ‘I’m thirsty,’ said Grace, and Dorothy swivelled around to pass her the king-size Schweppes bottle filled with water. Grace dropped it and Dot unbuckled her seat belt and said to Andrew, ‘Don’t crash,’ and squeezed through the gap between the front seats to the back and sat with one hand stroking the side of the baby’s breathtakingly soft face and the other hand propping up the bottom of the heavy bottle so that Grace could drink from it. ‘Lou’s only little,’ she said to Andrew. ‘Give her a chance. She’ll turn weird and difficult soon enough.’

‘You’re probably right,’ said Andrew. ‘Look at the parents.’

‘Do you mean Aunty Eve and Uncle Nathan?’ said Grace.

‘No,’ said Dorothy, hitting Andrew in the arm. ‘We’re talking about someone else.’

‘Lou means toilet,’ said Grace.

‘It’s a pretty name,’ Dorothy said. ‘Be nice.’

Things had changed for Grace with the baby’s arrival. Maybe it was the week Dot spent away from her, with bird-like, premature Amy in the NICU. Maybe it was simply the fact of another child. The parenting books had a lot to say about introducing new siblings. The word
sibling
was deceptively bloodless. Grace threw stuff and she wouldn’t take a daytime sleep. She railed against the wind or the sun or the straps on her pushchair and she let food fall half chewed from her mouth and always removed her clothes and shoes once she’d been dressed. She liked being read to, and attempting skew-whiff jigsaw puzzles and perching on the kitchen bench while Dorothy baked, and she liked sitting up against her mother’s side while she breastfed the baby and hitting her lightly in the face.

An electronic jazz riff on the radio announced a traffic report and Andrew turned it up and the newsreader said that a tropical storm was heading east and could develop into a hurricane. Residents were advised to prepare hurricane kits and a flash-flood warning was issued. ‘Motherfucker,’ said Andrew.

‘What do we do?’

‘Everyone’s still driving.’ It was true; the traffic out of town had slowed but all three lanes were moving, the red and yellow car lights glistening through the grey rain.

The car shook in the wind as it edged forward and the windscreen was a blur, carved by the metronome of the wipers, the shifting of water from side to side. The traffic slowed to a crawl and Dot said to Andrew, ‘OK really don’t crash,’ and undid the clasp over Amy’s belly and lifted her into her arms and rucked up her T-shirt and clicked the plastic toggle to release the cup of her bra.

‘This is my one fucking week off, man,’ Andrew shouted at the traffic.

‘Hold my hand, Mummy,’ said Grace, and once the baby was plugged into that rhythmic sucking and the milk was drawing from all the way under Dot’s arm, through the breast and into Amy’s mouth, the fine hair at the nape of her neck damp with sweat, she could free a hand and find Grace’s palm.

Nathan’s newspaper said that the storm might move further east and pass them, that there might not even be lightning and thunder, no need for the canned food, torches, extra nappies and colouring-in books they’d picked up on the way. He showed them a satellite image of the storm, a startling spiral with a tiny hole at its centre through which you could imagine seeing the surface of the earth, the whorl around the eye terrifying to look at, a pocket-size image of force, magnetic suction, and Andrew said, ‘Come on, how is that not a hurricane.’

‘Maybe we’re just out of its path,’ Nathan said. ‘No radio range so we just got to wait and see.’

‘Nathan,’ Dot said, touching his upper arm, ‘I’m so sorry about your father.’

He nodded. ‘Thanks. Yeah, it’s been rough on my mum.’

Evelyn came out of the bedroom, closing the door quietly behind her, and crossed the room on tiptoe towards them, streaky blonde hair tumbled over her shoulders, smudged eyeliner, bare feet and a long cotton sundress. Beside her, Dorothy could feel Andrew tense up, and she was conscious of her nursing bra, coffee-stained T-shirt, the roll of flesh over her waistband. Eve whispered, ‘Louisa’s asleep,’ and opened her arms wide to embrace Dot and the baby on her hip in slow motion, her touch like feathers.

The pool was a natural crater in some rocks, sealed roughly in patches with concrete, filled with rainwater and sterilised with salt. The rocks were mossy. Even for an adult it was hard to clamber out, pulling up on the slippery round edges that sloped too gradually for hands and feet to get any real purchase. Rain pocked the irresistible surface. The water was the temperature of blood, warmer than the air above. After the first dip Dorothy emerged on all fours, knees bright red from the effort of gripping the rock.

‘Primordial slime,’ Nathan said. ‘You’re like the first stage of mammalisation.’

‘Is mammalisation a word?’

‘Mammalial.’

‘That might be something to do with breasts.’

‘Oh yes.’

Dot wrapped herself in a towel and sat on the covered porch watching the rain come down, and Grace came and sat on her knee, the child’s head fitting perfectly underneath her mother’s chin.

They were on hyper-alert about the kids: Grace, Louisa and even Amy, although she could not yet crawl. The fence had to be
locked at all times. At least one adult per child. No running on the wet rocks. Don’t give them water wings, a polystyrene flutter board, they won’t ever learn to float. Everyone knew someone who had let the child run ahead to the water, who had gone back to answer the phone, whose pool gate had swollen in the rain and wouldn’t shut properly, who had been helping another child with a grazed elbow that needed sterilising when – And the images were there and you couldn’t erase them and it was then that you wondered why have the children in the first place, loss was too possible, you can’t be a parent, surely this can’t be what a parent is?

The men cooked, raggedy T-shirts beside the barbecue, smoke gathering under the awning, a current of air drawing it out and dispersing it over the pool. The storm had passed and the atmosphere felt rich, charged with negative ions as though just breathing it could get you high. After a few wines Evelyn said to Dot, ‘I thought Andrew was a vegetarian?’

‘Used to be.’

‘That was a cool thing for him to do. Brave. I mean anyone can be a vegetarian now. Except Nathan.’ She drained her glass and poured another one, started in on that.

‘How are things?’

‘Great! How’s Andrew’s work?’

‘The caretaking, or the painting?’

‘… Both.’

‘He’s doing abstracts now.’

‘It’s great that he keeps with it.’

Dorothy bit her thumbnail. ‘What are you thinking about any
more kids?’ she asked. ‘Louisa’s so gorgeous. She’s being lovely with Amy.’

‘To be honest,’ Evelyn said, ‘I’m not sure. Nate would like to have another but I don’t get why he’s so keen.’

‘Maybe, since his dad …?’

‘I don’t know.’ Her vague voice, the habitual hand over her mouth. ‘Sometimes I wonder if it’s better to just have one kid and try to do that right.’

‘Bit late for me now,’ Dot said. Her breasts hardened and ached; she pressed down on them before milk could spot her new sundress. Was the baby alive? Ah her brain.

Through the shambles of early parenthood Eve had retained her knack of making things lovely, wild flowers pluming from a milk jug, herbs scattered over the salad. Their mother’s floating-skirts phase was in here somewhere, but Eve’s grace was her own. Yet even though she and Nathan touched each other, kissed in passing with an ease and enthusiasm Dorothy envied, and even though they had Louisa, a seamless child, Evelyn carried this twisting, claret undercurrent, the thing that set her finger tapping on the table when her husband told a story.

Standing now, Eve supported herself with a palm on the table before, Dorothy knew, she would walk unevenly to the fridge for another bottle.