The Forrests (14 page)

Small groups of parents huddled in conversation across the quad. A woman Eve had fought with at the quiz-night fundraiser a week earlier was holding Tania hostage. Grown-ups, hunched over the papers just like students, had scribbled furiously on the answer sheets in the school hall, and for a minute the scene could have been an examination room, all of them fifteen again, sitting their School C. ‘Name four famous Belgians,’ said the quizmaster, a local radio host with a voice that loved itself. After that there were gaps in her memory of the evening, leading up to the moment when the trestle tables were being folded away and the woman – Brenda – came over and started trying to be friendly. Everyone knew Brenda and one of the school dads, the one who OK had great abs but did he really need to be so ready to go shirtless at the end-of-year picnics, were getting it on.

‘Have you seen
Three Sisters
, at the Mercury?’ Brenda asked. ‘It’s the most wonderful production.’

‘Yes. I know.’ Evelyn had gripped the ridged handle of the Stanley knife for popping balloons hard in her fist. ‘It made me want to have an affair too.’

Now Brenda’s eyes flicked across the playground to Evelyn’s and away, and she pushed her hair back with one hand and kept on talking, and Tania shifted awkwardly on her feet. She should go over and apologise. She should lie and blame the drink, or invent some marital strife or a sick parent, an entity from outside that had
taken over her body and opened the mouth and made it say rude hurtful things that she could not help. Why was she such a bitch? The bell rang, releasing her, and she looked amongst the running children for her daughter’s shining head, her windmill arms. God damn it, the asphalt was vertiginous, there was that hole again, she wanted to fill up with pastries, buns, the sort of stodge she used to cram in her mouth when she was younger and it didn’t matter. Distractions, distractions. Food, then sex, then endless preschool craft then school help, remedial reading, and now she had to do something else or she was going to turn into one of those uber-fit freaks you saw at aerobics, the women who did two classes back to back, anything to fill the hours between mothering and lunch. Or – she felt the whisper slide across her mind – she would find someone, a man, a way to lose control.

That night she sat next to Nathan while he watched
Newsnight
. In the ad break he said, ‘Have you heard anything about the job?’

Evelyn said, ‘No.’

‘It’s really slack of them. You should call.’

‘I had a lover,’ Evelyn imagined saying, ‘that I’ve never told anyone about.’ Nathan would turn to her, then back to the TV, then press mute and swivel sideways on the sofa. ‘Tell me about it.’ Oh it would be good if he already knew. Would she say the next bit? Could she talk about that, the way things were with her and Daniel, the things they did to each other, the person she was before she became this respectable (narcissistic, bored, paranoid) housewife? How would it go? He’d shrink back a bit. Be embarrassed. Ask if she had ever been abused. Or want to try it, and get it wrong.

Nathan wouldn’t let it drop about the job. Evelyn told him again she had sent the questionnaire off and was waiting to hear, but perhaps should start looking for other work anyway. Kimiko needed help in the old flower shop.

‘But you wanted to be involved? I don’t get it, you were so set on doing something that counts.’

Evelyn shrugged. ‘Maybe making people nice bouquets for their birthdays is important. Wedding flowers, funeral wreaths, doing something beautiful, better than a windowless room with your ear getting sore from the phone the whole day.’

‘You could do that and then I’d bring you flowers.’ He pressed the remote and the screen fizzed to black and her husband stood over her, smiling down, and said, ‘Maybe it’s a good thing you don’t work for that guy. You’re too cute to be in politics. Some dork will just try and get you into bed.’

After he left for his card game Evelyn turned the stereo up full bore and lay on the floor and let the vibrations run through her until Louisa came and shook her wrist and said, ‘Turn it down, Mum, I’m trying to get to sleep.’ She poured a glass of wine and reached for the phone to call her sister, then remembered that Dorothy, pregnant again, was in bed at the same time as her kids these days.

She looked for Daniel in the phone directory. Seven
D. Hills
in Auckland. She could try the numbers one by one, though Daniel would surely not be here, wouldn’t have a listed number, maybe not even a phone. He was probably somewhere like Prague, being revolutionary with a Czech hottie he’d met at clown school. Or he would answer. And then what? He wouldn’t know it was her,
couldn’t tell from her breathing. ‘This is Evelyn, obsessing about you.’ Obsessing was too strong a word. What this was, was trying to integrate. Either integration or a burn-off. You made a decision and everything followed from that, and the older you got the more impossible it was to see through the Vaseline lens of time back into the past, your alternative lives, the ones you never now would lead.

Nathan had won at cards. He pulled the bedcovers over his shoulder and turned on his side, wuffling through his mouth. At about three in the morning Louisa stood in their doorway and said, ‘I’ve wet the bed,’ and Evelyn listened in the darkness as Nathan got out of bed, took Louisa to the bathroom, cleaned her up, dressed her in fresh pyjama pants, brought her in to sleep between them, crossed the landing, stripped her bed, took the sheets down to the laundry and came back up the stairs to land heavily in bed again. Evelyn fell asleep to the soft rumble and slosh below them of the washing machine spinning round.

The secretary rang to find out why she hadn’t sent in the questionnaire.

‘But I did. Days ago. Oh, damn. It must have got lost in the post. That seems crazy.’

‘Oh.’ The woman exhaled sharply. ‘What a pain. We’re trying to file all these positions now, we want to finalise it today, it’s a waste of time for HR to do them individually.’

‘Yes. I understand, of course, I’m so sorry to muck you around. Look, I don’t want to mess up your systems, perhaps the best thing is just to forget about it.’

‘Forget about it?’

‘Yes, perhaps it’s best if I just withdraw my application, just scratch me off the list.’

‘Well do you want the job or not?’

‘Yes, well I do, I think he’s brilliant, it’s a great cause, I’m sure you’ll have every success, it would be a wonderful thing to be involved in but I don’t want to hold you up, not on my account, maybe you should just – just don’t consider me.’

‘Are you withdrawing your application?’

‘The thing is my mother-in-law isn’t well.’

A pause.

‘Actually, she’s dead.’

‘Right. Goodbye.’

Evelyn put the phone down, liberated and ashamed. Then she pulled the White Pages towards her, opened it at the folded-over triangle marking
Hicks
to
Hills
, found the first number and began to press the buttons.

DOROTHY AND ANDREW
were in Cornwall Park with the kids when the call came through. The toddler, Donald, clutched at a length of banana with his fists, and squelches of creamy fruit bulged through his fingers. Shadows from the latticed leaves flitted over the tartan rug. The big roll of kitchen towel unravelled when Dorothy tried to tear off a sheet, not enough perforation, and Donald dropped the banana to grab at the soft white cone of a flower. She took him by the wrists and wiped his hands back and forth over the grass. At the sharp ringing of the cell phone, a wedding party posing for photos looked over from the ginkgo trees. Dorothy called out, ‘Sorry!’ Andrew liked to keep up with technology; it was a guy thing. One day that groom would understand.

Finally Andrew found the persistent phone and answered the call, taking it away from the rest of them, by the russet-winged paradise ducks. Those birds, stalking the paths, gawkily big. Reggae music started from a boom box at someone else’s picnic and Amy
jumped along off the beat, around and under the picnic table, and Grace read a book on her stomach on the grass, her hair so long and falling into the clover.

Dorothy watched Andrew nod and listen. There was, in the air around his head, a sort of pulsing that she could feel too. Amy yelped sharply and emerged from under the table. She stood in front of her mother, face pruned-up with pain, tears in her eyes, rubbing her forehead. At last Dorothy saw the child, she came into focus, and she drew Amy into her arms and kissed her hair. The phone call ended – Andrew reached the handset out towards Dot across the metres of grass, as though he was showing her something on the screen or wanted her to take this contaminated object from him, and he gestured clumsily for her to come, past the children, through the bright afternoon, his nose wrinkled, his face helpless. One duck charged another, chests up, wings pointed to the ground, and a small terrier barked at them, straining at the leash.

THE HIGH DEPENDENCY
Unit smelled like an old folks’ home, which smelled like stale flower water, which smelled stagnant, like unmoving curtains onto a double-glazed aluminium-framed window through which there was a manicured rock garden, koi carp drifting in a pool. Dorothy stood at the reception desk waiting for the nurse to get off the phone. This was the next stage, after the long waiting while Eve was in surgery, and it was good to have a place to be. The flowers she had bought from the shop downstairs had to stay outside the ward’s double doors, in the nothing space by the lifts, stems set in an old ice-cream container on the floor, the flowers balancing tenuously against the wall. It was inevitable that a small human movement would make the flowers slide down, the bases of their stems emerging dripping from the water, so that who knew what state they would be in later. She had already decided to take them to Nathan and Eve’s, where she was going to stay, Andrew holding the fort at home with the kids. The flowers would make a
good payment in kind for one of the casseroles Nathan would be brought that night. There hadn’t been time to make casseroles at home, or do anything but get here.

The nurse got off the phone and pointed Dot in the direction of Evelyn’s room. ‘You’re her sister?’ Usually this wouldn’t have to be asked. Usually there would be the resemblance. ‘Hubby’s in the family room. Think he’s having a wee rest. Long day.’

Evelyn was asleep, her head encased in a giant white turban of bandages so that she looked like she had encephalitis, which she did not, or like her head was an enormous cartoon thumb. ‘What’s the worst that could happen,’ she’d said once when Dorothy felt guilty over the children watching
Tom & Jerry
, ‘they grow up with a sense of comic timing?’ Her face was swollen, streaked with purplish and yellow bruises. Between the lacerations her skin shone greasily in the light that came from the window. Dorothy took a tissue from the bedside table – it came out of the box with a long, pulling hoosh – and gently, hardly touching at all, patted her sister’s nose and the grazed cheekbones and chin. A heavier breath escaped Evelyn but she didn’t wake. Dorothy sat down and took the newspaper out of her bag and dug her fingernails into her palms when an image rose up of
sitting in the hospital
beside Amy’s incubator, the tubes and lines going into her baby.

Before long a little clutch of people crowded towards Evelyn’s bed, the surgeon’s walk-through, and Dorothy rose from the chair to greet them and to make space. ‘I’ll get her husband,’ she said, but was rooted to the spot; she wanted to see her sister conscious. Someone shook Evelyn awake and Dot tried to poke her head in between the shoulders of the doctors and interns so that Eve would know she
was there. Evelyn’s gaze rolled over Dot the way it rolled over everyone else surrounding her, and her eyes clammed shut again. A brief exchange agreed that this drowsiness was fine.

‘Been breathing on her own, good girl. So there’s head injury here,’ the surgeon said to a – what, a student? – using the sort of elegant hand gestures people made when selling jewellery on late-night infomercials. ‘Broke the left arm here and here, and the shoulder here.’ He examined his folder. ‘There was another fracture here, the ulna, but that’s old, probably a childhood break.’ He looked at Dorothy.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘When she was nine. Or ten.’ She couldn’t remember how Eve had done it, only that their parents had brushed off her complaints of a sore arm and it wasn’t till a fortnight later when she got bumped at school, rebroke it, that the secretary had called Lee and said,
Your daughter needs an X-ray
.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I think she was ten.’

A girl in a white coat said, ‘The hip?’

‘No, she was lucky. Internal bleeding, ribs. She was on a bicycle?’ A question, to Dorothy.

‘Yes, she, the driver just opened the car door, it threw her off. She hit the road.’ Unnecessary to add
no helmet
. Enough people had remarked on that.

‘Thank you.’ He addressed the others, again, telling them the serious issue was brain swelling, ‘but we’ve gone in here – and here – to relieve pressure.’

Perhaps these were the hand movements of a weather presenter, or an air hostess in a safety demonstration, the hand that mimes
pulling down the oxygen mask and gripping the life-jacket whistle although there’s nothing there. It was hard to concentrate. She was panicking.

‘I’ll just go and get Nathan,’ Dot said, ‘can you please, please wait.’ Standing up had brought her body back to her; the muscles that were stiff and creaky, Play-Doh left out overnight. As she left to find the family room she heard, ‘Another scan.’

The family room was smaller than she’d imagined, with an aluminium window frame and a pile of pamphlets on the table. Brain injury, a child’s guide to bereavement. No thanks. Nathan lay on his side on the pink velour couch, his face stuffed into a cushion. She shook him. He followed her back into the HDU, his entire self folds of hanging grey fabric.

The curtains were pulled around Evelyn’s bed and a smiling nurse emerged. ‘Just changing the drip,’ she said. Evelyn lay there alone, still asleep, the space around her bed empty. The surgeon and his entourage had moved on to the next patient, the next case.