The Forrests (18 page)

There was Grace, with her friends. Their pod circled the crowd, arms folded. Last time Dot had been here her daughter still ran around the netball court, playing games. ‘What do they talk about?’ she asked Kate.

‘God only knows,’ Kate said. ‘I roll my eyes.’

The nursery kids were let out. Donald sprinted up and dumped his schoolbag at her feet and said, ‘Where’s Chloe?’

‘She couldn’t come today.’

‘Mummy! Can I go to Ivan’s house, please, can I,’ and shook his hands in prayer and Ivan’s mother from the other side of the playground raised an arm and nodded, and Dorothy called, ‘Thank you,’ and kissed her son’s ducking head before he raced away.

‘Are you going to that road-safety meeting?’ Fleur asked.

‘Can’t,’ Kate said. ‘Ted’s got shingles.’

‘Oh no.’

‘You should go.’ This was to Dorothy, with significant eyes.

‘I know.’ The cautionary tale. Poster girl for speed limits, sober driving, pedestrian crossings, chicanes, judder bars, cycling helmets, slow down signs, check before you step notices, rigorous broken yellow line parking prosecution and not letting your life get out of control. ‘Maybe it would be too much. I don’t want to freak people out.’

‘Dottie, you lost your sister. It happened. People are freaked out. It is a freak-out situation.’

‘I don’t want Eve to be some sort of exhibit.’

Kate nodded. ‘Well. That’s different.’

‘How did Ted get shingles?’

‘Kids. Chicken pox. Stress. Midlife crisis. Take your pick. At least it’s keeping him where I can see him.’

The wind licked coldly at Dorothy’s head. She had once had a beanie, like Sam. She shouldn’t have thrown it on the fire.

Sam walked towards them, giving a half-wave. ‘Thank you, Dorothy,’ he said.

‘Any takers?’

‘A few. I’d better be going.’ He smiled at Grace, who’d attached herself sinuously to her mother’s body. ‘Hello.’

‘Mummy,’ she said, nuzzling Dorothy’s upper arm. ‘You’re here.’

Dorothy stroked her daughter’s honeyish hair, wanted the hug to go on for ever. ‘We’re going to the playground,’ she said to Sam over Grace’s head. ‘Would you like to come?’ Amy doofed into the backs of her legs – ‘Mama!’ – and she nearly lost her balance. ‘Don’t do that,’ Dot said loudly. ‘Don’t do that to me.’

‘Don’t do that to Mum you stupid idiot,’ said Grace.

Amy looked at them. A decision was made and her face dropped and she hung her head. Dorothy lowered herself to the ground on one knee and pulled her into a hug. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry for giving you a fright. I didn’t mean to shout.’

‘Who’s he?’ Amy’s voice buried in her neck.

‘This is Sam.’ Getting up was going to be difficult. Dot put a hand forward to the wet asphalt, backside in the air, and pushed up all her weight through one knee. Fabric squeaked around the seams of her trousers and blood whumped in her ears. They were the last ones left in the schoolyard.

At the playground Amy chewed a blob of gum she had found under a bench. Dorothy opened a palm and the girl craned her head forward and spat out the gum, green and tooth-ridged. The bin was overstuffed with fast-food boxes, and Dot shook the gum off onto the streaky steel hub on the top. Sam was pushing Hannah on the smallest swing; the baby kicked her chubby legs and beamed.

‘My brother owns a car dealership,’ Sam said as the child swung back and forth in front of him. ‘If your husband is ever interested in trading in the people mover.’

‘Do you work for him as well?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Older brother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you close?’

Sam smiled. He had dimples. ‘It’s very nice when siblings get on.’

‘OK, not an answer.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Nothing.’ Grace had joined up with some boys from the big school and was sitting on a skateboard at the top of the slide. ‘Grace!’ The girl ignored her. The skateboard tipped forward, front wheels in the air over the steep metal trough. ‘Grace!’ Dorothy ran to the slide, legs chafing, her voice low and betraying panic, as though her daughter was an unleashed Rottweiler. ‘Get off there now. Get off!’

Grace scowled and pushed the skateboard down the slide. At the bottom it shot and skidded along the asphalt. She slid down after it, controlled, stately. ‘Jesus, Mum, I wasn’t going to do it.’

Raindrops spotted the playground as though shaken from the trees. The sky condensed. A large incongruous seabird lifted itself
from the asphalt into flight, legs hanging heavy beneath it. More rain fell, and steadier, and mothers and children crowded to get out the safety gate. Sam brought the baby to the buggy and settled her in while Dot shook open the folded rain cover. She domed it over Hannah and the baby cried, as she always did, her little hands reaching for her mother from behind the clear plastic sheet, outraged that she had become removed by this layer, made blurry. Sam produced a broken umbrella from his plastic bag and held its stingray tatters over them all, pushing the buggy with his other hand as they made their way, centurions in turtle formation, through the security gate and along the street. Huddled beneath the waterproof fabric, Grace and Amy in front splashing water from the puddles, this kind man at her side, Dorothy’s heart opened and she felt she could stay outside in all weathers, walk for miles. The rain, the clear plastic, the wet leaves – all were concrete, touchable, safe.

At the front door, Dot shooed the girls inside and rocked the buggy over the threshold, unclicking the domes on the plastic cover and pulling Hannah into her arms. Sam hesitated.

‘Do you want to wait out the rain again?’ she asked.

He doffed the umbrella. ‘You did have an umbrella,’ she said, as though naming the object for the first time. She reached out and softly pinched the rim, where a spoke bobbled through the nylon. ‘Sam, thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

For a moment longer they stood grinning at each other.

‘I’ll talk to my husband about the car. You could come back and I’ll sign the forms. Make an appointment for an engine check or whatever it is mechanics do.’

‘Can we watch TV?’ Grace in the small entranceway, tracking mud over the floor.

‘Grace! Shoes off! Help your sister.’

Sam said, ‘Yes, I’ll come back. Thank you for the fruit.’

She was distracted, crouching down to put Amy’s slippers on, and when she looked up he was running through the rain, his heels lifting behind him.

‘Thank you,’ she called, and he waved, the umbrella flapping above him, shattered raindrops spraying from it, every which way.

The next day while the baby was sleeping there was another knock on the door. Dorothy shut the oven door to keep the heat from escaping, and ran to answer it. A woman with a clipboard introduced herself, waving the photo ID on her lanyard as though it were a hypnotist’s watch chain. ‘I’m from the council. We’re doing a survey about neighbourhood feeling, the sense you have of belonging in this area. Do you have twenty minutes now or should I come back?’

She ticked the 25–39 age box. Her last year in that bracket. The urgent need came over her to
make the most of it
. Yeah! She beamed at the council worker, wanted to throw a hand up for a high-five.

‘Are you satisfied with this neighbourhood as a place to live?’

‘What is your experience of road safety in this neighbourhood?’

‘Do you have access to physical and mental health facilities in this neighbourhood?’

‘Do you consider most of your friends to come from this neighbourhood?’

‘Can you describe for me, demonstrating with boundaries on this map, your sense of where the neighbourhood begins and ends?’

There was a mechanic’s on the back street behind the bank. And another on the edge of the playing fields by the adventure playground. Everywhere she walked now, Dot looked for those large roller doors, the open squares of darkness within, the dank air that smelled so headily of petrol, cubicle offices with glass windows like the graphed pages of Grace’s maths book, men in overalls, turning pads, hydraulic lifts, oily floors.

DRIVING HOME FROM
the campground Andrew said, ‘I think I need glasses.’ Their children and Lou were in the back seats and Dot looked over at him from the passenger’s side and thought oh yes, that would be right. He was hunched over the steering wheel, frowning, and the skin of his face had lined and thickened, and the hair was maybe more dry or thinner or something but the head, the shape of the head was the same.

Suddenly the traffic in front of them stalled and he nearly drove into the back of another car. The bend in the road that they inched around finally revealed a lane closed, police cars, an ambulance, the puckered metal of a wreck.

‘Don’t look, darlings.’

Of course, they did. There was a medical sheet over a stretcher on the side of the road, but you couldn’t tell if anyone was under it.

*  *  *

At the public baths, the sounds of shouting and water sloshing against the pool’s sides ricocheted through the hangar-like space. Holding Hannah’s little hand, Dot stepped down from the raked benches and through steamy air to the soft, faintly gelatinous water that puddled over the top metal step down into the cordoned-off recreational pool. Tepid at first, the water cooled as more of her body was immersed, and she floated her daughter through to a gap in the playing children and drew her in towards her, their skin touching under the water, slippery cold and warm at the same time. She held Hannah by the wrists and whooshed her in a semicircle back and forth, then supported her back while she kicked with shonky glee, her eyelashes spiky and wet.

‘Evelyn!’ The name came from the general mass of bodies in the water and might have been just a random shout if it hadn’t happened again, more clearly, and a woman broke through a pair of dunking pubescent boys and space-walked towards Dot. ‘Evelyn Forrest! Oh my god. Is this your little girl? She’s so cute!’

‘I’m Dorothy, Eve’s sister. This is Hannah. Say hello, Hannah.’

‘I can hold my breath. Watch this.’ The girl puffed her cheeks out and plunged her face beneath the water.

‘Oh you’re Dorothy, of course you are. You’re not twins, are you?’

Dot hitched up the straps of her swimsuit. ‘How are you?’ Hannah came up gasping. ‘Well done, darling.’

‘Really well.’ The woman waved an arm towards the big pool. ‘My boys are huge now, they’re in squad practice, for my sins. Five a.m. every day! They love it but talk about nearly get a divorce. How old’s your girl?’

‘How old are you, Hannah?’

‘I’m five. But I’m short for my age.’

‘She’s three.’

‘Look at those eyes, she’s so like you. Freaky. Have you got any others?’ She craned her neck.

‘At school. Seven, eleven and thirteen.’

‘Four, wow. You don’t look it.’

‘I’ve been on a diet for about two years.’

‘Well they
wreck
our bodies. I miss babies, I adore babies, but no more.’ She made a scissoring gesture with her fingers. ‘No. Way. O. Ver. Hey so the reunion! Did you get the email?’

‘No, I …’ Hannah pulled at the neck of Dorothy’s swimsuit and Dorothy moved her hand away. ‘No, darling.’

‘I can see your boobies.’

‘Stop it.’

The woman was still talking. ‘… can you believe we’re so frigging old? You’ve got to come, I’ll flick you the thing, we’re all going.’

‘Really?’

‘God yes, if you don’t go everyone knows it’s because your life is shit.’

‘How old are your boys?’

‘She said the S word,’ said Hannah.

‘Thirteen and fourteen. Monsters. I mean, we were fourteen! Oh my god the laundry I have to do. The smells. The secretions. I look at them sometimes and think a girl is going to kiss you?’ She throttled herself with one hand and leaned back until she had fully sunk then came up choking for real, spluttering, and Dorothy pounded her between the shoulder blades till she stopped. ‘God knows what I just swallowed. Such an egg. Sorry.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘No more sight gags. So. Are you in the book? I’m going to stalk you. We need all the moral support we can get.’

She was either the Tollerton girl or Amanda Marshall. One of them went out with Peter Smythe and the other one went out with Paul Baxter. Peter could do one-arm push-ups for fifteen reps and Paul was the school beer pong king. The woman in the pool now looked like the woman who was either the Tollerton’s or Amanda’s mother, who had worked part-time as a guidance counsellor and who specialised in passing out sanitary pads the size of light aircraft. Mrs Tollerton. Mrs Marshall.

Hannah said, ‘Mama, I want it,’ and lunged towards a randomly floating orange flutter board, so that Dorothy had to follow or let go of her. At the dring of an electric bell the woman spun towards the pool’s edge and marched through the water, arms extending and retracting as though pulling partners towards her in a square dance. She called something over her shoulder as she reached the metal steps. ‘Tell Evelyn.’

Maya Kumar’s house was in a new subdivision near the school. The taxi dropped Dot at the end of the road and she walked the wide clean path past half-built houses on bare sections, under street lights endowed with pretty curves and hexagonal glass bulb-protectors, as though they were flowers that had grown there since Victorian times. Light blazed orange from the open front door to Maya’s house and several cars were parked on the street, cars that looked modest but more reliable than the rusting Beetles and shark-like Holdens of the school days. There was one black-tinted four-by-four.

Dorothy put a bottle of wine on the kitchen bench.

Maya kissed her. ‘It’s so great you’re here. Mandy said you’d pike out. Also, I told her about Eve. She didn’t know. We’re all so sorry.’

Something about this environment, the pressing sense of a past with Evelyn in it, made the stock response impossible.

‘Wait, I’ll get you a drink. My husband has vanished for the night, wise move.’ Maya had married one of their old teachers, which for a while had been a scandal. She’d quickly got him out of teaching and into computers. ‘Can you believe he was younger then than we are now?’