The Forrests (20 page)

The night was warm, close, and the Victoriana lamplight was soft and tawny. The new houses rose like cardboard cut-outs from their blank sections. Apart from one carload of boys and their wives, crushed into the back sitting on knees, heads bent under the low ceiling of the Ford station wagon, everyone walked down the gently curving slope like a wedding procession. In the boot of the Ford a couple who were both married to other people did fake waggly-tongue kissing as the car drove away. People whooped at them. The car suddenly braked and the couple jerked forwards and everyone laughed. The man with hard shoes and Dorothy helped Monique lift Ian into her car and collapse the wheelchair and stow it in the boot. ‘Actually, John,’ Monique said, placing a slim hand on his arm, ‘would you mind driving us?’

Dot waved them off and said, ‘Just checking in with the kids.’

The car disappeared around the corner, leaving the smell of exhaust and the optical print of tail lights. At home, Andrew answered the phone, TV commercials playing loudly in the background. ‘Sorry hang on.’ He pressed the mute button on the remote, cursing as the low battery did nothing to the volume.

‘They only sound louder,’ Dot said. ‘How’s Donald’s temperature? Should I come home?’

‘You mean bottle out? No.’

‘We’re just leaving Maya’s now.’

‘No rush.’

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘And yet there you are.’

‘Ha.’

‘Aha.’

She hung up the phone and checked that it was hung up, and checked that it was hung up again and put it back in her bag. Must have been about a year ago she’d left the phone with Daniel’s number in it at the toy library, lost the SIM card, all her contacts. At the bulbous end of the cul-de-sac there was a turning circle like the bottom of a test tube, the place children would ride tricycles and sell lemonade to foot traffic made up of people their parents already knew. A path ran off the end of the cul-de-sac and the last light in the street cast a muzzy white triangle as far as the grassy wasteland beyond. From here she could see over to the floodlit top field and the school buildings and possibly the dark shapes of people walking along the road towards the school gates, before they were obscured by a lump in a hill.

The light petered out at the end of the path, where a wire fence blocked access to the undeveloped hills. A sign was planted in front of the fence and Dorothy stood on the edge of the light, on the point where it gave way to nature, and reached one hand out to touch the high tensile fence wire. An electric shock snapped up her arm and she yelped as the arm flung back, and shook it and staggered down the path a little bit, laughing soundlessly.

Time had passed since everyone else had arrived at the reunion. Blisters stung on her toes, pulpy and jammed into the ends of her shoes, from running down to the school in high heels. The registration people outside the hall had never heard of her. Through the double doors came music that they had danced to a hundred years earlier, at the graduation ball. Dorothy dropped Maya’s name and Mandy’s but the younger woman said, ‘We’ve had to step up security since your day.’

‘Yes,’ she said, leaning forward on the desk, her face close to the woman’s, ‘I did have a day. A school day. I went here. My whole family went here. Why would I make that up? Do I look like a terrorist?’

The woman’s gaze drifted over to something behind her and a voice said, ‘Yes. I think so.’

It was Daniel. He was wearing a black suit, smiling, and his teeth were peggy and brown. Those dark eyes, oily like coffee beans, looked at her while he spoke to the woman. ‘Someone put my name down,’ he said. ‘Daniel Hill?’

‘Danny Hill. You scumbag.’ The chemistry teacher clapped a hand on his shoulder.

‘Hello, Mr Crosby.’ He was still looking at Dorothy. His face made her want to pull her jacket up to hide her own. ‘Hi, Dot.’

‘They don’t recognise me,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it.’

The suit was second-hand and smelled it, and the worn lapel felt rough against her face when they hugged. Some crying fell out of her. He held her shoulders. ‘We don’t have to go in if you don’t want,’ he said.

‘No no we should. It’s just – like the water closed over our heads, you know. We’re just gone. Doesn’t matter.’

The three of them walked through the doors into the school hall. Mr Crosby headed for the bar. There was a student band playing music that wasn’t quite loud enough. Light splintered around the room from a disco ball. Faces, bodies loomed and receded. Someone said, ‘Weren’t there more of you, didn’t you have a sister?’ and Daniel hung back and when she began to explain about the accident a group of guys swallowed him. The woman’s mouth flew open and she whispered, ‘Oh no,’ and Dorothy hugged her. ‘It’s OK.’

In the middle of the dance floor Monique was giving Ian a kind of lap dance in his wheelchair. ‘Wow,’ Dot said, and the woman pulled out of the hug and looked at her with a furrowed brow, performing confusion.

‘Check it out.’ Dorothy pointed to Monique. ‘I can’t work out if that’s really amazing or a bit cruel.’

‘Probably only so much Viagra can do,’ the woman said. ‘I’m so sorry about your sister.’

‘Thanks. Me too.’ She squeezed the woman’s arm and said, ‘I’m just going to the bar. Do you want anything?’

The barman filled the softish plastic tumbler to the brim with white wine. It dimpled under the pressure of Dot’s thumb and fingers and she tried to hold it lightly with both hands, sipping wine and looking out over the edge. Danny was in a corner by the stage, flanked by three or four men whose past boy-faces floated somewhere beneath the surface of their current faces. He finished saying something then looked around the room. All the wine in her glass disappeared down Dorothy’s throat and she swallowed a lurch of joy. Mandy Marshall and the now-Rogerson girl danced over and Mandy squeezed Dot’s waist and shimmied up and down. To now-Rogerson she said, ‘Remember Dorothy? Freak or unique?’ She leaned right in. ‘You were rocking that swimsuit at the pool!’ Her breath was a mist of vodka. ‘Have you had any work?’

‘No.’

‘I know someone. Comes to your living room.’ She pulled at the skin of her temples so that her face went taut.

Now-Rogerson said, ‘Really? Call me next time. John’s given me the all-clear.’

‘Just a minute,’ Dorothy said. ‘I’ve got to find the loo.’

As she left them, now-Rogerson said, ‘Did she even go to our school? I don’t remember her at all.’

‘Remember the Forrest girls?’

‘There were more than one?’

Danny was in the queue when she came out of the toilets. The lifeless smell of drains mingled with the mothball scent of the chemical blue plugs they used in the bottom of the urinals. ‘So I saw you at the funeral,’ he said.

‘I know.’ He had left straight after the pall-bearers slid Eve’s coffin
into the hearse that was to take her to the crematorium. The image that stayed in Dot’s mind was of the back of the car, the brake light that glowed red on the rear windscreen when the engine started. Later she had scanned the mourners, an arm around Lou’s shoulder, wanting to introduce her to Daniel, certain that this was important. But he wasn’t there.

Dan was openly staring. ‘You’ve got like, a billion kids.’

‘Yeah.’ Guilt twanged in her, but she didn’t know if letting his flippancy pass was a betrayal of her children or a protection. ‘You?’

He shook his head. ‘Nope. How’s Andrew?’

‘He’s good. Busy.’

‘How’s Nathan?’

‘He’s all right, he’s OK, yeah. Doing well.’ A muscle in Dot’s upper arm started twitching and she held onto it, felt the jumping tic beneath her hand. ‘Are you … with anyone?’

‘I was fucked up that day. I shouldn’t have left early. I should have talked to you, talked to your parents.’

‘God, Daniel, I hated that we lost touch.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I mean, what happened?’ Probably he was sober, this close to recovery, and the thought made her woozier, drunk.

‘Dottie, I never properly made amends.’

She shook her head. ‘For what?’

‘Well, you know. All of it. My sort of vanishing. And then Eve.’ He ducked his head to the left, to the right. ‘Maybe we should talk about this somewhere else.’

‘You don’t have to tell me about that. I’d rather you didn’t.’ She had taken his denim jacket to a fundraising fair for the girls’ hockey club, her stall with the clothes rack and boxes of
old children’s books and vinyl, and sold it to one of the hockey dads for next to nothing and watched him walk away with it on, and then seen him wear it at Saturday games for ages afterwards until she no longer thought hey, that’s Daniel’s jacket when they were talking. He’d bought it, and wore it so often, she guessed, because they had a thing going on between them, a flirtation, and him in Daniel’s jacket was a part of that she could never explain. After a while, prolonged exposure, an embarrassed dance at the prize-giving, the strange sexual energy had evaporated and they were just people in the same community again, without the heat.

‘I didn’t want to hang around because. It was a time for her and Nathan. And family. You guys together.’

‘You are our family,’ Dot said.

‘I know, but.’ Daniel shrugged.

Don’t shrug
, she wanted to shout.
Shrugging is not an option
.

‘Maybe it wasn’t that,’ he said. ‘Maybe I was just too chicken.’

An awful sense suffused her that he hated himself. No. Please let him not be stuck in that loop. ‘Listen, Daniel, you don’t have to make amends.’ It was easier if she looked at the wall behind him but there was his face, those dark, dark eyes, and the time on him, the years all over him, emanating like a heat mirage. ‘If it’s part of your programme or whatever. You don’t owe me anything. We were just kids.’

He frowned. ‘That’s not true.’

‘Hey look,’ she said. ‘You’re still taller than me.’

‘You must have stopped growing.’ His hand reached up and held her arm – a soft, slow shock. Her whole body expanded. She would
kiss him right here if he leaned down. ‘Feel your arm,’ he said, squeezing the jerking muscle. ‘That is so weird.’

Feedback screeched from the hall. ‘I love that sound,’ Dorothy said. ‘So.’ She exhaled as though blowing out a candle. ‘How long have you been back for?’

He let go of her. ‘This last time, couple of years.’

‘Do you see much of Maya?’

‘Not really. I used to hook her up sometimes. In the bad old days.’

‘Before.’

‘Rehab.’

‘Right.’

‘But it’s all good now.’

‘All good?’

‘Jesus, Dorothy, you’re kind of drilling into me!’

‘Sorry. I don’t mean to. It’s just that phrase.’

He levelled a look at her. ‘So, you are a mum. You’re like,
fecund
.’

Blood began to rise beneath her skin. ‘You’re a shunt.’

‘Ointment,’ he said.

‘Diphthong.’

‘Tumescent.’

‘Gristle. Slack.’

‘Do you feel old?’

The question surprised her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I never think of that. Do you?’

He tilted his head. ‘I feel like I’m dying.’

They stared at each other. His grin faded. The urgent need to say something, to touch him, pressed on her, and she didn’t have
the words. She shifted her weight and stepped a foot to the inside of his, her leg almost between his, then the door to the bathrooms opened and someone said, ‘Are you going in?’

He put a palm to the door. ‘Yes.’

‘I’ll wait by the bar,’ she told him, sliding her foot away, at the same time as he quickly said, ‘Hey I’m going to head home. But maybe we could meet up?’

A billion kids
was who she was to him, he would never know. Daniel didn’t want the power any more, and she would just be giving it over in order to what, to break through the G-force of her family life, to jerry-build a rocket ship and climb into it and blast off. Some people took drugs. Some people went rock climbing.

‘Do you work?’ And yet here she was, punching her cell phone number into his phone.

Daniel nodded. ‘I’m a drug counsellor.’ He shut the door. At that moment the band started playing a song from when she was fifteen, a song her body heard before her brain did. The music was like lying on the runway as a jumbo jet took off just above you, scraping the air.

Her shoes lay emptied on the wooden floorboards and she thrash-danced up and down, everything around her streaking lines of movement and light. In a split second of self-consciousness she could feel her middle-aged face moving as she jumped so she thrashed her head back and forth to hide behind her hair, threw herself into the music even deeper to forget. The impact of a shove, and she went sprawling into Ian’s wheelchair and saw the chair spin before she hit the ground and drink got spilled on her and someone shouted, ‘Piss off.’ Dot scrambled to her knees to check on Ian,
leaning over the arm of his chair, apologising. He shook his head. Monique intervened.

Dorothy’s knee ached as she scooped up her shoes and walked straight for the exit, panting, bouncing her palm against the wall that was hung with display boards and enlarged photographs and posters advertising the decades-old Battle of the Bands and the school magazine. Five or six unfamiliar people were smoking cigarettes under the sheltered entranceway to the hall. A taxi swung into the school gates and pulled up outside the hall and Dorothy limped towards it, the shoes in her hand, and leaned in to the open passenger window.

‘Rogerson?’ the driver asked.

‘Yes.’

*

In the children’s bedroom the curtains were still drawn shut. Donald had a devil dress-up cape on and a torch in his hand and was repeating to Hannah in a sing-song voice, ‘I’m going to eat you.’

‘Come on darlings, breakfast time,’ Dorothy said, picking up toys on the way to the windows. ‘Feed the fish. And then you need to get ready for school.’ Her body operated in space, not her. The tangibility of the mini stegosaurus and cloth doll, the need to remove them from the floor before someone turned an ankle or broke the wing off a kitset aeroplane, the silver light in her eyes after pulling the curtains, the lid of the fish-food jar to replace, the rumpled pillows and sheets to straighten, bedside books to pile, the papery skin of oatmeal that lined the saucepan
as porridge thickened on the stove, the facts of rubbish day and buying a board for Amy’s science project and letting gorgeous, leggy Grace cycle off without laying anxiety shit all over her independence and knowing already how much she was going to miss that girl and school bells and bus timetables and volunteer morning with crossing duty, these things saved her.