The Forrests (21 page)

Hannah swivelled enthralled eyes to her mother. ‘Go away.’

The bus driver tried to close the back doors before Dorothy could get the pushchair through. ‘Wait,’ she called out. The buggy rocked side-to-side as she stepped down onto the footpath and Hannah complained in her dream. Halfway across the road they had to pause as more traffic passed, a pulse in the base of Dorothy’s throat knocking when the cars drove too close to the wheels of the stroller. At last she was walking to the other side.

Indoors wouldn’t do; the café was empty and hushed, no music playing. On the pavement she moved one of the outside tables along, the heavy legs scraping the asphalt, so there was space next to it for the buggy. Hannah continued to sleep. Dorothy squeezed the wooden chair over, sat with the café’s wall at her back and watched people pass by. A waitress came, a young woman in a tank top with a tropical bird tattooed on her shoulder. Dot ordered coffee. ‘I’m so jittery, coffee’s probably a mistake.’

‘Go crazy,’ said the waitress. ‘Go wild.’

Dot twisted the ends of a sugar sachet, picked up another and shook it like a tiny maraca. A man carried a cardboard box down the street. A toddler and her mother crossed the road holding the handles of her toy pushchair between them. Hannah still loved to
be swung between her and Andrew’s hands whenever they walked through the park. No, Daniel could not be in her life. She was almost afraid of seeing him in daylight. In the far distance a helicopter traversed the sky, a snub-tailed dragonfly. The coffee came. The presence of the waitress, her care in placing the cup on the table, turned the volume up on the world. ‘This is the BirdMan café, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And there isn’t another one, round here.’

‘Another BirdMan café?’

‘Never mind, sorry, I’m just confused.’

Dorothy drank her coffee and looked at the newspaper. She checked her phone but there were no further messages. Yes it was Wednesday. Yes it was the right date. Where was he? When Hannah woke she would have a sore neck and be thirsty. Every now and then someone came round the corner and Dorothy’s solar plexus gripped although her fingers retained their placid immobility over the paper on the table. She was a body divided into parts.

The waitress cleared the cup, its lining of froth dregs like the scurfy foam left on the mudflats when the tide went out. It was time to collect Donald from school. She paid for the coffee with cash Andrew had given her that morning. The older woman at the bus stop helped her lift the awkward buggy up the steps. Hannah woke up when the bus rumbled out into the traffic and said, ‘Are we there?’

Andrew ran water into the saucepan for pasta and Dorothy stood behind him, eating peanut butter on a rye cracker, her mouth glued
up. He lifted a single long hair from the pyramid of grated cheese on the chopping board and let it float to the floor.

‘Gross.’

‘Sorry,’ she tried to say.

He turned, smiling. ‘What?’

She thunked her head into his chest. ‘I can’t talk.’

He wrapped his arms around her and they swayed for a few moments. Footsteps padded down the stairs and Donald appeared in the doorway in his pyjamas, scowling.

‘What’s up?’ Dorothy smoothed the boy’s hair back off his face.

‘I’m scared.’

‘Why?’

‘I scared myself today with the devil.’

‘It’s just dress-ups,’ Dorothy said. ‘We don’t believe in the devil in this house.’

‘Why have we got that costume?’ He stretched his arms wide and she leaned down into the tight embrace, slid her arm around her son’s back and hugged him, speaking into his hair. ‘For Halloween. I’ll put it away until then.’

‘Yes.’ Donald nodded, his eyes shiny. ‘Get it out of my room.’

Dorothy hoisted him into her arms and said, ‘Come on, heavy boy. Say goodnight to Daddy.’

‘Again,’ said Andrew.

After kissing the little children one more time, closing the door on Amy in bed with her headphones and a book, removing Grace’s plate of leftovers from the essay notes on her desk, Dorothy stood at the top of the stairs with the orangey-red devil cape folded over her arms. She put the hood part with its squishy
black horns over her head but couldn’t do up the Velcro at the collar because it was too small. The fabric rustled as she walked down the stairs. She stood in the kitchen waiting for Andrew to turn around from the sink.

‘Are they all good?’ he asked.

‘Yeah.’ The ringing of the telephone cracked the air. She headed towards the living room, the ongoing sound, was halfway to the door when he spoke again.

‘That might be Louisa. She wants to come and stay.’ He lifted his arm high to drain the pasta, and the kitchen filled with the starchy, salty smell of steam.

Dorothy walked slowly to the phone, the cape swishing.

‘Is this Mrs Dorothy Forrest?’

‘Yes. Ms.’

‘Hello, ma’am, how are you this evening?’

‘Fine.’ She waited.

‘Ma’am, this is Peter calling about your Internet provider at home there. Just a courtesy call wondering if you or anyone in the house is looking to upgrade their ISP at no cost at this present time?’

Inside the hood her head grew hot and she pushed the cape off, to the floor. Andrew called something from the kitchen. She said into the phone, ‘No, sorry.’ She hung up and then rang on again to check the dial tone. It was broken, stuttering to indicate that someone had left a message.

‘Sorry,’ Dot mouthed to Andrew as she sat at the table with the phone pressed to her ear. The message was from Donald’s after-school karate teacher, a reminder about the upcoming exams.

*  *  *

The car park at the public baths was flooded and they waited in the Honda for the rain to ease up before making a dash for the indoor pools. Another song from years ago came on the radio. Dorothy turned it up and listened, the red digital minutes ticking closer to the swimming lesson’s start time. Through the aching shone a shaft of pleasure: Hannah was a quick learner; by the third chorus she was singing along.

The song ended and Dot turned the engine off and stood by the door with rain soaking her back as the stuck little buckle wouldn’t unclasp down by Hannah’s hip. Once her daughter was free Dorothy lifted her under an arm and kicked the door shut and locked it and dropped the keys by the tyre and lowered, squatting under the weight of the child and the swim bag, and walked her fingers forward along the wet asphalt without letting go of the girl until she hooked up the key ring and pushed down into the ground with her feet in order to stand. Hannah was on a funny angle and Dot righted her with a hip then ran through the puddles, swerving to the left as a car backed out of a parking space towards them and jerked to a stop.

They arrived at the entrance desk. The swim-bag handle was crooked cuttingly into Dot’s elbow, and water seeped all up the legs of her jeans. She placed Hannah upright on the floor and mopped at the girl’s head, and shook droplets from her own hair like a dog. Hannah ran to the sweets dispenser, a transparent globe of red and yellow candy drops, and jiggled the coin return and asked for money. Dot took the membership card from between her teeth and slid it through the barcode scanner, then waddled through the automatic glass doors into the swampy air
of the pool room, suddenly sniffing from the chlorine, nudging Hannah forward with her knees, steering her daughter now to the changing cubicles at the end of the Olympic-length pool, smudging wet cords of hair away from her eyes.

In the dim, bare changing rooms Hannah was asking for lollies but she couldn’t have one now. Dorothy helped her out of her fleece-lined jacket and sweatshirt and T-shirt and pulled the elastic-topped trousers down and then up again so that she could see to get Hannah’s shoes off, and lifted her to sit on the bench so the socks wouldn’t get wet on the Petri dish floor. Dot unpeeled the socks from Hannah’s hot muppety feet and bunched them into the shoes and pulled the trousers down again and there she was, standing, all prepared with her swimsuit on underneath, her lung-shaped ribcage, the swelling diaphragm. Dorothy planted a kiss on her shoulder. Through the door, at the end of the pool, the large racing clock and the clock next to it that displayed the time were visible, and they were late.

‘Let’s go,’ Dot said, and jammed the girl’s clothes on the top of the swim bag and held her hand past the giantesses getting changed, the slap of Lycra against their freckled skin, past a topless woman blow-drying her glossy black hair and through the other doors to the children’s pool and the class. She stretched the thick rubber-goggles band over the back of Hannah’s head without snagging her hair, and lowered the suctioned lenses softly over her blinking eyes. The instructor reached up, arms dripping, and took the girl by the torso and flew her above his head and slowly feet first into the water. Next to Dorothy a baby began to wail, his voice piercing the white noise of the swimming pool. The baby’s mother comforted
him, rubbing along the ridged gums where he was teething, while Hannah plunged face first into a starfish shape, her body slightly jack-knifed, her bottom sticking up and her feet kicking randomly, never breaking the surface of the resisting water. All around the air was thick with splashing, shouting and the smell of chlorine, and in another learners’ lane a woman of about Dorothy’s age free-styled her way up the length of the pool, her arms whaling at the skin of the water as though she was fighting it. Dorothy called to her daughter, ‘That’s great darling.’

COULD YOU BE
in your forties and still hate your father? Did Dot really hate Frank or was this some kind of habit to keep her infantilised, a hotline to childhood? Dreams about Eve came on her unawares, the grief in them freshly ripped. Grace got a boyfriend, a sweet teenager with hair falling in his eyes and a fireworks obsession, Hannah made the transition to school, and Dot started getting more loaded than all of their friends at gatherings, so that people remarked on it, smirking as they issued invitations. ‘Party’s started!’ they’d shout on opening the door to her and she envisaged a future where she took that on herself, started dressing in fun colours and wacky shoes, became the woman with a loud voice, bumping and grinding off the table of canapés. Out of party mode, the bossy parent in her emerged and she couldn’t leave Donald or Hannah’s teachers to do their work in peace. They were called in for a meeting with the principal and a Board member, boundaries gently but firmly set. On the way home Andrew shouted at her,
That was fucking humiliating. Sort yourself out
.

So she went to the BetterSelf Program and gave them a lot of her money, no, it was Andrew’s money, which they couldn’t strictly spare. That’s right, Andrew was the one flecking spit from shouting, and she was the one going to a course on how to behave. His paintings had been through a black phase and now he worked on hyper-realist portraits of politicians, which surprisingly no one wanted hanging in their living rooms. By this time her father, the erstwhile hate object, was deaf over there in upstate New York, nothing more than a trench coat, a pair of spectacles, a thinned blond comb-over and a giant flesh-coloured hearing aid. ‘Hearing-assistant device’, her mother called it, her mother who could never have been the woman who’d dragged her kids to a commune in the night, that wild beast who had stood down the bottom of a deep hole in the earth in her rubber boots and kept digging. Lee’s cells had turned over what, four and a half times since then, if regeneration was a seven-year cycle, if that could explain it. No, Dorothy could not phone her father to make amends or – no, hang on, that was the other thing – but she could not make the call to apologise or, what was she supposed to do?

Could she extend her hatred to men in general? The other day she heard people on the radio talk about masculinity studies. Sorry, what? What? There must have been something in her ear. Perhaps her husband’s finger was in her ear.

The Program people had confiscated their cell phones. Red plastic-coated wire baskets at the door. They sent them out to pay phones in the street to make their life-changing calls. It was her second day in the Program and so far she hadn’t been brought up on stage, hadn’t been dismantled in front of everyone and told that her story, her life narrative, was nothing more than an illusion or a lie.
But Andrew was looking after the children for the long weekend, he had stayed home from a hunting trip so she could do this, his friends had probably called him whipped
to his face
and she was in deep. So instead of wimping out she waited her turn at a phone booth, smoking a cigarette because she was not yet broken down enough to not need a cigarette or a drink ever again. The tall woman ahead of her emerged, her face watery and joyous as though a mask had been removed and her skin was feeling air for the first time.

The telephone receiver was thick and green in Dot’s hand. The booth smelled of cigarette smoke and so did she. She pulled out her address book, which was so old and out of date that there were people in it who were no longer alive, including Eve. Loose leaves of the address book fell out into her bag as she looked for the right page. The spine was broken. She’d used it to call her mother last night – two numbers always transposed in her mind and when she tried to ring her parents she could never remember which ones they were. Michael had finally been in touch with them and Lee had passed on his number, which was scrawled now next to her parents’ in a green felt pen that had been the only thing to hand and the ink had nearly dried out, just lasting long enough to faintly record these digits, and afterwards there had been the intense satisfaction of throwing the pen and its lid in the rubbish bin without bothering to connect one with the other, there being nothing left to protect.

The old handwriting in the address book gave Dorothy pause, the receiver by her ear. Perhaps subconsciously she had known that this day would come, although that morning she had been told that there was no such thing as fate, and no stories in anybody’s lives other than the ones they invented. Maybe she had invented herself
into this place. The cord coming off the receiver was covered in a flexi kind of metal coil. The square buttons were silver. No dial, no black cubed pair of activators like the sort she and Evelyn used to be able to tap to make their prank phone calls for free. Everything was greasy. There he was. Michael. She sighed, nervously – she had been breathing hugely ever since the announcement that the time had come to make this call. Her hands felt sickly, needed a shakeout. She punched in the numbers. If he’d moved again or wasn’t home, would that be a get-out clause, or would they make her
take it to the next level
? Part of her hoped they had some other level in mind and that this would be the skin-lifting experience of promise. Public ecstasy. But this was before she got into 5Rhythms.