The Forrests (22 page)

The phone rang into her brother’s flat. He picked up and her gut seized. Did she hear right what they were meant to do? Or was she the only person in the world of the Program laying herself on the line? ‘Michael? It’s me. Dorothy.’

‘Dorothy.’ There was a pause. ‘Oh yeah.’

‘Um, you probably get these calls a lot but I’m doing BetterSelf …’

‘What?’

‘The Program. It’s a personal-growth thing.’

Another, longer pause, in which he might have been silently laughing. He finally said, ‘So what are “these calls”?’

‘Oh, we’re meant to contact someone we’ve …’ Could she describe their relationship as broken? Was it a rift? A falling out, or just the distance of time? ‘How are you?’

‘I’m OK.’ His voice sounded really different. Not the renewed accent of her parents but weird, like he was talking through a neck brace.

‘So, I got your number from Mum. Where are you?’

‘Friend’s place. The landlord sold my flat. I mean I was sleeping in the fucking warehouse. Until those guys screwed me and the fucking company tanked. You heard about that, right? Cos you didn’t call me. “How are you getting on, Michael, are you OK, do you need any help?” ’

Lee had told her he’d been importing Turkish carpets. She couldn’t resist: ‘I heard there was a hole in the rug business.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Could we maybe meet up?’

‘What for?’

‘Just to talk, to see each other. You’re my brother.’

‘Hang on.’ She could hear him talking to someone else. He came back on the phone and said, ‘Hang on, I’ll just be a minute.’ The other person’s voice got louder. Michael got louder too – did he say ‘You’re a fucking thief’? The background went silent and it was hard to tell if she was hearing the sound of Michael breathing or the cars driving past. Lately one of her ears had felt a bit muffled.

‘Michael?’ Part of her brain tried to calculate how long she had been out here and how much longer she had to achieve the act of reconciliation. It was possible he had hung up.

‘Yeah I’ll meet up,’ he said. ‘Not here. There are
arseholes here
.’ Her head jerked away from the blast of sound.

‘Do you want to come to my place? You could see the kids. Grace is fourteen now. Or you could come during the day?’ When Andrew would be at work. Yes. That routine.

He didn’t want to come to her place, but named a pub on the other side of the city, gave some cursory directions. ‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Oh, well we’ve got the rest of the – the course doesn’t finish till tomorrow night – but – yes, definitely, tomorrow afternoon.’

‘OK.’

The street outside the conference centre was empty and she ran up the stairs to the foyer two at a time in a panic that they would have started without her. In the morning a woman had come in late and she’d been brought up on stage and called out on her commitment issues shit in front of everyone until she cried. Dot was the last person through the doors. She slid into her white seat just as the Speaker approached the podium. A bruised feeling swelled and his words were lost and when once again tears wouldn’t stop leaking down her face the woman in the next seat passed Dot a tissue and patted her knee and said, ‘Never mind, things will change.’

*

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna

Krishna Krishna Hare Hare

Hare Rama Hare Rama

Rama Rama Hare Hare

She took the kids to eat at Gopal’s. It was cheap! They pushed dhal around their plates, hating it. Amy caught her mother in conversation with a serene-faced woman in a pale-apricot sheet, a white bindi between her eyes, and said as she dragged her away, ‘Don’t you dare become one of those. How could you do that to me.’

*

Dot and Andrew met Nathan at a restaurant bar and the three of them perched on high wooden stools. He showed them photos of Louisa with his new girlfriend, an actress whose accounts he’d been doing for years, and who had become well known. ‘You’ve probably seen Lou more recently than this. But here’s Estelle.’

The pictures quickly replaced each other on the small screen as Andrew moved his thumb.

‘Nice gear, dude,’ said Andrew of the camera. They started talking about the tricks it could do.

There she was, her famous face shining right at the camera, her arm slung over Louisa’s shoulders, and then she was gone, and there was a picture of Louisa in a T-shirt Dorothy had given her, joke-posing like a model. ‘Go back?’ Dot said.

‘There.’

Estelle was tiny, one of those people with a miniature body and big facial features that seemed to be drawn to acting. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ Dot said.

‘Apparently so.’

Andrew’s thumb kept swiping the photographs along, so that looking at them caused a kind of motion sickness.

Dorothy hugged Nathan. ‘You know …’ She wasn’t sure if it was her right to say it. ‘You know Eve would have been happy for you.’

He squeezed her hand. Tucked the camera back in his jacket pocket. Dot waited until the maître d’ directed them to a table then mumbled an excuse and shut herself in a rest-room cubicle and cried. Footsteps clacked into the room. They paused. She bit down on the length of her index finger. A few more steps and the hingey sound of the door opening and closing again. By the basins, she dried her face
on the roller of thick blue paper towels. She stood for some moments longer, listening, looking down at the running water.

Three hundred and fifty people came to Nathan and Estelle’s wedding, including Dot and Andrew and their kids. After the al fresco dinner there was a display of belly dancing, and the guests were given tambourines to shake along while waiters cleared the plates. ‘Three hundred and fifty tambourines,’ said Donald, who played percussion in his school orchestra. ‘This is going to be awesome.’

The new bride made a speech to Louisa. Dorothy clutched Grace’s hand as Lou then stood before everyone in her vintage bridesmaid dress and glasses, a pink streak sprayed in her hair, and thanked Estelle for becoming her second mother. In turn, Estelle thanked Evelyn – the spirit of Evelyn, her arms out in an all-encompassing gesture, as though Eve hovered everywhere under the blazing white pontoon lights – for having given birth to Lou. She waved a balletic arm at Dorothy and Andrew, and the guests who couldn’t see them through the thicket of other guests called for them to stand up, which they did, halfway, briefly, and Dorothy nodded her thanks to Estelle and sat down again wiping her eyes with one of the linen table napkins. The other people at their small round table smiled and one of the strangers patted Dorothy on the arm and said, ‘It’s so great you’re here.’

‘My lady and me, twenty-seven years. It’s a thing,’ their tablemate said while they stood to watch the fireworks whistling, fizzing gold, traffic-light red in the sky, ‘being married to the same person, the same person for so long.’

‘The problem isn’t that they’re the same,’ Andrew said, ‘it’s that they change.’ The night had become cool, and he put his suit jacket
around Dorothy’s shoulders for a cape. Their children had banded together with other kids and were leaping on the slope of grass, going crazy at the fireworks, even Grace and Lou exploding with squeals and applause, falling to their knees, rolling around getting juicy green stains on their brave teenage party dresses. One of the boys hit another one in the face by mistake and Dot inhaled, poised to run to the scene, but Grace was there, calming them, crouching down to hug a teary child and send him off to play again, not looking around for adult approval, just doing it. What had happened to that insecure toddler Eve had predicted such dark things for? Dorothy softened, watching her daughter. They were the lucky ones.

‘Excuse me, guys,’ one of the wait staff said, his hands gripping their plastic table and lifting one side off the ground, ‘we’re just setting up the limbo dancing here.’

‘Any time you want to leave,’ Andrew said to Dot.

‘My wife is awesome at the limbo,’ said the other guest, and he walked into the crowd of firework-lit faces to find her.

*

It had happened a couple of months after the school reunion, when she’d long stopped waiting for the call. One afternoon the phone had rung and it was actually Daniel. He was sorry for standing her up in the café, said a young man he sponsored ended up in hospital that day. He’d been thrown, had lost his bottle, wanting to see her was the old him, part of his disease. But he was going on tour now, to Sarajevo, and had something of Eve’s to hand over.

‘Post it,’ she said. She walked the phone to the window and checked down the street.

‘OK, that was an excuse. A Trojan horse. I want to see you.’

‘Now what is this, some kind of honesty high?’

‘Did you tell Andrew you were going to meet me at the café?’

Dorothy helped Hannah climb down from the table and wiped tomato sauce from her face with the paper towel. ‘I didn’t meet you at the café.’

‘Did you tell him though?’

‘No.’

‘How are your kids?’

‘Great. Amy’s broken her arm.’

‘Amy? She’s the second one?’

‘Yes. She came off a flying fox.’

‘Please, Dottie.’

Hannah was staring into the distance, scratching her bottom. Worm pills. Dorothy squeezed her above the knee and the girl imploded with giggles. ‘If we are going to meet I’m going to tell Andrew.’

‘Good.’

Instead she backed out of the room when Hannah wasn’t looking, hid in the bathroom and shut the door while they agreed a time and date for Daniel to come over, even though the only other human being in the house was three years old and not really listening. The phone disconnected. For a second Dorothy saw that the room she was in, and the bath, the cabinet, the towel rail, were made of cardboard. Through the window the bleached sky busted in. She ran to Hannah, slung her onto the sofa with an alphabet book and began to read it out loud. By the time the book was finished, home had solidified, become three-dimensional again, and when Andrew came back from polytech she had already given the children dinner
and cleaned up, and it was six o’clock so the open bottle of wine was par for the course. Amy and Grace were breaking their brains over algebra and Donald knew all of his spelling words. She and Eve used to think their mother insane for making a cake each time she raised her voice to Frank. Now Dorothy opened the oven door and stuck a wooden skewer into the tin. Of course she wouldn’t tell him. She dropped the skewer in the sink; it had come away gooey with warm, unset batter.

When Daniel called out hello and pushed the door open it was as though a character from a dream, an animated cartoon, had entered the waking world. But she was the one who’d told him to come now, while Andrew was at work and Hannah playing at a friend’s, the one who’d felt alive – alive to the glimmering leaves, the light in the sky, the smoky colours in her children’s hair, the smell of the daphne bush and lavender, the gliding closeness of birds, everything. Now here he was, real on the couch. Unasked, he’d removed his shoes in the hall. She hated it when people did that –
totally unnecessary –
but she’d disappeared into the kitchen as soon as he came in, so hadn’t seen it happening, just the resulting socks. He didn’t look around the house and this lack of interest miffed her but was also a relief. The fewer things he touched the better.

She put lunch on the table and thought she wasn’t hungry but as soon as she tasted the bread realised that she was. Daniel draped his suit jacket over the arm of the couch and sat at the table in his shirtsleeves, ate and drank easily, relaxed in his body, and she searched his eyes for evidence of the past, of anything other than this innocuous moment – her mind flipping back and
forward over what it meant. No, it meant nothing, had nothing to do with her life. Yes, it was a good thing to have him here with the dandruff on his shoulder and debunk the whole fantasy. She should get him round another time for dinner; they could all talk about the old days. Ask him to babysit the kids while she and Andrew went out. They could be movie friends, sneak off to daytime sessions when Hannah was at preschool and he was between saving needy addicts. Yes.

While they ate he told her about the clown school and afterwards, performing for kids in refugee camps, the travel, the drugs, rock bottom, coming home. She prompted him for stories. Daniel wouldn’t say much about the harder things he’d seen, but there was still plenty to tell. He had sat in the YWCA in Nairobi, watching as a tall thin woman lowered sugar cubes into her cup of tea: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. He’d dropped his wallet, passport, credit cards, everything, into a hole-in-the-ground toilet in Indonesia and had to lower himself in to fish them out. Cuban families had welcomed him into their peeling Havana apartments and fed him cured meats and rum. He had slept, or tried to sleep, on the deck of a ferry travelling to a remote Greek island, velvety water black beneath him, hard bright stars above, been abandoned by friends to card games in Marseilles when the luck was not going their way, got stranded on the wrong side of the river in St Petersburg as the bridges were pulled up for the night.

She wanted to know more about the low he hit, was greedy for disaster and humiliation, the appalling behaviour, smoking coals left in his wake. He mentioned a couple of women and she thought poor them, no wonder they hate you, and then she thought what a
couple of crazy bitches and then she thought oh, I just want to be special and she cleared the table and said nothing.

‘So what about you? You were practically a teenage mother,’ he said.

‘Not quite.’

‘I wish I had kids.’

‘You still could.’

‘Yeah, no.’

She tried to imagine her life without its family life. Half-awake in her father’s arms, being carried up the stairs to bed. Keeping lookout while Evelyn squatted for a wee in the long grass by the estuary at the commune. The living room at home full of Lee and her women friends, jigging on the spot, watching them swing their hips with their eyes shut, arms fronding the air. A baby’s slow turn inside her, like an astronaut. Her son’s hilarity at his own sense of humour. The mailman paused on his bicycle by their letterbox. Daniel lay on the sofa, clutching a cushion to his chest. ‘You look as though you’re at the shrink,’ she said.