The Forrests (7 page)

‘He’s my dad’s.’ She pointed down the road in the direction the woman came from. ‘I don’t know his name.’

‘Blackie?’ The woman was speaking to the dog. ‘Blackie?’

The dog barked again, loud over the running car engine.

‘It’s acting like it can talk,’ Evelyn said. ‘Like you’re having a conversation.’

The woman laughed.

‘Is he yours?’ Evelyn asked. ‘Blackie?’

‘Yes. He’s grown a bit.’

Exhaust fumes coloured the air. The light of early morning had found its way onto everything now, on the dog’s conker-coloured eyes and the woman’s sleep-deprived face, in the spaces beneath the tree trunks and over the pile of grey stones Evelyn had gathered.

Evelyn dug at the stones with her foot, sending one skittering over to the woman. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘My dad’s really going to miss him.’

The woman frowned. ‘Can you help me bring him home? I don’t want him disturbing the baby.’

Blackie sat panting in the passenger seat and Evelyn sat in the back behind him, next to the sleeping infant, one hand reached forwards to hold the dog by the soft leather collar. The woman drove slowly, with the windows halfway down, back past the turnoff to Eve’s father’s house and on.

‘Do you have deer?’ Evelyn asked.

‘Yes,’ the woman said.

The baby woke and squalled. Blackie began to lunge around and Evelyn pulled him back into place. ‘What should I do?’

‘It’s all right. We’re nearly there.’

The car grated to a halt on the gravel drive outside a one-storey, red-brick farmhouse. The front door was white, with concrete pillars either side. ‘Can you wait in the car with Blackie?’ the woman said. ‘I want to surprise the kids.’

She unpicked the baby from the car seat and it stopped crying as she held it to her, its round little head nodding hungrily into the mother’s clavicle. The dog and Evelyn waited in the car. Blackie huffed. Evelyn hugged her knees up to her chest and pulled her ex’s leather jacket tighter around her. In the last few minutes the temperature seemed to have dropped; the lawns were dusted in patches with frost; her breath puffed, visible, into the air. Sometimes Daniel called in at the florist’s, and Kimiko teased her after he’d gone. The woman came out the front door, still holding the baby, and a man in a thick tartan flannel shirt, jeans and boots steered two children wearing pyjamas towards the car, his hands resting lightly on their shoulders, their little hands covering their eyes. The girl’s pyjamas were blue with a pink-pig pattern and the boy’s were covered with pictures of yellow trucks.

The woman crunched over the gravel back towards her car and Eve. Her children had clamoured over Blackie and hugged their parents tightly before chasing him inside. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Now would you like to see the deer?’

Dorothy woke around dawn short of breath, and Daniel wasn’t there. It was the carpet dust. The insides of her ears were hot and itchy.
Between her shoulder blades was a raspy blockedness, weak and immovable at the same time. Leaning out over the edge of the bed, hair falling around her face, Dot scrabbled in the bottom of her bag, grit collecting under her fingernails, retrieved the inhaler and took a puff. Then there was a kind of glottal stop and she couldn’t breathe any more. She coughed but no air came out, there was just a retching sound. Something was blocking her windpipe. Launching around the dimly lit room naked she banged herself on the back as hard as she could, her body getting tighter and tighter with the lack of air. In the darkness came a sensation of the edges closing in. Another convulsion shook her and the thing in her throat entered her mouth wetly and she gasped, eyes streaming water, and the tiny scrap of fabric could be picked off her tongue and flicked aside.

She pulled Dan’s sweatshirt on and found some knickers in the ruched sheet at the bottom of the bed. The bedroom door was stiff. She yanked it open, her arm shaking, and pitched down the hallway towards the kitchen. The door of his new flatmate’s room was ajar. They were cross-legged on the bed, smoking a bong, and when they became aware of her they leaned back on the pillows. It was a boy’s room, the floor strewn with unlaced Doc Martens and Army-surplus jumpers and record covers. Daniel looked flushed and gorgeous, and his friend started laughing and said, ‘Sorry, sorry, it’s just nerves. I thought you were the cops. It’s not funny, sorry.’

The Red Squad burst in and hauled him crucifixion-style from the room, feet dragging, a clatter of shields and batons dividing the air.

‘Daniel? What’s the story?’

He reached an arm out towards her but didn’t move from the
bed. ‘Dot – there’s no story. Bryce, this is my sister, Dorothy.’ His voice was fantastically slow.

‘I’m not really his sister.’

Bryce said, ‘Sorry, I just, I’ll stop in a minute.’ But before he’d finished saying it he had stopped laughing.

‘I’m not your fucking sister, Daniel.’

Daniel leaned forward over the sheets as though he might be going to get out of bed or reach for Dot but then he sank down again flat on the bed like a mannequin and said in a long almost sung note, ‘
Aahhhh
.’

In the communal living room that guy Andrew, the house scapegoat, was practising karate, slow-motion punching the air, his legs in a lunge position on his purple mat.

‘Can’t you do that in your own room?’ Dorothy said. ‘Your breathing is so loud.’

The scapegoat closed his eyes. ‘You don’t even live here,’ he said. ‘And by the way is your brother smoking drugs? Tell him my stepmother’s a cop.’

In the communal kitchen the scapegoat’s frozen yoghurt was defrosting on the bench.

‘It’s just the same as ice cream,’ Dorothy shouted through the wall. She tipped his Fresh Up down the sink, put her face right under the tap and drank, and coughed until she could breathe freely. One of Daniel’s sweatshirt sleeves rode up and she licked a finger and rubbed at the stamp mark still there on the inside of her wrist.

ANDREW HAD BEEN
surprised the first time he saw Dorothy pluck her eyebrows or floss her teeth, but the cheese toasties and wine on the couch while they listened to albums together was the right kind of intimacy, and maybe a few clipped toenails on the bathroom floor was the price you had to pay. He had never before lived with anyone he was sleeping with. The fact of her being there, lesson plans spread over the table when he came back from work, the ponytail swing as she rose to hug him, was astounding.

They lay in bed in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. It was an old apartment building, the bed covered in sunlight, the sheets a buttery yellow. And finally, after he asked and asked again, she told him a lot of juicy detail about her sex life with the man before him, which included, in a roundabout and quite tortured rendition, so that it took Andrew ages to work out what she was saying, she and this
bean
, this
joke
, this
guy whose name she wouldn’t say
, trying out tying each other up.

‘Not at the same time,’ she said. ‘Obviously.’ The sound of traffic rushed through the rooms like wind through leaves. Andrew sat up, thought for a minute and announced that he wanted to fuck her.

‘You did just fuck me.’

‘With something else.’

She lay there breathing, her eyes on his, and it was apparent that after what she’d just told him she had to go along with it. He banged in and out of the bathroom and the kitchen, everything he looked at, plates and bowls and her bunches of dried flowers, uselessly shaped. That was the part he remembered later, the bouncing panic, returning to the room terrified she would be laughing at him, unprepared for the erotic charge of her body lying there on the bed in the goldy heat being fucked with some implement or another. And he remembered his cheeks hot with the sense of expansion, of these are the ways we can be with each other, there are not any limits.

There was no food in the apartment. While a record spun on the stereo, Dorothy and Andrew sat on the floor with their bank statements spread in front of them, covering her yoga mat.

Coffee, lunch and bus money lived in a ceramic mug Dorothy had made at high school, and they shook all the coins onto the bench and counted them, and jogged down the three flights of stairs, Andrew’s coat pockets clanking, and walked the long road of car dealerships and square concrete churches to the nearest grocery shop, which was closed. Dorothy began to weep. The fucking, the disclosures and the hunger overwhelmed her. ‘I’m sorry I told you about that guy,’ she sobbed. ‘I thought that’s what you were meant to do when you got engaged. Tell each other everything.’ In truth
she was afraid that she had talked about Daniel simply for herself, to bring him closer, never mind that it hurt.

He sat down next to her on the red wooden bench outside the grocer’s and put his arm around her shoulders, stroking her head. Her hair ran like water through his fingers. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. A square-bodied woman in a coatdress crossed the chipped bark in front of them carrying a paper bag with pointy green leeks sprouting from the top and he called out to ask her where she had got her shopping from.

They walked in silence.

‘I know,’ he said when the Sunday market appeared just around the corner, ‘we’ll plant a garden on the windowsill.’

Dorothy waved as Andrew drove off. They’d have to get a new car; he’d ripped out the back seat for his canvases. He tooted from the traffic lights and she blew him a kiss. The interior of Evelyn’s flower shop was clouded and cool from the mist spray, and the scents of tuberose and potting mix made time heavy, dream-like. Surely smells weren’t usually this intense. She toured the displays of roses, geraniums, the hyacinths with their obscenely bulging soil.

‘Your friend isn’t joining you today?’ asked Kimiko.

‘Andrew? He’s gone back to work.’ She was dying to say it: you mean my fiancé.

Evelyn wiped flakes of green florist foam off her hands onto her legs and swizzled the apron off and flung it on the stalk-stained cutting board. ‘She means Daniel. He’s been popping in.’

Oh Daniel. Dorothy hadn’t seen him since he’d got back from
Melbourne. ‘This smells amazing,’ she said, inhaling the air above a small potted lavender, waving it under Eve’s nose.

She veered away. ‘Sends me to sleep. I was at the flower markets at dawn.’

The sisters took paper-bag sandwiches down to the harbour and sat on the jetty with their legs over the edge. Six feet below swelled the choppy bottle-green sea, chunks of water buffeting the splintered pylons, the salt smell deep as petroleum, filthy, alive. Evelyn unpeeled her sandwich and tweezed out the alfalfa sprouts with her fingertips and dropped them in the sea. Birds swooped. Dorothy told her the news that she was pregnant. Eve’s face fell open and she placed the sandwich into her lap and wiped her fingers on the fabric of her coat. ‘And you’re happy about it?’ she asked, picking at a couple of pilled spots on the sleeve.

‘Yes,’ said Dorothy, amazed that she could ask, slightly frightened at the gap between them that the question exposed. ‘Of course. We’re going to get married.’

‘Will you keep teaching?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Can I come to the scan with you?’ Eve hugged her sister fiercely, water rising in the side of Dot’s vision so that she felt she might fall in. They sat close together, foreheads touching. A cormorant plunged into the dark sea. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Eve said. Eye make-up had run on her cheek, and when she exhaled one laughing breath translucent snot bubbled out of her nose. ‘Why do I always get dumped? Sorry, sorry.’

Dorothy passed her the inadequate, one-ply paper napkin from her sandwich bag.

‘How’s Andrew?’

‘He’s excited.’

‘Have you told Frank and Lee?’

‘Not yet.’

Evelyn quizzed her more, about where she would live, they couldn’t stay in Andrew’s flat, and how would they live, would she go on the benefit, and what names she liked and what would the baby look like, questions Dorothy had no answer to. The wind died down and the sisters leaned forward to look at their reflections in the smoothly undulating, repetitive water, giant feet and small blurred heads. Evelyn held Dorothy by the shoulder and fake-shoved her as if to push her in, and they squealed and giggled and crab-crawled back away from the sea to the relative safety of the middle of the timbered jetty.

Daniel refused to be drawn on how long he would stay before leaving again, working his way, woofing or whatever. It was not enough that he had to be off-hand about his Melbourne ex-girlfriend,
Tammy
, a fucking
performance
artist, which probably meant stripper, or that he had to be so cool about the record shop he had worked in and the squat he’d lived in with this and that band and the frequent use of the adjectives
underground
and
independent
before anyone’s job title so that she had already decided to refer to his closest friend, some heroin-addicted PhD candidate, as Underground Pat. Now he made allusions to a job on a cargo ship leaving for South America, but for all that he clearly liked saying the place names he hadn’t decided. Paranaguá. Montevideo. Zárate.

‘I don’t know the date.’

‘You’ll be the date. All those sailors. They’d love you.’

They sat on the wall outside the library. Daniel’s satchel strap cut a thick diagonal across his body. He dug a ready-rolled cigarette from the pocket of his jacket. Tiny brown curls of tobacco dangled from the end of the cigarette paper and when touched by the flame from his match they illuminated bright orange and disappeared. He inhaled, and exhaled. She held her fingers out for a puff.

‘You shouldn’t be smoking,’ he said.

‘Just one.’

‘Why’d you do it, Dottie?’ The darkness in his eyes really did seem to flicker – coal, jet, a hot shiny chestnut.

Dorothy passed the cigarette back to him and their hands touched momentarily. ‘Which part?’

He looked at passers-by from under his brows. ‘Karate boy.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Sorry. He’s a good guy.’

‘Yeah, he is. Anyway, what were you doing? You just … went away.’ The memory of those months after he’d gone made her pity her former self, a twenty-one-year-old girl who was small in Dot’s mind as though she’d been photocopied on a reduction setting, when really it was the same body she inhabited now, four years on, no different in size. The bricks were damp. She slid off, the edge of the wall scraping against her thighs, and picked at the mossy bits with a thumbnail. The sun shone through stacked, strangely cornered dark clouds, and down the street an empty parking space glittered with window glass, like shattered mentholated sweets.