The Forrests (19 page)

In the large picture window beyond the kitchen, Amanda Marshall stood silhouetted, a man at her side. Dorothy caught her eye and waved and Amanda resumed animated chat with the man as though she hadn’t seen. Through the window was a view of the school’s top field. Maya slid a wine glass into Dot’s hand. Her perfume smelled of jasmine and gardenias. It was time to brave the living room, where about twenty people in small groups stood dotted around, not all identifiable without staring. Many of the women had moved to the short, bran muffin hairstyle of the forty-plus.

An air of the Principal’s office hung over the closest group as they stood in silence, casting around for what to do with olive pits and dirty paper plates. Someone said, ‘We live at the end of the train line now, isn’t that awful?’ A conversation started about children. None of them were sending their kids to the school where they’d all met.

‘Not even me,’ said Maya, ‘and I could probably hit the roof of the common room if I threw something from here.’

‘You should try it,’ Dorothy said. ‘Maybe an egg.’

Maya glanced around and spoke as though to herself. ‘I wonder if this is everyone.’

Later, when Dorothy was talking to Nicky something and Elaine Woods-now-Rogerson, she heard, ‘Is Daniel coming?’ and the women’s words churned and bubbled over the floor, all the sound of the party underwater except Maya’s response.

‘Yes of course! He’d better be.’

Jason’s group exchanged information about Philip Lloyd, who had become a dealer in Australia. ‘Really?’

‘A car dealer,’ said Jason’s wife, who had been a few years behind their group at school, ‘not a drug dealer.’

Jason said Daniel was definitely out of jail and someone else said he’d never actually been in jail and a third person said apparently he’d found God since getting off the smack. ‘The NA God, where everything’s a pathology. You can’t sneeze without wanting to make it with your mother.’

‘I always wanted to make it with your mother,’ said a man Dot knew but couldn’t name.

Jason laughed. ‘Yeah well we’re about to move her into a unit at the bottom of our garden so come round any time.’

‘Where’s your dad?’

‘He passed away last year.’

‘God, sorry.’

The conversation shifted to choosing funeral directors and Dorothy drifted on. A man who didn’t look familiar sat in the corner of a black leather sofa and a woman with great legs sat next to him and held a champagne glass to his lips. Down the hall in a
room that might have been a study four or five people murmured and laughed over a wall display of photographs from their time at school. The outgoing cluster squeezed past Dot in the doorway. The room was empty now. The photos were on the walls. Evelyn would be there, and Daniel, and Michael, and Ruth. Her email to Michael about the reunion had bounced back. From the living room came the opening chords of a song that was number one for the summer she learned to drive. Someone shouted, ‘Maya, we’ve got the whole night to get through, pace yourself!’

Dorothy stepped back from the photo room and into a girl of five or six. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Can’t you sleep?’

‘The music’s annoying me,’ the girl said.

‘Come on. I’ll take you back to bed.’

The girl led the way up the stairs, along a hallway and into her bedroom, which was decorated with richly coloured taffetas and sparkling hanging mirrors that sent spangles floating over the walls. ‘Wow,’ Dorothy said. ‘This is amazing.’

‘It’s like a princess,’ the girl said. She hopped into bed and leaned over to turn on the slowly rotating nightlight.

Dot blocked one ear with a finger and listened. ‘You can’t really hear the music from here.’

‘Yes but it was when I got a drink of water,’ the girl said. ‘From the bathroom.’

‘I see. Do you think you’re going to be able to sleep now?’

The girl plonked her head down on the pillow. ‘Yes.’ She clutched a plush toy puppy to her and closed her eyes. The lids trembled. Stars from the nightlight wandered over the bed, stretching and shrinking on the contours of her face.

‘Goodnight,’ said Dot. ‘Do you want me to send Mummy up?’

The girl nodded, her eyes emphatically shut. ‘Yes.’

The woman with the legs asked if Dorothy knew where the bathroom was.

‘There’s one upstairs. I think it’s all right to go up.’

‘Can you show me?’ Her name was Monique and she was the second wife of a boy from school, the boy who had now become the man sitting on the black couch being fed champagne. Monique was a decorator. On the way up the smoothly carpeted stairs, no fuzz gathered in the angles of the risers, she speculated on the cost of the leadlight windows, the oak ceiling beams, the glass bricks in the kitchen, the marble bench tops and the under-floor heating in the bathroom, asking Dorothy to guess how much the house was worth.

‘I know nothing about real estate, sorry. There are children sleeping,’ Dorothy whispered.

Monique drew her into the bathroom by the elbow. The women smiled at each other in the mirror. Monique’s smile was toothy, almost goofy, and her eyes glinted.

‘Who’s that guy you’re with again?’ Dorothy asked.

‘Ian Abernethy.’

‘I don’t remember him.’

‘He doesn’t remember anyone. He’s had an accident. Rock climbing. No helmet.’

‘The guy on the sofa? That’s him? Oh. I’m so sorry.’

‘Yeah, but he wanted to come, he’s doing pretty well apart from can’t use his arms for some stuff or really walk. And he
talkth like thith
.’ She was rootling in her silver leather shoulder bag and pulled
out a small envelope and from the envelope took a pill, which she bit in half. She ran some water into a tooth mug and swallowed the half that was still in her mouth, waving her fingers in front of her lips and making a face. She offered the other half to Dorothy, who said, ‘No thanks.’

Monique shrugged and popped the second half in her mouth, gulping some of the water that flowed from Maya’s shiny bathroom mixer tap. She pulled at the ends of her hair and wet her fingers in the small ring of water collected around the plughole of Maya’s basin. ‘Design flaw,’ she said, and brushed a finger over each eyebrow. Then suddenly she was at the toilet and lifting the lid and pulling her skirt up and her knickers down. Dorothy slipped out the door and stood on Maya’s thick carpet and saw herself reflected in the full-length mirror on the landing opposite. From the bathroom there was the light scooshing sound of Monique’s pee hitting the water in the bowl, followed by the whirlpooly flush.

They stood in the doorway to Maya’s bedroom counting the pillows on the bed. ‘It’s like how many jellybeans are in the jar,’ Dorothy whispered.

‘Any more than four pillows is disgusting,’ said Monique. ‘What’s next, soft toys? Let’s get a drink.’

Master bedroom
: one of the phrases Daniel used to use to make her squirm. They heard Maya coo, ‘Goodnight,’ in her daughter’s doorway, and ducked into the bedroom and pulled the door shut. Dorothy flapped her hands to indicate that they should go out and front up, but Monique gripped her shoulders, holding her in place. A pulse thudded in Dot’s ears, as though there was wine
instead of blood in her veins. In breathing silence they listened for the sound of Maya going back downstairs but the carpet muffled any footsteps. Monique thrust her head forward and kissed Dorothy on the mouth, and she ducked away, Monique’s lips smearing her chin, and shook her head. ‘Don’t.’

‘OK.’ Monique thumbed the lipstick off Dorothy’s face.

After a few seconds Dot opened the door a crack and they darted down the empty hallway to the stairwell landing, where they paused for breath. ‘I have soft toys on my bed,’ she said. ‘I used to.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Monique. She scowled in the landing mirror. ‘You were the weird shit Blu-Tacked above the desk type.’

‘Really? Can you tell?’ Dorothy checked her reflection for lipstick remains.

‘Oh sure. I’ve decorated your fifteen-year-old bedroom a million times over and I know all about it girl, I can tell you those stains never come off the wall, you’ve got to completely repaper.’

‘You can look at me now and tell?’

‘Come on, you love it. Your little symbols carved in the wardrobe door with a compass.’

Dot leaned over the banisters. People stood in the hallway below, talking. She waved to a girl from one of her classes. ‘God, she’s a cosmetic surgeon now. I’ve done nothing with my life but have children,’ she said to Monique.

‘You’re one of those women, your husband only has to look at you, right? We’re not going to have kids. Ian could, still, but oh dear, I won’t say it! Let’s get you a drink.’

Dot sat next to Ian Abernethy and introduced herself. He
nodded and smiled and said ‘Yes’ when she offered him a sip of her wine. She held the glass up to his lips and dabbed at the edges of his mouth with a paper napkin after he sipped. The song that came on made her heart beat faster. There was music that for years had been out of bounds because of its time-machine properties, its ability to land her in a place from before. That kitchen with the paint samples brushed on the walls, Donald in his bouncer on the table. Her parents’ front room, lying behind the sofa with the thickly lined curtains pulled, the seared smell of cold ash. Driving through a landscape of low scrub, a bottle of Coke between her thighs, a pack of cigarettes on the passenger seat, the element-orange glow of the cigarette lighter after it popped from the control panel, the sky behind clouds in thin towers. In front of them some people were shouting and jigging, and others including Monique were properly dancing, and the music was too loud to talk. Ian said something and Dorothy pointed at her ear and shook her head. He pushed his head forward towards the dancing people. She leant over close to him and spoke into his ear. ‘You think I should dance?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wow, Ian, you smell amazing,’ she said. ‘I could drown in that smell, I could just spend all night smelling you, what is that stuff?’

He smiled and shook his head. She sniffed his neck. ‘That is incredible. OK. I’m going to dance.’

He took another sip of wine and she left the glass balanced around the corner of the sofa behind Ian’s unmoving feet. Dorothy had just started dancing when the music stopped and Amanda Marshall clapped her hands and shouted, ‘So are we going to this thing or what?’

‘What,’ shouted a boy who had become a man with a red face and a solid, protruding butt, roundly muscled in beige cotton trousers. He was wearing hard shoes and had once cried when he missed a penalty kick at the inter-school final.

‘He dashed the tears from his face,’ Dorothy said to Ian. She was sitting next to him again. The energy was gathering, and Daniel wasn’t here. He had to come. He had to. Around them people were on the move, placing wine glasses on Maya’s low, generous windowsills and between the vases of papery poppies on the table. Women bent and picked up handbags and someone inched into the room hidden behind a giant armful of coats, which the guests extracted one by one.

Maya was in the kitchen, holding plates streaked with hummus and baba ganoush under the running tap. The tap sprayed out softly as though there was a shower nozzle over it. Dorothy bent down to look. There was a shower nozzle, and the tap itself was on a bendy stainless-steel concertina-like tube so it could be moved around. Maya made the water swirl and bubble in a circle over the plates. Dot handed her another one off the dirty stack.

‘Did you have some food?’ Maya asked.

‘No, I’m fine. I ate with the kids.’ Feeling suddenly that there might still be cheese sauce on her top or a globby seed from the raspberry jam sticking to her hair she bent down to check herself in the side of the espresso machine. The unfaced marble of the sink bench was rough beneath her fingers. ‘So is everyone going on to the school?’

‘Yeah. We’ve got to show up otherwise it’s that whole thing again, like last time.’

‘What happened last time?’

‘You were here.’

‘No. Have you got any tea towels?’ Dot pulled the handle of one of Maya’s kitchen drawers, and it opened so glidingly that she staggered backwards and had to clutch Maya’s arm for balance and Maya nearly fell on her. ‘Sorry.’

‘I’ll just leave them to drain.’

The drawer sat open like a projected tongue. Dot bumped it shut with her hip.

‘Whoa, Big Chill!’ Mandy grabbed Dot’s hands and swung their arms around in a kind of dance. ‘Yeah, I’m the younger dark-haired one they all want to fuck.’

Dorothy extracted her hands under the guise of doing a cosmic sort of dance move then crossed the expanse of the kitchen to the water jug. The genteel doorbell chimed. She poured a glass and held it to her lips, lightly bit the rim.

‘That might be him,’ Maya said. ‘Fucking late as ever.’

The party noise obscured any footsteps that might have sounded up the polished hall. Daniel would be wearing trainers anyway. Here came the figure appearing in the kitchen doorway and it was a middle-aged woman, no,
Dorothy
was a middle-aged woman, this was an
older
woman with short greyish-blonde hair and wearing a brightly coloured dream coat. There had been a production of that musical when they were at school and although, or because, their father disdained ‘Lloyd Webber’ the Forrest children all auditioned, but Ruth was the only one who got a part. Maya greeted the woman, who was here to mind the sleeping daughter, and clapped her hands and said, ‘Doors are closing!’

‘Is everyone here?’ Dorothy asked. ‘Who you invited?’

‘Too late now,’ Maya said. ‘We’re O for outta here. Time to kick this party to the kerb.’ Horror struck her face and she said, ‘Oh – sorry – I didn’t mean,’ and shook her head and shouted, anger in her voice now, ‘Come on, you guys.’

Dorothy said, ‘It’s all right.’

‘Did you see the photos?’ Maya asked. ‘I was going to do an In Memoriam but then I couldn’t find a good picture, and I didn’t know if I should, and …’

‘Oh Maya,’ Dorothy said. ‘Thanks. It’s fine.’

In the hallway by the stairs a small table housed a telephone and its charger. Dot stepped up onto the bottom stair to make room for Monique and Ian in his wheelchair. ‘Coming through,’ Monique sang out. ‘Don’t want to run you over.’