The Forrests (24 page)

An old van stood parked outside Dorothy’s house, not the same van that had taken them away all those thousands of nights ago, but close enough. Its windscreen framed a dream catcher and a couple of dead flies lay in the dust on the thin ledge of dash. The memories wouldn’t hold, they were unlatched, she felt blurred by some other place and time she couldn’t really see. If Evelyn were here, or Daniel, she could ask them what was wrong about Rena. Easier not to grasp at the evaporating past, easier to focus on what was in front of her now.

A trio of figures formed a tableau on her porch. Rena introduced Dorothy to her daughter Mei, and Mei’s daughter Susan, a girl of about eight, dressed in a hand-knitted jumper and white cotton knickerbockers. Mei must have been one of the younger children at the commune, or perhaps back then she wasn’t born yet. They all backed away from the dog when it loped up the steps and skittered to a stop right by them, claws audible on the wooden boards. The girl’s hair was in braids that might have been slept
on, gaps appearing between the woven strands, a sparkled hairclip perched over one ear. The dog lapped noisily at its water dish and Dorothy opened the house and welcomed the small group inside, the hallway giving onto the cedar-panelled kitchen, autumn sun warm through the windows, setting the glazed bowls on the table alight. The women smelled of wet wool and old citrus fruit, and Dorothy lit the scented candle on the shelf.

The girl, Susan, sat down and reached across the scrubbed wooden expanse, lying nearly flat on it to arrange the bowls, the largest in the centre, smaller ones in orbit. ‘There are some books in Hannah’s room,’ Dorothy said. ‘Do you want to see?’

Susan shook her head. ‘No thanks.’ Her voice was husky.

‘She’s a wee bit older than you, I think. My kids are at school. Well, my eldest’s at university.’ Dorothy looked at Rena, expecting some reaction to this evidence of the passing of time, but the woman was impassive, maybe blissed out.

‘I’m eight. How old are you?’ the little girl asked.

‘I’m forty-nine.’ She’d just had a birthday; it was the first time she’d said this new number out loud. On that birthday morning she had lain in bed, listening to the shower running over Andrew’s body, the mattress rising to hold her like an open palm, feeling closest of all to Eve. Later she lit a candle for her sister. Yes, she wanted a postcard from Daniel that never came, just as she wanted the phone call out of the blue, the unexpected knock on the door. It was easier to admit these things than pretend the ache did not exist.

Susan smiled. Her two front teeth were new adult ones, rectangular, wavy-ended. ‘It was my mum’s birthday yesterday.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’ Mei shrugged. ‘The big three-o.’

The kettle hissed and Dorothy shook the teapot upside down over the sink until the sodden teabag inside was spat out. She set the tea and four mugs on the table. ‘Out of milk, sorry. But there’s apple cake.’ Dense earthy slabs, the smell carried on the steam from the mugs of tea.

‘Is this your birthday cake?’ asked Susan.

‘Yeah, why not. I remember an amazing chocolate cake at the commune. Vinegar and eggs. Does it still exist, Hungry Creek?’ Dot asked Rena. ‘Are you living there?’

‘Can we borrow a ladder?’ said Rena, coming out of her trance with a static fizz. ‘There are louvres in a downstairs window but it’s too high to get them out.’

‘Sorry?’

‘To Mike’s house. We need to get in.’

The sides of the tea mug were stinging hot. It wobbled slightly as Dot replaced it and liquid slopped onto the table. ‘No. You can’t break in.’

‘Have you got a key?’

‘No. But if he’s not there he’s not there.’

‘I’m worried. What if something’s happened?’ Rena stared at Dorothy, direct. The bones in her face were still strong and beautiful. She looked capable of anything. ‘Like when he got stuck? Like if he hasn’t got his medication?’

‘My mother shouldn’t talk about things like that.’

The girl Susan placed her hands over her ears, closed her eyes and began to hum a song.

‘What if he’s lying there unable to move? Unable to reach the
phone?’ Rena said. ‘It’s the louvre window or we bust the front door.’

‘Sorry, but I don’t understand why it’s so urgent.’

Rena jabbed at her own chest. ‘I’m dying.’ It was almost a shout, full of terror.

‘Oh my god,’ Dorothy said. ‘Rena, I’m so sorry.’ She reached across the table to place her palm over the woman’s wide, veiny hand.

‘I need to know if he wants my place at Hungry Creek. She doesn’t.’ A thumb jerked towards her daughter, who was examining the papers on the bench – school permission notices, children’s swimming certificates, a gas bill.

‘So men …’

‘Yeah hell, we let men in years ago. If he wants it, there’s an interview process. But I need to know now. We’ve got to get back there tonight. So if he’s home and just not answering the phone or whatever, I want to know. Susan, you’re small enough, your mum can give you a leg-up through the window.’

‘I can tell him to call you.’ Dorothy was still wearing her puffer jacket and another bolt of her own body heat surged through her. ‘Well, I’ve got to go out again,’ she lied. ‘Rena, I’m so sorry.’

The flat battery on the smoke alarm beeped. Something else to do later.

Outside the house Dorothy waited for them to get into the van.

‘Oh, we’ll just hang around a bit to see if Michael shows up,’ Rena said.

Dorothy stared at her. Was she really having a stand-off with a dying hippy? The dog waggled around the back door of Dot’s
car, ready to jump in. She imagined, if she drove off on her fake errand, anything to get away from Rena, the child being pushed through the gap between the bathroom louvres. Rena waiting while the girl walked through the dark house with her hands covering her ears, a house that was strange to her. Past Michael’s closed doors and drawn curtains. Looking for the front door, or the back door, any door to open onto the world outside, hoping not to pass an arm on the floor flung out of a doorway. Michael’s enormous body sprawling from the end of it.

‘Aren’t you worried he’s in there,’ Rena persisted, ‘stuck again? I mean, do you look after him or what? You know he’d be crazy not to take Hungry Creek. The world’s going to hell. I’m glad I won’t be around to see it.’

Across the road, a leaf zigzagged the air at dream speed and settled on the roof of Michael’s car, joining the yellowing layer that covered the bonnet too.

‘All right. I’ll do it. Come on,’ Dorothy said to the dog, and clicked her tongue.

The louvre panes were heavy, their edges bumpy and rough, and she had to push down hard on each one to slide it out into the bathroom, gripping tight so as not to have it drop and smash on the floor or the toilet that sat just below, lid down. The glass was thick and possibly unbreakable but still Dorothy was careful as she slid a removed pane out between the remaining slats and lowered it into Rena’s ready palms. Mei held either side of the ladder’s ridged metal rails. The top of the ladder leaned into Michael’s weatherboard wall. Susan was a small distance away, at the street corner of
the house, with the dog. If she was on lookout, nobody put the language on it.

‘Michael,’ Dorothy called through the widened gap in the window, a mouth missing some teeth. ‘Hello? Michael?’

From the road came the swoosh of a car passing without slowing down. Far away someone was mowing a lawn. The man’s legs would be catching blades of grass and bits of grit that would smear if touched, the way things did after the rain. She called again, and listened, and a weak response seemed to come from somewhere inside.

The top half of her body fitted through the gap and she could easily reach the cistern, which she balanced on while she tried to hoist her hips over the window ledge. The flush button was in the middle of the cistern lid and an edge of a finger pressed it and the water gushed loudly. She was doubled, half in and half out of the window. Her mind was on holding herself up with her arms and not collapsing like an enormous tracksuit-clad snake into the bathroom, and also on the bottom half of her body sticking out the window and the possibility that Rena, Mei or Susan would have a digital video camera or filming capabilities on a cell phone. She leaned down to flip shut the lid and seat of the toilet and tipped forward, one arm outstretched, and lunged, like an acrobat shinning down her partner’s body, from balancing on the cistern lid to the closed toilet seat to the floor and now her whole self was balanced on her hands in the small bathroom, and something happened with her feet and her legs thudded to join her so that she was sideways half on the floor half on the toilet and now she stood upright, panting.

‘I’m in,’ she called. ‘Michael? Are you home? I’m in the house.’ No reply. ‘I’ll let you in the back,’ she called to Rena. She pulled at the filmy white shower curtain that surrounded the bath. No Michael, just matching pink plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner. Dorothy peeled the leg of her tracksuit away from her left calf and felt the white-flaked skin where she had scraped it on the window ledge, pinpricks of blood dotting through over the shin bone. The bathroom door was closed. Suddenly she needed to pee and she did, and flushed the toilet again although the slow cistern hadn’t refilled. There was a toothbrush on the basin ledge. The empty space behind her reflection in the mirror made her shudder.

A bit of light pierced the shady hallway, and she walked towards the kitchen at the back of the house. She startled – a peculiar split second of announcing silence, the echo before the sound – and the telephone rang. It was intensely loud and she picked up and said, ‘Michael’s house.’

‘May I speak with Lord Waldegrave?’

Dorothy laughed. ‘No, sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong number.’

‘Oh. My apologies.’ The man hung up.

Mei’s dark head and Rena’s grey one passed the kitchen window. She put down the phone and a light tapping came at the back door and a woman’s voice quietly called her name. She turned the lock but the handle wouldn’t move. ‘It’s snibbed,’ she said through the crack in the door, or where there would have been a crack if the door hadn’t fitted tightly into its frame. ‘The lock needs a key.’

There was a wooden block attached to the wall next to the door, a curlicued pokerwork line burned into it, just like the key holders they had made in woodwork at high school. With a rushing sound a wave of rain swept against the house and the women shouted at her to hurry. Two keys dangled from the block’s nails, one small and flat like a key to a padlock and the other a slightly rusted cartoon key. Neither of them fitted the back door.

‘He’s not here,’ she said into the door. The rain was sparser now, spattery. Mei looked through the window at Dot and pointed two fingers towards the front of the house.

Aside from the burned knife by the stovetop, the kitchen was clean, a bowl of soft local apples on the table. The fridge lurched into a hum. The milk inside was sour. She leafed through the letters next to the telephone. The same city council rates bill she had in her own house, the gas company bill, a flyer advertising gardening services, lawn mowing, tree surgery,
Turk of America
,
Kilim Monthly
. And among these, letters addressed to Sir Michael de Waldegrave Esq., Lord Forrest Waldegrave, Waldegrave House, Sir Van Der Waldegrave, The Manse. An A4 envelope with the sender recorded as Who’s Who. Who’s Who. The phrase owled around inside her head, talons out.

Dorothy leaned against the bench for a few seconds then reached down to pick up the envelopes that had fallen onto the floor. From here she could see a spray of sauce flecks on the skirting boards, a swept line of crumbs in the corner, a squashed kidney bean. She opened the cupboard and a meal moth flew out. The women were knocking hard on the front door, ringing the doorbell. She checked the empty living room, then the bedroom before opening the door; the bedding was rumpled, the bed half made, and a pillow
lay on the carpet next to a roach-studded saucer. The house hung with the stale stench of pot. Outside, the dog barked.

‘He’s not here,’ she said, and walked out the front door and shut it behind her. Rena pushed at the door but it had automatically locked; there was no handle.

‘No,’ Rena said. The dog was out of sight, still barking, after a cat perhaps. The four of them stood on Michael’s doorstep and Rena said, nodding towards the side of the house, where the bubbled glass louvres would be stacked against the weatherboards, spotted with rain, and the bathroom window blackly open, ‘Why’d you do that? We’re going to have to go in again.’

‘Why? He’s not there. He’s probably gone away.’

‘He would have told you.’

‘For god’s sake. He isn’t there. Leave it.’ Dot stood by Michael’s letterbox, facing away from the house across the road.

‘Come on, Granny,’ said Susan. ‘I want to go.’

Over by Dorothy’s house the sound of the dog barking was incessant.

‘What do you want to do?’ Mei asked her mother. She stroked a hand down the crimped slope of Rena’s shaggy hair and pulled her into an embrace. Rena rubbed her eyes into Mei’s shoulder, while Susan patted her grandmother’s back with a small, childish touch. When the old woman lifted her head and rolled it on her neck and sighed, the edges of her eyes were red. ‘If he doesn’t care,’ she said to Dorothy. ‘I’m
dying
. I need to know from him before I finalise the will. If he doesn’t care, it’ll go somewhere else.’

‘Mum,’ Mei said gently, ‘please don’t keep saying that.’

‘What, I’m dying? What’s the matter, it’s not enough that I’m
dying, now I’m forbidden to say I’m dying? It’s the lying that gives you cancer, Mei, I’ll tell you that much.’ They were all speaking loudly now, over the maddening relentless sound of the dog.

‘OK.’ Dorothy stepped back towards them. ‘Does he know how to get hold of you? Why don’t you give me your number, in case he’s lost it. I’m sorry, I’ve got to see what’s bothering the dog. She brings rodents in the house.’

‘I’ve been leaving messages for a week.’ Rena’s voice was losing some of its resolve.

‘Can you wait a bit longer?’

‘OK.’