The Forrests (32 page)

In the empty cabin she was given her suitcase looked too flash, out of place, and her knapsack leaned like a person against the end of the wire-wove bed. ‘Smells a bit musty,’ Michael said, ‘but no one’s lived here since Rena died.’

Dorothy opened the stiff, small window opposite the bed. A bee drifted in. ‘How did she die?’

‘Happy. At peace. It’s a long time ago now.’ He stood in the middle of the double-bed-sized room, looking around with his overly healthy eyes, large still but solid, muscular in a flannel shirt, torn shorts, wrinkly knees, tanned skin encasing the natural man. Of course, she’d meant, ‘Did she die in this room?’

‘Michael,’ she began, and he said, ‘Mike. Mike will do.’

‘Mike. Thank you for this. It’s only till I get my driver’s licence back. And my teaching registration lapsed while I was at the maternity home. As soon as I get a job I can find somewhere in town. Of course there’s always the pension.’ A joke. The older she got, the further away they moved the pension age.

‘What happened to your house?’

‘We sold it ages ago, to put the kids through school. We’ve been renting. I had those fines; it’s slowed me up. But I don’t want to take anything on until there’s some cash flow.’

‘I don’t really understand what went on there.’ That gap in his front teeth was disconcerting, made him look a bit simple. One must have been knocked out.

‘I haven’t got much money. There’s no getting around it. I just have to start again.’ The bee crawled up the lichened door frame. ‘Mike,’ she said, wanting to take his hands in hers, instead sitting on her own hands on the wire wove, feeling the mattress sink nearly to the floor, ‘do you believe people can start again? Do you think it’s possible, at my age?’

‘Of course,’ he said, clear eyes floating. ‘That’s what this place is all about.’ With that he shut the door. The knapsack slowly keeled over onto its side, and the springs holding the wire hexagons of the bed-base to the rusting frame let out a violent creak as she reached to snatch the canvas bag upright. The small wooden cross above the bed slid onto a diagonal, like the needle of a compass.

It was Mike’s night to cook so she helped him, and the mostly young people he lived with all welcomed her and thanked them both for the food. They explained that ‘Dorothy’ had the word
rot
in it, therefore here she would always be Dot. Their names were Thane, Jared, Karen and a couple that might have been adopted by deed poll – Hope and Faith. ‘Do you remember Name?’ she asked Mike. ‘Was she here when you came back?’

He didn’t remember her. Karen said she must have been long gone. The roll call of former commune dwellers remained unrecorded. Prayers were chanted. Dot shut her eyes as everyone did, feeling warm channels of breath running in and out through her nostrils, until she heard the small sounds of cutlery against enamel plates, a wooden bread board being pushed across the table, a serrated knife sawing crusts. She produced the bottle of red wine from her knapsack but it didn’t stay on the table. Later she saw it on the storeroom floor, next to a big box of potatoes, their oval spheres dark and fragrant with earth. She was looking for the ginger to slice for a pot of tea, and groped around the rough wooden battens just inside the door for a light switch before remembering there was no power.

Back in the eating area Mike sat with his arm round Karen’s waist – she had an animated, sparkly face, was probably in her forties, with dark hair in a low ponytail, the ponytail Mike had now between his loosely curled fingers, thin ribbons between his paler brown hands. The ginger root was fibrous, the knife slicing through first the ridged skin and then the hard inner flesh, ringed like a felled tree stump, and the fine tough hairs in the centre. When she poured water from the whistling steam kettle into the teapot the slices lifted and bobbed near the surface, and the warm, bracing scent released into the air and mingled with the herby smell of Thane’s joint.

Michael caught Dorothy looking at him, worried. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I don’t do that any more.’

Karen snuggled in and kissed his cheek.

In the morning, when it was just light, Dot placed eggs one by one in the recycled ice-cream container, minute pore-like squirkles in the beige shells, some of them streaked with droppings or dried gunge. The eggs were fragile and weighted at the same time, the curved shells touching lightly against their neighbours in the plastic tub, each one thick with its own liquid contents. The coop smelled of straw, which smelled of feathers, which smelled of bird-shit, which smelled of sticks. There were seven eggs in total and the next day there would be a similar number, and the day after that and the day after that. You would not ever be alone at the commune.

The eggs rolled and knocked slightly against the smooth walls of the plastic tub, blueness glowing onto them around the edges, light shifting over her as she carried the container across the yard to the kitchen, dewy grass cold and ticklish on her bare ankles where the path ran out.

For a while the commune had financed itself from the orchard, Faith told her, but that income ran down over the past few years, with industrial greenhouses reaching tentacles across the countryside and the new supermarket a closer drive for most people in the town, and stocking organic produce anyway. A homeopathic-remedies venture was not cost-effective. She had seen the dark-blue glass bottles on windowsills and lined up along skirting boards, sprouting lumpy beeswax candles or pale at the shoulders with thick dust. Michael went into cider and exploded the storage shed.
It was agreed that the commune would no longer try to make money, but grow only the means of their own survival. No extra cash meant relying on their own skills for everything. ‘All right if you’re bunging a diff in a car,’ said Mike, who was washing the breakfast dishes, scrubbing hard at the encrusted rings where fruit from a batch of muesli had burned to the oven tray. ‘Not so hot if you need a crown replaced.’ That explained the missing tooth.

Thane’s partner had objected, and she moved out and started up a craft market in the city, the success of which mystified the remaining commune dwellers, given that it sold ironic macramé and peg dolls, nothing that would actually be any use. ‘What’s it for?’ Faith asked the air, scattering sunflower seeds over her plate of stewed rhubarb. ‘What’s a block of wood that looks like a piece of soap
for
?’ The rhubarb lay in coiled wet ropes in her earthenware bowl like someone’s hair.

‘What about Daniel?’ Mike asked. ‘You in touch?’

Flickered with adrenalin, caught out as always at the mention of his name, she told Mike that last she heard he’d gotten married. Adulthood was like this – your voice calm, your face normal, while inside, turmoil, your heart still seven, or twelve, or fifteen.

‘So, not since I wrote to congratulate them.’ Daniel’s reply had intimated a possible move back home,
nostalgic in my old age … but María’s family are here
. It hadn’t been the time to mention her divorce. Since then, whenever the urge to contact Daniel came over her, she resisted. He had a different life. A vine had grown over the kitchen window and been cut back, leaving a tattoo of broken black swirls. Dorothy picked at the insistent tendril that crawled under the windowpane, its bright greenness probing the room, pale
green shoots emerging like arrowheads, or the tops of the spades suit in a deck of playing cards.

There’d been some serious upgrades to the ablutions block since their childhood, with pump bottles of lavender soap and warm indoor showers. The water gleaming on Rena’s young body in the sun. Cobwebs clung stickily in Dot’s hair. She pulled at them in the tin-plate mirror but something that her fingers transferred, oils or heat or dirt, made them glue up and harden. When she flossed her teeth the taste of blood came into her mouth. It was normal, when first among new people, to feel more alone; of this she was sure. Just a little bit longer: first to feel at home here, then to leave. Her hibernation from the world could not be permanent. She didn’t have the capacity of a Michael or a Thane.

Dimly she noticed shouting from outside and dropped her toilet bag to the floor. Waves of panic crashed through the sheet iron and the non-tanalised wood although the words were unclear; sounds ran together the way dogs sometimes barked, unbroken.

She saw the car before she saw Mike. He lay on the ground beneath it, under the front wheel, his leg pinned, and Thane stood over him by the open driver’s door, one arm reached into the car, hand on the steering wheel. Mike’s face was bright red – burning red. People stood around, someone clutching her own head, someone with his palms raised. Mike roared, and his body twisted as he pulled away from the leg. Dust eddied around him. Hope, or was it Faith, had a length of wood, was holding it like a batter at the plate, shouting at Thane. All this was processed as Dot ran to Michael, spoke to Thane, and tried to lift the car. Squatting at the
knee she heard her jeans rip, the arse of her jeans, something went pop in her pelvic floor or near it, and she wasn’t able to budge the tyre. Her heart wrenching. Now Thane lifted too, helping, inches of searing air between the rubber tread and the leg and Mike dragged himself out from its shadow. The leg was fucked, and he retched into the dust. A two-legged metal jack lay next to him on its side.

Blood streaked his jeans but there was no severed artery. The problem, Karen said when Mike was lying across the back seat and Thane was trying to start the car, was the distal tibia, which was splintered and crushed. She cupped the side of Mike’s face with her palm. ‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘Something has happened to your lateral condyle. It might be split or it might be pulped. We don’t know. They’ll give you an anaesthetic and find out. Maybe the neck of the fibula is broken. These things sound worse than they are. They might put a pin in your lower tibia. Or you might go into traction, depending on the knee, but the knee looks OK. They’re going to bolt you together,’ she said. ‘You’ll be the bionic man. Screws and rods, the works.’

Dorothy asked her to come to the hospital with them but Karen said no, put a kiss on her palm and pressed it to Mike’s good leg. ‘I can’t go into the city. Sorry. I’ll be here waiting.’ That
I know my boundaries
tone of the recovered person, the once damaged. It was a truth about life for those people that love had its limit. Survival came first. At last Thane had the car in gear and shouted at Dorothy to get in.

She sat in the back with her brother, holding the tourniquet she’d made out of her shirt as tight as she could above his knee, her
knuckles and the pads of her fists green-white. She was hunkered down in the space behind the passenger seat to do it, hold him steady. He looked old.

‘He going to lose the leg?’ Thane said it stridently, as though she couldn’t hear him although he was just there, driving, inches away. Where was Thane from? Who was Thane?

‘No,’ she said.

The car slowed, and she raised up on her knees to get blood back into her legs, and the world floated through the window – white roadside flowers, the bank dotted with purple and pink wild flowers, the raffia-petals of cornflowers or anemones, the road dust yellow and the faint sweet smell of cows. ‘We need to get there fast,’ she said, and then there was a bump and Michael moaned and the car slowly, carefully, tilted and lowered over the cattle grid, her brother breathing in pain with every rise and fall. Dot released one stiff hand from the knotted shirt. She held his enormous open hand that was like a catcher’s mitt. Michael closed his eyes slowly and mouthed something.

‘It’s better than it looks,’ she said, a tiny portion of her mind surprised that she could lie. They drove past a brindled cow, conch-shaped eyes either side of its head. Straggly agapanthus.

‘There was a leak,’ said Thane. ‘Up the front here, antifreeze or something.’

‘What colour?’

‘Green, dark green kind of.’

‘Not the oil?’

‘Don’t know, skid plates, makes it hard to see where the leak comes from. That’s how come he was under the car. We’ve lent our
jack stand to the farmer down the road, there was just a scissor jack.’ Thane’s voice was unmoored. He was losing it.

‘It looked like you were running him over.’

‘No.’

‘What about what’s-her-name, with the baseball bat?’

‘Yeah, she tried to lever the car but it didn’t work.’

‘Are you worried about the leak? Will we make it?’

The engine groaned as the car climbed a hill, a stock truck crawling in front of them, the hot smell of wool and live animals jammed together in the dark. Mike’s eyes were closed and his lips slightly parted over his harlequin teeth. He wasn’t wearing shoes. She couldn’t look at the foot that she had twisted back into place when he briefly passed out. The other foot, the good foot, was brown and cracked and the toenails had aged, coarse and square and yellowed. Dark hair sprang along the ridge of the foot-bone and on the lower knuckles of the toes. Michael’s face was clammy beneath her hand. She moved her hand away a bit and he grunted and rolled his head towards it. Stubble bristled her palm. ‘Fuck, Thane, can you go any faster, how useless is this car?’

‘I’m going to be sick,’ said Thane. ‘It’s the adrenalin, it’s draining from me. I feel faint.’

‘You fucking hippy. It’s no better back here.’

‘No, you have to drive.’

‘Get out then.’ She shouted it.

He stopped right there in the road and in a slamming of doors they swapped places. ‘I’m not licensed,’ she said into the rear-view mirror.

‘Just drive fast,’ he said. ‘Drive as fast as the car can go.’

And the road spooled into them like a retracting tape measure.

*

Michael and his foot survived, and Ruth fell back into line with her marriage to Ben. Andrew married again: Beth, the widow of a man he used to work with at the polytech. He’d gone to the man’s funeral, he told Dorothy, and Beth had wept into his lapel and said, ‘Thank god you’re here. You’re the only one he liked in that whole place.’ ‘Can you believe it?’

There would never be mutual visits, holidays together, but in the evenings, when she’d closed up the art room at the hospice and gone back to her quiet apartment, Dot and Andrew often spoke on the phone about their children and grandkids: about Amy’s struggle through the ranks of retail management and Donald’s coming out which had been no surprise, and what to do with crazy Hannah ditching an engineering internship for the ludicrous short-term goal of touring with a band, and how in hell any of them were ever going to afford their own home, and wasn’t it good that Grace was back at work now Meg and Frankie were both in school. Together they thanked god for the barely surviving public education system and the fact that Hannah seemed to quite like slumming it and Donald was the one with the business mind, his software-development business in profit. Sometimes Andrew even bitched to Dot about Beth’s sullen sons, who were taking their own sweet time to accept the marriage. ‘They’re still grieving their dad,’ Dorothy said, and Andrew said, ‘I know that. Jesus, I don’t need you to analyse the world for me, Dorothy, just listen. Be a friend.’