The Forrests (6 page)

Eve turned the radio on but the battery was dead. She pulled out the kitchen drawer to look for new ones, pushing aside the battens of string and pricking a finger on a drawing pin. Her father’s name registered before she really read it – yes – his full name, Frank Michael Forrest – and she pulled the envelope from the drawer. Two more lay beneath it, and all were addressed to her father at Lee’s house, bearing the Ministry of Justice insignia in the top left corner. They had been redirected in her mother’s handwriting, and remained unopened. Evelyn rifled through the rest of the drawer. Nothing else. She stood there holding the envelopes, then shoved them deep in the drawer, covering them with an old phone bill and a couple of Christmas cards decorated with glued glitter that was sandpapery to the touch.

‘You need batteries,’ Evelyn said when her father came back. ‘We’re going to the supermarket.’

‘I’ve just been.’ He opened the fridge and gestured at flat cardboard boxes of pizza, a string bag of green apples and new bottles of milk, the silver-foil tops not yet opened.

‘You’ve got meal moths.’

‘Oh.’ He looked perplexed. ‘What are they?’

She would clear out the cupboards and vacuum in the corners and wipe down all the boxes. She would find enough fresh food to make something hearty for dinner, and light the fire and pick flowers for the table and in the morning would sand down the
windowsills and paint them and clean the windows and re-roof the house and mow the lawns and burn this house down and build a better one and bring her father back from the dead. She stood on the kitchen doorstep and punched one hand into the corner of the pocket of her ex-boyfriend’s leather jacket, and with the other smoked a cigarette.

Most people were jammed in the front half of the pub, near the low stage. The band had been due to start an hour ago but the only action was the occasional puff of dry ice being sent from the wings to mingle with all the cigarette smoke and thicken the air, to make it visible so that the musicians wouldn’t have to emerge into transparency. Dorothy balanced the beers. Someone jostled her and liquid sloshed over her hands. She passed one to Daniel, restrained herself from kissing him even though she just wanted to kiss him all the, all the time.

‘Bears are thrust upon me,’ said Daniel, and he growled like he always did with that joke while he stared at the stage. He drank, and leaned away from his hip bone to rummage in the front pocket of his jeans for his lighter. Dot slanted her cigarette into the flame. She loved to watch his body, the way he managed pockets, jackets, basketballs, the things he touched. A couple of Dot’s friends waved from over near the bar but there was no way of getting through the crush. Dan’s flatmate was talking about that incredible sound system. He said something else and it was lost because the drummer walked on and then the rest of the band, and there was a surge of people who had been waiting outside in the smoking section to do this push when the band appeared and with bodies pressing into
every side Dot’s feet lifted from the ground as the music began. It hit her in the breastbone – punched through the honeycombed tissue and split out from there, and she dispersed into the other bodies, radiating with the vibrating sound, lost in it and him.

A fierce orange light from the three-bar heater blazed by the pantry door; the soles of Evelyn’s sneakers smelled melty where her legs were stretched towards it. Frank came into the kitchen and washed white paint out of a thick wide brush into the sink, water running opaque beneath the spiky black bristles.

She put down her reading. ‘When are the owners coming back?’

‘Oh, another couple of months yet.’

‘Do you know where you’re going to go then?’

‘Your mother and I have been talking again.’

‘Really? Oh, that’s great.’ She half rose to hug her father but he knocked the brush on the side of the sink and laid it on the stainless-steel bench, where a small white puddle formed around it.

‘Come and see the orchard,’ he said. ‘Before it gets dark.’

Through the kitchen window was a steeliness to the sky she hadn’t noticed happening.

Frank led the way out the front of the house and past an empty flowerbed, a large oval of rich brown soil, to a wooden stile. He was a dark figure ahead, halfway into the new field. On the other side of the fence the dog trotted up and bumped into Evelyn, wagging his tail. She patted his flank. He clambered the stile after her. The wind picked up now they were away from the shelter of the house. Her father’s path was a bit like a sidewinder’s as he walked. She wondered when he’d last eaten; what he’d had to
drink. The light was dropping quickly and she called out, ‘How far is it?’

Frank tottered backwards as though her voice was a lasso. ‘Not far.’

They walked along the side of a saggy wire fence and he gestured behind them. ‘Deer over there. And they’re outside the irrigation scheme. But there’s talk of a drought.’ He spoke airily, as though the problems of nature were not his.

‘I’d like to see a deer.’

‘Who’d you break up with?’ he asked.

‘Just a guy. It’s OK.’

‘Has Dorothy got a boyfriend yet?’

‘No. She says she’s too busy.’

‘Your mother and I were married at your age. You can’t muck around.’

‘The florist’s moving. I’m going to look for a new flat, closer. With a couple of friends.’

‘How’s your brother, how’s Michael?’

‘All right. Don’t know. He’s all like, hangs out with his friends. Do the others know about you and Mum?’ Talking about it gave her a false-hope feeling, one she wanted to back off from, as though she was repeating somebody else’s lie.

‘No rush,’ he said. ‘Best to wait.’ He started singing an American folk song, his voice old-fashioned in the growing dark.

‘Hey, did you bring a torch? Should we be heading back?’

‘No, this is it.’

There were some old trees dotted around but without the leaves to go on Evelyn couldn’t tell if they were fruit trees. She touched
one. The bark was scalloped with flakes of silvery green lichen. ‘Is this an apple tree?’

Frank was just behind her. He held her elbow with gripping fingers and shifted his weight from foot to foot. ‘An apple tree? Let’s see.’ She extracted her arm and walked on. There was not much sound. The thick wing-flaps of roosting birds, the breathing of the dog. Venus appeared above the distant hills, a speck of light in the blue dusk.

He stumbled, and half fell onto Evelyn, heavy against her arm. She pushed him upright. ‘Come on Dad, let’s go back to the house. You need to eat something.’

‘No, I haven’t shown you the orchard yet.’

‘No. No Dad, let’s go back to the house.’

‘No.’ His hand was around her wrist, dragging it downwards. ‘I want to show you the orchard.’ His eyes were juicy, young, he was grinning like a schoolboy, he was somewhere inside his own head and the trees were pressing in.

She twisted her hand around to pull at his arm. ‘We’re going back to the house. Come on.’

The only light on in the house shone small through the evening and they crossed the field towards it, Evelyn leading as though she knew what she was doing, her father following somewhere in the back. Distance grew and shrank and soon they were at the stile. Evelyn hopped over and ran the last metres to the house, the flowerbed giving softly beneath her shoes, round the side of the building and into the back door and the kitchen. She put all the lights on, and the oven, and washed her hands and was drying them on the holey, starchy linen tea towel when the planked back door opened and her father came in. He sat at the table.
She pulled a soft plastic bag of bread from the enamel bread bin and spread little scoopings of cold butter on it, the knife going through the bread in places, her hands trembling. She pushed a plate and a glass of water across the table towards him. ‘Eat up.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Eat it.’ She turned her back and busied herself with the pizza and an oven tray and didn’t look at him again until she was sure he was eating. She cut the mould off the end of a block of cheese and added it to the plate. ‘This can’t happen any more.’

He rolled a chunk of cheese in a slice of bread and shoved it right in his mouth like his hand belonged to somebody else. He chewed and said gluggily, ‘Is there any peanut butter?’

‘You can’t keep doing this. The not eating, all of it. We can’t keep worrying about you.’

‘Yes, sorry.’ He wiped his fingers on the paper napkin she had torn off for him, and dropped it on the floor.

She laughed, feeling helpless. ‘You’re going to stop?’

From under the table, balancing on his fingertips, patting the floor with the other hand to pick up the paper towel, a slow, uncertain, ‘Yes.’

The stainless-steel sink bench was cold against Evelyn’s back and she tugged down the hem of her jumper. ‘You’re going to look after yourself?’

‘I’m fine.’

She stared at the loaf of bread, its doughy satisfactions, but instead took the cigarettes and lighter from the pocket of her ex-boyfriend’s jacket and lit one. ‘Good. Me too.’

*  *  *

At the bottom of the stairs she opened the door off the hallway onto her father’s study. The oak table filled most of the room and was spread with a range of open-faced, hardback journals for his History of Theatre project. She flicked through the pile of carbon-copied typewritten pages near by and saw the coloured edge of a magazine, the flat pink of bare flesh. Hastily she covered the papers again. Evelyn looked into space and didn’t move. She listened. It had been a photo of a man. She didn’t want to lift the papers back to check. Maybe it had been a photo of a woman. Maybe it had been a theatre programme, one of those shows her father liked to talk about from the sixties, a kind of performance art. She sneezed in the dust, the shock of that the impetus needed to get out of the room and shut the door.

The guest bedroom was large, with a high ceiling and a view of shorn fields, lumpy in the moonlight. The curtains, sprigged with the sort of daisy pattern Evelyn had longed for as a child, didn’t quite reach the bottom of the window. She held the window wide open and stuck her head out and inhaled the piny air. Stars swarmed overhead. She shut the window latch and shook out the duvet, dust motes floating in the air, the satin fabric smelling coldly of naphthalene. The bedside light was broken so she read with the main light on, moths tapping against the window glass, a couple fizzing on the light bulb. Her father’s room was across the landing and there was the unpausing sound of his footsteps up the stairs and going into his own room and shutting the door. She unhooked her bra and pulled it out the side of her sleeve and curled up with the asthma inhaler gripped in her hand, wearing the leather jacket, her T-shirt, jeans, and socks.

*  *  *

After the gig, in his bedroom, Daniel pulled the sheets up over Dorothy’s bare back and all the way over her head so that they were in a tent and she moved herself down his body, her ears still ringing.

The dog woke Evelyn with his barking. It was still dark, although the sky was tinged yellow right along the edge of the horizon. She kicked her feet into their trainers and opened the door carefully, the round metal handle stiff and creaky on the angled shaft. There was no noise now and it was possible the dog’s barking happened in a dream. She made her way down the stairs, through the kitchen and its smell of cold pizza, and out the unlocked back door, breathing in the watery clean air as she crossed the yard to the kennel. Pinkish-grey clouds floated on the felt-like sky. The dog was standing awake, a chain running from the kennel to his collar. The moon cast light and shadows over the links. His shaggy smell rose up as she unhooked the collar clip. He passed Evelyn and turned back to look at her, and she followed him round to the front of the house and up the long rutted drive towards the main road. Old pine trees stood at intervals like giants either side, the ground beneath them scattered with needles and cones, darker shapes on the dark earth. The house was dark at their backs, and she tripped once or twice on the large pits in the unsealed drive, but the dog trotted alongside, nimble and even. She ran the last stretch to the road and followed the dog in the direction he took, forward in the half-light.

A few hundred metres down the road a gravelled lay-by housed some crumpled DB cans and she dragged the dog away from sniffing at a spent condom. Bird calls spiralled in the dense trees. The
breeze was almost warm, holding a suggestion of rain. Eve began to make a little shrine of stones. Against their tiny scale she felt like the Incredible Hulk, bursting to escape her body, her father’s house, the countryside. Her stomach burned with envy of Dorothy’s ability to be not
here
with the loneliest man in the Western world but back in her own life, her studies and her teaching and her sunny flat and her
thing
, the secret she held onto. Fucking Daniel. Eve refused to be the one to bring it up. To ask the question would only make real the ice field between them, the blank that she was left standing in, alone. This was the worst of it – this plunging sense that everyone else had got something she had not. The dog nosed around in the weeds between the gravel and the trees, wagging its stiff rope of tail.

The hum of an engine broke the night. The dog and Evelyn looked up at the bend in the road, anticipating, and it was several seconds before light beamed round the corner then a car emerged and cruised past. It slowed and she stood up. The car reversed back. A growl came from deep in the dog’s throat.

‘You all right?’ The driver was a lady in her thirties or forties, wearing a woolly hat and a checked shirt, open over what might be a petticoat. The engine cut out and a baby cried. The woman reached an arm towards the back seat where a child of a few months old lay in a safety cradle. She started the car again and the baby stopped crying, and after yanking the handbrake on she walked around to Evelyn. The dog barked once and stepped up to the woman and stood looking at her. She scruffled him behind the ears. ‘Is this your dog?’

‘No,’ Evelyn said.

The woman leaned down to examine his collar. ‘Where did you find him?’