The Forrests

20. The Home





Her sister had come. She’d brought the paper and she shook it open, spread it over the bed with her purple hands, their freckles like tea leaves, the fingers that seemed to have grown out of the gold and ruby rings jammed down by the knuckles, and read to Dot. A resident at a care home was found with her mouth duct taped shut. Strange – when she held the paper up and showed Dorothy the photograph those words weren’t there. Then the paper wasn’t there. Nothing but the ceiling, the partial view of wall, the corkboard with photos Dot couldn’t focus on, soft rectangles floating in space. The headline unravelled bluely in front of the corkboard almost like a real sentence, wider than it was long. Dot felt the words in her mouth, the sense memory of making sound with the musculature of tongue and palate and teeth. Being able to say the word musculature. An investigation was being held into the care home and a care worker had been suspended. Dot’s sister patted her leg. She jiggled some irises in a vase and sighed ridiculously, given that Dot was the one in the damn bed with the phantom tongue.

The young man on community service popped in. People often ‘popped in’. They ‘just put their head in the door’. They said ‘only me’ and ‘cheerio’ and ‘won’t stay long’. Michael had lain on the bed in the hospital, before they’d saved his foot, saying, ‘How long do you think I’ve got?’ Time being measurable now. Suitcases on the landing and boxes in the hallway. The corkboard was pinned with copies of ancestral portraits, black-and-white men and women in high collars and middle partings, the joke gallery. ‘Prop me up so I can see it, darling,’ that was right.

The sister read to Dorothy about a petition to stop topless women riding motorbikes and another on the cost of a new airport. Her gentle voice recited the latest findings, and what was in their food, and the seven secrets of happiness. She read about the King Cobras and the Dead Rabbits. Sorry, she said, there used to be a photo there, the one she cut out for her son, a newly discovered species of frog. A dog went missing for three months and returned to its owners to raise the alarm on the night of a house fire, and Dot’s sister read about that too. She read about people living in caravans and spotlighting in the woods.

Dorothy did manage a word while she sat there: Sister. And she denied it! She told Dot she was not her older sister, not Eve! This was the same sister that perched with Dot on their windowsill, peering down to the street a storey below, waiting for Ruth’s boyfriend to walk up the path, giggling, ready with the bowl of water to douse him as he raised his fist to knock on the door. The skin of the water sliding, tipping in the bowl with their laughter. Her bony spine like Dot’s knobbled into the window frame, their heads ducked beneath the sash window. Always that tingle when she stuck her head out one of those windows – that the cords that held the glass above her might suddenly break, the pane slip, whoops. They sat in the window, Eve and her, and when Dot saw them in her mind’s eye, from where she was standing unbodily just in from the bedroom doorway, they were in silhouette against the spring morning and the light-struck space between their bodies was symmetrical, one of those optical illusions, a vase. Standing in the doorway Dot very nearly remembered the sensation of floor beneath her feet, but not quite.

Outside the window rising up from the street was a tree they could climb into, when they were brave enough and before their father had it pollarded for their own good. The fuzzy yellow pollen made Michael sick; the poor boy spent spring days in his bed at the back of the house, the window down and the curtains drawn, their mother bringing him jugs of water and fresh pillowcases.

He lay in traction in the hospital and Dorothy sat by and listened to the stories of his active years, decades importing Turkish rugs and worrying about storm damage to the cabin at the commune, that rectangular box made of Fibrolite, with a tap, one living space and two bedrooms. The bathroom was an add-on out the back door. Although there were laddered wooden steps up from the beach path and a plastic bucket in which to dunk dirty feet, the cork floor inside was always gritty with sand. The inside walls were unclad, and shells, white coils of no particular beauty, sat on the raw battens alongside paperbacks with flaky spines and crazed brown mugs from a local potter. They were grown-up. Still there was the nodding white beach grass, the straggled leaves of the sunflowers against the grey Fibrolite wall, the trumpeting sky.

They sat in the stuffy cabin with Ruth, Evelyn, Michael and Lee, and it was raining, the world outside dripping, and inside everything was sticky and they played cards till their fingertips were blue and nobody spoke for at least an hour before Evelyn looked out the door and saw that the rain had stopped, and called to everyone to come out and down to the water. The room emptied until it was just Dorothy and Daniel, and the Formica table the colour of tomato flesh, flecked with yellow, like seeds, and the peeling wooden kitchen chairs and the rag rug on the floor and the large pages of newspaper streaked with mud and scrunched by the door where people had wiped their feet on the way in, and the stubs of candles puddled on saucers, their wizened black wicks cold to look at, and finally Dot stopped her looking all over the room and swung her gaze back round to him. He was counting cards. He patted the pack together and shuffled it deftly and split it and bridged the two halves and let all the cards flick together and arch, all the time looking at the cards, but with a small smile on his face that he couldn’t quite get rid of. Dorothy said that she didn’t want to play any more cards. She walked past him to the sink and poured a spluttery cup of water from the big creaky tap and drank it very quickly because her mouth was dry, her lips as dry as on a winter’s morning. He was wearing his striped T-shirt and a pair of jeans and he’d kicked off his sandshoes by the door and his feet were so bare. He asked her to pour him a drink. When she put the cup on the table in front of him it shook. He reached to pick up the cup and his hand brushed against her wrist. He shifted over on the cracked vinyl bench seat and made space for her. Dorothy sat; her legs were shaking too. Daniel started to spread out cards as if they were going to play a game and he was still looking intently at the little collections of blue-and-white patterns, secret pictures decipherable in their geometry, when he said, ‘How long do you think we’ve got?’ He pulled at the neck of his T-shirt as though there was something inside it.

The sister was talking with the young criminal while he pulled at the closed-over plastic liner in Dot’s wastepaper basket and shook the rubbish into his green sack. Tattoos peeked from the sleeves of his blue uniform jacket, which was slightly too short in the arms. They gave Dorothy a haircut and held up a hand mirror to show her what she looked like. Where was the duct tape of mercy then, she wondered, because there was nothing to stop the words coming out while she said, ‘That’s not me, that bouncy hair is not mine, those wavering eyebrows, those eyelids, the sunken cheeks, the neck you don’t understand that cannot be my neck, my brittle shoulders, my pink cardigan.’ They wheeled her back into her room while she was still talking. ‘Why is there a teddy bear on my bed? Why does a doll sit with splayed legs in the armchair? Whose are these toys? Did I steal them? Do children visit me who want to play with them? Do they smell? There’s something on my head. Did someone Sellotape a bow on my hair? Did that happen while I was looking at that collapsed face in the mirror? Do I smell? Have I soiled myself? When you lift me like that it hurts. Do I have a sore on my spine? Thank you for the medicine. Thank you for the clean sheets. Thank you for drawing the curtains back so light comes through the gauzy lining.’

The sister talked to Dot about when they were children and picking snails out of the letterbox and racing them along the painted concrete fence. She laid a hand on the blanket above Dot’s scaly shins, purple yellow with bruises and veins and stuck with white medical tape where she barked them on the tea tray and the blood didn’t clot well, and she patted and squeezed Dorothy’s feet. Her sweater was the colour called jade and her hair bobbed above it soft and blonde. She removed one of Dot’s feet from beneath the blankets and from the ticklish pressure and clicking sounds she must have been cutting the toenails. She was slow with the clippers and Dot squeezed her fingers together in sympathy but nothing moved.

‘What are you doing community service for? If I may ask?’

The boy in the blue jacket stopped wiping the windowsill and looked towards Dot but he didn’t answer. In the hospital with her baby the orderlies wore blue jackets. Amy lay flat on her back on a bed with sides, her face swollen from one of the things they were putting into her, the morphine or the ventilator. Lines into her legs, her neck. Her eyes swollen shut while the machine breathed for her. Windows at one end of the room, the other end, past more beds, each the centre of its own pod of drips and monitors and LED displays and sensors attached to little finger pads with band-aids, reading heart rates, oxygen percentages, sending the information in a flashing line, a series of rising and falling numbers, to a screen. Thank you. In the family room a woman prayed in the direction of Mecca. It was Ramadan and she was going the day without food. Dorothy pumped milk into a bottle and stored it in the fridge for the nurse to attach to the drip that would feed it into Amy’s stomach. Thank you. A woman leaned her elbows on the table in front of her and held her face with fingers on her eyebrows and thumbs on her cheeks and sighed in and out before she cried silently, her stomach shuddering. Crying here was bad news. Two girls had been struck by lightning. Dorothy’s friend visited and looked at the baby and walked straight back out into the corridor. A minute later she returned, her eyes bloodshot, and she sat beside Dot until it was time to express milk again. Thank you. In the family room some new people played cards, the blue rectangles glowing like lapis lazuli on the green table. A doctor changed one of the artery lines and the baby’s leg went whitish grey, and a vascular surgeon with a moustache explained that Amy’s body was too small for the bypass operation that was required, that the ratio was beyond the capability of the human hand. There was a meeting in the consultant’s office and papers appeared and Dot and Andrew were asked to sign them and they did, and a portable X-ray machine was wheeled in and an image was captured and everyone waited for someone to say something, and they didn’t know who it was that they were waiting for. It was a game where nobody wanted to be the one to say. Thumbs to the forehead, bags not. And then while everyone was standing around the bed, looking, the leg changed colour again, becoming rosy, so slowly that it might just have been something wished for. The sweating surgeon disappeared. The promises they signed to were not invoked. Amy was miraculously small and growing, she was inside Dot only days ago, and she cured herself. Thank you. Days later they returned home and the envelopes in the letterbox were lacy where snails had eaten them.

It was dark and her sister wasn’t there. In the light that crept from under the door the outline of the corkboard appeared to float just in front of the wall. The pillowslip felt fresh and soft beneath Dot’s head and the mohair blanket the sister brought her was warm and light. The spiky irises had gone; daphne smelled thickly, spriggily sweet. There was a vague pressure on her hand and when Dot try to raise her arm it increased, and panic pierced her – ‘Don’t strap me down,’ but when she turned her head she saw in the half-light the liquid glow of a drip standing over her like a benevolent sentinel.

‘Those morphine dreams are fruity, man,’ the boy in the blue coat said, his tattoos falling to the floor like vines.

‘You’re proving your point,’ Dot said. ‘I’m so sick of gargling,’ she said. ‘Morphine doesn’t mean the end. This is not over. I know what your game is.’

‘You know it,’ he said. ‘You know.’

Her sister and the boy in the blue jacket played cards on a tea tray, both either side of Dorothy’s bed. Dot had shrunk because they were playing over her legs but her legs weren’t there, they were too short now to reach the end of the bed. The window was open slightly onto the rock garden and the little white flowers growing there sent a citronella perfume into the room. Koi carp were splashing in the pond. Those carp gleamed fatly and orangely like juice spilt into water on the day she was brought here. She poured orange juice into her daughter’s water when she would not drink it, and together they watched the parabola of thick liquid plunge into the clear glass. Grace lay next to Dot in her floral pyjamas and jiggled her cheeks with her little hand, and her brother came in to snuggle under the blankets too and

The young criminal sat on the end of the bed. He had changed out of his blue coat; he wore a grey sweatshirt with an image on the front that Dorothy couldn’t make out. ‘Are you in a gang?’ she asked him. ‘The Dead Rabbits? Did you get done for tagging? Did a businessman push you up against the sprayed concrete wall of your old school, his arm across your windpipe? Did a cop car pull over? Did your friend run off?’

He dipped the foam cube on a stick in water and ran it around the inside of her mouth. The first time she did that for Eve her hand shook with nerves. She closed her eyelids in silent acknowledgement. There was a terminal narrative. It was a story until it stopped being a story and until then they kept wanting to know. Give up, the doctor told Donald, kindly. Surrender your need for the detail; there is only one way this is going to end.

Her sister talked about being a child and eating honeysuckle, picking off the flowers and sucking at the backs of their petals to inhale the flavour, which was like honey

The sound was like a box being pushed around on the floor in a downstairs room. It was like a dog clearing its throat. It was like a car with engine failure being pushed over gravel. The white barred sides of the bed were up and someone explained to someone that if Miss Forrest tried to get out of bed in the night she would hit the ground. The space between the bars was dusky, shadowed. She lay in the cot with baby Grace, just to be another body breathing with her, helping her fall asleep. This was the blanket, hairy beneath her fingers, and the smooth sheet under her cheek. Her sister was reading poetry out loud. Dorothy thought about telling her that thing she had been meaning to say but the effort of making sounds was

Her sister’s voice, and she said, ‘I’ve got to go, Mum. I’ll be back tomorrow.’

‘Time for some fresh air,’ the criminal said, and he wheeled her out into the remembrance garden, past the living room where an old man saw squirrels on the curtain rails and heard his own bedroom slippers walk around at night without him. His wife visited him every day, while he, poor man, was rubber-banded into an armchair and spent his hours leaning forward to stand and being pulled back into the cushions by the band’s resistant force. Up, down.

One of her favourite things to see was a freighter on the horizon. Or cargo barges lying like waiting crickets in a still harbour.

Women in blue jackets unloaded boxes of food from a van into the hospice kitchen. She wondered for maybe the hundredth time in her life why cartoon chickens advertised their own edibility by doing the thumbs-up with their wings. Her son came, a tall man in a suit, and brought her a baby. The baby was in her arms – someone else was holding him as well, there were cautious adult hands attached to that body, not just her twiggy wrists – the baby’s face was clear, wide, his gaze roving the air, his body light as though hovering in space, just touching her lap. Donald lifted the baby and she kissed the top of his downy head. Caramel.

The growth on the rocks in the fishpond was like those canned Halloween cobwebs she sprayed on the windows for the children each October.

Rain fell straight into the pluming water fountain. The drops of fountain water slowed as they reached their peak and turned and fell, and turned and fell. Across the pond stellata flowers shone yellow-white against the pearly sky, the branches black in the rain. A marmalade cat pawed the dirt under the tree, turned and settled, and rested, its face content.

The young criminal smiled at her and walked over the miniature horseshoe bridge, towards the cat. The cat was enormous, the world a willow pattern on a flat plane. Slowly the cat blinked, rose and walked away, glancing back once, shaking itself before disappearing indoors. The young man smiled at Dorothy.

She leaned forwards in the chair and paddled her feet on the ground, inching out from under the awning so that the rain fell first on her bathmat-like slippers, now on her knees, on her hands, her lap, her hair. Rain hit the permanent wave they’d given her and some of the drops found their way through the jolly grey curls and down to the skin of her scalp. It was a balm.

Daniel stood in the smoked-glass doorway off the living room, where dances were sometimes held. His tallness was stooped with age, and he said to Dorothy, ‘Something something.’ She turned her head and Daniel shifted his weight, he had a stick, and like a tall three-legged creature he stepped closer, shuffle tap, shuffle tap, step ball change

His hand was large and worn, and his eyes were topped by peppery brows, the hairs ticking upwards as though surprised, and past the marks and wrinkles, deep behind all that those eyes were there and they were so warm and dark, and they really did flicker, and he sat back slowly in the rain with her

The tide was a long way out and they stepped down over the rocks carpeted with tiny blue-black mussel shells onto the mudflats, the sky high and ashen above. For a while they were walking close to the cliffs, beneath trees that captured light and held it clustered between their leaves, then braver they ventured out towards the moored boats that sat nakedly on the gunmetal-grey mud, near each other but not so close that they could swing and collide in a storm when the water was deep. The mud smelled rich and salty, and green algae lay streaked across it like handwriting. Some of the surface was ruffled and this was where the mud was softest and it sucked at their sneakers so that they took big quick steps like slapstick astronauts, and Daniel talked about things that he pretended to find amusing but secretly loved. He laughed away his view of the world as a way of holding onto it. She would remember to tell him that, later.

They rounded a large yellow sailboat, its belly traced with mould, and a creek opened up in the mudflats, light reflected on its silvery water. The sandy banks of the creek were cut by the water into perfect angles. On the other side, shoots of some kind of estuary plant stood straight up towards the sky. Their feet were under the mud, they were sinking and doubled over with laughter, reaching down into the cold gritty mud to pull their feet out, to push at the heels of their mud-soaked sneakers, get the things off, now, feet and ankles caught, the mud spotted with wormholes and bubbles, and they both tipped over on their knees just as the rain started. The wind blew in a great thickening rush. A dandelion clock tumbled past mid-air, thin black-tipped wisps floating from the pored seed-head that rose, released, like the microphone thrown by the singer from the band they heard that time, and she remembered the fierce, elated way he flung it high into the air to turn and fall, an invitation, towards the upturned faces of the crowd.





Acknowledgements


Thanks to my friends and family, and to those who read early drafts, including Lisa Samuels, Travis Gasper and Damien Wilkins, Chris Morgan Jones and Suzy Lucas, and Gillian Stern, Georgia Garrett and Alexandra Pringle, for their generous advice. Thanks to Brita McVeigh and Fergus Barrowman for the serendipitous reading suggestions that also shaped this book.

Versions of two chapters have appeared as extracts in the NZ Listener and Metro magazine. A version of Daniel and Dorothy’s conversation in ‘Spells’ appeared as part of a story ‘Jack, Internationally’ broadcast on BBC Radio 4.