the bus into town, and Lee was on dawn shift at the delicatessen. Ruth stood, breathing hard from trombone practice, and shouted at the stairs behind her, ‘Dorothy! Evelyn!’
Michael paused in the hallway, muddy football boots swinging from their laces by his side. ‘What do they want?’
‘You’re so rude. Dad or Mum.’
‘They’re out.’ He slammed the kitchen door.
Ruth gave her public smile to the man and the lady, and bellowed again. ‘Dorothy! Eve!’
The lady spoke. ‘Or anyone in the family over eighteen?’
‘Michael,’ Ruth shouted. ‘Come back!’
The kitchen door pulsed with his disdain. Last week Michael had bounced back home after another attempt to leave. His flatmates always stole from him, you could never trust people, and he was like a lodger from a foreign country now, someone who appeared at mealtimes but didn’t talk and who gazed at you, if you addressed him, with implacable confusion.
‘Sorry,’ said Ruth. Over the rooftop across the road the sky was charged with light, shining through an invisible skin about to burst open.
From the bedroom upstairs Evelyn peered through the window, past the branches of the plane tree, but could see only the unfamiliar white Datsun parked outside, a sparrow on the bonnet. She returned to the mirror and finished spraying her hair, flipped it in a backcombed tangle over her shoulders. Daniel, rumpled in his dressing gown, ambled in, a thin joint lit between his fingers. ‘They’re calling for you,’ he drawled.
‘You should get dressed.’
‘I’m not well.’
‘Go back to bed then.’
‘I’m bored.’
Ruth cried, ‘Dorothy!’ then, less convinced, ‘or Eve!’ The sound reverberated.
Evelyn pulled her bottom eyelid down to draw kohl along the inside. ‘It’s far too early for this kerfuffle.’
‘There are two of them. It must be serious.’
He stopped outside the bathroom and knocked on the door. ‘There’s someone downstairs for you,’ he said, his mouth up close against the surface. The words travelled through the grains and particles of wood and into the steamy air of the bathroom where they disintegrated and Dot, drying herself with a sharp-smelling, slightly damp towel, heard a murmur. She put her bathrobe on and opened the door. Steam escaped. Daniel jerked his head in the direction of the stairs. ‘Someone there for you.’
‘For me?’
‘Think so.’ He pinched out the joint and left it on the basin ledge. ‘Warm in here.’ His gaze combed the room, took in the leavings of the female body, cotton-wool discs hardening with old nail-polish remover, the hairbrush bristles puffed with a cobweb of fine blonde hair, a cardboard tampon wrapper unfurling in the toilet bowl.
‘Have my bath. Haven’t you got a lecture?’
‘Lectures are a colossal waste of time.’
‘I know, but you’ve got to go.’
‘I actually think I’m going to rebel.’ He undid the cord on his dressing gown. ‘Go away now.’
Ruth appeared at the top of the stairs, her face red. ‘What are you doing? One of you get down here.’
As Dorothy passed the bedroom Evelyn swung out, braced in the door frame, her almond eyes through the sludgy make-up doing their trick of radiating heat. ‘Thanks,’ she whispered.
The trombone started up again. ‘God,’ cried Eve. Dorothy walked down the stairs, hair wet, air from the open front door coming up chilly beneath the bathrobe, the towel smelling not very nice in her hand. The man and the woman were in the hallway now, and the man gently shut the front door behind him and the woman turned from examining the family portrait that hung next to the hallway mirror. In the portrait, for which the Forrests had sat some years ago, the painter – a goateed friend of Frank’s with white bristles on the backs of his hands – had given the children rosy cheeks and shiny eyes, as though they had that minute run in from playing outdoors, and made Frank look dignified with his collar unbuttoned and their mother wear a pale-blue sweater and a string of fake pearls, her smile soft. I have become a wife again. The children, created from short little dabs and longer streaks of paint, clustered around their parents, eyelashes thick and dark and spiky, Michael’s nose straight and fine, a white gleam brush-stroked down the centre. Daniel should have been in the picture. Sometimes at night Dorothy thought she could make out his shape behind her shoulder, hidden beneath a layer of paint. The woman sighed as her gaze left the painting and fell on Dot. ‘Miss Forrest?’
A hand on the bottom newel post of the banister. ‘Yes.’