He nodded. Then he sat back against the white faux-leather couch. The room was very hot and the adults’ voices were loud and artificial. She had done it herself, talking to Mister Unfriendly, soared into that upper register that denoted false cheer. Dorothy looked down at her shirt and saw that the buttons were uneven. Starting from the top button she fixed it, then examined the polish on her fingernails, chipped in the shapes of tiny treasure islands, the miniature repeating asterisks in the striated skin on the backs of her hands. Next to her sat a short woman, a Filipina nanny possibly, of indeterminate age. ‘I suppose this sort of thing pays well,’ Dorothy said. ‘Being in a television ad.’
‘Yes,’ said the nanny. ‘It’s a sick world.’
Dot smiled. ‘You can say that again.’
Grace came out of the casting room, the baby in her arms. Dot stood, reaching out to take her, and Grace said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Mum, your shirt.’
Oh, weird, the buttons were undone; her bra was awful, a flesh-coloured satiny thing that appeared capable of standing upright in doubled mountainous peaks if unhooked and cast to the floor. Then the roll of stomach below the bra, the protruding curve of oatmeal flesh that looked, to Dorothy, as though it belonged to somebody else. Halfway up, the curve was cut across by the transparent black waistband of her tights, with a thick raised seam wiggling indecently down the middle and disappearing into the waistband of her skirt. ‘Oops,’ Dorothy said, her voice raised for the benefit of the room.
There was no time between being a child, really bemused by bodies like this, and having one of your own, no time at all, and on the way to the car she would explain this to Grace, who looked good still, though she wore a lot of make-up and you could always see a pink elastic thong strap when she crouched down to help the kids with whatever. Not that she herself was even too decrepit; some women her age dated men of thirty, though she suspected those men were unknowingly gay. And Carmen from the maternity home had only just come out. Hope for everyone. Rather than alarmed she should be grateful. This was what she would say to Grace, that daily, in amongst all of the yeah everything, she tried to be consciously grateful. So what if she had learned it from the Internet? And she knew, she could tell, that Grace loved her kids, and her flinty, faintly desperate women friends, and her sexy old husband bringing those planes home safely day after day after day, even if she didn’t love the motorway whine and the oil refinery and half of Amsi’s colleagues sucking up the stress leave every year.
‘When will you know?’ she asked as they waited to cross the road to the car.
‘Oh, we didn’t get it.’ Grace rooted in her massive pink bag with one hand, the baby balanced on her hip with the other. ‘They cast the parents as white.’
‘They might change their mind.’ Of course they would. If it were down to her she would gobble Meg right up, her brother too.
‘God damn it, where are they?’ Grace stared at her mother, one arm half swallowed by the bag. ‘Did you give the keys back to me?’
‘Did I?’
‘After you went back for the nappies.’ Grace stood on her toes and peered down the street. ‘Where’s the car?’
‘The car’s down there.’ Dorothy gestured, loosely, to the line of parked cars.
‘Where? I can’t see it.’
They walked forward along the noisy street, the air thick with midday summer heat, as though in a trance. Meg pulled the floppy cotton hat from her damp curls and waved it, then dropped it. Dorothy bent to pick it up. Flat pods of melted chewing gum blemished the footpath. Sunlight badoinged off storefronts’ plated glass. She should have unpeeled her tights in the bathroom at the casting place, shoved them in the bin that was sickly sweet with other people’s grandchildren’s nappies.
They walked on and the spot where she had thought the car was parked moved ahead of them, like the moon used to when she was small, and they were driving at night, all of them, the dark back of her mother at the wheel, the bony pressure of a brother’s or sister’s head against her shoulder, black hills on the black night out the window. A plane slowly tore the sky overhead