‘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