blue with stubble. Repellent as it was, the beard made Dot think about whoever had to kiss this man, or whether anyone did. He smelled keenly of a blue, minty aftershave. She wanted to grab him and shake his shoulders and tell him, ‘You’re human! Don’t fight it!’ But now was not the time.
‘This lady has shoplifted a packet of biscuits.’
‘Inadvertently,’ Dot said.
‘I saw you. It was quite deliberate.’
‘No really. It was a mistake.’ She rolled out a phrase of Diego’s that she’d always hated: ‘A senior moment.’
The man with the beard chuckled. ‘Really? Oh dear.’
‘I’m mortified,’ Dot said. ‘I would of course like to pay for the biscuits. But I assure you, I am not a criminal.’
‘May I see some identification?’
She handed him her bus pass. He opened a drawer and took out a ring-binder folder. In it were pages and pages of photocopied returned cheques, photo IDs, student cards, sample signatures with the word FORGED stamped over the top, and even mug shots. If they had a reference here to the photocopy of her bus pass ID – the one pinned to the corkboard of villains and recidivists by the checkout tills of her local grocery store – Dorothy was cooked. He held the bus pass in one hand and flicked through the pages with the other.
‘Doesn’t much look like you,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t do you justice.’
Dot blinked, slowly. ‘Thank you.’ Not that photo, but another one, years – decades – ago, there had been a day when she had gotten a new staff ID shot taken for the school where she was working. There she was smiling for the camera, dressed ironically like a ‘lady teacher’, but in the photograph when it was printed she just looked like a lady teacher. That was a day, yes, she remembered that day.
Sex with Diego would be epic. Dorothy knew this because he told her once, when he was having a beer at her place after he fixed the balcony rail. ‘Sex with me, darling, it’s epic,’ he said, his legs stretched out before him, the bottle balanced on his solid, convex stomach.
‘Good for you,’ she said. She had the old photo albums out and was selecting, binning and gluing photos without being able to study them too closely. His presence was a buffer against falling into the pictures and the long crawling out again. ‘Good for your ladies.’
‘You want to ask me to scan those for you. I’d do it as a favour.’ He swivelled right and left in the squidgy chair and thrust a look at her.
‘Diego,’ Dot laughed. ‘I’m ancient.’
‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,’ he said.
‘No knocking will occur. But thanks. I don’t get many offers these days.’
‘Your loss, darling,’ he grinned.
‘I’m sure.’ Wind came through the open window and shifted the photos around. On the balcony the ladder rattled against the eaves.
Epic sex. Jesus. She would have liked to see him naked, but that was as far as it went. On the whole being unleashed from sex was a tremendous relief. But this was something, standing in front of the store manager’s desk while he looked for evidence of criminality, and her heart quickened.
In the apartment Dorothy put some music on and knocked on the window glass to shoo the pigeons off the sill. With summer coming, and open windows, her great fear was that a bird would fly into the room, panicking and crapping everywhere. The happiness she felt on the bus home leaked away with the passing afternoon and now Dot was cross for having given in to the cheap thrill. She pretended her children were too far-flung to be ashamed, but Diego would mind, and he would be the one to come and get her if she ever had to make the call from the police cells. His face clouded with disapproval. Another crazy lady. Dot couldn’t afford to lose him. She took out her magnifying glass to read the craft magazine.
Later she worked on a funding application to buy new sand trays for the hospice, reading patient testimonies – ‘sacred multidimensional depths of psychic consciousness . . . self-witnessing . . . silent reflection . . . I grew so much personally . . . I am at home . . .’ until it was dark. She got up to put on the lamp and saw a strange man in the doorway of the locksmith’s looking up at her apartment building. Just a couple of glances, but the feeling flew