up from the street like a sparrow – he was looking at her.
The man was young, in his twenties, and though it was hard to tell from this third-storey window, he seemed to be tall. In the brief seconds of his presence she noticed his shoulders braced, how he stood on the balls of his feet, hopping slightly. Yes, he reminded her of Donald, her son, as though he’d stepped through the computer screen of their last conversation and into the neighbourhood. His hair was long around his face. He wore a suit jacket, sneakers and jeans. Maybe he was there to score, or to meet a person who never showed up. Maybe he was just getting some keys cut. They watched each other. He wasn’t Donald but he was somebody’s son – an adopted-out child. Then he was lost to the mass of children playing football down the middle of the road. Gaps in their calling and kicking let in the sound of old men nattering outside the newsagent’s. She liked the old men’s voices. The way they went on. Go for it, she thought, standing by the minimal breeze and listening to their gorgeous unwinding gossip. Don’t stop. Go for gold.
The cloud of footballers passed and the new locksmith, a middle-aged woman, was there in place of the man, staring up. Dot ducked too fast and her knee went. Slowly she lowered herself fully to the ground, trying not to curse aloud. The music had long stopped and the floor felt cold through her jumper. The knee pulsed a sweet, nauseous pain up her thigh into her hip. ‘Bastard,’ she said, ‘bastard, bastard.’ Dot crawled to the kitchen, dragging the lame leg behind her. Rum first, then the liniment cream, then, when she had manoeuvred herself through to the bedroom to lie down, curled, giving in to the ache, a pill.
In the morning the knee felt a lot better. Diego came to drop off some magazines from the Laundromat downstairs, old ones with the covers ripped off, for Dot to take to work. When he saw that her knee was strapped he insisted on accompanying her the two blocks to the hospice. The spring air was perfumed, inhalable. Diego carried the magazines in a plastic bag and the fabric off-cuts for quilting in a giant checked carrier bag over his shoulder, and Dot told him about the mandala paintings the patients were doing and the woman who had decided her life essence should be expressed by pictures of Princess Diana.
He shook his head. ‘Such a sad day when that lady died. There will never be another like her.’
‘What would be in your mandala painting, Diego?’
‘In mine?’ He laughed. ‘You trying to put me in my grave? Heaven hopes it is a long time before they wheel me in to sign the entry papers to that place.’
Dot looked at his profile against the moving colours of the mosaic wall outside the school buildings. ‘No, Diego, I don’t think you’re ever going to die.’
He shrugged. ‘Well, some day.’
They reached the hospice and the smoked automatic reception doors parted, waiting for Dot to enter. Diego placed the bags just inside the lobby and nodded at the young receptionist. ‘Morning, darling.’
Dot touched his arm, suddenly longing for him to stay. ‘Will you come in today? You know they love it when you do.’
‘Ah, no, today I’ve got a lot of people to see.’
‘OK. Lucky ladies.’
‘Oh yes,’ he smiled, ‘and lucky me.’
After work she made some packet soup and ate a digestive biscuit, then went down to the locksmith’s. The new owner looked curiously at Dot. ‘I’m just about to close up.’
‘Oh, sure. How are you finding the neighbourhood?’
The owner nodded. ‘Pretty good. People always need keys.’
There was a moment while she waited for Dorothy to get the message that her day was over. Dot backed out again into the street. The Turkish men stood in the brightly lit empty shop they used as FC headquarters and talked, and teenagers leaned against the round doors of the industrial-sized washing machines in the Laundromat chatting into cell phones and flirting with each other. There was a sound like thunder but it was just the roller doors coming down on the greengrocer’s and the mechanic’s. The neighbours were cooking curry and a seductive smoky smell came from the kebab shop. A woman in a summer dress walked a giant dog, an exquisite thing, grey and huge and thinly wolfish, the length of the street, its