and nodded. ‘Eve didn’t know,’ she said. ‘Eve didn’t know. I’m the lucky one.’ Dorothy smiled at him, her hand to her mouth as always, until something changed. The hand moved away and of course she – his mother – was still there.
20. The Home
Her sister had come. She’d brought the paper and she shook it open, spread it over the bed with her purple hands, their freckles like tea leaves, the fingers that seemed to have grown out of the gold and ruby rings jammed down by the knuckles, and read to Dot. A resident at a care home was found with her mouth duct taped shut. Strange – when she held the paper up and showed Dorothy the photograph those words weren’t there. Then the paper wasn’t there. Nothing but the ceiling, the partial view of wall, the corkboard with photos Dot couldn’t focus on, soft rectangles floating in space. The headline unravelled bluely in front of the corkboard almost like a real sentence, wider than it was long. Dot felt the words in her mouth, the sense memory of making sound with the musculature of tongue and palate and teeth. Being able to say the word musculature. An investigation was being held into the care home and a care worker had been suspended. Dot’s sister patted her leg. She jiggled some irises in a vase and sighed ridiculously, given that Dot was the one in the damn bed with the phantom tongue.
The young man on community service popped in. People often ‘popped in’. They ‘just put their head in the door’. They said ‘only me’ and ‘cheerio’ and ‘won’t stay long’. Michael had lain on the bed in the hospital, before they’d saved his foot, saying, ‘How long do you think I’ve got?’ Time being measurable now. Suitcases on the landing and boxes in the hallway. The corkboard was pinned with copies of ancestral portraits, black-and-white men and women in high collars and middle partings, the joke gallery. ‘Prop me up so I can see it, darling,’ that was right.
The sister read to Dorothy about a petition to stop topless women riding motorbikes and another on the cost of a new airport. Her gentle voice recited the latest findings, and what was in their food, and the seven secrets of happiness. She read about the King Cobras and the Dead Rabbits. Sorry, she said, there used to be a photo there, the one she cut out for her son, a newly discovered species of frog. A dog went missing for three months and returned to its owners to raise the alarm on the night of a house fire, and Dot’s sister read about that too. She read about people living in caravans and spotlighting in the woods.
Dorothy did manage a word while she sat there: Sister. And she denied it! She told Dot she was not her older sister, not Eve! This was the same sister that perched with Dot on their windowsill, peering down to the street a storey below, waiting for Ruth’s boyfriend to walk up the path, giggling, ready with the bowl of water to douse him as he raised his fist to knock on the door. The skin of the water sliding, tipping in the bowl with their laughter. Her bony spine like Dot’s knobbled into the window frame, their heads ducked beneath the sash window. Always that tingle when she stuck her head out one of those windows – that the cords that held the glass above her might suddenly break, the pane slip, whoops. They sat in the window, Eve and her, and when Dot saw them in her mind’s eye, from where she was standing unbodily just in from the bedroom doorway, they were in silhouette against the spring morning and the light-struck space between their bodies was symmetrical, one of those optical illusions, a vase. Standing in the doorway Dot very nearly remembered the sensation of floor beneath her feet, but not quite.
Outside the window rising up from the street was a tree they could climb into, when they were brave enough and before their father had it pollarded for their own good. The fuzzy yellow pollen made Michael sick; the poor boy spent spring days in his bed at the back of the house, the window down and the curtains drawn, their mother bringing him jugs of water and fresh pillowcases.
He lay in traction in the hospital and Dorothy sat by and listened to the stories of his