head she saw in the half-light the liquid glow of a drip standing over her like a benevolent sentinel.
‘Those morphine dreams are fruity, man,’ the boy in the blue coat said, his tattoos falling to the floor like vines.
‘You’re proving your point,’ Dot said. ‘I’m so sick of gargling,’ she said. ‘Morphine doesn’t mean the end. This is not over. I know what your game is.’
‘You know it,’ he said. ‘You know.’
Her sister and the boy in the blue jacket played cards on a tea tray, both either side of Dorothy’s bed. Dot had shrunk because they were playing over her legs but her legs weren’t there, they were too short now to reach the end of the bed. The window was open slightly onto the rock garden and the little white flowers growing there sent a citronella perfume into the room. Koi carp were splashing in the pond. Those carp gleamed fatly and orangely like juice spilt into water on the day she was brought here. She poured orange juice into her daughter’s water when she would not drink it, and together they watched the parabola of thick liquid plunge into the clear glass. Grace lay next to Dot in her floral pyjamas and jiggled her cheeks with her little hand, and her brother came in to snuggle under the blankets too and
The young criminal sat on the end of the bed. He had changed out of his blue coat; he wore a grey sweatshirt with an image on the front that Dorothy couldn’t make out. ‘Are you in a gang?’ she asked him. ‘The Dead Rabbits? Did you get done for tagging? Did a businessman push you up against the sprayed concrete wall of your old school, his arm across your windpipe? Did a cop car pull over? Did your friend run off?’
He dipped the foam cube on a stick in water and ran it around the inside of her mouth. The first time she did that for Eve her hand shook with nerves. She closed her eyelids in silent acknowledgement. There was a terminal narrative. It was a story until it stopped being a story and until then they kept wanting to know. Give up, the doctor told Donald, kindly. Surrender your need for the detail; there is only one way this is going to end.
Her sister talked about being a child and eating honeysuckle, picking off the flowers and sucking at the backs of their petals to inhale the flavour, which was like honey
The sound was like a box being pushed around on the floor in a downstairs room. It was like a dog clearing its throat. It was like a car with engine failure being pushed over gravel. The white barred sides of the bed were up and someone explained to someone that if Miss Forrest tried to get out of bed in the night she would hit the ground. The space between the bars was dusky, shadowed. She lay in the cot with baby Grace, just to be another body breathing with her, helping her fall asleep. This was the blanket, hairy beneath her fingers, and the smooth sheet under her cheek. Her sister was reading poetry out loud. Dorothy thought about telling her that thing she had been meaning to say but the effort of making sounds was
Her sister’s voice, and she said, ‘I’ve got to go, Mum. I’ll be back tomorrow.’
‘Time for some fresh air,’ the criminal said, and he wheeled her out into the remembrance garden, past the living room where an old man saw squirrels on the curtain rails and heard his own bedroom slippers walk around at night without him. His wife visited him every day, while he, poor man, was rubber-banded into an armchair and spent his hours leaning forward to stand and being pulled back into the cushions by the band’s resistant force. Up, down.
One of her favourite things to see was a freighter on the horizon. Or cargo barges lying like waiting crickets in a still harbour.
Women in blue jackets unloaded boxes of food from a van into the hospice kitchen. She wondered for maybe the hundredth time in her life why cartoon chickens advertised their own edibility by doing the thumbs-up with their wings. Her son came, a tall man in a suit, and brought her a baby. The baby was in her arms – someone else was holding him as well, there were cautious adult hands attached to that body, not just her twiggy