back to remove – he gestured – ‘this television, any non-essential furniture, books, your family car, the paintings, any other goods that fall within our rights’.
‘I won’t sign it.’ She wrapped the bathrobe sash around her hand until the fingers went purple. The shoulders of the robe were cold with the water from her hair. ‘Why have you come now when my father’s out? It’s not his fault. You can’t take our things.’
‘Dorothy.’ The woman spoke softly. ‘I’m afraid that we can.’
‘Do you have a brother or sister also eighteen or over? We just need the one signature.’
‘What happens if I don’t sign it?’
‘We come back until payments are made.’ The same adenoidal tone. ‘You won’t like that.’
There was a tap on the door. She darted to it, held herself between Evelyn and the room. ‘What’s going on?’ Eve asked between her teeth. She was wearing Dorothy’s fake-leopardskin coat. She never asked.
‘Real estate agents. I’m about to get rid of them.’
Her sister raised an eyebrow. ‘Good job. See you then.’
Daniel pulled Dorothy into the hallway, his eyes locking hers. ‘Hang on.’ It was obvious he was stoned. It would be so good to bring him into the room. She held on to his lapel. ‘Are you sure you’re OK? Who are they?’
‘Estate agents. I told Eve.’
‘Shall I take them on a tour?’ He tugged her dressing-gown sash. Had forgotten Eve was right there.
‘No.’ She moved away. ‘No it’s fine.’
So Evelyn and Daniel nodded, and she watched them patter down the path, arms hugged across their bodies, hair flung as though by static in the wind, before she went back into the room to sign the paper.
After the man and woman were gone and Ruth had left for school, Dorothy washed again in cold water and got dressed. Soon their mother would be home with bags of stale pastries, faintly smelling of that fancy imported cheese, Camembert and Gruyère, boiling from another outrage pulled by the posh woman she worked for, a coiffed bitch in a fob-watch chain necklace and raised shirt collar who patronised Lee because despite her genteel bearing she badly needed the job which for a woman like her was only just on the acceptable side of retail, the European vocab dressed it up but really she was a salad hand, a till monkey, because they were broke, broke, and it was the imminent return of this fury that finally propelled Dot out towards the bus stop.
The morning street was alive with disco from a portable radio, a couple of men in super-tight jeans peering over a car engine, a woman holding her toddler’s hands as he slowly put one foot in front of the other along a low brick wall. The mother lifted the boy down and wiggled her hips in time to the music and the sound of dance floors carried on the wind over the whole street, even reaching inside the wooden shelter. A Falcon full of young men drove past and whistled.
Except for the usher, a young man in a blue jacket doing something unseen with ticket rolls or sweet packets behind the desk, the cinema foyer was empty, the day’s first screening a few minutes away. Dorothy sat on a chair upholstered in grey tartan, a splodge of stain showing up on one of the paler checks. The sport section of yesterday’s newspaper was folded on the next chair: half a headline and a photo of half a man running towards the camera, a ball tucked under his visible arm. The cameraman probably had one of those telephoto lenses, the ones that trumpeted out of the camera’s cubed rectangle, too long, disproportionate, exposing what the human eye couldn’t see.
At the sound of hydraulic doors Dorothy looked up. Her father came into the foyer eating a chocolate-coated ice cream in a cone. There was a moment, alone with his pleasure, where he didn’t register Dot, and she was struck mute, longing to leave him in peace, this happy cloud. Don’t look over. Then he did, and finished his mouthful. ‘Dottie. What are you doing here?’
Her palms buzzed as she showed him the copy of the form they had given her, a thin ghost paper, the collection company’s logo in a faint banner across the top, and at the bottom the tracing of her name. Aside from Dot’s Post Office bank account this was her first time signing an official document and the curves and loops looked like someone’s idea of a signature, not a