Frank scanned the paper and took bites of ice cream. She waited. ‘Driving fines? Goddamn it, Michael,’ her father said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Michael didn’t take the car. It was me.’
Again that feeling, the way he looked at her, as though she’d only just materialised in front of him. At last Frank sat down. She put the newspaper on the floor between them; her fingers felt dirty with a sense of whoever had touched it before. For a while, she told her father, a couple of years ago, when she was fifteen, she used to take the car at night. She didn’t mention Daniel. Now her face burned and the clog in her throat was hard to talk over as she apologised.
‘Is Evelyn in on all this too?’
An elderly couple entered the foyer, one stick between them, and crossed the perilous carpet to the ticket desk.
‘She never came. She doesn’t know about it. Dad –’
‘Look, I’m just catching up.’
‘I’ll leave teachers’ college. I’ll work full-time and pay you back.’
‘Right,’ he said. His voice was dry, a bit splintery. ‘You’d better leave this with me.’ He spoke to the sheet of paper. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I’ll take care of this now.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ The more she apologised, the worse she felt.
‘Don’t worry. It’s more than those fines,’ he said. ‘There’s been – we haven’t been as careful as we could.’ He rubbed a flat hand over his mouth. Don’t cry. ‘It’s more than that.’
‘Are we going to be OK?’ Would their things be taken? Could they pay the rent? Where would they go? Not possible to ask out loud.
‘Dottie,’ her father said. ‘We’re going to be great. Things are great. Sure we have some obligations but everyone –’ In the middle of his sentence the tannoy bonged and the usher announced that the feature would begin in one minute. As though summoned in a dream he stood and wiped his ice-cream hand on his suit jacket. ‘I’ll sort them out. Don’t worry about it.’
‘Thanks, Dad,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ She kissed the side of his head, the sun-spotted skin over his temple where the hair was receding. She felt the need for more words from him but he was already moving through the foyer, towards the doors opened onto the dark screening room. He waved her away with the back of a hand and nodded graciously – not a care in the world – to the usher who now stood at the cinema entrance, his patient blue arm held out for Frank’s ticket.
In a stationery shop down the road she leafed through the women’s magazines, searching out advice columns. There was an advertisement for bedding that used the word Manchester. Daniel would like that. Creepy language was their joke after visiting his mother in her unit: doily, shunt, fecund. She could slide a shuddery sort of word into every exchange. Martin’s recovering from surgery but he’s going to need a bag. Gina’s youngest has phlegm on the lung. Cut a section from his bowel. Ganglia. Aorta. My gout. Dorothy had sat on the flat couch next to Daniel, ignoring the needling claws of the cat that had colonised her lap, wanting so much for his mother to like her.
None of the agony aunts mentioned money, the lack of it, the plunging of one’s family into the poorhouse, what to do if your mother was enraged and your father was a wastrel, how to leave home without breaking your older sister’s heart, how to stop your sister from stealing everything, how not to tell her about you and Daniel even though it was probably perfectly bloody obvious to everyone, if they were looking, which they maybe were not because their own lives were full too of the one foot in front of the other, the confusion about how best to proceed. Nothing about brothers, mental health of, or younger sisters, possible alien host factor, or why Marc Bolan had to die or why there were so many born-again Christians at Teachers’ College or whether she would go to jail or what to do next. If she changed the names there would likely be an opinion on whether [Daniel] truly loved [her], but it would depend on the magazine, whether he was her soulmate or just using her for sex.
They were all at dinner for the first time in weeks. Dorothy waited for what her father might do. The grilled-cheese roll was making her feel sick; she passed it to Daniel,