‘No. A little bit. I just went through a break-up.’
He patted her knee. ‘You’ll live.’
‘Woo hoo,’ she hooted at a truck full of live sheep as they overtook it.
They were quickly on a country road, muzzy hills in the distance the only relief from the flatness of the floodplain. Frank drove down the middle of the narrow road, getting faster and faster. He took a bend at speed and she grabbed the handle above the window and braced her other hand above the glove box. She turned to check on the dog, who was whining, and the car swung again. ‘Dad. You’re driving too fast.’
The road crossed a river, tumbling silvery grey beneath them. A man in waders was planted downstream to the left and she put a palm to the car window, wanted to stop, talk to him, pass time there with the sand flies and the river stones, the khaki box with compartments, coloured feathers, hooks. The road rushed on, lined with poplars feathering the sky, and the world was pale, grey and white and green. The speed on this stretch dizzied her eyes.
Evelyn’s body lifted from the seat as they bounced along the unsealed drive, and when the car reeled into its spot outside an old building she took a second of stillness to catch up with herself. The dog leaped from the car and disappeared round the side of the house, a flash of black.
‘So this is it.’
The house was made of wooden weatherboards and the corrugated-iron roof bowed in the middle. The no-colour paint on the windowsills and door frame was crackled, and as soon as she stepped inside there was a grapey, rotten smell that got stronger as she followed her father to the kitchen.
‘Have you had lunch?’ He boiled the scuffed white plastic kettle. She told him about Kimiko and the florist shop, about the volleyball team. The tea was strong with a rainbow film floating on the surface. The phone rang and Frank went to another room to answer.
Everything in the bathroom, next to the kitchen, was freezing: the toilet seat, the tap that left a rusting smudge on her hands, the clean-tasting water. When she returned to the kitchen her father was still not back. Evelyn looked in the cupboard for biscuits and a smudgy grey meal moth flew out, into her face. There were three opened packets of biscuits, one of them mouldy and the other two soft. She had a bowel-deep urge to get into the borrowed car and drive away, but instead did what was needed: in the bottom of the cupboard she found a large brown rubbish bag, propped it open and shook the weevil-infested flour and the clumpy bran flakes into it, and dropped two half-empty jars of crusted peanut butter and one of crystallised honey on top of the pile.
Eve turned the radio on but the battery was dead. She pulled out the kitchen drawer to look for new ones, pushing aside the battens of string and pricking a finger on a drawing pin. Her father’s name registered before she really read it – yes – his full name, Frank Michael Forrest – and she pulled the envelope from the drawer. Two more lay beneath it, and all were addressed to her father at Lee’s house, bearing the Ministry of Justice insignia in the top left corner. They had been redirected in her mother’s handwriting, and remained unopened. Evelyn rifled through the rest of the drawer. Nothing else. She stood there holding the envelopes, then shoved them deep in the drawer, covering them with an old phone bill and a couple of Christmas cards decorated with glued glitter that was sandpapery to the touch.
‘You need batteries,’ Evelyn said when her father came back. ‘We’re going to the supermarket.’
‘I’ve just been.’ He opened the fridge and gestured at flat cardboard boxes of pizza, a string bag of green apples and new bottles of milk, the silver-foil tops not yet opened.
‘You’ve got meal moths.’
‘Oh.’ He looked perplexed. ‘What are they?’
She would clear out the cupboards and vacuum in the corners and wipe down all the boxes. She would find enough fresh food to make something hearty for dinner, and light the fire and pick flowers for the table and in the morning would sand down the windowsills and paint them and clean the windows and re-roof the house and mow the lawns and burn this house down and build