a better one and bring her father back from the dead. She stood on the kitchen doorstep and punched one hand into the corner of the pocket of her ex-boyfriend’s leather jacket, and with the other smoked a cigarette.
Most people were jammed in the front half of the pub, near the low stage. The band had been due to start an hour ago but the only action was the occasional puff of dry ice being sent from the wings to mingle with all the cigarette smoke and thicken the air, to make it visible so that the musicians wouldn’t have to emerge into transparency. Dorothy balanced the beers. Someone jostled her and liquid sloshed over her hands. She passed one to Daniel, restrained herself from kissing him even though she just wanted to kiss him all the, all the time.
‘Bears are thrust upon me,’ said Daniel, and he growled like he always did with that joke while he stared at the stage. He drank, and leaned away from his hip bone to rummage in the front pocket of his jeans for his lighter. Dot slanted her cigarette into the flame. She loved to watch his body, the way he managed pockets, jackets, basketballs, the things he touched. A couple of Dot’s friends waved from over near the bar but there was no way of getting through the crush. Dan’s flatmate was talking about that incredible sound system. He said something else and it was lost because the drummer walked on and then the rest of the band, and there was a surge of people who had been waiting outside in the smoking section to do this push when the band appeared and with bodies pressing into every side Dot’s feet lifted from the ground as the music began. It hit her in the breastbone – punched through the honeycombed tissue and split out from there, and she dispersed into the other bodies, radiating with the vibrating sound, lost in it and him.
A fierce orange light from the three-bar heater blazed by the pantry door; the soles of Evelyn’s sneakers smelled melty where her legs were stretched towards it. Frank came into the kitchen and washed white paint out of a thick wide brush into the sink, water running opaque beneath the spiky black bristles.
She put down her reading. ‘When are the owners coming back?’
‘Oh, another couple of months yet.’
‘Do you know where you’re going to go then?’
‘Your mother and I have been talking again.’
‘Really? Oh, that’s great.’ She half rose to hug her father but he knocked the brush on the side of the sink and laid it on the stainless-steel bench, where a small white puddle formed around it.
‘Come and see the orchard,’ he said. ‘Before it gets dark.’
Through the kitchen window was a steeliness to the sky she hadn’t noticed happening.
Frank led the way out the front of the house and past an empty flowerbed, a large oval of rich brown soil, to a wooden stile. He was a dark figure ahead, halfway into the new field. On the other side of the fence the dog trotted up and bumped into Evelyn, wagging his tail. She patted his flank. He clambered the stile after her. The wind picked up now they were away from the shelter of the house. Her father’s path was a bit like a sidewinder’s as he walked. She wondered when he’d last eaten; what he’d had to drink. The light was dropping quickly and she called out, ‘How far is it?’
Frank tottered backwards as though her voice was a lasso. ‘Not far.’
They walked along the side of a saggy wire fence and he gestured behind them. ‘Deer over there. And they’re outside the irrigation scheme. But there’s talk of a drought.’ He spoke airily, as though the problems of nature were not his.
‘I’d like to see a deer.’
‘Who’d you break up with?’ he asked.
‘Just a guy. It’s OK.’
‘Has Dorothy got a boyfriend yet?’
‘No. She says she’s too busy.’
‘Your mother and I were married at your age. You can’t muck around.’
‘The florist’s moving. I’m going to look for a new flat, closer. With a couple of friends.’
‘How’s your brother, how’s Michael?’
‘All right. Don’t know. He’s all like, hangs out with his friends. Do the others know about you and Mum?’ Talking about it gave her a false-hope feeling, one she wanted to back off from, as though she was repeating somebody else’s lie.
‘No rush,’ he said. ‘Best to wait.’ He started singing an American folk