had to be so cool about the record shop he had worked in and the squat he’d lived in with this and that band and the frequent use of the adjectives underground and independent before anyone’s job title so that she had already decided to refer to his closest friend, some heroin-addicted PhD candidate, as Underground Pat. Now he made allusions to a job on a cargo ship leaving for South America, but for all that he clearly liked saying the place names he hadn’t decided. Paranaguá. Montevideo. Zárate.
‘I don’t know the date.’
‘You’ll be the date. All those sailors. They’d love you.’
They sat on the wall outside the library. Daniel’s satchel strap cut a thick diagonal across his body. He dug a ready-rolled cigarette from the pocket of his jacket. Tiny brown curls of tobacco dangled from the end of the cigarette paper and when touched by the flame from his match they illuminated bright orange and disappeared. He inhaled, and exhaled. She held her fingers out for a puff.
‘You shouldn’t be smoking,’ he said.
‘Just one.’
‘Why’d you do it, Dottie?’ The darkness in his eyes really did seem to flicker – coal, jet, a hot shiny chestnut.
Dorothy passed the cigarette back to him and their hands touched momentarily. ‘Which part?’
He looked at passers-by from under his brows. ‘Karate boy.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Sorry. He’s a good guy.’
‘Yeah, he is. Anyway, what were you doing? You just . . . went away.’ The memory of those months after he’d gone made her pity her former self, a twenty-one-year-old girl who was small in Dot’s mind as though she’d been photocopied on a reduction setting, when really it was the same body she inhabited now, four years on, no different in size. The bricks were damp. She slid off, the edge of the wall scraping against her thighs, and picked at the mossy bits with a thumbnail. The sun shone through stacked, strangely cornered dark clouds, and down the street an empty parking space glittered with window glass, like shattered mentholated sweets.
‘It was horrible,’ she said. ‘When you left.’
‘Dottie.’ He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t really handle it.’
‘No.’
Their knees were touching. She felt the air between them densely electric. It sent her moral compass on the spin, tocking lazily, directionlessly around as though she would do anything, he only had to say.
Daniel waved at someone down the road and the young man ambled towards them, curly hair and stone-washed jeans, and they raised chins at each other and started talking about the support act for the gig that was on that night. It was a skill she had noted since Daniel’s return, that he could pick up with people right where he left off. Dorothy bit into the apple that thank god was in her bag because she was constantly hungry and accidentally dribbled a little bit of juice on her T-shirt, and the boys kept talking and the guilty burn of the cigarette still tingled in her mouth.
Her parents kept laughing, like they just couldn’t believe it. Frank would shake his head and say how proud he was and then he’d set himself off again.
‘But you’re a baby.’
‘I’m twenty-five.’
She blamed Michael. Home still at nearly thirty, he had warped their expectations. Dorothy sat between him and their mother on the reunited family sofa, Andrew across the room on a kitchen chair. The doorbell rang and Ruth let Andrew’s parents in, each of them with new partners, awkwardly joking from their collision on the doorstep. Dot greeted them and went to sit with Andrew because it was hard for him, everyone in the same room, his defensive father and the sullen policewoman stepmother, his mother overcompensating, her second husband oblivious, his mind on a hiking track somewhere, filled with tussock. ‘Lovely,’ said Andrew’s mother. ‘So what time is our booking at Chang’s?’
‘It’s not Japanese, is it? I don’t like Japanese food,’ said the stepmother, staring at the peace-sign badge on Dorothy’s cardigan. ‘What is that?’
‘She’s allergic to fish.’
‘It’s Chinese. Andrew,’ said his mother, ‘are you still vegetarian?’
‘Yes.’
‘A vegetarian!’ said the stepmother. ‘Whatever happened to a good steak?’
‘Arrest me,’ Andrew whispered in Dot’s ear, and she whispered back, ‘Fifteen to life.’
His mother shrugged and laughed around the room. ‘And yet he’s so tall!’
‘Listen, darling,’ Lee said to Dot as the Lazy Susan spun clockwise, moving the bowls of pak choi and flecky chilli sauce and pale, glistening chicken around, ‘let’s invite some of the Americans.’ Frank was negotiating a possible return to the States. Someone remote