‘You all right, miss?’ one of the big men directed at Dorothy, and when she said, ‘Yes. Thanks. Sorry,’ they moseyed back to their spots either side of the Irish tavern doors, where bass thumped beneath people shouting to be heard.
Daniel was still, watching them, a couple of fingers now up to his gums as though holding onto something. ‘Ha,’ he said, and wheezed. A finger came away bloody and he wiped it on his jeans. He shook his head at Dorothy. She moved towards him but his face made her stop. She held out the blue-and-grey plastic inhaler from her bag and said, ‘Do you need this?’
‘No.’
‘Why the fuck,’ she said to Andrew.
‘Sorry,’ he said. He kicked the wall and his foot skidded on the tiles. A gritted-teeth roar came from him and he walked off down the street saying, ‘All right, I get it. All right.’
‘Anger management,’ said Daniel, and Dorothy said, ‘Don’t,’ and after she had half run, half walked down the road after Andrew, Daniel raised his arms priestlike to Michael and said, ‘That guy is a master of the fucking obvious.’
Outside her family house, in the passenger seat of Andrew’s spray-painted car, Dorothy sat with an arm over her head like a bird’s wing, ducked down under the dash. That hard rolling sound was Michael wheeling the rubbish bin back to its spot by the front door. He hadn’t seen them. It had to be in and out, get the last of her old stuff and leave. When Lee heard about the fight she rang up to say she was ‘very disappointed in Andrew’. It was too late. Dot had chosen. They’d walked all the way home together after the Chinese restaurant and he’d asked her please don’t see that guy any more. She peered out, slowly straightening up as her brother double-checked that the front door was locked and headed down the street, away from the car, past the bus stop, to disappear round the corner.
‘He’s gone,’ said Andrew, and he opened his car door and stepped one leg onto the pavement. He held his palm out and Dorothy put her small silver house key in his hand. He entered the house. She exhaled, as nervous as if he were breaking in. Fluffy yellow pollen floated thickly from the plane tree. Dorothy got out and leaned against the car. Sunlight flared off the windowpane of her bedroom upstairs then vanished as Andrew lifted the sash and threw a bundle of her old clothes onto the pavement. Half of them would be too small now that her body was changing. She gathered the things and threw them across the back seat. A bra stuck in the hedge; Dorothy tore out a small branch as she yanked it free. Andrew was the one up there helping her get out and the baby was inside her and Daniel wouldn’t be in the house anyway, he didn’t live there any more, nor did Evelyn, nor did she. The owner, Osborne, was selling it. The estate agent’s sign showed a fish-eye photograph of the front room that made it look larger than it was, and a shot of the house from across the road at night-time, every light behind the plane tree blazing with comfort.
Instinct made her duck as a dark shape fell from the window – a box that bounced and shed its contents over the small front yard – old schoolbooks and childhood stuff – Daniel’s exercise books, the kid’s microscope Michael had saved up for – ‘No,’ Dorothy called, but now Michael’s guitar landed on the end of its neck, the body thwanging on the ground. ‘No,’ she shouted. She threw herself into the driver’s seat and leaned on the horn. In the silence that followed, the upstairs window closed. Papers and parts of toys had scattered everywhere and Dorothy collected them, hugged them to her, dropped them in the squashed cardboard box, pushed it onto her pile of clothes inside the car. In the driver’s seat she pulled the seat belt across and stepped on the clutch and turned the key, shaking.
Andrew appeared by the car window. A moment passed in which the two of them watched each other through the glass. She was afraid of him. And then he was the one who looked frightened. Slowly she released the gearstick into neutral and unwound the window.
‘Oh my god,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’ He knelt