Evelyn with bizarre energy, and she flung her arms to the sky as if to jump forward in time.
Dot sat up and made a cushion for the baby out of the padded sling, unclipped her bra and began to feed her. Thank god.
Eve laughed. ‘You look like a gypsy.’ She drew a camera from her overstuffed daypack and snapped a picture of Dorothy as she squinted up at her, mouth open, nose wrinkled, before understanding that her sister wasn’t going to photograph the view.
The baby wouldn’t sleep; there were mosquitoes in the room and Dot held her under a square of muslin while Eve grated carrots for the salad. The men came in from shooting wild goat and sat on the grass untying their muddy boots. Later, back in Auckland, an envelope would arrive from Nathan containing photos of them both on quad bikes with brown hairy carcasses, hides intact but split and hollowed dark in the middle, roped on board. For now the meat hung in the local farmer’s cool store; the cabin did not have enough refrigeration. Dorothy kissed Andrew.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he said.
‘I’m studying your face for signs of blood lust.’
He smiled sheepishly and shrugged. ‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’ She kissed him again. ‘We should – you know. Later. I’m going to go and check on Grace.’ After all the day’s anger the girl lay stonelike in bed, immobile as her mother leaned closer and closer, as she reached a finger to stroke her cheek – was it cold? too cold? Could that pillow fall on her?
Dot leaned in the doorway by the pool, the baby hot against her neck, Amy’s long body so sweet in the rabbit suit, her legs dangling bare and warm from the dry, light nappy.
‘. . . like what,’ Andrew was saying, ‘like that’s because you’re just looking for an end, for an end to your single life. I don’t know, married, it’s one way of living.’
Nathan laughed.
‘I mean, as soon as you have a wife and a kid this whole world opens up. Sexy airhead mothers. Pre-school teachers, nurses.’ The evening light was going, the pool spread darkly in front of him. Soon Dot would light the outdoor candles, but not yet. ‘The midwife that delivered Amy gave me her number. How sick is that!’
Dorothy laid the sleeping baby down in her travel cot and went to join the others playing drunk touch-rugby by the pool. Andrew tackled her to the ground and Nathan leapt on the grass next to them both and wrestled the ball out of her arms, banging her breast with his elbow. It burned. She kicked out at him and he ducked away and Dot charged up and went in low and pushed Andrew into the pool, roaring. He crashed into the water and came up coughing, laughing, and called out, ‘Watch it or I’ll root you with my Joy Pad.’ The greeny dark night spread flat, a sheet held taut by two people. Andrew disappeared under the surface again in an ostentatious, teenage-boy plunge. Bubbles rose. Dot turned around, taking a few moments to get her balance and see Evelyn in the night, where she was, she and Nathan hanging in space, their feet just touching the ground.
‘That’s great,’ Evelyn said to Dot, or Nathan said to Evelyn. Dot was confused. Soon after that Eve and Nathan went inside. Dot looked down at the oily surface of the pool, the mossy rocks, and imagined engineering a moment with her sister as she rinsed the dishes, finding the right words to say to brush away the indiscretion. But when she followed them inside the cabin was empty and all the doors off the living room were closed. Andrew came to bed smelling of beer and waterweeds, leaving the sheets damp wherever he turned over.
Early in the morning Dorothy sat with her legs in the pool, kicking slowly, her body the same temperature as the water, walking in space. The cabin was quiet and glowed in the lemony light that the sun cast over the garden, the outdoor tables and chairs, the slippery rocks. Over towards the edge of the property, silhouetted eucalypts stretched dark explosions of leaves into the sky. She’d pumped off the milk that might have gotten laced with wine, though if Amy had drunk it maybe she would have slept better. Thinking of the baby made her afraid of everything that could go wrong. She knew in her heart it must have