water, fanning the weighty liquid with her fingers. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry about the whole Joy Pad thing.’
‘That’s OK.’ Evelyn crinkled a smile, water in her eyelashes. ‘We’re all grown-ups here.’
She pushed off and then there were the soft sounds of her moving through the water, Andrew talking nonsense to the baby, Nathan and Louisa playing a game passing leaves back and forth like money. Maybe Eve was right about Nathan’s anger. Everybody knew someone who’d been in the room you never wanted to go into. Whether it was cancer or what, there was a room, and it was bad enough but it was nowhere near as bad as the room you didn’t come out of. The room they took the families into, to tell them the news. There was an actual door, she’d seen it. Painted grey, with the words FAMILY ROOM in metal letters by the handle.
Something heavy landed on Dorothy’s back, pressing her breasts painfully into the ground. Her daughter. Grace’s knees were in her shoulders, her forearms around Dot’s throat, choking her mother’s windpipe. Dot rolled to the side but the girl clung on tight. ‘Mummy, Mummy,’ she rasped in her kitten voice.
Pulling back onto her haunches, scraping her already-scraped knees, Dot swung Grace round into her arms and held her there. ‘Baby,’ she said, and Grace smiled up at her, gaps between her square little teeth, her face so open, needing nothing but love. ‘You’re my mummy,’ Grace said.
Together on the ground beside the pool they rocked back and forth. Grace’s arms were short and squeezy in Dorothy’s brown, bevelled grown-up’s arms. From the other side of the pool Louisa and Nathan waved, and though Dot couldn’t focus that far, in her mind there were the blue eyes of her sister’s child, bluer than the sky, or the pool, or the Mexican drinking glasses on the mosaic table, just watching them calmly.
‘Baby girl, baby girl.’ Dorothy held Grace and caressed her hot cheek, her damp hair.
8. Stories
The text on the questionnaire swam and blurred as Evelyn looked at it, or at the air that hovered above it. She’d thought the run-through with the press officer’s secretary, the woman who would be her immediate boss, had covered everything. It wasn’t much of a job, for god’s sake. Obediently she’d sat by the desk waiting for the interview and watched the door handle turning, the door opening a crack. In the corridor the secretary conducted a loud, careless conversation with a colleague – ‘I’m recruiting the phoners, you wouldn’t believe how many people want to do it, such an exciting job, not.’ Evelyn thought, then, of the photocopied paper notices that had begun to appear nailed to trees and lamp posts in her neighbourhood advertising jobs for housewives, work from home, earn $30 per hour, surely a figure of complete bullshit. Who rang those numbers? Data entry, cold calling, persuading people to be surveyed. Her sister would do it, but Dorothy was out of her gourd on oestrogen, progesterone, always with the baby at her breast or another one on the way.
The secretary had come in sipping coffee from a polystyrene cup, then biffed it in the wastepaper basket, the rim stained with her lipstick, the bitter smell drifting over, making Evelyn’s mouth water. She’d folded her hands in her lap and smiled at the woman, jumped through the hoops.
And then this arrived in the mail a week later and required her signature before the job could be formally offered. The document ran to seven pages. There was new stuff here.
‘How’re your taxes?’ the secretary had asked, and Evelyn laughed. Nathan was an accountant. He did TV producers, musicians, people who paid at the last possible minute, and he was not grand enough that he could fiddle things. For all his bad Hawaiian shirts he wouldn’t dream of filing a late return or failing to include every taxable penny paid to his assistant.
‘And this gap in your employment history?’
Explained of course by Louisa, now at school, enabling this model mother, this parent helper, yes, the secretary could see the list of relevant although unpaid volunteer experience, to return, usefully, to the workforce. ‘I used to be a florist.’
‘And what is it about the candidate that makes you want to serve him?’
Evelyn had prepared for this. She wanted to live in a world – no, world was too loose, too New Age – she wanted to live in a society where the small had as much weight