‘No.’ She kicked the door shut with a foot, pulled the trigger on the cleaning bottle and squirted vinegar all over the wall.
Their parents flew in from the States accompanied by Ruth, who despite having left her twin girls at home was definitely a mom, in her pale-pink polar fleece and easy-wash layered hair. Dorothy waited at the airport barricade amongst uniformed men holding name boards, as matted backpackers, men and women in business suits, stunned families and countless senior citizens ambled through the electronic doors, their faces expectant, uncertain. Her family came near the end of a large tour group, her mother and father disguised as old people holding hands, Ruth just behind with the teetering trolley. Frank wore the sashed camel trench coat and round tortoiseshell glasses of an Anglophile American. Lee’s pearl earrings looked real. Bless Ruth, she had a photo of her twins right there in her wallet, and Dorothy pored over it while her parents buckled themselves into the back seat, taking their time, older.
‘Gorgeous girls,’ she said, handing the photo back to Ruth.
‘They are.’ Ruth started to cry.
‘It’s OK,’ said Dorothy, patting her hand. ‘You’ll feel better when you see her. Eve’s going to be fine.’
As Dot drove them into town to shower and ‘freshen up’ at their hotel before the hospital, Lee murmured from the back seat in a fully American accent about the changes to the motorway, the new bridges, the buildings in the hazily approaching city that had never been there before. The rear-view mirror presented a slim rectangle of her swept-back ash-blonde hair, the sensitive indents at her temples more pronounced with age.
‘Oh look,’ she pointed at the new Sky Tower when they reached the city. ‘It’s like something from the future.’
Hospital quickly became ordinary, the place where their days happened. There was the institutionalised gravy smell, and the man with half a head and the kindness of every single person, even the friend who said ‘Boxing on’ each time they spoke, which made Dorothy want to punch her. The hierarchy in a corridor. People going to the shop in their pyjamas. ‘Slippery slope,’ Nathan finger-wagged, laughing at Dorothy when he saw what she had taken to wearing. ‘It’s a slippery slope once you start wandering the halls in your slippers. You’re not even a patient.’
And the peeling paint over the plaster walls in the hospital corridors, psoriasis on an industrial scale. Scurf tide in the shower. The male orderly who all night was trying to kill Evelyn, sending a signal to his murderous colleagues by the clicking of his pen. The one time Eve lost it, crying at Nathan and Dot, ‘Would you just go? Would you go, please, so that I can start waiting for you, so that I can start counting the fucking paint-drying hours until you come back?’ Toast on a tray. Sleeping in the afternoons, her head shaved and stapled, a cannula plug sticking out of her hand. Taking the anti-fitting pills, the steroids that made her paranoid. The move to a general ward, the visitors and flowers and boxes of home baking, Evelyn’s friends sitting on the end of the bed, women in their thirties cross-legged like schoolgirls still.
Across the café Dorothy saw her mother’s back, the age in the hump of her upper spine. She was perched on the end of a table that another family occupied, big kids eating burgers and parents with chips and soda, the paper on the chip bag soggy, streaked red with ketchup. ‘Hi, Mum,’ Dorothy said, and Lee startled. She folded the newspaper into her handbag, put away the pen.
‘How is she?’
‘Sleeping. Shall we go and sit over there?’
They moved to an empty table by the floor-length windows. A bird had gotten in and hopped along the wainscot, pecking at crumbs. ‘Where’s Dad?’
Lee shook her head. ‘Don’t ask.’
‘What does that mean? Where is he?’
A one-shouldered shrug. ‘Out somewhere.’
‘Do you not care?’
‘Of course I care.’ The words snapped out of her. She sighed, and regained control. ‘I just do not know where he is.’
Now Dorothy looked away, exasperated. ‘He should be here. Or he can always visit my kids again if he doesn’t like the hospital. Go and spend some time, get to know them a bit.’
‘I know, darling. And we will,’ Lee said, a bony hand patting her daughter’s wrist. ‘Of course we will, but we’re thinking about Eve right now.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ This was infuriating, that Lee had become frail and tremulous in direct