appetite, where what she wanted was what she wanted. The children had grown used to it. It was quite good being a fat mum. They liked her softness, the cuddles. She didn’t spend hours walking or doing Pilates or running nowhere on a treadmill. They helped with the biscuits and the cakes. Fingers stroking the bars of the electric mixer, licking grainy raw dough.
She offered the young man at the kitchen table a slice of Madeira cake, which he declined. ‘No thank you. I’m allergic to gluten.’
‘An apple? Mandarin?’ Dot pushed the fruit bowl towards him.
‘What sort of car do you own?’ he asked.
‘A metallic salmon people mover.’
‘Does it run well?’
‘It’s ugly,’ she said. ‘But I don’t drive it. Everything I need to do is close by.’ She didn’t say, I don’t leave the house without the aid of lorazepam, so not a lot of operating heavy machinery.
‘That’s nice.’
‘Which street are you in?’
‘Oh, I don’t live around here.’ He named a suburb she had vaguely heard of, which might have been one of the grotty old suburbs, rebranded by estate agents. Pylon Valley, Abattoir View.
‘But you work for this mechanic?’
‘It’s freelance. We generate contracts for local businesses.’ He laughed. ‘I came here a few weeks ago to see if I could interest you in some tree pruning but there was nobody home.’
‘Really? I wonder where we were.’ Dot dug her thumbnail into a mandarin, the bubble-like pores popping, limonene spritzing invisibly over her hand. ‘We have a plum tree that needs to be crowned.’
‘Yes, I saw it from the road. But I don’t work for the tree surgeon any more.’
The word surgeon sat on the table between them like a fish. He ate his mandarin, but the room was too quiet, and Dot was afraid she was going to hear him swallow, so she stood and said, ‘I’m just going to check on my baby. She’s sleeping.’
Internal motes floated across her field of vision as she walked out of the room, feeling the drop in blood pressure. She wasn’t going back to therapy because there was only so much therapy she could handle. That was why Andrew was pissed off. The realisation made her smile, and then she felt regretful, and told herself she must make more of an effort. She should stitch that on a handkerchief. Pull your fucking socks up.
She leaned over the cot sides to lift the girl. With the first baby, Dorothy had been small enough to fit inside the cot too, to curl up and comfort Grace when she wouldn’t stop crying, and then she got bigger and bigger and bigger until now so much of herself pressed against the cot sides while she leaned down that its bars creaked and scraped against the wall. A little rubbed line was appearing in the paint. When Hannah moved into a bed and they dismantled the cot for the last time and tried to sell it online they would have to paint over that rub mark. Or perhaps by then the cot would have had it and they would just leave it out for the inorganic rubbish collection, or take it to the tip. The baby was still asleep, undisturbed even by being lifted, and she was breathing. There was a timetable, a schedule, by which everything was meant to happen but now it seemed a good idea to lower her back onto the blankets and go and ask the salesman if he was ready to leave. In this room you couldn’t hear the rain. As she slowly removed her hands from under the baby, Dot felt a creeping up her back. It was wrong to have this stranger in the house.
The man had taken off his hat. It sat on the table, a flat half-oval. Dorothy stared at his head, where the hair grew short and tufty out of a rectangular shaved patch. Staples held the seam of a surgery scar together.
He grabbed at the hat and went to pull it back on. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to. Sorry, I know it’s very warm in here.’ She reached the tin of chocolate chip cookies down from the top shelf, pausing to lean a wrist against the shelf, her head on her arm, tears hot in her eyes. ‘Condensed milk and brown sugar,’ she told the man, her voice wobbling and jolly, and sat back down.
‘Thank you. But I won’t have one.’
‘Of course. The gluten thing.’ She bit one and chewed.