Lou were in the back seats and Dot looked over at him from the passenger’s side and thought oh yes, that would be right. He was hunched over the steering wheel, frowning, and the skin of his face had lined and thickened, and the hair was maybe more dry or thinner or something but the head, the shape of the head was the same.
Suddenly the traffic in front of them stalled and he nearly drove into the back of another car. The bend in the road that they inched around finally revealed a lane closed, police cars, an ambulance, the puckered metal of a wreck.
‘Don’t look, darlings.’
Of course, they did. There was a medical sheet over a stretcher on the side of the road, but you couldn’t tell if anyone was under it.
At the public baths, the sounds of shouting and water sloshing against the pool’s sides ricocheted through the hangar-like space. Holding Hannah’s little hand, Dot stepped down from the raked benches and through steamy air to the soft, faintly gelatinous water that puddled over the top metal step down into the cordoned-off recreational pool. Tepid at first, the water cooled as more of her body was immersed, and she floated her daughter through to a gap in the playing children and drew her in towards her, their skin touching under the water, slippery cold and warm at the same time. She held Hannah by the wrists and whooshed her in a semicircle back and forth, then supported her back while she kicked with shonky glee, her eyelashes spiky and wet.
‘Evelyn!’ The name came from the general mass of bodies in the water and might have been just a random shout if it hadn’t happened again, more clearly, and a woman broke through a pair of dunking pubescent boys and space-walked towards Dot. ‘Evelyn Forrest! Oh my god. Is this your little girl? She’s so cute!’
‘I’m Dorothy, Eve’s sister. This is Hannah. Say hello, Hannah.’
‘I can hold my breath. Watch this.’ The girl puffed her cheeks out and plunged her face beneath the water.
‘Oh you’re Dorothy, of course you are. You’re not twins, are you?’
Dot hitched up the straps of her swimsuit. ‘How are you?’ Hannah came up gasping. ‘Well done, darling.’
‘Really well.’ The woman waved an arm towards the big pool. ‘My boys are huge now, they’re in squad practice, for my sins. Five a.m. every day! They love it but talk about nearly get a divorce. How old’s your girl?’
‘How old are you, Hannah?’
‘I’m five. But I’m short for my age.’
‘She’s three.’
‘Look at those eyes, she’s so like you. Freaky. Have you got any others?’ She craned her neck.
‘At school. Seven, eleven and thirteen.’
‘Four, wow. You don’t look it.’
‘I’ve been on a diet for about two years.’
‘Well they wreck our bodies. I miss babies, I adore babies, but no more.’ She made a scissoring gesture with her fingers. ‘No. Way. O. Ver. Hey so the reunion! Did you get the email?’
‘No, I . . .’ Hannah pulled at the neck of Dorothy’s swimsuit and Dorothy moved her hand away. ‘No, darling.’
‘I can see your boobies.’
‘Stop it.’
The woman was still talking. ‘. . . can you believe we’re so frigging old? You’ve got to come, I’ll flick you the thing, we’re all going.’
‘Really?’
‘God yes, if you don’t go everyone knows it’s because your life is shit.’
‘How old are your boys?’
‘She said the S word,’ said Hannah.
‘Thirteen and fourteen. Monsters. I mean, we were fourteen! Oh my god the laundry I have to do. The smells. The secretions. I look at them sometimes and think a girl is going to kiss you?’ She throttled herself with one hand and leaned back until she had fully sunk then came up choking for real, spluttering, and Dorothy pounded her between the shoulder blades till she stopped. ‘God knows what I just swallowed. Such an egg. Sorry.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘No more sight gags. So. Are you in the book? I’m going to stalk you. We need all the moral support we can get.’
She was either the Tollerton girl or Amanda Marshall. One of them went out with Peter Smythe and the other one went out with Paul Baxter. Peter could do one-arm push-ups for fifteen reps and Paul was the school beer pong king. The woman in the pool now looked like the woman who was either the Tollerton’s or Amanda’s mother, who had worked part-time as a guidance counsellor and who specialised in passing out sanitary pads the size of light aircraft.