was wine instead of blood in her veins. In breathing silence they listened for the sound of Maya going back downstairs but the carpet muffled any footsteps. Monique thrust her head forward and kissed Dorothy on the mouth, and she ducked away, Monique’s lips smearing her chin, and shook her head. ‘Don’t.’
‘OK.’ Monique thumbed the lipstick off Dorothy’s face.
After a few seconds Dot opened the door a crack and they darted down the empty hallway to the stairwell landing, where they paused for breath. ‘I have soft toys on my bed,’ she said. ‘I used to.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Monique. She scowled in the landing mirror. ‘You were the weird shit Blu-Tacked above the desk type.’
‘Really? Can you tell?’ Dorothy checked her reflection for lipstick remains.
‘Oh sure. I’ve decorated your fifteen-year-old bedroom a million times over and I know all about it girl, I can tell you those stains never come off the wall, you’ve got to completely repaper.’
‘You can look at me now and tell?’
‘Come on, you love it. Your little symbols carved in the wardrobe door with a compass.’
Dot leaned over the banisters. People stood in the hallway below, talking. She waved to a girl from one of her classes. ‘God, she’s a cosmetic surgeon now. I’ve done nothing with my life but have children,’ she said to Monique.
‘You’re one of those women, your husband only has to look at you, right? We’re not going to have kids. Ian could, still, but oh dear, I won’t say it! Let’s get you a drink.’
Dot sat next to Ian Abernethy and introduced herself. He nodded and smiled and said ‘Yes’ when she offered him a sip of her wine. She held the glass up to his lips and dabbed at the edges of his mouth with a paper napkin after he sipped. The song that came on made her heart beat faster. There was music that for years had been out of bounds because of its time-machine properties, its ability to land her in a place from before. That kitchen with the paint samples brushed on the walls, Donald in his bouncer on the table. Her parents’ front room, lying behind the sofa with the thickly lined curtains pulled, the seared smell of cold ash. Driving through a landscape of low scrub, a bottle of Coke between her thighs, a pack of cigarettes on the passenger seat, the element-orange glow of the cigarette lighter after it popped from the control panel, the sky behind clouds in thin towers. In front of them some people were shouting and jigging, and others including Monique were properly dancing, and the music was too loud to talk. Ian said something and Dorothy pointed at her ear and shook her head. He pushed his head forward towards the dancing people. She leant over close to him and spoke into his ear. ‘You think I should dance?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wow, Ian, you smell amazing,’ she said. ‘I could drown in that smell, I could just spend all night smelling you, what is that stuff?’
He smiled and shook his head. She sniffed his neck. ‘That is incredible. OK. I’m going to dance.’
He took another sip of wine and she left the glass balanced around the corner of the sofa behind Ian’s unmoving feet. Dorothy had just started dancing when the music stopped and Amanda Marshall clapped her hands and shouted, ‘So are we going to this thing or what?’
‘What,’ shouted a boy who had become a man with a red face and a solid, protruding butt, roundly muscled in beige cotton trousers. He was wearing hard shoes and had once cried when he missed a penalty kick at the inter-school final.
‘He dashed the tears from his face,’ Dorothy said to Ian. She was sitting next to him again. The energy was gathering, and Daniel wasn’t here. He had to come. He had to. Around them people were on the move, placing wine glasses on Maya’s low, generous windowsills and between the vases of papery poppies on the table. Women bent and picked up handbags and someone inched into the room hidden behind a giant armful of coats, which the guests extracted one by one.
Maya was in the kitchen, holding plates streaked with hummus and baba ganoush under the running tap. The tap sprayed out softly as though there was a shower nozzle over it. Dorothy bent down to look. There was a shower nozzle, and the tap itself was on a bendy stainless-steel concertina-like tube so it could be moved around. Maya