past boy-faces floated somewhere beneath the surface of their current faces. He finished saying something then looked around the room. All the wine in her glass disappeared down Dorothy’s throat and she swallowed a lurch of joy. Mandy Marshall and the now-Rogerson girl danced over and Mandy squeezed Dot’s waist and shimmied up and down. To now-Rogerson she said, ‘Remember Dorothy? Freak or unique?’ She leaned right in. ‘You were rocking that swimsuit at the pool!’ Her breath was a mist of vodka. ‘Have you had any work?’
‘No.’
‘I know someone. Comes to your living room.’ She pulled at the skin of her temples so that her face went taut.
Now-Rogerson said, ‘Really? Call me next time. John’s given me the all-clear.’
‘Just a minute,’ Dorothy said. ‘I’ve got to find the loo.’
As she left them, now-Rogerson said, ‘Did she even go to our school? I don’t remember her at all.’
‘Remember the Forrest girls?’
‘There were more than one?’
Danny was in the queue when she came out of the toilets. The lifeless smell of drains mingled with the mothball scent of the chemical blue plugs they used in the bottom of the urinals. ‘So I saw you at the funeral,’ he said.
‘I know.’ He had left straight after the pall-bearers slid Eve’s coffin into the hearse that was to take her to the crematorium. The image that stayed in Dot’s mind was of the back of the car, the brake light that glowed red on the rear windscreen when the engine started. Later she had scanned the mourners, an arm around Lou’s shoulder, wanting to introduce her to Daniel, certain that this was important. But he wasn’t there.
Dan was openly staring. ‘You’ve got like, a billion kids.’
‘Yeah.’ Guilt twanged in her, but she didn’t know if letting his flippancy pass was a betrayal of her children or a protection. ‘You?’
He shook his head. ‘Nope. How’s Andrew?’
‘He’s good. Busy.’
‘How’s Nathan?’
‘He’s all right, he’s OK, yeah. Doing well.’ A muscle in Dot’s upper arm started twitching and she held onto it, felt the jumping tic beneath her hand. ‘Are you . . . with anyone?’
‘I was fucked up that day. I shouldn’t have left early. I should have talked to you, talked to your parents.’
‘God, Daniel, I hated that we lost touch.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I mean, what happened?’ Probably he was sober, this close to recovery, and the thought made her woozier, drunk.
‘Dottie, I never properly made amends.’
She shook her head. ‘For what?’
‘Well, you know. All of it. My sort of vanishing. And then Eve.’ He ducked his head to the left, to the right. ‘Maybe we should talk about this somewhere else.’
‘You don’t have to tell me about that. I’d rather you didn’t.’ She had taken his denim jacket to a fundraising fair for the girls’ hockey club, her stall with the clothes rack and boxes of old children’s books and vinyl, and sold it to one of the hockey dads for next to nothing and watched him walk away with it on, and then seen him wear it at Saturday games for ages afterwards until she no longer thought hey, that’s Daniel’s jacket when they were talking. He’d bought it, and wore it so often, she guessed, because they had a thing going on between them, a flirtation, and him in Daniel’s jacket was a part of that she could never explain. After a while, prolonged exposure, an embarrassed dance at the prize-giving, the strange sexual energy had evaporated and they were just people in the same community again, without the heat.
‘I didn’t want to hang around because. It was a time for her and Nathan. And family. You guys together.’
‘You are our family,’ Dot said.
‘I know, but.’ Daniel shrugged.
Don’t shrug, she wanted to shout. Shrugging is not an option.
‘Maybe it wasn’t that,’ he said. ‘Maybe I was just too chicken.’
An awful sense suffused her that he hated himself. No. Please let him not be stuck in that loop. ‘Listen, Daniel, you don’t have to make amends.’ It was easier if she looked at the wall behind him but there was his face, those dark, dark eyes, and the time on him, the years all over him, emanating like a heat mirage. ‘If it’s part of your programme or whatever. You don’t owe me anything. We were just kids.’
He frowned. ‘That’s not true.’
‘Hey look,’ she said. ‘You’re still taller than me.’
‘You must have stopped growing.’ His hand reached up and held her arm – a soft, slow shock. Her whole body