expanded. She would kiss him right here if he leaned down. ‘Feel your arm,’ he said, squeezing the jerking muscle. ‘That is so weird.’
Feedback screeched from the hall. ‘I love that sound,’ Dorothy said. ‘So.’ She exhaled as though blowing out a candle. ‘How long have you been back for?’
He let go of her. ‘This last time, couple of years.’
‘Do you see much of Maya?’
‘Not really. I used to hook her up sometimes. In the bad old days.’
‘Before.’
‘Rehab.’
‘Right.’
‘But it’s all good now.’
‘All good?’
‘Jesus, Dorothy, you’re kind of drilling into me!’
‘Sorry. I don’t mean to. It’s just that phrase.’
He levelled a look at her. ‘So, you are a mum. You’re like, fecund.’
Blood began to rise beneath her skin. ‘You’re a shunt.’
‘Ointment,’ he said.
‘Diphthong.’
‘Tumescent.’
‘Gristle. Slack.’
‘Do you feel old?’
The question surprised her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I never think of that. Do you?’
He tilted his head. ‘I feel like I’m dying.’
They stared at each other. His grin faded. The urgent need to say something, to touch him, pressed on her, and she didn’t have the words. She shifted her weight and stepped a foot to the inside of his, her leg almost between his, then the door to the bathrooms opened and someone said, ‘Are you going in?’
He put a palm to the door. ‘Yes.’
‘I’ll wait by the bar,’ she told him, sliding her foot away, at the same time as he quickly said, ‘Hey I’m going to head home. But maybe we could meet up?’
A billion kids was who she was to him, he would never know. Daniel didn’t want the power any more, and she would just be giving it over in order to what, to break through the G-force of her family life, to jerry-build a rocket ship and climb into it and blast off. Some people took drugs. Some people went rock climbing.
‘Do you work?’ And yet here she was, punching her cell phone number into his phone.
Daniel nodded. ‘I’m a drug counsellor.’ He shut the door. At that moment the band started playing a song from when she was fifteen, a song her body heard before her brain did. The music was like lying on the runway as a jumbo jet took off just above you, scraping the air.
Her shoes lay emptied on the wooden floorboards and she thrash-danced up and down, everything around her streaking lines of movement and light. In a split second of self-consciousness she could feel her middle-aged face moving as she jumped so she thrashed her head back and forth to hide behind her hair, threw herself into the music even deeper to forget. The impact of a shove, and she went sprawling into Ian’s wheelchair and saw the chair spin before she hit the ground and drink got spilled on her and someone shouted, ‘Piss off.’ Dot scrambled to her knees to check on Ian, leaning over the arm of his chair, apologising. He shook his head. Monique intervened.
Dorothy’s knee ached as she scooped up her shoes and walked straight for the exit, panting, bouncing her palm against the wall that was hung with display boards and enlarged photographs and posters advertising the decades-old Battle of the Bands and the school magazine. Five or six unfamiliar people were smoking cigarettes under the sheltered entranceway to the hall. A taxi swung into the school gates and pulled up outside the hall and Dorothy limped towards it, the shoes in her hand, and leaned in to the open passenger window.
‘Rogerson?’ the driver asked.
‘Yes.’
In the children’s bedroom the curtains were still drawn shut. Donald had a devil dress-up cape on and a torch in his hand and was repeating to Hannah in a sing-song voice, ‘I’m going to eat you.’
‘Come on darlings, breakfast time,’ Dorothy said, picking up toys on the way to the windows. ‘Feed the fish. And then you need to get ready for school.’ Her body operated in space, not her. The tangibility of the mini stegosaurus and cloth doll, the need to remove them from the floor before someone turned an ankle or broke the wing off a kitset aeroplane, the silver light in her eyes after pulling the curtains, the lid of the fish-food jar to replace, the rumpled pillows and sheets to straighten, bedside books to pile, the papery skin of oatmeal that lined the saucepan as porridge thickened on the stove, the facts of rubbish day and buying a board for Amy’s science project and letting gorgeous, leggy Grace cycle off without laying anxiety shit all over her independence