and knowing already how much she was going to miss that girl and school bells and bus timetables and volunteer morning with crossing duty, these things saved her.
Hannah swivelled enthralled eyes to her mother. ‘Go away.’
The bus driver tried to close the back doors before Dorothy could get the pushchair through. ‘Wait,’ she called out. The buggy rocked side-to-side as she stepped down onto the footpath and Hannah complained in her dream. Halfway across the road they had to pause as more traffic passed, a pulse in the base of Dorothy’s throat knocking when the cars drove too close to the wheels of the stroller. At last she was walking to the other side.
Indoors wouldn’t do; the café was empty and hushed, no music playing. On the pavement she moved one of the outside tables along, the heavy legs scraping the asphalt, so there was space next to it for the buggy. Hannah continued to sleep. Dorothy squeezed the wooden chair over, sat with the café’s wall at her back and watched people pass by. A waitress came, a young woman in a tank top with a tropical bird tattooed on her shoulder. Dot ordered coffee. ‘I’m so jittery, coffee’s probably a mistake.’
‘Go crazy,’ said the waitress. ‘Go wild.’
Dot twisted the ends of a sugar sachet, picked up another and shook it like a tiny maraca. A man carried a cardboard box down the street. A toddler and her mother crossed the road holding the handles of her toy pushchair between them. Hannah still loved to be swung between her and Andrew’s hands whenever they walked through the park. No, Daniel could not be in her life. She was almost afraid of seeing him in daylight. In the far distance a helicopter traversed the sky, a snub-tailed dragonfly. The coffee came. The presence of the waitress, her care in placing the cup on the table, turned the volume up on the world. ‘This is the BirdMan café, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And there isn’t another one, round here.’
‘Another BirdMan café?’
‘Never mind, sorry, I’m just confused.’
Dorothy drank her coffee and looked at the newspaper. She checked her phone but there were no further messages. Yes it was Wednesday. Yes it was the right date. Where was he? When Hannah woke she would have a sore neck and be thirsty. Every now and then someone came round the corner and Dorothy’s solar plexus gripped although her fingers retained their placid immobility over the paper on the table. She was a body divided into parts.
The waitress cleared the cup, its lining of froth dregs like the scurfy foam left on the mudflats when the tide went out. It was time to collect Donald from school. She paid for the coffee with cash Andrew had given her that morning. The older woman at the bus stop helped her lift the awkward buggy up the steps. Hannah woke up when the bus rumbled out into the traffic and said, ‘Are we there?’
Andrew ran water into the saucepan for pasta and Dorothy stood behind him, eating peanut butter on a rye cracker, her mouth glued up. He lifted a single long hair from the pyramid of grated cheese on the chopping board and let it float to the floor.
‘Gross.’
‘Sorry,’ she tried to say.
He turned, smiling. ‘What?’
She thunked her head into his chest. ‘I can’t talk.’
He wrapped his arms around her and they swayed for a few moments. Footsteps padded down the stairs and Donald appeared in the doorway in his pyjamas, scowling.
‘What’s up?’ Dorothy smoothed the boy’s hair back off his face.
‘I’m scared.’
‘Why?’
‘I scared myself today with the devil.’
‘It’s just dress-ups,’ Dorothy said. ‘We don’t believe in the devil in this house.’
‘Why have we got that costume?’ He stretched his arms wide and she leaned down into the tight embrace, slid her arm around her son’s back and hugged him, speaking into his hair. ‘For Halloween. I’ll put it away until then.’
‘Yes.’ Donald nodded, his eyes shiny. ‘Get it out of my room.’
Dorothy hoisted him into her arms and said, ‘Come on, heavy boy. Say goodnight to Daddy.’
‘Again,’ said Andrew.
After kissing the little children one more time, closing the door on Amy in bed with her headphones and a book, removing Grace’s plate of leftovers from the essay notes on her desk, Dorothy stood at the top of the stairs with the orangey-red devil cape folded over her arms. She put the hood part with its squishy black horns over her head but couldn’t do up the Velcro at