the collar because it was too small. The fabric rustled as she walked down the stairs. She stood in the kitchen waiting for Andrew to turn around from the sink.
‘Are they all good?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’ The ringing of the telephone cracked the air. She headed towards the living room, the ongoing sound, was halfway to the door when he spoke again.
‘That might be Louisa. She wants to come and stay.’ He lifted his arm high to drain the pasta, and the kitchen filled with the starchy, salty smell of steam.
Dorothy walked slowly to the phone, the cape swishing.
‘Is this Mrs Dorothy Forrest?’
‘Yes. Ms.’
‘Hello, ma’am, how are you this evening?’
‘Fine.’ She waited.
‘Ma’am, this is Peter calling about your Internet provider at home there. Just a courtesy call wondering if you or anyone in the house is looking to upgrade their ISP at no cost at this present time?’
Inside the hood her head grew hot and she pushed the cape off, to the floor. Andrew called something from the kitchen. She said into the phone, ‘No, sorry.’ She hung up and then rang on again to check the dial tone. It was broken, stuttering to indicate that someone had left a message.
‘Sorry,’ Dot mouthed to Andrew as she sat at the table with the phone pressed to her ear. The message was from Donald’s after-school karate teacher, a reminder about the upcoming exams.
The car park at the public baths was flooded and they waited in the Honda for the rain to ease up before making a dash for the indoor pools. Another song from years ago came on the radio. Dorothy turned it up and listened, the red digital minutes ticking closer to the swimming lesson’s start time. Through the aching shone a shaft of pleasure: Hannah was a quick learner; by the third chorus she was singing along.
The song ended and Dot turned the engine off and stood by the door with rain soaking her back as the stuck little buckle wouldn’t unclasp down by Hannah’s hip. Once her daughter was free Dorothy lifted her under an arm and kicked the door shut and locked it and dropped the keys by the tyre and lowered, squatting under the weight of the child and the swim bag, and walked her fingers forward along the wet asphalt without letting go of the girl until she hooked up the key ring and pushed down into the ground with her feet in order to stand. Hannah was on a funny angle and Dot righted her with a hip then ran through the puddles, swerving to the left as a car backed out of a parking space towards them and jerked to a stop.
They arrived at the entrance desk. The swim-bag handle was crooked cuttingly into Dot’s elbow, and water seeped all up the legs of her jeans. She placed Hannah upright on the floor and mopped at the girl’s head, and shook droplets from her own hair like a dog. Hannah ran to the sweets dispenser, a transparent globe of red and yellow candy drops, and jiggled the coin return and asked for money. Dot took the membership card from between her teeth and slid it through the barcode scanner, then waddled through the automatic glass doors into the swampy air of the pool room, suddenly sniffing from the chlorine, nudging Hannah forward with her knees, steering her daughter now to the changing cubicles at the end of the Olympic-length pool, smudging wet cords of hair away from her eyes.
In the dim, bare changing rooms Hannah was asking for lollies but she couldn’t have one now. Dorothy helped her out of her fleece-lined jacket and sweatshirt and T-shirt and pulled the elastic-topped trousers down and then up again so that she could see to get Hannah’s shoes off, and lifted her to sit on the bench so the socks wouldn’t get wet on the Petri dish floor. Dot unpeeled the socks from Hannah’s hot muppety feet and bunched them into the shoes and pulled the trousers down again and there she was, standing, all prepared with her swimsuit on underneath, her lung-shaped ribcage, the swelling diaphragm. Dorothy planted a kiss on her shoulder. Through the door, at the end of the pool, the large racing clock and the clock next to it that displayed the time were visible, and they were late.
‘Let’s go,’ Dot said, and jammed the girl’s clothes on the top of the swim bag and held her hand past the giantesses getting