silent and it was hard to tell if she was hearing the sound of Michael breathing or the cars driving past. Lately one of her ears had felt a bit muffled.
‘Michael?’ Part of her brain tried to calculate how long she had been out here and how much longer she had to achieve the act of reconciliation. It was possible he had hung up.
‘Yeah I’ll meet up,’ he said. ‘Not here. There are arseholes here.’ Her head jerked away from the blast of sound.
‘Do you want to come to my place? You could see the kids. Grace is fourteen now. Or you could come during the day?’ When Andrew would be at work. Yes. That routine.
He didn’t want to come to her place, but named a pub on the other side of the city, gave some cursory directions. ‘Tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Oh, well we’ve got the rest of the – the course doesn’t finish till tomorrow night – but – yes, definitely, tomorrow afternoon.’
‘OK.’
The street outside the conference centre was empty and she ran up the stairs to the foyer two at a time in a panic that they would have started without her. In the morning a woman had come in late and she’d been brought up on stage and called out on her commitment issues shit in front of everyone until she cried. Dot was the last person through the doors. She slid into her white seat just as the Speaker approached the podium. A bruised feeling swelled and his words were lost and when once again tears wouldn’t stop leaking down her face the woman in the next seat passed Dot a tissue and patted her knee and said, ‘Never mind, things will change.’
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare
She took the kids to eat at Gopal’s. It was cheap! They pushed dhal around their plates, hating it. Amy caught her mother in conversation with a serene-faced woman in a pale-apricot sheet, a white bindi between her eyes, and said as she dragged her away, ‘Don’t you dare become one of those. How could you do that to me.’
Dot and Andrew met Nathan at a restaurant bar and the three of them perched on high wooden stools. He showed them photos of Louisa with his new girlfriend, an actress whose accounts he’d been doing for years, and who had become well known. ‘You’ve probably seen Lou more recently than this. But here’s Estelle.’
The pictures quickly replaced each other on the small screen as Andrew moved his thumb.
‘Nice gear, dude,’ said Andrew of the camera. They started talking about the tricks it could do.
There she was, her famous face shining right at the camera, her arm slung over Louisa’s shoulders, and then she was gone, and there was a picture of Louisa in a T-shirt Dorothy had given her, joke-posing like a model. ‘Go back?’ Dot said.
‘There.’
Estelle was tiny, one of those people with a miniature body and big facial features that seemed to be drawn to acting. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ Dot said.
‘Apparently so.’
Andrew’s thumb kept swiping the photographs along, so that looking at them caused a kind of motion sickness.
Dorothy hugged Nathan. ‘You know . . .’ She wasn’t sure if it was her right to say it. ‘You know Eve would have been happy for you.’
He squeezed her hand. Tucked the camera back in his jacket pocket. Dot waited until the maître d’ directed them to a table then mumbled an excuse and shut herself in a rest-room cubicle and cried. Footsteps clacked into the room. They paused. She bit down on the length of her index finger. A few more steps and the hingey sound of the door opening and closing again. By the basins, she dried her face on the roller of thick blue paper towels. She stood for some moments longer, listening, looking down at the running water.
Three hundred and fifty people came to Nathan and Estelle’s wedding, including Dot and Andrew and their kids. After the al fresco dinner there was a display of belly dancing, and the guests were given tambourines to shake along while waiters cleared the plates. ‘Three hundred and fifty tambourines,’ said Donald, who played percussion in his school orchestra. ‘This is going to be awesome.’
The new bride made a speech to Louisa. Dorothy clutched Grace’s hand as Lou then stood before everyone in her vintage bridesmaid dress and glasses, a pink streak sprayed in her hair, and thanked Estelle for becoming her second mother.