He put the cushion on the floor next to him and patted it. ‘Come and sit with me.’
Maybe there was food in her teeth. Dorothy had a long drink of water and wished people still smoked. Hannah would be eating lunch at her friend’s house, creamed corn or whatnot, and after that the play-date would come to an end and the mother would drop her back. At the thought of her sweet, shy three-year-old minding her table manners at someone else’s house, a pang slowly shot through her.
‘Did you bring the thing from Eve?’
‘Come here.’ He patted the cushion. ‘Come here and I’ll show you.’
She knelt on the cushion next to his head. No accident she was wearing a skirt. Close up he looked pretty rough, his skin leached of youth, his hair quite grey. She wanted to touch his hair, feel the skull beneath it. He smelled great. ‘What is it?’ she said, inches from his body, waiting for a message, or a trinket, or a piece of paper, not for him to open his hand and show her the scar on the pad below his thumb, a shiny purple whorl of cigarette burn and say, ‘This.’
She held his hand. Bent back the fingers slightly. The burn scar was like a tiny eye. She wanted to kiss it. The cords of his wrist, the embossed veins ran up into his shirtsleeve. She pushed her fingers up beneath the cuff, felt the hair on his forearm, the twisting muscles. He leaned his head against hers.
‘Nothing can happen here,’ she said.
‘I know.’ Daniel lay back, shifted onto his side and pulled her up onto the couch towards him. ‘Come here,’ he said again. ‘Come and lie on this lovely Chesterfield with me.’
‘I think you mean davenport.’
‘Lofabed.’
‘Lofabed?’ She laughed. ‘I never heard that one.’ They lay next to each other but there wasn’t really room. ‘There isn’t really room. My body’s changed.’ She was worried she might cry. ‘I’m older. I’m not the same.’
‘Here. Come on, beautiful. This way.’
Later he asked if she remembered the commune, the gold chocolate coins, the rabbit. ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘How in real time we probably weren’t there for very long. But I feel like part of me is still in that place. Alternative self still running around with those frogs and all that.’
‘I remember the shotgun,’ she said, propped up on her elbows beside him on the floor. She didn’t remember the rabbit.
Daniel moved a hand down her back, up the side of her waist, cupping her breast. ‘Oh my god,’ he laughed, ‘I can’t believe I’m actually here.’
The kitchen clock ticked. By some act of grace, time played it slow. ‘So, this is what I imagine,’ Dorothy said. ‘When we’re old, and that stupid passport of yours is lost in a fire.’ She saw it, the last ship he would ever be on, drifting charred and blackened up the coast, bumping the sand on a rain-soaked night, tumbling Daniel out, choking on seaweed and saltwater, onto the earth. ‘Then you’ll come back to me, all aged and useless, and nobody else will want to know, and I’ll make you feel better.’
‘Like this? Like it is now?’
‘Yes. Except you’ll be old and scrawny.’
‘You’ll be fat,’ he said. ‘A big fat babushka.’
‘And you’ll dine out on your famous northern lights and young women sashaying in cobbled town squares and swimming races in fucking Niue or whatever, and we’ll all say oh that’s just Uncle Daniel with his stories, and it won’t matter that you have nothing left.’
‘I’ll have nothing left?’
She sat up, then stood up. Blood rushed from her head. ‘Hannah’s going to be back.’
He nodded. ‘I know.’
She turned aside to clip up her bra and saw in her peripheral vision a blur of movement. Daniel had stood, and begun to juggle the contents of the fruit bowl. Fruit circled the air above his palms. An apple left his grasp, flew high in the air to smash against the ceiling and thudded along the scuffed floor. He kept juggling, his eyes locked on Dot’s face. A mandarin followed with an orange splat. Now a banana, boomeranging off to the corner of the room – another waxy green apple – a whole bunch of comical grapes, rising, turning like a heart to fall and land squashily on the bumpy rag rug. She had a hand to her mouth, shaking her head. From his pocket Daniel tossed her an apple. It was mottled with bruises