glad to fulfil, especially now, in what everyone had taken to calling ‘these times’. He needed her. In the winter he’d got stuck in the bath and it was only when she dropped some mending round, coming through the unlocked back door with a pair of folded jeans the size of a tablecloth, that she heard him yelling. Together she and Andrew unwedged him and for a while she’d made him go on a diet, bringing pots of low-GI casseroles, but nobody could make her brother do anything he didn’t want. Dial-a-Pizza pulled up outside his place almost every night.
Now he came very close to her. ‘They are watching, and waiting, and they are going through my rubbish.’
‘Michael. You need to take your meds.’ Meds: she hated that fake flak-jacket word, but it was her brother’s language, a way to butch out the shitty passive business of being a patient, someone who needed help. ‘I’m coming in with you.’
‘No you’re not.’ He turned abruptly and galumphed the few metres to his house ahead of her, surprisingly fast given his bulk, and she stumbled over the dropped bags of cleaning product and into the hot muscular flank of the dog and raced to his door but he got in first and was too wide to overtake. The door slammed in her face.
‘The police helicopter was out this morning.’ She yelled it through the wood, held a finger in the air and spiralled it. ‘Did you hear? Keep your doors locked.’
On the news they’d reported an escaped prisoner, a double murderer. How did they escape? That was what Dorothy wanted to know. Buddleia tumbled from the brick wall, purple flowers spilling into the air.
She shouldn’t have mentioned the helicopters. It was the last time she saw Michael for a while.
Light gathered in the valley of the bank, hung pale brown in the long fronds of grass. On another hill the grass furred in the wind, pinkish gold. The path took Dorothy from her house to an unsealed track that tailed off, and along the bank to the fringed beginnings of the woods. A very few wild flowers dotted the slopes with red and purple, the sparse colours fleeting, as though they would disappear if looked at too long, and cabbage white butterflies butted the grass feathers with greenish wings. The person emerging from the thin leggy trees – birches, bark lined with cracking peel, the trees inside sloughing their skin – was a scarecrow of purple clothes beneath a mushroomed umbrella, a shock of grey hair. Dorothy’s dog ran up to the figure, its black hide shimmering over the muscles that crossed beneath the skin. The figure made a half-beckoning hand gesture towards the dog, the umbrella buffeting in the wind.
The brushing grass against her calves whispered louder, its smoky scent intensifying as Dorothy walked towards the woman and the woman walked towards her without looking up, the world behind her head blocked by the umbrella, her stare somewhere on the ground. With a plunging certainty Dorothy recognised her. Rena. Her mother’s friend from Hungry Creek. ‘Hello,’ Dorothy said loudly, passing. The woman stalled and smiled frowningly and said, ‘Hello. You’re . . .’
‘Dorothy Forrest. You knew my mother. At the commune.’
Rena’s face was wrinkled, blue in the glow from the umbrella. Her gaze sizzled, and the smell of recently fritzed marijuana clung to her. ‘Dorothy. Look at you. My god.’
Each made a small, aborted movement towards the other, stopping short of a hug. Yes, Rena looked older, but not by that much – surely not by the same number of years as Dorothy had aged. It was forty-odd years ago. Rena must be seventy.
‘I’m looking for your brother Michael,’ she said. ‘Do you know where he is?’ She had the determined gaze of the embattled, and Dorothy got the dumb, shameful feeling that she was resisting knowledge, the salient detail. What did this woman want with Michael? The dog had its nose in something under a tree, and Dot smelled or imagined the smell of a rotting animal, a poisoned squirrel or rabbit, and called to the dog in a deep, stern voice and it returned, breathing quickly through its open mouth, its lips squid-ink black and wet, the tongue a happy pink. ‘Really? You’re looking for Michael?’
‘I need to talk to him about something.’
Dorothy gestured towards the street. ‘Have you tried him at home?’
‘We need him to sign something and,’ Rena turned as though he might be coming up the