ready palms. Mei held either side of the ladder’s ridged metal rails. The top of the ladder leaned into Michael’s weatherboard wall. Susan was a small distance away, at the street corner of the house, with the dog. If she was on lookout, nobody put the language on it.
‘Michael,’ Dorothy called through the widened gap in the window, a mouth missing some teeth. ‘Hello? Michael?’
From the road came the swoosh of a car passing without slowing down. Far away someone was mowing a lawn. The man’s legs would be catching blades of grass and bits of grit that would smear if touched, the way things did after the rain. She called again, and listened, and a weak response seemed to come from somewhere inside.
The top half of her body fitted through the gap and she could easily reach the cistern, which she balanced on while she tried to hoist her hips over the window ledge. The flush button was in the middle of the cistern lid and an edge of a finger pressed it and the water gushed loudly. She was doubled, half in and half out of the window. Her mind was on holding herself up with her arms and not collapsing like an enormous tracksuit-clad snake into the bathroom, and also on the bottom half of her body sticking out the window and the possibility that Rena, Mei or Susan would have a digital video camera or filming capabilities on a cell phone. She leaned down to flip shut the lid and seat of the toilet and tipped forward, one arm outstretched, and lunged, like an acrobat shinning down her partner’s body, from balancing on the cistern lid to the closed toilet seat to the floor and now her whole self was balanced on her hands in the small bathroom, and something happened with her feet and her legs thudded to join her so that she was sideways half on the floor half on the toilet and now she stood upright, panting.
‘I’m in,’ she called. ‘Michael? Are you home? I’m in the house.’ No reply. ‘I’ll let you in the back,’ she called to Rena. She pulled at the filmy white shower curtain that surrounded the bath. No Michael, just matching pink plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner. Dorothy peeled the leg of her tracksuit away from her left calf and felt the white-flaked skin where she had scraped it on the window ledge, pinpricks of blood dotting through over the shin bone. The bathroom door was closed. Suddenly she needed to pee and she did, and flushed the toilet again although the slow cistern hadn’t refilled. There was a toothbrush on the basin ledge. The empty space behind her reflection in the mirror made her shudder.
A bit of light pierced the shady hallway, and she walked towards the kitchen at the back of the house. She startled – a peculiar split second of announcing silence, the echo before the sound – and the telephone rang. It was intensely loud and she picked up and said, ‘Michael’s house.’
‘May I speak with Lord Waldegrave?’
Dorothy laughed. ‘No, sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong number.’
‘Oh. My apologies.’ The man hung up.
Mei’s dark head and Rena’s grey one passed the kitchen window. She put down the phone and a light tapping came at the back door and a woman’s voice quietly called her name. She turned the lock but the handle wouldn’t move. ‘It’s snibbed,’ she said through the crack in the door, or where there would have been a crack if the door hadn’t fitted tightly into its frame. ‘The lock needs a key.’
There was a wooden block attached to the wall next to the door, a curlicued pokerwork line burned into it, just like the key holders they had made in woodwork at high school. With a rushing sound a wave of rain swept against the house and the women shouted at her to hurry. Two keys dangled from the block’s nails, one small and flat like a key to a padlock and the other a slightly rusted cartoon key. Neither of them fitted the back door.
‘He’s not here,’ she said into the door. The rain was sparser now, spattery. Mei looked through the window at Dot and pointed two fingers towards the front of the house.
Aside from the burned knife by the stovetop, the kitchen was clean, a bowl of soft local apples on the table. The fridge lurched into a hum. The milk inside was sour. She