replacement for sex or conversation. If she wanted to read there was the living-room couch and sometimes she woke in the small hours of the morning under the thin woollen throw, neck stiff, the gadget hot on her stomach.
‘Going to be a storm,’ she said. Andrew hummed acknowledgement. She patted his foot before she left the room, and he twitched away, a reflex.
In the hot living room, which smelled of pine needles and Christmas lilies, the girls had laid out a Ouija board. Dorothy let Hannah pull her down to sit with them on the carpet. Silver baubles knocked against each other when she brushed against the spiky Christmas tree. ‘I thought you’d outgrown this.’ The board had taken a thrashing during Hannah’s occult phase, but since she became a surfer it languished in her bedroom cupboard.
Hannah shouted over her shoulder, ‘Donald, come on!’ To her mother, ‘Destiny’s grandma died ten years ago today. We’re going to call her up.’
‘Have you got any dry clothes? Go and change before you start wakening the spirits.’ They wore their summer wetsuits, the tops peeled down, bikinis underneath, hair tangled and damp. ‘You’ll catch cold.’
Weather like this should bring Eve, this storm that licked up water and dirt and flung them around in muddy flames. A funnelled tower of cloud massed across the hills. Wind scalloped the puddles. She stared at that olive tree across the road. A bulge in the trunk would swell and burst. Her sister would shake out of the bark, make her way here through the rain. Dot remembered, as she did every Christmas, her mother’s schoolfriend – the woman who gave away her son. Years later the grown stranger standing outside the house, hoping to be taken in.
If only she had made more mistakes. If only time would deliver her a young man waiting on the driveway, his hand extended to be shaken.
Grace stuck her head through the door. ‘Mum, Louisa’s here.’ She looked at the Ouija set-up, the arc of letters and the stone planchette. ‘Can you get rid of that? We’re not going to do it any more.’
‘Good thinking.’ She folded it into the drawstring bag.
Lou hadn’t changed out of her pink nurse’s uniform. ‘Ta-dah, the home movies,’ she said, brandishing a USB stick from her pocket. ‘Finally.’
‘How was work?’
‘Bit tough.’ She was doing a long stint on the coma and neuro wards. ‘No change for Tina. Baby’s first Christmas.’
Tina was a teenage mum Dot had worked with at the maternity home. Nearly a year ago she had given birth, and hours later had a brain haemorrhage. She was still alive, in that way. ‘That way’, Dorothy explained to her children when they moaned about their unjust world, meant on a respirator, in a nappy, fed through tubes, drained by tubes, unable to see or hold her baby. The other mums, the girls whose babies came around the same time, had visited at first. Now hardly anyone came. Their lives had moved on.
Thunder and lightning broke, and the rain roared. The hall lights flashed out and on again. The family piled onto Dot and Andrew’s bed and watched the Forrest home recording that Ruth had reformatted and sent to Lou. Stop-motion children jumped into and out of a cardboard box, appeared and disappeared behind tree trunks, and waved halves of themselves beside a long mirror. Someone had added a soundtrack, a sort of Laurel and Hardy tune that made the past seem even more remote.
‘Is that you?’ Grace asked of a cartwheeling figure.
‘God, look at our haircuts. There I am.’ Streaking across the shot, Daniel leggily after her, the camera not interested, trained on the cardboard box on the lawn, the box that rose and was cast aside to reveal Eve, now in close-up saying something unrecorded, dropping the box to the ground and walking back into the house, bending to pat the cat. In the dim bedroom, Louisa reached for Dorothy’s hand.
The camera followed Evelyn up the steps and into the house. Blackness fell as it crossed the threshold indoors, then the world revealed itself again in adjusted light. Eve stood at the kitchen sink drinking a long glinting glass of water. She set the empty glass down and looked straight at the camera once before she started to perform, a hand behind her head in a parody of a swimsuit model, cat-walking the hallway. The camera followed her up and down, up and down, swinging past its own reflection in the hall mirror: flashes