towards a desert oasis. Lightly he popped to his feet, plucked underpants from the pile and flung them high into the air, where they somersaulted before he caught them. He did it again. ‘Hey, Dodo, look.’
She was already looking. How could she ever wrench her gaze from this perfect boy, her grandson, his shiny shiny eyes. Dot began to fold the washing. This time Frankie bobbed up beneath his pants like a soccer player heading the ball. His mother said the same thing as before, more loudly, and he spun towards the sound and the underpants fell to the floor. Dorothy cheered as the boy kicked them down the hall, swerving invisible oncomers. Grace gave her a look. ‘Are you sure you want to come with us?’
‘Yes. I can help with Meg. If you have to talk to them separately or something.’
‘I won’t have to talk to them separately.’
Meg was being auditioned for a commercial, if you could describe a baby screen test as an audition. The kids were good-looking. It helped pay the rent.
Frankie emerged from the bathroom wearing the underpants and tossed his pyjamas in the air so they fell in a small heap of primary colours beside the hallway runner. He put his legs through the sleeves of the pyjama top and hobbled towards Dorothy, eyes glowing. ‘I’m a cheese boy.’
‘Time to get dressed.’
‘Dodo, did you know that ten is not the highest number?’
‘What is?’ She lifted him under the arms, swung him onto the sofa beside her, and tugged a T-shirt over his head, feeling the old momentary resistance as his skull crowned through the double-stitched collar.
‘Eleven,’ Frankie said. ‘Or a hundred.’
‘What about a hundred and one?’
He stared. ‘What about a hundred and two?’
‘That’s how old Dodo is,’ said the boy’s father.
‘Aha,’ said Dorothy. ‘Today, I feel it.’
‘We should do something for your sixty-fifth.’
‘Hmm, maybe.’ She just had to keep putting Grace off until being sixty-five passed.
Amsi held the shorts out and Frankie succumbed to the inevitable. He balanced with a hand on his father’s shoulder and held one thin, knobble-kneed leg raised and lingering, crooked in space over the open waistband of the shorts. ‘Come on, you’re going to be late for school.’
Finally dressed, the boy climbed from the sofa to a kitchen chair, balanced his way over three more chairs, their legs grating on the floorboards with his shifting weight, then leapt to the hall carpet in a drop-and-roll move. He sat up and picked at the double-knotted laces of his shoes. Amsi leaned against the wall, calm, the air-traffic controller on his morning off, and watched. ‘Do you want a hand?’ he asked his son.
‘I can do it.’
Over the boy’s head Amsi spoke to Dorothy. ‘So how’s the apartment-hunting?’
Grace walked Meg down the hall towards them, holding the baby’s hands as she proceeded in small, jerky lurches.
One segment of footpath outside the house had been repaved and three paw-prints were caught in the concrete, claws out as though freshly made for all time. Dorothy sat in the back of the car because Meg cried if she was not in the front. When the engine turned over, music shrieked from the speakers. Grace cut the sound. The baby burbled and clapped her hands, and a rubbish truck ground towards them on the other side of the road, and the car passed through the dull smell of its contents and on, around the corner, up the feeder ramp and right onto the motorway that roared past the house for hours each night.
The waiting area was full of girls with curly dark hair between twelve and twenty-four months, and their mothers, or maybe nannies. Dot had never seen so many curly-headed toddlers; there must have been fifteen. She’d brought a book, but the place was too noisy. One lone man sat with his daughter on his knee, and she twinkled her hands and sang a wordless nursery rhyme as he jigged. ‘I wonder why they call everyone at the same time.’ Dot leaned forward over the low reception table so he would know she was addressing him. ‘It’s like Oz in here.’
He gave a shrug that was more like a mime of a shrug, as though they were in a nightclub or the kind of place where talk was pointless.
‘My granddaughter’s in there now,’ she said. ‘Do you come to many of these?’
‘Sorry?’ He held his daughter’s chest with one arm as he leaned forward and cupped an ear.