her arms clinging. Eve held the glass up to the light, squinting at the print that was still there from Dorothy’s lip. She rubbed it on her T-shirt. At the creaking of the back door, Ruth yelped, but it was just her brother. ‘Budge up,’ said Michael, pulling a chair in. They made a circle around the table, each of them touching the upside-down glass with their fingertips. The cream Scrabble tiles spread in the round, like fragments of an ancient mosaic sun. Afternoon breath. Stillness. In the waiting silence, a mewling came from upstairs.
The bottom drawer of the girls’ dresser protuded as it always did, the runners too stiff for the girls to jam back. On top of their clumsily folded sweaters lay the cat, licking goo off two newborn kittens, so tiny, their tails abrupt.
‘Shall we get Mom?’ asked Ruth, and the others said, ‘No, she’s out.’ The children crowded round, the Ouija board forgotten. This was what they had been waiting for. The cat convulsed and another kitten emerged, blind and squeaking with a tiny rasp, its mouth hingeing a yawn, the body shaky, the paws and face so complete. The mother cat craned towards it with her rough tongue and began to clean its fur.
The Forrests had moved, when Evelyn was eight, Dorothy seven and their youngest sister Ruth not yet at school, from oh my god the hub of the world, New York City, to Westmere, Auckland, New Zealand. Dot thought her father said, ‘At last we live in a cloudless society.’ Reasons to do, she later figured, with lack of success back home, a paucity of funds, an excess of entitlement. Frank was a second son and despite the Forrest trust fund he claimed to have been ‘cut loose without a net’. Even after emigration he couldn’t get a break into professional theatre. He took on Westmere’s amateur dramatics society where over time he would dwindle the membership on a diet of Brecht and Ionesco. Each month their mother, Lee to the older kids, Mommy to Ruth, would go to the bank and withdraw the allowance that they lived on. It was never quite enough to travel home, which was probably no accident, though, ‘They just don’t understand the price of plane fares,’ she would cry.
They arrived in late summer, drowsing from the slow flight via Honolulu, the last of the high living in a hotel pool although the beach was right there, into the weird openness of southern sky that came with its colours all the way down to the deserted streets, filled in the space between houses. In the first weeks they knew no one, saw no one but each other, walked only to that shop called the dairy, the fish-eyed stares of those leaning kids under the soft warmth of its awning making each Forrest child want to turn and run away.
When school finally started, Evelyn was recovering from croup and the doctor with his comb-over and dark suit ordered her to stay home. Their mother dressed Dot in the frock she’d worn to a cousin’s wedding, because she hadn’t known where to source the uniform and it was important to look well put together. Persil white, with broderie anglaise around the hem, and a satin sash. It turned out there was no uniform. The sash Dot managed to retrieve from the cistern in the girls’ toilets, and the mud rinsed out of the broderie anglaise eyelets, but nothing, not even vinegar, not even turpentine, would shift the chewing gum from where it stuck all through her long blonde new-girl American hair, and so Lee had to cut it off with the fingernail scissors, the other utensils being in a container ship in transit somewhere along the swelling blue sea.
Lee sobbed as the hair came away and Dot stood perfectly still, breath deep in her belly, and reassured her mother with a phrase she’d learned that afternoon. Michael’s new friend, Daniel, had punched her in the shoulder and said, ‘Shit happens.’ At that she’d stopped crying, brought back into herself. The chewing gum was nothing. She had spent her first day at school without Eve. Nobody even knew she had an older sister. She had been alone and had survived it.
Cartwheeling along the planked row of school benches. Pale green institutional paint, bubbled, thick and waxy. Tiny pockmarks left by the asphalt on the heels of palms. The whirl of blue sky and black ground. The hot-metal smell from the pole