as though everything was normal, as though in fact he lived here.
‘Good.’
Daniel took his cereal bowl to the sink. More than half of the crossword had been filled in. When he rinsed the bowl and wiped it and put it away he also wiped the bench. She watched his familiarity with where things belonged. He said, ‘I have to go to work now.’
‘Where do you work?’
‘At the taxi company. I clean the cars. Just on the weekends.’
‘OK.’
‘See you later. Hey this plum tree up the road has got heaps of plums, do you need any?’
Lee stared into the fruit bowl, where two apples lay next to a giraffe-skinned banana. Her brain was fuzzy.
‘It’s not a private tree or anything. It’s on the verge. I’ll bring them later.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, and he wiped the air with his palm in a low wave as he left the kitchen. She heard the front door being carefully closed. Daniel was thirteen.
Lee walked quickly back up the stairs to check Michael and he was there, still, oval mouth open, in his single bed, the candlewick bedcover half slid to the floor, his body nearly filling the whole mattress now, weighty with sleep. There was a neatly rolled sleeping bag placed on a pillow in front of the wardrobe door.
She took the children up north, to the wimmin’s commune, Hungry Creek, while Frank was gone, waking them from their beds one midnight and hurrying them out to where a strange van idled, packed already with their stuff. Daniel, who hadn’t stopped sleeping over, came with. He jiggled with excitement behind Evelyn and Dot, turning his head from one to the other and pretending to double take. ‘Don’t you ever get confused,’ he said, ‘wake up one day thinking you’re the other one?’
‘We’re not twins.’ Dorothy wanted to sink down and close her eyes, but the night pressed against the windows and she knew anything might happen.
‘You’re practically identical.’
‘We’re not even fraternal.’
‘That would mean you’re brothers,’ Daniel said. ‘Fratricide is when you kill your brother.’
‘Really?’ said Dorothy. ‘What is it when you kill your brother’s friend?’
The van smelled of sandalwood, and dust burst slowly from the velvet-and-corduroy patchwork cushions whenever they were bumped. They drove under randomly spaced streetlights. In synch, Dorothy and Evelyn sucked back a puff of Ventolin from their inhalers.
Michael said, ‘Are there snakes in the creek?’
‘Eels,’ said the woman driving, a woman they didn’t really know called Rena, who was a new friend of Lee’s and wore a headscarf over an incredible bush of copper hair.
Rena washed herself under the outside shower, where the water collected above the nozzle in a black polythene bag and was slightly warmed by the sun, and she crossed the path to her cabin still naked, wearing her towel around her neck like the changing-room athletes Dorothy had seen in magazine advertisements for deodorant, only they wore aerobics leotards or tennis whites. Rena, with her springy hair and strong body, did not use deodorant.
It was strange being in this place without television or a flushing toilet. Dot lay in the children’s cabin on a bunk bed, on top of the thin red sleeping bag, sloughed like a cocoon over the foam mattress, yellow and bitten, that covered the plywood bunk base, and she wept over The Little Mermaid and for all her selfishness. When her father returned she would love him with an open heart. In the bunk opposite, Daniel stretched out on his stomach, reading a tattered comic. He gave off the tangy smell of hay.
‘Daniel,’ she said, wiping her face on the flannel sleeping-bag lining, ‘how come you’re not living with your family?’
For a moment she wasn’t sure whether he’d heard. His knees were bent, dirty-soled feet in the air. Eyes still on the comic, he told her that his dad was in between lodgings and his mother had a new boyfriend. ‘Didn’t Lee say?’ He turned a page.
‘No. She might have.’ Where was Eve? It had been a long time with no Eve. Dorothy stretched as her sister came through the doorway. ‘I was looking for you,’ they both said at the same time, and Evelyn added, ‘Do you want to play go home stay home?’
Dot held the book up. Eve came and lay beside her on the bunk, her body warm, and she put her cheek against her neck and held her bare arm and walked her fingers up from her wrist to the crook of her elbow. They whispered to each other. Daniel