Dottie and Pin Go Somewhere – by Kate Kruimink
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
The day was in three fat strips, like cuttings from a magazine. At the top, a thick piece of dark purple for the sky. In the middle, dense green treetops lit with gold. Below that, a narrow strip of grey road set with low buildings. Pin and her feral little creature were stuck down in the bottom strip, the grey road and the buildings, although they were standing in a cloud of glitter. The air down there was warm and wet. Pin’s little creature, her Dottie, was dancing, or something. Jigging, her face serious. Dottie was wearing red cat-eye sunglasses, yellow gumboots and a blue dress with two pockets. There was a fluoro-orange Post-it note stuck to the front of her dress. On it was written I LOVE YOU, DOTTIE in purple texta.
‘Dottie,’ said Pin. Pin was wearing black. She wasn’t looking up at greengold trees or the sky like pummelled skin. She was looking down at the drooping creation in her hands. ‘This glitter’s got everywhere,’ she said. Her hands and dress were thick with it, and Dottie’s too, bright darts of gold rippling over them. The creation was some kind of a thing on a paper plate, with pink feathers radiating out, and the glitter dumped all over but no glue to stop it travelling.
‘That’s all right,’ said Dottie.
‘I don’t know where to put it,’ said Pin. ‘Didn’t they have glue at daycare today?’
‘They had glue but I didn’t like it,’ Dottie said. ‘It’s okay. I just wanted you to see it. You can put it in the bin now.’
‘That seems a waste.’
‘No. Put it in the bin,’ she said, grandly.
The pub on the corner looked empty, its small windows dark, its walls thick. They had been past it a thousand times but never gone in. It sometimes advertised a poker night, which Pin had wondered about. There was a skip against the side wall, where the carpark was, and Pin pulled Dottie across the road toward it. A dark green car swooped them and they skittered onto the kerb.
‘Do you really, really want me to throw this beautiful thing away?’
‘Yep!’ sang Dottie, doing a balancing dance along one of the white lines. The carpark was empty; the road had gone quiet, too. Pin dropped the thing into the skip but it didn’t go straight down; it skated in the air and skidded itself onto a broken box. Glitter settled all around it. ‘Ooh,’ said Dottie, freezing. ‘I just remembered I’m desperate.’
‘Hold on,’ Pin said again. ‘Don’t wee on the ground. Try not to.’ She brought Dottie around the corner, back on the footpath. The door to the pub was up a set of concrete steps, its glass pane thickly tacked over with posters except for a narrow space too high for Pin to see through. There was so little life she didn’t even know if the door would open when she pushed. But it did, and three slow men looked up at her, white-haired, angled, one leaning on the bar and the others at a table, and then a fourth man rose up from behind the horseshoe of the bar. Inside was dim and yeasty and she shut the day behind them. Only the bruise of the sky still lay above the blank backs of the posters.
The man behind the bar was also white-haired, but his hair was long, and he stood up straight, an empty pint glass in one hand, a rag in the other. He began to absently polish the glass.
‘Can she use the toilet?’ asked Pin.
‘Yeah, but I don’t know where they are,’ said the barman, turning the glass in his hands. The men’s toilet was marked on the wall opposite.
‘Don’t get many women?’ she asked.
‘Nah, it’s that I’m new,’ he said, and she smiled because he looked nothing if not a fixture.
‘They’re through the door, the ladies,’ said the man leaning on the bar, who was wearing a hi-vis vest. There was an obscure door over on the corner past the pool table and she pulled Dottie after her. Dottie couldn’t stop looking at the barman.
‘A wizard,’ she whispered as they went through the door and into the dark corridor beyond.
‘Probably,’ said Pin.
Dottie had fumbled out her Post-it notes from one pocket and her texta from the other. ‘Can you please write There is a wizard here?’
‘Okay.’ Pin took the notes and the texta and wrote it. Dottie peeled off the note and stuck it to the door they had just come through. There was residual glitter on it; there was glitter on everything.
‘Now people will know,’ Dottie said.
‘Do you think he does spells?’
‘Mu-um,’ she said. ‘Of course. He’s a wizard.’
‘Is he really a wizard, or just pretend?’
Dottie didn’t respond, instead darting ahead into the gloom. The women’s toilet was just down the corridor, through another heavy door marked with the silhouette of a fancy Victorian lady with a bustle and a parasol. Dottie had her shoulder to the door and was heaving at it. Pin reached over her and pushed it open. The floor inside was busy with small olive-green tiles. Pin saw herself in the mirror, her black dress riddled with that bloody glitter. She brushed at it.
Three stalls. Dottie, tucking her stationery away again, entered and inspected each before choosing the middle one. ‘I’d like some privacy, please,’ she said primly, shutting the door on Pin. ‘Please put your foot under the door though,’ she added. ‘Don’t go without me.’
Pin stood with her golden front pressed against the stall door, her sandalled feet under the gap, bracing herself with her golden hands.
‘Are you there?’ asked Dottie. Pin waggled her toes. Dottie laughed. ‘What’s going to happen?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Pin, but Dottie didn’t answer.
***
The child wouldn’t wash her hands and also wouldn’t consent to Pin washing hers because she didn’t want them to lose their glitter. She would only allow sanitiser, which smeared the glitter around and clumped it on their fingers. Pin often wondered if she should take a firmer hand with Dottie, but she tended to yield to her instead. Something has to change, she thought. I need to take her somewhere. Pin had been everywhere, grimly spidering across the world, crawling out of windows of squats in cities where she was a stranger. But Dottie had never been anywhere.
Back out the heavy door, they turned the wrong way down the dark corridor and found a narrow blank wall with a green rectangle in it. The rectangle was a window, large and low, slightly open, and crowded with those greengold leaves that Pin had not been able to look up at outside. The air sighed and sighed. Pin looked, but she could see nothing but leaves. Dottie edged forward, Post-it notes and texta ready again. ‘Can you please write This is a wizard spell?’ she whispered.
Pin felt unhinged, like she had gone loose on her axis and the air was flapping her. She wrote the message and Dottie slapped it on the glass before reaching out and pulling the window shut with clever little fingers. The sighing of the air cut out. Dottie charged with animal confidence around one or two corners and there they were again, back in the bar. The men had not moved. ‘Thank you,’ said Pin. ‘Say thank you,’ she said to Dottie, who crouched behind the pool table.
‘You’re right,’ said the barman, taking the white towel from his shoulder and running it along the bar. ‘Love the glitter.’
***
A flock of birds rose like vapour before them as they came down the steps. Pin felt the rush of air from their wings. They watched them go, the birds crowding together in the air and then stringing themselves out along the power line. This was the first time Pin had looked up all day. She saw the dark purple sky and the great swathe of leaves beneath it and the little birds like white flicks of a paintbrush.
‘I weed on my toes,’ Dottie told her. ‘They’ve gone all slippery.’
Pin sighed and squeezed the hot little hand, the wiggly fingers and the caked glittery sanitiser. She took Dottie gently around to the empty carpark to get her sandal off and let her toes dry. There was a patchy strip of grass by the fence and Pin knelt there, holding Dottie’s damp foot.
‘Would you like to go somewhere with me?’ Pin asked her.
‘We go somewhere already,’ said Dottie, but she was distracted by the barman coming around the side of the building, holding a misshapen rubbish bag tenderly in his arms. He heaved the bag into the skip, a buffet of wind catching his long hair. The bag thudded in, and gold dust puffed into the air and hung there, all around him, twinkling. ▼
Photo by Luke Besley on Unsplash
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