Dot (Araminta Hall)

younger and it was just the two of us alone in this house I would lie awake every night with my heart pounding as if it was running a marathon, imagining dying and leaving Alice all alone. I was filled with terrors of her shouting for me, of eventually coming to find me and my body being cold and unresponsive. Of her having to negotiate her way out of the house and to our nearest neighbours. Because I knew that if she didn’t leave no one would miss us and come looking.
    About the only thing that could comfort me on those long night-time voyages was the thought that one day she would grow up and get married and fill this house with children. I actually looked forward to arguments over furnishings and eventually moving into the turret and getting annoyed by noise. But that has never happened; it wouldn’t even have happened if she had created another family instead of just having Dot. Her surroundings are yet another thing that she fails to notice; if I asked her to describe this house she might find it hard, even though she rarely leaves it from day to day. We occupy our generations singly. We are all single.

5 … Fear
    When Alice told Tony that she was pregnant his first feeling was that of defeat. In the time since their fake holiday he’d known that he had to break it off. But, Christ, she was gorgeous and she quite clearly adored him and, well, he didn’t think he loved her as such, but she was funny and sweet and far from the worst person to spend time with. In the end though she had become like all women, full of questions and need and such desperation to be loved you sometimes hated them. You can never give women enough, his older brother Matt had told him once as they’d sat on their back step coughing on their father’s purloined fags, they’re like sodding oceans, there’s always more. Tony hadn’t known what he’d meant at the time, but he did now.
    Tony was not going to be like his old man, who was nothing more than a drunk and a waster. He’d grown up watching his mother work two jobs, one to bring in the money and one to take care of them all. They’d all known that she’d longed for a daughter, presumably as her anchor against the sea of testosterone which surrounded her, or maybe simply not to see her husband’s face everywhere she looked. She had loved her sons, probably still did, but she was always tired and often she found it easier to pretend she hadn’t heard than to answer. Now Tony was going to be a dad and he was going to do it right. So he got down on one knee and asked Alice to marry him and she was so happy he felt sure that he’d done the right thing, he thought he probably did love her, he thought everything would be OK.
    Alice said they could live on love, she’d eat cheese on toast for the rest of her life and never want anything ever again, but that was just irritating. You could not live on love because love, in Tony’s experience, rarely survived poverty and Tony was poor. Besides, the thought of Alice on the Cartertown estate or even in some shitty studio flat was absurd. She basically had no idea what she was talking about, which made him feel as if he couldn’t breathe properly. We have to talk to your mother, he said finally, when he realised that she was never going to come to the right conclusion on her own. She’s not going to be involved in this, Alice had answered. For God’s sake, Alice, he’d said, we’re getting married and having a baby, you’re going to have to introduce us sometime. He knew he was probably a disappointment to most parents, but still it hurt that Alice should feel this so keenly.
    On the day of the introduction it felt ridiculous to Tony that at his first meeting with the mythical Clarice he was going to be telling her that he was marrying her daughter and she would be a grandmother in six short months. It was the first time he’d been to Alice’s house and he even had to bloody write down directions, standing in a cold phone box with the phone wedged under one ear as he scribbled the route on to an old receipt. It all felt wrong.
    Alice of course hadn’t warned him that she lived in a castle. He’d known she outclassed him and presumed that she came from a bit of money, but not the huge house that towered over the village and had a turret tacked on to its side, for Christ’s sake. He’d recently bought a shitty three-hundred-pound Renault 5, which smelt of petrol so you had to drive with the window down, even in the