Dot (Araminta Hall)

look at our large house and our beautiful possessions and listen to my grandmother’s cut-glass accent and you’ll think, Oh come on, this is a nice middle-class family, there can’t be any secrets here. But I can assure you there are. In fact, I’m starting to think that if you scratch the surface of any family you’ll probably find a teeming mess of shit. Sometimes I walk around our pathetically small village on winters’ evenings at the time when people have turned on their lights but not yet drawn their curtains. I stare into the windows and watch people turning on TVs or doing their exercises or chatting to their children or whatever. It used to make me feel cosy, but now it leaves me a bit cold. Instead of seeing happy lives I wonder at secret porn stashes or murder victims in freezers or just plain general misery. It’s the same as how I used to look at my classmates and envy what I saw as their easy lives: you know, with a mum and a dad and maybe a brother or sister, perhaps a pet, grandparents who visited with bags of sweets, relatives to go and stay with at Christmas. But now I’m beginning to wonder if more people just means more shit?
    So, anyway. When I was about ten I found a photo of a man stuck behind my mum’s bed and Mavis and I immediately decided that he must be my dad. I mean, what other explanation could there be to our immature minds than this? And sometimes when you believe something when you’re very young it sticks like toffee on your teeth and becomes a fact without any proof. I’ve always kept this photo in the drawer of my bedside table, stuck inside a copy of Great Expectations (and yes, I do get the irony, it’s why I chose the book). When I was younger I looked at this photo a lot and my dad went through loads of incarnations. As I grew so he was a fireman, other times a lawyer, a celebrity agent and for a good year an actor, when I became convinced that the man explaining the Theory of Relativity on a physics video bore more than a passing resemblance to the man in the photo. Even Mavis agreed with me and so we’d sit up late on Friday and Saturday nights watching made-for-TV films and bad Spanish soap operas. Mum never even asked us what we were doing, but Gran started to sit with us and get as sucked in as we did so that even now you can have a great conversation with her about the relative merits of Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme, which is pretty cool, I have to admit.
    Sorry, you might think I’m rambling, but all of this is relevant. The man in the photo could be a rock star and my mum could be his supermodel girlfriend. And then there is me. I am not that tall, I wear size twelve clothes, my legs and bottom are decidedly dumpy and, the real clincher, I’ve got ginger hair, when they are both sleek brunettes. You might wonder why it took me seven years to figure this out, but like I said, this man simply was my father. Besides all of which, I hadn’t looked much at the photo for a good eighteen months before the fatal time. But then Mavis was being super moody and refusing to tell me what happened with her and Clive after they dropped me after that disco (which is a whole different story that has nothing to do with this one) and Mum and Gran were being mega annoying. So I got the photo out for old times’ sake, I suppose like some sick comforter or something. And it suddenly hit me. Wham! How the hell did I think that I could possibly be the product of such an outrageously gorgeous couple as my mum and this man would make? I felt like I’d been sleep walking, like I was a complete idiot. Of course my dad hadn’t walked out on my second birthday to buy some balloons, of course my mum hadn’t got rid of all his possessions and her photos of him because she found them too painful a reminder as I’d always presumed. No, no, the much more likely truth was that my father had never really been ours in the first place, that he belonged to another family.
    Which is when I got my second little revelation that had been far too long coming. Sitting on my bedside table is a photo of Mavis and me, which she had framed for my last birthday. It was taken when we were about two or three, on the one and only ‘family’ outing we ever went on together. The story goes that a famous Russian circus came to Cartertown and Mavis’s mother got us all tickets, but then on the day she was ill, so Mum and I went with Mavis and her dad. The photo jogged some deep memory