Dot (Araminta Hall)

was the best person to watch reality TV with as she was the only other person Mavis had met who seemed to hold it in as much disdain as she did whilst being unable to look away. Eventually the adverts came on and Dot went to the loo and, just for something to say, Mavis had asked Alice whom she wanted to win.
    She’d looked up at this and Mavis had been shocked all over again, as she so often was, at just how beautiful Dot’s mother was. It was something about the fragility of her almost translucent skin which made you want to touch it to see if it was made of cream, or maybe her stupidly huge brown eyes or the long auburn hair that gave her the look of a fairy tale princess. Mavis thought she verged on a cliché; as if an illustrator had been asked to draw his perfect woman.
    ‘Win what?’ she’d said.
    ‘ X Factor ,’ Mavis had answered, but then felt the need to add: ‘You know, the programme we’re watching.’
    Clarice had shifted in her seat and Mavis glanced at her, seeing a look of – what? – maybe embarrassment cross her usually impenetrable features.
    Alice had glanced worriedly at the screen, seeming to see it for the first time. That is a television, Mavis had wanted to say, it projects moving pictures into our living rooms for our entertainment, although I think one day we’ll discover it’s the government’s way of keeping us docile. We watch X Factor on it every Saturday, we’ve done it for years.
    ‘The only one who can sing is that girl with the ridiculous hair,’ said Clarice.
    ‘Amber?’
    ‘God, what a name.’
    Mavis looked back at Alice but she was staring at her hands again, obviously relieved that nothing more was required of her. Not for the first time, Mavis wondered if she had something medically wrong with her. But then Dot came back into the room and the theme tune started and they had all let themselves be dulled by the blue box.
    Not that any of that helped her now. Mavis left her bedroom for the first time that day to go to the kitchen to get a biscuit, knowing that the sweetness was the only thing that might subdue the sickness for a few minutes. Her mother was in there polishing the kettle.
    ‘I was going to make some tea,’ Mavis said, even though she hadn’t been.
    ‘I’ll put it on for you.’ It was obvious that her mother was only offering because she didn’t want other hands to touch the sparkling chrome. Mavis opened a cupboard door and rustled around, feeling the tension at her back as she shifted tins of soup into tins of tomatoes, flour into sugar.
    ‘Are you looking for something?’ asked her mother.
    ‘Biscuits.’
    ‘They’re in the tin. They’re always in the tin.’ There was a note of desperation in her voice so sharp Mavis wondered if she might cry. But instead of asking what the matter was Mavis walked to the tin and fished out a biscuit, eating it standing up leaning against the side, letting the crumbs drop on to her T-shirt before they hit the floor. Each one fell like a boulder into the silence; her mother watching their path. Mavis willed her mother to tell her to stop, to catch the crumbs, to get her a plate, anything apart from the awful twitching as she waited for her to leave the room so she could get out the dust devil.
    A faulty scale sounded from the dining room. ‘Dad got a pupil then,’ Mavis said, pointlessly. Her mother nodded and Mavis knew she was too preoccupied with the crumbs to speak. She left the room, hoping that she was trailing crumbs behind her. She stopped outside the dining room door and listened for a minute to her father trying to sound important, trying to impress a primary-school kid with his musical knowledge. She was filled with an immense hatred for her family, her pathetic, tiny, fucked-up family.
    And when you looked at it that way you had to feel sorry for Dot, didn’t you, as her family were no better; sometimes they even seemed weirder than her own. At least on the face of it hers were semi-normal, she at least had the requisite number of parents and a mother with a fairly run-of-the-mill mental illness. Dot was stuck in that creepy house of hers with a grandmother who thought she was a cross between the Queen and God and a mother who lived her life as if she ingested industrial doses of Valium on a daily basis. Because what mother would never mention their daughter’s father, never even tell her his name, pretend like she was an immaculate conception? ‘Why don’t you just ask her?’