Dot (Araminta Hall)
regular at lap-dancing clubs and massage parlours in towns like Paddockbridge and Woolley, a good hour and a half’s drive from his home. Occasionally he would simply go to a pub in one of those industrial towns where he could still pull a woman who expected as little as him, although he’d noticed that these encounters were becoming steadily seedier and more depressing with each passing year. He always wore a condom and he never kissed any of them because he still held out hope that one day Sandra would let him kiss her again, even if only on the cheek. Bodies were good at giving absolution; they were warm and giving, tender and fragile and a good reminder that you were alive. And then there was the rush of the orgasm, which flowed through his body like a drug, washing over his frayed nerves and calming his whirling brain. It was one of the few times when Gerry stopped seeing the destruction he’d caused in his life. He would lie still for a few minutes afterwards, anaesthetised to the world, a great silence inside him. A cigarette could prolong the sensation, so that on the drive home he might even smile. But then he would walk through his spotless front door and neither his wife nor his daughter would acknowledge him and he knew that everything he did disturbed Sandra’s order and the tension would flood back so that his eyes burnt with the effort it took not to cry. He’d grabbed at the chance Dot offered him, but along with everything else he’d got that wrong too: it had been yet more nothing and the realisation that only his wife offered him a something was starting to make him feel desperate.
10 … Bewilderment
So, Tony has just left and I probably should go and find Alice in whatever corner of the house she is hiding, but, truth be told, I can’t face it. I have received the third truly shocking news of my life; first my mother, second Howie and now Alice. I suppose you could say Jack’s death was shocking, but I was too young and besides he’d been ill for about a year before he died. And after Mother I was always waiting for the news about Father. Really I shouldn’t lump Alice’s news in with all this death, but that’s what it feels like: the end of her life, except she doesn’t even realise it. The people l love always seem to let me down one way or another; or maybe I should look at it from a different viewpoint, maybe there’s some intrinsic fault in me that makes them want to let me down.
I saw Alice’s face when she was telling me and I am sure I am not wrong to say that she enjoyed hurting me. Not the way that young girls so often come up against their mothers, because we never do any of the usual screaming and shouting and door slamming. More that it gave her a ghastly pleasure to cause me pain. That’s almost the worst of it, actually: that I could have done such a terrible job of being her mother as I have so obviously done. Of course I know that I’ve been far from perfect, but I do love her and I obviously haven’t managed to convey that at all. How did Howie do it? That’s what I’d like to know. How did he make it always look so easy? How did he have the courage to kiss her and bounce her and tell her he loved her? How did it not terrify him to his very bowels to give so much of himself to someone else, to invest all his happiness in another fragile human being?
I went to stand by the window when they were telling me as I needed to see a marker, like the rose bushes, to make sense of it all. The light was on the window, but I swear I saw myself skipping down the path at the bottom of the garden. I was even wearing my favourite blue dress from when I was, what, twelve, and my hair was streaming behind me. I had to dance when Father told me about Mother, there didn’t seem to be any other appropriate reaction. I went into the garden and danced under her window, trying to feel my way around the thought that I was never going to see her again. Of course it seemed impossible; I always presumed it was too big a concept for my young mind, until the police told me about Howie and I realised it had nothing to do with being a child. Because trying to understand that particular thought is the worst thing about death, the desperate scrabble the brain makes of trying to fit the pieces together, as if you could dip your hand into time like it was a pond and fish out the bits you need to make a whole. People talk about waking up after someone they love has died and forgetting for
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