Dot (Araminta Hall)

rappers were fat, but fat birds were plain wrong. It was a shame, as Mavis had been pretty tidy when he’d got up close and personal with her. He tried to remember when that had been, end of the summer or some time like that. But his head hurt too much and the light was already fading on the day. He thought clouds were gathering outside; the wind coming in through the open window was bitter and he hoped it would snow. He hoped it would snow for days on end, piling up outside so that no one could get in or out. He wanted to lie in this warm bed for ever. To turn on the TV, chat to his mates on Facebook, fuck his girlfriend, eat the food he hadn’t bought in the fridge downstairs and sleep. The thought of the New Year seemed wearisome: 2005. It was a neat number and surely required neat actions. He rolled on to his side. Most of all Clive wanted to sleep.

12 … Speech
    There was a tatty stack of papers, yellowed and brittle, forged with creases from years of resisting their folds, sitting neatly in a small drawer in the middle of Clarice’s dressing table. The drawer wasn’t locked and anyone could have opened it at any time, but no one else ever had. She took them out to read from time to time, treating them as if they were made of gold and not wood pulp. Clarice knew it was ridiculous to think it, but of course they were more precious to her than gold, more precious than anything else she possessed. Sometimes the words on the paper made her smile, other times cry. She never knew which to expect until she started to read.
    Clarice had only found the papers about ten years before, tucked inside a book of Howie’s which had sat, along with all his other books, on the shelves of his study since he’d moved into the house just after their marriage all those decades ago. Before Howie the study had belonged so resolutely to her father that she would never have been able to imagine Howie occupying it so completely. Sometimes she tried to remember her grandfather occupying the space and at others she worried that it belonged to no one now which meant that there was no one to continue its history into the future. The thought of the house being sold after her death caused her physical pain, a tightness across her throat and chest, so that she had to shut her mind to the young couples she’d seen with skips outside some of the older houses in the village.
    Clarice would never know what had made her so restless the night she found the papers. Never know why her legs twitched as she sat by the fire, never understand why she stood up and opened a door which had been closed for so long the air smelt musty and walking across the room was like swimming through time. Or what drew her to the bookcase, what made her take down that particular book, showering dust as she’d pulled it towards her like fairy powder, tickling her nose, stinging her eyes. The book had opened naturally where it held the papers, as of course it would do, but Clarice swore she heard it sigh as it gave up its ghost, as if it had been waiting a very long time for this moment.
    She had sat at Howie’s desk then, which of course was no longer really his but also waiting for someone else to lay claim to it, and unfolded the papers, her heart stopping and then racing, so unprepared was she to see the familiar handwriting again, so out of context and time. She had felt as if he had reached out to her across the years, as if he’d put his arms around her from far away. She’d had to stop for a moment before she read, resting her head on her hands and taking gulps of air into her lungs as she was hit again by a jarring pain, which she recognised all too keenly, as she realised all over again that she was never going to see him again. That Howie was as truly gone as if he’d never existed. Her stomach had felt as empty as if she’d fasted for a month.
    When they told Clarice that Howie was missing she understood her mother for the first time. She felt so alone she ached. But as his absence meant that it was only her and Alice from that moment onwards she also knew that she could not indulge in the luxury of death. Her father was long dead by then and her only living relative was an aunt in Yorkshire who didn’t even come to the memorial service. For much of the first year she wondered if he had felt anything, if he had known that he was going to die as the boom hit or if all of that was pure supposition. Sometimes she imagined his body as it must have