Dot (Araminta Hall)

hospital, but she’d told her they couldn’t be friends; she’d pushed away the one person who could have helped her. Over time she’d forgiven Gerry, if you could call it that. They’d slipped into a quiet pattern of strange mutual dependency without any intimacy. Then Rose had come along and it had made her realise that life is for living, that no one was to blame, that to waste the next sixteen years would be to waste a whole life and what was the point of that.
    ‘Oh my God,’ was all Mavis could say when she’d finished. ‘I wish you’d told me before.’
    ‘I should have done,’ her mother replied. ‘God, I didn’t know Dot was so desperate to know who her father was, although it’s completely obvious, of course she would be. I could have told her.’
    The words sounded so pathetic, so out of date and pointless that Mavis wondered how it was that none of them had spoken to each other in sixteen years. Why had they all lived in their own worlds, terrified of letting each other in, terrified of being the first to crack?
    ‘We’ve all been so bloody stupid,’ her mother said as if Mavis had spoken out loud. She stood up again. ‘And now Dot could be lying on a street in London when any of us could have stopped her.’
    ‘Oh Mum, you don’t think that’s true, do you?’
    ‘No, don’t worry, I’m sure it’s not.’ But of course Mavis knew that this chance of life or death was a lottery and not something that your mother could influence in any way. A realisation dropped through Mavis’s mind: that her mother could not save her from dying, any more than she would be able to save Rose. That we do our best, but that ultimately we are all at the mercy of the little decisions that see you alone on a London street for the first time in your life on exactly the same day as others decide to blow it up.
    Sandra left the room after that to get Gerry home and call Alice again and Mavis heard her voice soft and low from the kitchen and felt an amazing surge of pride for her that felt very much like love. The man on the screen was talking about how the police had shut down all the mobile phone networks and it made Mavis feel slightly better, until she saw a woman of Dot’s age being helped down the road, her head gashed, her face black, her eyes staring. It wasn’t just death that could get you on those streets, Mavis realised, there was also all the pain and fear, not to mention the maiming, the people who would no doubt lose limbs, others who would be psychologically scarred for ever. She wondered how anybody ever had the courage to simply leave their house when they had a baby, when the baby became a child, the child an adult. She wanted to lock Rose and herself into a padded cell, as if that would do any good. For the first time ever she started to understand her mother and Dot’s mother, started to see how loving someone so completely can sometimes make you scared, can make it easier not to say the painful things, to hide behind cleaning or silence, to become less of a person yourself to make them more of one. When Dot came back to them Mavis would tell her all of this.
    A little later Mavis’s dad arrived home, his face grey and his eyes blood-shot. He kissed her mother and then she left; Mavis heard the car driving off. She’d never seen her parents kiss before and it felt odd. Her dad sat on the sofa next to her.
    ‘Any news yet?’
    ‘No, I keep trying her mobile, but it goes straight to voicemail.’
    ‘I heard on the radio they’ve shut down the mobile networks in case the terrorists use them to set off more bombs.’
    ‘I know.’
    The images rolled relentlessly in front of them. Other people’s lives ending or being destroyed. But neither of them could look away.
    ‘I wish I’d said something to her,’ Mavis’s dad finally said.
    ‘You?’
    He reddened. ‘Well, anyone really.’
    ‘Mum told me all about what happened with Alice and the baby and everything.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘Anything you want to add?’ They both kept their eyes on the screen, on the ridiculousness of the carnage.
    ‘Not really. Everything she said is true. I was a total fool. I haven’t been a good husband.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Maybe I can make it better?’ He looked round at Mavis and she was struck by how lost he looked, how childlike. Did anyone ever stop guessing?
    ‘You’re lucky you’ve got that chance,’ she said finally, sounding much more grown up than she’d meant.
    Thirty-three people