Dot (Araminta Hall)

were now confirmed dead, the woman on the screen said, but the number was expected to rise.

17 … Leaving
    Tony thought he remembered his mother once saying something like: Where there is a beginning there is also an end. He couldn’t remember when or in what context but he wished he could because he felt lost and cast adrift in a world that understood him as little as he understood it. He was twenty-four, living in a topsy-turvy house with a possibly mad wife and her definitely mad mother. He took the bus into Cartertown every day to work at a job which sickened his soul, calling people to sell them something useless. At least ten people a day called him a cunt, twenty told him to fuck off, fifty just put the phone down. Although the worst were the old duffers who probably hadn’t spoken to anyone in weeks and would painfully prolong the conversation even though they were never, ever going to buy. Scott, his manager, was ruthless; he told them to cut those calls as quickly as they could because ‘time is money’, a disgusting epigram which was written in large red letters across a banner at the front of the room. The banner hung next to a bell which you had to get up and ring every time you made a sale over a hundred pounds. It was always the same three people who rang the bell and, after doing it once, Tony had vowed never to ring the bell again. The only, only part of his life which brought him any joy was his daughter, whom he loved with a passion he had never thought possible.
    Recently though it hadn’t felt like enough. All through his youth, listening to his dad’s Rolling Stones records, Tony had never doubted that he was going to be someone; but now, as he bumped home on the bus staring out of the window, Alphaville and Kirsty MacColl and the Beastie Boys on his Walkman (bands that Alice wouldn’t even know existed), he wondered at what he had lost. People from his office sometimes went for drinks after work and he’d gone a couple of times, standing in wine bars feeling totally excluded from their lives. Girls would often talk to him, as they always had, but he was never really able to get into it and would tell them about Dot and Alice as quickly as he could to make them walk away.
    Then he noticed the pub in the village, which he had to walk past every night, and he’d taken to stopping in for a pint or two before undertaking the long walk through his front door. People were starting to nod at him when he came in and the night before he’d had a semi-conversation with the butcher. You cannot become this person, he found himself thinking as he left. Of course Alice was always waiting for him at home, dinner cooked and Dot in bed, her mother lurking somewhere in the background like a terrible memory which he couldn’t place. Alice never mentioned the fact that he was late or that he smelt of beer and the cigarettes he’d recently reverted to. He would sit sullenly in the kitchen, spooning her often-tasteless food into his mouth, willing her to ask him what he’d been up to, why he was late. But she always talked about Dot and things they’d done in the day, her enthusiasm bubbling out of her so innocently that he sometimes wanted to smash the plate into her face, just to see what she would do. At least Clarice was open in her disdain, which was something after all.
    If you had asked Tony in the years between him becoming interested in girls and meeting Alice to name the qualities he was looking for in a woman, he’d probably have described Alice. Most men would in fact probably describe Alice: beautiful, passive, submissive, unmoody, caring, intelligent. But now he had all that, he thought he probably wanted something different – he just didn’t know what yet.
    Simon, the pub landlord, was full of the news that he had hired a new barmaid; ‘A right cracker,’ he said to anyone who would listen, ‘and she’s starting next week,’ The air in the pub vibrated as they waited and Tony laughed at the men behind his pint, wondering at the limits of their lives. Maybe we should move, he began to think, try a city? Perhaps if he got Alice away from her mother and out of the house she’d been born in she’d be forced to engage more with life?
    He had forgotten that it was the new barmaid’s legendary first night when he turned into the pub the following Thursday, but as soon as he saw her standing behind the bar he couldn’t help letting a smirk cross his face. She was exactly what