Dot (Araminta Hall)

on uncertain ground and I feel my heart fluttering with what I want to say, but now is surely the time to be brave. ‘In fact, maybe my mother should apologise to all of us. Or maybe it’s her mother’s fault, or her mother’s. Or maybe our fathers. Why do they all get away scot free?’
    Alice is crying in deep, heaving sobs. ‘What’s happened to us?’
    ‘I don’t know, but I’m sick of it. Alice, we’ve kept on going, we’ve stuck in there. And by God we’ve probably got a lot of things wrong, but we’re still here. My mother, Tony, Howie: they all opted out one way or another. But we didn’t, we’re still here.’
    ‘If something’s happened to her I’ll die.’
    ‘Stop it. Nothing’s happened to her.’ I stand up and go to sit next to her on the sofa. I put my arm around Alice and I’ve forgotten how good it feels to touch warm flesh. She sinks into my shoulder and I feel her tears on my neck so I rest my face against the top of her head. It’s been maybe twenty-five years since I held another human being but my body remembers how to do it as if it was yesterday. All this wasted time: what were we thinking?
    ‘Oh Mum,’ she says. ‘It hurts so much.’ I kiss the top of her head and whole chambers unlock inside me. Words do mean something, I remember, it is always within our power.
    There is a knock at the front door and we both jump to our feet. The possibility of redemption is too sweet to imagine. Sandra is standing on our doorstep and I am rushed backwards through time, sucked down a rabbit hole of remembrance.
    ‘Can I come in?’ she asks and we both stand back, and then all go into the sitting room.
    ‘Is Mavis OK?’ Alice asks.
    ‘Yeah, I got Gerry to come home and sit with her and Rose. Obviously they’ll call if they hear anything.’
    ‘Do you want some tea?’ I ask.
    ‘No.’ Sandra sits on my chair by the fire and so we both sit back on the sofa. For a while we listen to the numbers and details on the telly. The people emerging from the smoking holes seem to have an incessant need to tell their stories, but all the stories are different and there is nothing concrete to grab hold of.
    ‘I hope you don’t mind me being here,’ Sandra says finally.
    ‘No, it’s good,’ says Alice.
    ‘It’s just I know what you’re like,’ Sandra says and then blushes. ‘I know how easy it is to blame yourself for things that happen to your children. But it’s not helpful, thinking like that.’
    Alice starts to cry at this and so I take her hand. ‘I’m only thinking what is true,’ Alice says.
    Sandra sits forward at this. ‘Alice, you were the only person who spoke any sense to me after my accident and I so wish I’d listened to you.’
    ‘I can’t even remember what I said.’
    ‘You told me that it wasn’t my fault.’ Sandra stands up at this and goes to stand by the window, her hand tapping against her thigh. I feel as though I’m watching a play. ‘But I didn’t listen. I’ve spent the past sixteen years cleaning away my sins, repeating actions that stop me falling apart in the middle of the day. Then Rose was born and it was like someone slapping me. I stood in that hospital where I felt everything had ended for me and watched my daughter give birth. My God, it was …’ She reaches out and touches the window as if looking for the right word in our garden. ‘It was so bloody real. And I thought: What am I doing torturing myself about something that happened because of lots of different reasons, lots of different moments, split-second decisions?’
    ‘That’s different. Dot wouldn’t be in London now if I had told her about her father.’
    ‘It’s not different. I wouldn’t have driven my car into a tree if I’d trusted my instincts when Gerry lied to me about you and him after the circus. Not that any of that matters. We are where we are. You have to just keep moving forward, that’s all there is.’
    ‘What if I have no forward, San? Dot is my forward.’
    Sandra comes over to the sofa at this and squeezes in next to us. She’s always been emotionally brave and I wonder what it’s been like for her, these past sixteen years, entombing herself like a mummy. ‘Dot is going to be fine. She’s too special.’
    It is a ridiculous and preposterous thing to say because as we sit here I realise that everyone is special. That people will die today who are special. That the men who blew themselves up for an ethereal idea are special. That we all