Dot (Araminta Hall)

working for Ron when Jake was 2, just part-time at first, but as soon as the boys were both at school full-time I’ve gone in every day. Ron lets me leave at 3 and I used to walk down the road and pick the boys up and take them home for tea or to scouts or karate or whatever it is they do. Now I go home and cook supper and wait for them to return. Somehow this life makes sense to me. I mend broken things, I look after my sons, I have dinner on the table when Silver gets home and I go to bed most nights tired in my bones rather than my mind, which is so much the best way round. Never let anyone tell you any different, Dot. We all find our bone-tiredness in different places but I am sure there is little meaning in money beyond the obvious and chasing it is a fool’s paradise. What matters to me is us sitting down to supper together as a family every night, welcoming Silver home at five and shutting the door on the world.
I think you have coloured my life to such an extent that this is the only way I can live. For so many years I was a stranger to myself, unable to believe that I could have left you and then never called. My mind would tell me to pick up the phone, but my fingers simply refused to punch in the numbers. I was scared of myself and all the things I could be capable of, frozen in terror at any action. Silver, the boys and Ron are the only reason that I am still breathing today. What I have with them has given me a purpose and yet I still have this great hole in my soul that only you can fill.
Are you still reading or have you screwed up this letter in disgust? I know I sound pathetic and I am not trying to justify what I have done. What you want is an explanation and if I had one I would give it to you. Christ, I’d give it to myself.
Silver says I remind her of a very fat woman who stares incessantly at pictures of models in magazines whilst eating cakes and saying that she’ll start the diet tomorrow. I torture myself with memories and imaginings of you, always telling myself that I will contact you tomorrow. Yet tomorrow never comes, which I know it a terrible cliché, but sometimes clichés are the only words that make sense. I don’t know how Silver has put up with me over the years. There have been two periods over the past sixteen years in which my despair at myself has been so great that I’ve only functioned with the help of those horrid white pills which the doctors like to dole out. I haven’t gone down that route for a while though now; I take my vitamins, exercise well, play football with Adam and Jake, chat to Ron, listen to Silver and life moves on.
I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me, by the way, I just want you to understand as much as I can explain. When I met your mother I was an angry young man. I had left home a few years earlier and I hadn’t spoken to my parents since then. I remembered them as mean and unloving, which was true to some extent; my father certainly drank too much but I don’t think he was the alcoholic of my memory. He had four young boys, a wife who had to take in other people’s ironing and a job in a mine that was shutting down and sometimes he had to choose between food and heating. Show me a man who wouldn’t fall apart in that situation? Silver made me contact them again after Adam was born. My dad had stopped drinking by then and my mum and brothers were so pleased to see me, it made me feel ashamed. My mum would adore you, by the way. All of her boys have had boys and I know really she’s always wanted a girl. I think she only had me because she thought she was due a daughter. I’ve never told them about you. But I would so love to take you to meet them. And I know you might be thinking: How come he was able to contact them again but not me? The answer is simple. I could have accepted their rejection, but I have so much (possibly everything) to lose if I hear that you have no interest in seeing me.
Seeing them again made me realise the importance of family and how we only really know ourselves when we know where we’ve come from. But still I didn’t contact you. God, I wanted to. Every night Silver would ask me if I’d done it and I’d shake my head and feel like the world’s biggest loser.
You see, by then I didn’t know how I was expected to love people and be loved back when I’d let you down so badly. I constantly doubted myself. I would worry that I would find myself walking out on Silver and the boys as if what I had done to you