Dot

by Araminta Hall

  ‘Right,’ she said, moving on down the bar, ‘I’ve had enough of those.’

  Tony took his pint and went to sit in a corner. He was hungry and remembered he hadn’t eaten any lunch. The beer mixed with his gastric juices, rushing through his body. He ordered another pint from Simon, taking it back to his table without speaking to Silver, marvelling at his own stupidity but unable to stop himself. It was past ten now and he thought he’d rather sleep on the green than go home to Alice. He didn’t have anything to say to her.

  Half an hour later his head was fuzzy and so he stumbled into the fresh air and sat on the bench on the green opposite the pub. He checked his watch a few times and didn’t admit to himself what he was doing. But eventually the last stragglers left and he could see Simon and Silver clearing the glasses and wiping down tables through the lighted windows. He was pleased to notice they did it almost in silence, exchanging a quick goodbye before the lights went off and Silver emerged, her coat done up to her chin and her stride purposeful. Tony stood up without knowing exactly what his plan was and followed her down the road. In the end there was very little option but to quicken his stride and come up behind her. He touched her lightly on the arm and she jumped away from him, letting out a little scream.

  ‘No, sorry, Silver, it’s just me, Tony.’

  She peered up at him. ‘What the fuck are you doing creeping up behind me like that?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Bloody hell, don’t do that to me. You might live in a tiny little village, but where I come from you don’t want men coming up behind you in the dark.’

  ‘Sorry. I don’t come from here anyway. I’ve only lived here two years.’

  Silver shifted her weight on to her hip. ‘Is that what you’ve stopped me to say at eleven-thirty at night?’

  ‘No.’ Tony looked at the sky and felt as if he was falling upwards through the stars. ‘I don’t really know why I stopped you. Truth is I can’t stop thinking about you.’

  She spluttered at this. ‘Please.’

  ‘I know that sounds crap, but it’s true.’

  Silver sighed. ‘When I was younger I used to think I was quite a good judge of character, but the last few years have shown me how far off the mark I am there and you’ve just proved it to me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought you were nice, Tony. I’ve seen you round the village with your wife and your daughter and then you come in the pub and you’re friendly without seeming like you want anything and now this.’

  There was such a gap between what Tony meant and what he’d said, he pulled at his hair, not confident that he would ever get her to understand. ‘I know it looks shit. Christ, it is shit. But this isn’t me. Look, I’m not going to lie. I’ve got a great wife, but a shit marriage. And a daughter who I love more than anything else in the world. And I haven’t done anything like this before. But I can’t stop thinking about you.’

  Her face was set hard, even in the dark. ‘And what do you think you’ll achieve by telling me that?’

  He felt desperate enough to cry. ‘I don’t know.’

  She turned away. ‘Go home to your family, Tony.’

  He grabbed at her arm again. ‘No, please.’ It was only a second’s glance but their eyes met and Tony saw all he needed. ‘My God,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Silver, please.’

  ‘Please what? I’m not that type of woman.’

  ‘I know. I’m not that type of man. Just meet me for coffee or something. Away from Druith. Please, just once.’

  Silver wasn’t that type of woman, in fact she wasn’t like any woman that Tony had ever met before. She was only two years older than him but she seemed to have lived fifty lives already and cynicism ran through her veins. Her father had been an alcoholic like his own and her mother had been blasé about her existence. She’d married an unsuitable man too young who’d hit her twice and after the second time she’d packed a bag and got on a train and ended up in Cardiff. But it had been scary on her own there and so she’d started looking for jobs in the country and ended up in a hotel, where she’d met Simon and agreed to come and work for him in Druith, which seemed like exactly the sort of no-place she needed.

  They became lovers quickly, making love on Silver’s creaky single bed in her studio flat on the edge of Druith in which they were as desperate as each other. When he was with her, Tony felt he could touch the stars. He liked to lie on her stomach, breathing her musty odour, tasting her at the back of his throat. And she would stroke his hair and laugh at the things he said.

  ‘I’m going to organise a party for Dot’s second birthday,’ Alice said one Sunday as they walked along the river.

  Tony kicked a stone into the water. Ironically they’d got along much better since he’d met Silver. For one thing he didn’t go to the pub much any more, but also he found it easier to be kinder. ‘Really?’

  ‘I’ve met so many nice women at the playgroup. And Dot seems to enjoy playing with their children. I just thought tea or something.’

  ‘Sounds great.’ Dot ran across the grass in front of him and Tony felt a tightness in his chest, a sudden realisation that things could not continue in this way. He wanted to watch a child he had created with Silver. He wanted to take her home to meet the parents he hadn’t spoken to in years.

  Tony said all of this to Silver when he next saw her. She didn’t want to take him away from Dot, but sometimes you don’t have a choice in these matters. They agreed to leave in the weeks after Dot’s birthday. Tony would start looking for a flat in Cartertown and Silver for a job. He’d explain everything to Alice and, although it would be hard and ugly for a while, ultimately she’d meet someone much better suited to her. He imagined a time when they’d all be friends. When he’d go to pick up Dot for the weekend and have a nice chat with Alice’s new husband and they’d look back on this time and maybe not laugh, but at least think they had been brave and right.

  Alice was filled up with her plans for Dot’s party for the next two weeks, so much so that she didn’t notice when Tony spent more time than usual with Silver. Even Clarice seemed to have entered into the spirit of things and one evening Tony came home to find the two women huddled over a book, discussing recipes. Maybe they weren’t mad, he found himself thinking, just different and so removed from his own experience that he found it easier to let himself think that they were unhinged.

  ‘D’you want me to give Dot her bath?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, would you?’ said Alice, turning her smile on him, which was still capable of taking his breath away.

  Tony scooped his daughter into his arms, bounding up the wooden stairs as relatives who would never belong to him watched their every move. He ran the bath higher than Alice did and filled it with bubbles, shutting the door so that the steam filled the room. Tony hung his jacket over a chair, rolled up his sleeves, took off his tie and shoes and helped his podgy daughter out of her clothes. Her arms and legs were like pillows and her skin mottled as he placed her into the bath. She splashed at the water, clutching at the bubbles which dissolved in her hands, her fiery hair sticking to her scalp as it got wetter and wetter.

  Tony knelt on the floor, resting his arms on the side of the bath and staring so intently at his daughter that he stopped seeing her; he started to doubt her reality. The thought rushed through him that his actions were going to affect her, that how he managed the next few weeks, months, years would determine the person she would one day become and the responsibility seemed awesome.

  ‘I love you, Dot,’ he said.

  She looked up and smiled. ‘I love you, Daddy.’ She reached over to him, chasing the tears he was crying down his cheeks with her fingers.

  ‘We’ll get a nice flat, Silver and I, and you’ll have a beautiful pink bedroom and I’ll fill it with toys and dolls and you can stay whenever you want.’

  ‘Dolls,’ she squealed.

  ‘Whatever you want, angel. We’ll all be happier this way, I promi
se.’ But the words sounded hollow and tasted stale and a sickness rose in him that made him retch over the toilet until he was hot and trembling.

  Dot woke them on the morning of her birthday as she did most mornings, her warm body between them from some indeterminable point in the night when she’d cried and Alice had left the room and reappeared with her. The day was bright and the sun poured over his wife and daughter, so that they looked unearthly. He’d made love to Alice the night before and the memory shamed him. He’d kissed those perfect lips, run his hands over her blemish-free flesh, held her tightly, moaned into her neck. And, worse than all of that, he’d meant it. As Dot tore at her presents he knew that his mind only had a few more hours left in it, that the route he was travelling only led one sure way and that was madness. He knew that better – or maybe worse – men than him could split themselves, but it was tearing at his soul. He decided to call Silver that night and say he was going to talk to Alice tomorrow and that they should leave on Monday. Silver had a job lined up at a pub in Cartertown and they could stay in a B and B until they got a flat sorted.

  The day dragged him towards it. Everywhere he turned he felt as though he was at a ghastly fairground in a hall of mirrors showing him what could have been. Dot was amazing, bounding around in her delight like a puppy. He heard Clarice laugh; he marvelled at the plates of food Alice produced. Even the house felt warm and friendly as balloons brightened dark corners and music pierced the silence.

  After lunch Tony took Dot into the garden and spun her round by holding her hands so that she shrieked with joy. They fell into the grass together and Tony noticed how the roses in the border were the same colour as her hair. Pieces of his daughter fell all around him, shredding his heart and mangling his brain. He lay on the lawn with Dot resting on his stomach and looked back at the tall house with its dark windows and magical turret and realised that he no longer knew right from wrong. He felt sure that the right thing to do would be to walk away from Silver and yet even the thought was impossible. He tried to imagine his future without her as he stroked his daughter’s hair and it felt as empty as death. He had maybe minutes to save himself. He now knew that if he stayed and witnessed his daughter become two he would never leave. Tony stared into the electric blue sky and understood what had eluded him for so long: he loved Dot more than anyone but in order to stay alive he had to take care of himself and Silver was as integral to his staying alive as oxygen.

  Tony got up off the grass and took Dot back into the house. His head felt large and full, as if he’d had a skinful the night before and was still wobbly on his feet. The kitchen smelt like a bakery, like a place he’d have enjoyed growing up in. Alice was standing by the table, squeezing pink icing out of a white tube on to miniature cakes. She smiled, pushing her hair out of her eyes with the back on her hand, leaving a trace of pink on her forehead.

  ‘I’m just going to nip out and get some more balloons,’ Tony said.

  Her expression changed at this. ‘But we’ve got loads.’

  ‘Oh well, I just thought we could do with some more.’

  Alice glanced at the clock above the door. ‘The party starts in an hour.’

  ‘It’ll only take me five minutes.’

  ‘OK.’

  He hesitated at his moment of freedom, unable to turn and take his exit. Instead he walked over to where his wife and daughter were standing. The next time he saw them everything would be different and they would no longer belong to each other. He picked Dot up, kissing her red cheeks. ‘You do know you’re an amazing mother, don’t you Alice,’ he said. She laughed nervously. ‘No, I mean, look at all this. Look at Dot. You’re incredible.’ It wasn’t enough, he wanted to say more but nothing formed in his mind.

  She blushed. ‘Don’t be silly.’

  Tony put Dot back down next to her mother and turned and left the kitchen. He pulled his jacket from the cupboard in the hall that Clarice insisted they use and shut the front door quietly behind him. He still didn’t know exactly what he was doing, but as he walked down the road and felt Clarice watching him from the sitting room windows he knew he wasn’t going back.

  The only person who could save him now was Silver and Tony wished he had one of those phones he’d read about in some of the papers recently. Phones that posh businessmen kept in their briefcases and were able to use standing on street corners. The report he’d read said there were satellites in the sky which transmitted their conversations to each other, that one day we’d all have one in our own pockets which we could use to call people on the other side of the world. But he didn’t care about the rest of the world, only Silver. Tony walked to the Hare and Hounds and went straight in without stopping. Silver was pulling a pint for Charles Wheeler but when she saw Tony she stopped. He turned and left and she followed him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked as they stood on the green with so many pairs of eyes watching them. ‘I thought it was Dot’s party.’

  ‘I can’t do it, Silver.’

  She put her hand on his arm and it was the first time that day that his heart slowed to anything like a normal pace. ‘Calm down. You’re white as a sheet. What’s happened?’

  ‘We have to go now.’

  ‘Have you told Alice?’

  He shook his head and tears spilt out of his eyes without warning. ‘I can’t do it any more, being there and thinking of you all the time. It’s wrong. And Dot – shit, Silver, what am I doing?’

  ‘We don’t have to. You can walk away from me now and there won’t be any hard feelings. I’ll go to Cartertown; you won’t ever have to see me again.’

  ‘But I love you.’

  She was crying as well. ‘I love you too. But sometimes—’

  ‘No, I went through all that in my head this morning. It has to be you, Silver. It’s always been you.’

  ‘You’ve got to speak to Alice. You can’t just leave.’

  ‘I can’t go back and I can’t tell her now. Dot’s party is about to start.’

  ‘Then we can wait for tomorrow.’

  ‘No.’ Tony heard his own desperation, as pathetic as a drowned kitten. ‘Don’t make me go back there, I can’t.’

  ‘But Dot—’

  ‘She won’t even notice. I’ll call Alice tomorrow or next week. We’ll get a flat and Dot can come and stay.’ Tony grabbed on to Silver’s hands. They were cold.

  ‘Of course she’ll come and stay,’ she said, using the back of her hand to wipe the tears from his cheeks just as his mother had done when he was small.

  If you say something enough it becomes true, doesn’t it? Tony shut his eyes and believed this with all his heart. Silver didn’t need any more convincing; Tony knew that she understood him better than anyone else when she turned and they walked away from the pub, back to her flat where they packed all her things, got into her rusty Renault 5 and drove out of the village. By that evening they were clinging to each other in a double bed in a dingy B and B in Cartertown, as Dot’s party finished and Alice went to bed, not thirty miles away, although they might as well have been in different universes.

  18 … Tragedy

  Gerry had twenty minutes tops to make a decision about what to say to Sandra. What a prick! He replayed the drive home in his head and his stomach twitched with embarrassment so that he groaned like a dying man. He hadn’t planned it because what sort of fool would plan to make a pass at his wife’s best friend? Of course he’d noticed how absolutely gorgeous Alice was, you’d have to be a woofter not to, but he’d never considered anything happening between them. He’d never even wanted anything to happen between them, which was why what he’d done was so unfathomable, even to himself. Gerry liked to keep his dalliances totally separate from his life because that’s what they were. Stupid young girls, as he liked to think of them, with short skirts and red lips who made him feel better for a few hours and then disappeared from his life like a passing fog so that he could often pretend they had never existed. And he hadn’t even done anything like that
for coming up to two years now anyway, not since Mavis had been born. He drew up outside his house and saw a light on in their bedroom. Mavis was still asleep so he allowed himself a cigarette as the car cooled down and the engine ticked over. He banged his hands hard on the steering wheel. He had to think fast because Alice might already be on the phone to Sandra, and the real, ugly truth of it all was that he couldn’t imagine his life without his wife, the woman he’d loved from the first time he’d knocked those books out of her arms outside the library in Kelsey.

  Gerry got out of the car and flicked his cigarette into the bushes, zipping up his bomber jacket to keep out the cold. The air was prickling and he could feel in his nostrils that it would be icy by morning. He lifted Mavis out of the back seat and hurried her into the house. The atmosphere inside was calm and still and he could hear the murmur of the radio from their bedroom. Sandra had not received any bad news yet, that much was clear. He took his daughter up to her bedroom, easing her little limbs out of her clothes. Her cheeks were sticky and she should of course brush her teeth but there was no way he was going to wake her now. He left her vest and pants on and tucked her under the pink duvet, kissing the side of her head and smelling the sugar and excitement still lingering on her. Her bright hair glowed in the light trickling in from the landing and he felt a surge of ownership for Mavis, a sense that she belonged to him. A life without her and the baby in Sandra’s stomach would be worthless, he realised, perhaps two hours too late.

  Gerry stayed by her bed for a minute, trying to organise his whirling thoughts. There was a chance that Alice might not mention it to Sandra but it was a slim chance and if he didn’t get in there first there wasn’t a hope in hell of her believing him. There’d only been one other time that he’d come this close to being caught, when a student had got a bit too interested and started sending him letters to his house, which he’d had to intercept on an almost daily basis for a few weeks. It was all so stupid anyway. He couldn’t understand why Sandra would care about these girls, who meant nothing to him. He wasn’t like that prick Tony who’d gone and fallen in love with Silver and had now run off; he had no intention of ever even liking them. What he did with those girls was no different to an evening spent in the Hare and Hounds with his mates on a Thursday. They were just a distraction, a way of passing the time, and they had absolutely no bearing on his feelings for Sandra.