Dot

To Lindy & David, my Mum and Dad

‘Wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zig-zags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.’

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Join-the-dots puzzle

noun (British): a puzzle requiring you to connect a series of dots by drawing lines between them. If the dots are correctly connected, the result is a picture.

Collins English Dictionary

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1 … Discovery

2 … Concealment

3 … Redemption

4 … Trying

5 … Fear

6 … Consumption

7 … Friendship

8 … Confession

9 … Nothing

10 … Bewilderment

11 … Acting

12 … Speech

13 … Revelation

14 … Arrival

15 … Recklessness

16 … Waiting

17 … Leaving

18 … Tragedy

19 … Despair

20 … Writing

21 … Kindness

Acknowledgements

A Q&A with Araminta Hall

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1 … Discovery

They were playing a game of hide and seek, as they so often did. Some people might have seen it as a lack of imagination, but as both Dot and Mavis displayed so much imagination in later life, it seems more likely a fact of circumstance. Druith is after all miles from anywhere, sunk in a low, damp Welsh valley, and Dot’s house suggested itself to hide and seek in a multitude of ways. Not that two ten-year-old girls were aware of any of this. They didn’t even find Dot’s house strange: it was still nothing more than a marker in their childhood landscape, and the fact that the floors tipped, cupboard doors opened into secret passages and a concealed turret sprouted out of the side of the house washed over them. The only thing they were beginning to find amusing were the plates which Dot’s grandmother inexplicably chose to hang on the walls. ‘What next?’ they’d whisper to each other. ‘Will we be eating off paintings?’ Although one glance at the heavy oils of permanently displeased relatives and windswept landscapes made this seem very unlikely.

They never played hide and seek when they were at Mavis’s house, not just because she lived in a perfectly proportioned box with no nooks and crannies, but also because her mother looked as if she might cry if you so much as walked on her permanently hoovered floors or breathed on her dustless possessions. Which was in direct contrast to Dot’s mother, who seemed to float through life without noticing anything, and her grandmother, who unfathomably didn’t care about dirt but about most other things. Out of two peculiar options, however, Dot’s house always seemed the most appealing.

Mavis had annoyed Dot that day. She was a fastidious girl, given to huffing and puffing and slapping logic all over Dot’s daydreams. Games of beautiful princesses or magic carpets were never allowed and sometimes Dot was bored by the shops where prices had to be accurate and bills added up precisely. That was usually when she suggested a game of hide and seek.

She left Mavis counting in her attic bedroom, nasally intoning the numbers up to one hundred, and raced down the stairs to the second-floor landing. Once there she weighed up her options and realised she’d used all her best places a dozen times already. Mavis would go straight to the bottom of the laundry basket, the jutting shelves in the larder, even behind the basement door which they both found so scary. The door to her mother’s bedroom was open and the space below her mother’s bed beckoned as invitingly as a pair of outstretched arms. Dot hesitated on the threshold, knowing that Mavis would never enter this room without permission and wondering if this meant she would be cheating. Mavis had already reached sixty-five; she didn’t have much time. Dot glanced behind her but her grandmother’s door was firmly closed, as it always was. Besides, her mother wouldn’t care. It was only her grandma who was mortally offended if anyone entered her room without permission; a peculiar rule which had somehow permeated the consciousness of the house. Even Dot’s mother knocked on her own ten-year-old daughter’s door before coming in to kiss her goodnight. Dot decided that if she left the door open it wouldn’t technically count as cheating.

Dot always felt depressed by her mother’s room, although at that time she would never have used this word to describe what she felt whenever she went in there. She would have said that it made her feel empty, or sad, which is of course a childish way of saying the same thing. Nor would she have vocalised those emotions anyway as, even at the age of ten, she already understood enough about the human heart to know never to articulate feelings like those to her mother, who was so delicate even the slightest thing could disturb her for hours. Besides all of which, Dot couldn’t have told you why it made her feel sad and empty. If pushed she might have said that it was because it lacked so much, which was true. No photos or pictures, no books, no ornaments, no mess; it looked like the spare rooms at the other end of the house and it made Dot worry that really her mother lived elsewhere.

Dot slid her body under her mother’s bed, shimmying as far back as she could against the rear wall, where she was sure no one could casually glimpse her from the door. It was dusty under there, but it still smelt of her mother’s favourite perfume, Rive Gauche, which sat next to her bed in a magical blue and silver bottle and was her only concession to luxury, or maybe even life. The springs which held her mother each night almost touched Dot’s nose and she worried that her mother might come in for a rest and push the springs into her face. Dot would shout, of course, but she knew it would take her mother ages to figure out what was going on, by which time the springs could have dug into her skin.

Mavis was searching now. Dot could hear her in the bathroom next door looking in the laundry basket. She could probably roll out from under the bed before her mother lay down; in fact if she heard her coming upstairs she’d roll out just in case. This made Dot worry that she would scare her mother or not be able to make her understand what she was doing. Only the night before she’d been going up to her room and seen her mother sitting at her dressing table, staring so intently at her reflection that the woman in the mirror seemed more real than the one doing the looking. Dot wished that she hadn’t hidden under her mother’s bed; it had been a stupid idea and was bound to make Mavis cross. Nothing was ever simple. Why couldn’t her mother be more like a proper mother? This mythical woman lived solely as an image in Dot’s mind along with the ponies and princesses: proper mothers did things like bake and pick flowers and ask what had happened at school. A proper mother didn’t drift off in the middle of sentences or rub her temples as if she would push her fingers into her brain if she could. She didn’t cook the most indigestible and weird foods she could think of, she didn’t still live with her own mother. Most of all, she didn’t forget to mention who her child’s father was.

The fact that Dot had never met a perfect mother was not the point. The only other mother she knew well enough to compare was Mavis’s, who was as strange as her own, cleaning a pristine house every day, watching the world through smear-free windows and avoiding speaking to Mavis’s father as if her life depended on it. There was her grandmother as well, who was of course her mother’s mother, but it was almost impossible for her young mind to comprehend her as a mother and she was hardly what you might call normal anyway. Dot listed some of her grandmother’s beliefs as the dust itched her eyes and prickled her skin: do not sit on at least five of the chairs round the dining room table and three in the sitting room as they are too precious, never pick daffodils as they look common anywhere but in the ground, under no circumstances say the words ‘toilet’ or ‘pardon’, stand up when anyone older comes into the room, never sit on the blue velvet chair by the fire or go into her bedroom or touch any of her china. Dot was still too young to decide what she thought about her grandma’s rules, for all she knew they could have been right. And besides, they were related to Jesus, as proved by a family tree which some great-uncle had drawn and which now hung on her grandmother’s bathroom wall. And that surely must give her grandmother some sort of right to preach.

Dot’s arm had grown numb and was starting to buzz with pins and needles which felt like ants running through her blood. She pushed it upwards and her elbow brushed against the smooth surface of what she immediately knew to be a photograph. Unable to turn around she rubbed her elbow over the photograph again and felt that it was trapped against the wall by the head of her mother’s bed. An excitement built inside her out of all proportion to the event: she knew she had to look at something so alien in her mother’s bedroom. It was easy to dislodge and then she was able to pull herself out and reach back in to retrieve the photograph. Dot’s eyes had been made lazy by the dark and it took a minute for them to adjust to the light, for them to focus on the face staring out at her. Then she saw him: a handsome man smiling out at whoever had taken the picture. His face took up most of the frame, but she could see enough blue sky to know that he was outside, as well as the fact that his mid-length brown hair was blowing across his good-looking face with his blue eyes sparkling out and straight into her. Dot felt her whole body tingle like it was Christmas morning. She staggered to her feet and ran to the landing where she shouted for Mavis.

Mavis had been downstairs and it took her ages to reach Dot, although any amount of time would have been too long.

‘Where were you?’ she asked. ‘And why have you come out? I didn’t call.’

‘Under Mum’s bed …’

‘What? But that’s not fair, you know I wouldn’t go in there.’

Dot pulled Mavis into the bathroom and locked the door behind them. ‘Look what I just found under there.’ She handed over the photograph, which already felt like a precious possession to her. She watched Mavis look, studying her face intently, praying that she’d come to the same conclusion. Mavis sat on the side of the bath and Dot copied her so that they could both stare into the face of the handsome man.

‘Where did you say you found this?’

‘Under Mum’s bed. It was sort of trapped against the wall by the bed.’

Mavis looked at Dot and her little face was so serious. ‘Do you think it’s him?’

‘Who else could it be?’

‘I think you’d know anyway,’ said Mavis authoritatively. ‘I mean, you must have some sort of bond.’

‘I was really excited when I felt it. I knew it was a photograph straight away.’

‘Well, you see.’

They both looked again until Dot felt she wasn’t really sure what she was looking at any more, until the colours ran into each other and the background washed over the man’s face.

Eventually Mavis handed the photograph back to Dot. ‘He must be.’

Dot felt as if something was stuck in her throat, but the releasing tears refused to come. Instead she said, ‘I think it definitely is him.’

2 … Concealment

Mavis switched off her mobile because it was easier to ignore Dot when she didn’t actually have to know that she was calling. The girl did not know when to let something go and if she had to tell her one more time that nothing had happened after the stupid sixth-form disco then she would scream. It had been six sodding weeks ago and still she was having to go through all the ridiculous details on an almost daily basis. Mavis had never lied to Dot about anything before and she wasn’t enjoying it now, it was just that the whole thing with Clive was a lie and she didn’t know how to make Dot understand any of it.

Clive was nothing more than a poster on a wall, a pathetic schoolgirl crush, which Dot in her naivety called love. Mavis wondered if Dot would ever speak to her again if she were ever to reveal that after they’d dropped Dot home she’d sucked his dick and then let him fuck her in the back of his car. Dot still thought Mavis was a virgin: until that night Mavis had been a virgin. Dot still thought that one day Clive would see the error of his ways, dump Debbie and declare undying love on a moonlit night to her. Yet the reality was that he didn’t love anyone as much as himself and he hadn’t spoken to Mavis once since that night.

Mavis was a clever girl, much brighter than her surroundings. She had lowered her sights and persuaded herself that she didn’t really even want to try for Oxford and that Manchester suited her so much better, for no other reason than that was where Dot was headed. She couldn’t wait to take Dot away from this dump, to show her that there were places where being clever didn’t get you ignored for ten years, that there were people out there who would love them and listen to them.

She lay back on her bed now and curled herself into a ball, trying to erase the knowledge of the sickness that was relentlessly washing through her body. Her mother had complained the night before about the smell of vomit in the bathroom, if you could call meekly mentioning anything complaining. Any other mother might wonder why her teenage daughter had been sick every day for the past week or at least ask her if she felt OK. And if her mother didn’t ask then maybe her dad might or even her best friend. Mavis thought that she had been surrounded by selfish people all her life and it made her want to punch a few walls.

She calmed herself with the thought that Dot wasn’t really fundamentally selfish, she had been made that way. If you asked Mavis it wasn’t Dot’s lack of father that was the problem, more her lack of mother. You would never meet anyone who seemed more like a replica of a person than Alice Cartwright. She reminded Mavis of the last sheet you print out of an ink cartridge; pale and blotchy with missing words. Last Saturday night they’d all been at Dot’s as per watching X Factor. Clarice had been groaning at everything that was said, which Dot found highly annoying, but which amused Mavis. Sometimes Clarice was the best person to watch reality TV with as she was the only other person Mavis had met who seemed to hold it in as much disdain as she did whilst being unable to look away. Eventually the adverts came on and Dot went to the loo and, just for something to say, Mavis had asked Alice whom she wanted to win.

She’d looked up at this and Mavis had been shocked all over again, as she so often was, at just how beautiful Dot’s mother was. It was something about the fragility of her almost translucent skin which made you want to touch it to see if it was made of cream, or maybe her stupidly huge brown eyes or the long auburn hair that gave her the look of a fairy tale princess. Mavis thought she verged on a cliché; as if an illustrator had been asked to draw his perfect woman.

‘Win what?’ she’d said.

‘X Factor,’ Mavis had answered, but then felt the need to add: ‘You know, the programme we’re watching.’

Clarice had shifted in her seat and Mavis glanced at her, seeing a look of – what? – maybe embarrassment cross her usually impenetrable features.

Alice had glanced worriedly at the screen, seeming to see it for the first time. That is a television, Mavis had wanted to say, it projects moving pictures into our living rooms for our entertainment, although I think one day we’ll discover it’s the government’s way of keeping us docile. We watch X Factor on it every Saturday, we’ve done it for years.

‘The only one who can sing is that girl with the ridiculous hair,’ said Clarice.

‘Amber?’

‘God, what a name.’

Mavis looked back at Alice but she was staring at her hands again, obviously relieved that nothing more was required of her. Not for the first time, Mavis wondered if she had something medically wrong with her. But then Dot came back into the room and the theme tune started and they had all let themselves be dulled by the blue box.

Not that any of that helped her now. Mavis left her bedroom for the first time that day to go to the kitchen to get a biscuit, knowing that the sweetness was the only thing that might subdue the sickness for a few minutes. Her mother was in there polishing the kettle.

‘I was going to make some tea,’ Mavis said, even though she hadn’t been.

‘I’ll put it on for you.’ It was obvious that her mother was only offering because she didn’t want other hands to touch the sparkling chrome. Mavis opened a cupboard door and rustled around, feeling the tension at her back as she shifted tins of soup into tins of tomatoes, flour into sugar.

‘Are you looking for something?’ asked her mother.

‘Biscuits.’

‘They’re in the tin. They’re always in the tin.’ There was a note of desperation in her voice so sharp Mavis wondered if she might cry. But instead of asking what the matter was Mavis walked to the tin and fished out a biscuit, eating it standing up leaning against the side, letting the crumbs drop on to her T-shirt before they hit the floor. Each one fell like a boulder into the silence; her mother watching their path. Mavis willed her mother to tell her to stop, to catch the crumbs, to get her a plate, anything apart from the awful twitching as she waited for her to leave the room so she could get out the dust devil.

A faulty scale sounded from the dining room. ‘Dad got a pupil then,’ Mavis said, pointlessly. Her mother nodded and Mavis knew she was too preoccupied with the crumbs to speak. She left the room, hoping that she was trailing crumbs behind her. She stopped outside the dining room door and listened for a minute to her father trying to sound important, trying to impress a primary-school kid with his musical knowledge. She was filled with an immense hatred for her family, her pathetic, tiny, fucked-up family.

And when you looked at it that way you had to feel sorry for Dot, didn’t you, as her family were no better; sometimes they even seemed weirder than her own. At least on the face of it hers were semi-normal, she at least had the requisite number of parents and a mother with a fairly run-of-the-mill mental illness. Dot was stuck in that creepy house of hers with a grandmother who thought she was a cross between the Queen and God and a mother who lived her life as if she ingested industrial doses of Valium on a daily basis. Because what mother would never mention their daughter’s father, never even tell her his name, pretend like she was an immaculate conception? ‘Why don’t you just ask her?’ Mavis would ask Dot when she was still too young to understand the impossibility of the situation. Of course she’d understood for years now; she’d worked out long ago that families, unless they inhabit American TV shows, do not communicate when they speak. Now her hopes for redemption for both of them centred on late-night conversations in student digs illuminated only by fairy lights and candles in which they’d amuse their fellow students with tales about their lunatic mothers, making themselves sound so much more interesting in the process.

Mavis and Dot had often speculated whether they’d been drawn together because of this; they’d even made themselves blood sisters at some single-figured age and then had their noses pierced together in a shabby tattoo parlour in Cartertown when much too young. Dot’s grandmother had been the only adult in their lives to comment on this and even she had limited her disapproval to a shake of the head and a sharp intake of breath, something which had pleased them less than an observer might have thought. Two weird lonely little girls feeling their way through life without any real guidance. The thought was enough to make Mavis turn her phone back on, but as soon as she did it bleeped the arrival of a message. She pressed the screen and her heart flipped pathetically when she saw it was from Clive.

Yo! Debs n C r havin a hip hopping NYE party. Druith Cricket Club. 8 till late. Respect.

It was enough to make Mavis want to cry, although she never would have done. He thought so little of her he was happy to fuck her, not speak to her for six weeks and still invite her in a group text to his party. Why not shit on her doorstep while he was at it? Although probably she only had herself to blame. He’d been joined at the lips to Debra Paulson since year nine and she had the wardrobe of Kylie Minogue and the body of a porn star, as well as the reputation for never refusing anal sex. And Mavis had gagged. She’d been trying to block out the memory since it had happened but it refused to leave her alone, worrying her like a bad dream. She had been reassuring herself by repeating the mantra, ‘It had only been for a second, maybe he hadn’t noticed?’ Mavis groaned and lay back heavily on to her bed; of course he’d noticed. He’d noticed and told all their friends; right now boys she had known since primary school were doubling over at the tale of that frigid freak Mavis. But it had been a shock. She’d read enough Anaïs Nin and Nabokov to expect his dick to taste salty and fishy like the sea, but it hadn’t, it had tasted of sweat and even (faintly) of urine and she’d been overwhelmed by the thought that she might as well be licking a toilet seat, which had made her gag, just for a second.

Her phone rang and it was inevitably Dot.

‘Hello.’

‘Mave, did you just get a text?’

Her friend sounded so over-excited she wanted to put the phone down again, she even contemplated lying, but knew it was useless. ‘You mean the one from Clive?’

‘Like, hello? Of fucking course.’ Mavis felt herself sink lower, as if her body was melting into the sheets. ‘I mean I didn’t even know he had our numbers.’

‘Of course he’s got our numbers. We’ve sat in small classrooms with him for most of our lives.’

‘Yeah, but …’

‘He’s gotta fill the cricket club.’

‘But still.’

‘Yeah, well.’

There was a pause and then the question Mavis had been dreading. ‘You are going, aren’t you?’

‘I sort of thought not.’

‘But why?’

‘Cos he’s basically a dick.’

‘Clive’s a dick? When did this happen?’

‘It didn’t happen, he’s always been a dick, I just hadn’t noticed before.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Fuck what?’

‘I mean, what’s got into you, Mave? You’ve got so moody lately and now you’re saying Clive’s a dick when I’ve sat up with you on many nights discussing the fineness of his arse.’

‘Yeah, well, you can be fit and still a dick, so.’

‘Right.’

‘I mean, fuck, we live in the middle of fucking nowhere and he’s having a hip hop night and in the fucking cricket club. I mean, please. He’s probably never even been to London, it’s so far on a fucking coach. And New Year’s Eve. That’s like ten weeks away or something. It’s tragic.’

‘OK, don’t come then, I’ll go on my own.’

‘Come on, don’t guilt trip me.’

‘Whatever. Have you asked your dad yet?’

‘Shit, I hoped you weren’t serious.’

‘Well I am.’

‘OK, I’ll do it tonight.’

‘Great.’

‘Great.’

Mavis and her parents’ supper always took place in the kitchen, even though they had a dining room, and her mother always kept the main light shining down, as if daring either of them to spill a drop. Her father was smoking at the back door when Mavis went in and her mother was worrying herself into a frenzy.