Dot

by Araminta Hall

  Adam is nearly two. He has almost reached the moment when I last saw you and now every day is torture as I wonder if you are the same as him.

  If Silver has a girl this time I might jump off a bridge.

  5, Drovers Place,

  Kelsey KT2 6RJ

  6th August 1996

  Dear Dot,

  I wanted to write and say Happy Birthday. I think of you all the time, especially at this time of year and I look at little girls of your age when I’m on the bus and wonder if you are the same. 9 years old, I can’t believe it. I have two sons now with Silver and we live only an hour and a half from you in Kelsey. They’re your half-brothers, Adam who’s nearly 5 and Jake who’s 3. I’ve put my address at the top of this letter and I would so love you to write back to me.

  I can’t explain properly why I left and didn’t contact you. I didn’t plan it and I never thought I’d be the sort of person who would behave like that. In fact, I’m not that sort of person. If you met me now you wouldn’t think I was capable of anything like that. My partner Silver goes out to work and I keep the house. I’ve got a little part-time job, but really I look after everyone and do all the cooking and cleaning. I think I’m what’s known as a ‘new man’. My friends from home take the mick a bit, but I hardly ever see them and, anyway, I don’t care what anyone else thinks.

  I hope your life is going well and I hope your mother and grandmother are well.

  Please show this letter to your mother and then write to me and I could come and see you.

  Love Dad xx

  5, Drovers Place,

  Kelsey KT2 6RJ

  31st December 1999

  Dear Dot,

  I am going to contact you this year. I am going to send this letter and fulfil the only New Year’s resolution I’ve ever made. I can’t believe that you are 12 and I haven’t seen you for 10 years. Although that’s not entirely true, I do sometimes sit outside your school and watch you come and go. It was hard to do that unnoticed when you were at Druith Primary, but now you’re at Cartertown Secondary it’s easy. I was waiting there after your first day in September last year and I couldn’t see you in that sea of uniformed bodies and my heart felt like it had dropped out of my body. I sat there shaking and sweating, imagining that Clarice had got her way and sent you to some posh private school, maybe even a boarding school, and I wouldn’t have any way of seeing you again. But I waited again the next day and there you were, hard to miss with your bright hair, which I am so glad to see hasn’t faded over the years. Please don’t ever dye it, Dot.

  You have two half-brothers, Adam who is 8 and Jake who is 6. They both go to the local primary in Kelsey. Adam loves it, but Jake can’t see the point. Sometimes I can’t see the point. It feels unbearably cruel to make him go in there every day when all he wants is to come home with me and potter about at home. I end up telling him that I’ll get into trouble if he doesn’t go in, which sounds so pathetic, and he still has far too many days on the sofa with a stomach ache. Do you like school? Have you always or did you go through a time when it made you unhappy? And if you did who kissed you better and held your hand? I hope Alice has been a good mother. She is a kind and loving person, but I always found her very closed off, as if she lived behind a brick wall. Sometimes I used to imagine that she was Sleeping Beauty, trapped behind all that overgrown ivy and all I had to do was fight really hard to find a way in. But maybe I didn’t try hard enough or maybe she was still asleep, I don’t know.

  I know she’ll have told you about Silver; we’re still together and I love her very much. But that doesn’t mean I’m proud of what I did or wish I hadn’t handled things better. I think about what I did to you all the time; on most days it crowds everything else out of my brain so that I find it hard to concentrate on the small daily tasks that face me.

  I’m so sorry, Dot. So, so sorry. I hope that is enough. Please write to me or call me (07700 900961) anytime and perhaps we could arrange to meet?

  Happy New Millennium.

  Love, your Dad xxx

  5, Drovers Place,

  Kelsey KT2 6RJ

  6th August 2000

  Dear Dot,

  I am a coward and I probably won’t send this letter. I have just sat in my car at the end of your road for two hours, waiting for you to come out. I was the man in the red Volvo talking on his phone as you walked past. Although you probably don’t remember seeing me and even if you knew who I was you probably wouldn’t speak to me and who could blame you.

  You looked amazing today. It’s not the first time I’ve sat in a car and watched you, by the way. Sometimes I wait outside your school and see you with your friend, the girl with the ginger hair. I don’t think either of you realise how striking you look, with your flaming hair and determined expressions. The boys probably ignore you a bit now as boys are very obvious at your age and are scared of anything different. But don’t change for anyone.

  I am trying to find the right words to say I am sorry but I don’t think I possess them. I don’t think they’ve been invented. If I knew why I left like I did I’d explain it to myself. I am still with Silver and we have two sons, Adam who’s coming up for 9 and Jake who’s 7. God, I’d love you to meet them. I’d love to be able to tell them about you. And you’d love Silver. I know your mother has probably told you lots of things about her and she has every right to do so. But Silver is the woman I was always meant to be with. She is kind and warm and generous and wants me to be in contact with you almost as much as I do myself. She wanted me to tell Alice before we left and she spent the first year badgering me to let her know where we were. I don’t know why I didn’t. I can’t explain it.

  You look happy and well. I hope Alice and Clarice are as well.

  Please write or call (07700 900961).

  With much love, Dad x

  5th June 2002

  Dear Alice,

  I know it will be a shock to hear from me and I cannot begin to say sorry enough for what I did all those years ago. Not a day has gone by when I haven’t thought about Dot and longed to make it better, but something has always stopped me. My leaving had less to do with you than me; I hope you know that. I hope you recognise me for the angry, stupid young man that I was. I hope that time is nothing more than a bad memory for you now and that your life is full and happy.

  I am still with Silver and we have two sons, Adam who’ll be 11 this year and Jake 9. We live in Kelsey, which is only an hour and a half from where you are. The reason I am writing is that we are moving house tomorrow and I wanted to send you my new contact details. I know how stupid that must sound considering you didn’t know where I was living before. But it’s time we sorted all this out. I want to be a father to Dot, if you’ll let me. I would love to get to know her again and for her to be part of our lives. She should know her half-brothers, apart from anything else. I’d also like to start contributing financially. I know you don’t need my money, but it seems immoral somehow not to be paying in some part for my daughter’s life. I have been putting money aside for her each month, which of course she can have, but I’d like to do more. Really, I’d like to get to know her again.

  I really hope you and Clarice are well. Please write or ring or email and we can set up a meeting.

  23 Downland Avenue, Kelsey, KT1 2GH, 07700 900961, tmarks66@bthubs.com.

  Hope to hear from you soon,

  Love, Tony

  20th November 2003

  Dear Dot,

  I read today in the paper about a girl who was murdered on her way home from school. She got off a train near her home and walked down a busy road, taking the same route that she always did. But she never arrived. Her parents probably went mad, calling everyone they knew, trying to persuade the police that it was out of character, calling her mobile incessantly. She was exactly the same age as you and she stared out of the newspaper at me today with her sweet smile and eager look in her eyes and I realised that if anything ever happened to you I would have to read about it in a newspap
er. And then I realised that I would only read about it if it was newsworthy and actually a million things could happen which I’d simply never know about. I could be sitting here thinking about you and you could not exist any more. And then I thought, What’s the difference anyway? How do you exist for me? Or how do I exist for you? Just because you are there is not the same as knowing anything about you. And surely you have to know about someone for them to be real. Are you not just the same as someone I’ve never met on the other side of the world? Why do I feel like we are connected just because we share some genes? The whole thing makes no sense. Everything I’ve ever thought is wrong. Which is no great news really as I am the man who walked out of his daughter’s second birthday party and never came back, never sent a letter, never picked up the phone. I play the part of the family man with Silver and our two sons, but really I am not that man. I don’t even know the person I am. I wouldn’t recognise him if he punched me in the face right now. Men fly planes into buildings, countries flood, people sleep on the streets every night, parents abuse their children in their homes, wealth is unfair, society is diseased. And I sit here and think I am any different. Nothing is real. It’s all a joke. We’re all a joke. And a bad one at that.

  23 Downland Avenue,

  Kelsey, KT1 2GH

  07700 900961, tmarks66@bthubs.com

  8th July 2005

  Dear Dot,

  This letter will come as a surprise to you, but I have, in some senses, been writing it for sixteen years. It is 4 a.m. right now, a time I’ve become well acquainted with over the years. I spent most of yesterday and last night watching the news, as I’m sure you did, as I’m sure most people in Britain did. It sounds stupid to say that it made me think of you, but it did. As I watched other people’s lives fall apart on streets a few hours’ drive from us, I wondered why I was ruining my own life. It seemed almost rude to all those people who were losing their children or parents or sisters or whatever yesterday. I’ve spent all these years feeling scared of contacting you in case you hate me and it suddenly seemed so pointless and such a waste of time.

  I’ll start with the easy bit and tell you something about myself. I’m sure your mother has filled you in on the whys and wherefores. Everyone in the village must have known that I left with Silver, who was the barmaid at the village pub (it was the Hare and Hounds back then, but now it’s the White Crow). I know that she will have told you about that and I know how awful it must sound. All I can say is that I knew I was meant to be with Silver from the first moment I spoke to her. I don’t know if it will make you feel any better to learn that we are still together and we have two sons, Adam who is coming up for 14 and Jake who is nearly 12, who are obviously your half-brothers. I did love your mother, but we were very young and totally wrong for each other, which is not a good combination. I always hoped that she would meet someone who could make her happy. I have sat outside your house quite regularly over the years; it’s only a ninety-minute drive from our home and in my darkest moments it’s calmed me to see you. In a sense I’ve watched you grow up. You look like a lovely young woman. I’m so pleased that your hair has stayed as bright as it ever was and I love the way you dress, so different from all those tiny skirts and Ugg boots and skinny jeans that every other girl of your age seems to wear as a uniform. In all my watchings I’ve never seen anyone else, apart from Alice and Clarice of course, and a nice-looking girl of your age who also has ginger hair and who I presume is your friend. It makes me think that your mother hasn’t met anyone else; she certainly still has that far-off look in her eyes and this has brought me much sadness. I am often consumed with the thought that I ruined her life and that you will hate me for that. Often I hate myself.

  I work in a shop that fixes things. It’s a really old-fashioned shop, owned by a lovely man called Ron, who has become like a second father to me, or maybe more like a first father. I’ve spoken to him about you so much over the years I probably should be paying him, rather than the other way round. He’s always told me to contact you, just like Silver, and I’ve always known that they’re both right. I tried lots of jobs before I found this one, but I’ve been with him for ten years now and I doubt I’ll ever leave. All those jobs in call centres and banks and insurance companies chilled my soul. I know that sounds melodramatic, but that’s what it felt like. I would walk into those offices and it was like someone had put an icy hand into my stomach and twisted my guts. I would sit at my desk and watch people out of my window and it would seem like a waste to be shuffling numbers and papers which in the end amounted to nothing. After Jake was born Silver and I swapped and I stayed at home and looked after him and Adam and she went to work in a builders’ merchants. She runs it now and has just opened their second shop in Cartertown. I’m not ashamed to say that it’s because of her that we have a roof over our heads. I started 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. A
ll 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 was some sort of sickness. Then I would wonder what the point of contacting you was, considering what a terrible person I was. And then of course time, in this instance, does the opposite of healing; it solidifies like cold porridge, it drags across your mind and laughs at you.

  You’ll see that I’ve enclosed a post office book with this letter. I’ve been putting money in an account for you since I left, not much, as you’ll see, and also not nearly enough, but it might help in some way, especially if you’re thinking of going on with your studies. I am hesitating about putting it into the envelope because I don’t want you to feel like I’m buying you off or that I think money in any way compensates for what I’ve done. I know it’s no substitute for all the bedtime stories I’ve missed or the dinners I’ve never cooked you or the kisses I’ve never given you. All it’s meant to be is proof that you’ve never left my mind, not once, in all the years I’ve been away. You are going to be 18 very soon and what I would really like would be to know you well enough to buy you a present that would make you smile. I would love to buy you a present.