Dot (26 page)

20 … Writing

3b, Colliers Court,

Tredwell Street,

Cartertown, CR4 2TZ

6th August 1990

Alice, so it’s been a year and Dot is 3 today. I hope you’re having a party or something for her. I hope it’s a better party than last year. I’m so sorry I haven’t been in touch before now. You’ll know I left with Silver. I’m sorry for this as well. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, I’m sorry I just walked out, I’m sorry we couldn’t make it work. I can’t explain my actions. I felt so trapped by you and your mother and I knew Silver was the person I should have been with as soon as I met her. I know that probably sounds harsh to you, but I also think you’re going to (or maybe you already have) meet someone so much better suited to you than me. I know you thought you loved me, but it wasn’t real. You can’t love someone when they are so different from you. We weren’t right for each other and I hope you know that as well as I do.

You are so hard to reach, Alice. I tried talking to you, but sometimes it felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall and in the end I gave up. It’s like you don’t need anyone or anything. You didn’t even seem to get annoyed by Clarice, who is odd, let me tell you. If you dropped her into Manchester town centre I think they’d lock her up. Either that or rob her blind.

I miss Dot like crazy. Please write back to me so we can sort out me coming to see her or something.

I hope you’re well.

Tony

14th September 1991

Dearest Dot,

Silver had a baby boy last night. We’re going to call him Adam. He is 8 lb 3 oz. You were 7 lb 3 oz. You were very, very beautiful when you were born and Alice was amazing. Silver was amazing as well. One day you might have a baby and understand all this.

I was in the room when you were born. I doubt your mother has ever told you that. Of course she hasn’t, you’re much too young to understand things like that. I held you when you were only a few minutes old and you felt so tiny I was scared. I got the same feeling when I held Adam last night. You both felt so light, you could almost forget you were holding a person. I imagined dropping him or squeezing him too tight, or throwing him against the wall. That sounds so wrong but it’s what my arms itched to do last night. Not because I wanted to hurt him, of course, but I think maybe because it was possible and would ruin my life. It doesn’t seem real, it doesn’t seem possible that this scrap of life will turn into a person and it’s up to you to get them there. Not that I’ve been there for you these last two years.

I probably won’t send this letter, not least because you won’t be able to read yet, but in a few weeks I will ring your mother and arrange to see you again and you can meet your brother and we can forget the last two years.

I looked out of the hospital window last night with Adam in my arms and I thought that you could be looking at the same stars. I hope you were. I hope you are.

I love you, Dot.

Your Dad x

6th August 1993

Happy Birthday Dot.

Did you know your birthday is the anniversary of Hiroshima?

When you were born you exploded an atomic bomb inside me that’s been detonating ever since.

Silver is pregnant again, round and bloated and happy. I should feel the same way, but I don’t. I feel thin and weak and miserable.

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, [email protected].

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 newspaper. 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.