Dot (Araminta Hall)

delicious even though Alice was troubled by the mate she knew nothing about and the mysterious favour. She didn’t want to be a bystander to Tony’s life any more, she wanted to be part of it, which was enough to pull her through the lie to Clarice and get away with it.
    Tony met her off the bus on the first day of their pretend holiday and held her hand all the way to the Ford Escort he’d parked a few streets away. They were unusually quiet, embarrassment radiating between them at what they were doing and all it said about how they felt. On the drive Tony wound down his window and turned Radio 1 up full blast, singing along to bands Alice didn’t know. But it lightened the mood and made her laugh. Alice’s hair whipped across her face and she let her head rest against the seat, drinking in the countryside around her, thinking that she would probably never feel happier. Briefly Alice thought about Clarice, either sitting in her chair under the apple tree, or maybe discussing the pruning of the roses with Peter, perhaps listening to the afternoon play on Radio 4, and she was filled suddenly by the sensation that she couldn’t catch her breath, as if she was drowning. Fear of the future loomed over her, a complete knowledge that she could not submit to such a life, that eking out your days was not enough.
    They parked in a dusty car park and walked over a hill to the beach, Tony carrying the picnic he’d brought along and Alice their towels. The sky was so blue it was as if you could look through it and Alice had to keep watching the horizon to stop herself from feeling giddy. The sun was hot and round and hard, as it so rarely was in the first week of October where they lived, so that by the time they reached the steps to the beach they had forgotten they were only half an hour from home and both were imagining Greek islands.
    ‘Have you ever been here before?’ Tony asked.
    Alice laughed. ‘Of course I haven’t. It’s so beautiful.’
    They started their climb downwards. ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ Tony said. ‘I’ve never been abroad, but people who have say it’s better than any beach there.’
    ‘How do you know about all these things?’ asked Alice as she watched the top of Tony’s head bobbing down the steps in front of her.
    He turned back and smiled at her so that her stomach contracted into itself. ‘I don’t know. How do you not?’
    They swam and they kissed and they lay in the hot sand and they were so beautiful and perfect and so complemented the beach that the weather rewarded them with a week of perfect sunshine. There was hardly ever anyone else on the beach and even when there was there were rocks and grasses to hide behind. Alice knew that she would lose her virginity to Tony, although the whole phrase seemed inadequate for the process. She was not losing anything and it did not belong to her. But Tony seemed strangely reluctant. She couldn’t imagine that he was a virgin and she had imagined that he would lead her through this with the same confidence that accompanied everything else he did. She pushed her body into his, but still his hands seemed to stop at all the right moments.
    By Thursday night Alice felt desperate. Desire had overtaken her body so that she tingled if a fly so much as landed on her. She showered when she got home, tasting the salt as it washed off her skin, and then stood for ages in front of the bathroom mirror, staring at her now brown face, wondering if perhaps she wasn’t as pretty as she’d suspected. She rubbed at the freckles on her nose and worried that she looked like a child.
    ‘You’ve changed colour,’ Clarice said to her as they ate their incongruous supper of pork chops, sitting in their brown dining room, even though the evening was still warm and the air was as light as a kiss.
    ‘Oh, I’ve been lying on the grass outside college at lunchtime with some of the other girls,’ answered Alice, amazed at how easily lies now tripped off her tongue. Like everything else, lying seemed to be simply a matter of practice.
    Clarice nodded. ‘Have you thought about what you’re going to do when you finish?’
    ‘I suppose get a job in Cartertown.’ Even the words tasted stale to Alice.
    ‘It’s funny’, said Clarice, ‘to see you growing up. There were times when you were younger that I thought it would never happen and now it’s happened so suddenly.’
    Alice had no idea what her mother was talking about and so she took a sip of