Dot (Araminta Hall)

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.
I’m also going to put in the other letters I’ve written you and Alice over the years. I never posted any of them, so don’t think that your mother didn’t show them to you. I’ve really deliberated over showing you these. You might get the impression from reading them that I’m unstable, and in some senses you’d be right, but I’m not that person now, I’m the person on this page. In the end I think you need to know as much as I can show you and so I’m going to put them into the envelope.
I wish things were different. Sometimes I can’t believe that time is real. We fix a lot of clocks in Ron’s shop and when all the pieces are lying in front of me waiting to be reassembled I think: We invented that, why do we live by its rules? In the spring and autumn we make it go backwards and forwards and yet it is still our master. And we all know the feeling when it speeds up or slows down. In fact, that first year with Silver was the fastest year of my life and perhaps has some bearing on why I never contacted you (not that I think that’s an adequate excuse). I imagine rearranging time by putting the pieces together differently and going back to the day I left. I would have still made a life with Silver, but I would have been braver. I would have stayed for your birthday party and then told Alice properly and now you’d be coming to stay every other weekend and I’d know things about you. I never planned to walk out like I did. But (and I’ve never told anyone this, not even Silver), I suddenly realised that if I stayed and witnessed you becoming two I would never leave and if that happened I was going to die or become so bitter that I would have been a horrid father and husband. By which I don’t mean that Alice or Clarice are bad people, but they were too different from me, so far removed from anything I understood that I felt completely lost in that life. Even the house terrified me with all its blind turns and false doors. I used to feel like it was laughing at me, like it knew I was no match for it and nothing but an interloper.
I don’t know if she’s ever told you, but Alice never wanted us to live there when she found out she was pregnant. I used to get so annoyed with her when she was carrying you, as she’d go on about how we could live on love and cheese on toast on the Cartertown estate and I used to think: You don’t know what you’re talking about. But maybe she was right and I was the one who didn’t know what I was talking about. Because I was very narrow in my thinking back then and there isn’t ever only one way to travel, you know, Dot.
But maybe we are the people we are only because of the things that have happened to us? Maybe everything has a meaning? I’m not sure; I wonder what the people lying in hospital now after having been blown up on their way to work would say to that. I long to know what sort of person you are. Are you going to university? How did you do in your A Levels? What music do you like? What’s your favourite food? God, and that’s only scratching the surface. I can tell what Jake and Adam are thinking by the turn of their mouths and yet I don’t know the most basic things about you. And yet I love you just as much as I love them. How is that possible? How can I love you when all I have of you is the