active years, decades importing Turkish rugs and worrying about storm damage to the cabin at the commune, that rectangular box made of Fibrolite, with a tap, one living space and two bedrooms. The bathroom was an add-on out the back door. Although there were laddered wooden steps up from the beach path and a plastic bucket in which to dunk dirty feet, the cork floor inside was always gritty with sand. The inside walls were unclad, and shells, white coils of no particular beauty, sat on the raw battens alongside paperbacks with flaky spines and crazed brown mugs from a local potter. They were grown-up. Still there was the nodding white beach grass, the straggled leaves of the sunflowers against the grey Fibrolite wall, the trumpeting sky.
They sat in the stuffy cabin with Ruth, Evelyn, Michael and Lee, and it was raining, the world outside dripping, and inside everything was sticky and they played cards till their fingertips were blue and nobody spoke for at least an hour before Evelyn looked out the door and saw that the rain had stopped, and called to everyone to come out and down to the water. The room emptied until it was just Dorothy and Daniel, and the Formica table the colour of tomato flesh, flecked with yellow, like seeds, and the peeling wooden kitchen chairs and the rag rug on the floor and the large pages of newspaper streaked with mud and scrunched by the door where people had wiped their feet on the way in, and the stubs of candles puddled on saucers, their wizened black wicks cold to look at, and finally Dot stopped her looking all over the room and swung her gaze back round to him. He was counting cards. He patted the pack together and shuffled it deftly and split it and bridged the two halves and let all the cards flick together and arch, all the time looking at the cards, but with a small smile on his face that he couldn’t quite get rid of. Dorothy said that she didn’t want to play any more cards. She walked past him to the sink and poured a spluttery cup of water from the big creaky tap and drank it very quickly because her mouth was dry, her lips as dry as on a winter’s morning. He was wearing his striped T-shirt and a pair of jeans and he’d kicked off his sandshoes by the door and his feet were so bare. He asked her to pour him a drink. When she put the cup on the table in front of him it shook. He reached to pick up the cup and his hand brushed against her wrist. He shifted over on the cracked vinyl bench seat and made space for her. Dorothy sat; her legs were shaking too. Daniel started to spread out cards as if they were going to play a game and he was still looking intently at the little collections of blue-and-white patterns, secret pictures decipherable in their geometry, when he said, ‘How long do you think we’ve got?’ He pulled at the neck of his T-shirt as though there was something inside it.
The sister was talking with the young criminal while he pulled at the closed-over plastic liner in Dot’s wastepaper basket and shook the rubbish into his green sack. Tattoos peeked from the sleeves of his blue uniform jacket, which was slightly too short in the arms. They gave Dorothy a haircut and held up a hand mirror to show her what she looked like. Where was the duct tape of mercy then, she wondered, because there was nothing to stop the words coming out while she said, ‘That’s not me, that bouncy hair is not mine, those wavering eyebrows, those eyelids, the sunken cheeks, the neck you don’t understand that cannot be my neck, my brittle shoulders, my pink cardigan.’ They wheeled her back into her room while she was still talking. ‘Why is there a teddy bear on my bed? Why does a doll sit with splayed legs in the armchair? Whose are these toys? Did I steal them? Do children visit me who want to play with them? Do they smell? There’s something on my head. Did someone Sellotape a bow on my hair? Did that happen while I was looking at that collapsed face in the mirror? Do I smell? Have I soiled myself? When you lift me like that it hurts. Do I have a sore