of her silver satin dress when the breeze brushed by. The breeze. Even nature knew the rules. While Dolly baked in the Smitham family camp, sweat beads colonising her hairline and making her bathing suit stick, that silver dress fluttered tantalisingly from up on high.
‘Who’s for cricket?’
Dolly ducked lower behind her magazine.
‘Me, me!’ said Cuthbert, dancing from one foot (sunburned already) to the other. ‘I’ll bowl, Dad, I’ll bowl. Can’t I? Can’t I? Please, please, PLEASE?’
Father’s shadow cast a brief respite from the heat. ‘Dorothy? You always like to take first turn.’
Her gaze traversed the proffered bat, the rotundity of her father’s middle, the morsel of scrambled egg clinging to his moustache. And an image flashed across her mind of the beautiful laughing girl in the silver dress, joking and flirting with her friends—not a parent in sight.
‘Might give it a miss, thanks Dad,’ she said weakly. ‘Head-ache coming on.’
Headaches carried the whiff of ‘women’s business’ and Mr Smitham’s lips tightened with awe and distaste. He nodded, backing away slowly, ‘Rest up then, eh, don’t exert yourself—’
‘C’mon, Dad!’ called Cuthbert. ‘Bob Wyatt’s stepping up to the fold. Show him how it’s done, why don’t you?’
In the face of such rallying cry, Father was powerless but to act. He turned on his heel, strutting down the beach, bat slung over his shoulder, in the chipper manner of a much younger, far fitter man. The game began and Dolly shrank back even closer to the wall. Arthur Smitham’s one-time cricketing prowess was part of the Great Family Story and the holiday game was thus a hallowed institution.
There was a part of Dolly that hated herself for the way she was acting—after all, it was probably the last time she’d come on the annual family holiday—but she couldn’t seem to shake herself free of this ghastly mood. With every day that passed she felt the gulf between herself and the rest of her family widen. It wasn’t that she didn’t love them; it was just that they had a knack lately, even Cuthbert, for driving her stir crazy. She’d always felt herself to be different, there was nothing new in that, but recently things had taken a definite turn for the worse. Her father had started talking at the dinner table about what was going to happen when Dolly finished school in September. There was a junior position opening up on the secretarial staff at the bicycle factory—after thirty years of service he might just be able to pull a few strings with the head secretary to make sure Dolly got it. Father always smiled and winked when he said that, about the strings, as if he were doing Dolly a tremendous favour and she ought to be grateful. In reality the thought made her want to scream like the heroine in a horror film. She couldn’t think of anything worse. More than that, she couldn’t believe that after seventeen years, Arthur Smitham—her very own father—could so misunderstand her.
From the sand, there came a cry of ‘Six!’ and Dolly glanced over the top of her Woman’s Weekly to see her father swing his bat over his shoulder like a musket and begin the jog between makeshift wickets. Beside her, Janice Smitham was emanating nervous encouragement, offering tentative calls of ‘Good show!’ and ‘Jolly well done!’, countered quickly with desperate cries of ‘Careful now,’ or ‘Not so fast,’ or, ‘Breathe Cuthbert, remember your asthma,’ as the boy chased his ball towards the water. Dolly took in her mother’s neat permanent wave, the sensible cut of her bathing suit, the care she’d taken to present herself to the world in a way that ensured she made the least possible impact; and Dolly sighed with hot perplexity. It was her mother’s lack of understanding on the matter of Dolly’s future that vexed her most of all.
When she first realised that Father was serious about the bi-cycle factory, she’d hoped Mother would smile fondly at the suggestion, before pointing out that naturally there were far more exciting things in store for their daughter. Because, although Dolly had fun sometimes imagining she’d been swapped at birth, she didn’t really believe it. Nobody who saw her standing next to her mother could have thought such a thing for long. Janice and Dorothy Smitham had the same chocolate brown hair, the same high cheekbones, and the same generous bust. As Dolly had recently learned, they had something more important in common, too.
She’d been searching the garage shelves for her hockey