six in the morning (postman, nightdress) and putting everything where it didn’t belong (slippers, breadbin). Mad as a box of frogs, Harold had called her. She was around Dorothy’s age when she first started to lose her mind, although Dorothy always thought losing your mind was such a strange phrase. As if your mind could be misplaced, like a set of house keys, or a Jack Russell terrier, as if it was more than likely your own fault for being so bloody careless.
They’d put her mother in a home within weeks. It was all very quick.
It’s for the best, Harold had said.
He’d said it each time they went to visit.
After he’d eaten his peaches, Harold had settled himself on the settee and fallen asleep, although how anyone could sleep in this heat was beyond her. He was still there now, his stomach rising and falling as he shifted in between dreams, his snoring keeping time with the kitchen clock, and plotting out the afternoon for them both.
Dorothy took the remains of their silent meal and emptied it into the pedal bin. The only problem with losing your mind was that you never lost the memories you wanted to lose. The memories you really needed left first. Her foot rested on the pedal, and she looked into the waste. No matter how many lists you wrote, and how many circles you made in the Radio Times, and no matter how much you practised the words over and over again, and tried to fool people, the only memories that didn’t leave were the ones you wish you’d never made in the first place.
She reached into the rubbish and lifted a tin out of the potato peelings. She stared at it.
‘These are peaches, Dorothy,’ she said to an empty kitchen. ‘Peaches.’
She felt the tears before she even knew they had happened.
*
‘The problem, Dorothy, is that you think too much.’ Harold’s gaze never left the television screen. ‘It’s not healthy.’
Evening had tempered the sun, and a wash of gold folded across the living room. It drew the sideboard into a rich, dark brandy and buried itself in the pleats of the curtains.
Dorothy picked imaginary fluff from the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘It’s difficult not to think about it, Harold, under the circumstances.’
‘This is completely different. She’s a grown woman. Her and John have probably just had some kind of tiff and she’s cleared off for a bit to teach him a lesson.’
She looked over at her husband. The light from the window gave his face a faint blush of marzipan. ‘I only hope you’re right,’ she said.
‘Of course I’m right.’ His stare was still fastened to the television screen, and she watched his eyes flicker as the images changed.
It was Sale of the Century. She should have known better than to speak to Harold whilst he was occupied with Nicholas Parsons. It might have been best to try and fit the conversation into an advert break, but there were too many words and she couldn’t stop them climbing into her mouth.
‘The only thing is, I saw her. A few days before she disappeared.’ Dorothy cleared her throat, even though there was nothing to clear. ‘She was going into number eleven.’
Harold looked at her for the first time. ‘You never told me.’
‘You never asked,’ she said.
‘What was she doing going in there?’ He turned towards her, and his glasses fell from the arm of his chair. ‘What could they possibly have to say to each other?’
‘I have no idea, but it can’t be a coincidence, can it? She speaks to him, and then a few days later, she vanishes. He must have said something.’
Harold stared at the floor, and she waited for his fear to catch up with hers. In the corner, the television churned the laughter of strangers out into their living room.
‘What I don’t understand’, he said, ‘is how he could stay on the avenue, after everything that happened. He should have moved on.’
‘You can’t dictate to people where they live, Harold.’
‘He doesn’t belong here.’
‘He’s lived at number eleven all his life.’
‘But after what he did?’
‘He didn’t do anything.’ Dorothy looked at the screen to avoid Harold’s eyes. ‘They said so.’
‘I know what they said.’
She could hear him breathing. The wheeze of warm air moving through tired lungs. She waited. But he turned to the television and straightened his spine.
‘You’re just being hysterical, Dorothy. All that’s over and done with. It was ten years ago.’
‘Nine, actually,’ she said.
‘Nine, ten, what does it matter? It’s all in the past, except every time you start talking about it, it stops being in the past and starts being in the present again.’
She gathered the material of her skirt into folds and let them fall between her hands.
‘Would you stop fidgeting, woman.’
‘I can’t help myself,’ she said.
‘Well, go and do something productive. Go and have a bath.’
‘I had a bath this morning.’
‘Well, go and have another one,’ he said, ‘you’re putting me off the questions.’
‘What about saving water, Harold?’
But Harold didn’t reply. Instead of replying, he picked at his teeth. Dorothy could hear him. Even over Nicholas Parsons.
She smoothed down her hair and her skirt. She took a deep breath to suffocate her words, and then she stood up and walked from the room. Before she closed the door, she looked back.
He had turned away from the television, and was staring through the window – past the lace of the curtains, across the gardens and the pavements, to the front door of number eleven.
His glasses still lay at his feet.
*
Dorothy knew exactly where she’d hidden the tin.
Harold never went into the back bedroom. It was a holding place. A waiting room for all the things she no longer needed but couldn’t bear to lose. He said the thought of it gave him a headache. As the years turned, the room had grown. Now the past pushed into corners and reached to the ceiling. It stretched along the windowsill and touched the skirting boards, and it allowed Dorothy to hold it in her hands. Sometimes, remembering wasn’t enough. Sometimes, she needed to carry the past with her to be sure she was a part of it.
The room trapped summer within its walls. It held Dorothy in an airless museum of dust and paper, and she felt the sweat bleed
