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about that? No, I didn’t. Terrible things happened in the war, but the war was over. It was nothing to do with me. It was history. He was whole. My dad.
    A holiday: the beach, Llandudno, North Wales. I noticed hollows on my father’s legs, the fleshy calves, deep hollows big enough to cup an egg in. I put my finger in one of the hollows. I must have been very young. It was warm and smooth inside, purplish like the skin on a newborn mouse, not hairy like the rest of his legs. I wanted to ask him what the holes were but he jumped up and pelted down the beach, ran splashily through the shallows until he reached deep water and then he swam. He swam out and out like always, arm over arm over arm. I was afraid when he swam out like that, out towards the middle of the sea, towards nothing. His dark head grew smaller and smaller, sometimes vanishing altogether. When I could see him no longer and I thought he had drowned, I did not scream or shout or point, I turned over on to my tummy on the beach-towel, fear beating in my veins. I lay still on the beach-towel, eyes shut, the chill of the sand striking up through the towel, shutting out the voices of Mummy and Hazel who were oblivious to the danger, until I felt the sprinkle of cold that meant that he was back. I turned over and looked up at him, towering against the sun above me, all the hairs on his body cradling glittering drops. I got up off the towel to let him use it. I didn’t say a thing but I was so relieved that he was safe I needed to pee. I walked down the beach and into the sea until the cold water gripped me by the waist and then I peed blushing as the invisible heat flowed out between my legs into the cold.
    â€˜I can’t believe you didn’t ask your mum about his dreams,’ Foxy frowning at me, an edge of criticism in her tone.
    I shrugged. Close as you are to someone, up to your eyes in love, it doesn’t mean that they will understand you. No one from outside can really understand a family: it is a culture it takes a lifetime to acquire.
    â€˜If that was part of my family history, I’d have to know,’ she insisted. Foxy is a historian, her special interest oral history, family histories, the quiet stuff, the detail. She still teaches a little but most of her time and energy are concentrated on writing and research. Her study is piled with boxes of tapes, faint crackly voices recounting memories from the beginning of the century, Victorian and Edwardian voices. She gets quite frantic sometimes when she thinks of the dying resource, the most direct primary evidence. But skewed, I say, for how can a memory not be skewed that is eighty or ninety years old, that has either lain dormant or been continually embroidered for the best part of a century? It’s Foxy’s turn to shrug at this and talk about intelligent and selective interpretation, about empirical corroboration. I criticise, but I think it’s wonderful, what she does. I think she is wonderful, asleep now, awash in the tangle of her hair.
    She is so much cleverer than me. Cleverer and more patient. My degree – not a bad one, 2:1 in history and philosophy – has fallen off me like so much dust, all that learning. I prefer the day-to-dayness of my business, selling second-hand and period clothes. Second Hand Rose is the name of my shop, a popular shop in the centre of York. I spend much of the week travelling to markets and auctions collecting stock. I wash and press and mend while listening to the radio most evenings, turned down low so as not to disturb Foxy when she’s working at home. I open my shop five days from midday to six. Connie works in the shop and lives in the upstairs flat. My guard-dog she calls herself, giving a big husky bark of laughter. I can’t pay her much but she has the flat rent free, a pokey hole, admittedly, and the odd outfit. And I mean odd. When I’m buying I keep Connie in mind. She’s in her mid-fifties.