A few hours later Manda and Francesca arrived home.
        “Dotty!” Dotty wasn’t home but Manda didn’t know that yet.
        “Ivan!” Ivan wasn’t home either, another thing their mother didn’t know. “Goodness,” Manda muttered, more to herself than to five year-old Francesca who was prising open Dotty’s biscuit packet as quietly as she could so that she wouldn’t have to share them. “I told her to come straight home so I can get ready. Where is she? Always thinking of herself ...”
        Manda, their mother, had been looking for a pot to clean in amongst the debris in the kitchen. Instead she found a black plastic electrical object with a red light flashing on the front.
        “What’s this?” she whispered, as if it is a bomb that might go off.
        “It’s the bottom of the phone,” said Francesca through her crumbs.
        “Don’t eat biscuits before dinner,” said Manda. “Why is this light flashing?”
        “There’s a message.”
        “A message?”
        “Yes, a message.”
        “Who from?”
        Francesca sighed and looked at her mother.
        Manda didn’t feel ready for messages. She’d had a long exhilarating day and was confused by returning to the cold light of motherhood so soon. She caught a glimpse of herself in the darkening window. Her hair was astray, but that wasn’t new, and her face was flushed, but perhaps that was the heat in there, and rushing home with Francesca.
        “I didn’t know we had messages. Does your Dad know about this?”
        “It was him who bought it. The messages are usually from him.”
        “Really? What do they say?”
        “They say, ‘miss you pumpkin’ and stuff and ‘hi kids’ and ‘happy birthday Ivan’. Just stuff. Sometimes he sings.”
        “Sings? What does he sing?”
        “Um …” Francesca thought. She put down the packet of biscuits and kicked a carry out carton under the table. “Y ..M..C..A” she sang and threw her arms about in a flurry. “We’re going to stay in the Y..M..C..A.”
        “Right, fine, I see,” said Manda waving her own hands to stop her.
        “He showed me last time he was home.”
        “Good for him.”
        “And there’s three at least from the school. Bye!” Francesca grabbed the biscuits and ran up the stairs.
        “Three what? Three messages? From …? Don’t eat before dinner!” But Francesca was half way up the stairs already.
        There was a strange brown lump just inside Dotty’s biscuit packet. Francesca was on her favourite spot at the top of the stairs when she found it. It was a soft golden colour, brown and gold at the same time and it smelled funny, a bit like Ivan’s white shirts after he’d been at work. Ivan was her big and only brother. He was nineteen and Francesca was his favourite sister. Francesca sniffed this golden lump. It was roughly square but it had tooth marks on one side. She put her own teeth to it and bit off a piece. It rolled around in her mouth for a minute, some of it sticking in her teeth and then she spat it out so that it dribbled down her blue school jumper. She threw the lump down the stairs with a clatter. Maggie the cat streaked over and licked it.
        “Stop chucking stuff about!” said Manda from the kitchen. She put the phone base down. She’d decided not to listen to the messages.
        “Poo!” said Francesca under her breath. “Cat jobby!”
        But it wasn’t cat jobby. It was Dotty’s secret stash of hash and some of it was still stuck between Francesca’s teeth.
        Francesca shoved another biscuit into her mouth to take away the taste of cat poo which somehow just wouldn’t go.
        “Ivan!” shouted Manda.
        “Not here!” said Francesca.
        “Damn!” said Manda.
        “Miss Winnaker says it’s rude to say ‘damn’.”
        “How does she know? She’s probably never said ‘damn’ in her life!”
        Manda was saying damn a lot. Lately she’d been saying ‘fuck’ and ‘bugger’ too. She’d said these words for as long as she can remember, which sometimes didn’t seem very long, but she’d been saying them more often now and sometimes in front of the children.
        Francesca was stung and confused. She’d had five biscuits by then so she went into her room, the same room she shared with Dotty, and hid the rest under her pillow, leaving a small trail of crumbs across the holding bay that was Dotty’s habitual bed. Ten minutes later when Francesca’s mother called her for tea she was feeling strangely hungry and wolfed the sausages and beans from her plate. Manda cleared a space on a counter and chopped an apple for her for afters.
        Suddenly the phone rang.
        Manda and Francesca flew out of the kitchen and chased into every other room in the house in search of the phone. The base was ringing but the handset had gone. While they were in Ivan’s tiny box room a man’s voice on the base in the kitchen said:
        “…for Mrs Dash …a passport … driving to licence …prove she’s not Manda?”
Manda wasn’t sure she’d heard right and thought it was her husband Cal having a laugh, not that he was very funny those days, and Francesca was in the holding bay stuffing biscuits into her mouth like there was no tomorrow.
        Tomorrow, thought Manda. What would happen tomorrow? And what would happen that night if Dotty didn’t come home soon?
        She pulled the notebook out of her jacket pocket. In the front of this notebook were the household accounts, or the beginnings of the household accounts. Half a page of numbers and question marks hung there with ‘El’ for electric and ‘G’ for gas and other letters which didn’t make sense to her any more. Further in was a portrait of her by the great artist Francesca. She had huge hands and feet, stick legs and arms, staring round eyes and eyelashes that curled into her hair line. She was running, her pointed knees facing west, a shock of hair blown backwards by her flight towards a door. “I LUV MI MUM” was scrawled behind her in Francesca’s best five-year-old hand-writing.
        Manda licked her pencil and wrote in the back of the book, ignoring the scoring out she had put there in the morning. She paused in front of the mirrored cupboards in her room to count. She was counting the hours and the minutes that she had been away that day. How long had she been free? Francesca was late up that morning. Six hours minus a few minutes for the shopping and a few more for the post office, plus … what? She made a rough estimate and scribbled the figure down. She totalled this in the weekly column, then the monthly, then the grand total. Beautiful figures that grew as time went on, telling her she was having a life.
        “Chess? Francesca darling?”
        Silence. She was on the bottom step by the kitchen. Francesca was on her bed staring at the floral mattress poking through the broken underside of the top bunk.
        “Francesca? Chessy?”
        No reply. Manda went back into her room and searched for something eye-catching to wear to the pub.
        Francesca’s tongue was poking about trying to get the cat poo out of her teeth. She had rolled onto the holding bay that was her sister’s bed and was trying to dislodge the strange lump with biscuits. These were the most delicious biscuits she had ever tasted. She stopped long enough to peer at the package. Di-ges-tive. She made a mental note to tell her mum to get more. She poked again with her tongue. She could feel it and taste it but it just wouldn’t go.
        Manda thought she’d have to see what clothes the Dotty had. Perhaps there would be something loose enough to cover her extra bits.
        She stood at the girls’ bedroom door and sighed. Something really had to be done. The top bunk had been broken for ages, shit, since Christmas, and it was October, nearly Christmas again. And some day they’d get a cupboard for all these clothes, except the girls would never use it, unlike Ivan who was very tidy.
        And then she saw Francesca. She had a packet of biscuits in one hand and the head of her Guy in the other. She was fast asleep in the warm place that Dotty had left an hour or so earlier. Crumbs dusted her face like a five o’clock shadow.
        “Poor lamb,” said Manda. “Poor wee darling.” It was hard work being at school and Francesca was a hard worker. Manda left her there, gently covering her with a coat. Francesca wouldn’t relinquish either the biscuits or the Guy. Manda retreated downstairs and continued to search for clothes, forgetting why she went upstairs.
        Two hours later she was standing at the kitchen window gazing at herself when Dotty’s face appeared where her own should have been. It took her a moment to realise. Her hands, which were resting in a sink full of woolly jumpers, flew up to her mouth throwing soap suds across her black satin top. (It wasn’t really a top, it was a lace petticoat over a black tee shirt. It was all she could find.)
        “Why didn’t you answer the phone?” yelled Dotty flinging open the back door. She kicked a carry out box across the floor. It bounced off a cupboard and spilled black bean sauce across the lino.
        “Where on earth have you been? I should have left an hour ago,” said Manda.
        “Didn’t you get the message?”
        “What message?”
        “For you to prove I’m not you.”
        “Well, everybody knows you’re not me. What are you ...?”
        “Why did you have to give me such a stupid name?”
        “God, must I apologise again?”
        “Yes, you bloody must!”
        “Sorry! I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” Manda really was sorry. She was sorry for being too young and stupid when Dotty was born and for having a liking for pointillist paintings twenty-two years earlier when she was naming Dorothy Dotty.
        “Not good enough. Nowhere near. Where’s Ivan?”
        “I don’t know. Working, I suppose.”
        “When’s Dad coming home?”
        “Don’t know. Where’s the Calendar?”
        They stood, backs to the counter, surveying the shambles that was their kitchen. The Calendar was not on the wall where it should have been and was not protruding from any of the piles anywhere else. Manda bit her lip. Dotty knew, really, that she was too old to shake her head and be angry with her Mum, but she was. What on earth was Manda doing all day? She closed her eyes.
        “Where’s my biscuits?” she said, throwing towels on the floor.
        “What biscuits?” said Manda.
        “Where’s Francesca?” said Dotty, putting two and two together.
        “Francesca?”
        “Yes, where is she?”
        Francesca was eating the most delicious sweets in the world. Her friends were all giving her theirs, mix-ups and jelly tots, Freddie Frogs and Bazooka Joes, but Francesca was sweet enough and redistributed these offerings amongst the massing crowd of adoring friends. She did not want to be woken by her sister who was shaking her and shaking her. She did not want to speak to Dotty even if she pried open her fingers and emptied all the biscuits into the holding bay. She wanted to fly with all the other children up to the great sweetie shop in the sky.
        But her magic carpet was lumpy and sagged as it carried her down the stairs and into the car and all the way to the hospital.