Girl A(33)

A few days before our departure, Father arrived home with a brown paper package. ‘A family gift,’ he said. Delilah tore open the parcel and held up a thin, red T-shirt, which was imprinted with a verse from Peter: Grace and peace be yours in abundance. A set of identical garments fell to the floor. There were six Tshirts in all, one for each of us and for Mother and Father. On the back, the Tshirts bore our names.

‘Wow,’ Delilah said. She distributed the rest with great care, holding each garment flat on her palms, like an offering.

We set off for Blackpool on a Friday evening, when it was already dark. Mother held Evie, who was grumbling; she would usually be asleep, or in my arms. ‘Why didn’t we go earlier?’ I asked, but the car was quiet, and Father ignored me. It had rained all afternoon, and orange light glittered on the road. Delilah stroked the material of her new T-shirt, her fingers playing absentmindedly over the polyester. Ethan held a schoolbook up to the streetlights and squinted through the darkness. I wished that I had remembered to bring one, too.

‘We’ll need to be quiet,’ Father said, ‘when we arrive.’

I sat up taller. ‘Are we here?’ I asked.

We swung onto the promenade. The cold void of the sea extended from the sky. On the other side of the car was a cataclysm of lights: twinkling arcades, and men and women queuing outside the dance halls, and neon horses escaped from a carousel and suspended high in the night. Ethan rolled down the window. The slot machines chirped. A fat man in a ringmaster’s suit beckoned us towards a doorway draped in red velvet. There was no queue there. ‘Can you see the rollercoaster?’ Ethan said, tugging me across the seat to look. ‘I’m going on that.’ Before we reached the hotel, Father pulled away from the seafront and parked along a side street, behind an ice-cream truck with shattered windows.

‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘Remember?’

We took the bags and the pram, staggering beneath their weight, and followed Father into the dark. Wind skittered from the sea and down the lane. The streetlights here were broken, and I couldn’t see my feet. I stood on something soft, which gave way beneath my shoe, and hurried on. Father led us to a little wooden gate and found the right key. Then we were through it, in the garden of the hotel.

My father worked at the Dorchester, Blackpool, which is still on the seafront today. When Olivia’s parents took us to tea at the Dorchester on Park Lane, thirteen years later, I looked at my reflection in the vast courtroom mirror – champagne; velvet dress; the scones just replenished – and thought of the other Dorchester, which I had once considered to be the most exciting place in the world. There was a time when I thought that I would return with Evie. Here, I would say, the site of your very first holiday. I envisaged running through the Pleasure Beach from one ride to the next; winning an oversized stuffed animal; fish and chips on the beach, in the evening, when we were salt-battered and drunk. I found the Dorchester on the same sites I checked for business travel, and weekends with JP. But the reviews were terrible (‘Avoid This Disgusting Place’; ‘Vile’; and, at best, ‘OK but needs serious updating’), and I knew, scrolling through the photographs, that the place I remembered no longer existed. If we returned, I would probably find out that it never had.

From the garden, we could see into the hotel’s empty ballroom. Covered tables arranged around a wooden dance floor. Reflected in the wood was a glass dome onto the night sky. On a clearer night, you would be able to dance on top of the moon. Above the ballroom, I could make out the small, square lights of guests still awake in their rooms. Father was looking at them, too.

‘It’s important to be quiet,’ he said. ‘Do you understand?’

He opened a fire door, and let us into a narrow staircase.

The rooms were on the very top floor of the hotel, and reeked of paint. The radiators had been turned up high. ‘See,’ Father said. ‘Brand new, and renovated.’ Ethan, Delilah and I pressed our noses to the glass. Father had kept to his word. You could see out to the pier and to the big wheel, turning slowly through the night.

‘I need to sleep,’ Mother said. She lifted Evie from the pram and through the interconnecting door. She had developed a kind of forward lurch when she walked; it made you want to reach for her with every other step, although none of us did. Father followed her. We climbed beneath the covers in our new Tshirts, still whispering between the beds. Delilah, softer at night, asked me to stroke her hair. Leave the curtains open, I said to Ethan, last thing. I wanted to fall asleep to the lights of the promenade, rising up to our window.

If you’ve seen the photograph from Moor Woods Road, you’ll have seen the picture taken on the pier at Blackpool. It was Saturday morning, and early. We had been too excited to sleep for long. Mother and Father took us to the beach before the first service began, begrudging but good-humoured, and we ran ahead of them, the cold, wet sand slapping beneath our feet, and seagulls spilling out across the sea. The sky was a thin blue, carved up with plane tracks and cloud. We teased the waves, running close enough for them to catch us and screaming when they came. Evie took tentative steps from me to Ethan, and back.

When we reached the pier, Delilah accosted a stranger to take the camera. ‘Tshirts,’ Father ordered. ‘We should see the Tshirts!’ It was just above freezing, and when we took off our coats and our sweatshirts, we shrieked at the wind on our skin. We were laughing, too; even beneath the pixels, you can see it. It’s there in the way that we hold on to one another, and in my parents’ faces. An artefact of the last good day, and much harder to look at for that.