She has become a stranger in her own house. It is 1964 and my father is arrested. He neither dies nor is he there. His shadow dents the cushions of every chair. Outside, children dive-bomb swimming pools, dogs barb the air with their din.
History stops where the suburbs begin.
My mother buys a set of cups and saucers and stows them away in the passage cupboard all the years of my father's sentence. They are her porcelain dream of leaving, a constant lesson in tenuousness. Sitting in their dark tissue paper they are forerunners, waiting for the other objects in the house to join them on a long-delayed journey to somewhere else. The garden gate is on its last legs. The ground under the gate has been removed by stormwater summer after summer till any fat cat could worm its way through.