Summer evening. Molly puts on her new red, sleeveless dress and smoothes out its ripple-like creases. She lifts the blood-coloured lipstick and presses it lightly against her mouth like Arlene tells her to. It must seem like I’m going on a date Molly thinks to herself, and she sees a dimple bloom at her cheek in the mirror as she silently laughs at the irony. Her hands still shake slightly when she wonders how she will greet him and to calm herself she turns on the hairdryer. Its whirring roar eventually steadies the rise and fall of her beating chest. Normally it’s only after rows with Arlene that she has to use it.   

            A deep orange glow bleeds through the half-opened blinds of Mark’s apartment, revealing a knot of scrunched sheets at the end of a single bed and several lidless plastic pots on a bedside table. The rusted shaver eats into his skin as he shaves in the fluttering light of a tiring bulb and a single drop of blood falls into the plastic bowl below. A flour-covered apron hangs on a wooden peg beside the door and beneath the letterbox on the stained carpet lie a small heap of junk mail and expired tax payment letters.   

            The change of address card included with Molly’s letter showed that Arlene still hadn’t changed her name. He noticed also how Molly’s handwriting filled each line in long and loopy swirls just like his own. Mark stuck the letter to his wall alongside his polaroid of a nine-month-old Molly and threw Arlene’s change of address card with cigarette butts and orange peel in his bin.

            He knew they’d moved.

            The pills that Mark takes are only a means of ensuring that his psychiatrist, David, doesn’t check him into a mental institution. He still refutes that he is paranoid. He chooses his shirt and tie from a dull grey and blue spectrum and comb’s his thin hair backwards to veil his slight bald patch. Sometimes at work he searches for the root of the problems in his marriage to Arlene but that fervent flame of anger still burns inside his mind. He still insists that Arlene cheated on him.              

            Molly knows that Arlene would be going out Wednesday evening. She always does. But it’s not friends, like she says, that Arlene sees. Molly knows. She often hears her stumble through the kitchen and up the stairs late at night and sometimes she thinks she hears her cry out for Mark. And sometimes she sees a grey Mercedes that Molly thinks belongs to David, the psychiatrist that Arlene sometimes sees, pull up outside their house and drop her off early on Thursday morning. Her lipstick is always smeared roughly around her mouth and her bra straps have a habit of hanging pathetically off her shoulder like some sort of perverse lasso. But she doesn’t seem to mind.

            The gold-leafed book was what made her send her Dad the letter. Arlene had thrown out most of his belongings before they moved. All of his vinyl records at one point were scattered like musical notes across a score at the foot of the stairs in a broken mess. But Molly found the book in a flimsy cardboard box that Arlene had obviously missed. Its black leather cover was still as soft as she remembered as a child and it sunk like a pillow when you touched it. The gold edges of the pages also fascinated her and Molly recalled how her Dad told her that in ancient times, craftsmen would create gold leaf by placing a quantity of gold between two leather straps and pounding it by hands for weeks or months until the gold was exceptionally thin.

            Molly spent whole evenings pouring through its golden pages. Inside her Dad had written poems. Mostly they were poems about Molly and poems for Molly but her favourite poem was one that she and her Dad had written together when Molly had first learned to write. Molly told him what to write, who then dotted the letters and Molly went over them. The poem read:

My Daddy is a wally

Because sometimes he shouts at Mummy.

But I don’t mind my wally who is a daddy

Because he hugs me and says I love you Molly

She knew the poem was rubbish but Molly cannot forget the line: he hugs me and says I love you Molly because on that day he actually did.

            Mark stands outside the grey-stone house with white, flaking windows and a pale blue front door with a black knocker and a broken doorbell. The wires of the doorbell spew out from its encasing and Mark thinks that it looks as though the case conceals a nest of multi-coloured worms.

            A grey Mercedes passed Mark as he was nearing the driveway. Arlene, in the passenger seat, fortunately did not see him. Age seemed to have crept up on her in the years that he and her had been apart. Time had chiselled deep lines into her forehead and around the eyes but she had grown her hair long like when they had first met. Mark thought he recognised the driver, too, but dismissed the idea a few moments later. It couldn’t have been him, he thinks.  

            The dark and silent knocker stares back into Mark’s pale green eyes. Every living cell in his brain urges him to lift his hand and knock the door but something prevents him from doing so. He remembers how he kissed her goodbye, the hurt in her eyes and that gold-leafed book. All those poems. I wonder, he asks himself, where it is now?

            She stands and waits for him in the living room, smoothing and smoothing her red sleeveless dress. She cannot sit down. He should be here by now. I don’t think he’s coming, Molly blurts out loud. But then a faint knock knock cracks the wall of silence around her. Molly rushes to the door.

             He stands in front of her in a grey suit and a blue tie. His hair is thinner than she remembers. His eyes are paler too. Neither of them can speak. It’s as if someone has forgotten a line onstage. Molly’s heart stamps against her chest. Cold shots of adrenaline surge through her body but she doesn’t need the hairdryer. This is excitement, not anxiety, she thinks. Then words seem to start trying to escape from his throat and out of his mouth. She waits, he swallows, he breathes; she breathes, he breathes again and he finally says: your Daddy is a wally.