CAROL DODDS SHUT HER front door finally and thought about all her dead men. This was as square Nedra Dodds, her maminlaw, waddled out to the gate in chocolate suede hat and ginger anorak to fetch her grandson – Carol’s eldest at twenty-two – from Strangeways.

The dead Dodds men –

Carol endured.

(Living dead, she was.)

But her lovely gentle daft bow-legged Vern. Soft-skinned Vern. His hands like daughters’ hands. Vern Jenkins, who had predeceased the Dodds men having been murdered by them and buried by them, and yet still visited her house regularly of a night. Vern dead –

had defeated Carol.

This was May Day morning ’85, midweek, in Woodhouse Park, Wythie, a beautiful black baby upstairs, undeclared, quiet as a secret, dreaming in her son’s vacant room, having stolen it early because he couldn’t wait till December so came two month too soon and lived.

Meanwhile, Carol’s lad, freed today from his first stretch and finally a Dodds man. Right from being born he was sweet, soft; he’d resisted them, his late fathers living through him, but for only long enough to learn there was no good to be done or honest work to be had or prospect to be lost, round here or in town. A proud rum bugger now. Of luckless blood and lazy charm. Another Dodds man now with the Devil in him as planned.

And soon to discover he was roomless, an uncle.

But Nedra wasn’t gone yet. Through the warped diamond Carol watched her without watching. Then Carol went into the front room and got a better look before her maminlaw vanished behind five-foot privets and made for Civic Centre to bus it into town for the first time in a year. Nedra’s cooking was wrapped and dished on the kitchen and coffee tables and cooling on counters. More scran in the fridge. She’d been baking since ten to six. Carol had lain awake listening to stuff happen underneath her: the kitchen drawer squeaks and the tearing of Cook’s matches and the whisk rattle.

Carol endured. Ever since her maminlaw moved in her front door stayed open, chain off. The kettle whistled on the stove more often than that black baby cried. Nedra ignored those rare cries but kept welcoming the local kiddies she minded for next-to-nowt and those she didn’t who wanted fussing over as well and so invited themselves. Noisy buggers; always running. Dancing hair flashing past Carol at waist height to see Nedra in the kitchen. No quiet. No stillness. Not like now. Behind the sittingroom window with the baby upstairs so quiet he might be forgotten and the house so quiet it was another house again and still not hers. Its walls leaned in, waiting. Dead Dodds men hung, framed, waiting.

Next door’s two had been round earlier: the littlest lad on their street, who was always in and out, who was never still and in motion looked like a prancing marionette; he even had Joe 90’s white-blond hair and horn-rimmed specs. And an older brother big enough to blow and tie balloons. Nedra hadn’t shown Carol the balloons before today and hadn’t asked for any help. Carol had been shunned in the kitchen earlier. The brothers there before school; Nedra recruited them with the promise of hot butties. Carol kneeling on the speckled green lino, arse up, head in the bottom cupboard, after the last pot to heat some powdered milk. When a balloon popped, she cracked her head on the rotted shelf.

Nedra clapped once from fright, then laughed.

Joe 90 burst into tears.

Carol reeled out the cupboard but stayed knelt on the lino. She plucked splintered shelf wood out of her bunned hair while she breathed behind her teeth, swallowing the pain. She just glared, creating a bubble of silence till –

the small lad, fretting round the kitchen, resumed wailing. He ducked Nedra as she tried giving him another tied balloon.

Nedra had his brother do three more then gave him Carol’s seat at the kitchen table and a drink of water and a hot ginger biscuit. She’d already given one to Joe 90, which stopped his tears. He chewed it slowly, still prancing round the table.

‘Making me dizzy this morning, you. Can’t be having no fall at my age. I’m already a cracked plate.’ Nedra scraped a chair and sat beside the elder lad, finding her rosary in her apron pocket. Then squinted low: ‘What you still doing on that floor? You want bloody sweeping up.’ The small lad crossed their vision, lapping between them. Nedra’s eyes broke from Carol’s to give chase. ‘Now, now. Pack it in. What’ve I said?’

The next time he passed behind his chair his brother grabbed him, catching his twiggy wrist. He shook him, not hard, but again the lad cried. It reminded Carol of her son at that age.

Nedra got rid of them early so they wouldn’t touch any more party scran while she busied about under the endless stare of her saints and dead men.

Now the house held its breath, ready with a Welcome Home spread; the months of powdered-milk smell crusting all drapes, carpets, cushions, snuffed out – at least downstairs – the witch’s promise of all things sweet offered up instead. Carol’s front room was full of waiting even if Carol didn’t feel full or empty and wasn’t really waiting for her son or another Dodds man. She stood at the window and warmed her shins on the radiator through her cosmic-print leggings. The glass was clean. The netting was clean. For a while Carol watched the street. She heard Nedra’s walking stick tock the pavement. Nedra didn’t need a stick. Nedra only took it to town. Maybe to school or church some days in bad winters when the capillary streets she knew as hers became as foreign and sequestered as frozen blood. But the poor cow didn’t realise she and Carol were the ones cut-off, hoarfrosted, long lost. Nedra was forever busied with the grand nothing of everything. Religion, roots and blood.

But Carol felt buried now that the world was turning faster and faster yet she saw none of it herself any more and only sensed life happening in other places and its happening reaping her no reward except adding to the soilweight on top of her, increasing the depth and comfort of her own burial, so she felt bitter and safe in that the world would hide her without her asking to be hidden, and would forget her before she knew she was forgotten and realised that things were always rigged for her to be forgotten. She could only blame the Dodds men for so much. What they’d done so had she. Poor Vern. Realising this, way before she became a widow in her house of two and a half widows, she had decided the fight had left her. She was glad to be lost. She wasn’t waiting to be found, only for Vern to visit, to nightly manifest. Not even death could stop Vern from bedding her.

So Carol turned from her window but left her shadow there on the netting without her, out of time, since Carol could resist the second the minute the hour the day the week the month the year the clock the heartbeat. In time, Kelly, her only son, would be home. This was her life. Her house. Her dead men. Her shadow unstitched, left there like dirt on her clean netting as she brewed up and went back to bed, wondering when the last living Dodds man would die.