My mother trod a familiar path; hedged by as many briers as Sleeping Beauty’s ever was. (For briers that are invisible pluck just as surely, just as bloody as any others.) Her path led from a gate that shut with a click, down grey ribbons of asphalt to a tram stop. She went each day in a tram and a creaking lift to an office on a fourth floor; sat there, from nine to five (with an hour off for lunch). And when the bell rang, and she came out with all the others — Norma and Melveen, Frank and Janet and Des — her parcels were stuck with tickets to show they were not stolen. Under her gloves her fingers were stained with ink and Poster Black; but she didn’t care — it came off with scented soap at home.

So the days pass and the years tick away on the watch that doesn’t always go.

THREE

MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER gave birth to four children: two boys and two girls.

The boys grew from solemn, sepia, photograph figures in sailor suits to men.

The older, with his bird-like face and tawny fringe of hair, who held a cricket bat carelessly in his hand, was elected to take part in a stronger tragedy than most. He married a girl with black hair and blue eyes who spent her childhood in an orphanage because her mother and father were not married. Years later she found out who they were — but it was awkward: they had a respectable position, quite flash, and five other children, and she was a little common (it was the orphanage). So they didn’t see her quite so often — after all, it wasn’t as if they really knew her, and then she didn’t come at all. And silly girl — not pretty any more — she drank herself to death. Willie, too, acted out his part faithfully. He, who was his mother’s darling, disintegrated into a wrinkled wild-eyed ruin — a wine-dot, a dirty alcoholic — who died, with abundance all about him, of malnutrition in a tin shed.

The younger, propped up by a telescopic stick on a padded armchair, abandoned his toy whip, his pleated skirts and sailor’s cap for a khaki uniform. He, with his smooth face and prim mouth married, because he must, Fanny, the publican’s daughter. They had eleven children. Fanny’s ginger hair and garrulous voice faded with time and cancer; she lay still at last, withered and drained of all her passion: her face as yellow as her faded hair against hospital sheets. Dick, of the smooth peach-bloom and wide-brimmed slouch hat became a stout, bald-headed worthy, who died, speechless from a brain haemorrhage, alone in a lavatory. He left a respectable Catholic aura and eight of the eleven children and twenty-three grandchildren behind him.

The girls were separated from each other by twenty years. One was my grandmother, the other my great-aunt.

Reece is my great-aunt; yet at ten I am taller than she at thirty-five. She is my grandmother’s sister; yet she cannot read or write or count. She is a grown-up; yet she wears children’s clothing. She has frog-like eyes with half-moon lids, sad eyebrows arched in permanent surprise, a domed forehead with wrinkles, a snout, a mouth that shows her tongue — becomes an idiot-grin when she is happy. People stare at her in the street — she is real, and reality is too strong for their slumbering, narcotized lives. She is a mongol.