Alice feigns flu to knock off early from work. First time in years after turning up on time, staying late, losing vacation days, because she knows—her department head knows—if she is away, that the mess, the mix-ups and mistakes when she returns is not worth two weeks on a beach with cheap cocktails and other people’s screaming children ruining her book. It’s not like she can even tan with her skin, pale and uninteresting, and prone to sunburn and melanoma. But on this day, grey and heavy with insurmountable problems of beds, afflictions and staff under too much pressure, she has reached the edge of the abyss. This day, this time of the year, this alignment of stars—as medical discharge co-ordinator for a London hospital—she’s had her fill of arranging cul-de-sac care in the community for the hopeless to empty beds for the hopeful, however deluded. It’s a never-ending merry-go-round. No-one gets on or off without damage.
In the October drizzle, she crosses Blackfriars Bridge to catch the tube to her local high street; its chain stores, stalwarts and Johnny-come-latelies, kebab houses and cafes indistinguishable from hundreds of other high streets across London and England. At Tesco Express, she buys meal-for-one specials, wine and bubbly for her big day tomorrow. Further on, she picks up a Korean takeaway; chicken and noodles, which smell better than they later will taste. Walking to her converted-on-the-cheap flat in a 1930s semi in a road of uniform semis in a suburb of semis, it comes to her that she misses the light of home. “Why,” she asks herself, “why on the eve of my fortieth birthday have I dug myself into this dull and dour land?”
She eats on the sofa, watching but not listening to the news. Honestly, who can bear to listen anymore? A bottle of on-special Chilean cab sav smothers the bitter taste of garlic and over-sweet soy sauce. After three episodes of Call My Agent, Alice leaves the oily tinfoil containers and empty glass on the carpet and heads to her unmade bed, long overdue a linen-change. She surfaces deep in the night, frozen; her full bladder not yet screaming. Instinct has her burrow deeper under the inadequate blankets, in the inadequate flat of her inadequate life.
The sea has never been kind to me, banners across her brain.
She shakes it away. Opens her eyes. She’s busting for a pee. This urgency is more recent. The iciness of her skin and the alarm of her bladder, fear of leaking and making her already cold bed colder drives her out from her den and out of bed. Her feet shuffle blindly into her jandals. She rises with an aching heave and gropes her way to the bathroom in the dark. The fluorescent glow from her clock allows her to see enough, but not too much. Small mercies.
On the cold toilet seat, shivering in her old tee, pants around her ankles, she leans forward, rests her arms on her knees. Weeks now this racing heart, this gummy mouth thick with unwanted memories has plagued her early mornings. She shuts her eyes against the churning in her gut. Relief comes with the voiding. She pulls her cigarettes from her work bag dumped on the floor where she’d rushed in to retch yesterday. One deep inhalation. As with bees, the smoke calms.
The dream fizzes and flickers behind her closed eyelids.
Waitematā waters blind her. Split by the sun into a million, billion diamonds. She looks down. A lacy froth cools her four-year-old toes. Cool. Silky. She looks up. Beyond the beach, beyond the baches, the dairy and permanent homes with red corrugated roofs and pastel weatherboards, beyond the dark pohutukawas and Norfolk pines, the green hills turn blue. Her eyes hurt to look. She shields them with her hands. The sun burns sweetly on her shoulders. She caresses the curve of her belly in her new swimsuit, blue with white polka dots and flounces. A mini version of Mum’s bikini. No water, Mum says. Don’t go in the water without me. Behind her, Mum’s shrieking, shouting with her friends. The sea begs her. She wades a little bit in. Come on, the water says. Come on. Deeper. Deeper. The water rises. It blubs up her nose, stings her eyes. Silences her cry. No one notices she’s gone.
Alice lights another cigarette. Water dreams are always fearful, are not new—but this dream of a beach, first warm and happy and then afraid, is new. It makes no sense. But then, her dreams never make sense. Take the recurring nightmare in blue—dense, dark, dangerous—which plagued her as a preschooler. In that dream, she was both omniscient—watching it play like a bad movie—and inside it. Caught by Peter Pan pirates who locked her in a clichéd treasure chest and tossed her off a gangplank to sink to the bottom of a blue-black ocean. Panicked by claustrophobia and fear, until the chest opened and she struggled in the murky water. Cold, cold, cold with desperation, she’d swim up seeking air. She who could not, cannot swim, swam seeking light, seeking warmth. Even now, after all these years, she relives breaking the surface, seeing land, striking out to reach the shore while creatures, a cross between dinosaurs and mechanical machinery, eat constantly at the land and prevent her reaching safety. Almost comical now. But not then.
The memory triggers her skin. She shivers like a plucked chicken in the chill of the unlit bathroom, drops the half-smoked cigarette down the toilet and hoists her pants.
Her mother never heard Alice’s screams in the night. Mum blamed the sleeping tablets but lately Alice wonders if her mother ignored them as a sort of revenge. For existing. Payback for the depression that her mother blamed over and over on Alice.
A quick hand-scoop of water wets her parched mouth—she has become a mouth breather, slack-jawed when she sleeps. Old. Not old. Not yet. She grabs her camel coat thrown on the back of the chair and burrows deep like a woodland creature snuffling blindly in the darkness for warmth and safety, recalling the relief when her father came to bundle her in his arms, to shush her cries. Nightmare after nightmare. Night after night.
Eyes wide open, she falls from the precipice into another tumbling sleep.
Mum bags the attention, flaunts her bikini, kicks high her dancing legs, twirls her dancing arms.
Mum. Mum.
Stop bothering me. It’s hot. Go for a swim, sweetie. Go, go, go.
Mum, I need to peeee…
Mum wrenches her tiny hand, pulls her into the water. Gripping Alice’s squirming body like a vice, unimpressed by her crying and flailing legs, her mother swims out, out, out.
You mad bitch. You mad fucking bitch, Daddy shouts, kicking into the water, snatching Alice. He drops to the wet sand, holding her like she’s welded to him. He is hurting her.
The aftertaste of fish wakes her near dawn. She throws off her covers. The taste, salty and pungent, kicks up in the recess of her throat. It is not new.
Everybody was drinking. Yes, they were.
Alice runs her parched tongue around her mouth. The first morning she woke to ghostly tang of over-cooked smoked fish, she lay stupefied at the memory of Auntie Dot, Mum’s spinster sister who took it upon herself to move in, dolloping chunked fish in a glutinous white sauce flecked with parsley, treacherous with hidden bones. Cat’s vomit, Alice called it. Friday nights kneeling in front of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, flagrant and savage on the wall above the fireplace, fingering the rosary beads. The memory brings an almost physical sting in the skin of her knees. Supplications done, Auntie Dot spooning the pallid mess onto her stoneware plates, which made her nerves grate with every scrape of the fork. Thirty years later, the smell, the taste inhabits still the mucous membranes of her mouth, the lining of her nose; so, too, the crunch of those miniscule bones, needle-sharp and spectral white.
She drifts off, nauseous, fearful.
Pre-dawn.
Alice pees again. She scrubs her teeth with minty toothpaste, swills astringent blue mouthwash, scouring the fishy memories. She retched then with every mandatory swallow and retches now over the sink.
Nothing good ever came from the sea.
Back in bed, the past ticker-tapes through her half-sleep. Disjointed. Fragments of almost-patterns, mismatched images, illogical timelines—hard to piece together, impossible to order.
Why has that taste of fish returned? Why have dreams of water, mountainous waves and splitting ground, of menaces both human and mechanical, returned to induce such fear that she pants herself arid every night?
Water. Always water.
Everybody was drinking. Something Mum said.
Blamed.
She sinks down again under snatches of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean in her head. Daddy’s song. Bring back, oh bring back, oh…
She wakes. Unremembered dreams clot her head.
It is a bad day. She knows it by the bogginess of her eyelids, the saturation of her eyeballs, the slovenliness of her limbs. She knows it when she sees her cigarettes from last night floating like fraying cockroaches in the toilet bowl, leaking their yellow-stained death wish. Another giveaway.
She flips the immersion switch, turns on the television—selecting the breakfast programme with the least annoying presenters; the ones who remember that they don’t always need to smile, smile, smile through the floods, fires, sexual assaults and government betrayals. But not even they can keep her thoughts in the basement.
Over the years, it has become a ritual to visit the Elgin marbles at the British Museum on her birthday. Something of their enduring beauty claims her and brings—if not hope—then a sense of reassurance that the world is larger, older than any one miserable woman marking another milestone. If those beautiful sculptures, exiled as she is, have survived, been displaced and knocked about, then so can she. Except this year, one question has gate-crashed her thoughts: Why does she stay? Nostalgia, sour and sentimental, squeezes her heart. Alice is at a loss what to do. This day, endurance is not aspirational.
Damn sobriety. The milk has curdled her coffee. She pulls a stemmed glass and opens a birthday-treat Cloudy Bay Pelorus. She’d dithered over the price, thought it an extravagance too far, before saying out loud, Ah, fuck it, I’m only forty once. The woman stacking beers behind her had laughed, said, Damn right. Buy two, love.
No one should turn forty on their own. No one should turn forty alone in a city in which they have never belonged, working a dead-end job, living alone devoid of family, children, love.
But this is how Alice turns forty on a dark autumn day in London, in her studio flat—a term that sounds a lot more decent than it actually is. There should be balloons, presents, bad jokes about being past it, and shrieking girlfriends, kids, maybe even grandkids. Alice turns forty alone except for her ghosts and two bottles (again, why the fuck not?) of New Zealand fake champagne. She has the whole day to get quietly drunk. And later, a Tesco curry meal for two (because, again, hell, it’s her birthday—who cares if she pigs out?)
She pulls up Shostakovich’s The Gadfly from her playlist. The only record not in the top ten charts she ever bought. She’d been thirteen when she saw Reilly Ace of Spies with Sam Neill on late-night cable TV. An Affair with a Married Woman had been the lurid title that sucked in her ‘wanting-to-know-stuff’ self. She fell in love with Reilly and the theme music. Sam Neill didn’t last. The music did. She leaves the curtains drawn. Unwashed, glass in hand, she lies on the sofa and coasts again.
A bonfire on the beach. Meat packs ripped open and sandwiched into metal grills; potatoes wrapped in foil—silver bullets tossed into the embers. Tupperware laid out on the towels. Cheese rolls, cold cooked chicken legs and BBQ sauce, curried rice salad and someone’s Auntie Jeannie’s shredded carrot and celery salad—the one with the blue cheese dressing and too many olives—which are mostly pushed to the side of paper plates or buried in the sand. Crates of beer, bottles of gin, and the pssst, pssst, pssst of tonics and ginger ales being opened to cut the hard spirits.
Come on. Lighten up. Everyone’s drinking, Mum shrieks.
I can’t stomach this anymore, Dad says. I’m going.
Take Alice with you, Mum says.
No, he says, let her have some fun.
Did he think if I was there, she would behave herself?
Maybe he didn’t think.
The day isn’t yet done. Every adult with a paper cup or bottle in hand, knocking it back because they have no further to stumble than the holiday cabins on the other side of the dunes—they drink without guilt, to excess. The kids will look after themselves. And in the late afternoon shadows, those deep long ones of summer, a few teenagers have snuck behind the shed at the far end of the bay to sit on old Jim’s kayaks piled high at the tail of the day, because he too has a bottle to his lips and a fag in his hand. Kids—careless of their shifting weight on the struts and seams of the craft—mess with the paddles, shriek, and get silly on purloined booze and the one joint passed around, which Kev has filched from his dad’s stash.
The afternoon heat, the alcohol, and the smoky, sidelong male stares leave Mum restless as a poked nest of fire ants.
‘It’s hot. Let’s go for a swim, sweetie. Come on.’
Except, even at four, I know it isn’t the heat or me she cares about. It is the blue and white polka dot bikini she’s strutting, angling for maximum attention.
Alice’s mobile shatters her stupor. Bugger. It’s Dad.
‘Happy birthday, Sweet Pea. I’d hoped you’d come home this year.’
‘Thanks, Dad, but work, you know. Can’t get away. How are you?’
‘Good. Good. I sent a card. Did you get it?’
‘Not yet. But it’ll come. I’ll let you know.’
‘Alice, if you need help with the fare...’
‘No Dad. Honest. It’s all good. Just you know, work and I’ve got a fella, doctor actually. Maybe it’ll go somewhere.’
‘Good for you, Sweet Pea. You deserve someone.’
‘Yeah. Maybe.’ Alice is not sure what else there is to say. ‘Bye Dad.’
‘Bye, my Alice. I love you.’ He hesitates before hanging up.
An I love you back wouldn’t have cost her. He is lonely, she knows. He never risked another woman in his heart, his life. You are all I need, Sweet Pea, he says. But he hasn’t had her for years. She knows he wants her back in his life, in New Zealand. Within travelling distance, at least.
She can still see him storming back to the beach after the sun had gone down. Her hero. Come to rescue her.
The kid needs her bed. And so do you.
Mum had laughed, turned her back on him.
Take her, she’s yours. She wasn’t my idea.
He’d stood, fists bunched, humiliated, defeated, then walked off without them into the darkness.
She pees again, then goes to make toast to soak up the sourness of dreams and wine tearing at her stomach. The lie to her father is regrettable but necessary. She has unused annual leave stacked up and the so-called maybe fella fell through weeks ago. Dimitri had moved back to Cyprus. Funny, he too had said he missed the light of his home. If he’d asked her to go with him, would she have? Probably not. He’d never been a hopeful but he had made her laugh and wasn’t entirely useless in bed. But... but nothing.
She eats and watches Homes Under the Hammer, followed by some Australian series, which, while not New Zealand, has enough familiarities to make her switch off after twenty minutes.
Another wave of smoked snapper fouls the toast. She runs to the toilet to throw up more than bile. She swills her mouth, sits on the bath rim, lights a cigarette. This sensory ghost descended some weeks ago. At first, she blamed her steady diet of raw ciders, cheap wines, and dodgy curries. It took a while to tie its occurrence with the dreams. They didn’t always happen at the same time but lately they are hand-in-hand, malevolent twins standing at the foot of her bed most mornings.
Her chest tightens with the rush of nicotine.
It’s hot. Let’s go for a swim, sweetie, Mum says for the crowd. Come on you little shit, time you learn to not ruin everything, Mum whispers in her ear.
Alice blocks her ears and closes her eyes. Desolation squats in her heart this birthday morning. Her tee-shirt stinks of vomit. She stubs out the cigarette and takes a shower. Under the cascade of hot water, Alice cries, head tipped, goldfish-mouthed in supplication. She tweaks the tap, upping the ante until her skin cooks to lobster. Close to fainting, she steps out into the white-tiled cauldron of steam, cuts a swathe through the condensation clouding the mirror and puzzles to see her mother before she lost the baby; the same constellation of freckles spurred by hormones, the same puffy eyelids, and bloated half-moon smudges beneath her eyes. It took years and one drunken Christmas night before Dad blurted out that the baby had not been his. That the miscarriage had been an abortion. How he’d hoped a holiday would help. It didn’t.
Her near-memories are inkblots in the darkness of time; vague, shape without substance. They won’t come out of the shadows.
Everyone was drinking, every adult and a few sneaky teenagers behind the kayak shed at the far end of the bay. The late afternoon heat. The alcohol. Dad’s anger. Admiring male stares and smirks. Mum on fire under her skin and down the length of her spine.
Let’s go for a swim, sweetie, she said. Come on...
Alice tried to tell lovers, to understand her, know her. But they don’t care enough to know.
Ah, never mind, love, forget the past.
Have a drink, Gorgeous Girl; life’s too short to be unhappy.
Come here sexy, I’ll make you forget everything bad in your life.
She became known by many names. Names she grew into, grew out of, held on to, let go of: Nutmeg. Cunning Little Bitch. Monkey. Smarty-Pants. Ginger. Blue. Beloved. Sexy. Nurse. Darling Girl. ‘What’s-Your-Name?’ after too many one-nighters. No name but at least they asked.
So many girls.
Over the years, during hangover mornings, she’d glimpse their faces in the swing of the bathroom mirror; skins shimmering, diaphanous from the corner of her eye. When she’d turn, nothing. They’d flit across booze-soaked nights in clubs, in the mottled mirrors of toilets reeking of drink and drugs, in the stinking loos of pubs while she was bent over a sink, pummelled from behind by some mate of a mate of a fucking mate who promised good shit in return for a bad fuck. She caught them watching her splintered in the cracked mirrors—sometimes hopeful, sometimes disappointed; often puzzled.
It is in mornings after vodka-fuelled nights when everything is a blur—her life, who she is, where she is, and most importantly why she is—that, deep in the synapses and sulci of her brain, those women live on. They exist forever: Manchurian viruses that wait and pick their time to resurface, to remind her of the poverty of her life. Of the choices she made. Of the girls who failed to live, yet refuse to die. Spectres. She doesn’t know the right one, the real one, the one she’d like to be, the one she could have been, the one she wasn’t allowed to be. She doesn’t know. At forty. That bothers her.
Where did the years go? What happened to those girls and women she tried on for size? Their shells. Carcasses cast off when they no longer fit, strewn on the floor of her life. She has trod upon them, crushed their existence and reduced their memories to dust. And dust she knows, never goes. It moves, relocates, returns.
Vomit rushes sour and sharp up her throat, her mouth. Bent over the toilet, she struggles to catch her breath between gushes of undigested wine. Exhausted, she lays her head on her arm and lets her eyes close, her cheek cool against the porcelain.
The water is rising—or is it me falling?
Dad has gone again. Slammed the door. Taken the car. I refuse to bloody babysit your goddamn child again.
Our child.
Act like it then.
I don’t mind; I’m happy to stay with Mum. When she parties, she is happy and laughing, singing along to the songs. Away from the party, she plonks me down in the shadows: says, Not a bloody peep, you hear? She walks, dances all slinky back to the campfire where blokes pass a joint round. Laughing, they tip frothing cans into her mouth. Mum and her friend Tanya giggle, wiggling their bottoms in flowery, tiny bikinis. Mum’s bum, cheeks on show, glows pink from the flames. She looks beautiful.
If Dad was here, he’d have something to say, alright.
I need a wee. I hold it and hold it until I can’t. I call her but she doesn’t hear me. Tanya’s new boyfriend Jonah is playing guitar so I sneak over and pinch Mum’s almost bare bum. She yelps, spins round, slaps my face. Everyone goes quiet. Everyone watches. My blue shorts turn dark and the wee runs hot down my legs. Someone says, Poor kid. Mum says, Oh fuck, scrunches her can and tosses it into the fire before grabbing my hand, pulling me into the water. I can’t swim and Mum knows that but she says for the crowd, it’s alright baby, let’s rinse you off. Shush, shush, I’m sorry baby, come on with Mummy. I dig my heels into the sand because the water is black, black, black under the dancing lights. She spits in my ear, Come on you little shit, time you learn to not ruin everything. Behind us someone yells, Hey Patsy, haven’t you had a bit much to drink for swimming? Not yet, she shouts back and hauls me into the water, which is so cold it makes me gasp and my skin fizzle. Before I know it, the sand disappears under my feet. I shriek, Mum I can’t stand; but she tucks me under one arm, hoisting me up, saying climb on my back and pretend you’re riding a dolphin like the statue of that Greek boy in your encyclopaedia, which is stupid because he was sitting up riding a horse, and I am belly-flat on her surfboard back, arms around her neck holding as hard as I can.
Then everything calms down.
Mum swims, one arm over the other, strong, smooth out, out beyond the dancing lights, beyond the music, beyond the shouts—paddle baby, paddle, I’m taking you on an awfully big adventure… I am cold but safe until she flips, unlocking my arm. I slide under the water. Black washes over me, burying me. I reach out for Mum but grasp only the salty water. It fills my mouth, blocking my nose, my voice.
She comes close. She’s got me. Her hand grips my shoulder and presses down, down, down.
Muffled by the water I hear her shout, I can’t find my little girl, help!
But Mum…
It is quiet.
I don’t feel cold anymore.
Alice jerks awake. Feels the water, the fear, the screams, rough hands dragging her onto the sand, the salty water splurging from her lungs, burning her throat.
Hears Mum shrieking. Everyone was drinking! Everyone!
She can’t shake it loose this time. Acid scorches her throat. She must be ill: this vomiting, the crazy dreams, the urinary frequency; one minute hot, next cold, sweaty.
She rings the GP. No, it isn’t urgent, just fucking awful, she says. There is no appointment until Tuesday. She tosses her phone across the lino before leaning over the toilet bowl again.
She remembers hard hands, shouts.
Mad bitch. Mad bitch. Mad fucking bitch.
The sand scaling her tiny back. The siren screaming in her head. Quiet. Dad. A doctor. A nurse next to her bed. He held her hand all through that night. There were police. There was no Mum.
Alice remembers the empty house, the hole in their lives where her mother should have been. Dad never said why her mother was taken away.
Four years later, no sightings later, she was told her mum had jumped in front of a train. There was no funeral, but there must have been one because twenty years later, before she left for England, Dad had taken her to her mother’s grave. They didn’t stay long.
Alice showers and dresses. She cannot bear the meanness of her flat. The stale smells and the walls closing in. She walks to the wide-open common where she is buffeted by great joyous gusts of rain-filled wind. Two dogs chase a tennis ball thrown over and over by their owner. Their purposeless joy is contagious. The trees have turned for autumn. They are beautiful. Nothing about their colours, fluttering in the branches and carpeting the ground in plate-sized leaves, multi-hued, soft beneath her steps, stirs bad memories. Autumn bypassed the North Island every year in New Zealand. She has come to love this vibrant chaos in England. Greasy takeaway boxes and newspapers scud past, one bold print tabloid tumbles ahead; its hateful headlines trampled by the chatter and giggles of a gaggle of bundled-up under-fives, with bulging swim-bags on their backs, being herded by vigilant teachers to the municipal swimming pool beyond the stand of oaks and beeches.
Her breath slows. Exhaustion whooshes away, carried on the gusts of wind that feel personal, as if they have arrived to comfort only her. The sickness softens in the clean air. Her nightmares retreat under the trees shedding, preparing to be dormant before budding back into life. Hope. Regeneration. Belief. She needs such promises. Just as she needed this excursion out of herself, to stride out the ‘poor me’ that has wrapped around her the past weeks on the back of a broken romance and an impending doom-laden birthday.
The thin sun disappears behind the clouds. An afternoon chill sets in. She’s been walking for hours. She heads for the Costa Coffee by the train station, craving a flat white. The aroma of clagging sugar pastries and bitter coffee slams into her when she steps inside. She runs to the toilets and vomits. Hot. Cold. Clammy. Something is wrong with her. The mood that had buoyed her a few moments ago drowns under the lurching of her stomach and the sting in her throat.
Once she has a grip on her legs, she rushes through the humid, fetid air, out of the café and walks to Boots along the road. Deep breaths control her nausea and trembling legs as she waits in the queue to speak to a pharmacist.
The woman sees how fragile Alice is; sits her down, checks her temperature, blood pressure.
‘All normal. How long has this been going on?’
‘The vomiting today, but the nausea days, a few weeks.’ A small kerching rings in her brain.
On cue, the pharmacist asks, ‘Right, and when was your last period?’
Dimitri walked away a month ago. She hasn’t had a period since. And before he left? She pulls out her phone. Checks the dates.
Kerching has become Gotcha.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ she says. ‘Seriously?’
She buys three pregnancy tests. To check, and double, triple check.
At home, she bins the curry but drinks the rest of the sparkling Cloudy Bay. Reckons if she doesn’t know she’s pregnant, it won’t count.
The next morning, she vomits, pees and waits, her hungover head in her hands. Lunchtime, the same result but without the hangover for company. She leaves the third for the next morning. Same answer.
Monday morning, she calls in sick and walks, skirting the Thames and traffic, Oh shit thoughts holding her hand. Pregnant at forty. Madness. A baby. How can she? She can’t. Pregnancy destroyed Mum. This alien infecting her these past weeks explains the nightmares, the ghost fish, the dredged-up, garbled memories. Mum’s unfathomable post-abortion depression tried to kill Alice before eventually killing her. Alice is afraid. Of everything, but especially herself. But. But. But she is not her mother. She is more like her father. The questions form, bold in her head. Can she love this child? Nurture it? Be kind? Be careful? Dad did. He loved and laughed and did his best to keep her safe.
As she walks, bare-headed in the rain, Alice catches the odd side-glance thrown at her, a couple of step-aways to let her pass. Has she been talking out loud? So what? She is not mad. Or is she? She didn’t choose to become pregnant, but if she aborts this... thing... will she risk spinning out like her mother? And it is with that thought Alice realises what is madder than being pregnant at her age is that she is not unhappy about it.
Near Battersea Bridge, she takes out her phone. The Elgin marbles can’t go home but she can.
Her father takes forever to answer.
‘Hello, Sweet Pea.’ His voice syrupy with sleep. ‘Is everything okay?’
Alice has forgotten about the time difference.
‘Yes, Dad. All good. Wanted you to know, I’ll be home for Christmas.’