But Alice is reassured that the carer is there, that her parents will be fed and medicated, washed and dressed, and that for an hour or two she won’t need to worry about them. She can’t quite hear what they’re saying because the microphone on the webcam she set up in their living room last time she visited doesn’t pick up sound properly in other rooms. She can hear voices from elsewhere, her mother talking to the carer. On it she can see a small square room, a cat sitting on a green sofa licking its haunches, a pot of tea on the coffee table. She brings her gaze back to the screen of her iPad. When she sits on the sofa on the other side of the room it is all she can see, as though it is a part of the room, as though it is about to seep through the window frames and drown them all. And suddenly, overnight, there was all this sea. In Brixton, where she lived before, she had a view of walls, of other people’s gardens, of distant towers and fumy skies.

Alice still feels awed by the sea, by its vast proximity. To the left there is a slipway where small fishing boats form a colorful spine down to a concrete jetty and where the great, dreadful froth of the North Sea hits the rocky shoreline. It’s enough, just about.īeyond her window, between Victorian streetlights, a string of sun-faded bunting swings back and forth in the boisterous April wind. Silly money for a piece of art made from old maps, perhaps, but not silly money for a single mother of three. She makes art from old maps which she sells on the Internet for silly money. She hadn’t imagined that they’d ever outgrow this place.Īlice sits in her tiny room at the top of her tiny house. She hadn’t imagined that one day she’d have a gangling child of almost six foot. And Romaine, the baby, was just four months old. They were all so little when she moved them here from London six years ago. The ceilings slope and bulge and her fourteen-year-old son needs to bow his head to get through the front door. It is a tiny house, a coast guard’s cottage, built more than three hundred years ago for people much smaller than her.

I found you lisa