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1)
When Dawn is four, Mark borrows her for the afternoon to bring to a family reunion. He tells his family, “I got stuck with babysitting, you know how it is, can’t be helped,” and then uses her rambunctious toddler high spirits to get out of any conversation he finds awkward the entire event.
Dawn won’t remember this one, in the future, but she’ll find a photo from that day tucked into the back of the dusty clutter on the mantelpiece when she’s twelve and looking for pictures for a family tree project -- a photo of rank upon rank of the Renton clan, and Mark hovering at the edge of the group, Dawn’s chubby, baby fingers holding on at the neck of his t-shirt where she’s swung up on his hip. She’s been back to Renton family dos before, now and then, but she doesn’t remember this one, and when she asks her mother about it, Allison laughs.
“Yeah, this was back before Cathy and Davie,” Mark’s parents, “Knew all the sordid details, think they were still trying to assess whether you’d inherited the Renton nose, or some shite like that.”
Dawn doesn’t mind family gatherings with Mark’s parents, really. Cathy dotes on her, and Mark’s nephew Drew is about her age and gullible, easy to goad into making a little trouble and with bad enough of a poker face that he generally takes the fall for it. The handful of times she’s spent with her mum’s family she’s liked less. Mum usually cries in the car ride home after, and then Da swears a blue streak about Mum’s father until she laughs, and Mark never comes along on these trips which leaves the air feeling off-balance and strange, and then it takes a few years before everyone has forgotten enough about the last trip to agree when Mum’s sister calls up and suggests another one.
Dawn met one of her Da’s sisters in a cafe once by chance.
Dawn tucks the Renton family photograph in the back of her notebook for school, and after supper, she asks Mark to run through the names and relationships of the aunties and uncles and cousins she doesn’t know as well. Mark squints down at the photo and gives her a few names that are clearly made up -- Bathsheba Marie MacIntyre, Kirkegaard Jones the Fifth. Daisy Maisy Elton Marie, his second cousin’s bastard’s file clerk. Dawn giggles and carefully notes them each down.
2)
When Dawn is five, Ali and Simon race to see which of them can pull Dawn’s kindergarten teacher fastest. Mark wins, and neither of them speak to him for a week.
3)
Mark occasionally reads the arts section of the Times if someone leaves it behind on the bus, but the truth is that they’re none of them exactly plugged in to the modern art scene, which is why they don’t hear about Begbie’s triumph until he’s had his third exhibition.
“Really?” Simon asks. “That raving bloody nutter? An artist?” Half-way through the sentence, Mark belatedly puts his hands over Dawn’s ears, which Simon could have told him would only pique her interest.
“Who’s a bloody nutter?” she asks around Mark’s hands in her piping little voice.
“Just some absolute fucking waster, sweetheart,” Simon tells her, locking eyes on Mark. “Just some horrifying bastard Mark cozied up to at school so that by the time we were adults we were all stuck with him.”
Dawn nods and turns back to her cereal. Mark says, “Don’t put this on me -- I did my best to stay well out of his way in school,” and “Well anyway, it sounds like he’s doing far too well for himself to worry too much about us little people.”
4)
When Dawn is nine, her father leaves and he doesn’t come back again until she’s been ten for months and months already.
It’s a while, long enough that he misses her first performance in a school play, but not long enough for her to forget his voice, so she sits on the top of the stairs and listens as he slurs belligerently about how he just wants to see his daughter.
“You can’t keep her from me, you fucking bitch, you have no right,” and Dawn has missed him, but she is damn well not going downstairs if he’s going to sound like that -- angry, possessive, like she’s a thing.
“You’re not going near her until you look less like you crawled out from inside a bin,” Mum snaps, and then, “When Kelly ran into you in London she said you were on meth.”
“Oh, well if Kelly says it,” Dawn’s da snarls, and it’s then that Mark speaks up.
“Let’s leave Kelly out of it, and let’s leave Dawn out of it too until we’ve all calmed down a bit,” he says, and Dawn hears the rustling of the door creaking open and closed, the clank of keys, and then Mark is saying, “Come on, mate, Si, c’mere, let’s grab a pint and you can tell me all about amphetamines. We’ll come back and talk to Ali when it’s daylight,” because the knock on the door that had brought Dawn’s father home had come in the middle of the night, waking Dawn and the rest of the house from a deep sleep.
Mark follows Dawn’s da out of the house, and Dawn makes her way down the stairs to where her mum is leaning against the bannister, white-faced and trembling. When she hears Dawn coming, Mum turns her way and pastes on a shaky smile. “He certainly knows how to make an entrance, your father, doesn’t he?” she says, and Dawn hops down the last two steps to wind her arms around her mum’s waist and hug her tight.
After a moment, her mum’s arms reach up to wrap around her, hugging her tight and running hand through her hair. “Oh, he’ll be alright, love,” her mum says, quieter. “Mark will shake some sense in him, nothing could ever keep Simon Williamson down.”
5)
When Dawn is eleven, she meets her baby brother.
He came to be in the year when her father was away in London, and Da told her, once, that it was seeing this new baby as a baby that reminded him that he had to come home. Dawn thinks that’s a little backwards, new kid reminding him of the old one he’d not seen in a year, making him abandon the new one to go back to the old, but she’s glad to have him home just the same. Mum and Mark tend to bicker, without Da to come between them as a distraction, and with Da gone there’s no one to take her out of school for the afternoon on the pretence of an emergency but actually because he wants someone to catch a Tuesday matinee with. The year her Da was gone, Dawn lost all her schoolyard cred as the one kid who saw all the action and horror flicks while they were still in theaters.
The baby, when Dawn sees it, is a few months old. Da and Mark have taken Dawn to London together because Da has determined that playing the “no, actually I’m gay” card with the new baby’s mum is the best way to justify the fact that he’s entirely walked out on her without burning any bridges. The apartment they’re visiting is posh as anything, and Dawn’s new brother’s mum saves all of her anger for Da, who is slowly but surely wheedling his way back into her good graces, which means she’s perfectly happy to be sweet to Dawn.
“Such a lovely little girl,” she says, gazing down wistfully at Dawn. “You look just like your father.” Dawn has heard this before, although she can’t quite see it herself. Her hair is dark and curly like her mum’s, although Mark says Da’s sisters’ hair looks the same, or did when they were kids, at least. Dawn knows her father dyes his hair; when she was very young, she used to like to sit perched up on the edge of the bathroom sink and watch as he combed the bleach carefully through his roots with a toothbrush. Mum says Dawn can try it for herself, if she likes, but Dawn doesn’t like the idea of not knowing how bleaching her hair would turn out until she’s tried it. She’s moved house nine times in her life that she can remember, she’s seen her mum through two tries at nice, normal boyfriends and let her Da take her to the park to pick up single mums who look like they might like a quickie, and she’s quizzed Mark late into the night when he decided, when Dawn was eight and a half, to try a correspondence course to finish Uni -- Dawn is used to chance, but her appearance has always been her own, to hold as steady as she likes, and she doesn’t particularly want to change that.
Dawn looks up at her new brother’s mum and completely ignores the soft way the woman is fishing; whatever this nice, rich lady wants from Dawn’s Da, she is probably not going to get it. Instead, Dawn asks her, “Can I hold the baby?”