Dee

Dee is Felicity’s girlfriend and one of Fern Woolbright’s flatmates in a dilapidated shared flat in Didsbury. The novel presents her through small domestic particulars and Fern Woolbright’s sharply observant perspective: she is elusive about her own circumstances, but participates in the household’s quarrels, rituals, and plans, helping turn an accidental and uncomfortable living arrangement into a kind of shared home.

Identity and Background

Dee shares the attic flat with Fern Woolbright and Felicity, a drama-school student in her third year. Fern Woolbright describes Dee as tiny and, from a distance, easy to mistake for a child, though she is approaching thirty. Her appearance and habits are rendered through the same comic, specific lens: she stays at home, henna-colours her hair, and reads tarot cards. The contrast between her diminutive appearance and her adult life is part of Fern Woolbright’s playful portrait, not a fuller account of Dee’s own history.

Little is established about Dee’s work or family. Fern Woolbright does not know what Dee does, and Dee is vague about her relatives. She does not seem troubled about staying in the flat over Christmas, but the reasons for her circumstances remain unexplained. The novel leaves that uncertainty intact rather than supplying a backstory.

Life in the Flat

The flat is a two-bedroom attic in a crumbling red-brick corner house, far from the well-lit student accommodation Fern Woolbright had expected after an administrative error. Dee appears to Fern Woolbright as an unofficial extra resident: she pays no rent and does not buy shared basics such as milk or toilet paper. Fern Woolbright imagines that Felicity conceals her during the landlord’s surprise visits, tucking her into a drawer or under coats. This is Fern Woolbright’s suspicion, presented as comic speculation rather than confirmed fact.

Domestic friction becomes explicit when Fern Woolbright confronts Dee and Felicity about touching her belongings. Dee begins hyperventilating and has to breathe into a brown paper bag. The argument grows into mutual insults, but does not end in a lasting rupture: tears and whisky give way to apologies and hugs. Dee’s place in the flat is therefore both a source of irritation and part of a close, if volatile, household relationship.

Shared Rituals and Plans

At Christmas, Dee and Felicity do not appear eager to return to their families. Felicity’s parents reject her sexuality, while Dee offers little explanation of her own family situation and plans to stay. When Fern Woolbright decides to make a substitute Christmas tree from the kitchen’s yucca plant, Dee joins in with Felicity, decorating it with clip-on earrings, plastic popper beads, and shapes cut from cigarette-packet foil. Fern Woolbright’s radio, now shared in the kitchen, plays carols; the improvised decoration and communal listening help make the room feel festive, and Fern Woolbright feels excited for the first time in weeks.

Felicity and Dee also share an evening Spanish class at a local institute. Felicity imagines Spain as a possible alternative if acting does not work out, with a gay and lesbian bar as the proposed venture; Dee adds vegetarian snacks, including nuts, crisps, and perhaps olives. The suggestion gives their imagined future a domestic, practical detail, and shows Dee participating in a plan shaped around Felicity’s ambitions.

Characterization and Narrative Role

Dee is defined less by a revealed personal history than by her position within a makeshift household. The framed postcards of female Music Hall performers displayed by Dee and Felicity, like the yucca tree dressed with household odds and ends, help establish a shared domestic world outside the conventional family homes neither woman seems keen to return to. Dee’s evasiveness remains unresolved, but her presence is concrete: she shares the flat, provokes and survives a quarrel, joins in its celebrations, and contributes to its imagined future.