The Dollmaker

by Nina Allan

“That’s just the trees,” I said. “If you listen you can still hear the road.”

  What I meant was that civilization was not far away. We walked on, side by side, both of us straining our ears for the sound of a car. It was true that from the top of Wimbush Hill you could normally hear the traffic dashing to and fro on the bypass but for some reason at that moment it was perfectly quiet. I shuffled my feet in the dirt, making the leaves rustle. The sun poured down through the trees, cross-hatching the path with streaks of yellow. Like rancid butter, I thought. Its brightness amongst the gloom dazzled my eyes.

  “I liked the play,” I said to Helen. I realized this was the first time I had mentioned it, even though it had been months ago. We were on the bridge by then. The sun was hot, one of the last hot days of that year. We leaned our arms against the parapet, soaking up the warmth. Mica sparkled in the granite, and I thought about how diamond is the hardest substance on Earth, and yet it is made of the same stuff as coal, or the fragile lead in pencils.

  A simple rearrangement of space.

  “Thanks,” Helen said. I thought she might want to say something more about the play but she changed the subject almost immediately. “I love this warm weather. It always makes me feel I could live without food.”

  I bent over the parapet and looked down through the trees. The leaves were beginning to turn, but only just. I gazed and gazed, wishing I could transport myself into that other universe Edwin had talked about. You’ll want to ask if I missed my mother, but I can’t answer, not honestly, because I can’t remember. It was my father I missed, even though he was still living and breathing and making sure I ate a proper meal at least once a day. I know that probably doesn’t make sense to you but that’s how I felt.

  The ground beneath the parapet was scattered with leaves, the first leaves of autumn, and yet I imagined I could see something else, down there in the cutting, something small and white. Its brightness against the leaf litter made it distinct, made it stand out a mile. It was Rosamund, of course, her broken remains, though mercifully she was too far away for me to see her properly.

  “What’s that?” Helen said, catching sight of her too. “Let me see.”

  “It’s just a piece of paper,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

  “It looks like a dead baby,” Helen said. “I’m going down to have a look.” Her cheeks were flushed, with excitement maybe, or with the prospect of having something to talk about besides ourselves.

  “It’s not worth it. It’s probably just an old Sainsbury’s bag.”

  “What’s the matter? Or is ignoring dead bodies getting to be a habit with you?”

  There was a light in her eyes, the light of goblins dancing. I understood even at the time that what she said had nothing to do with me, that it was something deep within her, an anger at the world, but the fury in her voice – the laughing contempt – was so potent and so keenly directed it was like an earthquake. I could feel my limbs shaking yet the space inside my head seemed utterly still.

  I thought of the nurses, the paramedics, trying to comfort me, my father saying nothing, the weeks of skating around the facts like a hole in the ice. Helen might be a selfish bitch but at least she had it within her to speak the truth.

  “I wish you were dead,” I said, quite calmly. “Then I could ignore you, too.”

  “People are saying that you left her to die. That you came in and saw her lying there and then went out again. That you deliberately didn’t call an ambulance.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. Because you’re crazy? Everybody thinks so – crazy and pathetic. The way you keep hanging around me makes me sick.”

  A rushing within me, like a wind gathering. A blissful sensation, because in those moments I allowed myself to hate her. I’m not good at hating, Andrew, because I’ve never been brave enough. Another moment and it would be too late. I would love her again, or at least understand her.

  Helen was right. I really was pathetic. But then I heard the ghost train coming – its strident whistle, like a signal, do it – and that was enough.

  I caught her by the hair, so soft in my hands, like thistledown, like traveler’s joy. I think I really did mean to push her over the parapet, but she pulled away from me and went sideways, into the barbed wire fence that separated the cycle path from the drop into the culvert. She raised one hand to her head, to where I’d torn at her hair, and used the other to steady herself, grabbing at the barbed wire as if it were a lifeline.

  She screamed, the sound of a rabbit caught in a trap, and I saw the blood pulsing up between her fingers from where the claws of the barbed wire were lodged, deep in her palm.

  “Get it off me,” she cried. “Get it off.” She was weeping now instead of screaming, her face, when she turned to look at me, blotted out by pain.

  Her heart is broken, I thought. Isn’t that how all fairy tales end, really?

  “Get it off yourself,” I said. I turned then and walked away from her, back along the shaded pathway and into the town.

  With all my love,

  Bramber

  THE UPSTAIRS WINDOW

  by Ewa Chaplin

  translated from the Polish by Erwin Blacher 2008

  I remember a conversation I had with him once, at the private view for his first major London show.

  “What’s the difference between a spy and a secret agent?” he asked me. It sounded like the setup for a joke.

  “Are you serious? There’s no difference, surely?”

  “Perhaps not, if you’re going by the dictionary. But did you ever hear of anyone being shot as a secret agent?”

  Niko insisted that although in theory the words shared a meaning, in practice the term “secret agent” made you think glamour and heroics, whereas “spy” was a dirty word, synonymous with treachery. It was a put-up job, Niko reckoned. What side of the line you ended up on came down to who got to write up the report.

  “Think about it,” he said. “The Rosenbergs were convicted as spies, and died in the electric chair, whereas James Bond gets to blow heads off for a living because some spook in some back office has given him a license to kill.”

  It didn’t seem to occur to him that James Bond didn’t actually exist, that he was a literary invention owned by a film franchise. I asked him what the big deal was, but he’d gone all deadpan on me. Niko could be a pain like that. He had a habit of holding forth on heavy subjects, and once he got into his stride there was no stopping him. Tell him to lighten up and he’d look at you as if you’d suggested that dropping the atomic bomb had been a good idea.

  “You wouldn’t be asking that question if it were you facing the firing squad,” he said.

  We were standing in front of a painting of his called “The Tower,” which was typical of the work he was doing back then. From a distance it looked like a dense mass of abstract colors. It was only when you saw it up close that you could see how complicated it was. “The Tower” was made up of hundreds of tiny squares, painted one above the other like a giant stack of matchboxes. Inside each box was a different object: a pink transistor radio, a commemorative mug, a plastic doll with only one arm, the kind of mindless jumble of trash you find stuffed into the backs of cupboards or jumbled together in cardboard boxes in your local junk shop. When I asked Niko if the objects were supposed to mean anything he refused to say.

  Some of the critics reckoned “The Tower” was the Tower of Babel, that the random collection of objects was supposed to represent the lack of understanding between people or between nations or whatever. As far as I was concerned, this theory didn’t hold water: even though they had different titles, Niko’s paintings all looked pretty much alike.

  “Time Machine,” “Fortress,” “Meridian” – whatever the paintings were symbolic of, the show sold out. No one called Niko’s work weird or quirky either, they called it playful or ironic. I
saw one review that described the Camden paintings as having “all the freshness and vitality of a well drawn comic strip.” Each time Niko was interviewed, he was asked to spill the beans on what the paintings were about but he always kept stumm. He said the meaning of a work of art depended on who was looking at it. Art talk bores me, to be honest, so I didn’t pay much attention. What I do know is that Niko seemed to be doing all right back then. I admired him, and I liked his work. What I disliked was everything that went with it, all that art school bullshit. I’ve always believed that good journalism is about saying what you mean in as few words as possible. When it comes to the art world you often end up getting the exact opposite.

  Niko and I never really discussed Laura Plantagenet. My friendship with Niko was a coincidence in any case – Laura and I split up more than a year before I first ran into Niko, and it wasn’t Laura who introduced us. Niko and Laura had been in and out of each other’s lives since they were at college, but I think he understood her even less than I did. I can’t remember if it was me or Laura who first suggested we get married. Whoever it was, we were a disaster waiting to happen. But because of the Angola brief and the film that came out of it I thought I was God in the making and I had the money to go with it. Laura had just finished shooting Gethsemane, the film that made her famous, propelling her out of the art house and into the glossies. Ivan Stedman and Laura Plantagenet, the proverbial golden couple. Except that we weren’t.

  After Laura I stayed single. I don’t mean I stayed celibate – far from it. But I made up my mind to steer clear of anything too serious and not just for my own sake. Work and relationships don’t mix, or at least not for me. When I come back off a job I’m exhausted, not fit for human company. I like to unpack my kit, junk the worst of it, steam-clean the rest, then lie in the bath for hours listening to the pipes grumble. I like to enjoy the sensation of feeling safe. There have been times when I’ve asked myself if I do what I do simply because I know that feeling will always be waiting for me at the end of it, but I decided that was bollocks, just the tiredness talking.

  If all I wanted from life was some uninterrupted downtime I would have chosen a profession less likely to get me killed.

  It was during one of these furloughs that Niko turned up at my flat. I hadn’t expected to see him again, to tell the truth. He’d made a mistake, and a bad one. Such actions have inevitable results. I distrust idealism. I’ve seen enough of it in practice to know it’s rarely about the other man. You might even call it the ultimate expression of arrogance, but whatever you call it, it’s not worth dying for. Niko looked terrible. He stank like he hadn’t washed for days and there was an ugly-looking cut beneath his right eye that had only partially scabbed over. I assumed it was police work, though it turned out to be a souvenir of a fight Niko had got into in some pub on Newport Street. Looking at it made me feel tired. It was one stupid thing after another with him.

  I’d followed the trial on TV of course, and as if that weren’t enough, Niko’s girlfriend Mica mailed me all the press cuttings. But I was in Kuwait while it was going on and for once that seemed like a bonus. I wanted no part of it, least of all as a witness. Mud sticks, and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Do that in my line of work and your sources are liable to dry up overnight. For all his talk of secret agents and spies, Niko never seemed to grasp that.

  Seeing him standing there in the hallway, my first thought was what excuse could I come up with, to tell him he couldn’t stay?

  “You’d better come in,” I said. “Let me fix you a drink.” I decided I’d let him rest up for a couple of hours, then tell him I had a plane to catch. Asking for more would be unreasonable, even for Niko.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I could definitely do with one.” His hands hung limp at his sides, and there was grime under his fingernails. It looked like motor oil. I wondered what had been the final straw for him – the threat of execution, the crap in the papers, the wholesale public destruction of his work. I poured him a Scotch. He held the tumbler up to the light then took a quick swallow. When he rested the glass on the sideboard I could see his greasy fingerprints on the crystal.

  “I’m going to make a run for it,” he said. “I know someone who can get me out.”

  “For God’s sake, Niko,” I said. “It’s not worth the risk. If you jump bail and they catch you, you’ve had it. Sit tight and you get five years, maybe less. It’s hardly the end of the world.”

  “If I stay here I’m finished as an artist. They may as well kill me now.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic. It’ll all blow over. Get some commercial work, just for a while. You might even find this business works out in your favor eventually. People like notoriety, they lap it up. You’ll end up with more commissions than you can fulfill.”

  “I’m not like you, Ivan. I’m not prepared to play their games.”

  “I resent that.”

  “You’ve never been afraid to compromise. That’s how you get by.”

  “I make sure no one interferes with my freedom, if that’s what you mean. If I have to adjust a paragraph here and there, then I’ll make that sacrifice. It’s a matter of priorities.”

  “I won’t have anyone telling me what I can and can’t paint.” He snatched at his glass. His hands were trembling, though whether from anger or fear I could not tell.

  “So long as they leave you alone, who cares?”

  “And if they keep demanding more compromise, which they will?” Niko said. “What then?”

  I thought of all the examples I could give him, colleagues of mine who had been forced into far worse corners just to keep their passports: Estrella Finzi, Duncan Patel, Martin McEwan. I bit my tongue, though. I was tired enough as it was, and I couldn’t face the fallout if Niko thought I was comparing myself with Martin McEwan.

  “Let’s talk about this tomorrow,” I said. “You look like the walking dead.”

  * * *

  —

  Laura managed to extricate herself, of course. She’d stopped seeing Niko on any kind of a regular basis at least six months before the case was brought, for a start, and she was required to appear in court only once, via a video link. Her lawyers maintained she had no idea that Niko intended to utilize her image in the creation of blasphemous material, which is probably true, to be fair. Laura is blind to anything that bores her, which would have included Niko’s endless tirades against the Rouse government and what he called their draconian persecution of the creative impulse.

  I ran into her on the street, not long after Niko pulled his disappearing act. I was just coming out of Green Park tube. She was crossing Piccadilly, in front of the Ritz. I’m lucky I suppose. If Laura was bored with Niko then God I was bored with her. The fact that I can recall that feeling precisely, a tedium so intense that I occasionally toyed with the idea of killing her just so I wouldn’t have to hear her voice again, is what made it possible for me to stop in the street and have a civilized conversation with her. To enjoy her company, even. Niko never reached that stage of enlightenment. I guess he never will now.

  “Laura,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks,” she said. “I’m gasping for a drink, though. Do you fancy some lunch?”

  She swept off her shades, a pair of vintage Versace’s that would have set me back a month’s earnings in the old days. It is no accident that so many of the film journalists and critics who have eulogized Laura over the years have found themselves unable to resist mentioning her eyes, which are a soft, powdery blue, shading to mauve around the margins of the iris. It was those eyes I first fell in love with, like everyone else. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say I believed in them, the way some people still believe in God. Even now I wonder how it is possible for eyes like that to conceal such deep reserves of pettiness and self-absorption. I don’t mean that Laura is stupid, quite the opposite – she was always smart as a whip and twice as
sharp, able to grasp a situation in less than a beat. Her intelligence is what makes her such a great actor, I suppose, that ability to sum people up. It’s what comes with it that drives me insane: her habit of dismissing at a glance anybody or anything that does not directly concern her person or her interests.

  Being looked at turns her on like a spotlight, yet it was in those moments when she believed herself alone that I was most in love with her. Moments in which she might scrape distractedly at the edge of a fingernail with a worn-down emery board, or lie sprawled on her back on the sofa staring up at the ceiling. I used to wonder what went through her head at such moments, whether I might see her differently if I were able to read her mind. Probably not, and in any case these moments of reflection never lasted. The second she realized I was watching her she began to perform. She became someone else then, the person I found unknowable and in the end couldn’t stand.

  We went to a Greek place at the far end of Curzon Street. Quiet. Once I’d got the drinks in, she cut straight to the chase.

  “Did you know Niko was planning to jump bail?”

  “I was still in Kuwait,” I lied. “I had no idea.”

  “Simon says he’s a fool. We could have found him a decent lawyer, if he’d only asked.”

  You’ll have heard of Simon Caultham, of course, the maverick auteur who kicked off his career with that incomprehensible alternative zombie movie, Feet of Clay, and who first directed Laura in Amber Furness. Caultham had been married twice already and no one believed for a moment that he and Laura would last five minutes but they seem to suit each other. Perhaps it’s the inherent one-upmanship that turns them on: two equally monstrous egos, locked in a perpetual stalemate.

  “Niko doesn’t have that kind of money,” I said. “Not anymore. You know that.”

  “Isn’t that what friends are for? That’s the trouble with Niko – always so insistent on his pathetic principles.”