by Nicky Singer
“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” says Grandma, swift to defend me. I wish I loved her more.
My father pauses, he comes to a stop. Not because of what Grandma has said, but because he finally sees me, standing in my mother’s room with some socks and a pair of knickers clutched to my face.
“Have you gone mad?” he says.
“Well, she’d have every right,” says Grandma.
“You keep out of this,” says my father.
“Oh,” says Grandma as if he’s punched her. “Oh.” She sits down on the bed. “You wouldn’t speak to me like that if Gerry were alive. You wouldn’t dare. He wouldn’t let you.”
“Well?” says my father, looking at me.
I say nothing. I don’t move the socks and I don’t move the knickers.
“Well what?” says Grandma, recovering a little. “What are you talking about? Will somebody please let me know what’s going on.”
“Yes,” says my father. “Why don’t you, Tilly? Tell your grandma what you consider acceptable behaviour in my restaurant.”
Grandma waits.
I say nothing.
The nothing infuriates my father. His breathing is noisy.
“The trouble with you, Richard, is you always go off at the deep end.” That’s my mother speaking – her calm voice. The one that made him even madder.
“Right,” says my father. “Looks like I’m going to have to tell you, Margaret. My daughter, your granddaughter, thinks it’s appropriate to put blood and glass and chilli seeds—”
“Not glass,” I say from behind the knickers.
“Oh – so you admit the other two—”
“What,” interrupts Grandma, “are you talking about? Blood and chilli seeds and glass what? In what?”
“In the food of my guests, my patrons. So that they choke. So that they vomit. So that I have to apologise. Explain. Although there is no explanation. Unless,” he continues, “you count like mother like daughter.” He comes over to me, shakes me by the shoulder. “Well,” he says, “well?” He drags my hand from my face. The knickers fall to the floor.
“Leave my mother out of this,” I say.
“I’d like to. I’d really like to leave Judith out of this. But there’s a genetic connection, you see. A particular brand of impetuosity, of self-indulgence. Like you think you can do whatever you want whenever you want to and hang the consequences. As if only little people have to bother about consequences.”
He does look little. Standing there, red and angry.
“Small body – small mind,” says my mother.
“I think that’s enough, Richard,” says Grandma.
“No it’s not enough. Not nearly enough. Because do you know what the consequence of this particular lunacy is – apart from the free meals and the free drinks, that is? It’s that I had to buy two tickets for that stupifyingly stupid Celeb Night event. And have you any idea what those tickets cost?”
“They’re in a good cause, Richard.”
“Right …” He pulls two large floppy tickets from his trouser pocket. “National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children,” he reads. “Yes, I see your point. Because they’re going to have a big job to do in this house if you don’t adjust your behaviour, Tilly M. Weaver.”
When I was small enough to climb on his lap and he was shouting, I could sometimes defuse things with a smile. Not a defiant smile; an enquiring, hopeful, complicitous one. He’d sometimes catch that smile and something would change, break. He’d laugh.
I try a smile.
“And wipe that smirk off your face. You’re just like her. Think everything can be laughed off. Who cares? Well, I care Tilly. I’ve got a business to run. A business that pays for everything you eat and everything you have.”
He says it like he means “and everything you are too”. Like he owns me. I stop smiling.
“I hate you,” I say, very quietly, like she might have done.
“Fine,” he says. “Dandy. I’m not particularly enamoured of you right now either. But I’m going to get more impressed soon because you’re just about to do something responsible, something decent for a change. You’re going round to Mrs Van Day’s house to apologise.”
“Mrs Van Day!” exclaims Grandma. “It was Mrs Van Day?”
“And Mercy,” says my father. “Which is why Tilly’s on her way round to their house. Right now.”
“No,” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “Oh yes.” His hands are on my shoulders. “Come on.” He frogmarches me down the stairs and along the hall, pausing at the door only long enough to haul it open, shove me out and slam it behind me.
As I stand on the doorstep (it’s cold, getting dark and I have no coat) I hear raised voices behind me.
“You’re taking things too far,” says Grandma.
“I’m sorry Margaret, but I have responsibilities. Unless someone starts drawing some boundaries Tilly’s going to wind up in exactly the same place as Judith. If she can’t exercise some self-control, then someone has to exercise some on her behalf. She has to learn there are lines you can cross and lines you can’t. Something Judith never quite …”
I step away from the house then, because I do not want to hear it any more. My mother fouled in my father’s mouth. As I begin to walk I find my right hand in my right pocket. I’m reaching for Gerda.
But, of course, Gerda isn’t there.
8
Gerda’s in my apron pocket. I left her there. Folded inside a neat square of cloth at the restaurant. Grandma’s right. I do have a temper. A boiling rage that erupts, just like my father’s. But also a cold anger that makes me go very still inside. It frightens me, how detached I can feel, how I felt when Gerda (my joy, my beloved) whispered that one word to me:
“No.”
So I forgot her. I just walked away. I’ve practised this over the years. I can refuse things, lock them in boxes, make them safe. Sometimes I think my brain is full of locked boxes. And that one day there will be too many boxes and my brain will explode. Then fourteen years of scary things will cascade to the floor and finally I’ll have to look. But not now. Not yet. That’s how I’ve survived. Until now. Until my father came and said what he said and I dipped my hand in my pocket and Gerda wasn’t there.
And I felt a hole open up in me bigger than my heart. Like I was empty and could never be full again.
Which is why I turn left (towards the restaurant) and not right (towards Mercy’s) at the bottom of the drive.
“Where are you going, Madam?”
Somehow my father has emerged from the house. He has caught up with me. More than this, he’s standing in front of me, blocking my way.
“I’m going back to work,” I say. “I’m sorry I clocked off early.”
“Did you hear anything in there?” he asks. “Anything at all?”
I wait.
“Get in the car,” he says. He points at the machine as if I don’t understand English.
I don’t move.
“Get in the car.”
I go back up the drive and get in the car. He follows me, climbs in, slams his hand on the door lock and roars out of the drive. Exactly seven minutes later (I’m watching the clock so as not to have to look at him) he jerks up in front of Mercy’s house.
“Out,” he says.
I get out. Stand on the pavement.
“Doorbell,” he says.
I go up to the door. It’s almost a year since I stood here last. They have a new knocker. A brass fish.
“Knock,” says my father.
I put my hand in my pocket. Gerda isn’t there.
“Knock!” he says. “Damn you.”
I knock.
Mrs Van Day opens the door.
“Oh,” she says, “Tilly …”
My father leans out of the car. “Tilly has something to say to you,” he shouts. Then he shuts his door and drives away.
“Oh,” repeats Mrs Van Day. And then, into my silence: �
��Do you want to come in, Tilly?”
“I’m sorry,” I say then. And I am. How is Mrs Van Day to blame? “Very sorry.” The words feel physical, like scented oil on skin. It’ll be like this when I apologise to Gerda. She will look at me out of those blue eyes, I’ll say sorry and she’ll forgive me. It’ll be all right. “About the restaurant.” I add. “I don’t know what came over me.”
Mrs Van Day draws me over the threshold. “Tilly,” she says, “Tilly,” she sighs and puts her hand on mine. “It’s not important. Doesn’t matter at all. What’s important is … is there anything we can do?”
“I need to see Mercy.”
“Of course. Cindy’s here, though. Dress-fitting. Well, trouser-fitting actually. But …” She looks at my face. “She’s in the drawing room. Just go in, you know your way. I’m making tea. Do you want one?”
I never drink tea. But as this is the first time today anyone has offered me anything, I say, “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
She turns towards the kitchen and I cross the hall to the drawing room. I can hear voices. I push the door very gently because I need the room to be just as I remember it. A serene room with white sofas and a white carpet. And yes, here it is. Above the white marble fireplace, the bevelled glass mirror in the plain gold frame. At the windows, the watered cream silk curtains with the pale gold tiebacks. And yes, yes – to my right – the enfolding white sofa on which I lay that Saturday when Mercy, who’d arranged to meet me at two o’clock, didn’t turn up till five.
“I’d just go home if I were you,” said Mrs Van Day. “Teach the wretch a lesson.”
But I loved lying there, could have lain there all day and all night. It seemed such a clean, calm room. Compared, at least, with my house where even the colours and patterns clash and shout. I remember thinking, as I lay there dozing, nothing bad could ever happen in this room.
“Tilly!”
Mercy is standing in the centre of the room. She’s wearing a breast-hugging bodice of slashed white and pale blue which covers her back but exposes her taut stomach and the beautiful hollow of her tummy button. At her hips is a wide white belt from which blue gauze trousers flow. The trousers are quite transparent and beneath them she wears a pair of blue satin shorts cut high on her thighs like a bikini bottom. At the hem of her left leg, Cindy kneels. She has a mouth full of pins which she’s extracting from a small doll-shaped pincushion on the floor.
Only it’s not a pincushion. It’s Gerda.
“Let me guess,” says Mercy. “You’ve come to apologise. It was all a big mistake. You don’t know what came over you – again. You’re really sorry.”
Cindy looks up. “Hi,” she says through the pins.
Gerda says nothing. Her blue eyes stare at the ceiling. There are pins in her right arm, her left arm, her legs, at her throat, at her breast, through her heart. And I want it not to be true. I want my eyes to be lying to me, so I just stand there, immobile, waiting for the picture to change. Because there is no way Gerda can be here. No way that she can be lying on this floor, stabbed through. No way at all.
“Well?” says Mercy, shifting her weight.
“Keep still,” mouths Cindy.
Mercy moves but I keep still, I don’t move a muscle. Just watch as Cindy, using the last of pins in her mouth, stretches a hand towards Gerda and pulls a thin steel blade from Gerda’s hip. The force of the extraction is enough to spin Gerda, twist her. So now she’s facing me, looking up at me. Her eyes are blank.
That unlocks me. “Gerda!” I scream.
“Gerda,” Mercy says. “Gerda, eh?” And I know she’s smiling. I can feel it on my back. I’m on the floor, crawling, grabbing at Gerda, lifting her, pulling those pins out of her body. But I’m too angry and my fingers are all fumble. I start at her heart, trying to get five or six pins out at a time, but I’m jerking, shaking, and there’s still one there, and two at her throat. And I want to pull with both hands, but I also want to hold her, press her against my heart, because only then will I know. But it’s all taking so very long. “How could you!” I cry.
“Gosh,” says Cindy, taken aback. “I mean, I didn’t …” She looks helplessly up at Mercy.
“It’s only a doll,” says Mercy.
All the pins are out. But Gerda is still limp, lifeless. I clutch her at last to my breast. Nothing. Nothing at all. “Speak to me!” I yell.
“Dolls don’t speak,” says Mercy. “They’re inanimate objects. They have stuffing where you and I have brains. Well, where I have a brain, anyway.”
“I don’t understand,” says Cindy.
“No, you wouldn’t,” says Mercy. “You see it really doesn’t make much sense. But it’s probably to do with genes and madness.”
“You took her. You stole her!”
“Not exactly,” Mercy says. “You dropped her. Jan picked her up. Her! What’s with this ‘her’ stuff? You dropped IT. It! That thing. That creepy thing. Jan picked it up. I said I’d return it.” She pauses. “And now I have.”
“You stuck pins in her.”
“We needed a pincushion.”
“Pins in her stomach, pins in her throat!”
“Yes?”
“And in her heart!”
“OK.”
“You’ve killed her!”
“Ah right. Emergency. Call the Doll Police.”
Mrs Van Day comes in with a tea tray set with a silver teapot and four china cups. “Everything all right?” she says.
“It will be,” Mercy says, “if you’ve got the number of the funny farm.”
“I’m sorry?” says Mrs Van Day.
“Tilly’s of the opinion that I’ve murdered her doll. But I’m not sure it will stand up in court.”
Mrs Van Day looks at me. “Tilly,” she says, “Tilly, do you want me to phone your grandma?”
“No,” I cry. “No, no, no.”
And then I run, out of that room and out of that house and out along the street.
“Tilly …” Mrs Van Day calls after me.
But I don’t look back. Just run north, north towards the railway line, towards the place that Gerda first took me, our place. The place she wanted me to be when she whispered that first word, “Come.” If anywhere on earth can restore her it will be here, this wasteland, this bridge. There is something in the air there. You can breathe. Gerda will breathe again. So I run and I hold her close, as if my heart could start hers.
It’s getting dark. When I arrive at the bridge, I fling myself down by an elderflower bush. The ground is damp. From behind me I hear the noise of a train.
“Trust me, trust me, trust me.”
“Gerda.”
Nothing.
“Gerda!”
Still nothing.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Nothing.
So I inhale, I take a huge lungful of that high, wasteland air. Then I close my mouth over Gerda’s and breathe out, as if I could force breath into her, kiss her back to life.
Nothing.
Then I see it. In the side of her neck, a last pin. It’s buried deep, right up to the head, which is why I have missed it. And I get my nail under this one last cruelty and I pull. Pull. Pull. And it’s out.
Then I hold my own breath as I wait and wait (as I waited for my mother) for Gerda to breathe again.
But she does not.
9
Jan is up at the bridge. He’s come to fill his lungs with air and blow into the pipes. It’s dusk, and as he listens to the tune of the Antara and the sound of his own breath, a thought fidgets his mind: there is no new air on the planet, no virgin breath, only what’s been recycled, shared. As he inhales, he imagines atoms of oxygen flowing through his body, atoms which he blows out (through the pipes) as carbon dioxide and which the plants around him (the elderflower, the cow parsley, the dock leaves) accept in their turn, breathing in his carbon dioxide only to exhale it back into the world as oxygen. This means, he thinks, that the air he is breathing now will have pa
ssed through the lungs of the long-dead, and who knows whose lungs those might have been? Confucius’s, Mozart’s, Hitler’s? Or perhaps this breath once belonged to a lion, or a mouse or a wombat, and returned to him via a nettle or a giant redwood tree. He must be careful of this breath, he realises, for he also breathes it for the yet unborn.
And for his mother.
For this is where the thought is leading. To Violeta Veron. She lives close to the rainforests which breathe for the world, whose air the wind lifts across seas and continents. So perhaps this very inhalation has come round the world from her, and, even now, it is beginning its long return journey. And thus they are still bound to each other, just as they were when she held him in her arms at the moment of his birth.
He is so involved in this thought, and the tune which is coming from the pipe (which has a tenderness he has not previously achieved), that it is some while before he looks as well as listens. And when he looks this is what he sees: a girl kneeling on the wet ground, head bowed over a task. The task is drawing a thin, shiny object (a pin? A needle?) across the inside of her left wrist. The track of the pin is marked by a line of small, bright blobs of blood, strung together like a bead bracelet. There are two or three of these bracelets running parallel across her wrist. The girl is Tilly. She observes the red bracelets without emotion, and then she moves the pin, pushing it harder, jabbing it into a blood spot, pulling at the flesh, lifting it, making this one wound wider and deeper. The jabs are fierce, but she appears quite calm, maybe she even smiles, as though there is relief in this blood-letting.
Jan’s pipes hang about his neck. He has stopped playing, he has almost stopped breathing. Is he to stand by and watch Tilly injure herself? But she is not suffering, at least not suffering from the blood. So he does just stand there. After all, he’s interfered before and she has run away. And he does not want her to run again. He wants to talk with her. No, he wants to hold her. This is the feeling surging through him, he wants to take her in his arms, press her close and feel the bloodied beat of her heart against his own. But he makes no move at all.
Where the deeper cut is, the blood is forming into a fat drop, heavy enough to fall under its own weight. The slightest turn of her wrist, or dip of her arm, and gravity would have that drop, bring it to earth. But Tilly keeps her hand flat, poised, making the blood work at falling, watching its slow but inexorable gathering and pooling. And it’s while she waits that she must, at last, feel his eyes on her. Because she looks up suddenly, sees him and screams.
