Doll

by Nicky Singer

  It is not a scream of surprise or shock, a small thing quickly over. It’s a long, open-throated yell. The noise is huge. It fills the wasteland. A noise to tremble plants and deafen trains. Her mouth a giant screaming O. And he wants it, needs it, to stop. So he throws himself to the ground and grabs her by the wrists (does he also want to put his finger across that blood, stop that too?). She struggles, pulls against him, but he is strong, he can hold her, but he cannot hold the noise. It spirals, it goes up a pitch, two pitches, which makes him feel afraid. Her face is very close to his, her eyes dark and staring, her mouth howling wide. His heart crashes in his chest. And still the noise comes out of her, as though she doesn’t have to breathe, as though she can scream for ever. And he has to put an end to it.

  If he had another hand, he would put it across her mouth. But he only has two hands and they are around her wrists. So he leans forward and clamps his mouth over hers. Takes that scream in his own throat and swallows it.

  The noise stops. Her lips are wet, sweet, strange. The two of them hang together a moment there, and then she pulls away, panting. Immediately he releases her wrists.

  He thinks she might hit him, raise her fists and batter his head. That would be all right. What would it matter if she hurt him? He wouldn’t move. He would just kneel there and let her do it. But she sits back down on her heels, draws away from him, pulls down her shirt sleeve and buttons it at the cuff. So the wounds are gone, disappeared.

  Then she looks at him and says, as though nothing at all has happened: “You should tune those pipes.” If she sees his astonishment she does not pause. “In the winter, when they’re cold, they play too low. You have to put seeds in them. Pulses. Just a few, six maybe. Ten. That’s what Inti did. Makes the pipes play better.”

  This is not the conversation he expected, and certainly not the one he wants to have. Which is about the girl, her mother, the doll, the wounds buttoned up under the cuff. And also about the kiss. For he has kissed her, hasn’t he?

  “Why do you always come?” she asks then. “Wherever I am, you come.”

  But this is his place. He owes her no explanation for being up at his bridge.

  “Who are you?”

  Oh—to answer that. He is an English boy born in Chile. A boy with Chilean blood raised in cold rain. An orphan who yet has a mother, two mothers. A boy who lives too much in his heart, in his imagination, and whose words—like now—stick in his throat. A dreamer on the edge of love, for it is love (isn’t it?) that he feels for this girl?

  “And why did you take Gerda?” This is sudden and more aggressive. “Give her to Mercy? Why did you do that? Mercy stuck pins in her. Pins in her stomach, her head, her heart. So she can’t talk any more. Doesn’t talk to me.” She pulls the doll out of her pocket, thrusts it towards him. “See?”

  The doll lies limply on the palm of her hand. Tilly withdraws her then, strokes the side of the doll’s face. “She had my mother’s voice.”

  He leans a little towards her then. But she shakes him away, stands up, puts Gerda in her pocket.

  Still on his knees he looks at his hands. There is blood on them where he held her wrists. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” she says. “Sorry!” Then she makes a kind of song of it, a mantra. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. So very sorry.” At first her face looks soft, vacant as though she’s in a trance, then her body snaps to and her eyes flash. “Did Mercy tell you something? Did she? What did she say? Mercy lies, you know. Was it about my mother? Did she speak about my mother?”

  Jan hesitates.

  “Do you have a problem with talking?” she shouts then. “Think it’s OK just to sit and stare at people?”

  He stands. “Mercy said – only that your mother was ill.”

  “Ill,” Tilly laughs. “She never said ill. Mercy said ‘sin bin’, didn’t she? ‘Tilly’s mother’s in the sin bin.’ That’s what she said, didn’t she?”

  He wants to deny it, but it is the truth, so he can’t.

  “Well, my mother isn’t in the sin bin,” Tilly continues. “She’s not even in detox.” Her voice is rising, wobbling. “My mother’s dead. She died. She’s dead.”

  When he doesn’t respond immediately (and what is he to say?), she thrusts her chin forward and adds: “You don’t believe me, do you? No one believes me.”

  He feels his heart tick.

  “I believe you,” he says.

  10

  I watch him go down the slope, a shadow moving against the dark sky. He has a slightly loping walk, a walk bigger than he is, the walk of a man, or a wolf. I track him all the way across the field to the barred, metal gate. I watch him climb into the town, disappear.

  When he leaves my horizon, it’s as if he was never there. The landscape lies still and undisturbed. Did I make him up? Did I walk him up to the bridge and away again? It seems so, as I stand here alone in the semi-dark, the hairs on my arms lifting beneath my sleeves. But something remains. It’s the tune. Some part of it is still in my head. I couldn’t have imagined that. I didn’t even know I was listening, but I must have been, even when I was cutting. A sweet, melancholy tune, but too low, as if a colour was missing. That’s what I heard. Jan playing the Antara. Not as Inti would have played, swelling with carnival, with exuberant love, but as if the very next breath he took might crush his heart in his chest.

  And then he kissed me. Or at least I think he kissed me. I put my hand up to my lips, touch where he touched. My lips feel full, fat, as though he sucked on them. But he did not. Just closed his mouth over mine and then – walked away. He walked away. Can you kiss someone and then walk away?

  I can hear the sound of a train coming, that loud, low, rumbling. And I find myself on tiptoe, as if I’m going to run again. I’m poised and the train’s coming, I can feel the wind of it, a thousand kisses against my cheek. How long is it since anyone kissed me, anyone at all? I speed to the edge of the bridge, where the brick wall begins. I must go now, if I’m going, because the train is almost upon me, bellowing at my back. But I hesitate. What if I didn’t make it up? What if he did kiss me, what then? The train screams and whooshes and I flatten myself against the wall, which is lucky because the train is on the inside track. Sixteen carriages of certain death, missing me. And then it’s gone and I’m still there. Alive. Kissed.

  In my pocket something stirs, moves. It’s Gerda.

  I pull her out. She’s upside down. I right her.

  “Gerda!”

  Her eyes look at me. She can see! I could burst for joy. But can she speak? Can she?

  “The kiss,” says Gerda and she pauses. I wait with trembling delight, trembling anticipation, feel again the boy’s lips on mine. “The kiss,” repeats Gerda, “it never happened. You made it up.”

  When I get home they all talk at once. Their voices tumble on top of each other. Grandma’s is the loudest, or maybe just the one I’m listening to, because I don’t want to hear what Gerda’s saying.

  “Where have you been?” Grandma says. “I’ve been so worried about you. Mrs Van Day called. Why did you run out of her house like that? You’ve been hours. I’ve been going demented. I’ve had to tell your father. I nearly rang the police. One more hour and I would have rung the police. Have you had anything to eat? You look half-famished. Did you have any lunch? I bet you didn’t have any lunch, did you? Shall I make you hot milk? Why did you do it, Tilly, put that stuff in the Van Days’ food? I thought Mercy was a friend of yours? She did stand by you, you know, when … I’ve got everything ready for you for tomorrow. All your clothes washed and ironed. Folded. On your bed. I’ve done everything. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? I’d like to help, Tilly. You know I would. Why do you think I came to live here in the first place? Only because of you. You know that don’t you? I’d rather have stayed in my own home, the one I shared with Gerry. So many memories in that house. If only your parents hadn’t divorced. History repeating itself. But at least Gerry died. Didn’t walk out on me.
Walk out on Judith. She was only fourteen, you know, when Gerry died. Same age as you are now. He had so much to give her and he died. Can’t blame Gerry though. Can’t really blame Richard. Takes two, and even though she is my daughter, Judith. Well, what can I say? And …oh what are we going to do, Tilly? If only Gerry were still here, he’d know what to do. Gerry always knew what to do. Gerry loved me. Really loved me. What about toast? Hot buttered toast, you must be able to put away some toast?”

  My father screams: “And don’t bother to come to the restaurant next week.” Of course he doesn’t really scream, because he’s not even in the house. Not in person anyway. He’s on the notepad by the phone, shrieking in Grandma’s spidery handwriting. Richard. Tilly. Don’t come. Sunday. Got cover. Tell her she’s not needed. I’ve got Aaron and Billy. Responsible people. Tilly’s too like Judith. Not to be trusted. It runs in the genes.

  Of course the note only really says the bit about the restaurant, but I know what he means. I know what business means to him. Business split up my parents’ marriage. Him being in the restaurant twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And her not. She helped out in the beginning, of course she did, was brilliant with the customers. And then there was that other Sunday – how many years ago now? Seven, eight? And he banned her. Just like that. No second chance. Couldn’t risk it again, he said, couldn’t trust her. He had a business to run, didn’t she understand? Of course she understood, that’s why she did the market, made a life for herself where she wasn’t judged.

  “He never kissed you,” says Gerda. “What makes you think a boy like Jan would want to kiss you?”

  “Not to be trusted,” says my father.

  “Toast,” says Grandma, “did you say yes to toast?”

  “Tilly,” says my mother. “Beloved.”

  Or I think she says “beloved” but her voice is very tiny and, beneath the babble, I can’t quite hear.

  “Look at the holes in me,” says Gerda. “Have you seen where the pins were? Huge holes. You should never have left me there. Abandoned me. Why did you do that, leave me in the restaurant? Me. You should have taken care of me. Then it would never have happened. It’s all your fault.”

  “It’s all your fault,” says my father. “You should exercise greater self-control. You’ll go the way your mother went.”

  “Your clothes are all washed and ironed. You only have to put them in your drawers. It’s not much to ask. I look after everything else. I’m making the toast anyway. But what you really need is a stew. I’ll make a stew tomorrow. Put herb dumplings in it. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Do you think,” says Gerda, “just because I have stuffing inside, I don’t feel pain?”

  I go up to my mother’s sewing room to get away from the noise, but the noise follows me. It shouts in my ear, they shout in my ear. My mother’s treadle is silent. I sit down and paddle my feet furiously but there is no clunking, no childhood comfort, only the talking, the shouting which drums and hammers in my brain.

  “It’s all your fault. Fault. Fault. Fault.”

  I go to the Fairy Tale box then, reach for Red Riding Hood and put my hand beneath her skirts. I hit the hard, cool glass, pull out the bottle, unscrew the cap and inhale the foul, sweet stench. Then I drink. I tip back the bottle and pour the colourless liquid down my throat. It makes me want to retch. But I keep pouring. I barely give myself time to swallow. Something hard and high hits my brain. There’s a spasm of nausea and then the floor comes to greet me. I’m all gratitude. Because I know, for a while, I will forget everything.

  11

  The fire doors can’t be alarmed. There is a crack of dark between them already; one small push and they will swing open on the night. Jan gives that push, and then lets the doors sshh heavily closed behind him. He should not have come, though there were reasons, he had his reasons. He looks up at the sky: stars, of course, but pale and polluted by the light spilling from two floors of Oakwood Club activity. He moves across a manicured lawn, past a lit pond (with decorative stone cherub) and on towards the beckoning shadows of the copse which is all, Jan thinks, that remains of the original oak wood from which this club has cut its land and its name.

  He turns a deliberate back on the club and its owner (Mr Merrison, who is being especially cooperative in view of the new refurbishment and the long-term need to drum up more – and richer – business), and walks away from his mother, from Mrs Van Day, from Mercy and from the final Celeb Night discussions on acoustics and crudités and mirror balls.

  The first trees Jan reaches are beech, tall and graceful. But they do not detain him, he is tracking inwards to where he can see the spreading shape of an ancient oak. Royal tree of England. It draws him. If he were a real Chilean boy, what would his tree be then? What bark would he press his back to in the mountains of his unknown homeland? What stars would shine for him? For the stars of the cold north are not those – or not only those – visible to southern eyes, the eyes of his mother. How can he imagine his mother if he cannot imagine her sky? Besides, it’s important, because of the grandfathers. All of them, the Chileans (his grandfather, his great-grandfather, his great-great-grandfather), they are all in the heavens, looking down upon him from their starry heights. They speak to him, whisper ancestor words, know things, these grandfathers. Grandfather Haldane Lock, he is also up there, staring, starring down.

  Jan arrives at the oak and stands beneath its age. Through its branches the stars come to him. Grandfather Lock, his English mother’s father, was the first person Jan ever saw in a coffin.

  “Haldane, do you know what it means, lad?”

  “No.”

  “Half-Dane. Half-Dane, half-Yorkshireman. Neither fish nor fowl, that’s me lad.”

  And Jan had known what Grandfather Lock was talking about, and why Grandfather Lock had squeezed his eight-year-old hand. Haldane Lock never said “thee and me, both”, but that’s what he meant, the half-Chilean boy and the half-Danish grandfather. And then he died. There wasn’t much said. A disease perhaps. Old age. Though he never seemed that old, with his undimmed blue Danish eyes. But then he was in a box, and Jan’s mother wept. Jan did not weep, just went into the night and located Rigel, the star at Orion’s heel (the place where the Chilean grandfathers shone) and looked. And there he was, just to the south, a bright, intermittent and previously unnoticed star. Grandfather Lock. An Englishman could not be among the stars. But a half-Dane. Yes.

  His mother had caught Jan once, leaning out of a window, speaking to stars.

  “What are you doing?” she’d asked.

  But of course he hadn’t said. It would worry her if she thought he heard them talking, and they did talk, sometimes seriously, sometimes just mumbo jumbo. But even the mumbo jumbo was good. He liked the sound of their voices, the comforting murmur of them. Occasionally the grandfathers bickered. Grandfather Lock liked a joke. He amused the Chilean grandfathers, and also irritated them. Sometimes they stayed silent for weeks in a kind of protest. But Jan didn’t even mind the silence; it was not against him, for they never judged him, the grandfathers. He could say or be whoever he liked and they loved him. “You’re one of us,” they said. “Blood and bone.”

  And Violeta Veron would know this. That’s why the grandfathers had chosen the constellation of Orion, clumped their souls with the gas and dust of the hunter who pursued his quarry in the northern hemisphere in the winter and spring and in the southern hemisphere in the autumn. No one would have to tell Violeta Veron this, she would know where to look in the heavens and also how to listen. For his grandfather was her father and his great-grandfather her grandfather, and so on down the spiral of time. Mother and son chained together by blood and stars, though so many thousand miles apart. But what were miles to the stars? What were days and nights?

  That was another thing. Because of the turning world, his day might be Violeta’s night. It pleased Jan to be awake thinking of his Chilean mother asleep and, more than this, to be asleep when she perhaps wa
s awake, thinking of him. Because she would think of him, wouldn’t she? She must think of him. Where he was, what he was doing, if he was happy.

  “Boo!” Mercedes Van Day has caught him, with his back against a tree, staring at stars.

  “I wondered where you’d bunked off to.” She smiles that radiant smile.

  Has he absented himself again, so she should follow him again? Perhaps. She is the reason he has come tonight, after all.

  “Mrs Van Day wants to go to the Club, check some last-minute details,” his mother had said. “Acoustics, that sort of thing. You’d be a great help at that. Test the sound system. Would you, Jan?”

  And he’d said yes, because he knew Mercy would say yes, that she’d come in case he came. And there is something Jan needs to know. It is about kissing. Because Mercy does want to kiss him, he is sure of that. And he wants to kiss her, oh yes. How could he not? His whole body jangles when she is near. This is what he wants to know: can a kiss be claimed? Would you know youd kissed Mercy in a way it is impossible to tell with Tilly? Because Tilly refuses you, won’t let you in. Makes a kiss a nothing thing, something to be forgotten, something that might never have happened. And also, put more bluntly, when Mercy looks at him, Jan feels he might explode inside.

  But, before he can begin, there is one thing itching his mind. “The doll,” Jan says, “Tilly’s doll, why did you stick pins in it?”

  “What?” Mercy says and then: “Oh that. I didn’t stick pins in it. Cindy did. The dressmaker.” She pauses, checks his eyes. “I just had the doll on a table in the drawing room and Cindy … why … did you see Tilly, then? Did she mind?”