by Paul Finch
I made the dolls do that sex thing that adults are always thinking about. That's why it was easy to copy. When I stopped and put the dolls to one side, I listened. Suddenly I could hear shouting. It was Miss Werrell's voice and then three men. It sounded as if they were all arguing, so I listened with my mind more than my ears. My trick had worked. I had made Dr Stenners do things. Bad things. He'd left his car and gone to Miss Werrell's room.
I was a bit sorry for her because she was crying and very upset, but I thought she would think it was worth it when Dr Stenners got what he asked for. And he did. When he was told to go to the office of the main doctor, Dr Wolversley, I listened to their conversation.
Dr Stenners was very confused. He had tried to do dirty things to Miss Werrell and he couldn't get out of it. He'd ripped her clothes and put his hands on her body. Dr Wolversley asked Dr Stenners why he had tried to 'rape' Miss Werrell. Dr Stenners was crying and kept saying, "I don't know, I don't know." It was brilliant. In the end, Dr Wolversley said that he was going to 'suspend' Dr Stenners until he'd had an 'enquiry.'
It all went very quiet at Fairholme after that. I knew that both Dr Stenners and Miss Werrell had gone away. There were other doctors who saw me, but none of them suspected anything. They all thought that Dr Stenners had been an idiot and should have known better than to force himself on Miss Werrell. They thought Dr Stenners thought he could just make Miss Werrell do what he wanted. He was that sort of man, they all said it.
I was feeling quite smug. I was glad that Dr Stenners was disgraced. But I had a bit of a shock a while later when I found out that Dr Wolversley had a visitor. It was Mrs Alburton. And they had a conversation that made me feel very worried.
She told him about me and said things that she shouldn't have said. Like, Madeline is at that age in girls where her frustrations and anger give vent to outbursts that go beyond normal bounds. I know she said that because I wrote the words down. Mrs Alburton meant that I was a freak. That I could do things. She told Dr Wolversley about how I'd done all that damage in the dormitory, even though I'd been in my own room. They talked about 'telekinesis.' I'd read about it in some of the books I'd looked at. Dr Wolversley didn't say to Mrs Alburton that he thought all this was rubbish, but in his mind, he was thinking it was pretty weird and not very likely.
He did try to ask her if there could have been any other reason for what happened. Mrs Alburton said, to my horror, that she was sure it was me. I could do that sort of thing. And she said it was freakish. What was worse was, she never even mentioned Teddy. She never said what those vile girls had done to him. That wasn't fair. I realised that Mrs Alburton wasn't on my side at all. She was glad to get rid of me and now she was trying to turn Dr Wolversley against me.
He said that Dr Stenners had had problems with me because, no matter how hard he tried, Dr Stenners couldn't get through to me and I resented him. Mrs Alburton said that if I didn't like somebody, they were likely to get hurt. When they talked about Dr Stenners's behaviour with Miss Werrell, Dr Wolversley said that it had been 'unfortunate.' I read Mrs Alburton's thoughts and she knew that I had been involved somehow. She didn't say that, but she told Dr Wolversley to be very careful with me.
Things got worse after that. For a start, Dr Wolversley told all the staff that I was to be watched all the time. I was not to be left on my own, apart from night time. Even then, there would be a TV eye watching me in my room, so that the night nurse could see me in bed. I read the minds of all the staff. It was quite shocking to find out that most of them thought I was weird and possibly dangerous. The most terrible thing of all was, they took away all the dolls in my room.
That did it! How dare they! I was allowed to play with the dolls in the day time, with the other kids, but not to keep any with me. They were my only proper friends. I was very angry, angrier than I'd been since Teddy was murdered. Everyone was turning against me. It made me irritable and I broke a few things and spoiled some of the food in the staff canteen. It was where most of them had breakfast, lunch and tea.
It got so that whenever anything bad happened, even if it was nothing to do with me, like when someone lost some keys, I got the blame. They said things to each other like, it's our little witch girl, and sniggered. They were supposed to be adults, but they were like stupid kids. I just got angrier and angrier. I wasn't going to give them the chance to punish me, though. I shut myself inside my head and just listened. Maybe that would have been okay, but then they did something really cruel.
They decided that all the old dolls should be scrapped and replaced with new ones. All my friends, the ones I had dressed and re-painted, even though the staff didn't know that each doll represented one of them. They just thought the dolls were old and ugly-tatty. Fairholme had been given some money for things like books and toys, so the staff wanted to bring in brand new stuff. So they shoved all the old dolls into a couple of big cardboard boxes and put them in a store room, where they would have to wait until a man came with a truck to take away things that could go. They didn't say, to be burned, but they meant destroyed.
There was no one I could talk to, except my friend Julie Treadway. Like me, she was very upset when I told her what was going to happen. The dolls were her friends too.
"We have to rescue them," I told her, and she agreed. We knew neither of us could get near the storeroom, not directly. So in the middle of the night I made one of the night staff unlock the room and go back to the counter area where the night staff sat, reading and writing reports and stuff. The storeroom was along a corridor that wasn't used much, so there was no TV eye watching it. I was able to make the night nurse forget that she'd opened the door. She was so interested in the papers she was dealing with that it worked brilliantly.
Julie was able to go to the storeroom and open the boxes. She put all the dolls around the room in a nice, neat line, just as though they were all having a cosy chat. Julie shut the door and I got the night nurse to lock it again, but I made sure she put the key somewhere where it wouldn't be found quickly. Like before, I made her forget what she'd done. When she got back to the desk, I made her fall asleep.
I went to sleep, but I made sure that I woke up just before staff breakfast time at half past seven in the morning. I had to work quickly, but that was okay. The first thing I did was to check that all the staff who wanted breakfast were eating. All the ones I was angry with, or really didn't like, were in the canteen. Some staff weren't there, like the night staff, but they'd never bothered me much. Dr Wolversley wasn't there, but I knew he wouldn't be. He would be in his office. That was part of the plan.
The windows in the canteen, like all of Fairholme's windows, had special locks. I'd found out by experimenting that I could unlock or lock them-like I did when I was moving things. So I locked all the windows in the canteen and then I did the main doors and the side doors that they called the fire doors. So no one could get in or out.
I slipped out of my room and found the key to the storeroom that I'd made the night nurse put away. If anyone saw me leave my room on the TV eye, they probably thought I was just getting up and going to the toilet. I went to the storeroom, which was out of sight anyway. I locked myself in with the dolls.
I knew they were pleased to see me. Their funny little eyes were watching me. I explained to them what I was going to do, because it was only fair. They wouldn't have understood if I hadn't explained. And they might have been angry with me. They were okay, though. So I started work. As I got on with it, I heard sounds in my head-screaming. I pushed the horrible sounds to the dark part of my mind and pretended it was something like a TV in the background.
The screaming sounds got worse and worse as I worked, but I ignored them. They were to be expected. As I was finishing, I heard shouts and more screams somewhere near the storeroom corridor outside, like people were running about. I sat on an old packing crate, holding the last of the dolls. I waited while the din outside got worse.
When the knock came on the door, quite loud an
d a bit frantic, I let it unlock itself. It banged inward and Dr Wolversley was standing there. He was wearing a long, white doctor's coat and there was blood on it, quite a lot of blood. His hands were very bloody, too, right up to his sleeves, which were wet. It wasn't that that made me stare, it was his face. It was incredibly frightened, his eyes really wide, looking at me. His whole body was shaking. He looked like a monster. I could see people rushing about behind him down the corridor, shrieking instructions to one another, and in the distance, those screams.
Someone had managed to get the canteen door open. Dr Wolversley had been in there. Now he reached out a bloody hand and gripped the doorframe. I think he was about to faint, he was so terrified. Then he saw the dolls. I'd put them all back neatly in a ring, like Julie had done.
"These are my friends," I said. "I don't want anyone to throw them away."
He just gaped at them, his mouth wide open. Would he recognise them? I'd done my best to change them, so that he wouldn't. At first I'd thought about scrubbing off as much of their faces as I could and then drawing on new ones, but, as I said, I'm not a very good artist. So I left their faces. To be honest, they weren't very good likenesses of the staff they represented, so that was okay. That's why I left them and made the other changes.
Dr Wolversley made a funny sort of squawking sound in his throat. He may not have recognised who the dolls were, but he knew then that I'd changed them all. Swapped an arm here, or a leg there. They didn't all fit back together very well, because the dolls were slightly different sizes. Oh yes, and I swapped over two of the heads. They'd snapped into their neck sockets pretty well, so that was okay.
I didn't think the doctor was going to speak at all, but eventually he said, "What are you going to do?" His eyes, still wide, like an owl's, were looking at the doll I was holding. It was him. This time he knew that.
I held it up and cupped its head gently in my right hand. "That depends on what you're going to do to me."
THE LARDER
Nicholas Royle
Not long after we got together, she mentioned that when she was a child her older sister had taken her treasured copy of the Observer's Book of Birds and destroyed it. She could still picture the two thrushes on the cover. I tried some second-hand bookshops, but could only find a later edition, so, although I knew it would be easy to locate online, I decided to give her my own, featuring on the dust jacket what I knew, more precisely, to be a pair of fieldfares. I had bought it second-hand a year earlier, having decided to start collecting the Observer's Books, but only those of a particular vintage, reissues from the late 50s and early 60s.
A week after I had given it to her, I found myself briefly on my own in her kitchen and happened to spot the book lying on the worktop. I picked it up and noticed that the front jacket flap had been inserted between two pages-between the garden warbler and the Dartford warbler-like a bookmark.
I heard the creak of a loose floorboard on the landing outside the kitchen and immediately put the book down again and knelt to get the milk out of the fridge. As she entered the kitchen, I saw her eyes flick to the book momentarily.
"Cup of tea?" I offered.
"Thanks."
While the kettle was boiling, I visited the bathroom. I heard her leave the kitchen. When I came out, I saw that the book had gone from the worktop.
As I was pouring the tea, she re-entered the kitchen and stood behind me. I turned around.
She was standing very close. I handed her one of the mugs.
"Thank you," she said as she took a sip.
"You're welcome."
She didn't back away.
"I like your flat," I said.
"Good," she said. "I want you to feel at home."
She took another sip of her tea and I tried my own, but it was too hot.
"Where do those doors lead?" I asked, inclining my head towards two doors off a narrow vestibule leading to the bathroom.
"The green door leads outside," she said. "Back yard. There are steps down. It doesn't get much use over the winter."
"It's spring now," I pointed out.
"Shall we go and sit in the sitting room where we can be more comfortable? she said.
"Okay," I said and followed her, with a backwards glance at the other door, which had been stripped and coated in wood stain.
The walls of the sitting room were bare apart from a framed pastel of heathland dotted with clumps of gorse.
"I know I've asked you before," I said. "Is that of somewhere in particular?"
"The New Forest," she said.
"Ah yes, that's where you're from, somewhere down there."
Later, she was in the kitchen preparing a snack for us to have before we went out for a drink. She sang to herself as I listened from the bedroom. She had a lovely, rippling singing voice with just an occasional harsh, almost scolding, note to it. I saw the book by her side of the bed and picked it up. The jacket flap remained in the same place. 'This uncommon little warbler is the only resident bird of its family,' I read from the description of the Dartford warbler. 'It is found only in a few southern counties.' I scanned down the page. 'HAUNT. Gorse bushes and copses.' Then, hearing her approaching from the kitchen, I put the book back down, making sure the flap stayed in the same place.
****
We saw each other only once a week, as we lived in different cities. On a Monday or Tuesday, I would catch a train and we would spend the night together.
The following week, I arrived in the afternoon while she was still at work. I made a pot of tea and while it was brewing I looked idly around the kitchen, pretending to myself I wasn't looking for the Observer's Book of Birds. I looked at the door to the back yard; it was actually painted the greenish blue of a small number of British birds' eggs-heron, dunnock, redstart, whinchat. (I had recently acquired a fine copy of The Observer's Book of Birds' Eggs.) There was a key in the lock. I looked at the door next to it, which did not have a key in its lock, but then maybe it wasn't locked. I poured out the tea, then went over and grasped the handle of the wood stained door. I turned the handle. The door was locked. I moved to my right and unlocked the greenish blue door. Wooden steps led down to another door at the bottom. I went down, unlocked that door and found myself in a yard no more than six feet square. There was a little round table and two chairs. It was a fine day, warm enough to sit outside. I went back upstairs for my tea.
There wasn't much else in the yard. A washing line hung down from a hook. Its other end lay coiled on the concrete flags next to a hefty stone around which I noticed a number of smashed snails' shells. I sat and drank my tea until the sun disappeared behind a cloud and I went back inside.
When she came home we went out to the pub. I watched her as she walked to the bar for our second round. She was wearing a deceptively simple dress that flattered her. She had wide hips and narrow ankles; her bare arms tapered to slender wrists and long, elegant fingers that rested on the edge of the bar the way they might settle on a piano keyboard.
I smiled at her as she returned with our drinks.
Later, in the flat, I leaned back against the kitchen sink and she pressed into me. I threaded my arms around her waist and kissed her.
"I sat in the yard this afternoon," I said.
"Really?" she said, returning my kiss.
"Yeah. It's nice."
She laughed.
"What's that other door?" I asked, indicating with a nod the one I meant.
"That's the larder," she said, pulling away from me and taking both my hands in hers. "Shall we go to bed?"
"I can't think of a good reason not to," I said and let her lead me out of the kitchen. I had only a very limited view from behind, but her expression looked strangely fixed and almost alien as her sharp features cut through the still air. We both in turn stepped on the loose floorboard.
In the middle of the night I woke with a pounding head. She stirred as I got up, but her breathing remained slow and steady.
I found some parace
tamol in the bathroom and gulped two down with a glass of water. Sensing that I would struggle to get back to sleep, I went into the sitting room. On the coffee table was the Observer's Book of Birds. I picked it up. There was enough light from the streetlights, the blinds having not been lowered. The flap had been moved on by a single page to the thrushes-mistle thrush and song thrush. My eyes moved over the text until they snagged on a short paragraph towards the bottom of the page devoted to the song thrush: 'FOOD. Worms, slugs, snails, grubs and insects; also berries. The bird smashes the snail-shells on a stone known as an "anvil".'
****
The following week the papers were talking about a heat wave. She texted me, saying did I fancy meeting her by the canal and we could walk back up towards her neighbourhood, perhaps getting something to eat.
When I reached the canal she was already there, standing on the road bridge looking down into the water. Unaware of my approach, she appeared to be staring with almost murderous intensity at a moorhen and her chicks.
"What did they ever do to you?" I joked.
She snapped her head round and her smile of recognition took a moment to arrive. She pecked me on the lips and we headed in a northeasterly direction, ending up walking through the market. I had previously seen the lock-up shops down there only after the end of trading, all the units hidden away behind roller shutters covered in vivid graffiti. Every other business, it seemed, was an African butcher's, their trestle tables practically lowing under stacks of cows' hooves.
"Look at these," she said, pointing to yet more hooves hanging from lethal meat hooks just above eye-level. She took hold of my hand for the first time during the walk, intertwining her long fingers with mine. I looked down involuntarily and was aware of her turning to look at me, so I met her gaze. There was a strange half-smile on her lips that didn't quite meet her eyes. She looked back at the meat hooks. The butcher approached from the shadows, asking if he could help us, but she turned away without answering him and we walked on.
