Doll (10 page)

“Then you can’t do it, won’t do it, ever again. Promise me?”

“I promise.”

Which is why, I suppose, I collected the cream candles and the incense, brought the red roses from the garden. I’m not saying I actually fetched these things, maybe I did and maybe I didn’t. I just knew I needed something to fill the space inside me and these seemed like good things. Things she might have chosen herself, if she’d been in any fit state to choose.

No. That’s a lie. And I do have to stop lying. I brought the candles and the roses and the cinnamon for myself, because I wanted there to be a different story, one that was beautiful and also one that I could finally bring to an end. So it was about control, I suppose, and the fact that I had none.

Grandma arrived then. I’m not at all sure what would have happened if she hadn’t come back early that day. Sometimes I think I would have taken that knife and plunged it in my mother’s breast myself. But maybe not. You have to have emotions for that sort of thing, and that afternoon, I was without emotion.

Grandma cleared up, of course. Drove my mother to the hospital. Spoke to whoever she spoke to, the Liaison Nurse probably, Alison, who works in A&E but is also a member of the Substance Misuse team. Alison, who knows my mother well. Anyway,
Grandma fixed it, sorted it as she always did, always has. And then she returned. Alone.

The tune is very high now, and far away. And of course I know Jan is not playing for me. I am foolish, but not that foolish. I look down at my hands. They feel tight and hot, as if they have been burned by a rope. Gerda is in pieces. Her head, her arms, her legs, pulled from her trunk. Her spine bent, her blue eyes ripped from her face.

It was me. There’s a broken piece of sequin under one of my nails. I’ve blinded her. I’ve torn her limb from limb.

But then Gerda is only a doll.

Jan has never seen a condor, at least not with his own eyes, but there is one in his music. It is flying over a mountain at daybreak, wheeling, gliding, magnificent. The sun is bright and the air clear. Jan can see for miles. And of course he knows it is not Violeta Veron. How could it be? It’s not even a woman and certainly not a middle-aged woman. It’s a young girl. (Although of course, in the Chilean dream his mother is young, unblemished, for in dreams you never grow old.) But this girl is just the one from the bridge, Tilly.

Did he deliberately mistake her? Was he afraid to see what he actually saw? A dark and agitated creature whom he might also love? Did he want it to be his mother because his mother would love him (must love him) whereas Tilly might not? Can he have been so afraid? For it is Tilly. The clench and tumult of her, her hands pulling at something, as though she was pulling pieces out of herself. And yet this is why the song soars, because he is not just playing for the loss of his Chilean mother, or his distant homeland, or even for the theft of his blood name, he’s playing for the girl and for her losses, for whatever it is that makes her claw so bitterly at her own flesh. And, whereas before, he wanted to bring this song (which he has dreamt so many times) to an end, now he would play forever, for the song is his kiss for her, one she may understand. But the song is no longer his own, it is spiralling upwards and he hears it reaching for an end. The song is going to end.

I put the dismembered pieces of Gerda into the pouch of the rag dress and pick up my coat from the floor. Around me people fidget. The novelty of the pipes is wearing off. They want more drinks, more and louder
music, they want to be able to talk, laugh, isn’t this what they’ve paid for? Jan is taking too long, his allotted time is over. He’s an embarrassment, isn’t he? And yet no one wants to be the first to move.

I move. I hug the walls, skirt the empty dance floor, I have to get to my grandmother. She is sitting with Audrey, her back to me. She gives a little shriek as I touch her on the shoulder.

“Tilly!” she exclaims, and then she sees my dress. “Oh – Tilly.”

On stage, I hear a sudden spiral of notes and then a spinning fall, as if a stone had been thrown into a ravine. It is over.

“Grandma,” I say, “I want to see my mother.”

Jan lets go of the pipes. They would fall to the floor, but for the plait of brightly coloured Bolivian wool which hold them about his neck. The light goes out on the stage. There is a silence and then a sudden burst of applause, a single person clapping ecstatically. Whether other people join in or not, Jan neither hears nor cares. He’s looking out to where he last saw Tilly. She has disappeared.

The stage lights come back on. They are waiting for a bow, perhaps. Jan turns for the steps. Where has she gone? His eyes are so focused on the faraway dark space which used to be her that he doesn’t notice the figure hurrying towards him. They collide. Jan begins a mumbled apology.

“No,” says the figure, and puts a finger to his lips.

It is his mother. Mrs Susan Spark.

“I never knew,” she says. “Why didn’t you say?” There are tears in her eyes. “Jan Veron.”

“Where’s Tilly?” he asks.

Sanctuary Ward is less than a mile from Oakwood.

“It’s ridiculous to go now,” whispers Grandma. She looks at her watch. “It’s seven-fifteen already. Visiting hours finish at eight.” As I don’t believe she has ever visited my mother in the hospital, I’m not sure how she knows this or if it’s true.

“Now,” I say doggedly. “I have to go now.”

“And you can’t go in that … dress,” Grandma hisses.

“Do you think anyone in that place is going to care about what I’m wearing? Anyhow, I’ve got my coat.” I pull it on.

Audrey Phillips, who is sitting with her back to us, apparently engrossed in conversation with someone else, turns around then. At once Grandma
rises, she nods towards her friend.

“Tilly’s not feeling too good,” she says in a normal voice. “We need to go home. I hope you’ll excuse me.”

“Oh – I’m so sorry,” says Audrey.

I look Audrey in the eye and smile robustly. Grandma hurries then. We exchange the white raffle ticket for her coat and make our way to the car.

“This really isn’t wise,” Grandma says.

I know exactly where the hospital is, although I’ve never been inside. I’ve stood in the car park though, looking up, wondering which window was hers. I’ve also watched people going in and out of the front door, tried to guess which are the staff and which the heroin addicts. It’s not as easy as you’d think.

“Just drive,” I say to Grandma.

“There’s no need to be rude,” she says.

But she does drive. The rest of the journey we spend in silence. She pulls up in Raglan Road, four streets away from the hospital.

“Take me to the car park,” I say. “The hospital’s got a car park.”

“You can walk, you’ve plenty of time,” Grandma says.

“No,” I say. “Take me to the car park. Drive in.”

“No,” she says.

“Why? Why not!”

“It’s not raining, is it?” she says.

“No, it’s not raining. But that’s not the point is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Grandma.

“The point is my mother – your daughter – is a drunk. An alcoholic.”

Grandma actually puts her hands over her ears, as if this information is a shock, as if this is the first time anyone has let her in on the secret.

“And you think,” I continue, “that if you don’t actually look, if you don’t actually drive to the hospital and park in the car park, that it isn’t really happening. That your daughter isn’t really in there with a bunch of other drunks and smackheads.” The anger is suddenly going up my throat like sick. “Just like you think if you don’t actually drive me right to the school gate, then no one will know my mother’s in the sin bin. Again. But they do know. They all know!”

“There’s no need to shout, Tilly.”

But I am shouting. “Drive me,” I shout.

She doesn’t respond.

“Do you think if Grandad was alive—”

“Don’t pull Gerry into this.”

But I pull him in: “Do you think Grandad Gerry
would have swept it all under the carpet all these years? Refused to talk about it. Refused to act? Just cleared up, cleaned up, shut up?”

“You know nothing about Gerry.”

“I know everything about Gerry. You’ve been telling me for fourteen years. Gerry was a good man. A caring man. A decent man. Gerry had morals.”

“Gerry loved me. Really loved me.”

“Course he did. Well, lucky you. Lucky, lucky you!”

“On the night he died—”

“Gran, I know. On the night he died, he had more Tupperware receipts in his pocket than all the other salesmen put together.”

“On the night he died—” says Grandma.

“Drive, Grandma.”

“On the night he died—”

“Yeah, yeah. He had so many receipts he still got Salesman of the Week, even though he died on a Thursday. Now drive. Do what a decent man would have done, what Grandad would have done, go to the hospital. Face up to it, Gran.”

Grandma puts the key in the ignition, starts the engine.

“That night—”

“I know!”

She slips the brake. “You don’t know.”

And there’s something in her tone of voice that finally shuts me up.

“The night he died he wasn’t alone.” Grandma pauses. “She was with him.”

“What?”

This is not the right story, the story is that Grandad Gerry wrapped his car round a tree on the long road home to Grandma, when he was driving—alone – the two hundred loyal miles back to his wife. The story is the steering column broke. And you can’t tell when a steering column is going to break. So whatever happened it wasn’t his fault, not his fault at all. Grandpa Gerry was blameless.

I look at Grandma, but she is staring straight ahead, watching the traffic through the car windscreen.

“Sylvia Burnley. I only found out her name at the inquest. She came of course, in person, in her high-heeled shoes. He was killed and she wasn’t even scratched. There’s consideration for you. Gerry all over. She cried in court. Cried and cried. Like she owned him. The affair had been going on for eighteen months. She was wearing an engagement ring.”

I am stupefied. I focus on a red car in front of us,
on its particularly shiny bumper. It takes me two roads to articulate this question: “Does Mum know?”

“Of course not.”

Grandma turns into the hospital car park. “And there weren’t any Tupperware receipts in his pockets that day. There was an empty bottle of whisky. He was drunk, Tilly. Blind drunk.”

She reverses into a parking space, brakes and then continues to stare straight ahead.

When do they hand out the books that tell you what emotion you’re supposed to be feeling at any given time? I don’t think I can have been in school that day. I’m sure I should feel sorry for my grandmother, extend some sort of hand to her. But my hands are folded in my lap, and I have only one thought in my head and it is this: that all those years my mother lived in the shadow of a perfect parent and a perfect marriage, which weren’t perfect at all.

I get out of the car. “Thanks,” I say. “Are you coming in?”

In response Grandma slumps over the steering wheel and begins to sob.

I stand there for maybe thirty seconds and then I shut the door and walk away.

The building is Victorian, two-storey, and has coloured tissue paper in the downstairs windows as though it were a slightly dilapidated nursery school. There is a glass entrance porch with a bell labelled “Please ring for attention”. If only it were so simple.

I ring anyway and am buzzed in as far as Reception. A woman asks my business.

“I’ve come to see Judith Weaver. On Sanctuary Ward.”

The woman observes my mac and my bare feet but says only: “And you are?”

“Tilly Weaver, her daughter.”

The woman nods. Maybe there is nothing they have not already seen in here. “Sanctuary’s upstairs.”

I thank her and ascend the cream painted stairway with the chocolate brown carpet. The stairs twist past a window which looks out over a garden where four institutionally beige bucket chairs sit joined together, small pools of rainwater in their seats. At the top of the stairway is a glass door with a coded keypad for entry. I stand and wait at the shut door. Surely the Reception woman will have buzzed ahead? Through the glass I can see, directly ahead of me, what looks like an office and, slightly to the right, an open door
labelled “Day Room”. I don’t like to knock, but I don’t like just standing here either. A woman comes out of the office with a busy look on her face, sees me, backtracks and opens the door.

“Yes?” she says. In her hand are pills.

“I’m Tilly Weaver, Judith Weaver’s daughter.”

“Oh,” says the woman, and she waves me in. She also looks at my feet but says nothing. She’s not wearing a uniform, in fact she’s dressed in a denim skirt and multicoloured cardigan, but her name label reads: “Marcia Wells, Staff Nurse”.

The corridor is dark, the feel of the place small and cramped, what space there is blocked by a stack of commercial-sized plastic tubs of water. They are called Nature Springs and are still in their Cellophane.

“Are you on the list?” asks Marcia.

“What list?”

“Patients have to nominate visitors. In advance. Five only.”

And would my mother have nominated me? I can’t answer that question.

“Wait here,” says Marcia. “I have to deal with something. I’ll be back in a minute.” She disappears down the dark corridor with the pills.

I edge towards the Day Room. Will my mother be there? The room is a cross between a doctor’s waiting room and student sitting room. The chairs are lined up against the walls, a TV blares. There’s an uneven stack of videos, a pile of magazines, a plate of biscuits. Screwed to the walls, slightly too low, are pictures, some yellow flowers, a foreign coastline.

Five people are in the room, none of them talk, or look at each other. One, a young man in his twenties, is sleeping, curled up on his own arm. He looks peaceful. An older man, immaculately dressed in black jeans and a well ironed shirt, sits astride his chair, back to the TV, looking out on to the road. Perhaps he’s watching Grandma sob. I wonder then who his Grandma is, who washes his clothes and keeps him clean? A bigger, more thickset man stares at the television. He’s smoking and the cigarette and his right leg wobble. He coughs and clears his throat. The other two patients are women. A young blonde, also smoking, and a woman in her thirties with black hair scraped into a neat ponytail, reading a book. There is nothing extraordinary about any of them, and that gives me a strange comfort. If this is a humdrum thing, if it could happen to anyone, then my mother is not a freak. I am not a freak.

I wait. The television makes a joke.

No one laughs.

A clock ticks.

Tick. Tick.

Where are you, Mama?

“Oh Matilda, it is Matilda Weaver, is it?”

“Yes.”

Marcia is back with a list. “Come with me.” She leads me to the office, the door is wedged permanently open with a bottle of Nature Springs. “You are on the list.”

This fact makes me feel suddenly tearful. Did my mother put me on the list before – those times I didn’t visit?

“But I’m afraid I’m going to have to search you,” Marcia says. “You do understand, don’t you?”

And I suppose I do.

“Lift your arms, please.” I lift them. What are friends and family for if not to bring you comfort, the smooth glass comfort of a miniature, a reeling little bottle of Vladivar?

“And turn out your pockets.”

In my mac pockets are a Tazo disc from a cereal packet, a bus ticket, a dirty tissue and a twenty pence piece.

Marcia smiles wanly, gestures at me to put them away. “Now just take off your coat, please.”

I take if off. Now even Marcia cannot keep the surprise from her face.

“Just been to a fancy dress party,” I inform her.

“Has it got pockets?” she asks.

“No. I mean yes.”

She nods.

I turn out the pouch. Show Marcia Gerda’s severed legs, her arms, her face with the gouged-out eyes.

“Was it a voodoo party?” asks Marcia.

“No,” I say, and then I make a speech. “And anyway people have the wrong idea about voodoo. The word ‘voodoo’ actually comes from ‘vo’ meaning ‘introspection’ and ‘du’ meaning ‘into the unknown’. And it’s not about dolls so much as about ‘loa’, the spirits, spirits of the ancestors mainly.”

“Right,” says Marcia. “Is that what they teach you in school these days?” She feels into the corners of the pouch, brings out a half-sequin. “OK,” she says. “Thank you for that. And I’m sorry, but it’s the rules.”

I put the pieces of Gerda away.

“Your mother’s in Room Five, second on the right.”

The door to Room Five turns out to be labelled DF16. It’s the sort of door you might find in a pretty jail. Blank, but with a window, the bars of which are in fact the crisscross grill of patterned safety glass. Behind the glass is a small, floaty, summer-flower curtain and above it is a slot for a name, only there is no name. What might she have put there? Judith, Mrs Weaver, Mother, Mama, Big? Perhaps there is no name because when you come in here you lose your right to a name, or maybe it’s just that by the time you get here you have no idea who you are any more.

I knock and enter without waiting for permission. The room is in fact only half a room, a chipboard wall dividing what must once have been an elegant first-floor bedroom. The effect is to make the half-room too thin and the wrong shape, the once graceful bay window cleaved in two and banged up against the chipboard wall. The furniture is cheerless: a rickety chair, a hospital bed, a wardrobe, a small set of – lockable – drawers. On the bed, staring at the ceiling, lies Mama, my mother. Big.

Only she doesn’t look big at all. In fact, in the moment before she rolls over and sees me, it occurs to me that she’s the smallest person I’ve ever seen in my
life. She’s lying very still and has her arms crossed over her breast, her hands on her shoulders, as if she is trying to hug herself. Her feet (like mine) are bare, tiny, of course, and, against the black of her trousers, seem an unearthly white. It’s not cold in the room but I know those feet will be cold. I have an instinctive desire to cover them up. Her wounded wrist is concealed, flush against her black T-shirt. And I can see nothing of her blue eyes, fixed as they are on the ceiling, but it’s still as much as I can do to stop myself launching my body at the bed, flinging my arms around her. She turns then.

“Matilda,” she says, “is that you Matilda?”

“Yes.”

She heaves her huge body to an upright. And yes, actually, it is a big body, massive and fleshy, but so hunched and curled over, there might be nothing inside at all.

“Really you? Let me touch you.” She stretches out an arm and then withdraws it quickly. “Because there have been ants. And earwigs. They came in my left ear and ate their way through my brain. Or least that’s what I dreamed. Come.” She stretches towards me again.

I move closer, I go into her touch.

She takes my hand in hers, squeezes it tighter than bearing. I see the cut. It’s healed into an ugly red welt, the lower edge weeping a little clear liquid. There are marks where stitches have been. And I know most hospitals use SteriStrips now, so I wonder if they have done this to punish her.