Doll (11 page)

“Why didn’t you come before?” she asks. “Why do you never come? Why do you leave me here?” Her voice sounds so like Gerda’s. “Have you any idea what they do to you in here? They withhold your medication. I’m supposed to have medication four times a day. But they’ve cut it down to three. Two. They say they have it controlled, under control. But they’re not the ones lying here, sweating. Do you know how much I sweat? Sometimes my back is drenched. Drenched. And my hairline, my forehead. They said it would go, stop after just a few days. A few days! And the shaking. And you can’t sleep. I haven’t slept a wink since I came here. Not an hour, not a minute. But I dream. Oh yes I dream, do you know what I dream, Tilly? I dream that the nurses are eating me up, that they eat me up, starting with my feet. Can you imagine what it’s like having those people who should be caring for you eating you up?”

“Yes,” I say, “I can imagine.”

Then I make myself remember. I walk myself around our house on the days that Grandma cleared away the vodka and my mother prowled for cough medicine, for aftershave, for things under the kitchen sink, anything anaesthetic to throw down her throat. I watch from the doorway again, recalling the days when she could barely stand, when she held on to a chair and practised in front of a mirror how to hand over cash before she took that trip to the off-licence. I hear her slurred voice: “A bottle of Shmirnoff, pleesh,” listen to the pathetic noise of her fingers scrabbling inside her purse for cash. I walk myself from the sitting room, smelling the vomit, to the bathroom, smelling the vomit, to her bedside, smelling the vomit.

“You’re not listening,” my mother says.

“I’m listening,” I say.

“You do love me don’t you, Tilly? Because I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

A silence.

“I love you Tilly, you do know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So you do love me?”

“Yes,” I say. “I love you, Mama.”

It is ten minutes since Jan arrived in the car park, maybe a quarter of an hour. He’s waiting in the grainy dark, a spit of rain in the air. He would wait all night, but this may be the wrong place, she might not be here at all.

He scans the lit windows of the Victorian building. Only one window is uncurtained, a bay on the upper storey. A man, sitting behind the glass, stares out. He hasn’t moved since Jan arrived. But then Jan hasn’t moved much either, just stood in his T-shirt, Mercy’s words ringing in his ears: “Did your Cinderella turn into a pumpkin?”

Perhaps it had been rude of him to descend upon Mercy (directly from the stage) and, quite forgetting
to mention her captivating outfit of blue gauze, say: “Where is she, where’s Tilly, where has she gone?” But then it was Mercy whom Tilly had been standing beside.

“How should I know?” Mercy had said, and then: “Didn’t she leave a glass slipper?”

The anger was quite unmistakable, quite unmasked and it would have been nothing for him to backtrack, observe the courtesies. For hadn’t he said: “This is for someone – she knows who she is”? And of course Mercy might reasonably have thought he meant her (and perhaps he did – even though the dark figure beside her was so very close and quite in view). But he wasn’t quick enough to say anything at all before Mercy spoke again: “What are those pipe things anyway?”

“Antara,” he’d said. “From Bolivia. In winter you have to put seeds in them. Pulses. Just a few. Or they play too low. Where is she?” he couldn’t help adding as he touched the pipes and heard the tiniest rattle of those seeds. “Where’s Tilly?”

It was Charlie who spoke up. She’d overheard some remark made by Audrey Phillips, who was (apparently) a friend of Tilly’s grandma’s.

“Well, if she’s gone to see her mother,” said Mercy, her smile as tight as a cat’s, “then she’ll have gone to the sin bin.”

And of course he’d had to ask for the address and of course Mercy had said she’d be delighted to supply it, after all there was only one state-funded place for pissheads in town, and, she intimated, Jan’s concern was touching.

So here he was in the car park of the hospital, trying once again to stop a dream spiralling away into just so much smoke.

His mother had offered to drive him, of course, but he’d refused. It was only a mile, he’d said, and he needed the walk. Actually he needed to be alone. To sort something out in his brain. Because once again Tilly had fled, hadn’t she? Hed played her the tune, the one he thought she’d understand above all others and she’d simply run away. He wanted to walk the mile to acknowledge the madness of coming after her yet again. Well, he’d acknowledged it and here he was. Waiting.

There was someone else waiting, he noticed. An old woman in a car. When he’d arrived she’d been crying, the sobs violent enough to rock the whole of
her slight body. Her head banging, at one point, against the glass of the driver’s window. But the crying had ceased. The old woman had blown her nose and was now sitting erect, waiting.

Waiting.

And now the door to the glass porch opens and he (and the old woman in the car) both turn expectantly. But it is not Tilly. Just a man in a light jacket with the collar turned up. And Jan is about to look away again, begin the wait again, when, from behind the man, a smaller figure emerges. It is her. He knows it from the tilt of her head and also from the tight feeling in his chest.

“Tilly!” he wants to call. But he does not. He merely remains standing where he’s been standing all this while. In the shadows. For somehow he hasn’t quite got imaginatively beyond this point, the point at which she emerges and he – does what? Says what? Says what, mainly. It’s while he’s standing there, all the words in his mouth swallowed down, that Tilly sees him.

“You,” she says. There is no surprise whatsoever in her voice.

He stands and stands.

“So now you know,” she says. “I lied. My mother isn’t dead at all. She’s in the sin bin. Just like Mercy always said.”

And now he does speak, grabs her by the wrists (in case she thinks to run again) and it all starts spilling out of him, and he doesn’t know if the words are in the right order, but maybe that doesn’t matter, because surely she can feel the heat in him as he speaks about perfect mothers who aren’t really perfect at all. “You see,” he tells her, “I have a mother who is dead and not dead. Perfect and not perfect. A Chilean princess, dressed in rags, who never grows old, never will grow old, who gave birth to me, held me, loved me, loved me so much she knew she must give me up, because she was dirt poor, starvation poor, and if I was to die, how could she bear that? How could any mother bear that, when there was another way, another mother standing by with open arms?”

Tilly looks quite bemused, shocked even, and it occurs to Jan that he’s going too fast and hasn’t even mentioned the word “adopted”, hasn’t actually said it, “I’m adopted”, but she isn’t pulling away, so Jan takes a chance and dips one hand in his pocket to bring out the Violeta doll. He opens his palm so she will see the
wired thing with the sand and tarmac hair and the skirt the colour of baked mud; pushes beneath her face the arm that’s only a rusted stump, the one that was never quite long enough to hold him.

“And of course that was love, she loved me,” he says, because he’s been saying it to himself for so many years (and so has his English mother). “To give away your own child, what greater love could there be?” And then he stops, because he knows what a dangerous brink he’s on.

So it’s Tilly who has to jump. “Or maybe the greater love,” Tilly says in a voice that sounds quite faraway, “would have been to keep you. Keep you close whatever, forever.”

And now he really can’t speak. His throat is closed up. Not least because the girl is crying, though her tears fall without any noise at all. He puts a hand up to touch one of those tears, tastes it, wet and salty. He has never been able to cry about this himself.

She puts a very soft finger on his lips then.

“Did you kiss me?” she asks. “Up at the bridge. Did you kiss me?”

He nods, feels the finger move on his mouth.

But still she waits, it’s almost as if she’s listening for
another voice, for someone to disagree, to say there was no such kiss. But there is only the night wind about them.

She leans upwards then, places her mouth against his and kisses him with an urgency which is almost famished. There is nothing in his life which has prepared him for this.

And who knows how long they might have held that kiss but for the sharp honk of a car horn?

Honk. Honk. Honk.

Tilly pulls away.

“Grandma,” she says and she touches her lips with her hand.

It’s the old lady in the car.

“She was crying,” Jan says.

“I know,” says Tilly. “Which is why I ought to go.”

And she walks away. But, for the first time, Jan knows she is not leaving. She turns, halfway towards the car, and she looks at him. But he knows anyway, this just confirms it. If he were a winged creature, he would fly around the world this night. He would take off and circle the planet. Twice. Three times. He’d flip round Orion, say “hi” to the grandfathers and return to earth barely out of breath. Tilly is not a dream, not
a puff of smoke, Tilly exists. Real as a mountain.

As Tilly’s car leaves the car park, a white Rover drives in. He recognises it at once. Susan Spark. She takes the space vacated by Tilly’s grandmother. She can see him of course, he’s standing in her headlights. She switches off the engine but she doesn’t get out. Waits for him to make the first move, afraid of course that she’s interfering, because she’s come when he said, quite categorically, “I want to walk.” Want to be alone. But suddenly he feels quite exhausted. There is no one he could be more grateful to see.

He walks to the car and gets into the passenger seat.

Her face is all concern, but she still waits for him to begin.

“Thank you,” he says.

And she smiles like he’s given her a gift.

“Do you want to go home?”

He nods.

She starts the engine again, slides them silently into the night. She asks him nothing else, just keeps her peace and his. Then his love for her, which has been so quiet and so constant down all the years, flows over him. He wants so much to say something to acknowledge her place in his life, to make her understand how much her soundless intimacy means to him. But perhaps she knows already.

And so they travel together, gently, until (maybe aware of his noiseless need) she finally relinquishes, and says: “Is everything all right?”

And he replies: “Yes.”

He remembers her face at the Oakwood Club, a bright face lit with tenderness but also with fear, how she said: “I never knew” and then used his name, spoke it to him the first ever time: “Jan Veron.” Said it as if it contained a loss, as if being Veron he could not be Spark. But watching her there beside him, he knows he is also Spark. He is also for her as she has been for him. Susan Spark with arms not of rusted wire but of flesh and blood. Arms which have ached from holding him.

“Yes,” he says, “everything is all right.” And then he adds, “Mum.”

The pyre is Jan’s idea. He says we should take the dolls and go to the bridge, so we do. Our mothers, he believes, are like a grief only there’s never been a funeral. He wants us to make a funeral, a celebration and a mourning.

He brings matches and a penknife, but everything else, he says, we will find. The last few days have been dry but I still think it will be damp up at the bridge.

“It will be all right,” says Jan.

It is strange and soothing to walk with him to the railway line. Previously we have both made our way here alone. Yet we walk in each other’s prints, as though my path was always his and his mine. I remember how he loped away like a wolf the time of that first kiss, and now that stride is beside me, velvety, powerful.

When we reach the brow of the railway hill, he pauses, scans the wild horizon.

“The elderflower,” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “Of course. You know, then.”

“Know what?” I have selected the elderflower only because of its position, because in an undergrowth which can be dense, this stunted tree has claimed some ground for itself, has a little space around it. And maybe – perhaps – because this is the place where I sank that day I tried to breathe life into Gerda.

“The Celts,” says Jan, “thought the elder could cure mankind’s ills. They used the wood for pyres, put elder twigs into coffins, planted pieces in the earth around a grave. They believed wherever the elder grew, that was a sacred place, one that could not be despoiled.”

“How do you know that?”

“You knew it,” he says, “before I said a thing. You chose that tree.”

And I’m about to protest when I see there are other spaces, other trees, amongst the undergrowth that I might have chosen, might have sunk against – but didn’t.

“You can understand with your heart,” says Jan, “as well as your eyes. Must understand. Else what’s the point?”

Beneath the tree is a low-lying carpet of green.
Moss and fern-like weeds, dock leaves and that loose, stringy, sticky plant that winds itself about your ankles, clings to your clothes. There are also nettles.

“Watch out!” I say to Jan as he begins to clear a space.

“They’re not stingers,” he says. “They’re White Dead Nettles. You can suck the flowers. They taste of honey.”

“How long since you’ve been coming here?”

“A few years. Forever.”

Beneath the green are thin white plant stems, dry as bones.

“Will they burn?” I ask.

“Not well enough.”

I go hunting for more substantial kindling. I find a fallen log, too big and too damp, but also a dead tree, with branches dry enough to snap. I take what twigs I can break easily and then, further on, beyond the broken concrete posts and the sheet of corrugated iron, I spot a packing case.

“Perfect,” Jan says when I return to him. He has cleared and levelled a small oval of earth. He gets out his knife and strips the thinner wood from the sides of the crate.

I make myself watch the flash of the blade, pay attention to how calm I am. Just a knife blade, just stripping an old fruit crate. Jan feels my eyes, stops what he’s doing.

“Did it hurt when you cut yourself?” he asks.

“No.”

“And when your mother cut herself?”

“Yes. Of course.”

He nods, puts away the knife and begins to build the fire. He interlocks an airy tower of black sticks and white pieces of packing crate.

“Do you want to cut a piece of the elder?” he asks.

“OK.”

“You have to ask permission.”

“What?”

“Ask permission. Of the tree.”

I look to see if he’s serious. He’s serious. I imagine how it would be if anyone but Jan asked me to talk to a tree. But then no one has been – or could be – Jan.

“The ancient foresters,” he says, “wouldn’t even touch an elder without asking, let alone cut it. They were afraid of the Elder Mother.”

I am afraid of the knife. But I ask for it.

“Can I borrow the knife?”

He hands it to me. I flip open the blade, hold it close to a branch that seems dead.

“No,” says Jan, “you must take a living piece.”

“It won’t burn,” I say.

“True.”

I move in a branch, take a small, flexible, sappy piece of wood between my finger and thumb. The penknife blade is bright.

“Elder Mother, I ask permission to take a piece of your living tree for the pyre of the mothers who were dead but who now live, who were perfect but who are now imperfect.”

There’s a pause.

“How do I know if she’s given permission?”

“You don’t. You have to take the risk.”

That’s when I know I’m going to giggle. It breaks over me, a great, waving, convulsing giggle. And I can’t stop it, but I can muffle it. I clap my hand over my mouth, for fear of offending the moment, offending Jan. But he’s smiling.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you laugh,” he says.

I stop laughing.

“Tilly …” he says. And I know he’s going to kiss me. But he pauses, of course, and the waiting is a hammering of sparks on my spine. In his own time, he puts his mouth on mine and his hand over my hand. We kiss and cut the branch together.

“You didn’t ask permission,” I say, pulling away.
Why do I always have to pull away?

“Of the elder?” he asks.

“No,” I say, suddenly reckless. “Of me. For the kiss.”

“You have to take the risk,” he says.

If I hadn’t loved him before I think I would do now.

“Or of the elder,” I say.

“You asked for both of us. Anyway, this is a funeral. Have some respect.”

And then we both laugh and I think I’ve never felt so comfortable with another human being as I do with him.

“Knife.”

And I haven’t even realised I still have the knife in my hand. The knife is a nothing. I give it to him. He cuts the elder into a piece about the size of his thumb and positions it on a strip of packing crate right in the middle of the pyre.

A train goes past then. I see it in his eyes before I hear it. We turn together, we both need to know which track it will be on, though we are both quite safe today. It’s making the whining noise, the moan of the circular saw, but also the plush sound. A twelve-coach passenger train. It speeds past us on the inside
track. A killer train. We watch in silence as its smoking tail disappears over the horizon.

“Why did you do it?” Jan asks then. “Why did you run that day?”

“Because …because nothing seemed that important any more, I suppose.” He looks at me, waits, so I add: “It was the day after …she did it. And I think I’d just stopped caring. And also, maybe, some part of me wanted to feel what she felt. Wanted to know what it would be like to put your life in the balance. Will I die, or won’t I?”

Again he nods.

“And because she asked me to come here. Gerda.” From beneath my jacket I take the pouch which contains the dismembered parts of my once beloved. I lay her out on the earth beside the pyre, reassemble her, fit her arms and legs back on to their wires, place her head so close to her trunk that she might be whole again. But she isn’t whole. She’s missing her eyes.

“My mother made dolls,” I tell Jan. “Did it for a living. But she never once made me a doll. Not even when I was a baby.”

“Until Gerda,” Jan says.

“No,” I say. “She didn’t make Gerda. I did that.”

He expels a short breath, which at first I think is surprise, but then I think, no, it’s realisation, as if this information suddenly makes plain something that’s been troubling him. But I don’t stop to enquire, because I want to say it now, want to tell him.

“The night my mother died …” I continue, then I pause, have to rephrase my mind, “… the night she made the suicide attempt, I went back to her room. Gran had left, gone to A&E. She’d asked me specifically not to return to the room, told me to go to bed. But how could I go to bed? I went back, took the knife, which was just lying on the floor, the Sabatier carving knife with my mother’s blood on it, and I slashed her clothes. Put the point of the knife through every single dress my mother owned. I ribboned them. I kept thinking how they’d write it in the papers, ‘It was a frenzied attack’. Pathetic. Laughable. Only I wasn’t laughing.

“Then I came to her leathers. At first I didn’t think I could cut those. They were like her second skin, the biking leathers. But the point of the knife was so sharp, and I put it through, I dragged it down the thigh of her trousers. It felt like killing and it made me
feel good, so I did it again and again and again. I don’t sweat a lot, but I was sweating. Not just angry any more but excited. It frightened me.

“And I knew I needed to calm down, needed something to focus on, something difficult to make me concentrate. It came to me like a vision. Make a doll, make the doll she never made you. And I’ve never been very good at sewing, but it became so obvious. I found the kid gloves in a drawer. They were the only things I took from the drawers. They had been my mother’s hands when she came to kiss me goodnight, in those long-ago days when she didn’t smell of alcohol. I made them Gerda’s hands, her arms, her legs, her face. Then I sewed the black leather on to the white with black thread. How would my mother have done it? Would she have used white thread? Black? The stitches were ugly, but I didn’t really care. I pretended that my mother was ill. That she’d died of an illness. So, of course her hands would have been feeble, the stitching poor.

“But the doll’s left wrist, where the wound was. I kept seeing it. On the white white kid, I kept seeing the blood, I couldn’t make it go away. That’s why I assembled the bracelet, to cover it up, so I couldn’t
see. But, of course, I could see. The beads were red. I chose them. Red. So I could always see. Sharp red blood pricks all round her wrist. But she was as ready as she would ever be. Gerda the talisman. Gerda the mother who loved me. Who couldn’t have tried to commit suicide, because you can’t love someone and think to die on them.”

“And the doll – Gerda – she spoke to you?”

“I spoke to me. I heard her voice. My mother’s voice. And she was good, to begin with she was good. She loved me, Gerda. I made her love me, care for me, be on my side. I made her the mother I wanted, needed. I want to say deserved. But I suppose I never deserved a good mother, does anyone deserve a good mother, Jan?”

“Yes,” says Jan. “Yes.”

“But she turned. Gerda turned. It was like I didn’t control her, even in my own mind. She started saying real things, the sort of blaming, difficult things my mother would have said … does say. Even my own doll stopped loving me.”

“Put her on the pyre,” says Jan.

“But the sticks are too far apart,” I cry, “she’ll fall through!”

“Put her on,” says Jan.

“You know,” I say, “the time I went to her, my mother, after Celeb Night, do you know what I was going to say? I was going to say ‘No! Stop! Be quiet!’ I’d torn Gerda limb from limb and I was going to do it to her. Make her understand. And do you know what I actually said? I said ‘I love you’.”

He looks at my face, shrugs. He knows.

He knows!

“Don’t you think we should light the pyre first,” I say after a pause, “before we put on … the bodies? I mean, it might not catch.”

“Yes,” he says. “OK.” From his pocket he produces two boxes, a matchbox and a tiny brightly painted box of woven wood.

“Can I see?”

He passes me the woven box. Inside is the doll he showed me briefly at the hospital. It’s tiny, only half a thumb high with a face of orange paper and a left arm that’s just a broken piece of wire.

“Did your mother give you this?”

“No,” he says. “Though I used to pretend that she did. Violeta Veron, my Chilean birth mother. I pretended that when she gave me away she packed
with me some things to protect me, some things for me to know her by. A cut coin, of which she kept one half, a blanket she’d stitched herself, a doll. But actually I came with an institutional nightie and a pair of bootees. I used to imagine Violeta knitting the bootees. They’re pale green, with a piece of blue wool around the ankle, to tie them with. But actually I think they came from the organisation that effected the adoption. Someone else’s cast-offs.”

“And the doll?”

“Mum gave me that. Part of a set of Worry Dolls. You can get them in any high-street ethnic store. I’m not saying I wasn’t grateful. I was. Mum respecting my past, my roots, even though the dolls actually come from Guatemala. When I looked at them, and there were seven of them, they were all brightly coloured except this one. All made of matchwood except Violeta. And all of them had perfectly normal arms, except her. Except the mother who gave up holding me.”

“She’s too small to burn,” I say.

He takes her from me. “I want to start again,” he says. “I want to accept that I may look but I will never find her.”

He lights a match, puts it to a wafer of packing case. The strip blackens and smokes. He lights another and another. One of the dead sticks catches, but there is still only smoulder. Jan bends down and blows softly. In his breath the first flame comes, intense and vivid orange. He sits back. The fire will burn.

He unknots and unwinds the paltry piece of yellow thread that does for Violeta’s breast covering.

“This,” he says, “is for the mother who gave me birth and whose blood runs in my veins.” He drops the thread into the fire. It catches immediately, a wisp of sudden soot.

I have not thought what to say, but the words come easily.

“This is for Big.” I drop Gerda’s trunk into the fire. “For the mother who was always larger than life, the woman who filled my universe.” The velvet bodice smokes and the plastic around the protruding wires melts and stinks.

Jan unwraps the tiny piece of dun-coloured cloth that is Violeta’s dress. “This is for the mother who thinks of me in the night or who never thinks of me at all.” The cloth, borne on the faintest gust of wind, falls through the lit arc of sticks to land beside the green piece of elder, where it rests and waits to burn.

I take Gerda’s arms. “This is for Small. For the mother I saw at Sanctuary. For whatever the empty space inside her is.” The arms fall and burn separately.