Doll (5 page)

“Fine,” I say.

He nods, crushes.

“Who’s plating up?” yells Chef.

“Coming, Chef,” says Luigi.

And I’m coming too. Up the steps and into the different hubbub of the restaurant. I will not look at Table Seven.

“Did you bring me any chips?” asks Aaron.

“No.”

“I’m starving,” he says plaintively. “Starving.”

I busy myself stacking crockery.

“Do you know those people at Table Seven then?” Aaron asks.

“No.”

“Why are they looking at you then?”

“They aren’t.”

“They are. At least he is. The boy. Is he your boyfriend?”

“Shut up, Aaron.”

“You should have got me chips. I’d’ve got you chips.” He scrapes lettuce into the bin. “And she’s looking at you.”

“Who?”

“The woman. The one with the big hair and the red nails.”

Mrs Van Day looking at me and thinking what, saying what?
That poor creature, to think of that poor creature and her mother.

“The mother who loved you,” whispers Gerda.

But I hear something else, something very high and very clear, above all the noise of the restaurant. Something louder than the scrape of forks and knives, and the conversational din, something that cuts right through low music and the whisper of my beloved and it is one word.

“Darling.”

And I can’t really have heard her say it, because she is so far away. But I’m looking now and there she is, Mrs Van Day leaning across to her daughter, and her
body language says it too. “Darling. My darling.” And Mercy smiles, she opens, blossoms there in the gaze of her mother. Her mother who loves her right now. Her mother who is alive.

Ping! The dumbwaiter speaks. Food for Table Seven, it says. And I know what I will do.

“No,” says Gerda.

But I have my hand in my pocket and I’m scraping out those chilli bits and those hot, hot chilli seeds and that smear of Luca’s blood. Why else would I have brought them? And I’m lifting the white flesh of the fish.

“No,” says Gerda.

I know they are having fish, mother and daughter, because I saw the fish knives and forks when I went to the table. The beef must be for Jan and his mother. But the fish … Beneath the fillet is a soft run of juices and it’s there that I tuck the red choppings and the yellow seeds and those petals of Luca’s blood.

“What are you doing?” asks Aaron.

“Janey asked me to take this,” I say. And I push Gerda down, because she’s moving in my apron pocket.

I load the plates on to a tray and then I’m off, gliding, very calmly, across the chequered floor to Table Seven.

Jan is at home, upstairs in his room. It is cool here and quiet. He can breathe. Though he will not, he thinks, be alone long. The women are downstairs. His mother and Mrs Van Day, sitting in the drawing room, retelling the story of the restaurant. Getting the details right: the look on Tilly’s face, the choking, the fracas, the arrival of Tilly’s father (summoned from his office by the restaurant manager). The generous, extenuating pity.

“Of course it’s to do with the poor girl’s mother.”

Mercy is sitting downstairs too. Talking, joining in as required. But also waiting. She has, he thinks, something to say, something private. So she will follow him. Yes. He is expecting her. Her smell still in his nostrils. Sweet and bitter and sexy.

Meanwhile, there is a little time and he needs that time. The doll will rest no longer. Tilly’s doll. He has it in his pocket. While she was poised with the tray, he put his hand around that mass of black doll hair and pulled. There was no resistance at all. The doll just slid out of Tilly’s apron and into his trouser pocket. It was a silent thing, though his heart pounded.

He takes the doll out now and puts it in the palm of his hand. It lies there like a stiff star, its arms and legs pulled away from its trunk. Its blue sequin eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling. It is bland, inert. He fingers it gently, its various skins, the black leather and the white, the coloured velvets. Nothing.

What did he expect? That the doll would move, rear up? Speak to him? Yield its secrets just because he was looking?

He touches again. This time stroking the stitches, the ugly black slashes about the doll’s white throat. Stitches that, at a distance, made him feel that this doll was a wound. More than this, that the doll was evil. The incubus that drove the girl to take her life in her hands at the bridge, who willed her to push burning seeds into the mouths of the Van Days. At the doll’s ankles are similar stitches, large, misshapen, but not
hideous. No. Close to, the stitching seems merely desperate. Sad even. As though a child had made this doll, under duress, punching the needle in and out, not caring about the colour of the cotton or the size of the stitches, just wanting the job done, finished. But that’s not right either, because there is love in this doll too. The big, smiling (if lopsided) mouth, the soft and many coloured velvets, the red bracelet. The tiny glass beads painstakingly assembled, although the elastic is too tight. It bites into the white flesh of the doll’s wrist.

Jan does not understand. He concentrates, conjures again the girl’s face, reconstructs her fury. The way she looked at him up at the bridge, as though he was an intruder. And then again, at the restaurant table, the same look, an anger which made him feel … what? At fault. As though she both hated and required something of him. And so he’d acted. Pulled the doll from her pocket as he might have pulled the key from a maddened piece of clockwork. Thinking that he could make it stop. Make her stop. Unwind.

“What’s it to do with you!” she might have shouted again. But she didn’t. Just spun silently on her heels, untied her apron (so maddened she didn’t even
notice the absence of the doll?), and walked out the door of the restaurant and away down the street. He’d watched her go. She’s fleeing, he thought (though she wasn’t running), fleeing, just like she did at the bridge.

“
You
live too much in your imagination
,” his English mother says, though he is alone in the room. “
There
are things which are true – and then there are
stories
.”

Jan looks out of his bedroom window. In a few hours it will be dark. Stars will shine. And it will be impossible to know whether those stars are living or dead. Because dead stars still shine, the light they give out before they expire taking maybe a thousand years to reach the earth. Is that just a story? No. It is a truth. You have to understand with your heart as well as look with your eyes.

But he still should not have taken the doll. How would it be if she had leaned over and stolen Violeta? The idea alone quickens his breath, makes him reach out to the drawer and the tiny box, just to check that his stump-armed Violeta is safe. She is safe. He closes the box, slides the drawer shut.

There is a knock at the door.

He closes his hand over Tilly’s doll.

Mercy’s face appears. “Did I make you jump?”

He shakes his head.

“Do you mind me coming in?”

She comes in.

She is composed now. Her face, once more, flawless skin. In the restaurant he saw sinew, bone. As she bit into the chilli seeds her face contorted, her neck twisting with the effort of swallowing. Then her head began to shake. Her hair swinging in a frenzied staccato, cracking the tang of her about him like a whip. Then the spitting started. She grabbed for water, took huge gulps, crying out all the while so that the water spilled from her mouth. His mother thrust her a napkin and she fought to clean herself, to wipe away the shame. But the fire in her mouth was too violent, so she had to take more water, more and more until she vomited it on to her plate, her fish a lake of spat fluid. The mothers were shocked. His own mother offered napkins and consolation, but Mrs Van Day roared, all indignation until her own teeth closed on a seed and the burn began to burst on her lips too. She moaned, she cried, then she grabbed for her daughter and hurtled them both towards the ladies’ loo.

The commotion excited the other diners. All eyes
swivelled to the table where he and his mother sat, now silent and exposed. The mood was expectant, as though someone (himself, his mother?) was about to make an announcement, offer an explanation. But what explanation could there be? For an unbearable minute, they sat and sat and then the restaurant manager arrived, swiftly followed by Richard Weaver, the restaurant owner. A small sandy man with a soothing voice, Tilly’s father offered apologies and astonishment. He couldn’t imagine how it had happened, he was taken aback and sincere.

It took Mrs Van Day to mention Tilly. Mrs Van Day who returned at length from the ladies, all make-up wiped from her lips. “But think nothing of it,” she said to Mr Weaver’s further apologies (he had checked the facts with a bus boy). In the light of the tragic circumstances, Mrs Van Day said, she understood. She understood perfectly.

Mr Weaver ordered fresh linen and new main courses. But the Van Days and the Sparks could not be persuaded to stay for dessert, for coffee, for liqueurs (even though it was on the house). The Van Days and the Sparks were busy people. They needed to get away. They had things to do. Things to discuss. Like Tilly’s mother.

An hour or so later they were ensconced in his mother’s very English drawing room, the coffee freshly brewed.

“How many times is it now, Mercy?” asked Mrs Van Day.

“Three,” said Mercy.

“I thought twice?”

“Three times.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because every time her mother goes in the sin bin—”

“Detox clinic, darling.”

“Tilly’s gran brings her to school. But her gran doesn’t drive her to the gate. Too embarrassed apparendy. Drops her about three roads away. Makes her walk.”

“The poor girl,” said Susan Spark. “The poor, poor girl.”

“Still,” said Mrs Van Day. “No need to take it out on Mercy. What would be the justification for that?”

Was it then that Jan left the room, mumbling something that might have meant he needed to relieve some bodily function? But he came to his room, and now Mercy has come. As he knew she would. He looks at her beautiful mouth. The chilli seeds were like nettle stings on her lips, she said.

“What is it with these seeds?” Mercy says. “What part of them stays on your hands? I just rubbed my eye and hey presto – sting sting sting. So I’ve just had to wash again,” she adds, as if it’s an explanation for her being upstairs.

The skin of her eyelids is pale and transparent. He can see thin blue veins. How delicate she is, he thinks.

“I’m sorry,” she says then, “about – well, the restaurant.”

“Sorry?”

“You must have thought …”

He thought nothing, just watched the way her face dissolved to bone.

“You know, it can’t have been pleasant to watch.”

And this is it, of course, her fear, the thing she wants to say. She is afraid that she lost control. That she looked ugly. But, even contorted, Mercy’s face could not be ugly.

He shrugs. “Not your fault,” he says inadequately. But how can he talk about beauty and bone?

There’s a pause and then Mercy asks: “Do you know her, then? Tilly?”

What is he to say? He has seen the girl but not met her. Been addressed by her but made no reply. She walks in his dreams.

“Only the way she looked at you…”

“No,” he says, “I do not know her.” The words are true, but not true. They sound like a betrayal.

Something in Mercy’s body seems to relax. She smiles. “I’ve known her for ever. We used to be friends. Good friends, in fact. In the days when she was charmingly eccentric as opposed to seriously weird.”

He waits. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps this is what Mercedes Van Day has come to say.

“Not that it was ever an ‘equal’ friendship, even at the beginning,” Mercy continues. “She was always a little, well, secretive. Kept something back. And, of course, she never invited me to her place. Even though she came to my house quite often. I never knew why. Until I called on her unexpectedly one day.”

He says nothing, but his head is lifted.

“She tried to stop me coming in. Said her mum was asleep. ‘Don’t worry’ I said, ‘we can tiptoe.’ Well, we did tiptoe, right past her mum who was lying on the sofa in the drawing room. Then there was a moan, and a sort of choking noise and then her mother rolled off the sofa and landed on the floor. In a puddle of her own vomit.” Mercy pauses. “It was disgusting. And do you know the worst thing? Her mother never
even moved. Just lay there. Where she’d landed. Anyway, afterwards Tilly denied it happened. Said I’d made it up. Called me ‘a filthy liar’. Said that at school, in front of everyone.” She smiles again. “I’m afraid our friendship took a bit of a downhill turn after that.”

Mercy crosses the room to where Jan’s guitar is standing against the wall. She strums a finger across the strings.

“Are you going to play at the Celeb Night?” she asks.

Jan shrugs.

“You should. Your mum says you’re amazing.”

He winces.

Mercy laughs. “Go on. I’ll put money on you.”

“Mercy!” It’s Mrs Van Day calling. “We need to go. Cindy’s coming!”

Mercy looks at her watch. “Oh – the dressmaker.”

Jan gets up and as he does so, Mercy catches sight of something in his hand.

“What’s that?” she asks. “Oh God, it’s not the doll is it? Oh, it is, let’s see then.”

And she’s right beside him now, and when he doesn’t open his hand, she touches him. Or maybe
she touches the doll’s hair, and just glances her fingertip against his. He feels it in his spine, like electricity.

His hand opens.

“Oh,” she breathes. “Is that gross or what!” She pokes at the doll with fascinated disgust. “I’m beginning to think our friend might need some professional help. I mean that is revolting. I can’t believe her mother made it.”

“Her mother?” queries Jan.

“Yes, that’s what Tilly’s mother does, when she’s not drunk. Makes dolls and sells them at markets. But they’re normally big dolls, you know, rag ones. For kids. But this one – she must have been in the middle of some seriously random nightmare to have made this.” Her cat eyes shine. “How did you get it?”

“When she came to the table,” Jan falters. “She had it in her apron pocket. It … fell. I picked it up.”

“Tilly’ll be mad without it,” Mercy says. “She’s obsessional like that. Do you want me to take it? Give it back to her at school tomorrow?”

And he doesn’t. All of a sudden he doesn’t even want Mercy to touch the doll. The doll is something between him and the girl at the bridge. But Mercy is right. He shouldn’t have taken it. Tilly, mad with the doll, will be madder without it.

“Mercy!” shouts Mrs Van Day.

“Jan!” shouts Mrs Spark.

“OK,” Jan says. “OK.” And he gives Mercy the doll.

She pushes the doll so deep inside her skirt pocket it disappears. He cannot see the bulge of it against her svelte body.

She turns to leave.

I have done wrong, he thinks.