Authors: MT Dahl

Hollow Dolls, The (5 page)

Being at work was a chore for Mel now. Every day churned by like
anonymous Mickey D’s pink meat cocks coming out of a world grinder. Make any
shape, fry it up—always tastes like chicken. Water in the gas tank. Chug-chug-cough.
Maybe writing the book with Winnie would get their normal happening. Normal was
never on the map though. Mel knew that.

In Vancouver, up to grade six, it was a random blur of weird. She
and her mother moved so many times that the change of address slots on the back
of the report cards were always full. That was when Marlene was in sales. Girls
clung to Mel as soon as she’d arrive at their school. On separate occasions,
two girls she’d hung with committed suicide when Mel moved on again with
Marlene. Partially, it was about abandonment, Mel being their only friend for a
while. It was the bullying the girls got at school and on the internet. When
Mel was there, they’d have someone to prop them up, have their back even. Mel
could kick ass and if girls hung out with her, people left them alone. It just
happened that way.

Then Marlene met Peter and they stayed in one place for a while. For
grade eight and the first term at Killarney Secondary in Vancouver, there was
Luba and Lexa and Mel. They skated with boys, smoked weed and didn’t brag about
it. Mel danced street hip hop and made a few videos, with Lexa rapping. In
grade nine, Mel was a target for a few senior girls. She was in karate, they
wanted stripes. She put one girl in the hospital and that was the end of that.

Luba had dark brown hair she’d streaked red. Eventually it was a
drunken canvas of the two colors. She got hit by a truck one morning on the
way to school and still went to class—the truck got damaged. Mel watched Luba
blow an anonymous guy at a bus stop with his coat over her head. After, he got
on the bus and they went drinking at a house party where Luba stood on the
kitchen table and promised blow jobs to every guy there.

At some point, nobody knew the difference between gossip and
reality. It didn’t matter. Luba had home made prison tats, Goth dark eyes,
anaemic white-girl face and a dog collar. Biceps... Nobody went near Luba
except her boyfriend, who was working his way up in a gang. Mel didn’t remember
the name; there were so many gangs at the time, it was just a blur of badass.

Alexa played bass in an east-ender, dirty girl band. A tink with
short black hair and a rancid foul mouth. She was under Mel and Luba’s protection.
That kept her out of most shit. Occasionally girls tried to hang with them but
they were a trio. Besides, Mel knew she’d be dragged off eventually. So they
agreed to stay just three and that Luba would stick by Lexa no matter what. Mel
didn’t want any more suicide cases stacking up.

That was when Peter brought Mel and her mother to England, halfway
through grade nine. It was all of sudden like he’d been planning it without
saying a word.

Then came Winnie Hayes. Haverstock School was a few blocks from
Chalk Farm Tube Station. Day one: Winnie stole Mel, easy as a pack of Juicy
Fruit. Mel stole her back. Winnie’s freak quotient was seventy nature: thirty
nurture. She could draw mirror images in great detail, had a weird kind of dog hearing,
and an eidetic memory. Her mother Lauren had killed and
eaten
her father.
Lauren ended up in Broadmoor, a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.

Mel dropped out of Haverstock only a month later to start at
Club Lick
,
and she was gone, ‘Poof!’ but Winnie and her remained friends, sparring in
Feltham. Winnie didn't need to go to state school, there was plenty of money
from her book, but she preferred it. She’d grown up in Manchester, in dignified
industrial poverty, where her mom had done the deadly deed on her father.
Winnie wrote a book about her mother Lauren’s eating habits called,
Play
With Me
, then moved to London after the sales went ballistic. She was too
famous around Manchester. Anonymity; she liked it, Mel did too.

Winnie and her mother Lauren brought hate to a visceral level. It
was essentially inside the blood itself. Firstly, they had the same blood, and secondly,
they were both ‘into’ blood so to speak, so deep inside themselves, at a blood
cellular level; that was the location for the cage match. Two enter, one
leaves. The fight wasn’t over yet, though.

Lauren was a failed writer, so there was jealousy between them
over Winnie’s book and big financial success.
It brought a continual flow of
cash into Winnie’s account. She was terrible with money. It didn’t matter. She
couldn’t possibly lose or spend it all, the way she lived.

Mel knew Winnie was torturing her mother by visiting her out at
Broadmoor. Mel envied her and wished she could do the same to Marlene. Mel
would drive Winnie out, go for a pint, then drive her back. Afterward, Winnie
would have that look, and she would glow with a crisp darkness. All over
Winnie, she bristled with charred raven feathers, a coat that Mel couldn’t find
anywhere else. On those drives back from Broadmoor, often they had to pull off
somewhere on a country road, their desire was so intense. Mel was completely
taken by Winnie in her perfect form of feathered darkness.

Winnie graduated sixth form ahead of time in January, 2012. Mel
was proud of her like a little sister.

Mel’s freak was more internal. Georgy said her persona had been
erased by the psychological abuse she’d received at home and that she was
emotionally at the level of about a twelve-year-old girl. Mel figured most
people couldn’t see any of her freak flags. She never really had a personality.
During hypnotherapy regressions they discovered she’d started making herself up
around grade five or six. She’d watched what other girls were like and began
mimicking behaviours to construct herself. When she discovered what she’d done,
Mel felt it was actually quite brilliant of her, especially at such a young
age. The other important thing they’d discovered in therapy was that, Mel
couldn’t feel. In a word, she was a psychopath. The word was so often
associated with negative, violent stereotypes that Georgy cautioned her about
using it as a way to think about herself. Same with Aspie, short form for
Asperger’s Syndrome on the autism spectrum. Georgy said Aspie didn’t fit Mel’s
condition either.

According to Georgy, all her conditions qualified Mel for a whack
of personality disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM), which is the American Psychiatric Association’s freak bible. In the
beginning, when she’d seen Georgy’s list, she assumed they were just labels; a
necessary formality that Georgy used to get her away from the club and into his
office for therapy. She had to have
something
wrong with her. All the
girls went to see him, just to keep their heads on straight. In one session, Georgy
described how special Mel was. He said she was his comorbidity poster child.
That meant she had a various portions of different psychological diagnoses
simultaneously, which Mel took to mean none were serious enough for her to
actually have them.

In psychology there was a term for Mel’s particular combination of
comorbidities, not a formal diagnosis, but a theoretical one called schizotypy.
Georgy said it applied to Mel and read the textbook description, which could
have been in a different language for all the sense it made to her. “A
continuum of personality characteristics and experiences ranging from normal
dissociative, imaginative states to more extreme states related to psychosis
and in particular, schizophrenia. Schizotypy,” said Georgy, and he closed the
book. She never thought she was schizophrenic. They were like those old people
who wandered the streets yelling at ghosts. She certainly wasn’t like that. Even
Winnie’s doctor had put her on medication for schizophrenia. It was like the
going thing. Winnie wasn’t really schizophrenic either. Doctors were all just
pill-pushers. In the back of her mind, Mel assumed the other girls at the club
had some of the conditions she did. She could never know for sure, since being their
supervisor, none would confide in her about their sessions with Georgy. But
they were all seeing him too, so in terms of actual mental illness, Mel never
considered she was in any serious trouble.

Oh, and maybe a final thing on Mel’s freak scale was she could
kill a person a variety of different ways in a matter of seconds. That wasn’t a
disorder
per se
, yet her growing desire to kill would probably have to
be added to the list. She began making up disorders in her head like ‘taking
life’ disorder. It made her think of shoplifting. She’d stolen enough stuff to
have that one for sure, only that wasn’t a disorder. Shoplifting?

Beyond the psychological freak show Mel had been experiencing,
there was what actually happened—her real life physical phreak. That was where
things got metallic. Stone hardcore. The reason Mel couldn’t remember anything
from her childhood was the sexual abuse. Georgy said that Mel had post-traumatic
stress disorder. They had pieced some of her childhood together through
hypnosis sessions, although a lot of her history remained hidden. The men
before Peter were locked in the deep vault Melanie could never open. It was an
impasse, a place in her subconscious that Marlene stood by. So whenever Melanie
got near it in a state of hypnosis, the sight of Marlene would scare her off.

In her later teens, Mel realized that the men in her adult life
had their own freak. Gerald had his fantasies about Mel with a strap-on as his Dominatrix
bum-fuck girl. And Georgy Kovalev, her shrink? She knew in the back of her mind
that he was a sadistic sociopath. He looked at her sometimes and she felt like
he was undressing her—with a scalpel. She’d seen his photos of ‘Dead Ringers’
gynaecological tools. Georgy said he was making his own set. Mel just ignored
it at the time, thinking, “Doc fetish, whatever.”

After work that day, Mel and Hattie were at the tattoo shop in
Soho. Hattie was getting a touch up. Mel had had her rings installed at the
same place. She sat on the bench smoking, looking at magazines while Hattie had
her work done.

“Let’s go see Fi after,” said Mel, flipping the page.

“Elf girl Fiona? Sure. What’s up?” said Hattie. She was flat on
her tummy facing Mel, talking with a little more tension in her jaw than usual.
Needles and all...

“She’s doing a little thing. With me and my girl,” said Mel.

“At Fiona’s? It’s not a horse thing is it?” said Hattie, holding
her nose.

“No,” Mel smiled. “It’s a stable thing. Hay, hay, hay,” said Mel.

“Can I watch?” said Hattie.

“Mos def.”

Mel tried to smile like Cara, wishing she had her dark hair on
right then. Hattie knew all about Mel’s infatuation with Cara and her long dark
hair scenes with Winnie.

“We’ll have to go to the spa,” said Hattie. “Enemas too.”

“High, hot and a helluva lot,” said Melanie.

“You should get a tat,” said Hattie.

“I’ve got this.” Melanie turned and showed Hattie the small of her
back.

“Melanie
doll, I’ve seen that. Duh!” Hattie called her Melanie because she knew Mel had flipped.
“I mean a new one. Get a caduceus. Cara has one higher up on her back.”

“Does
she have rings?”

“We all have rings. You, Cara, her sister, Lilly even has them.”

“Her Sister?”

“Alejandra.”

Melanie’s head darted around like a lizard. Looking at Hattie, the
tattooist, pictures on the wall. The world glitched and Hattie’s face broke up
like taped frames on a video head.

Alej—streaks, Alej—streaks, Alej—streaks...

~*~

Melanie
tossed her white faux fur coat on the couch while Georgy sat in his oak swivel
armchair a few meters away. He talked and pretended to write in his notebook.
She’d seen his book, it was all scribbles. Stick men with penises, then vaginas.
Bums with things sticking out of them like a Bosch painting. Fish, egg-beaters.

“What
would you like to talk about?”

“I’ve
had another...experience.”

“Ok.
Before you begin—remember Mel, with these episodes, we’ve had better success
going straight to hypnotherapy.”

“No,
I want it here.”

“Continue
then.”

She
described her first trip to the island.

“A
Man-Rabbit? Have you been taking your medications?”

“Yes.”

“Your
water, how many per day?”

“I
don’t know, two or three, anyway. Georgy, I was
there
, on the island.”

“Mel,
you know that’s impossible, no matter how real these experiences seem.” Georgy
made some notes.

“You
always say it’s impossible.”