Ramsey Campbell - 1976 - The Doll Who Ate His Mother

Ramsey Campbell
 

The Doll Who Ate
His Mother ~ Ramsey Campbell
 

 
          
for
Kirby, a good agent; an even better friend

 
          
Thursday, July 24

 
          
There
were no taxis.

 
          
Clare
Frayn
stumped back and forth on Catharine Street,
shivering. The July night was mild, the entire street was orange as embers
beneath the sodium streetlamps, yet she was shivering. She glanced at her
watch. Four o’clock, good God. No wonder she was cold; her body was at its
lowest ebb. Even Rob had never kept her up so late before. In a minute she’d
chance the brakes in Ringo the Reliant and drive him home.

 
          
He
was standing at the corner of Catharine Street and Canning Street, a block
away, leaning his long body into the road whenever a distant motor whirred.
Beside him traffic lights blinked emptily; beyond him
glowed
the will-o’-the-wisp of a disordered telephone box. Around them both, in the
Georgian terraces of Liverpool 8, poets and artists slept—half of them drunk
and snoring, no doubt, Clare thought. Rob looked back at her over his shoulder
and smiled, encouraging, embarrassed. Then he leaned out again.

 
          
Who
else would have such a fool for a brother, Clare thought with a kind of
irritable resigned affection. Stop leaning out, for God’s sake. There are no
taxis. No sound at all, except for a ship’s low tone drifting sleepily up the
Mersey from the sea. But there was: the sound of an engine; the unmistakable
sound of a taxi
labouring
up Myrtle Street beyond the
curve, beyond the Children’s Hospital. She began to run, cursing her short
legs, slapping basement railings furiously with her hand, for speed. She
reached the curve as the vehicle did, driving down the side street opposite,
not up the hill at all. It was a lorry carrying its baby on its back.

 
          
When
she plodded back as far as the traffic lights, Rob said, “I’m sorry I’ve kept
you up so late.”

 
          
“You
mean you’ve just noticed? God, Rob, you’re worse—”

 
          
“Than
all the kids in your class put together. I know. But I really did need to talk,
and there’s nobody else I can talk to.”

 
          
Except
your wife, she thought. But of course it had been Dorothy he had wanted to talk
about, as usual. “It’s all right,” Clare said. “You know I don’t mind really.”
She was shivering again; her eyes felt as if they’d been fitted with thick
lenses a couple of sizes too large. “There’s nothing I have to get up for
later, anyway,” she said.

 
          
He
saw her shivering. He stooped and put his arm about her shoulders, rubbing
them. From nowhere a car came roaring up Canning Street, hooting at Rob as its
occupants did, at his pigtail and leather waistcoat and checked trousers and
high gold-painted boots. “I’d walk if I could,” he told her.

 
          
“I
know that. Don’t worry.” He hadn’t been dressed half so bizarrely the night
he’d walked home along Princes Avenue, when the youths had beaten him up and
left him on the central reservation of the dual carriageway, among the trees.
“But I don’t think we’re going to find a taxi,” Clare said.

 
          
“If
I could phone Dorothy I’d stay. But she might be worrying.”

 
          
“She’s
probably fast asleep in bed.”
Unless she’s a fool.

 
          
“She
wasn’t last time. That was when we had the row about having children, remember,
I told you. She wouldn’t go to bed until I said we’d try next year. I’m sure
she’ll still be up.”

 
          
No
man would keep me up like that, Clare vowed. “I don’t see what I can do,” she
said.

 
          
“Couldn’t
you drive me home? There won’t be any traffic.”

 
          
“I
don’t want to drive until the garage has looked at the brakes.”

 
          
They
both heard the taxi. It was whirring purposefully toward them, so loudly that
they strained their eyes at the empty street. Its sound had filled the street
before it turned, tantalizingly, somewhere out of sight. “Oh Christ,” Rob said,
swaying rapidly and unhappily from one foot to the other, tick tock.

 
          
Clare
gazed at him. He looked exactly like a child who was frantic to pee. All at
once she realized that he wasn’t anxious to get back to win the argument with
Dorothy, which he’d abandoned along with his dinner. He wanted to go home
because he was worried about Dorothy, because he loved her. She shook her head,
sighing. Some things about him she would never understand.

 
          
“Come
on,” she said suddenly. “I suppose if I drive slowly we’ll be all right.”

 
          
They
made for
Blackburne
Terrace and Clare’s car. Several
babies were walking across the roofs of the garages opposite, crying. When
Clare looked again they were cats. Rob said, “I still don’t understand how
Dorothy can stand those people.”

 
          
Don’t
go through that again, Clare thought, for God’s sake! She’d already heard once
how Dorothy felt he was losing her all her friends. He’d arrived at midnight
but had waited until one o’clock to tell her he was famished, to say nothing of
his doubts about his marriage, whether he’d married Dorothy just for sex, how
they’d run out of things to talk about, how working for the same people as your
wife meant you were together too much of the time. To Clare, all this had
sounded like one of his Radio Merseyside record shows without the records,
hours of sheer nervous energy, uncontrollable words. When he’d begun to mention
taxis, she’d thought he had run down at last, but here were Dorothy’s friends
again. “Perhaps you should ask her why she likes them,” Clare said, hurrying
toward Ringo the three-wheeler.

 
          
“Oh,
she went through all that. They aren’t reasons that make any sense to me. I
can’t understand how she could have friends like that. I’ve told her before I
don’t like them. They’re just a load of boring middle-class shit.”

 
          
“Keep
that for your record shows. You’re never going to convince me you’re
working-class.” In the grainy light beyond the streetlamps she squinted at the
car door, fumbling with the key; her eyes prickled. “Not with parents who’ve
retired to a spa town,” she said.

 
          
“That
doesn’t make me any class, love. Don’t try to throw me in that shit.” He
sounded as he did on his late-night
programme
, “The
Working Class Hero Show”: aggressive, dogmatic,
secretly
unsure. “You ought to meet her friends,” he said. “You ought to see them,
walking around the flat and looking as if this is all you can expect from a
secretary married to a deejay.”

 
          
“Are
you sure it isn’t you who think that?”

 
          
He
slid into the front seat, packing as much of his folded legs as he could
beneath the dashboard; then he turned to gaze at her. “No more so than you do,”
he said.

 
          
What,
Clare despise Dorothy? Just for putting up with Rob? Dorothy,
who’d
married him out of admiration for his drive and his
refusal to conform, who suffered him quietly most of the time now, perhaps
because she knew that if she didn’t contain herself he’d simply flee to Clare?
Yes, Clare thought, she despised her a little. Dorothy did herself no good by
keeping quiet. And all that was called love, good God.

 
          
Rob
was nodding triumphantly. “I know you,” he said. “I know what it means if
you’re more polite to someone when you get to know them better. It means you
can’t stand them.”

 
          
“Maybe
you should feel responsible for reducing her to that,” Clare said sharply. “Put
on your seat belt.”

 
          
“We
aren’t going far. I don’t need it with you driving.”

 
          
“No
doubt you’ll do exactly as you please.” She was determined that he wouldn’t
make her angry. She groped for the clasp of her seat belt.

 
          
“I
know I’m irresponsible. Don’t you think I know?” He’d reached another
monologue, as if he’d slipped it out of a rack. “But what can I do? By the time
I knew myself it was too late. Father and Mother put down everything I was, you
know that. That wasn’t likely to give me a sense of responsibility, was it? But
there you are. I’m not even taking responsibility for what I am. That’s what
I’m like.
Self-pitying, as well.
You can hear that,
can’t you?”

 
          
He
was retreating deeper and deeper into a maze of himself. He frightened her when
he was like this; he became, in the fullest sense, beyond her. He’d had these
moods more often since he’d begun smoking pot habitually. She shivered as she
grasped the wheel. She must get him home quickly. She couldn’t handle him in
this mood, not at this hour. The car dragged its headlights over the terrace;
on the porch the shadows of the columns crept out from behind their stones and
across the front doors, spreading.

 
          
She
tested the brakes as the car emerged between the square pillars onto
Blackburne
Place. “He’s still not right,” she said.

 
          
“Look,
I’ll stay if you like. I don’t want to be any trouble.”

 
          
God
forbid, she thought. She wanted at least a little sleep. “Let’s get you home,”
she said.

 
          
She
inched the car out onto Catharine Street, grateful for the lack of traffic. The
headlights gleamed on the sign of a jujitsu club in a Georgian basement,
then
were swallowed by the sodium glow. The car dawdled
toward the traffic lights, but their green held. Clare depressed the
accelerator warily. Once they’d crossed the five-way intersection at Upper
Parliament Street, they would be safe.

 
          
Rob
was silent now. In a way, that disturbed her more. She imagined him trapped
deep in himself, with no way out, not even words. She looked sideways at him;
beyond him, houses streamed by, blurred orange; the columns of a Greek Ionic
porch had sprouted tubular metal scaffolding. “Soon be home now,” she said, and
his lips twitched.

 
          
Upper
Parliament Street was deserted, dilapidated; its terraces soon gave way to razed
waste. The green light ushered her across, and she accelerated toward Princes
Avenue, past the drive-in bank and the redbrick domed Byzantine church and the
Cypriot fish-and-chip shop. Ahead, at the near end of the reservation which
divided the dual carriageway, William
Huskisson
the
merchant stood on a pedestal, clutching his robe glumly about him, against
exposure; beneath the sodium light he retained a faint dull-green gleam, like
verdigris. Clare drove by, into the flood of orange light.

 
          
The
light covered everything, thick as paint. It sank oppressively into the car,
filling it with shadows that moved like submarine vegetation as the lamps
sailed repetitively by. Clare resisted an urge to drive faster, to be free of
the light, but she felt it clinging
stickily
to her.
She squirmed. She shouldn’t have driven without sleep, after all.