But Dan… can’t. All of this is stupid, pointless. It’s irrational.
And he’s sorry, he’s sorry. He’s so sorry.
Those are his thoughts as he runs home, his skin electric with the anticipation that any second something will reach out for him. To touch his hair, perhaps, or stroke his neck. Or, worst of all, cradle his skull. Sizing it up.
Ursula has reached the town sign by the time he catches her up. “This is stupid,” he says again, out of breath. It’s really cold out here, the sky overcast and the stars hidden, a dampness in the air. It is stupid. He shouldn’t be here. He should be at home, working out what to do with his life. Trying to patch things up with Sara or calling Courtney and telling her this time he’s really going to do it. Jack it all in and emigrate. He needs to be strategizing. Consolidating or moving on. He’s not too old to start from scratch again. The Gulf maybe, or Australia.
“It’s just a tradition, Dan,” Ursula says. “You’ve come all this way. One short walk around the village is the least you can do.”
All right then. Just once round the village, bridge to bridge and then home. A night on the sofa and he can call out an Uber in the morning and be done with this. Nothing will happen.
“So, yeah,” he says, following her off the road and along the rabbit path that runs through the pale whin grass towards the river bank, “I can probably sort you out with someone to talk to on the promotional side of things and I know some shit hot fundraisers too. They might have some ideas you can use.” He’s rambling, he knows, but it’s better than thinking.
“Really?” Though she’s only a few feet ahead of him her voice sounds distant. There’s no breeze, it’s just her passage that’s making the grass dance in her wake, strobe-like in the lantern glow. “That’d be amazing.” The last word is muddied by the trickle and plash of water to their left, the creak of branches. Dan peers but can see nothing beyond the grass. There could be anything out there. To his right he can just about make out the silhouettes of houses. All the lights off, the windows dark like shut eyes.
“No problem,” he says, and now his own voice sounds thin out here too, diminished and tenuous. He presses on regardless. “Though to make a significant change, an area like this really needs some proper investment. A draw. Food tourism is big right now. Maybe you could get some development money to open a distillery? Whisky, craft gin. A shop to sell local cheeses and smoked meats?”
Ursula doesn’t reply for a moment. Then: “I’m not sure that’d work here. Don’t think She’d like that.”
No, don’t say that, he thinks. Don’t bring Her into it. Don’t give me an edge to pick at.
They’ve been walking a good ten minutes now and should be following the river bank up around the western side of the town, but they’re still in the long grass. It caresses his legs with every step.
“Ursula?” he says. She says something back but he can’t make it out. “Ursula!”
She pauses, raising the lantern as she looks back at him over her shoulder. In the ruddy glow from its impish eyes, her grin looks like a rictus. Her voice is suddenly pin sharp. “We’re nearly there.”
He wants to believe she means nearly home. They’re just walking the Ward. Once around the village.
Nothing’s going to happen.
He never asked Mum if it was true what his friends said happened to Dad. And all the others from the village who were found wanting. He didn’t need to because he doesn’t believe in it.
He doesn’t.
“Here we are.”
Yeah, there they are right enough. Fuck.
The grass has thinned out, revealing to their meagre light not the riverbank path but a rectangle of turned mud the size of Ursula’s back garden. The little field is coarse and cloddy but isolated clumps of scrawny leaves poke through here and there. Standing before the field is a rusty wheelbarrow with a garden fork balanced against it.
In the centre of the field is a house. Or something like a house. It’s a single storey high and in an awful state. Its roof slates are leprous with moss. Its lintels crumbling. Its bricks are in the process of being crushed ever so slowly by a prolific woody vine. There are no windows and just one door, which is too small for a normal person and has peeling green paint… and stands ajar.
“No,” he says.
“You can’t say no,” Ursula replies.
“I don’t want to.” Like a child.
“You have to. It’s why you came here.”
“No,” he says again and tries to turn away but she shoves him in the shoulder and he stumbles into the wheelbarrow and the fork falls with a scrape and a dull clang that sounds so loud out here in the dark that it almost stops his heart.
“I guess we discovered your ulterior motive, Daniel.” She’s grinning again, underlit by the rosy flicker and he can tell she won’t back down from this.
“Will you wait?” he says.
She lowers the lantern gently to the ground. He can see the scorching around the eyes and manic grin now, and a crack of light around the top indicating that the lid has shrunk from being cooked over the candle flame. The way she folds her arms tells him she’s not going to wait until it’s burned up completely. “Sooner you go, sooner it’ll be over,” she says.
What choice does he have?
He nearly has to squat to squeeze through the door but surprisingly there’s room to straighten up on the other side. And there’s light too. He’s not sure where it’s coming from, and there’s not much, but it’s enough to see the short hall that stretches in front of him. The stairs at the end. The hallway smells of turned earth and as he progresses down it he realises that he can touch both walls. In patches they feel soft and fuzzy like over-ripe peaches. Mostly they’ve been stripped back to the bare brick. Underfoot, twigs and pinecones scatter and snap, or something that feels like those anyway.
The stairs rise into darkness. There can’t be many of them in this tiny house but as Dan climbs he quickly loses count. He climbs until his calves complain, and with each heavy upward step the earthy aroma intensifies. He climbs until he forgets why he’s climbing, until the smell of soil is so strong it feels like his nostrils are plugged with it.
Then he is at the top, and he’s standing in a room whose ceiling is the earth. Skinny roots dangle down. White. Atrophying. Scraps of filthy cloth cling to them, like the last of the leaves.
And Dan stands there, waiting for the touch. The bark-brown fingers cradling a head fat with memories.
Weighing it in judgement.
Dollface
Seán Padraic Birnie
• • ∞ • •
Raymond lived next door to my wife and I and sometimes he’d come over and we’d drink beers out on the back patio. It didn’t matter what the weather was like, we always sat outside. He and I went a way back: we’d been at primary school together, though we’d never been friends, not in those days, and must have crossed paths only once or twice after secondary school. But then a few years ago he and his family happened to move into the house next to ours in Mile Oak and, amused by the coincidence, we got to know one another a little better over beers one night, which became kind of a regular thing. My wife didn’t like him. Raymond had a wife too and a young daughter he liked to complain about, and in fact he complained about the both of them a good deal, his combined and ongoing complaint forming our main topic of conversation, which was why my wife didn’t like him, because she didn’t think it was very sensitive for him to always be complaining about his daughter when we ourselves had lost two babies, one at sixteen weeks and the other the day after the birth. I tried to explain this to him once but he didn’t get it, which is why we’d always sit outside on the patio, on old green camping chairs I was always meaning to replace.
On this occasion, Raymond was complaining about his sister-in-law, who so far as I knew my wife and I had never met, because she had bought his daughter a present without asking.
Well, a present’s nice, I said. What’s
the problem?
The problem is the present itself and the fact that it isn’t just a present. Not with Mylene. It’s a present and it’s some kind of a, I don’t know. Some kind of a strategy. A device.
Okay, I said, and drank a swig of beer. In the summer I like to drink a nice chilled lager but in the winter I stick to ale. It was winter now. Raymond always sticks to lager, chilled or not, he wasn’t particular, being as he was more interested in the ABV than the variety of hop.
What do you think it is she wants?
Oh, said Raymond, waving his hand. The usual. To drive a wedge. Between Mary and me, and between Sophie and me. The thing is, I knew her before I knew Mary, and she’s never been, well…
He trailed off, muttering something under his breath. He was always swearing underneath his breath, which was another of my wife’s given reasons for disliking him. He swore quite a lot over his breath, too.
Now he was staring at the patio, shaking his head.
So what was it? I asked.
What was what? said Raymond.
The present.
Oh, the present. That fucking thing. It’s a doll.
He said the word ‘doll’ with considerable disgust. I nodded, wondering what could be so bad about a doll.
I hate dolls, said Raymond. Fucking dolls. Fucking Mylene.
Then he swore under his breath again, staring at the cracked patio, shaking his head.
*
Maybe a week later he told me he might need my help with something.
That was unusual because usually all we did was drink beer together out on the patio, but I said OK.
Thanks, said Raymond. Thanks.
I don’t think I’d ever heard him say thank you before.
That bloody doll, he said. Bloody Mylene.
Shaking his head, he studied a crack in the patio.
Just tell me when, I said.
That bloody doll, said Raymond, nodding to himself.
Later that evening, after Raymond had left, my wife said to me: I don’t know why you have to have him over all the time.
I nodded, looking up from my phone. We were sat on the sofa, in the glow of the television. Through the wall we could hear the TV in Raymond’s living room. On the other side of the wall, he and Mary, or maybe just Mary, were watching the same programme.
Raymond and I go way back, I said. Same primary school and all.
My wife sniffed. Then she zapped the television off with the remote control and went up to bed.
I got up and went to turn it off properly, because the remote just puts it on standby, and when something’s turned off I like it to actually be turned off and not just sleeping.
*
My mobile rang that night. It was three in the morning. It didn’t actually ring because I keep it on silent but the screen lit up and filled the room with blue light, and I was awake anyway, as I often am. Tilting the screen down so as not to shine its cold light on my wife, who never has any trouble sleeping, I went out into the hall to answer.
When, said Raymond.
Pardon?
I’d started to wonder if I had been snoozing after all because I was as groggy as if I had just been jolted out of the deepest cycle of sleep. And the landing outside our bedroom had acquired a kind of dreamlike quality. Everything was normal, everything in its proper place, but somehow accentuated. I rubbed my eyes.
When.
Raymond, it’s three in the morning.
You said to say when. I’m saying when. When when when. Okay?
I nodded, beginning to understand.
Can’t this wait until the morning? I asked.
Nope. Sorry.
Now the banister and the stairwell and the little stained-glass window above the stairs down to the ground floor of the house had lost that odd accentuation. They were themselves again.
I’ve been drinking, said Raymond. Can you drive?
I counted the units in my head, considered the fact that I’d eaten and had finished X hours ago, and said Yes. Okay.
It was while saying ‘Yes. Okay’ that I realised that what I should have said was ‘Where?’
I went back into the bedroom and got dressed in the darkness. My wife turned over in her sleep.
Outside, Raymond was leaning against the car in our drive, holding a baby, cooing babyishly to it while it burbled back at him. He had a satchel over his shoulder. Backlit by the streetlamp, Raymond and baby and satchel formed a weird silhouette. It was such an odd sight it almost gave me a fright. Maybe the world hadn’t quite lost that accentuation. I’ve always been a funny sleeper, and sometimes when I wake a little of the daft madness of dreams carries over into the day, like the sound of a television or an argument carrying through from the house next door. Not that it was day now, anyway. When I got closer I realised it wasn’t a baby Raymond was holding.
Hi, I said.
Evening, said Raymond, though the evening had ended hours ago. Look at this thing.
The orange light of the streetlamp gave the baby face a weird glow, but it was an ordinary doll, so far as I could tell. Nothing unusual about it. It had a slightly stubby nose, if you were to be critical, and maybe its big blue eyes were set a little far apart, but you had to really be looking for something to even think of that.
Well, I said. It’s a doll.
Raymond was nodding. I’d often notice him nodding, when I’d not said anything. It was as if he was agreeing with something someone only he could hear had said. Sometimes it coincided with something I had said and I’d never be sure who he was agreeing with, with me or with the someone only he could hear.
It is that, he said. It is that. Let’s drive.
Raymond gave directions like a satnav teeming with malware. He took us up the A27 and around the roundabouts where the A27 meets the A23, then back onto the A27 again and out east past the universities, before swinging us back towards town. The roads were mostly empty. It was eerie. I never really drive at that time of night. Who, outside of truckers, has anywhere to be going at that time of night? It made me wonder about the cars that we did pass. Where were they going?
Eventually, after several more circumlocutions, we reached Wild Park, which wasn’t even really out of town but which might as well have been for all the time it took to get there.
Fucking Raymond, I thought.
He was clutching the doll in the passenger seat.
All I’d managed to get him to say about it was this:
Present from Mylene. It’s a wedge. It’s a fucking strategy. I know how that woman thinks. Oh, I know that woman. Mary doesn’t know, or doesn’t choose to, but I do. Christ, would you look at it?
And he held it up, reaching with one hand to flick on the light in the roof of the car, which for a moment made it hard for me to see the road, but the road was empty.
Do you remember Mylene?
Before I could answer, he said:
We’re here. Stop.
I stopped the car.
He took a torch out of the satchel.
Let’s walk.
We walked.
Past the toilets, past the football pitches, into the woods.
It was dark in the woods.
*
Finally satisfied with the spot we’d found, Raymond crouched down. You squat like that, I thought, you’ll fuck up your knees. It was a stupid thing to think.
Do you see the problem? said Raymond. He was staring at the doll as if he was hoping it would blink first. Daring it.
It didn’t blink.
Not really, I said.
He tossed the doll down in front of him, onto the bracken, and sighed as if he was tired of dealing with people less intellectually capable than himself.
Mylene acts as though she doesn’t know that I know what she’s up to, but she does, he said.
I nodded, then stopped nodding when I realised it made it look as if I agreed. I didn’t know if I agreed or not. Raymond often assumed you agreed with him, whether or not you actu
ally did agree, and sometimes if you weren’t careful you could get caught up in that assumption and become complicit in whatever it was he was on about. Mostly I just knew that I was tired.
And it was working, too, said Raymond.
What was working? I asked.
He looked at me sharply, as if I was playing dumb. I blinked first. My eyelids were heavy.
Her plan, he said, looking down into the dirt.
I realised I was nodding again. Maybe it was like shivering: something you do to warm yourself up. I was shivering, too.
Wild Park is just a bit of woodland on the edge of the downs, on the outskirts of Brighton where the downland comes into town, bordered by the A27 to the north and Moulscoomb and Hollingbury to the south. It isn’t much, not really, though it is a nature reserve, to give it its due, but at four o’clock in the morning in the winter it can feel like quite a lot more, like a place befitting its name.
It got into my something, said Raymond, who hadn’t said ‘something.’
It got into what? I asked, looking up. Sorry.
He was nodding again, in that way he did. In the dark in the woods it wasn’t so hard to imagine that maybe someone else had said something after all.
My head, he murmured. I’ve been dreaming about the fucking thing. And every time I walk into a room it’s like, I don’t know, there it is, looking at me. Leering at me. I go from one room into the next and it’s there again as if it’s fucking teleported. Except I can’t quite remember if I had seen it in the room before, but I feel like I had. And it’s only been getting worse. And Sophie, he said, trailing off.
I watched him for a moment. He was breathing weirdly.
What about Sophie? I asked.
Sophie loves it, he said. She loves it. She really does.
I looked down at the doll, at its stubby nose, at its big doll eyes set very slightly too far apart, and tried to see it as he seemed to see it. I couldn’t do it.
Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 8 Page 22