Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 8

by Michael Kelly

  Mylene knew, said Raymond. She knew.

  I watched him. Then I looked at the doll again.

  Raymond, I said. Why are we here?

  He looked at me suddenly.

  I need a witness, he said. To corroborate. The way things have been going lately, I’ve started doubting myself.

  I realised I was rubbing my temple. I could feel a headache coming on. It was as if my tiredness had transmogrified, become a headache.

  A witness for what?

  It was beginning to annoy me, drawing him out.

  So that I know it is dead, said Raymond.

  He removed the satchel from his shoulder, the satchel that I’d forgotten he had with him.

  As I watched he opened the satchel and brought out a box of matches, a small trowel, and then a can of deodorant. It was a black Lynx canister of some sort. In the dark I couldn’t really see the satchel or the deodorant. In the dark it looked like he had removed the box of matches and the deodorant and the trowel from some secret pocket tucked away in the folds of the dark.

  They might have been tucked away in the folds of the past, too: I remembered as kids once, a few of us, Raymond included, at this boy called Joe’s house on Kimberley Road when his mother was out, arranging one of Joe’s not-inexpensive Action Man figures and a load of toy soldiers in the corner of the patio in his garden. Joe had a load of bangers, which were illegal in England and which he’d brought back from a holiday in France, small little red explosives that looked like sticks of dynamite out of a cartoon. We carefully positioned them throughout the scene, then laid bits of kindling from the fireplace in the living room, bits of scrunched up newspaper, and a whole lot of matches all around. Then one of us— Joe, probably, but maybe Raymond—sprayed the whole tableaux with deodorant. I had been the one holding the bucket of water, which to me meant that if we got into trouble later maybe I’d look like the responsible one. Now Raymond was holding the deodorant again but I didn’t have the water.

  In the dark the light of the fire when he lit it made my eyes hurt. Oddly accentuated, the doll burned. Its face began to melt. We watched it burn for a while.

  We left the doll in the woods in a sad little grave that he dug with the trowel. Then we drove back home.

  *

  The next day my wife didn’t ask where I’d been. She gave the impression that she had no idea I’d even been anywhere, but I was pretty sure that she knew I’d been somewhere. She seemed more annoyed than usual that evening when Raymond came over for a beer.

  We sat out on the patio, on the green camping chairs. They were getting tatty and old. I should buy some new ones, I thought.

  For the first time ever, Raymond didn’t say much. For the first time, I had to spur the conversation along.

  Mary’s pissed off, he said at last. She suspects something. Sophie’s distraught.

  I nodded as if I agreed.

  They’re staying with Mylene tonight.

  Do they know?

  No, but she suspects something. Mylene’s got in her head. I spent all morning pretending to look for the fucking thing. It’s surprisingly hard work, looking for something you bloody well know isn’t there.

  How’re you feeling about it now? I asked.

  He looked at me suddenly, then smiled. Much better, he said. So much better.

  But later that night when he rang he wasn’t feeling better anymore.

  *

  It was 11pm. My wife had gone to bed early for her, at 10, having scarcely said a word all evening, her face buried in the blue light of her phone. I’d found myself sitting in the living room, having another beer. The telly was on but I wasn’t really watching it. I’d turned the volume down so low it was hard to tell if the sound was on at all.

  I was thinking about the doll, about its eyes, set very slightly too far apart. My phone had dropped from the sofa to the carpet and I hadn’t bothered to pick it up again. Then it began to glow suddenly with its own blue light and I saw that Raymond was calling.

  Hi, I said.

  He whispered something, his voice full of urgency, more a hiss than a whisper.

  What? I said.

  …come back, repeated Raymond.

  They’re back from Mylene’s? I asked, sitting up, though I knew already that that was not what he had said.

  No. The doll. It’s back.

  For the first time since we’d met I could hear fear in Raymond’s voice.

  But they’re back too, he said. Came back this evening. And Sophie has the doll.

  I took a sip of beer and tried to think about this. He had said the doll, not a doll.

  Mylene replaced it? I asked.

  No, for Christ sake, what I said. The doll is back. The one we—he whispered this—the one we disposed of.

  That’s impossible, I said. She must have bought a new one. They’re hardly unique.

  Even as I said this I don’t think I really believed it. In the darkness of the living room, a few beers down, the clocks ticking to midnight, it wasn’t too hard to believe that what Raymond was saying to me was true.

  How do you know? I asked.

  I just know.

  Sure, I said. Sure. But is there anything particular—I mean, Raymond, you burnt the doll. We watched it melt. Then you buried it. I can corroborate this.

  I know, it’s impossible, but it’s the same doll.

  And is it melted?

  Not at all.

  Not at all, I said, nodding. My voice might have been the echo of Raymond’s repeating down the line. For all I knew he was sat in the adjacent room, on the other side of the wall in front of me, but for now our voices were bouncing around through a network of satellites and computers, crossing absurd distances at absurd speeds, entertaining impossible notions.

  How do you know? I said again.

  The birthmark.

  The doll has a birthmark?

  Yep. I told you it was weird.

  I was trying not to laugh.

  Okay, I said. Have you seen any others? Do you know where Mylene bought it?

  Mothercare, he said. I went and looked today.

  Right, I said.

  I was thinking maybe it was just that one and after Sophie reacted so badly I thought maybe I’d replace it. But when I went to the shop I didn’t like the look of them. They’re smart dolls.

  Smart dolls? I said, baffled by the term.

  Yeah, you hook them up to the WiFi and then you can talk to your kid through them. I bet she’s been spying on us.

  Smart dolls, I said, another echo repeating. The idea was new to me.

  Anyway, said Raymond, those ones—I looked—those ones in the shop, they didn’t have birthmarks.

  Some kind of manufacturing defect, I thought, thinking I’d said it. For a moment I wasn’t sure whether I’d said it or not.

  I closed my eyes. I was rubbing my temple.

  When I opened my eyes, the television was off, gone into some power saving mode, and I realised its screen had been the only light I’d had on, because I was sitting in shadows now.

  I’ll show you, said Raymond.

  Tomorrow, I said.

  No, I—

  Tomorrow, I said, and ended the call. Then I powered the phone down and tossed it back onto the floor.

  That night I slept on the sofa in the shadows of the living room and dreamt about the doll.

  *

  It was the same doll. He wasn’t wrong. I could see that immediately. He showed me the birthmark. It didn’t look like a manufacturing defect.

  Jesus, I said, because there was nothing better to say. It was impossible and it was true. What do you say to that?

  I can hardly bring myself to touch it, said Raymond. It’s like it’s contaminated. I’ll see Sophie playing with it and it just turns my stomach. But then if you take it off her she just cries and cries.

  What does Mary think?

  She’d want me sectioned.

  I nodded, shivering. It was cold out on the patio. The nights
were getting even colder. Raymond had propped the doll up on the white table. It was a baby, of course, but of an age where it could hold itself up. It looked like it was holding itself up. In the dark it wasn’t hard to mistake it for a real baby.

  It had its slightly stubby nose. It seemed weird to me to give a doll a nose like that. Its eyes set slightly too far apart. Who had designed this thing? I thought. And its birthmark. Why the fuck did it have a birthmark?

  Some of Raymond’s fear was seeping into me. For him, the fear expressed itself as revulsion. For me it was a kind of attraction. There was something compelling about the doll. It made the things around it seem fainter, vaguer, less real. It seemed oddly accentuated. I wanted to touch it but I didn’t want to touch it. I sat and peered at it, studying the texture of its bib and the plastic of its face and the synthetic hair glued into its head that, impossibly, wasn’t melted anymore, and wanted to look at anything else and at the same time it was all I wanted to look at, the only thing.

  What now? I said.

  Raymond looked up. I realised he’d had his face in his hands. For a moment I thought he’d been crying but on second thoughts decided not.

  Fire didn’t work, he said, stroking his beard.

  Usually he shaved but recently he hadn’t been shaving. Looking at him I saw the exhaustion in his eyes. He looked like he’d been sleeping even worse than me.

  I thought maybe I’d bury it.

  We did that before.

  But deeper.

  Okay, I said.

  I’ve got a better idea. You got your car keys?

  I tried to calculate the units of alcohol I’d consumed, but the truth is I’m numerically dyslexic.

  Yes, I said.

  Carefully Raymond put the doll into his satchel. He did it with a kind of gentleness, like he was tucking it in for the night. Then we got in my car and drove to the beach. The night was cold and getting colder, and the wind was getting up.

  *

  There’s a bronze statue of a donut or something that looks like a donut on the beach, a big green thing, two and a half metres wide, what’s called a torus, to the west of the Palace Pier and to the east of the husk of the West Pier. Christ knows why. Public art. On the groin there we stood looking at the waves. The lights of the working pier stained the black waves with their glow. In the winter in the dark with the cold and the rain the sea looked unforgiving. For a moment I thought Raymond was having second thoughts, then he turned and walked back down the groin and skipped over the wall where it was low enough for him to jump down onto the beach, and I heard him land on the pebbles with a groan, cursing his knees.

  Where are you going? I said, or maybe thought and didn’t say. It was hard to hear even my own voice over the wind.

  I walked over to the wall and looked down to see him gathering pebbles, and then I understood. He put the pebbles in his bag with the doll. Then he came back up on to the groin and walked to its end and stood for a moment looking out at the churn of black waves.

  I realised he had closed his eyes.

  What if it comes back again? he said.

  It won’t, I said, and wondered if I believed that.

  It did last time.

  I nodded.

  The night really was very cold, but it seemed inappropriate to try and hurry him along.

  Raymond, I said.

  He sighed and opened his eyes. Then he checked the buckles on the satchel.

  How’s your throw? he said, and I think I saw a smile on his face. In school I’d never been sporty like Raymond had been. That was probably the reason we’d never been friends back in those days. It gets boring getting beaten all the time.

  He stepped back and took a deep breath. Then, frowning, he took a few more steps, giving himself a run up. Then he ran, stopping suddenly at the seaward wall, and for a second I was certain he was about to tumble over it, but instead he launched the bag high, high up into the dark.

  He had a good throw. I didn’t hear it splash.

  I’m going to need a new bag, said Raymond.

  Yep, I replied, thinking it would probably just wash up on the beach in the morning.

  Oh, fuck, he said, halting in dismay.

  What? I said.

  What now? I thought. Jesus it is cold, I thought.

  My keys were in the bag.

  He started patting his pockets. Then he closed his eyes.

  Piss.

  What?

  I think my phone was also in it.

  We walked back to my car, parked up on Black Lion Street on the other side of the promenade and the Kings Road. We sat in the car for a while and then I drove us home.

  *

  The next day, I don’t know why, I called in sick to work and, leaving my car in the drive, got a bus into town. I got off at the stop on North Street, then headed south down East Street, and it was only once I’d reached the beach that I realised what I was doing.

  I’d been thinking about the doll, about its stubby nose, its large staring eyes set too far apart, and the fact that dolls came chipped these days, hooked up to the internet, and I’d been thinking about this Mylene.

  Did I expect to find the satchel? I don’t know. It would be an absurd thing to say, of course, that I expected to find it, but through those last few weeks absurdities had rather begun to accumulate.

  The beach might have been a different beach. It was the daytime now, of course, but the wind had gone, and the sea was flat, and the world felt peculiarly airless. It wasn’t hard to imagine some fucker with a Jesus complex trying to walk on it, the sea was that flat. And with the aforementioned accumulating absurdities they’d probably succeed. But it was so cold that you wouldn’t want to fail.

  I was giving up on the bag, pretending to myself that I hadn’t come down here for that, that I’d just wanted some air, nothing unreasonable, when I saw a kid struggling with something on the pebbles. He was maybe seven. I looked around but there were no adults in sight.

  I think immediately I knew it was the bag.

  Hey, I said, approaching him. Hey.

  He glanced up with a look that said he was doing something he shouldn’t have been doing.

  For a moment I didn’t know what to say. He stared at me, and for a moment I thought he was going to try and leg it.

  That’s my bag, I said, and when I moved forward, ready for a tug-of-war over the satchel, a forty-year-old man ready to grapple with a seven-year-old child, he scrambled to his feet and scurried away.

  I watched him leave the beach, disappearing up onto the promenade, kicking up pebbles in his wake. Then I looked down at the bag.

  Huh, I said.

  There was no doubt.

  I crouched down. My eyes widened and I recoiled when I touched it, as if every thread of its fabric coursed with diabolical electricity.

  It wasn’t wet.

  The boy had unclipped one of the buckles but the other was still secure. I unclipped it and opened the impossibly dry top flap, revealing the zip over the main impossibly dry compartment. Under the flap but not in the main compartment there were a few small pockets for pens and things. Opening one of these, I found Raymond’s house keys, and in the other I found his phone. The battery was in the red, in a power saving mode, but it wasn’t dead. There were several missed calls from Mylene.

  Fucking Mylene, I thought, in Raymond’s voice.

  In the main compartment, under some pebbles, I found the doll, which was also dry.

  I dropped the bag back onto the pebbles and stood up straight. I realised I could hear myself breathing heavily, breathing weirdly. I was trying and failing to think. For a moment I felt short of breath and like a wave of black panic was about to swell out of the calm of my mind, sweeping everything away, but it didn’t.

  I crouched down again and removed the house keys and the mobile phone from the front pockets of the bag. I fiddled with the phone until I managed to power it off. I looked around for a moment, checking that there was no one nearby to see m
e, and then running forward I hurled each of them, the house keys and the phone, out to sea.

  I’d never had a good throw before, but that was a good one.

  When I couldn’t find my car where I’d thought I’d parked it up on Black Lion Street, I walked up to Western Road and took a number 1A bus back home.

  The house was empty. For a moment its weird airless emptiness surprised me, until I remembered that my wife was at work. I should open some windows, I thought, but didn’t.

  Instead I went out on to the patio and, standing up on tiptoes, peered over the fence into Raymond’s garden. I looked up at the windows of his house. The curtains of the rear extension were drawn and the curtains in the windows of the back bedroom above it were also drawn. The other window on that floor was the bathroom window and that window was frosted for privacy, and was closed.

  With the satchel over my shoulder I looked down at the doll’s head poking through the pebbles in the main compartment. Then I slung it up and over the fence, into the garden next door.

  Fucking Mylene, I thought, in Raymond’s voice.

  Raymond didn’t come over for a beer that evening or the next, and he didn’t ring. The curtains at the back of the house remained drawn and the curtains round the front stayed drawn too. Whenever he watched television he’d have the television on pretty loud, because he was a little deaf, and we’d be able to hear it through the living room wall. Sometimes we’d hear him swearing through that wall. But for the next few nights we wouldn’t hear either, TV or swearing, at all.

  On the Wednesday, sitting out on the patio on my own, working my way through a bottle of Doombar, I remembered the satchel. Standing up from the camping chair, I went over to the fence, and going on tiptoes stood to peer over into Raymond’s garden.

  The satchel was gone.

  Returning to the chair, I went to sit back down but the damn thing collapsed underneath me, causing me to swear and spill beer. Swearing some more, under my breath and over my breath, I went and took the other chair, which I thought of as Raymond’s chair, from the shed. Then after testing the stability of the chair I sat back down and drank what remained of the beer.