The doll who ate his mother: a novel of modern terror

by Ramsey Campbell

  “Come on now, love,” the attendant said, steering her gently toward the bright white box of the ambulance, away from the orange glow. “You don’t know how you are yet. Anyway, you’ll want to be with your friend.”

  Her brother, not her friend. But let the man have his own way; he was only trying to be kind. Except that she wanted to hear what the other attendant would say to the policeman who had beckoned him urgently over to the car. She was sure they were talking about Rob. There was something they didn’t understand, that much was in their faces—perhaps the same thing that had confused her as she’d looked at the outside of the car. The policeman was urging the attendant over to the lamp standard, to the parked cars; they were peering beneath the cars, gazing about at the pavement. They looked like children hunting for treasure. “Wait a minute,” she said, wriggling her arm in the attendant’s grasp.

  They were walking slowly back toward Ringo, poor old car. She couldn’t hear their voices yet, but their faces and gestures were talking. There? the policeman said, including everywhere they’d searched in a sweep of his arm, pointing to the car, the ambulance. No, the attendant admitted, shaking his head doubtfully. Well then, the policeman said, looking as if he liked the idea even less. But surely, the attendant said, looking shocked, actually ill. They were nearly in Clare’s earshot. She strained her ears, herself, toward them.

  They were talking about the man. Which man? The man must have opened the door to throw himself out, or it had fallen open. The man was Rob, then. His something had something at the moment of first impact. But then what? Surely you aren’t saying—Clare strained forward, away from the restraining grasp. The sharp blue beacon of the ambulance cut through the orange glow, repeatedly flashing in her eyes, pounding, insisting that she hear the truth, that she admit she’d heard the policeman’s words. All he was saying was that the man’s arm, Rob’s arm, was what?

  “Missing,” he repeated irritably. “His arm is missing.”

  Wednesday,

  September 3

  “Tell me about Bob,” Dorothy said to Clare.

  They were sitting on the balcony outside Dorothy’s, on the fourteenth storey of a stack of flats overlooking Sefton Park. Ahead of them lay the playing field, like green baize worn through in black patches. Beyond the park and the huddled chimneys and church towers of Aigburth, a tanker slid over the glittering shattered sunlight of the Mersey. Beyond that, except for the occasional factory chimney standing smoking on the far bank of the river, there was nothing but the enormous open early-evening sky.

  “I remember when Rob and I were kids,” Clare said. She’d never been able to call him Bob, which he’d rechristened himself for the BBC. “He wouldn’t play with his friends unless they let me join in. Usually they liked me to.” She gazed out across the playing field, toward the iron-and-glass dome of Sefton Park Palm House, packed deep in trees. She was glad of these memories. She’d had them for years, and she loved to remember them. She was grateful that even now they weren’t spoilt.

  “But once they reached adolescence he changed toward them completely,” she said. “He became all serious and protective, wouldn’t let them near me. There was one boy, Lionel. I thought he was all right; we used to have some good fights when we were younger. He asked me out once, to the pictures. When Rob heard, he nearly knocked him down. He stood in front of the house that night to make sure Lionel couldn’t get at me, and wouldn’t tell Father and Mother why. I was upstairs sobbing my heart out, you can imagine. It was years later Rob told me Lionel had used to boast about all the girls he’d had, all the details. I don’t think he could have had so many, though. He was only twelve.”

  Dorothy was leaning forward, alert, ready to learn. Her wide eyes were black and shining as her wiry curls, on which the sunlight rested softly. Clare could see why Rob had found her attractive. But then, she’d never denied that Dorothy was pretty.

  “He could be really tough when he was looking after me,” Clare said. “You wouldn’t have thought it was Rob. I remember the first time I ever went to the Cavern, when the Beatles were on. Did you ever go? It was an experience.” Beneath the warehouses, dark thick stone overhead and close around her, musty-smelling, a crowd squeezed in so tight she could hardly lift her arm to drink her Coke, dense smoke hanging low beneath the ceiling: beyond the crowd she could just see four figures on a stage, making loud blurred sounds. “There was a boy there I knew from school,” she said. “He only touched me, only just below my shoulder, here, but Rob gave him such a push he nearly got trampled. I must have been about thirteen then.”

  Dorothy was shaking her head, wide-eyed, smiling, engrossed. To Clare, she looked a little like a teacher pretending to be interested. You should be interested, Clare thought. It’s a side of Rob you never knew.

  “Oh yes, and there was one other boy,” she said.

  “This was a few years later: I thought he was nice, at the time. We used to go for walks, and he’d tell me all his plans, all his dreams. Then one day I heard Rob had nearly broken his arm with a piece of railing because of what he’d been saying about me. All the time he’d been laughing at me with his friends. Rob never told me what about.” But she’d heard from someone else. Little Stumpy, he’d been calling her. Little Noddy. Little Stumpy-legs.

  “Poor Clare,” Dorothy said. “You must have been really unlucky with boys.”

  “Unlucky? I don’t think so. I’d say they were about average.” She gazed ahead; the light on the Mersey trembled against her eyes. “The funny thing was, he kept on, Rob did, even after we had our own places,” she said. “If I ever had a boyfriend I had to bring him up here for inspection, or Rob would be at me until I did. We had a row once. I’d told him I was inviting my latest to my flat, for dinner. I’m not making this up. We were just sitting down to dinner when Rob arrived, and he stayed until this bloke had gone. God, did we have a fight then. But the bloke wasn’t any great loss, when I think about it—a bit snobby and know-it-all.”

  “It’s incredible you didn’t lose your temper with Bob more often.”

  “Oh, he didn’t bother me really.” Sometimes she’d been grateful to him, when he’d arrived just in time to interrupt a planned seduction—or at least what she was sure had been threatening to be one. Not that she couldn’t have defended herself if it had ever come to the point. “I haven’t much time for going out with blokes,” she said. “Too much to do at school. When I’ve been teaching I just like to go home and flop. But I don’t mind that. It satisfies me.”

  Dorothy was nodding, smiling warmly. “No doubt I sound as if I’m deluding myself,” Clare said coldly.

  “Of course you don’t. I was just thinking, perhaps Bob was jealous. Maybe that was why he kept getting in your way, because he needed you.”

  Her voice faltered. She was coming up out of memories now, toward what had happened to Rob. “I suppose so,” Clare said hurriedly, searching for a change of subject. She felt uncomfortable. She always did here, trying to pretend she didn’t know everything about Dorothy, everything she’d said to Rob. All her mind would offer was that Rob had certainly seemed to need her since he’d married Dorothy.

  “Obviously I don’t mean he needed you, you know, sexually,” Dorothy said. “You used to look after him, didn’t you, as well as the other way round. Maybe he still needed that.”

  And why not sexually? Clare demanded. Why is it so obvious? Just because Dorothy was prettier! She remembered Rob at the age of eleven, saying, “Look what I can do!” and brandishing his erection. It had been empty, though, and she’d failed to see the point of all his red-faced manipulation. So she’d been the first, in a way; Dorothy needn’t feel so smug.

  Dorothy was gazing at her. Were her thoughts showing? She shouldn’t be scoring off Dorothy, not now. She stood up, pretending to abandon the conversation for the view. Around the park the long curve of Victorian villas and pointed spires, the occasional high-rise block that had shouldered itself a space, rose with her like a congregat
ion. Some of the trees were heavy with children; a park-keeper shook his fist at them, shook them down.

  Below her—a couple of storeys below, as it sounded—she heard passing cars. She looked. The world fell away with a soundless sucking gasp, down, down, to the tiny cars. Though the balcony wall was almost as high as her shoulders, Clare stumbled backwards. She imagined Dorothy resting her elbows on the wall, gazing down at the waiting concrete. It was morbid of Dorothy to have suggested coming out here. The sky tugged Clare toward the edge: “I’d like to go in now,” she told Dorothy.

  They carried the folded chairs into the flat, down the hall that always felt to Clare like a low concrete tunnel, dressed in striped gingham. On the right, the door of Rob’s workroom and record library was a lid, closed tight on the walls taped full of aggressively middle-class complaints, aggressively working-class complaints, and the newspaper report: THE RECORD SHOW MILLIONS OF FANS LOVE TO HATE. They laid the chairs in the hall cupboard, whose door promised a room.

  The living room seemed empty to Clare now. It had seemed so when she arrived, after the lift had given its usual joyful little leap at the fourteenth floor. It seemed deserted because it was full of Rob’s things—the rattle he’d bought when he’d joined the working class in watching football, the team photograph above the electric fire, the red lapel rosettes, the book by a local poet on top of the television, eager to show visitors its dedication to Rob. Must be leaving soon, Clare thought. She’d done her duty. Besides, they were running short of memories to discuss.

  “I liked your parents,” Dorothy said. “But think I can see why Bob didn’t.”

  “Did he ever tell you about them?”

  “He never wanted to.”

  “You mightn’t have liked them so much if he had.”

  Dorothy was moving about the flat, flicking a duster. The flat always seemed alert for visitors. Now she sat down, turning her heart-shaped face eagerly up to Clare. The first time she had done so Clare had thought she was trying to compensate for Clare’s height, and had been furiously annoyed. Later she’d realized the woman only wanted to be told everything, to know, to understand: a good pupil. Now, deep in Dorothy’s eyes, Clare saw a plea. She must be going soon. Dorothy’s friends would look after Dorothy; she couldn’t.

  “Oh, I don’t suppose Father and Mother were that bad,” she said. “It was just that Rob was never what they wanted him to be. But that’s part of adolescence; they couldn’t understand that. They wouldn’t let him grow out of it. It was always: My God, you’re not going out wearing that. Or: Don’t let me see you with that girl again. Or: I won’t have that cacophony in my house—that was his records, of course. The worst thing was, if he tried to be what one of them wanted, the other didn’t like it—it was always: Don’t be so affected.”

  “Yes,” Dorothy said. “I understand him better now.”

  No doubt she was remembering the shifting, self-contradictory arguments he had used to hurl at her. Clare remembered them too, though she hadn’t been present. She hurried on. “The strange part was they believed they were going to win. They were sure that whatever phases he went through, he’d join Father in the jeweller’s eventually. When he kept telling them he was going to work in broadcasting they just treated it as something else they’d talk him out of. They never really believed him, even when he went to work at the Cavern. When Radio Merseyside opened they behaved as if he’d betrayed them, hardly spoke to him. I used to get furious with them. I was two years younger than Rob, and their favourite, of course. They often blamed him for things I’d done. I could say anything to them and they’d listen. But then they went on doing exactly the same things to Rob.”

  “That’s what I meant, about your looking after him,” Dorothy said. “He needed it. I liked to look after him. But I didn’t do it too much, because I thought it mightn’t be good for him. Maybe I should have looked after him more.”

  Her voice was shaking. Her emotion was building, charging the room; Clare felt suffocated. She must go. Dorothy probably wanted to be alone.

  “Your mother wrote to Bob after we were married, you know,” Dorothy said. “She wanted us to go and stay with them. Even though he hadn’t invited them to the wedding. He wouldn’t go, of course. He didn’t even answer her letter. I suppose she wanted to see what I was like. I wonder what she thought of me finally. I wasn’t exactly at my best at the funeral.”

  There it was. She’d touched it. Perhaps that had earthed her emotion. “You looked fine,” Clare said, and indeed she had: she’d glided through the funeral, artlessly graceful and poised. Rob’s death hadn’t made her forget how to walk, Clare had thought—unfairly, no doubt. I must be going, she prepared to say. But Dorothy was gazing up at her, eyes moist.

  “There was only one thing I couldn’t bear,” she said. “When I had to go to identify Bob. There’s a little window that you look through. They had Bob lying on a trolley, under a sheet. He looked as though he were asleep, because, you know, all the injury was under his hair. They’d put him with his left side away from me, under the light. But I could see how the sheet hung straight down from his shoulder, just flat against his shoulder. I couldn’t understand at first what was wrong.

  “Then I kept saying, ‘Where’s his arm? Where’s his arm?’” She turned away from Clare and pressed her face into the back of her chair, shoulders writhing. After a while she said, “I’m sorry. I’ll make some coffee.” She hurried out, and Clare heard her sobbing in the kitchen.

  Clare listened, detached. Best to leave her alone. It was odd: she couldn’t feel what Dorothy was feeling. No doubt that was because her own reaction had overwhelmed her physically, all at once, and purged her.

  In the ambulance one of the attendants had poured her a drink of hot sweet tea from a flask. She hadn’t liked to say that she hated sugar. He’d stood over her while she drank it, blocking her view of Rob. The sugar and the motion of the ambulance had made her feel sick again.

  She had been sitting in the hospital with an old magazine lying slack on her hands when she’d heard her pulse. It was huge and soft; it was slowing like a run-down record. As she fell forward her mouth opened and the hot sweet tea spilled out, over the magazine.

  They gave her a sedative. She’d awoken in the evening. She’d felt fine, but anxious to telephone her parents. She mustn’t write; it would be bad enough for them to hear the news over the phone. When someone had reluctantly brought her a phone, she’d described the accident to a silence which she’d variously imagined full of grief, outrage, disbelief, a broken connection. Then her father had said, “When are you coming down?”

  She’d gone down to Cheltenham the next day. The Radio Merseyside people were looking after Dorothy; she didn’t need Clare. Neither on the phone nor later had Clare been able to tell her parents exactly what had happened to Rob. Thank God they disliked most of the news too much to buy newspapers. What could she have said? “They couldn’t find one of his arms”? “Someone stole his arm”? She’d tried once or twice, with her father, but it had sounded so ridiculous she’d thought it was best not to try. The absurdity of it had helped her not to brood. She admitted to herself she was glad. She wouldn’t care to feel like Dorothy. Here came Dorothy, behind coffee mugs muttering together on a trolley.

  “It’s past seven. Why don’t you stay for dinner?” Dorothy said. “Some of the people from Radio Mers will be coming up later. You haven’t met Tim Forbes, have you?”

  “I’ve a chop in the fridge, thanks, Dorothy. I don’t like keeping meat too long.”

  “Come and have dinner before you go back to school. I’m sure you’d like someone else to cook you a meal.”

  I’m quite satisfied with my own cooking, thank you. “I’m afraid I’ll be busy getting ready for the new class.”

  Dorothy nodded, sipping. “Did you go back with your parents?”

  “Yes.” Straight back to Cheltenham after the funeral; her mother had wept all the way on the train, as if she’d saved up all her
feelings during Rob’s life. Passengers had grabbed the adjoining seats triumphantly, then had hastily retreated. Clare’s father had leaned forward at intervals to pat his wife’s hand; he’d gazed grimly at the rushing landscape.

  “I stayed for a fortnight,” Clare said. “It took my mother that long to begin to recover. My father asked me to stay, because he couldn’t cope. She did love Rob, you see. It just shows, love isn’t the point, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s what you do that counts. When I was coming back they gave me all sorts of things—money, a handbag because mine was tatty, a new carving set. I just wished they’d given more to Rob, more of themselves.” She shook herself: in a minute she’d have them back at the mortuary again. “What about your parents?” she said. “Wouldn’t you feel better if you went to live at home for a while?”

  “This is my home. I love my parents very much, but I won’t live there again. That would be admitting defeat. Particularly when they’re in the same town, that would make it more of a defeat somehow. “This place is cheap enough. I’ve got my job, and Bob had quite a lot of insurance, you know—he bought some as soon as we got married. But I want to make my own way. That’s why I went back to work as soon as I could. I’ve got to be able to fend for myself completely. I don’t want looking after.”

  She was looking steadily at Clare. Clare thought: You’re not implying I need looking after, are you? Suddenly an idea caught her. All through her visit she had felt Dorothy preparing tensely for something: her tale of the mortuary, of course. But had the mortuary anecdote been aimed at her? Had the woman wanted to upset her in order to comfort her? Was Dorothy looking for someone new to look after? My God, she thought. The woman is sick. “I must go home and get on with my work,” she lied, gulping her coffee.