Doll

by Nicky Singer

Tilly’s mouth is a line, but she nods. “Normality,” she says.

  “Yes,” he replies, relieved. To look up at the night sky and sees stars, not grandfathers.

  “Normal parents,” says Tilly. “A mother, a father. An ordinary house, where they slept together. Ate together. A clean sofa. Quietness. No one ever shouted in that house, Jan. Ever. I loved being in that house. It didn’t seem to have any secrets.”

  To hear the night wind and not the mumbo jumbo, that was what Mercy offered Jan. She held out the promise that the stars wouldn’t clamour in his ears. But having the stars clamour in his ears is all that Jan knows, all he understands.

  “And also she liked me,” Tilly says. “Mercy liked me. Made me feel – not odd. More than this. Special.”

  “Yes,” he says, “that is her gift.” And he needn’t tell Tilly about how his body jangled when Mercy was near, because it wasn’t that, or not only that. Besides, if bodies were jigsaws, Tilly’s is his fitting piece, his leg lying so very exactly against hers.

  “Make-Believe,” Tilly continues. “I deserved that. I called Mercy a liar. Because she saw. Saw my mother in a pool of vomit. And I wanted it not to be. It was me who lied. Lied about Mercy. Lied to myself. Tilly Make-Believe.”

  “Enough,” says Jan. He puts his finger to Tilly’s lips. “It’s over.”

  “Is it?”

  “Walk forward, Tilly Weaver.”

  “Tilly M. Weaver,” she says.

  “Tilly … Mountain Weaver,” he replies.

  “Mountain!” she exclaims.

  “Yes. Tilly Mountain Weaver, Tilly Music Weaver, Tilly…Metamorphosis, Tilly Mourning and Moving-On. Tilly Mystery and Magic. Tilly Mine. Mine?” His finger has moved, to cup her chin.

  “Tilly yours?” She gives it back to him as a question. As though she cannot admit to his wanting her. And maybe he hasn’t made it clear, because he too is afraid. But she hasn’t moved his hand.

  “Tilly Mine,” he says and draws her nearer still.

  “Tilly Moondrop?” she whispers.

  And he nods, for there she is, a piece of the dark sky, broken off from the night, fallen to earth, bright in his arms.

  18

  I have good days and bad days. Sometimes I think Jan is my prince and I am his Cinderella and we will both live happily ever after. But I know that’s just a story and perhaps I’ve told too many stories. I’m good at them, of course, but also frightened of them. I know what they can do to you. I need to find some truth. Jan says truth is fluid, he says you have to see with your heart as well as your eyes. There was truth, he says, in my red roses, my candles, my cinnamon incense. And in Gerda. But I have to be careful because I’ve been to a place where I lost track, where there were so many lies, I could trust no one, especially not myself.

  Trust.

  I still find that difficult. Some part of Gerda – which is some part of me – still whispers in my ear: “How could he love you? How could anyone love you?”

  Jan says, how could he not love me when I contain mountains, oceans, rivers?

  “And puddles,” I say. “And stagnant ponds. And ice.”

  “Yes,” he says, “of course.”

  And how, he adds, could he not love me when I have freed his tongue to speak? He reminds me how I accused him of having a problem talking. “And now,” he says, “now!” He claims that I made it – make it – possible for him to say aloud things which previously he could only articulate inside his own head. And yet he is so often silent. For hours he can be silent. I can be sitting next to him and not know in which part of which universe he is in.

  “Do you understand that?” I ask.

  And he just smiles.

  “Who is this boy?” My mother, returned from the detox unit asks. “Where does he come from? How do you know him?”

  I don’t answer this question because I can’t. You see, it seems as though we’ve always known each other, some part of me recognises some part of him – and vice versa. But isn’t that just a story, the jigsaw, Yin-Yang story? It doesn’t really happen, does it? Besides Jan could just walk away.

  Then there’s Mercy. I’m still afraid of her, of course; jealous, I suppose. How Jan looks at her – and he does. Though she no longer looks at him, has other fish to fry. Adam Silcocks. Adam won the Celeb Night music section, he played Light My Fire, and Mercy, apparently, spontaneously combusted. She won the Celebrity Lookalike Contest, of course, so the pair of them had to lead the dancing, his arm around her waist (no, I didn’t see it, of course not, I was at Sanctuary Ward, but I’ve been told and I can imagine, that’s my problem, imagination), the two of them twirling together in the spotlight. And is he gorgeous or what? I did overhear that, Mercy talking on her mobile phone: “You should see him. Adam Silcocks. Is he gorgeous or what? My perfect man.”

  Perfect. That’s another thing. My perfect grandfather, Gerry. Has my grandmother told my mother about “perfect” Gerry yet? No, she has not. Grandma says my mother is still in a vulnerable state, only recently returned from hospital, she couldn’t really cope with such information at the moment, it would be kinder to wait. I wonder how long Grandma will wait? She’s already waited thirty years. Grandma’s good at waiting. But it can’t go on, I tell Jan, because otherwise I’ll tell my mother: “Guess what? Your father wasn’t a kind, loving, moral man after all. Your father was a shit.”

  Did it all start there? I sometimes wonder that. My mother growing up in the shadow of this perfect dead man, whose gap she could never fill. So whatever she did, it could never be quite good enough, never quite make up the deficit. She was, by definition, inadequate. For Grandma’s story was that Gerry loved her so much, that all other loves (my mother’s for her mother, Grandma’s for her) could only be pale shadows of that one great love. That one great lie. And then the iron hardening in my mother’s soul as her own marriage failed, proving beyond all doubt that no one could love Big the way Gerry loved Grandma. Was this it? Or could all these things have happened to another woman and that woman have laughed her way to a bigger, happier life? Jan says this is not my story and I can’t know the answers, and maybe I don’t need to know them. But I do need to know. Because I’m afraid. I am, after all, my mother’s daughter and I know what a little space it is between being tucked up warm in bed and reaching under Red Riding Hood’s skirts for that hard little bottle of Vladivar.

  “You are also,” Jan says, “your father’s daughter.”

  When he says this we both realise, with shock, how little we have thought of our fathers. “My father,” Jan says, “was a white lawyer in Santiago.” When he speaks of him, Jan always uses the past tense, as if he’s dead. And who am I not to understand that? He does not know the man’s name – was never told it and has never asked. Nor does he know whether the man had a long-standing affair with his Chilean maid, or just a hot one-night stand, or whether he raped her. The only detail he does know was that the man was married. It would probably be easier to find this nameless man in the city of Santiago than to find Violeta Veron, but Jan says he has no interest. The man does not exist for Jan.

  “I have thought so much about my mother,” Jan says, “but about him, nothing. I cannot explain why.”

  I leave the subject then. This is a pain I haven’t known, and I have to respect Jan’s quietness, his ability, for the moment, to let be. But of course I think of my own father and how I have grated against him all these years. He’s a quick, volatile man, a tiny volcano always boiling just beneath the surface. And of course I’ve blamed him, thought that if he been only a little bit slower, more tolerant, even just kinder, then things might have been different. But maybe I’m just mouthing my mother’s opinions. When I think of my father, I frame him so often in her words. The trouble with you, Richard, is you always go off at the deep end. I try to stand back, look at him afresh. It’s not easy. My responses – her responses – are so ingrained. Small body, small mind. And simply: I hate you. But why would I hate him? I retreated into my stories, he r
etreated into his work. Was that so bad, so very different? Oh, come on! He was a workaholic long before I was an alcoholic, can’t you see the connection?

  Shush, Mama. Please shush.

  I make this resolution at least. I will take more interest in my father. Typical for it to be that way round. I will be interested in what interests him, menus and the emptying of bins and problems with the laundry. I’ll be patient, make suggestions. Wait until, perhaps, I see a glimmer of other things in him – and he in me. I will no longer lay my mother’s anger at his feet, her resentment. And then we will see. Oh, you’ll see all right.

  Enough, Mama. Because you must have loved him once, so there must have been something to love. Besides, if I can be a stagnant pond and also an ocean maybe my father can be a roaring volcano and also a warm hearth.

  Fat chance.

  Be silent, Mama!

  Why have I let her so dominate me? Why loved her so much, so blindly? I can’t answer these questions, except perhaps to say that not loving her would have been even more frightening. Jan says maybe we should practise hating our mothers. Set a little time aside every day when we allow ourselves our loathing. I haven’t got there yet. Of course I know, or rather I accept, that Mama can be weak, selfish, vindictive. But there is a difference between what the mind knows and the heart believes. Besides, she is still my Big.

  When she came out of detox, I went with Grandma to fetch her. Grandma parked in the hospital car park. She didn’t mention this fact and nor did I. But it felt like progress. As did the fact that we went up to the ward together. Marcia Wells, the staff nurse, was on duty; she gave me a leaflet, pressed it into my hand. It tells you all about something called “A Merry-Go-Round named Denial”. Even the title made me want to laugh. And cry. They’ve made up characters, like in a story. One’s called the Enabler, the person who sees the alcoholic doesn’t suffer from their drinking, rescues them like you would a drowning man. And I think back to that time when my father left and Grandma moved straight into our house. She did it, she said, to protect me, to give me some sort of security. But now I think maybe she did it to protect the old illusion, the one that our family was perfect, is perfect. But then, if Grandma hadn’t cleared up the sick, I certainly would have done. So I’m an Enabler too. I too am to blame.

  “You are not to blame,” Jan says.

  I’m afraid of losing Jan. I’m afraid of needing him so much I’ll crush him.

  “Don’t be afraid,” says Jan. “You can’t lose me because you don’t own me.”

  I think at first, in saying this, he is refusing me, pushing me away. But he says it holding me. And this is also something I have to learn, how to hold and also let free.

  “Relax,” he says, “Tilly Moondrop.”

  Moondrop! What a ridiculous name to choose. I don’t know why I said it that day. I feel so far from any such thing. The most insignificant setback can reduce me, make me crushed and small again.

  “If I say it enough times,” Jan says, “perhaps you’ll believe it, grow into it. Your name after all. You chose it. What put it in your head?”

  Just being with him that day, I suppose, feeling confident enough to risk, feeling he wouldn’t laugh. And he didn’t laugh, has never laughed at me. I hold on to that.

  “Anyway,” he says, “you are my perfect drop of moonlight.”

  “Don’t say perfect.”

  “OK, my perfectly imperfect drop of moonlight.”

  “Are you laughing at me?”

  “No.”

  Perhaps, to be really strong, I need him to be able to laugh at me and for it not to matter. But I can’t think that far ahead. I have to take one day at a time. They say my mother is in recovery. I’m in recovery too. She goes to Alcoholics Anonymous and drinks spring water. I go to the bridge and drink Jan. He is the first person who has loved me who didn’t need to, who wasn’t supposed to. Then I worry that I’ve just substituted Jan for my mother, that I’m like some clingy little barnacle who just can’t ever be by herself.

  “So maybe you make a good barnacle.”

  “Are you laughing at me?”

  “Perhaps.”

  So things do change, quietly, slowly. Jan comes to my house. Rings the front-door bell, walks in my hall, sits in my living room, eats in my kitchen. Grandma makes him food. My mother makes him food. My mother. She makes hash browns, without any fuss, as though it was an ordinary thing. We spend time in my room, listening to music, being silent together. Touching.

  The house does not smell of vomit. It doesn’t even smell of disinfectant. Though each time before Jan comes, I go about, sniffing. Polish, candlewax, dust, incense. I don’t think it’s the happy ending. It never has been before. My mother has always relapsed. But I’m trying to be grateful, to allow tomorrow to take care of itself.

  When we go to the bridge (and we do go, Jan and I) I never think to run any more. I cannot imagine a single reason for running the bridge. I want to live. That too is a change.

  Where we lit the fire beneath the elderflower, there is a blackened pile of ash.

  “Something will grow,” Jan says, “eventually.”

  So I always go to look. I feel there’s something sacred about this piece of earth. A new beginning, a new hope. That, because of what happened here, this ground has the power to sanctify the past, bless the future. Yet it is six months before I see the first tiny push of green. I run.

  “Jan, look!”

  He comes to me, looks.

  “It’s a nettle,” he says.

  “A White Dead Nettle?” I hope.

  He kneels down, observes the tiny jagged leaves. “No, a stinging nettle.”

  My face falls. Jan laughs.

  “Tilly,” he says, “even the stars are only so much gas and dust.”

  Acknowledgements

  Many people helped make this book. I particularly thank those brave enough to share personal or family stories of alcoholism and self-harm: notably Justina, Lea, Deano, and my own sister, Jane. Dr Hugh Williams was a generous and informative guide on the Substance Misuse Service (any errors are mine) and I’m particularly grateful to the patients of the Westbourne Hospital for their honesty and their trust.

  I pay tribute to all those who spoke to me of adoption, especially Vanessa Gebby, Alex Boyd and my dreamer of dreams, Tom Russell. I learned from all of them.

  I’m grateful to Gary Stewart, who knows more about markets than most, and to Richard Curd who allowed me to prowl round his excellent Brighton restaurant Richard’s Brasserie. Any dried sea-sponges or blood-letting are entirely my own invention.

  I thank teenagers Charlotte Goodman and Laura Hopkins: Charlotte for advice on teenage girls and Laura for reading the manuscript for neanderthal expressions.

  I thank, as always, my agent Clare Conville, who makes my life happy.

  Lastly I send a big hug to Gillie Russell, Publishing Director at HarperCollins. She knows what she did. Thank you, Gillie.

  About the Author

  Nicky Singer was born in 1956 and has worked in publishing, the arts and television. She began her writing career at the age of 15, with lyrics for a cantata Jonah and the Whale, and has since written four adult novels – To Still a Child, To Have and to Hold, What She Wanted and Her Mother’s Daughter – and two works of non-fiction – The Tiny Book of Time (with Kim Pickin) and The Little Book of the Millennium (with Jackie Singer). Her first children’s book, Feather Boy, won the Blue Peter Children’s Book Award and has sold in eighteen countries. She was co-founder and co-director (1987–1996) of Performing Arts Labs, a charity dedicated to training new writers for theatre, screen and opera. In 1995 she presented BBC2’s highly acclaimed documentary series on women’s fertility, Labours of Eve, and wrote the preface to the book which accompanied the series. Nicky Singer lives in Brighton with her husband, their two sons and a daughter.

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  “Cleverly and economically written, this witty, observant and moving book is a comic and contemporary drama about courage, love, memory and the power of stories.”

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  “feather boy is the most intelligent book for youngsters I’ve read for a very long time. Every 12-year-old will see a bit of themself in Robert and won’t be able to put this book down until feather boy‘s emotional, thought-provoking climax. Fabulous.”

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  “feather boy is more than just a story about Bullying. It’s bigger than that. It’s about finding your voice, shouting from the rooftops about something you believe in, refusing to back down, never giving up. It’s enormously uplifting.”

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  “feather boy is simply fabulous…an emotionally intense suspense novel of the highest order.”

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  “A joy to read…A fascinating, emotional and captivating book that deserves wide recognition.”

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  “Something unique and special.”

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  Also by Nicky Singer

  Feather Boy

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain by CollinsFlamingo 2003

  HarperCollins Children's Books

  an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,