Holes for Faces (20 page)

How long did he have to spend at perfecting the use of the toothbrush on the teeth a face was baring in the mirror? Only the fear that his mother would see that he’d changed sent him to bed. The bed was a boat in which he was floating away from explosions on a beach, and then he was brought home by the soundtrack– the thud of the front door, the trundling of the bicycle along the hall, the thump of the dropped rucksack. Other noises followed—some that he was embarrassed to overhear—but the impact of the rucksack left an echo in his skull. It brought him out of his room once he believed his mother was asleep.

A streetlamp lowered its bulbous head to watch him through the window over the front door. Suppose his mother had left the pages with Midge? They were in the rucksack, and he took them into the front room. Since he couldn’t risk switching the light on, he tiptoed to the window and unfolded the crumpled wad in the glare from the street. Except for the poster for a showing of all five Chucky films and a talk about them, the sheets were copies of newspaper reports. Fifteen years ago but less than a mile away, two boys not even his age had tortured a toddler to death. Several newspapers blamed a Chucky film, and one said
For the sake of ALL our kids…BURN YOUR VIDEO NASTY.
The bold letters seemed to glisten like the stitches on Chucky’s face. He wasn’t so easily destroyed, even if the cinemas in Liverpool had banned him. He’d made some young kidnappers use his voice while they were torturing a girl, and it had been Chucky’s idea for a seven-year-old Liverpool boy to stab his mother’s friend twenty-one times with a kitchen knife. Newspapers had tried to have him stopped, but two more films had been made about him, though they hadn’t been shown in Liverpool. Now he was getting his way there too. No wonder he was grinning, and as Robbie stared into the gleeful eyes the expression tugged at his own mouth.

It must be all right to watch the films when you were old enough—otherwise the dockland cinema wouldn’t be allowed to show them. The showing was for adults only, but videos didn’t need to be. If Duncan could watch them, Robbie could; he wasn’t going to let his mother make his friend despise him. He was years older than any of the boys Chucky had manipulated. Maybe they’d all been young enough to play with dolls and believe in them along with Christmas and fathers and the other things that went away as you grew up. Being frightened of films must do, and it was time it did. Robbie folded the pages and stowed them in the rucksack and took his grin to bed.

He always felt dull the morning after he’d had a smoke, but his mother brightened him. “Good job we’ve got that dinner,” she said over breakfast. “We’re at Midge’s again. They have to be stopped, those films.”

She was on her way to work at Frugo in the mall by the time he left the house. He joined the parade of boys and girls in black and white, which seemed to lead to a funeral for the past—a Liverpool history lesson where most of his classmates were silent as mourners. He didn’t have a chance to speak to Duncan until the morning break. As they emerged into the corridor Duncan said “I’ve got them.”

“Chucky.”

As Duncan’s grin confirmed this, a girl they didn’t even know demanded “What about him?”

“We’re going to see him,” Robbie said.

“My mother says nobody should out of respect.”

“That’s what crows get,” said Duncan.

She and her friend blinked blankly in unison. “They’ll bring him back,” the other girl said with an extravagant shudder.

“Who will?” Robbie protested in case he was being accused.

“Anyone that watches him.”

“Anyone that does when they know they shouldn’t,” said her friend. “That’s like trying to call him up.”

“It’s like calling up a demon so you’ll get possessed,” the first girl said.

“These won’t, though.”

Their scorn provoked Robbie to blurt “Why won’t we?”

“They’ll never let you in to see those films.”

“We don’t care. We—”

“We’ll get in anyway,” Duncan interrupted. “Chucky’ll let us in so we can see him.”

He mustn’t want the girls to know about the viewing session at his house. He wasn’t quite as reckless as he liked Robbie to think. The girls scoffed at him and ran into the schoolyard as Duncan muttered “I’ve got two for tonight. I’ll text you when.”

For the rest of the day Robbie was dry-mouthed and brittle-skulled and barely able to sit still. He had to at dinner so that his mother wouldn’t notice. “Lots of homework again?” she said.

“Like last night.”

This was cleverer than usual, because she didn’t realise. He must be growing up. “Never mind, you’ve got all evening,” she told him.

He was altering an article about the slums of Victorian Liverpool when his mobile took a message.
shes gon cum ruond
, it said.

Comming
, Robbie responded. His head tingled and throbbed while he searched for words to change so that he could leave the house. Televisions relayed images from room to room all the way along the street to the Jawbone Tavern. Duncan and his mother lived in a house as small as Robbie’s almost opposite the pub. His friend and a smell of skunk met Robbie at the front door. “Better be ready for this,” Duncan said.

Robbie hesitated, only to see several men emerging from the pub for presumably another kind of smoke. Duncan raised two fingers, displaying the joint and gesturing at the men. “Get some of that. Last night’s was for wimps.”

“Not out here. Someone might see.”

“I don’t want her smelling it in the house.” With a protracted red-eyed look Duncan said “Go out the back.”

He needn’t make it seem as if Robbie’s caution were the problem. Robbie followed him along the hall, which at least was free of bicycles, and through a kitchen cluttered with furniture into the yard. He had a manly toke that made him thoroughly aware of the spectators—upstairs windows, all of them lifeless except for the wailing of a child somewhere he couldn’t locate. Before he and Duncan finished the joint he’d had enough of the windowless cell above which fireworks clawed at the sky on his behalf. “Where’s Chucky, then?” he said.

“Waiting for you.”

Duncan meant for both of them, of course. He led Robbie to the front room, where a plump couch and two undernourished chairs were miming patience at a blank television. The chair that had been on less of a diet was occupied by a romance of the Liverpool slums, while a woman’s orange cardigan sprawled across half of the couch. Duncan slipped a disc into the player and lounged beside the cardigan. “Chuck that,” he said.

Robbie laid the rumpled paperback on the carpet and propped his spine—more especially the cumbersome head it was sprouting—against the chair as child’s play started on the screen. That was the name of the film and, he supposed, what you called the mischief that the Chucky doll got up to once a killer’s spirit hid inside it. Why did everyone blame the boy who owned the doll? Why couldn’t they see that the doll was pretending to be him? They even took him to a psychiatrist for the doll to kill. At last the boy’s mother caught Chucky misbehaving and the boy helped throw him on a fire, burning him for the sake of all the kids as the paper said you should, though the mother still had to blow him to bits with a gun. Robbie was relieved she’d seen the truth at last. As he let go of the bony arms of the chair, which had apparently been bruising his hands for some time, Duncan said “Wimp.”

“Who is?”

“Him, going crying to his mam. Hope the other one’s better.”

How could the doll come back? It had grown its stitches now, but this wasn’t even its second film, and so Robbie couldn’t tell what had revived it. It killed a woman who used to go with the killer, and then it put her inside a girl doll. As that one began to speak, a noise crept into the room—giggling that ballooned into shrieks. “What’s so funny?” Robbie was panicked into asking.

“It’s Marge out of the Simpsons.”

At once Robbie recognised the croaky female voice from his mother’s favourite cartoon show. He felt isolated with the sight of Marge Simpson disguised as a doll that helped Chucky kill people. Eventually she was burned alive, which didn’t finish her off, and Chucky was exhaustively shot once again despite shouting “I’ll be back.” Didn’t someone else say that? How many films had Chucky and his partner taken over? A baby or a bloody doll popped out of her to end the film. Duncan ejected the disc and set about searching the cable channels, which fluttered past like slides snatching at the chance to move until Robbie cried “He’s there.”

Duncan jumped up, and the cardigan cowered away from him, flailing an armless arm. “Who?” he snarled, dashing to the window.

“Chucky. Not out there.”

Duncan shut the curtains and glared at Robbie, whether for unnerving him or because he hadn’t pointed out that passers-by could see what they were watching. “That’s not him.”

“It’s one of him,” Robbie protested, but as the grinning doll sprang from under a boy’s bed Duncan poked the information button to reveal it was a Spielberg film. It was meant to be about a poltergeist, which didn’t reassure Robbie. “I’d better get home before she does,” he said.

Duncan grinned like Chucky. “You’re never scared of your mam.”

“I’m not scared of any fucker or any fucking thing.”

“Better believe I’m not. My dad tried to make me scared of stupid fucking Chucky. Not my real dad, the one I got for my birthday when I was four.”

“What did he do?”

“Never mind what he done.” Having stared at Robbie, Duncan added “Said Chucky would get me if I was bad. That’s what they used to tell kids.”

Had someone once told Robbie that? It seemed uneasily familiar. “They didn’t know what they were on about,” Duncan said. “That’s not how Chucky works.”

He meant in the films, of course—he couldn’t mean anything else. “See you at school,” Robbie said.

“Shut it on your way out. I’m going to watch him give the doctor shocks again.”

The street was deserted. Lamps patched the pavements with light, which mouldered on the roofs of parked cars. If Robbie were a girl or in a film he might be daunted by the gaps between the vehicles, where a small jerky figure could dart out as its victim reached one of the stretches of pavement the lamps didn’t entirely illuminate. The only place he had to look for Chucky was on all the televisions, and he was lingering outside a window to see that no doll attacked the young couple in bed on the screen when a woman in an armchair caught sight of him. As she sprang to her feet he fled home. She didn’t chase him, but did she know where he lived? Suppose she told his mother? She couldn’t say he’d been looking for Chucky; nobody knew that, not even Duncan. Chucky was safe in his head where nobody would notice him.

The house was unlit, which meant that Robbie’s mother wouldn’t see him until he had a chance to sleep off any guilt that might escape onto his face. It didn’t look guilty in the bathroom mirror, where it foamed at the mouth while the toothbrush polished its grin. He was in bed well before his mother came home, though he couldn’t sleep. If he’d been allowed a computer in his room he would have played on it, but the games might have been too violent for his mother’s taste; she’d decided even board games were aggressive. He slept once the grinning doll subsided inside the jack-in-the-box of his head.

He thought he was behaving normally at breakfast, however dull his head felt, until his mother said “What’s the matter, Robbie? Why are you looking like that?”

“I’m not looking like anything.”

“Your eyes are. Aren’t you sleeping?”

“It’s all the stuff you’ve been saying about Chucky.”

“I won’t again. Don’t worry, we’ll be getting rid of him.” As a further comfort she said “My turn to make dinner.”

So there wasn’t a meeting. Perhaps that was why Duncan didn’t seek him out but only gave him a grin across the classroom. He joined him at the morning break, when the girl who’d accosted them yesterday caught up with them in the schoolyard. “Hope you’re happy now,” she said.

Robbie grinned, though it felt inadvertent if not meaningless. “Why?” Duncan demanded.

“Someone’s brought your Chucky back.”

“We haven’t lost him,” Robbie blurted as Duncan said louder “Who’s brought what where?”

“They’ve got him in a shop down by the Strand, in the window where everyone can see him.”

“They’ve got no respect,” her friend said.

“Nobody can stop him. He’ll get everywhere,” Duncan said, baring his teeth.

He kept the grin up until the girls left them alone. If he seemed to find it hard to abandon, that was just a joke. He made the face at any girls who looked at him and Robbie as they slouched around the yard, and the trick amused Robbie so much that he couldn’t help joining in, even if it felt as though strings were attached to the corners of his mouth. His lips had grown weary by the time the bell herded everyone into the school.

The history mistress wanted to hear stories of the past that people’s families had told them. One boy said how the government had hated Liverpool so much they’d tried to take all the jobs down south, and a girl retorted that the unions hadn’t let her dad or anybody do their jobs. “I think those are legends more than they’re history,” Mrs Picton said, and Robbie took the cue. “What about Chucky?” he said.

“What about…”

“He’s a story mams and dads tell, isn’t he? How it all started when those kids watched that film.”