Ramsey Campbell - 1976 - The Doll Who Ate His Mother (3 page)

 
          
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 congregation. 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.”