The Killing Doll (7 page)

He got off the line at Stapleton Hall Road and walked to Crouch Hill Station. There was a real railway line there and a real train that would take him to Brondesbury near his sister Kathleen’s. It was nearly six when he got there. He walked along the concrete path and up the two concrete steps and rang at the door.

Kathleen had just come in from work and her husband had just gone off to work. Before he went, he had told her that her brother Diarmit had been on the phone, on the scrounge too by the sound of it, no work, on the dole, and hadn’t they had enough of her family, for God’s sake? Kathleen didn’t know what to do. She was tired, she was pregnant, and they hadn’t got a spare room anyway. And everyone knew what Diarmit was, going to Mary for a fortnight and stopping three years. He had been funny ever since that bomb.

For all that, she meant to have him in, she meant to talk to him and explain. It was the sight of him and the stink of him that unnerved her. He looked as if he hadn’t had a wash for a month and he smelt of old vegetables. Dressed in dirty dark red, his face pale like clay, a carrier bag over one arm and the other hand stretched out towards her waving a paper, he frightened her so much that she stood there staring and quivering for a moment in silence. She smelled his smell and the heartburn she had came up and scalded her throat. She pushed the door and shut it in his face and leaned against it, breathing hard.

Diarmit knew she had not seen him because he did not exist anymore. He had had that feeling before, that he did not exist, after the bomb in Belfast. But since then he had recovered his being more or less consistently, only occasionally had he doubted that he was there. Now he knew for certain he had become invisible and inaudible, no one could see or hear him and it had been going on at that level ever since the morning when he went hunting round Sainsbury’s for the butchery department. They had tried to take away his existence so that they wouldn’t have to give him a job, and they had succeeded if Kathleen couldn’t see him, if his own sister didn’t know him.

And now, as once previously, he was aware of how large the things of the world were. He felt very small. Most people, even children, were much bigger than him, buses and cars were enormous, seeking to mow him down, roaring at him, as he crossed Kilburn High Road. It was useless to attempt to go back by train. The man would not hear him ask for a ticket, even supposing he were tall enough to reach the ticket window. He would walk. Though it was a long way, six or seven miles, on this fine sunny evening he would walk. He felt the hard sharp edges of his knives through the green plastic and they comforted him. With them he would defend himself if the big people, not seeing or hearing him, tried to trample him underfoot.

Up in his room, Conal Moore’s room, he felt safer. He was like an insect, safe in its cranny in the wall but in peril when it has to run across the floor. An insect can sting feet with the knives in its belly. Diarmit held the Harrods bag close against him as he climbed the stairs.

Two people came running down from the top, laughing, making a noise. He flattened himself against the wall so that they should not bowl him over and sweep him down as they passed. Inside the room it was better. He made a pot of tea, he slept. But after that he began to feel besieged and threatened. He felt that his life was in danger; what ego he still had, which he knew he had but which the others, the Conal Moores and the supermarket people, discounted, that was in danger. During the day he was aware that the house emptied, it was a hive only by night. He went down listening outside doors for sounds of life within. It was entirely silent but for music coming from behind one door.

The Dalmatian and the mongrel collie ran about the green, scavenging from litter bins. They looked very large to Diarmit even from this distance. Next to Mount Pleasant Hall they were pulling down a row of old houses and the air was yellow and thick with plaster dust. Next they would pull this one down. Diarmit understood how it would be. There was no one in the house but himself and he was as invisible as an insect, so they would pull the house down around him, now knowing he was there or not caring. They would care no more for him than they would for the woodlice and mites and spiders and silverfish that also lived in the house. He would be crushed in the rubble, overwhelmed by a cloud of yellow dust. He sat in the window and trembled.

By night it was safe. The workmen did nothing after five, he had observed that. He could come back to the house at night and hide there all night but by day he must be gone, taking whatever he valued with him. He might come back and find that the house had disappeared but that was a risk he must take.

Next day, after they had all pounded out of the house, banging doors, laughing, crashing down the stairs, they made enough noise for devils in hell, he crept out with his knives in the Harrods bag. He carried them as a wasp carries its sting or a security guard his gun. There was no doubt in his mind where he was going; he had it all worked out. Down the steps in Mount Pleasant Gardens and on to the old railway line where it spread out wide in a grassy valley, on to where it narrowed at the old Mount Pleasant Green station, and thence to the Mistley tunnel.

The tunnel was as dry as it ever got inside. It had an earthy oily smell and there were feathers everywhere. That mattress must have contained a million little white and gray feathers, for thousands had come out and blown away, had embedded themselves in the clay or adhered to the curved roof or lay in quivering heaps, yet the old torn mattress was still cushiony, still padded with down. Diarmit sat down on it and took his knives out of the bag.

From where he sat, well back under the curve of the roof, he could command a view of both the tunnel’s openings. He could assess what kind of a threat presented itself. As for himself, no one could see him, so there was no need to be hidden. But after a while he raised the mattress up on its side edge, making it into a curving wall which he propped in place with a roll of rusty wire netting and an oil drum. It was not for concealment but protection. He squatted behind it, as in a dugout or behind a windbreak, and it did protect him. Three or four people came through the tunnel, one walking towards Highgate, the others to Mount Pleasant, and although they were giant, lumbering, hostile creatures, their bodies nearly filling the tunnel space, none of them even brushed against the mattress and he was safe.

Diarmit understood then that he had found a way to live. Each night he could sleep in the room but by day he must come here, wary and armed, and station himself behind his barricade.

7

T
he doll, Mrs. Collins said, was exactly what Wendy wanted. No, she didn’t think ten pounds too much, ten pounds was very reasonable. Wendy wanted it as a birthday present for the little girl whose godmother she was. The doll was very obviously a little girl itself with a pink smiling face and yellow plaits and scarlet shirt and blue checked pinafore dress. Dolly had made several, all different, since the Myra doll and had had no difficulty in selling them.

Mrs. Collins gave Dolly a ten-pound note which Dolly, crossing the road from Mrs. Collins’s little terraced cottage in Orchard Lane, spent on stocking up with wine at the off-license. Five bottles, wrapped in tissue in two carriers.

It was a dull warm, white-skied summer day. Dolly climbed up the steps and got on to the old railway line by the bridge in Northwood Road. A woman was walking along with a white Pyrenean mountain dog on a lead. Dolly was wearing a pink and yellow and brown plaid cotton dress with a wide brown belt, tights, and low-heeled sandals. The tights were new, on for the first time, and to protect them she decided not to climb up the embankment but to go through the Mistley tunnel to the station and up the steps.

It was absolutely dry underfoot; there had been no rain for a fortnight. Usually it was a bit muddy inside the tunnel but not today. Footprints and cycle tire marks were etched in the hard, pale, feather-strewn clay. Dolly walked through the tunnel, carrying her bags of wine bottles. Someone had stacked the mattress up on its side and propped it up with an oil drum and some wire. Perhaps, rather, the council or the railway people or somebody or other were collecting up the rubbish in here at last before taking it away. Dolly nearly went over to the mattress to see, at closer quarters, if it did look as if some genuine tidying work had been done, but she thought better of it. The bags were heavy, and the smelly dirty old tunnel was no place in which to linger.

She mounted the steps. In Manningtree Grove, outside the house, she paused for a moment. Myra had lost no time in revitalizing the garden. The Michaelmas daisies and Solomon’s seal were all gone and in their place she had planted annuals—lobelias and tagetes and petunias—and these were in flower. Dolly was not one of those people who think all flowers beautiful and here she thought the juxtaposition of cobalt blue, orange, and shocking pink particularly inharmonious. Gingie, for once, was sitting on the post.

“Get off!” said Dolly and clapped her hands. The cat fled.

She let herself into the house but not quietly or cautiously. It was a Monday and Myra worked till lunchtime.

“Doreen!”

Dolly froze. The door to the front room opened and Myra came out, wearing jade green dungarees and a navy-and-white striped T-shirt.

“Caught at last,” said Myra but not unpleasantly. “I always seem to see the tail end of you disappearing. Now I’ve got you, come in here and give me the benefit of your advice.”

“Why aren’t you at work?”

These were practically the first words Dolly had ever addressed to her but Myra gave no sign that she realized this. “I’ve started a fortnight’s holiday, my dear. I’m going to begin on the painting tomorrow. Now don’t look like that!” Dolly hadn’t looked like anything. Her face, as usual, was expressionless. “Yes, I mean me with my own two hands,” Myra said. “To be perfectly honest with you, I spent so much on converting your kitchen I can’t afford to have the men in again.”

“They only put a sink in,” said Dolly, “and we didn’t want that.”

Myra gave her tinkling laugh. “Oh, well, that’s frank if you like. We won’t argue about it. I didn’t bring you in here to argue. I want you to tell me what color scheme you think I ought to have.”

This was something Dolly had plenty of ideas about. For a moment she forgot her hatred of Myra. “It’s a light room. You could have a strong color. You could have a white ceiling and brilliant white paintwork and deep russet walls. That would tone in with the carpet and those chairs.”

Myra was astonished. She had spoken to Dolly because she had genuinely thought it would be better to be on speaking terms with her. But in answer to her question she had expected some such rejoinder as “I don’t know” or “Whatever you like.” “I’m not keeping that filthy old carpet or those chairs,” she said scornfully. “I’m having haircord and stripped pine. And I think a natural beige for the walls, there’s a shade they call papyrus.”

“Suit yourself.” Dolly shrugged her shoulders. It was still early in the day but she suddenly felt she needed a glass of wine badly and she made for the door.

Myra had hoped for an offer of help which she now saw she wasn’t going to get. She remembered, though, the original purpose of accosting Dolly. “Want a coffee? I was just going to have one.”

Coffee was no substitute for a tumblerful of Spanish burgundy. “No, thanks.”

“Well, if I can’t twist your arm, I can’t. Come and inspect the work, though, will you? I hope to have a good bit done by Friday. Come and have a look and tell me what you think. We ought to be friends, Doreen, two girls living in the same house.”

Instead of putting up the real objections to Myra as usurper and iconoclast, Dolly chose a less obvious impediment. There was little she had to be proud of but she was proud and jealous of her youth. While she had her youth, miracles could still happen, her blind prince might come or some genius find a cure. “You’re older than me,” she said.

“A little bit,” Myra said, going red.

“I’m twenty-six. How old are you?”

The flush deepened. “When I’m asked that I usually say ‘somewhere between thirty and death.’ To be perfectly honest with you, I’m thirty-eight.”

“I thought so.” Dolly picked up her bags and went off upstairs.

She poured herself a big glass of wine and sat down to drink it. Four dolls sat on the mantelpiece, two little girls with yellow plaits, Myra, and an Indian boy doll in a silk turban. Dolly sipped her wine, watched by the dolls.

“Sunbeach” was the name of the color Myra chose for the living room, a compromise between her choice and Dolly’s. She thought Dolly might come down and see how she was getting on but Dolly did not. She worked every day and when she had finished the living room she started on the dining room, bought cheap but smart-looking brown haircord to carpet the floors and a three-piece suite in pine with brown-and-white check cotton upholstery. Pup looked in sometimes to give her a kindly word of encouragement, and occasionally Harold, conscious of the huge sacrifice he was making on the altar of marriage, turned his back on the shabby delightful solitude of the breakfast room and sat reading his book in a chair by her stepladder.

After that initial nasty feeling that he was indulging in necrophilia, Harold had only twice made love to his wife and neither time had been particularly satisfactory. For a while he was uneasy about denying her what he thought of as a wife’s right. He lay in bed waiting for the touch or the question, and when neither came but instead a cheerful “Good night, Hal,” he felt he had been given another night’s reprieve. But in fact, though he knew nothing of this, Myra had not married him for love, still less for sex. She had had all the sex, and indeed all the passion and fulfillment, she had wanted with the married man. She was a trumpery, shallow, insincere woman was Myra, but she had her happinesses and her miseries like anyone else and for her, all the happiness of love had gone when the married man went. In a husband, in Harold, she wanted a man to go about with and be seen with, someone of the opposite sex to talk to, and a provider of a big house and the security it brought. She was not dissatisfied with her bargain, and all the better if she could honor her part of it with her skills and her savings rather than a pretense of sexual enthusiasm.