Doll. Nicky Singer

your mother got a bike now?” asks Miss Pretty.

      I shake my head. Because my mother doesn’t have a bike. At least she didn’t when I left home that morning. Besides, this huge advancing thing cannot be my mother. Its head is too big. The figure stops. It takes off its hat.

      “Surprise!” it says and peals laughter.

      She swings my schoolbag round her neck, and puts me astride the bike. The saddle is wider than my splayed legs, or so it seems to me.

      “Hold on,” my mother cries and puts the hat over my head. It’s heavy and it doesn’t fit, even with the strap pulled to its tightest. I can’t breathe.

      My mother gets on in front of me.

      “Hold on,” she shouts and revs the engine. Hold on to what: the hat, the bike, my mother’s too-big waist? I glance imploringly at Miss Pretty and then we are off. Instinct alone preserves me. I dig my nails into the ridged hem of the leather jacket, I clutch and clutch. The hat bounces and throttles.

      “Isn’t it wonderful?” My mother’s voice comes by on the wind.

      “Didn’t you love it?” she says when we stop.

      “Yes,” I say. “Yes. I loved it.”

      Later, when my father finds out, he shouts at her. The first of the rows I actually remember.

      “I gave her the helmet,” my mother cries indignantly. “What’s the fuss? Anyway, she loved it. She said so. Didn’t you, Tilly?”

      Later my mother took me aside. “Pay attention, Tilly,” she said. “A bike’s not a method of transport. A bike’s freedom.”

      And it is to these bike leathers my mother took her scissors. I imagine that first impossible cut. My mother knifing through – what? The jacket? The trousers? The trousers probably. The leather thinner there. I can hear the sound, that slight crunch as the metal blades close on skin. Animal skin. And human skin. For that’s what cutting the leathers would have felt like to my mother. Like cutting her own skin. Yet she did it. For the doll.

      For me.

      What else has she cut? The doll’s bodice is velvet, a strokable patchwork of my mother’s more sumptuous tastes. A fragment of magenta, from a scarf probably. A snippet of gold, the trimming of that black evening gown, and yes, a tiny scrap of white from her “purity jacket”.

      “For atonement,” she said, kissing me and going out with my father in the days when they still did such things. I was four, I think, I didn’t know what “atonement” meant. Though it meant, for a while, that my mother stayed closer by me.

      I move on to the doll’s face. The hair is jet black and straight. You buy it in curls, so my mother must have brushed and brushed it to be like this. She has also shaped a fringe.

      “Don’t you think you’re too old to have a fringe now, Judith?” Grandma asked her.

      “No,” said my mother.

      The doll’s eyes are blue. Two startling June-sky sequins with a sewn black centre. And the mouth is smiling.

      But what’s this? This thing around the doll’s left wrist? A bracelet of tiny red glass beads, wound tight so they cut into the flesh a little. What can this mean? My mother never had anything so flimsy. She wore bone and amber and circlets of silver. And she never wore red, except on her lips. The bracelet is an impostor, I feel like ripping it off, freeing that left wrist. But this is my mother’s gift to me.

      Swing, Tilly, swing.

      “Tilly? Tilly!” It is my grandmother. She has returned. She knows where to find me.

      “Come in, Tilly,” she says. “Please.”

      I slow the swing, put my feet to the mud, slip the doll into my pocket. For the doll is just between me and my mother.

      “You must be chilled to the bone,” says Grandma.

      “I’m alive,” I say.

      “Oh, Tilly.” She takes my hand and leads me inside. I am content to be led. Now that she is holding me I feel a rush of exhaustion. I want to lie down. I want to be asleep. Although I do not expect to sleep. Not for a long time.

      She brings me to my room. Rubs and rubs my hand, as if to find blood. Then she goes to my bed and unfolds my nightdress.

      “I’ll be OK.”

      “Sure?” she asks.

      “Yes.”

      She bends to kiss me. When my grandmother was a child her father pressed a black cane against her spine to teach her the virtue of a straight back. She bends like the rod is still there. Sometimes I think there will be one kiss too many and then she’ll snap in two.

      “Goodnight,” she says, though it cannot be a good night.

      I wait till she closes the door and then I slip, naked, into bed. The doll is still in my hand. Have I been delaying this moment? No longer. I press the doll against my heart. For a moment there’s nothing. Nothing at all. All my expectations roar with panic. For there has to be something, something I can feel, something I can know, trust. And then it comes, a warmth, a small fire just beneath my hands. And of course it could just be my hands, the rubbed blood clasp of them, but I don’t think so. I think it’s the doll.

      My mother wired her dolls so they could bend, move. I watched her do it so many times. This doll has a wired spine and wired limbs. I’m not pressing now, more pulling, pulling the doll into my heart and I can feel that spine and those wires and, somewhere deeper still, the fevered thud of life. And yes, maybe it’s just my life. My heart beating. But it comforts me. So I don’t move the doll and I don’t move my hands.

      I’m still lying like this when I hear the door open again. It’s Grandma. She’s checking to see if I am asleep. I keep quite still and she doesn’t come any closer, just quietly shuts the door. The pretence suits both of us. We have lived a long time together, my grandmother and I.

      Later, I know I have slept because I wake again. And there’s a moment in that waking when I hope, I dream, that everything that has happened, has not happened. Then I see the doll. It’s moved in the night. It lies on my pillow and its face is wet. And I have this lurching idea that the doll has been crying. But maybe it was only me crying. I scoop up the doll, hold it. Hold her.

      Then I listen.

      Downstairs there is noise. Grandma, who has never slept well, is up already. I hear the clatter of her in the kitchen. She will have laid a table, put out napkins. What else will she have done?

      I rise silently and get dressed for school. We all need things to be ordinary. This is the game Grandma and I play. I tuck the doll into my skirt pocket and move with agile silence along the corridor to my mother’s room. The door is ajar.

      And of course, I do not want to enter there. I do not want to see again anything that I have seen.

      “What are you then?” my mother says. “A mouse?”

      So I go in.

      The room is tidy and the bed made, which alone proves that my mother is dead. For if my mother lived there would be mess everywhere. Drawers agape, clothes on the floor, lids off lipstick. But there is no mess. There are no candles. No cinnamon sticks. Even the flowers are gone. The window is wide open and the morning air abrasively clean. In the night, Grandma has scrubbed the carpet. Got down on her stiff knees with the disinfectant. If there were stains – if there were spots – on that carpet last night, there won’t be now. But there were no spots. There were just rose petals, red rose petals. That was all. I was there. It was a good death, the death she would have wanted.

      “Always tell the truth, Tilly,” says my mother. “The truth is important. Yes?”

      “Tilly.” It’s Grandma calling. “Is that you?” I move quickly into the corridor, pretend that I’ve just come from the bathroom.