Doll by Nicky Singer Read Free Book Online Page A

dumbwaiter speaks. Food for Table Seven, it says. And I know what I will do.
    “No,” says Gerda.
    But I have my hand in my pocket and I’m scraping out those chilli bits and those hot, hot chilli seeds and that smear of Luca’s blood. Why else would I have brought them? And I’m lifting the white flesh of the fish.
    “No,” says Gerda.
    I know they are having fish, mother and daughter, because I saw the fish knives and forks when I went to the table. The beef must be for Jan and his mother. But the fish … Beneath the fillet is a soft run of juices and it’s there that I tuck the red choppings and the yellow seeds and those petals of Luca’s blood.
    “What are you doing?” asks Aaron.
    “Janey asked me to take this,” I say. And I push Gerda down, because she’s moving in my apron pocket.
    I load the plates on to a tray and then I’m off, gliding, very calmly, across the chequered floor to Table Seven.

6
    Jan is at home, upstairs in his room. It is cool here and quiet. He can breathe. Though he will not, he thinks, be alone long. The women are downstairs. His mother and Mrs Van Day, sitting in the drawing room, retelling the story of the restaurant. Getting the details right: the look on Tilly’s face, the choking, the fracas, the arrival of Tilly’s father (summoned from his office by the restaurant manager). The generous, extenuating pity.
    “Of course it’s to do with the poor girl’s mother.”
    Mercy is sitting downstairs too. Talking, joining in as required. But also waiting. She has, he thinks, something to say, something private. So she will follow him. Yes. He is expecting her. Her smell still in his nostrils. Sweet and bitter and sexy.
    Meanwhile, there is a little time and he needs that time. The doll will rest no longer. Tilly’s doll. He has it in his pocket. While she was poised with the tray, he put his hand around that mass of black doll hair and pulled. There was no resistance at all. The doll just slid out of Tilly’s apron and into his trouser pocket. It was a silent thing, though his heart pounded.
    He takes the doll out now and puts it in the palm of his hand. It lies there like a stiff star, its arms and legs pulled away from its trunk. Its blue sequin eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling. It is bland, inert. He fingers it gently, its various skins, the black leather and the white, the coloured velvets. Nothing.
    What did he expect? That the doll would move, rear up? Speak to him? Yield its secrets just because he was looking?
    He touches again. This time stroking the stitches, the ugly black slashes about the doll’s white throat. Stitches that, at a distance, made him feel that this doll was a wound. More than this, that the doll was evil. The incubus that drove the girl to take her life in her hands at the bridge, who willed her to push burning seeds into the mouths of the Van Days. At the doll’s ankles are similar stitches, large, misshapen, but nothideous. No. Close to, the stitching seems merely desperate. Sad even. As though a child had made this doll, under duress, punching the needle in and out, not caring about the colour of the cotton or the size of the stitches, just wanting the job done, finished. But that’s not right either, because there is love in this doll too. The big, smiling (if lopsided) mouth, the soft and many coloured velvets, the red bracelet. The tiny glass beads painstakingly assembled, although the elastic is too tight. It bites into the white flesh of the doll’s wrist.
    Jan does not understand. He concentrates, conjures again the girl’s face, reconstructs her fury. The way she looked at him up at the bridge, as though he was an intruder. And then again, at the restaurant table, the same look, an anger which made him feel … what? At fault. As though she both hated and required something of him. And so he’d acted. Pulled the doll from her pocket as he might have pulled the key from a maddened piece of clockwork. Thinking that he could make