The Candle Dancer / The Way That You Found Me by Patrick Holland Read Free Book Online Page A

will.’
    Encouraged by this, Lotta said:
    ‘Dolfo dress always as girl. Or girl and boy, all mixed up. It’s no good. Nothing good can come of it.’
    I nodded, to acknowledge her opinion, not because I agreed. Doll was as she was: to be otherwise would be a lie.
    Doll was lying stretched out on a floral couch in front of the TV, her large and bony feet clad in men’s slippers. She wore flannel pyjamas and a men’s velour dressing gown, one pocket of which was weighted with a flat, rectangular object.
    ‘Suzy,’ she said. ‘So glad you came. I was sorry to hear about Carl.’
    ‘Oh, don’t be.’
    Doll eased herself upright. She was so thin she looked ethereal. It was the first time I’d seen her face bare since school and I was shocked by the shadowy roots showing in her white hair.
    ‘Come with me into the front room,’ she said.
    She moved slowly, as though her bones hurt.
    The front room smelled unused, and the yellow-gold couches felt stiff as always. I sat on one of them and kicked off my shoes so that I could rub my feet on the thick carpet, a burnt sienna colour swirled with white. Doll opened the lid of a record player.
    ‘CDs passed Lotta by. If you gave her a USB stick she’d probably use it to scrape off burnt beans from the bottom of the pan. I appreciate vinyl more now. The famous crackle. The sound quality.’
    She slipped a big black disc onto the player and handed me the album cover. It was a sepia photograph of young woman in front of a ploughed field, the rows vanishing into a haze of light. The woman stood in profile, her arms folded and her eyes closed.
    ‘Sibylle Baier,’ said Doll.
    ‘Where did you find this?’
    Doll had a history of finding amazing old records at garage sales and in op shops. She gave a self-conscious, chattering sort of laugh.
    ‘Oh,
that
was released on CD. She wrote the songs in the seventies and her son released them only a few years ago—I had to wait for it to come out on vinyl!’
    ‘She looks… sort of plain.’
    In fact, I found the image very inviting in its effortless evocation of another time.
    ‘Not my usual style, you mean?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Just listen.’
    Doll dropped the needle onto the groove and I heard Baier’s voice, captured in what sounded like the rawness of a home recording. Just her sweet voice and a guitar, creating an atmosphere so intimate it seemed to transport us to the seventies—probably when Lotta’s room was furnished. Baier seemed to be right there beside us, singing for our ears only of sad things that had happened to her. I found myself humming, enthralled by its lack of guile. We listened to the whole album, wordless. We hadn’t done such a thing since our school days.
    ‘I can see why you like it,’ I said.
    ‘It makes me think of my own mother. Well, what I imagine she might have been like,’ said Doll, whose eyes looked shiny. ‘Lotta says she used to play the guitar with me tucked on her lap, behind it. I don’t remember her.’
    I got up, knelt over her and gave her an awkward hug. I kissed the top of her head, fragrant with her favourite coconut shampoo.
    ‘That’s awful,’ I said, sitting down again. Doll had no parents at all. No-one knew the identity of her father. I thought of my father, always barracking for me; to the point where he’d given up his garage and paid for it to be made over into a studio. Now the studio was empty: I needed another band to make his investment worthwhile.
    ‘If my mother had lived, I think I’d be a more peaceful person. She would have understood me. No-one does. Not really. No,’ she said, reading my expression. ‘You don’t. You think you do, but I’m just a pin-board of your ideas.’
    I shrugged.
    ‘If you say so.’
    ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be an in-between person. Androgynous.’
    ‘But you’re not truly androgynous. You’re a boy who dresses as a girl.’
    Doll studied me for a moment. I couldn’t read her expression.
    ‘Channeling