Forever Shores (23 page)

‘The store didn't have any of them.'

I was disappointed. Part of me couldn't believe that I
was
disappointed, while the other half of me was dealing with the actual disappointment. Behind me, I heard Dad standing, but by the time I turned around, he had already left the kitchen and was making his way outside.

We watched the videos after dinner. Dad and Angela sat on the couch and I lay on the beanbag in front of them. Dad had rented six videos, each with a couple of episodes on them, and I must have been really tired or they must have been really boring, because I fell asleep through the middle of the second one. The Doctor was this old guy, and there were these robots that were supposed to inspire fear but just looked very, very lame. I could have made better costumes. I could have even made better sound and special effects. Angela and Dad, however, thought it was great: they laughed and pointed out all these things to each other, which couldn't have been very interesting either because even they couldn't keep me awake.

I dreamt again. It was probably because of those
Doctor Who
episodes: I dreamt that I was in my bed, that Dad had lifted me off the beanbag and taken me upstairs. Even in my dream I couldn't see his face, just the bottom of his jaw. He took me upstairs with Angela and the two of them put me in my bed, and in the dream Angela said, ‘He's a good kid,' which she would have
never
said in reality. Dad agreed, and they left, and that was when the strange things began.

Except that, like before, it didn't seem strange. When Dad closed my door, the cardboard cut-out of Tom Baker began to move.

He had no legs to walk, and was thus forced to waddle and rock his way across the floor. He navigated through the junk, bumping toys and magazines to the side, and came up beside me.

And then he did something that I would have sworn that a cardboard cut-out of Tom Baker couldn't have done: he
bent
over. Right over, until his cardboard face was pressed near my ear. Then, in his mushy cardboard voice, he said, ‘In 1972 I was in a production of
Troilus and Cressida
.'

I awoke with a start. It was morning and the sun was well and truly up. I was late, again, but I didn't feel like rushing out the door today. It was Thursday. Dad and Angela would have left early, and I didn't feel well—my body ached, my head hurt—and I decided that I'd either stay home or go to school late. I had done that before, and it wasn't a big deal, and besides which, I
did
feel sick. I didn't feel like doing anything, except for watching the 1978 season of
Doctor Who
, which I was a little uncomfortable with admitting. Especially with Tom Baker staring down at me from next to the television, and the dream touch of his cardboard face still against me.

I figured that I might as well watch some TV, so I leant to the floor for the remote … and paused.

There was a trail on the floor.

It led through the clothes, magazines, toys, and books: a thin line that looked as if it had been caused by something sliding along the carpet. The trail lead down around the far end of the bed and I knew without even checking, that the trail would end right at Tom Baker's cardboard feet.

I sat up, holding the remote tightly.

Tom Baker's cardboard lips moved slowly: ‘My final season as the Doctor in
Doctor Who
was season eighteen in 1981.'

His voice sounded exactly like it did in my dream, and for a moment, I thought that I
was
dreaming. A talking cardboard cut-out wasn't
that
strange in a dream, was it? I could just lie back and go to sleep and everything would be fine. Except that I would be going
back
to sleep—that was what stopped me. If I went
back
to sleep, Tom Baker would still be speaking with his mushy cardboard voice and I would still be hearing him.

And when I woke up, I might even want to watch
Dungeons and Dragons
for his appearance. Or I might find myself watching re-runs of
The Kenny Everett Show
,
Medics
or even the 1983 movie
The Zany Adventures of Robin Hood
.

I couldn't stop making references to Tom Baker! It didn't matter that I had never seen them, I
knew
, absolutely
knew
that
The Curse of Tutankhamen's Tomb
,
The Book Tower
, and
Doctor Who Night
were fantastic productions of television and theatre. There was no room for doubt in my mind. Why should there be? Tom Baker kept speaking, and I kept learning.

I jumped from my bed and ran out of my room, pulling the door shut behind me and slumping against the hallway wall. I could still hear Tom's soggy whisper from my room, but I had no idea what to do. What kind of insane cardboard cut-out had I been left? I sat in the hall and tried to block out the voice, but it crept past my fingers, filling me with its information.

And then it stopped.

I didn't open the door, but the longer I sat in the hallway, the more time went by without a murmur coming from inside my room. Eventually I stood and pushed open my door.

Everything was quiet. Tom Baker stood near the TV, silent, unmoving. He looked very much like an ordinary cardboard cut-out, but no matter how still and how cardboard he looked, I couldn't overlook the tell-tale trail around my bed.

I had to do something, I knew, and before I could stop myself, I grabbed hold of Tom Baker.

Dragging him by his head, I left the room. I got into the hall before he started to wriggle in my arms, trying to shake himself free, but I held on tight. I dragged him down the stairs, through the living room and outside where I stood him in the middle of the back yard. The yard is big, full of flowers and plants that Dad planted, and the best way to describe it is green.

At first I laid Tom Baker on the ground, trying to jump on him; but he would dart out from under my feet and try to scurry away every time I let him go, so that I had to think of something else. Grabbing hold of him, I stood him in the middle of the yard and trapped him between two cement pots—one behind him and the other one in front. The cardboard cut-out gave a sudden wriggle, but I trapped him anyhow.

He looked worried, trapped between those two pots, but I refused to have any sympathy for him. He had filled my head with things that I hadn't needed to know, like the fact that Tom Baker had been in
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
in 1973. Completely useless information!

I went into the shed and pulled out the lawn mower petrol can. Dad would come up with some form of creative punishment when he found out what I'd done, but I was more than willing to deal with that.

When I got back, Tom Baker was speaking again in his mushy voice. Blocking out the words, I began to pour petrol over it.

‘Matt?'

I turned around. Angela was standing on the back veranda.

‘Matt,' she said very slowly, ‘what are you doing?'

I pointed at Tom Baker. ‘I'm burning it.'

‘Matt,' Angela said walking towards me, ‘why don't you give me the petrol?'

‘Just listen to it!'

‘It's not saying anything Matt.'

She was right. The sneaky cardboard cut-out had gone quiet. I looked at Angela, I looked at the cardboard cut-out. Was this anything like
Frankenstein: the True Story
that had been made in 1973? How could I know? And if I didn't stop it here, would I become the leader of the Tom Baker fan club? Could I let that happen?

I threw the petrol can at him. Right at his head.

And he
ducked
.

Angela stopped, and stood very still, looking at me and then Tom Baker. She had seen it too! Before she could say anything, Tom Baker began to speak: ‘My first season of
Doctor Who
was in 1975, season twelve.'

‘Matt?' Angela said.

‘I told you!'

Angela backed away from the cut-out. Without waiting to hear what she said, I ran past her and back into the house, grabbing the box of matches Dad kept near the stove. When I ran back outside, Angela was standing in the same place, not moving but staring intently at Tom Baker.

‘Angela!' I screamed, but she did not react. ‘Angela!'

Nothing. I ran past her, striking the matches.

Tom Baker didn't stop speaking. He didn't cry out for me to stop, didn't say anything other than the fact that the real Tom Baker had been in the stage production of
The Trials of Oscar Wilde
in 1974.

And then the cardboard cut-out was on fire.

Angela shook her head, blinked tried to say something, then stopped. Instead, we stood there and watched Tom Baker burn. He spoke for a while, but soon that stopped, and it just burnt to the ground. The cut-out must have made me feel sorrow or something too, because I actually started to cry a little. Everything was blurred and strange, so when Angela put her arm around me and gave me a hug, I didn't stop her. I would have stopped Mandy or Andy, but like I said, Angela wasn't a bad sort, even if she did date my Dad. Which was okay, I guess. Someone was going to have to look him in the face and explain this.

Frozen Charlottes
Lucy Sussex

‘We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But … when enemy bombs are taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in their foundations? What things were interred and sacrificed amid magic incantations, what horrible cabinet of curiosities lies there below?'

Walter Benjamin

That night she thinks: never again. The woman to the left of her, a mere girl, has wept on and off, all afternoon. On the other side are a pair already into baby talk, and not even pregnant yet. She knows what the nurses say privately, to each other, raving bloody loonies, all of them, it's nature's way of preventing hereditary insanity. Sometimes she wonders if she is going mad herself, as the drug-induced depressions hit. No more, she thinks, this is it, now or never, even if that does mean
never
 … And as the black tide of misery rises within her, squeezing out through her eyelids, she too weeps, but with an edge of relief.

Next day he visits. He takes her hand, doesn't squeeze it, just holds it, in silence, waiting for her to speak. In the end she whispers: ‘Get me out of here!'

Getting out of the hospital is easy. What is harder is coming home to the big white house in the outer suburbs, and looking out the window at the rows and rows of houses undulating away, their hills hoists blossoming with little white squares, little blue or pink clothes. Nappie Valley, the real estate agents call it. And the glances of fake sympathy hurt as much as the real sympathy, from relatives, and so-called friends. She can't bear, either, for anyone to commiserate with her:
leave me alone!
In the end she doesn't go out much, creating a comfort zone around her: junk food, daytime TV. Until one day Jerry Springer's topic is
her
topic, too close to home, this home no longer, not to a nuclear family, two parents, one cat, one dog, a little boy and little girl. Not even one child lives here, despite the sunny room upstairs, all filled with nursery things, in their cardboard boxes, never unpacked. A monument to the what-might-have-beens …

He comes home to find her flipping through the real estate sections of the internet. ‘I'm getting us out of here,' she says.

He sits down, ready to listen. She moves from site to site, clicking on buttons.

‘Remember when we were the renovators from hell?'

He chuckles, and she knows she is on the right track.

‘And we'd talk about “projects”—“wrecker's delights” really, but we'd find them, buy them, do them up, sell them …'

He says: ‘I remember how we never wanted anything beyond six square metres of recycled Baltic pine floorboards, or a match for the odd antique doorknob. Achievable things …'

Before, she thinks, before we decided we had to get real jobs, and with that everything that came with them: the suburban dream home, the pension plans, the desire to perpetuate ourselves …

She clicks again.

‘So you're looking for a project,' he says.

She nods. ‘Just getting a feel for it. And then we can call up the old contacts, find which suburbs are about to boom, where you get good tools, or where the wrecking yards are these days.'

‘We can't go back in time, love,' he says after a while.

‘I know. But we have to move, move on, and this is one way. And it was fun, remember that? Despite the hammered fingers, the dust and dirt. You felt you were doing something creative, something positive.'

He thinks. ‘I'm sick of driving a desk,' he says finally. ‘You win. We'll give it a go.'

Selling the big white house is easy. Selling his business, resigning from what she knows might be the last good job she'll ever have, is harder. But hardest of all is finding the project, after they have narrowed down their hunt to a suburb where nobody knows them—a forgotten knot of working-class inner-city, stuck between industrial areas, and a rubbish dump about to be reclaimed.

It turns out to be one hell of a project—a little two-room cottage of stone, with behind it shoddy addition after shoddy addition, on a block of land paved with solid concrete and weedy wilderness.

He says: ‘It's classified—the oldest surviving building in the area. Which saved it from being flattened, at least.'

She says nothing.

‘I know it doesn't look like much, but you wanted a project, love …'

She takes a deep breath: ‘It'll do …'

They buy a second-hand caravan, to live in during the worst of the renovations, and park it behind the house. The first night, they sit outside in the dark, balmy night, eating pizza and drinking beer. Around them is the concreted back yard, with fruit trees sticking out, above them the expanse of stars, dimmed by city lights.

‘Tomorrow we start,' he says, looking at the stars.

‘Tomorrow,' she says, and slips her arm around him. Later, they make love in the caravan, with no consideration for days of the month, charts and temperatures—just because they want to.

The old bluestone is sound on its stone foundations; the rest of the house is another matter, the stumps decaying, the floors pitched every which way. In the lean-to kitchen, water in the sink tilts at an uneasy angle. Each decade or so, something has been added to the house: an 1890s annexe, a 1920s kitchen, 1950s bedroom, 1960s bathroom, 1970s brick patio.

‘We'll have to demolish and start again,' he says. ‘All except the bluestone.'

‘History,' she says, stroking the blocks of stone. ‘I should go to the library, the local historical society, see what they know about it.'

But in the morning, waking bright and early with the thumps as the skip is delivered, she forgets about research in the fun of getting dirty and sweaty again. In the garden they play tiger in the weed jungle, hunting rubbish for the skip: old tyres, half a bicycle, broken bricks, a rusted old barbecue. In one corner, under the weeds, is buried treasure, an old claw-footed bath, which they manhandle out into the centre of the back yard, for somewhere to put it. She is tipping a laden wheelbarrow into the skip when an old woman comes past, pushing a shopping trolley. She looks and bursts out laughing, a thin cackle, with little of fun about it.

‘You won't catch me, you won't catch me … doin' that!'

Crash! The contents of the wheelbarrow hit the bottom of the skip, the noise relieving her feelings at the interjection. When she looks up, the old woman has gone.

The rest of the day passes in a blur of work. When they stop for coffee and sweet biscuits, their hands are so filthy they leave grimy marks on the mugs. Otherwise, though, they are happy as a sand boy and girl. Late in the day, they are ripping up onion skins of mouldy carpet, then the lino beneath them, then old urine-yellow newspaper, so brittle with age it flakes in the fingers.

She stops, bending over the exposed floorboards.

‘I can hear something. Hush!'

‘What?' he says. ‘I don't hear anything.'

‘It's like a scratching, as if something's trying to get out.' Cocking her head to one side she follows the thread of sound, her Blundstone boots echoing on the newly exposed boards. She tries to tiptoe, to minimise the sound, something hard to do in the boots.

‘Watch that floor,' he says, as she disappears through the doorway into the 1890s addition. ‘It's borer central in there.'

A creak, a loud crunch, and then a shriek. He rushes in, to find her waist deep in rotten timber.

‘Jeeze! You all right?'

‘Better than the floor,' she says. She wrinkles her nose. ‘It smells like a stray cat lives down here. A tom, too. Maybe that was the sound I heard.'

‘Room enough for a wine cellar,' he says, gauging the space between what was left of the flooring and the cracked, dry clay beneath. It formed a subterranean cave, littered with broken bricks, bottles and rusted cans. He tests a joist, finds it sound. ‘Here, I'll give you a hand up.'

But she is looking at something small shining whitely in the gloom. She crouches, brushing off a layer of powdered timber from it. Next moment she screams again, not the little bat-squeak of surprise, but the stuff of nightmare, and keeps on screaming.

He's run to the nearest bottle shop and bought a bottle of cheap brandy. Now he hands her an inch of the liquid in a hastily rinsed coffee mug. She drinks, chokes, drinks again.

‘I'm sorry,' she finally says. ‘Did you see it? A little white hand, it looked like, reaching up at me. The size of a foetus in a bottle.'

She drains the rest of the cup, stands. ‘Well, they say you should face your fears.' She is, though, none too steady on her feet, as they near the gaping hole in the floor.

‘Let me do it!' he says, and lowers himself to the ground. He bends down then lifts his head, eyebrows raised.

‘It's just a doll, love. See?'

‘Leave it,' she says. ‘Let's call it a day and go get a video.'

But in the morning, though she is almost too stiff to move with the unaccustomed exertion, she pulls herself painfully through the house in her pyjamas, and into the 1890s section again. Wincing, she lowers herself into the pit.

She hears his footsteps in the next room along.

‘Hey! Do you think you could get me something to dig with? Please …'

The doll is china, and it has, quite definitely, been buried. The clay is hard as concrete, but she hesitates to use more than a trowel, lest she shatter the china. At the end, she has a blistered palm, but holds a baby doll, moulded all in one piece: head, legs, arms and torso. In the bathroom, with its peeling op art wallpaper, she washes off dirt from the doll in the basin.

‘History,' she murmurs. ‘Or herstory, given that a little girl must have played with this. I wonder how old it is.'

That wonder sees her dry her hands, get dressed properly, and head off to the big city library. She comes back hours later with a sheaf of photocopies, so eager she starts talking the moment she sees him. Which is on the front doorstep, where he stands broom in hand, sweeping several years of accumulated leaf mould off the verandah.

‘It's a type of doll made between 1850 and 1914—so it's the same era as the front sections of the house. They're called Frozen Charlottes, or Frozen Charlies. There was this popular song, called “Fair Charlotte”, about a girl who went for a sleigh ride in the snow. She had a party dress she wanted to show off, so she refused to wear a blanket to keep herself warm. Nineteen verses later, she comes to a bad end.'

She read:

He took her hand into his own,

Oh God! It was cold as stone

He tore her mantle from her brow

On her face the cold stars shone

Then quickly to the lighted hall

Her lifeless form he bore,

Fair Charlotte was a frozen corpse

And her lips spake nevermore.

‘Is that it?' he says.

‘Yes.'

‘Charming,' he says. ‘I'm not sure I could sit still to listen to twenty-one verses of that.'

From the street behind she hears the rattle of trolley wheels on pavement, a thin, cold laugh.

‘You won't catch me, you won't catch me … doing that.'

She turns, resolving to be neighbourly.

‘Surely
you
must sweep your verandah?'

The old woman continues on, not stopping. Over her shoulder she speaks, a parting shot, but a passing truck nearly obliterates the sound. Then she is past.

‘Did you catch that?' he says.

‘I'm not sure. Did she really say: catch me sweeping the house of horrors?'

‘House of mumble was what I heard. Clearly the local weirdo. Okay, so you've been researching. I've been checking out the floors, and I think they'll all have to go. But that's not all: there's another of these freezing charlies. I just found it, under the floor.'

She kneels in front of the bathroom basin, a nail brush in hand, scrubbing dirt off the new doll.

‘They're identical,' she says.

‘Like out of the same mould,' he says, glancing over her shoulder.

‘They
were
popular, a mass-produced doll. But why bury them?'

‘Some little girl had a sadist for a brother, I'd guess.'

She laid the dolls on the bathmat to dry.

‘Oh, there's a foot missing. I'll see if I can find it.'

He leaves her to it, starts taking a sledgehammer to the concrete footpath in the front yard. In the crunching of the hammer, his huffing and puffing, he forgets her, forgets the time. When he looks up it is sunset, and she is standing in the doorway. Even in the dim evening light he can see she is covered in dirt, and deathly white in the face.

‘I found more than the missing foot. I found a whole army of dolls, all much the same, all buried. There's more to this than some poor little girl with a nasty older brother. It's like the day of judgement or something, the last trump, and up comes the dead …'

‘Maybe the house was a doll factory once,' he says. ‘And they had a lot of rejects.'

Behind them, from the street, comes a now too-familiar sound, the sound of a shopping trolley. She crunches over the lumps of broken concrete, vaults the gate in her hurry.

‘Hey, you with the trolley! You know all about this house, you keep laughing at us! So tell us what the joke is, with all the dolls.'

The old woman gapes and ducks past, breaking into a shaky run up the street. Her shoes flap, her knee stockings, neatly darned, slip down her skinny shanks.

She thinks of tackling, if she knew how to do it, but instead uses her relative youth to outpace, then confront, the old woman. It isn't hard—her trolley is laden, and she is panting hard enough to give herself a coronary.

‘What is it about all the dolls buried under our house? You know, don't you?'