Hollow Dolls, The (3 page)

Days passed. Not good days.

Winnie lived about a twenty minute walk along Kentish Town Road
from Mel’s place. It was too far sometimes. Some days, even stepping outside
the door was too far. And then they’d get in these Mexican standoffs where
neither would take the plunge and walk over. Winnie was messed up, complaining
she’d been possessed by ‘the woman with the long dark hair’. Winnie went off
her meds months ago and Mel didn’t want her to fall too far. She decided they
should write something together—a memoir. She could give Winnie some Xanax to
tide her over. Mel grabbed her journal, bottled waters and went on her way.

Once she was outside, the London night air stirred her. Mel dug
her hand in her pocket, feeling the key that fit the door to Peter and
Marlene’s. She’d already teased herself with it for months, touching the edges,
wanting to sneak in to her mother and step-father’s when they weren’t there.
Even when she sat at a restaurant, the key would dig into her leg from her
jeans pocket. So instead of continuing on to Winnie’s, Mel turned like a doll
on the assembly line who suddenly had a mind to and she walked right out of the
factory up Chalk Farm Road, toward their place.

For five years she’d pushed Peter’s
memory out of her head. She hoped that dancing for other men, the stream of faces
would somehow erase her step-father’s. He was always there, ready to pop up
like something at the fun house. After Oksana, she felt she had to face him...them...both
Peter and her mum. In a strange way, she needed to know they were even real,
and not part of the messy delusional cast of characters. And in another, she’d
begun to feel that she was hiding from them—avoiding. It was like being a
prisoner—sequestered. Don’t go to Chalk Farm Road. Oksana was the challenge;
she didn’t want to bury her with all the other dirty laundry. Mel went into the
hamper.

She found them at The Lock Tavern.
Inside, movements on the film reeled by from moment to moment, the players and
puppets going clickety-clack.  Now she should go straight away to their
apartment. That was the
idea
, knowing they wouldn’t be home. But when she
had Peter in her eyes again, she froze.

He was dancing with a young girl. She had
an urge to go in, grab the girl’s arm and run, yet she just stared in through
the window. Then Peter was blocked by other dancers and she looked away and lit
a smoke. Nicotine helped settle her nerves and when she breathed the puff out
into the night air, she felt the walls of her stomach shake.

She looked at her small hands. Being
Melanie was good because there was so much that Melanie didn’t know. Things
were simpler.

She fought them off at first, then after
a while she obeyed. “Good girl Melanie.” That’s what they had said. Eventually she
found a place to hide from them; in the pain. And after a time, it began to
feel good. When Melanie thought about liking it, she felt dirty.

Slut.

Skank.

Those words were always about her. Only
it wasn’t true that she liked it. It was someone inside, liking it for her. And
she’d known it for so long, that it was someone inside. Now, standing outside
the tavern window, Melanie knew more. It was the girl inside. Melanie’s face
prickled and she felt her heart gulping in her throat. She whispered, “Nigreda?”
It was the girl from the combine, from the fire escape. Now she saw her. On her
eyelids they were together with the little fish and stars swimming in blood.

She leaned against the stone wall and loved
Nigreda so much at that moment. Then, with her eyes still closed, Melanie
squeezed the sides of the plastic water bottle gushing water into her mouth. It
was almost empty and the bottle clamped down on her tongue when she released
it. The burning on the tip of her tongue, that was her and Nigreda together,
feeling it. Right inside the pain on her tongue. Watching the stars and fish.
It was magnificent. Blood rushed to the tip of her tongue when she pulled the
bottle off. She was dizzy with joy and threw the empty against the wall.
Everything was as sharp as razors.

Through the tavern window, Melanie
watched Peter’s skinny triceps flex as he coerced the girl’s hips to the music.
Right away, seeing him with her, Melanie remembered Peter’s bony weight on top
of her. His stubbles grazing her cheeks. She touched the inside of her thighs.
Click click. It brought him closer. She rubbed her rings and craved dark sex along
with Nigreda.

Then something seemed wrong. She pushed
up on her tiptoes, looked back in the window. Peter was gone from the dance
floor. There was her mother, Marlene. Melanie looked at her mother’s hypnotizing
rag doll arms slung limp behind some anonymous man’s back. They looked
detached, dead already. Then they curiously arose like zombie arms with zombie
hands and zombie fingers running through the temporary man’s shiny, slicked
back hair. Their two obese bodies glommed into a limp twirl like a crooked Lazy
Susan of mouldy pies and tarts in an abandoned cafe. Marlene’s pancake makeup
expressions were caught like snippets in the overhead light each time her face
came around. Melanie saw jump cuts and they turned into clay animation like on
YouTube. It bugged her eyes out. She felt nauseated thinking of her mother. She
couldn’t stand to look at her anymore and turned away for some nicotine.

 “I thought that was you, luv.”

Melanie’s eyes opened wide. “No.” She
spoke dully, her body numbed. She stepped away from him, and stumbled into the
tavern wall. Melanie looked down, folded her hands. The ground breathed and
rolled like an ocean of green grass.

Peter pulled her chin up. “Melanie
Willow, let me look at you.” 

The tavern music scratched out from a
tin cup. Fingers jammed against her throat, pushed her head into the stone. Peter
pinched her nipples under her hoodie, pulled her jeans down. She felt the cold
air hit her legs.

Nigreda took Melanie by the hand. “Come
with me,” she said.

They were together, in that layer of
skin grinding on the masonry. Melanie’s body went up and down. Peter’s wire
brush dug in her cheek. The feeling of him against her quickly transformed.
Sucker fish lips wet and round smeared hers.

Her mind went back. Bottom feeder. Concrete
basement. Couch. Smell of ass, stale cum, and beer. Then Peter’s body, his
presence was gone completely.

Melanie’s shoulders dropped and with her
knees pressed into the grass and mud, her arms dangled. On her tongue the snake
with eel stingers; sour meat and vinegar taste.

Opened, folded flat on the ground, Melanie
and Nigreda laid together, brown girls with white cum droplets all over their
skin.

Melanie gagged and coughed. She shook like
old people do. Her jaw hurt and she gasped for air.

“Now, now Melanie, all the way in, you
know the rules.”

It was that same voice he always used. Melanie
nodded her head up and down and gulped more breaths while she could. Her pony
brushed her neck. The rubbery head went back inside.

Nigreda and Melanie were beautiful
together inside the pain with the blood and stars.

Wherever it wanted to go was okay. It
pressed against the back of her throat. Her jaw widened apart like a snake. The
gush came. She swallowed.

Nigreda said, “More.”

Melanie opened her throat, breathed
through her nose.

Desire pulsed in them both and pulled their
brown legs up over their shoulders. Their naked bodies did cartwheels like
spinning Chinese fire wheels. It was a celebration.

The snake jiggled, threw up.

They were together, Melanie and Nigreda,
taking life. Killing, soaking in the blood.

The snake became a dog, sniffed around
her bum. A dog’s nose against the cheeks, in between, then deep inside it went,
eating and spitting.

They were washing with blood. A
communion.

Melanie pressed her cheek and mouth hard
against the stone, kissing Nigreda’s scratchy lips. They were alone. Melanie rubbed
in between her legs. They came together hard, shaking, drooling, the brown
skinned girls in an electric convulsion. She pulled up her jeans and looked at
the night around her. Everything was blank again. With her face close to the
leaded glass window she saw the anonymous plastic dolls dancing inside. Their faces
were mute, waiting for a painted smile. She and Winnie could paint smiles.

“Winnie, where are you?” cried Melanie.
She lit a smoke, crouched down in
the dark, and leaned
back. A sound of derision escaped from between her lips
with each pull of the filter; quick rabbit punches, then a long draw.
The
cigarette
paper hissed and crackled as she watched
the red ember grow longer. She banged her head back on the rock. Angry at
herself, angry at the world. Some of the dried old vines of yellow climbing
rose snapped and one dug into her neck. The shock went down her spine into her
sex like a royal homing pigeon with a message for the queen. It was a pain
bundle tied to the pigeon’s leg. The Sex Queen and Peter Pain strapped together
in a dark destiny.

Melanie knew it all now. What was really
happening to her. She smiled. Nigreda smiled. As she moved, the jagged stick
cut deeper into her like it somehow knew she wanted more
.
She rubbed the
matted, sticky hair on her neck and examined her razor sharp bloody finger
prints as they shone in the tavern light. Her neck stung where she’d just
touched it from the tobacco fumes on her fingers.

“The cure for a wound is simple,” she
said to Nigreda. “More pain.”

Mel hadn’t thought it through. Mel was just stupid and that was
the whole problem. No. Melanie was the one who wouldn’t grow up. She was a
little slut, spreading her legs and sucking cocks. She shook her head as she
walked. It seemed London was always wet, and black, and night time. The centipedes
ran free inside her skin.

“Just continue on with the plan,” she told herself.

Outside Peter and Marlene’s apartment
she looked up at the window right across from the Chalk Farm Road tube station.
She’d only been in London a few weeks after leaving Vancouver when she met
Lilly and ran off to join the circus—
Club Lick
. There, across the
street, inside that window, was the apartment they’d all moved to. He’d never
touched her while she lived there at least. It was only a few weeks. Anyway,
coming to England seemed to distance him somehow, like he was just letting her
go. Maybe he knew she would leave, like an instinct.

The key dug into her palm while
everything clenched. The metal taste in her mouth was like something to cut
with. Mel crossed, looking down at the wet dark pavement. She could see the
cars out of the corners of her eyes. Still she thought of how Peter had seemed
to let go of her when they crossed the ocean. She hadn’t noticed that change in
him before this moment.

Her eyes caught every detail as she
shuffled along, almost running, weaving through the night creatures, dancing
past newspaper boxes and electrical poles along the sidewalk. It was as though
the objects weren’t really there. She moved in and out, knowing how the flow
went, which way the bodies would move. Inside outside, left right, push off the
pole, turn and skip sideways; never stopping, never yielding. She loved how she
could just do that. Flow.

She ran up the stairwell. Wall after
wall of multi-color graffiti tags streamed by. Tripped up on the concrete, she
sat and rocked the pain away on the stair.

Flow, right...fuck.

Beside her on the wall was a tagger’s ‘WoodE’.
Fat billowing pinks and reds with a black and white caterpillar border on the
outside. She pulled her left pant leg up and touched the blood on her shin,
licked it. Running the key along the side of her white comb; a row of scars that
almost covered the inside of her calf. She didn’t know how many cuts she’d made.
She rocked a few moments more. It was nice there in the hallway. Safe, because she
could hear people coming either way. She’d sat there before.

Three-thirteen.

On the other side of that door, she was
sure something waited—breathing when she breathed. All at once she turned the
key, slipped inside and closed the door, then leaned back.  It smelled like
gin, beer, and ass. Her eyelids pressed, she held her breath and listened.

Friday night beeps and voices muted soft
off the window pane. Air strained through her plugged runny nose. She licked
her lip. Salty. She was the only one breathing. Eyes open.

Over to the arm of the couch, she sat
and had urges to be bad, to do bad. She became restless, wanted to masturbate, to
cut and feel blood. To take control. She bit her hand and it calmed her a little.

A book on the shelf: ‘Diary’—she stuffed
it in her pack and took out water. She ate two Ritalin, two Xanax and drank the
whole bottled water, making sure to put the empty back in her pack.

She paced.

Many minutes in lost wandering, and then
a glow from the mantle. A shiny familiarity. It was her white rabbit—the one
her real father had given her when she was born in Vancouver. On her palm the
surface of the white rabbit felt smooth like skin. Marlene always kept the
rabbit hidden from her after Walter died. Then she’d found it under her mum’s
bed in a jewellery box and got caught.

Looking at the white rabbit, Melanie was
transported back to when she’d found it the first time and her mother had beaten
her badly.

Then she fell somewhere here too, in the
apartment.

Only she didn’t land.

As Melanie fell, the wood pounded her
back and legs. Marlene spit on her.

“Tramp! Slutty fucking bitch!”

The wood struck so many times and
wouldn’t stop. Then there was a cigarette burn on her arm and Melanie was gone.

She ended up on a long sandy beach with
blue sky and turquoise water as far as she could see. The day seemed to last
forever as she walked and walked aimlessly on the beach. The sun was so bright,
she had to close her eyes. It was orangey pink on her lids, pretty, safe,
nourishing. She hated that she was wearing a black hoodie and couldn’t
understand why she didn’t just take it off. Then a crackle came from behind.

Against the dense green forest curtain that
lined the beach, a tall expressionless white rabbit stood up straight, looking
at her. The rabbit shifted around in waves of heat from the sand. Melanie
squinted to focus, and her body drifted toward him. She wiped a sleeve over her
stinging eyes. Then he was right there, inches away. It was a man and rabbit
both. Melanie studied his face closely, occasionally tickling her nose on his
fine layer of lustrous fur. The Man-Rabbit stood perfectly still like a soldier
during inspection. He was a rabbit and then a man, and back and forth. He was
neither and both.

He was a handsome man. Someone Melanie
knew intimately.

She could tell he was about to speak and
turned her ear to his lips.

He whispered, “You must learn to love.”

 “Who are you?” she asked. Then she waited
and waited, feeling his slight breath on her ear.

The white rabbit fell, knocking on the wood
floor.

Mel slid off the couch to her knees, followed
the sound, feeling around on the floor and got the rabbit back. Heat poured off
her face and all around her black hoodie. Breathless, she pushed up with everything
left in her limbs and stumbled for the door.

As she pulled the hoodie up over her
shoulders it lifted her tee shirt up underneath, leaving her breasts out in the
night air. She tugged it down and sat on the curb. Cheering sounded out from across
the road, a hundred miles away. Rain washed her face, her old self dissolved
and a new alkaloid coagulated. Electrons regrouped, excited by the vibrating
lights on the wet road
. Solve et coagula.
A black cab horn blew a cannon
blast. Punk jaywalkers staggered and turned. They waved their arms. Beer
bottles smashed.

The cab tires tore a strip of liquid
nitrogen off the blacktop, enveloping red tail lights. Jiggling neon popsicles
in the frozen cloud dropped to the pavement and shattered. Shimmered there like
lip gloss. The punks screamed with their puberty threshold voices, cackling birds,
odds and sods, arms waving in claims of drunk dominance. “This is our road!”

They were grabby, clutching thieves,
stuck in the forevers—hoopy-loops of karma scouring the earth to find their next
booty, never knowing there was so much more. She sucked them in through her
eyes, onto the inventory ledger of souls. A pile of ill, dark, lost wanderers
in the warehouse of existence where proud ravens and magpies were possessed by
ego and a mere interpretation of trinkets, mounds of larvae teeming fomentation
over rats and roaches, all of whom were never aware of their preponderance or
how their multitudes proliferated. Mel was the Queen and Mel would send the
best of her Madagascar roaches, pirates to rape and pillage in the new world.
Peasants would follow their cum trail, a misdirection, and the truth would be
secrets kept, beauty for the few—the roaches of the world never seeing the
philosopher’s stone, the new Mel.

Mel pulled the Imperial margarine tub out of the freezer. She
hadn’t thought about these for quite a while. She poured some Jack Daniels Tennessee
Honey and pulled the lid off the frozen container. Inside were two baggies bulging
with pills. One side blue, the other side green. She opened the green baggie and
dug in.

A photo surfaced in pills. It was her with the man she knew but
didn’t. He was fully transformed into the man on the beach. How had she
forgotten? On the back it said “Jack, xo” in ballpoint pen. He’d left a clue. Maybe
a way back to the island.

Leaning onto a small juice glass she crushed two of the green ones,
rolled them on the round of the glass like a baker rolling dough, then chop-chop-chopped
with her razor and made two fat  lines. ‘Canines’, she called the green
tablets, because they had a k on one side and a 9 on the other. Those were the
ones Georgy prescribed whenever she hurt herself sparring. She didn’t take that
many, hence the stash. Pain was a different thing for her than for most people.
She related to it like it was a person. It was a place where Nigreda and her
lived now like room-mates.

 With worse injuries, Georgy would give her the blue ones instead.
Like when she dislocated her shoulder. They were both Oxycodone, the blue ones
were stronger. Oxy was like the distant trailer trash lab rat cousin of opium. Heroin
was something she’d never do. Never shoot with a needle. The guitar player in
Lexa’s band shot heroin. Mel had watched her turn into a zombie in six months.

The powder Mel just snorted got rid of Peter, his face, his touch.
She laid back on the couch and lit a ciggie. So perfect. She’d forgotten how
good these were. The character’s lines on cable TV didn’t matter. The images
were nice enough. The cigarettes tasted good.

After she woke, Mel felt creepy inside again. She couldn’t face
anything. As soon as thoughts of Peter began to form she shook her head. This
time she pulled a blue one from the other bag. ABG in capital letters on these
ones. She said, “Abigail.” Called them Abbys for short. She finished chopping two
fat lines of blue powder and snorted them up. Mel tipped her head back and
inhaled through her nose hard. On the couch her eyelids swam in blood. Her and Nigreda.
The real perfect thing, oxycodone flowed through her blood painting bluebells
and cockle shells, it sank into her limbs, into every corner. These were the
ones—Abbys.

‘Erykah Badu - Southern Girl’, played on the stereo.

Muh muh muh muh— muh—muh muh.

Sing a lang sang, sing a lang song...

Mel had it on repeat. She wobble danced, then flopped back on the
couch.

Love was just there, out in front of her to the left. She could
reach out and touch the bulrushes that leaned over with the weight of big burnt
orange caterpillars as they inched their way toward her. They promised to be
perfect butterflies, that their wings would take the pain away forever. Melanie
breathed in the scent of the yellow grasses bending in the breeze under the
golden sun and it tickled as it blew her pony tail across her bare back.

The cigarette had burned through her shirt to her chest, went out,
and rolled onto the floor. Emptiness rang. The chest burn hurt, the way
cigarette burns do. They’re a low heat that leave lingering damage, a resonant
pain with dark memories. She went to the bathroom to pee, wash her face, and just
see.

Back to the margarine container. Just one canine.
Plus a glass
of bourbon. That was better. She looked at his picture again and wanted to know
how he’d done it. He’d put the photo right there where he knew she’d be going
into the oxys. Mel ran a bath, put everything she needed on the chair by the
tub and got in.

Her hands were underwater in secret and a Marlboro dangled from
her mouth. Smoke trailed up into her eye and when she turned her head to make
the smoke stream go away she was her mother. She tilted her head back to take a
drag then spit the butt into the water. Nicotine trailed down into the water
like cigarette blood.

A shiny wiggle of light danced on the blade as the candle’s flame played
with her breath. It felt like a threesome; her breath to the flame to the
blade. Intimate.

She knew where everything was under the skin, inside her wrist. She
made a small incision beside the tendon careful to miss the blue vein. Blood
trickled, mixed with the watery film and ran down her arm as she rested it on
her knee. Then the other side. She watched the pinks and reds mix with the
water on her arms. A relief flooded her. Comfort. Like a hand inside her saying
with its touch, “Everything is going to be okay.”

She licked the blood from her forearm and realized she was hungry.
Two little cuts like eyes on her wrists. She cut another perfect thin line on
her calf at the top. And then another. She counted; thirty-eight still showing in
various pinks and reds. The rest were plain white and so close together they
weren’t lines any more, just a patch of scar with frayed edges. White comb.

Winnie.

 They were supposed to be doing it together. Now this was wrong.

She set the blade on the chair and swallowed an Abby, then eyed
the other four. If she took them she’d probably drown. It would be easier. Winnie
would be left behind—she could never do that.
She let her arms drop into
the warm water.

Girls always fall for doctors...

‘Got a dirty way, cause I got a dirty mouth, dirty South...’ It
was the last bit of lyric that Melanie heard. She was the little Southern Girl
with hands folded under the water, cute and dirty.