Hollow Dolls, The (9 page)

11

“I
hope you have my car.”

“Fuck,
Win!”

Mel
held Winnie’s face as her eyes darted back and forth, then down. Mel had her
thumbs on the little corner curves of Winnie’s mouth. The gratings flashed. The
blood. The dark haired woman was running through her psyche, stars and blood
splashing with her naked footsteps. Possess Winnie, right now. Take her back...how?
Finally she pecked her on the lips. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“I’m
fine, really,” said Winnie.

It
was a taunt. She saw it in the hazel. Mel really wanted to dig into her.

“The
DNA will be similar for all of them,” said Mel. “All the dark ones.” She set
Phillip’s photo on the table. A lock of hair stuck out from the bottom.

“He
was Lian blood?” said Winnie.

“Yes,”
said Mel. “How come you’re not answering?”

“I’ve
just been really busy. My phone died,” said Winnie. Lie.

“I
read the entries, Win. I know about Broadmoor.”

“Let’s
have a drink,” said Winnie.

This
is what Winnie did so well. She played Mel and the game was mutual. It was the
very basis of their attraction. Mel checked Winnie’s files while she poured. Gone.
 “What—”

 Winnie
bumped Mel with her elbow, handed her a glass of Jack Daniels. “Your favorite,”
said Winnie loudly, trying to persuade Mel into being more casual.

“Win,
don’t hide shit. And the memoir is all one hun percent true—we agreed. Anyway,
how would you even get Lauren out?”

She
gulped her drink, then searched Winnie’s face.

Winnie
winced, lifted her bum cheek, then settled.

“It
is bull isn’t it—the experiments? Besides, they have crazy security at
Broadmoor.” She was feeling the Jack hit her right away and just wanted to
cuddle. Winnie’s little mouth corner curves raised a bit, and Mel found her
irresistible, as always. She reached across and held her hands. She had to
wander into it. She couldn’t help but play with her.

“Is
Alejandra more beautiful? Do you love her more?”

“Yes,
of course,” said Winnie, looking right into Mel’s eyes defiantly.

Winnie
pulled on Mel’s hands and they both stood a bit, reaching across the table.
When their lips met, for that moment, Mel was her again, the woman with the
long dark hair. Fine, bring it on. Mirror images. The woman had driven a stake
into the ground. Into Winnie.

They
drank rum and cozied on the couch. The past evaporated. Winnie moved to jump on
Mel, then she stopped. Her bum hurt too much.

 “If
they could bottle what we have...”

Mel
put a hand under Winnie’s shirt. “People would be afraid to even test it out.”

Winnie
was slouched down on the couch and she looked up at Mel, taunting her again.

“What?”

“What!”
said Winnie. She put her hand on Mel’s and made her squeeze her boob harder,
then pulled it down between her legs.

Later,
relaxing with the telly, Mel opened her mother’s diary to the inside front
cover and read:

February 20th, 1997. Dear Diary, I just bought this at
Woolworths for the hell of it. Something to look back on.

She
fanned through the pages and a newspaper clipping slipped out onto her lap. It
was an advertisement for a place in Vancouver called
The Soft Rock Cafe.
The date at the top of the paper was—
Saturday, September 14th,
1995:

The
guitar stylings of... 
WALTER WILLOW & BERT FIELDS 
8pm | $5 at the door.

"A musician. Now I know one thing about my real dad.” She
looked at the date again. Her face prickled.

“Winnie. My dad’s alive.” She said it nonchalantly like it was
bound to come up.

“How do you figure that?”

“Look at this clipping, it’s him.”

Winnie held it up and examined it.

“That year in October I was nine!” said Mel. “He was there in
Vancouver at the same time. Alive. Win, my mother said he died in a car crash
when I was a year old.”

“That’s crazy!”

She stretched out on the couch, laid on her side to keep the
pressure off of her bum. Mel watched Winnie wincing and turning. “I went
overboard, didn’t I?

Winnie was still trying to get comfortable and she ignored Mel
like it was none of her business.

“You never said Moonfleet,” It was their safe word.

“Everything’s coo,” said Winnie. Lying on her side, she tucked one
leg under Mel’s, and one on top, and finally settled in. “You should Google your
dad.”

Mel was burning inside. Winnie was hiding something.

~*~

The door to Mel’s apartment was a
perforation. Through that tiny hole she could not fit and nothing existed on
the other side. She made phone calls overseas. Paced the fifty-five steps from
the kitchen to the bedroom to the bathroom and back again umpteen times. She ordered
food in and sat in front of the laptop trying to find anything about Walter
Willow.

Then she fell into her self-destruct
mode. Not suicide. It was erasure. A persona shift.

She stuffed a hefty bag indiscriminately
with everything. Starting with pizza boxes, liquor bottles...she emptied
ashtrays on top of her vintage Smurf with the white hat beside the old stained
throw rug she’d jammed in there. Nick-knacks, magazines... Then more of her
actual possessions, her life. All miss-mashed together. They were Burroughs
cut-ups. Pieces of identity blue-pencilled from existence, one after the other.
Filled Hefty bags sat by the door. The leftovers around the apartment fused in
place—bland leftovers of a persona suicide.

“You are iterations clacking in the
meaningless industrial past,” said Mel. “Details in a phantom biography.”

She was playing her life in reverse.

The Clash’s
London’s Calling
poster went last. In a right proper exhibition, she ripped it off the wall and ravaged
it to pieces. Afterward, she stood dazed in the expulsion of energy. A tiny
wire dangled out from the wall. It goggled at her where the poster had been. It
seemed she’d broken something. Attached to the end of the wires was a tiny
lens. Under a magnifying glass she saw the face of a bug. A bug? She pulled the
wire out of the wall further, stretching it until it snapped, then wound it into
a tight, setting it on the kitchen table for later.

Bloop.
That
sound from the laptop for an email. It was from Winnie. Mel called Winnie’s
cell. No answer. She clicked on the message titled: ‘Seven Rings’.

Melanie sat nestled in that limo like a little girl being
dragged off to extra curricular activities by her mother. Swank sixteen. Melanie
sat beside Lilly, who always wore leather and diamonds. And that Clive
Christian ‘C’ perfume. Cara was across from them with Hattie, Lilly’s best
trained bodyguard. Hattie hardly ever smiled. She didn’t need to. She was a
fox, and she looked at people like she was shopping for a good cut of beef. A
sexy Swede who carried a custom Glock 17 and a little two-shot 8mm derringer in
her boot. Melanie knew all about Hattie’s guns because she’d sat with a
stopwatch timing Hattie while she practiced field strip and reassemble on her
Glock. Best time so far: six seconds.

Hattie had served in Chechnya, Russia. She’d written
‘Maroon Beret SPETSNAZ’ on Melanie’s palm with a pen and told her to look it up
on the web. Melanie asked if she’d teach her and Hattie said sure. She started
taking Melanie to the shooting range.

Melanie had been on the trip to Inverness to buy the
Hummer they rode in too. Sometimes she felt like a spoiled little bitch, a
movie star... and this was one of those times. She loved it. They were off to
Diamond Jill’s piercing and tattoo shop in Soho. It was October 17
^th
,
2009. Melanie’s sixteenth birthday. Cara wore a black paisley top with a
natural black coque feather collar with metal rivets and velvet ribbon. Melanie
stared at the platinum Aztec Calendar precision-engraved belt buckle at Cara’s
waist. People could leave messages across time. She knew already the one she
wanted to leave.

Cara’s feathers quivered when she held up her iPhone
and said, “Say poosie!” It was her fake French accented version of ‘pussy’. She
liked subjects in her photos to say that because then they would purse their
lips as she took the shot.
Becs, bisous, faire la bise
—Cara was all over
that stuff. Melanie wanted to be like Cara so much that she’d have given
anything. She was almost in the family though, in a way.

“Wait, c’mon, Bun, sit up,” said Lilly.

She pressed a cheek to Melanie’s and they said
“Poosie.”

At Diamond Jill’s, Melanie wore a night shirt like a
hospital patient, stretched out on what looked like an operating table, with her
feet in stirrups. Hattie held Melanie’s hand, looked her in the eye, nodded.
Melanie nodded back, trying to look serious, then she saw Lilly admiring
Hattie’s ass. Lilly coveted that trunk forged so perfectly in Casablanca,
Morocco.  

Melanie blinked as the first needle pierced the apex
of her clitoral hood. It didn’t hurt, she was trying to examine the pain: What
it said, where she’d go with it. The pain passed by so quickly she knew she’d
have to pay closer attention on the other ones.

The technician fitted her clitoral hood with a
captive bead ring.

“You doing okay?” he said.

“I’m fine. It was...”

“What, hon? We can stop for a while.”

“No. I like it.” Melanie smiled shiftily.

“Oh, okay.”

Everyone smiled like she’d done well.

 “Let’s do these outer ones—there’s six more to go,
so just let me know if you need a break.”

“I will.”

Hattie stroked Melanie’s forehead gently. The tech
forced the piercing needle through her labia. After the third one, tears welled.
Happy tears, because Melanie never cried. On the fourth stab, she closed her
eyes and felt the drip of blood down onto the crack of her bum. She was held
down. Being opened flat for everyone now. Men, women, animals, sea creatures,
insects, Noah’s Ark was parading into her vagina. Orgasms for all!

The tech removed the fifteen gauge needle from the
final piercing, and fitted it with a ring.

“All done!”

Melanie cupped her wounds and wiggled her bum. Bit her
lip. After she had an orgasm, she tasted the blood on her tongue, looked around
and said, “Oops.” 

Hattie said, “Good girl,” and took Melanie’s hand,
blood and all.

Mel’s phone buzzed crashing into her
total recall of the event. She was so far gone back to the day, that she’d been
touching her rings, eyes closed, about to get off in remembrance of the pain.

“You need to come in,” said Cara. “Help
me get a handle on the girls.”

“Remember when I got my rings?” said
Mel.

“I enjoyed watching you suffer,” said
Cara.

“Your privilege, I’m sure.”

Great. She put her phone away. Cara was
getting more distant. Snarky even. Relating with people was impossible. Not Winnie
though. Mel had to cross out any possibility that she would exclude Winnie. Even
a thought in the mind drifting, brushing over Winnie as being like any of
‘them’ was sacrilege.

Mel went straight to Lilly’s office.
Club Lick
felt
foreign.

“Hi mum.”

As their eyes met, Mel felt a difference
between them she’d never felt before. The new thread of suspicion and
discontent. She disguised herself well.

“Sorry to hear about Phillip.”

“Thank-you. We’re all in a terrible
state.”

Lilly slid Mel’s pay envelope across the
desk.

“I hope you’re feeling better soon,
because we all miss you,” said Lilly.

“Thanks mum, I’ve got something for you
too.” Mel tossed the wire she’d ripped out of the wall on Lilly’s desk. “What’s
that about?” Mel said it dosed evenly with sarcasm and anger.

“What is this?” said Lilly, picking the
wire up. Lilly laid on her accent when she was lying. It was a tell. Mel knew.

“I found it in my wall—which you
probably already know, since it’s fucking not working anymore, is it?”

“How could you think such a thing,
Melanie? It must be that landlord, what’s his name...” Lilly snapped her
fingers at Ryland, the office assistant. “Get me his name, this pig.”

Lilly could have cams in all the girls’
rooms, be selling videos or some fucked up thing. “Lilly...you own the building
for Christ’s sake, fix it!” She was covering up. Normally if Mel spoke like
that to her she’d get an immediate reprisal.