The New Uncanny (16 page)

‘We could take her apart and try to fit them back.’

She began to pull at Polly’s neck.

‘No, don’t, don’t. We can take her to the dolls’ hospital at the Ouse Bridge. There’s a man in there – Mr Copple – who can mend almost anything.’

‘Her pretty dress is torn. There’s a toothmark on her face.’

‘You’ll be surprised what Mr Copple can fix,’ said Fliss, without complete certainty. Carole kissed her and said she was a generous creature.

Mr Copple’s shop was old and narrow-fronted, and its back jutted out over the river. It had old window-panes, with leaded lights, and was a tiny cavern inside, lit with strings of fairy-lights, all different colours. From the ceiling, like sausages in a butcher’s shop, hung arms, legs, torsos, wigs, the cages of crinolines. On his glass counter were bowls of eyeballs, blue, black, brown, green, paperweight eyes, eyes without whites, all iris. And there were other bowls and boxes with all sorts of little wire joints and couplings, useful elastics and squeaking voice boxes.

Mr Copple had, of course, large tortoiseshell glasses, wispy white hair and a bad, greyish skin. His fingers were yellow with tobacco.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Miss Weekes, always a pleasure. Who is it this time?’

Carole replied. ‘It was my very bad dog. She shook her. She has never done anything like this before.’

The two teachers had tied Polly up into a brown paper parcel. They did not want to see her vacant stare. Fliss handed it over. Mr Copple cut the string.

‘Ah,’ he said again. ‘Excuse me.’

He produced a kind of prodding screwdriver, skilfully decapitated Polly, and shook her eyes out into his hand.

‘She needs a new juncture, a new balance. Not very difficult.’

‘There’s a bite mark,’ said Carole gloomily.

‘When you come back for her, you won’t know where it was. And I’ll put a stitch or two into these pretty clothes and wash them out in soapsuds. She’s a Million Dollar Baby. A Bye-Lo baby. Designed by an American, made in Germany. In the 1920s.’

‘Valuable?’ asked Carole casually.

‘Not so very. There were a large number of them. This one has the original clothes and real human hair. That puts her price up. She is meant to look like a real newborn baby.’

‘You can see that,’ said Carole.

He put the pieces of Polly into a silky blue bag and attached a label on a string.
Miss Weekes’s Polly.

They collected her the next week and Mr Copple had been as good as his word. Polly was Polly again, only fresher and smarter. She rolled her eyes at them again, and they laughed, and when they got her home, kissed her and each other.

Fliss thought day and night about what she would do when Carole left. How it would happen. How she would bear it. Although, perhaps because, she was a novice in love, she knew that the fiercer the passion, the swifter and the harsher the ending. There was no way they two would settle into elderly domestic comfort. She became jealous and made desperate attempts not to show it. It was horrible when Carole went out for the evening. It was despicable to think of listening in to Carole’s private calls, though she thought Carole listened to her own, which were of no real interest. The school year went on, and Carole began to receive glossy brochures in the post, with pictures of golden sands and shining white temples. She sat looking at them in the evenings, across the hearth from Fliss, surrounded by dolls. Fliss wanted to say ‘Shall we go together?’ and was given no breath of space to do so. Fliss had always spent her holidays in Bath, making excursions into the countryside. She made no arrangements. Great rifts and gaps of silence spread into the texture of their lives together. Then Carole said:

‘I am going away for a month or so. On Sunday. I’ll arrange for the rent to be paid while I’m away.’

‘Where,’ said Fliss. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m not sure. I always do go away.’

Can I come? could not be said. So Fliss said:

‘Will you come back?’

‘Why shouldn’t I? Everyone needs a bit of space and time to herself, now and then. I’ve always found that. I shall miss the dolls.’

‘Would you like to take one?’ Fliss heard herself say. ‘I’ve never given one away, never. But you can take one –’

Carole kissed her and held her close.

‘Then we shall both want to come back – to the charmed circle. Which doll are you letting me have?’

‘
Any of them,
’ cried Fliss, full of love and grief. ‘Take anyone at all. I want you to have the one you want.’

She did not expect, she thought later, that Carole would take one of the original four. Still less, that of those four, she would choose Polly, the baby, since her taste had always been for grown girls. But Carole chose Polly, and watched Fliss try to put a brave face on it, with an enigmatic smile. Then she packed and left, without saying where she was going.

Before she left, in secret, Fliss kissed Polly and told her ‘Come back. Bring her back.’

Cross-Patch went with them. The big empty bed remained, a hostage of a sort.

Fliss did not go to Bath. She sat at home, in what turned out to be a dismal summer, and watched the television. She watched the Antiques Roadshow, and its younger offshoot, Flogit, in which people brought things they did not want to be valued by experts and auctioned in front of the cameras. Fliss and Carole had watched it together. They both admitted to a secret love for the presenter, the beautiful Paul Martin, whose energy never flagged. Nor, Fliss thought, did his kindness and courtesy, no matter what human oddities presented themselves. She loved him because he was reliable, which beautiful people, usually, were not.

And so it came about that Fliss, looking up idly at the screen from the tray of soup and salad on her knee, saw Polly staring out at her in close-up, sitting on the Flogit valuing table. It must be a complete lookalike, Fliss thought. The bisque face, with its narrow eyes and tight mouth appeared to her to have a desperate or enraged expression. One of the most interesting things about Polly was that her look was sometimes composed and babylike, but, in some lights, from some angles, could appear angry.

The valuer, a woman in her forties, sweetly blond but sharp-eyed, picked up Polly and declared she was one of the most exciting finds she had met on Flogit. She was, said the purring lady, a real Bye-Lo Baby, and dressed in her original clothes. ‘May I look?’ she asked sweetly, and upended Polly, throwing her silk robe over her head, exposing her woollen bootees, her sweet silk panties, the German stamps on her chubby back, to millions of viewers. Her fingernails were pointed, and painted scarlet. She pulled down the panties and ran her nails round Polly’s hip-joints. Bye-Lo Babies were rarer, and earlier, if they had jointed composition bodies than if they had cloth ones, with celluloid hands sewn on. She took off Polly’s frilled ivory silk bonnet, and exclaimed over her hair – ‘which, I must tell you, I am 90% sure is
real human hair
which adds to her value.’ She pushed the hair over Polly’s suspended head and said ‘Ah, yes, as though we needed to see it.’ The camera closed in on the nape of Polly’s neck. ‘Copr. By Grace S. Putnam// MADE IN GERMANY.’

‘Do you know the story of Grace S Putnam and the baby doll?’ scarlet-nails asked the hopeful seller and there was Carole, in a smart Art Deco summer shirt in black and white, smiling politely and following the movements of the scarlet nails with her own smooth mulberry ones.

‘No,’ said Carole into Fliss’s sitting room, ‘I don’t know much about dolls.’

Her face was briefly screen-size. Her lipstick shone, her teeth glistened. Fliss’s knees began to knock, and she put down her tray on the floor.

Grace Story Putnam, the valuing lady said, had wanted to make a
real
baby doll, a doll that looked like a real baby, perhaps three days old. Not like a Disney puppet. So this formidable person had haunted maternity wards, sketching, painting, analysing. And never could she find the perfect face with all the requisite qualities.

She leaned forwards, her blond hair brushing Carole’s raven folds.

‘I don’t know if I should tell you this.’

‘Well, now you’ve started, I think you should,’ said Carole, always Carole.

‘It is rumoured that in the end she saw the perfect child being carried past, wrapped in a shawl. And she said, wait, this is the one. But that baby had just died. Nevertheless, the story goes, the determined Mrs Putnam drew the little face, and this is what we have here.’

‘Ghoulish,’ said Carole, with gusto. The camera went back to Polly’s face, which looked distinctly malevolent. Fliss knew her expression must be unchanging, but it did not seem like that. Her stare was fixed. Fliss said ‘Oh, Polly –’

‘And is this your own dolly?’ asked the TV lady. ‘Inherited perhaps from your mother or grandmother. Won’t you find it very hard to part with her?’

‘I didn’t inherit her. She’s nothing to do with me, personally. A friend gave her to me, a friend with a lot of dolls.’

‘But maybe she didn’t know how valuable this little gift was? The Bye-Los were made in great numbers – even millions – but early ones like this, and with all their clothes, and real human hair, can be expected to fetch anywhere between £800 and well over £1,000 – even
well over
, if two or more collectors are in the room. And of course she may have her photo in the catalogue or on the website…’

‘That does surprise me,’ said Carole, but not as though it really did.

‘And do you think your friend will be happy for you to sell her doll?’

‘I’m sure she would. She is very fond of me, and very generous-hearted.’

‘And what will you do with the money if we sell Dolly, as I am sure we shall –’

‘I have booked a holiday on a rather luxurious cruise in the Greek islands. I am interested in classical temples. This sort of money will really help.’

There is always a gap between the valuation of an item and the showing of its auction. Fliss stared unseeing at the valuation of a hideous green pottery dog, a group of World War I medals, an album of naughty seaside postcards. Then came Polly’s moment. The auctioneer held her aloft, his gentlemanly hand tight round her pudgy waist, her woolly feet protruding. Briefly, briefly, Fliss looked for the last time at Polly’s sweet face, now, she was quite sure, both baleful and miserable.

‘Polly,’ she said aloud. ‘
Get her. Get her.’

She did not know what she wanted Polly to do. But she saw Polly as capable of doing something. And they were – as they had always been – on the same side, she and Polly.

She thought, as the bidding flew along, a numbered card flying up, a head nodding, a row of concentrated listeners with mobile phones, waiting, and then raising peremptory fingers, that she herself had betrayed Polly, but that she had done so out of love and goodwill. ‘Oh, Polly,’ she said, ‘
Get her,’
as Carole might have said to Cross-Patch.

Carole was standing, composed and beautiful, next to Paul Martin, as the tens turned into hundreds and the hundreds to thousands. He liked sellers to show excitement or amazement, and Carole – Fliss understood her – showed just enough of both to keep the cameras happy, but was actually rigid inside, like a stone pillar of willpower and certainty. Polly went for £2,000, but it was not customary to show the sold object again, only the happy face of the seller, so, for Fliss, there was no moment of good-bye. And you were not told where sold objects were going.

All the other dolls were staring, as usual. She turned them over, or laid them to sleep, murmuring madly, get her, get her.

She did not suppose Carole would come back, and wondered if she should get rid of the bed. The headmistress at the school was slightly surprised when Fliss asked her if Carole was coming back – ‘Do you know something I don’t?’ Then she showed Fliss a postcard from Crete, and one from Lemnos. ‘I go off on my own with my beach towel and a book and lie on the silver sand by the wine-dark sea, and feel perfectly happy.’ Fliss asked the headmistress if she knew where Cross-Patch was, and the headmistress said she had assumed Fliss was in charge of her, but if not, presumably, she must be in kennels.

A week later, the head told Fliss that Carole was in hospital. She had had a kind of accident. She had been unconscious for some time, but it was clear, from the state of her nervous system, and from filaments and threads found on her swimsuit and in her hair, that she had swum, or floated, into a swarm of minute stinging jellyfish – there are
millions
out there, this summer, people are warned, but she liked to go off on her own.

Fliss didn’t ask for more news, but got told anyway. Carole’s eyes were permanently damaged. She would probably never see again; at best, vestigially.

She would not, naturally, be coming back.

The headmistress looked at Fliss, to see how she took this. Fliss contrived an expression of conventional, distant shock, and said several times, how awful, how very awful.

The headmistress said ‘That dog of hers. Do you think anyone knows where it is? Do you think we should get it out of the kennels? Would you yourself like to have it, perhaps – you all became so close?’

‘No,’ said Fliss. ‘I’m afraid I never liked it really. I did my best as I hope I always shall. I’m sure someone can be found. It has a very uncertain temper.’

She went home and told the dolls what had happened. She thought of Polly’s closed, absent little face. The dolls made an inaudible rustling, like distant birds settling. They
knew
, Fliss thought, and then unthought that thought, which could be said to be odd.

MY SON'S TAMAGOTCHI had AIDS. The virtual pet was rendered on the little LCD screen with no more than 30 pixels, but the sickness was obvious. It had that AIDS look, you know? It was thinner than it had been. Some of its pixels were faded, and the pupils of its huge eyes were smaller, giving it an empty stare.

I had bought the Tamagotchi, named Meemoo, for Luke just a couple of weeks ago. He had really wanted a kitten, but Gabby did not want a cat in the house. ‘A cat will bring in dead birds and toxoplasmosis,’ she said, her fingers spread protectively over her bulging stomach.