Toyland

I was digging around in the brown soil of my father’s allotment and had produced the dead baby. It was silent and dirty and broken and disrupted the tranquillity of the hazy August afternoon. It was only later, I realised it was a doll. The old porcelain kind with a bonnet, dress, and blue glass eyes that shut when it lay down. Its old newspaper dress was torn and cracks infused its face like crazy paving. One of the eyes was missing, it was blinded. Somebody had buried it there, like a foul, haunted secret. The soil that held mysteries infected my hands to the elbows as I replaced it in the ground. Just to look at it made me realise that anything could be tarnished.
I had decided to model my outfit on that doll. I don’t know why, Perhaps a way to regain my past? Or If I breathed life into that inanimate porcelain thing I could be a child again? To be honest, I think it was just an excuse to have a freaky costume that people would remember. On the build up to the party I had purchased yards of muslin cotton, coarse as canvas. It took me ages to find the perfect shade of nicotine yellow, longer, than it took me to make the dress. After it was completed I waited until they went out and then buried it in the garden.
I’d not washed my hair in months. It was black and thick and waist length. Instead of becoming greasy, like I had anticipated, it was brittle and dehydrated like liquorish hey. Arthur had always liked to play with my hair; he liked to wind it around his long, yellowing, dirty fingers and to pull it out at the roots. Each time he would say it was an accident and I never believed him. I put on the dress and it felt cold and damp against my skin, like a mouldy shower curtain and I became aquatic, a fish. I would get used to it after a while and picked up lipsticks and eye pencils. My makeup would take time and they were growing, evermore impatient. But I made them wait as I sat in front of my pine vanity mirror, changing the face I had seen all my life into a clandestine mimicry of the doll. Mary came into my room and sat behind me, I could see her fresh face in the mirror. She became a blonde, ghostly twin. Looming ominously behind me, a flaxen-headed mermaid clone to my inanimate doll. Without saying anything she cut two lines on a compact.
“You look good”, she said as she surfaced and clumsily passed the mirror over.
“So do you”, I lied just as she had done and I felt nothing.
Mary had decided to dress up as a film star from the Forties. Her hair was curled into a frame of pneumatic peroxide. She wore an elegant shining dress and fur wrap. Her long legs were unidentifiable in her golden-yellow tail.
It didn’t suit her.
She just thought she looked glamorous but she just looked desperate.
There was something too distant, tragic and remote about Mary that people never welcomed. She struck me as being more Courtney Love than Marilyn Monroe. After my line I began to think differently. I began to believe my own bullshit as my face went numb. I couldn’t get the makeup right and in the end I gave up.
The taxi driver made me sit on a bin bag. I was annoyed with him and called him a wanker. Eventually, he kicked us out the cab and made us walk two streets to the party. Mary complained about her shoes, complained about her hair, complained about the rain and deserted me as soon as we had got there. She was a predator from the first moment. Determined to convince the hosts that a party without Mary was no party at all. Her thin white shoulders and exposed bosom caused every male head to turn, silly little wooden toys with springs in their necks. Constantly, throughout the night I had to explain what I was. To the Pirates and the Highway men, Princesses and Elvis’s (of which there were two) and everyone seemed to be faintly impressed by the thought I had put into my costume, rather than the overall effect. I firstly ventured into the living room, (these rooms always are the stoner rooms, as they have the sofas and eventually all the ashtrays) found myself bored and feeling numb. Upstairs bedrooms were packed to distraction with people that I didn’t know. All selling drugs or being on drugs and melting into one whizzing blur, leaving trails of smoke like Billy Whiz from The Beano. The situation was surreal, with fairies popping pills and clowns trying to do lines through their red plastic noses. I decided to go where I was safe, to the kitchen, where there would be fridge full of beer and not much else. Often, if the host is good and forward thinking there would be a sink complete with melting ice and bottles of wine, beer and Alco pops (or children’s booze as Mary often called it). Sometimes there would be people dancing on the work surfaces, like enthusiastic mannequins, but only if they were shitfaced enough. I arrived in the chrome kitchen (quite posh for a student house) and was met with Chloe, the host
“Hey…” she said “your Mary’s friend, right? What are you supposed to be?” I explained and she seemed none the wiser. As a hasty change of subject she collared a bloke who was standing behind her with his back to me “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, this is Aaron.”
“Oh, Aaron and I know each other”, I stammered, trying to get away, but obviously he saw me and smiled
“Hey, how you doin?” He said
“Are you supposed to be Joey Tribbianni?” I was confused
“No, I’m James Bond”, He said, frustrated.
“Oh, I see.” I was still confused as he was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt, but he had gadgets stuffed about his person that he proceeded to show me, like a spoilt child with a bursting toy box. I pods, mobile video phones and suchlike. I struggled to keep my eyes open. Chloe beat a hasty exit, leaving me with Captain Personality when he asked me
“So what are you supposed to be? Heidi on hormones?” He looked at my breasts.
“I’M A DOLL!!!” I yelled, getting irritated by all this misplaced attention and he scurried away with an “ok, I’ll see you later…” leaving me flushed and angry. He must have wondered why he had bothered even considering dating me so many years ago. I moved over to the sink and secured myself a fizzy but nauseating Alco pop that was supposed to be infused with vodka (I seriously doubted it). I found an open bottle of spirits and poured myself a paper cup quarter way full and used the children’s booze as a mixer.
“On the hard stuff then?” said that all too familiar voice behind me. I could feel his smirk.
“Fuck off Arthur. I can’t be doing with you tonight,” I snapped. I refused to turn around.
“Don’t you want to see what my costume is? I’ve been getting dumb-asses asking me what I am.” I was intrigued so I span around. My dress flared out and I felt like a debauched ballerina. He had messed up his hair so it stuck out at all angles in a big filthy mop and was wearing an old dirty tailed jacket. His trousers were distinctly Victorian and he had an old tarnished pocket chain. He looked at me like I was a dead flower, stuck, haphazardly, in a discarded absinthe bottle. It was a look of distaste, but also of understanding, like he couldn’t imagine me to be any other way. His eyes looked to the left.
“My mother sent them over,” he said as an offhand explanation, gesturing with his right hand. “The watch and the trousers are antiques. They belonged to some great uncle or something.”
“The jackets too big for you”, I said as a way to dispel my resentment. He did look first-class compared to all the hired costumes and homemade outfits.
He looked authentic.
“So you’re not going to ask me what I am.”
“Nope. I may be wrong…” I laughed, not a joke flirty laugh, but a weary, knowing laugh that sounded sinister as it passed my lipstick “…but I’d say you were something literary.”
“Not Dickens, but you are right.” He chuckled to himself. Surprisingly, he didn’t seem to be on anything that night. There was no glaze to his eyes, no mock drunken decorum. This confused me more than the outfit which was becoming clear in my mind.
“You’re the biggest villain of them all. You’re the thing I was most scared of when I was five!” I laughed and added “Your Andrew Ketterly”, he looked bemused for a moment, and then I smaned “Digory’s uncle”
“Yes, I’m from The Magician’s Nephew”, the statement sounded almost triumphant.
“Well, you certainly have the physique for it”, I accidentally touched his hand as he moved it away. My hand felt alien and plastic where his fingers had been.
“Pour me one of those will you?” he asked. I obeyed, as if in a dream, and placed the cocktail in his hand. He gulped it hurriedly, hastily taking his eyes off me. I desperately wanted him to ask about my costume, it only seemed fair.
“So you’re a doll.” He said eventually “cracked and neglected porcelain doll” he teased menacingly “you look a little like Polly, from the same Narnia book.”
“Maybe after Uncle Andrew sent her to Narnia” I smiled half joking, half serious. “So why are you here? Do you know Chloe?”
“Judy knows her boyfriend, somehow. She dragged me here”
“Oh” I said mock concern “what’s your girlfriend dressed up as?”
“A fairy, what else?” He raised his cold blue eyes to the ceiling.
Chloe bundled through the kitchen then, saying hellos and asking if everyone was ok. She stopped at Arthur and me.
“I see you’ve made a friend then. Got someone to talk to, that’s good”, she placed a friendly hand on Arthur’s arm and he looked like he wanted to kill her. Chloe turned to me “Aaron really fancies you”, (she was a bit drunk) “he said a while ago, why don’t you chat with him? It’ll make his day.” As always, Arthur answered for me.
“She isn’t too keen on Aaron. I think she likes me”, he smiled at Chloe, a fake ominous smile, waiting for her reaction and Chloe laughed
“Oh you”, she slurred, and patted his skinny arm (she was a lot drunk) “he’s such a flirt” she mouthed to me and tottered off with a bottle of wine.
After she had gone Arthur leaned over and whispered to me “why didn’t you call me after the other day?”
“I thought it’d be your turn to call me,”
“Stop playing that whole “rules” thing, it’s not your style.”
“Oh? so what is my style?” He was getting me angry and flushed. I felt thankful for the makeup.
“Dressing up as a debauched doll, chatting up blokes who have girlfriends, having dirty dalliances in their dingy flats...” His voice was sing song and playing, but I wasn’t game, I was embarrassed.
“You kissed me”, I said in an angry whisper. People around us heard and turned round. Its amazing how if you whisper the want to listen more. Arthur cared less about our audience than I did.
“So it’s entirely my fault, then?” He smiled like the devil and I wanted to hit him.
“Fuck this. I’m having nothing to do with any of this”, I said raising my hands, and I left him to go and find Mary.
Of course Mary was upstairs cutting lines with all the other fancy dress guests. She had secured herself a place on the big double bed and looked dishevelled, clammy and transparent. I only remembered then that she had dropped a pill in the taxi and was probably coming up.
“Hey!” she called beckoning me over “I just wanted to say thanks for helping me with my costume,”
“Oh that’s ok, I knew you would have said thanks earlier but it was a rush to get ready,”
“Yeah, it was a right menace getting here on time.” This was addressed to everybody else; they seemed to love the starlet. I noticed that the room, which was previously filled with giggling fairies and princesses, was now mostly occupied with pirates and robbers. Mary’s audience unsurprisingly, were mostly men.
“I just had a conversation with a fairy,” she giggled “I think I upset her, apparently she’s Arthur’s girlfriend, so I told her how skank he is.”
Horror swooped over me. Cold sweat and revulsion chilled my bones.
“You didn’t tell her about what happened the other day did you?” I had visions that I would get beaten up by a fairy at a fancy dress party with Marilyn Monroe vacantly picking her nose and looking on.
“No, don’t be stupid. I didn’t say anything like that to her. I just told her what a prick he is.”
“He’s here you know.” This got her attention and she began to crawl daemon-like towards me over the bed. Instinctively I backed away.
“Have you spoken to him? What’s he dressed up as?”
“Yeah I spoke to him. He’s a character from a Narnia book.”
“Aslan?” Mary could be so clueless
“No, Digory’s uncle. Don’t worry, you won’t understand.”
“So it’s some indefinable costume like yours then?” and she laughed at her own jokes and sat back on her haunches. I had visions of her having her dress up around her waist as she leaned over the bed to have another line and I felt depressed “do you want a drink?” I asked “water or something?”
“There’s some lemonade downstairs. Could you get me some?”
“Yeah.” I said as I left the room.

Downstairs also meant a return to Arthur. He hadn’t moved from where I had left him. He appeared quite happy with the stolen bottle of vodka and small catchments of Alco pops. Then it struck me.
He was waiting for me.
Even after I had told him to fuck off. Or did he realize I was going to come back downstairs? Had he just stuck around on the off chance? Something of him which was vulnerable and tragic registered with me, and I felt tender and protective towards him. He seemed lost without any vision. He viewed life through the broken fragments of a kaleidoscope. His girlfriend had clearly dragged him to a party that he didn’t even want to be at, full of people that didn’t even attempt to recognise the thought he put into his costume. He was alone and confined like a jack in the box, forgotten about, abandoned at the bottom of the toy chest, never allowed freedom and rooted inside his cardboard prison. The only people who would talk to him were people he didn’t even like.
I just felt sorry for him.
On closer inspection he didn’t look contented, and this made me think. Every time I concluded he was being smug or facetious he was just insecure and weird. He was clumsily, gangly trying to impress me and I kept yelling at him and assuming he was playing games. I walked over to him and unashamedly grabbed his hand. It felt skeletal and inhuman, hard like piano keys.
“I knew you’d come back,” he smiled and I felt frustrated. He was mocking me again. “All the other people at this party are twats. I knew you’d end up having to talk to me.”
“I have some drugs”, I said “do you want to go to the bathroom?” He gripped my hand tight so his knuckles turned bone white and pulled me upstairs.
The bathroom was very clean for a student one. It actually smelled of bleach and pot-puri and not of sick or stale piss (but I was sure that would not last until the end of the evening). We queued up to get into the loo. Arthur held my hand tight, scared that I would evaporate if he let go. Groups of people were coming in and out of the bathroom and they reminded me of fizzy cola sweets that you could buy by the handful, energetic and sour. Chloe sauntered past us as we were waiting and muttered a hello again. The mauve, smoky hallway was busy with people I didn’t know (or only vaguely knew), or just didn’t recognise. I was scared that we could bump into Judy and that she would hysterically scream at me about being with her boyfriend. Surprisingly, we didn’t see her at all. When we eventually got into the bathroom I sat on the toilet with the seat down and pulled a mirror, drugs and blade out of my bag. Building and compiling lines of cocaine was always a tedious job for me. Unlike most girls that were into such a drug I was never neurotic enough to cut the perfect line or to appreciate the finer points of an eating disorder. My eyes skimmed over my reflection as I took my line and it didn’t seem like me. It was the doll from the allotment doing the cocaine. We both rubbed our noses as he came up from my compact and someone began to bang on the toilet door. I didn’t care about what was going on in the outside world; I just presumed somebody needed the toilet. The cocaine began to make me feel numb; it must have been loaded with novocaine. It transformed me into a blank sheet of white paper. I recognized how Kay must have felt in the Hans Christian Anderson story, how he felt when the snow queen kissed him on the forehead. He went numb and cold and content, his glass-filled heart freezing over and deadened. I didn’t want Gerda to find me; I didn’t care about her anymore. One thing lead to another and after another line and a few sips of beer, Arthur leant over to kiss me again. I knew he would. I just had to get him in a private place and I knew drugs were always the best way to get him on his own. I felt out of sorts, like I watched myself and Arthur appear in a pop-up book. I became hot and dizzy and he suggested that we sit on the floor, the damp sea green drip mat becoming a separation between ourselves and the cold tiled wall of the bathtub. He put his arm around me and it felt right and fulfilling. We sat for a while. Talking softly about the other people at the party and what books we were reading. Tenderly kissing.
It was just nice to have him back.
It was just nice to possess him for a little while and relive the past.
When suddenly an almighty BANG hit the door and dented it. A scream emanated beyond. The impact physically made me jump up onto my feet. Arthur stayed where he was and I helped him up by harshly grabbing his jacket sleeve and ripping it.
“Get out of there NOW!” someone yelled beyond the door and kicked it.
“Great, that’s Judy”, Arthur said under his breath “she’s got an audience and wants to look nuts.”
“God I hate that”, I said. Trying to sound nonchalant, but metaphorically staining my pants as she continued to kick the door and scream. I knew she would come after me, not Arthur, and I would probably get kicked out of the party for this.
“How good are you at climbing?” Arthur suddenly said
“What?” I turned to him in disbelief.
“You heard, look.” He pointed at the semi open window, the wide ledge and the old iron guttering. We could quite easily climb down it. I weighed up my options. I could stay and fight her, I could break my neck on the guttering, but Arthur was already half out. Sitting astride the ledge with one long foot crooked around the solid, iron piping, his other foot on the side of the slippery white, porcelain bath.
“She’s been smoking crack”, he yelled and I followed him onto the gutter. Fighting crackhead’s was not my idea of a viable option and I escaped down the pipe. A bit of fear can always get you quite far. Arthur caught me at the bottom and we began to run. He sprinted through the gravelled garden, full of bemused people, with their blank, mannequin faces, wondering what all the fuss was about and through the patio doors into the kitchen, all the time pulling me along with frantic tugs at my already bruising wrist. He stopped in the kitchen and yelled to me
“Grab what you can”, and began stuffing cans and bottles into a plastic bag that he rescued from the floor. I obeyed and grabbed the vodka bottle that had been left by him not that long before. We ran out of the house and down the street. Laughing like children.
Much further on we had detoured into a deserted play park. It was council adorned with graffiti and broken swings. The park was dark and surrounded by overhanging trees. The bouncy, council flooring, designed for children to fall on, gave way in dangerous patches under my feet. We stopped running, simply because I couldn’t sprint any further. I was so out of breath and full of fear that I stopped and dry-retched towards the floor. After I regained my balance I tried to stand up and held onto my waist like a shop window dummy to give myself stability.
“Had…she really,” I gasped. Arthur was also clutching his stomach and leaning against a pole of the climbing frame “been smoking…crack?” he finished for me.
“Well, had she?” I could gasp out short sentences now, my breath was returning to me.
“No”, he shook his head and laughed. He slowly began to slide down the pole and sat on the floor.
“You…ARSEHOLE!” I yelled, not as dramatically as I hoped, due to my breathlessness.
“I…don’t even…know who…that was.” He laughed. He extended a long arm into the plastic bag and produced a can of beer. He opened it and took a large sip and coughed most of it back up onto his trousers. He began to make huge flat sweeping motions over the spilt beer with his hand. Then Arthur looked up at me and fixed those desolate, cold eyes on mine. For a split second they softened and he said “come here”, with his arms outstretched. Can still in one hand, he looked like a broken windmill. The night air was cold and I had no coat, my skin were beginning to prickle and bump with goose pimples and I fell into his arms, a messy tangled heap on the floor.
Villain and doll.
He laid a soft, moist kiss on my forehead which smelled of beer and that rusty, cat piss aroma of amphetamines. Arthur wrapped those long arms around me, chafing my red, bare arms with the rough old suede of his antique jacket and my lips reached up to his. We stayed there a long time, kissing like that.
I began to cry.
For once, he became sensitive, he wiped my tears with the coarse, torn edges of the jacket, covering it in make up and leaving my cheeks red and scraped. He placed one of those long fingers underneath my chin and simply asked
“What’s up?”
In the softest voice I had ever heard him use.
“Your going to hurt me”, I blubbed. Red nose and red cheeks.
“I can’t hurt a doll”, he replied and smiled “they don’t feel pain” as he kissed me again. Eventually I shifted myself from the embrace and ran a hand through my hair. I removed twigs from when we had run at speed underneath a blossom tree. He sat right up with his elbows on his knees. “I just wanted you alone.” He said. (Arthur often said things like this because he thought it was what I wanted to hear.) “The only reason I came with Judy tonight was I thought you’d be at the party.”
“How did you know I would be there? I don’t even know Chloe.”
“She mentioned she knew Mary. You two always come as a package. Its common knowledge”, he motioned to take my hand and I let him. His fingers were smooth, cold, long and like holding bone.
I looked towards my lap and away from those frosty, glass-like eyes. “Why are you with her?” I asked. I didn’t even know why I asked questions like this. The answers always got to me, and Arthur didn’t disappoint.
“To torture you…” he laughed and shook that shaggy head again. For a moment I thought he was being serious “…no, I like her, she’s fun and ok in bed.”
“Do you love her?”
“Don’t be daft. I don’t love anyone.” He laughed at my absurdity and tried to pull me closer, but I began to cry salty tears again, hot and pouring down my face.
“Then why are you doing this? Why are you raking up the past when I’d just begun to get over it?” He laughed more and offered me some beer. I took it and drank heavily, hating the bitter taste of larger, hoping it would wipe my tears away.
“It’s all just a bit of fun. I like games and so do you.”
“What do you mean!?” I was outraged
“Oh come on. You can’t seriously say that you’ve been more contented with a normal relationship? Stop being so moral and just go with it.” He looked away from me in disgust and I knew he was right. All my previously I had got bored. Aaron was only the tip of the iceberg. I thrived on the pain that Arthur inflicted, I could love him and hate him equally and that’s what drove me on. We got pleasure from the games, with our complex rules. It was like playing scrabble without words. Arthur pulled me towards him and kissed me again, he wrapped those skinny arms tighter and it reminded me of being tied up by a skipping rope by bullies, and he said
“ I can make you happy by making you miserable.” He laughed a disturbing sman and I was swallowed up by his tender bitterness, Alice down that rabbit hole. I decided to take the initiative.
“We could go back to mine, it’s not too far and Mary is at the party…” I said, in a sad whisper as the words passed my lips. He placed a finger on my mouth and then kissed me lightly, it tasted like beer.
“No, we can’t. Not tonight, but Judy is away soon. You could spend the weekend at my flat. We could sleep until noon and eat toast in bed.” He smiled. He knew these little things made me happy and I smiled too, willingly falling deeper and deeper into his deception. I imagined him trying to eat toast; he could never get anything down in the mornings.
“Why not tonight?” I asked, I just needed to know if it was a part of the game or something else. He laughed and diverted his eyes from mine.
“Mary will kill me if she finds me in your kitchen making coffee in the morning. You know she thinks I’m bad for you”, he quietly joked in an intimate way and it made me laugh, a giggly, snorting, post-crying laugh.
“Don’t you mean Irish coffee?” I could almost smell it.
“Of course, with a splash of vodka”,
“And maybe some cream”,
“Not for me, that’s sounds stomach curdling” and we giggled like old cherished friends. He placed his other hand through my hair and my forehead rested on his. The tips of his icy fingers pressed into the nape of my neck while the ground underneath me was growing cold and damp. I spied pieces of the dark play park between my tears from the corners of my eyes. Shadowy, skeletal leaves, shattered glass, dangerous litter all strewn about us. In our costumes we must have looked a sight. A ghostly doll and a sinister gentleman crumpled in an abandoned, council playground.
“Someone thought I was the Judderman tonight”, he whispered in my ear. It was strange to be sat in that intimate position, curled around him, almost like we were one. The park smelled of wet dew and soil. Its aroma was so strong I was almost muddy from association, and then I remembered the buried dress.
“Someone thought I was Heidi on hormones”, I whispered and giggled. He placed his face in my hair and stated
“You smell like you’ve been planted. Like dirt, but earthy.”
“It’s the dress. I buried it, to make it authentic.” I didn’t want to look at him, but could never turn away. I saw myself reflected in his eyes, a little doll trapped in blue mirrors. I thought of the dead baby again.
“It suits you. At least it’s original. I never thought I’d say this, but you’re a beautiful dead doll.”
“I didn’t think dolls were alive. Therefore they can’t be dead. You said they couldn’t be hurt.” He looked at me; cold, menacing, piercingly blue. His tone changed in a heartbeat.
“But they can be broken.”