CORDELIA'S TOYS (replayed)

CORDELIA’S TOYS

From a very early age Cordelia discovered that she possessed a natural understanding of image, and she soon learnt how to use it. It was such fun capturing fools by their own reflections into her wide-eyed snares, and once caught, they were duly mesmerized to become toys of her will and whim. Easily accomplished with simple acts of deception contrived by tying the waves of her ebony black hair into bunches with coloured ribbons, or adorning a plastic daisy necklace to brighten a plain pink cotton summer dress she achieved an effortless projection of virtuous innocence. A perfect innocence of angelic childhood. Add to that her sweet ice cream smile that she especially composed for the benefit of the outside world, she was more than aware that she could manipulate hearts like the squelchy soggy pulp she uses to mould papier maché into apples and stars. However, if that should fail, although it rarely did, she knew she could rely on the ethereal sparkle of her piercing blue eyes to shine through and melt any resistance away.

Sugar and spice.

In the realm of the rhodedenrum and the hydrangea, in and around the rose garden that safely blossomed under the attentive gaze of delphinium spires, Cordelia commanded her dolls in what many an adult recognised as the most charming display of play and inventive fantasy. The dolls, so enchanted by her summer giggles, readily submitted to her designs and fancy, their large eyes so trusting, their jointed limbs subservient to her control, and Cordelia, like some fairyland queen, reigned over her subjects in the honeysuckle regions where the lack lustre dahlias aspire to become muses.

Yet these were the games for image.

In the hours of early morning, when dying moonbeams sing such sad songs; pass away unnoticed and are forever gone. When no one stirs (not even a mouse), Cordelia quietly, hush hush silently enjoys the dead hours when neither day nor night exist. It is at this time, as night prepares to leave; snuffs out her starry glints, but just before the unbuttoned moon; undone, parachutes into tomorrow, that she glissades in and out of shadows of dreams that linger on. Like ghosts. Like memories slow to fade. Lodged in the remaining echoes of spent days.

Secret boxes in secret places to hide trinkets and mementos away: a silver sixpence, an acorn, a short length of bright red string, a miniature Coca Cola bottle, a rusty penknife, a magic pixie ring, and a faded folded photograph; of a grave. On the cross shaped headstone the word ‘Charlotte’ was just barely legible, not that she was able to read, although she did know a little alphabet song that they all sung along to in nursery school.

She had discovered the photograph under a loose floorboard in the recessed cupboard in her room. To her knowledge she had never known a ‘Charlotte’, she just liked the black and whiteness of the photograph, the stillness of the trees in the background, the lack of people in the rough sea of overgrown grass and the shadows caught, still frame, in the act of dancing. This collection of her precious things she kept in an old tin box that, although diseased with rust, the pictures of ladies wearing big dresses and skyscraper masses of white hair were still visible. Elaborate decorations. Princes and princesses courtly dancing. She kept the box buried in the garden close to the boundary wall where a chalk X marked the spot and a pink rose bush cultivated thorns.

The pink rose fragranced forgotten corner where raindrops hung from cobwebs like chandeliers lit by the sun. Where flies were caught in a sticky snare slowly dissolving into a liquified stew. A corner slowly crumbling into the nettles, eroding into the forget–me–nots, coloured by the poppies that live for a day.

But she had another collection. Cordelia had amassed numerous and assorted bones she kept hidden under those loose floorboard in a purple ‘My Little Pony’ lunch box that she stole from a precocious little yellow haired girl called Evangeline. These were the bones of birds, small garden mammals such as mice or shrews or even leftovers from Sunday chicken roasts that she had excavated whilst hunting for treasure in the walled garden at the rear of her house.

Drink all your milk for healthy teeth and bones.

She carefully cleaned them and then gave them names, and with these names came an ownership of an identity, and with this identity came the possession of a personality. Tea parties. Times tables. Pay attention you bones at the back. Bedtime stories. Big bad wolf gonna eat you up.

Now we are six we play Pooh sticks with ghosts.
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

Cordelia, as always, watching. Waiting. Like a forsaken spirit she haunts the space in which she inhabits. Her large eyes, like lilies weeping long slender sighs, open wider still with melancholic design to colour her outlook subterranean midnight blue. By choice she surrounds herself in an unnerving brittle silence. Crystallizing the ‘tick’ and the ‘tock’ into a creeping whiteness of no sound.

Time has little meaning during these quiet disregarded hours. She abandons the primary colours of her age and little girl flowery prints, pigtails, daisy chains and pony club talk, all to remain tucked-up tight in her bed, then she truly awakens, as if some mischievous spirit has bestirred itself within her. Gathering her little confidantes together, allocating positions, making certain precise arrangements, she soundlessly plays with her cherished friends. Her best friends. Her only friends. Dem bones. However, they were rapidly maturing, becoming restless having to listen to her stories of witches and broomsticks over and over again. Their perception of this relationship had soon shifted from the short lived joy of abstract reincarnation into a life sentence trapped inside a purple prison.

Her collection had grown so quickly, and she had amassed so many bones in various shapes and sizes that a blackbird skull, who Cordelia had named Cycnus, protested at the cramped conditions inside their secret box as well as the humiliation and discomfort at being wrapped in yellowing newspaper and wedged under the floorboards. She came to the conclusion that the bones must live.

Using her craft kit that she received as a Christmas present that year, she set about creating the kind of lives for her friends that they had dreamed about, talked about, waxed and waned with the moon. Boreas and Notus took the first steps when they entwined themselves within the curls of her hair, their clean creamy whiteness creating a vivid contrast amongst her deep dark curls. Erebus, Eumolpus and Perdix were skilfully tied up with black ribbon to form a pendant necklace like a Japanese wind chime, and like a wind chime made a sound when she moved. A click-clank floating out of the still darkness.

Bones and beads.

It was at her ninth birthday party, after the jelly and ice cream was served, that Cordelia unveiled her new puppet friend she had named Ned. More matchstick man than marionette. Cordelia had tied strings to his bony arms and legs and with a little practice taught Ned to walk, albeit with an angular motion and a dislocated sound like a crippled tap dancer performing a ballet for the kinetically insane.

Her exasperated parents humoured Ned as if he was just your common or garden typical imaginary friend, a ‘Drop Dead Fred’, even though they believed her macabre playmate should be buried deep deep underground. Send him back from whence he came. Made vain attempts at child psychology by trying to trade Ned for new expensive toys. All to no avail, Cordelia and Ned became inseparable. Together they would go to the park, sit down to meals and they even went to school together where they both learnt simple arithmetic, listened to stories about kittens and goblins, made cardboard castles and egg box dungeons, and at playtime they played hopscotch in the playground, although they always played on their own.

Cordelia was a quiet girl. Always darkly in a corner she would listen to her own silence, and it became difficult to distinguish if she melted into her own shadow, or if her own shadow had engulfed her. In her long silence. Always alone, if you don’t count the bones. Just a little girl shadow, no angel but an aligned eclipse. From the darkening boundaries of the dank and heavy sunless underworld, she watches and welcomes a smudged grim grey cloud of nefarious despair as if it was the summer holidays.

It was after Cordelia had turned twelve; pre-menstrual dawn, the contours of her femininity in outline formed. Metamorphic; sensual scene shifter. Wearing a cultivated predacious coy look of virtuousness that could make a thousand thousand flowers bloom; blush. Cordelia was growing-up.

It was also about this time that tragedy first struck the maternal safeness of her school. Simon Blunt, an overweight snotty-nosed piggish boy from her class was abducted by person or persons unknown. His body, well most of it, was discovered on wasteland not far from her home.

Her school, Sternum Secondary, Boneville Road, was suddenly pressed into a heavy state of shock. Overburdened with grief, tears flowed, fears gathered, flowers wilted and died in bunches outside the school gates. Grown-ups, who, let’s face it, should have known better, told lies with words that didn’t bare any relation to the cheese and onion smelling bully that never called her by her name, but by other untrue names, tugged hard at her hair, deliberately broke her pencils and regularly tried to put his hand up her skirt. Cordelia, obscured amongst indistinguishable dark shadows, watched like an undercover secret agent as inconsolable parents, teachers and classmates lowered Blunt’s body into the sticky clay earth. During the prayers of remembrance she happily played hopscotch with Ned.

The school, in future days, would see other tragic days such as these. Cordelia hid with Ned, they merged into the undercurrent which lingered like a tenacious mist, and yet she appeared to flourish in the thick oppressive air of endless sorrows. Blending effortlessly into the background, camouflaged and all but unseen, they unified into the shadows of dark corners and shaded recesses where she whispers her plans and schemes to him. The sound creeps around the playground like malignant spirits surfing on a chill breeze. Isolated from her piers yet never lonely, she was more than content to play happy families with her bones and dolls, which by now had moved on from Mattel and ventured into voodoo.

As Cordelia grew, so too did Ned. He became a larger, altogether a more complex entity that could now dance, draw and do any number of things a playmate was expected to be capable of in order to participate to any degree in her little tea dances and pretend stabbing slashing games. He even owned his own shadow now, and with that came the responsibility of his own darkness.

From the rib of Adam.

Cordelia always knew that Ned and she would one day become lovers and so become one. Tie the knot. Vertebrae ring on her finger. Bone china dinner service. As she now blossomed, like a fragrant pink rose into womanhood, Ned held her in his new bigger arms pressing her soft body into his bones and they danced, by candlelight, to a slow tune that had no music.

It was the theme of her silence.