DOLL HOUSE

The lifeless porcelain face shone through plastic under harsh fluorescent lights. The eyes seemed to follow you.

She hadn’t even wanted to be brought here. She was more interested in the boys’ aisle. With trucks and guns and loud banging, bleeping, blooping noises that sounded like hours of endless fun. 

But to please her mother, here they were looking at dolls. Her mother said little girls who play with dolls turn out to be proper ladies. She thought that was stupid.

She thought everything on this aisle was stupid, until she saw it.

It was wondrous. Stood out on its own, as big as her it was. Snow white walls with a brown wooden roof. Tiny glass windows looked in upon tiny furniture, tiny tables with tinier cutlery on top. A tiny grandfather clock and a tiny four poster bed. She had never seen anything like it! She felt as though she should be small enough to fit inside it. The world felt too big for her sometimes, and after all wouldn’t that make sense? Wasn’t she just like her mother’s doll? To be taken out and played with and shown off and primped and preened whenever there were visitors round for afternoon tea.  

At least if she fitted in this house, she would have somewhere of her own to go when her mother got bored with her. She thought it would be only right for her to have her own little house for her own little dolly self!

But her mother called her away. She said nothing. She never did, children should be seen and not heard after all. A few minutes later, she left the toy shop with the creepy porcelain doll under her arm, and the tiny little grandfather clock, secreted away in her secret pocket of her dress and an even more secret smile on her face. 

EDGE

She took the last train back home through the pink evening light.

She had been alone for far too long, she knew she needed respite.

Solace in the form of too much noise and an over compensating mother who brought hot tea in giant, cracked old mugs, even on scorching summer days like today.

She had been missing, Lost in the mire of adulthood and responsibility, teetering too close to the edge, so it was time to go home, time to regroup, to burst into flames like a phoenix, and have her rebirth aided by homemade dinners and jam tarts. It’s funny how you always have to go back the beginning to make a new start. 

SILENCE

It takes everything I have in me not to bolt. Not to turn on my prissy five inch heels and run. But I made a promise to someone, so here I am, in the dead of the night, waiting for a man.

I scrub up well, in heels, sheer black stockings and a slinky black and red number, just below thigh high, the top half, cut low enough to emphasise my ample cleavage, but high enough to leave just enough to the imagination.

I know how to work what I’ve got, but I’m no ones whore. At least, not usually.

I hear the street lights buzzing with that electric hum that fills up the night in every back street, of every city, in every town, on this whole rotten, spinning pile. A low dull buzzing and an orange glow. It could be anywhere. Could be, but it’s not.

The sound of heavy footsteps breaks my reverie and I am snapped abruptly back to the here and now. “Are you waiting for someone?” the voice is deep and thick, syrupy, but harsh, it cut through the night like cold steel.  Every inch of me begins to tremble, my skin, crawling at the baritone of each syllable.

Without turning around I nod into the darkness. Silence wraps itself around my tongue and mutes me. He takes my hand, turns me around and leads me back the way I came. Our soft foot falls echoing in unison through the dark damp alleyway as I fall into step beside him.

Keeping up with him, keeping my mouth shut for him, keeping my promise. I always keep a promise. 

BRASS

It was those heavy brass fire bellows that she saw every time she closed her eyes. Ornate patterns engraved into both sides, the squeak of the leather as her grandfather put them to the glowing embers of the coal fire and squeezed.  She remembered how the red coal would glow to a bright orange as he did, his thick tobacco stained fingers clasping the handles of the bellows.

Then he’d stand up, dust off his grey slacks, (always grey slacks), and say “it’s no use love, we need another few pieces of coal on it”

This was her only memory of him. Her only clear one anyway. There were snippets of other things, a distant song with unclear words and a muddled melody, thick horn rimmed glasses and a tattooed forearm, sinewy with old hardened muscles. The ink of the tattoo long faded to a bluish colour, the ink, bleeding and running and mingling with his own veins, that arm looked like blue stilton cheese, she used to think.

Those were the only things she knew of him. That and a deep regret at not coming back before now. Now there were only those memories. There would be no more.

She cursed her mother for leaving with her all those years ago, as she sat in an unfamiliar sitting room, staring blankly at an unfamiliar grandmother, desperately trying to think of the appropriate responses that a granddaughter should give at a time like this.

As she sat there, in this awkward, thick, sad, silence, her grandmother began to sob, deep gulping sobs, while she looked at her, as if imploring her to do something, to act, to say something even, say anything, anything at all.

But words wouldn’t come. So she did the first thing that came to her, and got down on her knees, knelt beside the dying fire, took the old bellows in her hands, and began to squeeze.