Doll Suit

Of all the underworlds in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

*

Months later, when she sees the suit again, discarded on the bed now, she has chance to appreciate the scale of its strangeness.  It’s made of some kind of rubber, but feels like clammy, human skin.  It’s huge and formless without a person inside it to give it rigidity. 

The head lolls awkwardly on its own shoulders, the dead doll eyes stare up at the ceiling, the mouth is a round, fuck me, orifice.  There are other parts too – the neck piece that joins the head to the body, concealing wrinkles, tufts of hair and the Adam’s apple.  The snake-like strands of the brunette wig slither across the duvet cover.

She strokes the blushing cheek of the suit’s face and she remembers the sound of dancing she heard on that other night.

*

Orpheus, the son of Apollo, loved his wife Eurydice.  On the day they married, he played her beautiful songs on his lyre as she danced. 

When she was little, her dad said they’d always be able to share the moon.  That wherever he was and she was, they’d be looking at the same orb, steadfast and loyal in the night sky.

She went to college in another city and before she’d made a life to stop the loneliness, she’d often look at the moon and imagine her dad in the back garden of their house by the fishpond, watching it and thinking of her.  And her dad was right – cheesy though it was, the thought gave her comfort.

He’d write her letters and they were high concept pages of how he thought fathers should write to daughters when they’d gone out into the world.  My dearest Becky, it is with much joy I relate the events of Saturday evening… The letters both irritated her and appealed to the Victoriana clad student she’d become.

*

One day, running away from Aristaeus, she stepped on a viper that bit her and Eurydice died.  In his grief, Orpheus played the saddest of songs, and Apollo suggested he travelled to the underworld to get Eurydice back.

When, out of the blue (out of anyone’s blue) her mum died, she was, for a while, closer to her dad than she’d ever been.  But she knew he felt her resentment at coming back home.  At getting the job in the sports centre, at quitting college.

Over time, the talking between them stopped. She didn’t even really know why.  There was no, one moment; no, one, big thing.  It was rather that when they were together, neither could face what they’d lost and it sat between them, metastasising steadily. So she moved out and stopped visiting.

But, tonight, her dad is on her mind.  In her tidy, little bedsit, she’s remembering when he took her to a university interview in York.  It was the coldest of February days and they’d driven up there under a crisp, blue sky, the exhaust trails of planes in the distance glittering like comets. After the interview, they’d wondered around the Shambles, drinking coffee and talking.  She recalls that on that day, she’d wished she could be a little girl again; not the eighteen year old she was - about to be launched into the wide, wide world whether she wanted to be or not.

Back in her bedsit, there’s part of her that still wants to be that little girl, uncomplicated and safe.  She decides she wants her dad back and she puts on her jacket, leaves the bedsit and gets into her car.

*

In the underworld, even Hades was moved by Orpheus’ music.  Hades told him he could take Eurydice home, but only if - as she followed him out of the underworld - he didn’t look back at her.

When she gets to his house, she sits outside for a few minutes, looking at it.  It’s not the house she grew up in – he moved to this house a year or so after her mum died.  This house is neat, suburban, bland.  There looks to be no lights on downstairs, apart from possibly a lamp that glows dimly through the leaded light in the front door; but upstairs, the front bedroom light shines bright.  With the key she’s kept hold of, she lets herself in the front door.

She was right – the lamp on the telephone table is lit in the hallway, but the rest of the downstairs is in darkness.  She picks up the junk mail of pizzas and house clearances and stacks them on the bottom step of the stairs.  She notices the mug that’s already on the stair, decorated with a cartoon cockerel, still full of coffee.

As she walks up the stairs, she hears music coming from the front bedroom.  ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ - its tinny, hollow bossa nova beat eerie in the darkness of the landing.   She can also hear footsteps; rhythmic, dancing footsteps.  Only one pair of feet, sashaying on the boards of the front bedroom.

When the sax slinks in, she has a change of heart.  She doesn’t want to see her dad, she’s decided.  It’s pointless – dangerous even – to look back.  If he wants to dance on his own to the fucking girl from Iponema, then that’s entirely his prerogative.  He’s not the same person he was, but then neither is she.

She turns round and starts walking back down the stairs.

*

As he left to go back to the world above, Orpheus could hear nothing of Eurydice and he began to believe Hades had tricked him.  He looked behind him, despite what he’d been told, only to see Eurydice vanishing into the darkness of the underworld.

All of a sudden, she hears the creak of the bedroom door and the music becomes less muted.  She’s still determined to keep on going because she knows no good will come of looking back.  But then, for no reason she can justify, she turns round.

Behind her, a creature is standing at the top of the stairs, about to come down them.  It has the face of a doll, made up and obscene. It’s wearing blue capri pants and a white shirt, wide open at the neck to reveal a black crevice of cleavage.  Its long, dark hair is held back with slides that look like outsized, over ripe cherries.

She almost trips as she steps backwards, but she can’t stop looking. The thing she’s focusing on is its feet.  By the bathroom, she can see the red stilettos it’s kicked off in the rush to get to her, and the revealed feet are her dad’s. Thin, vulnerable, ropey with veins.

The creature is speaking to her through its immobile, vulgar mouth.  “No, wait, Becky.  Stop, let’s talk”, it says.  By the time she’s got to the bottom of the stairs, its wig has fallen off and the hair lies on one of the middle steps, like a sad animal come in from the rain.  The creature is shockingly bald now and as it turns to the side, she sees the crisscross of laces that tie its mask to its head.

She turns round again when she reaches the front door, but the creature stops on the threshold of the house and vanishes in to the gloom of the hallway as she slams the door behind it.

In her car, the smell of the pine air freshener is cloying and fake.  Beyond the horror (and yes) fear, she feels, she's considering what anything she’s just witnessed means.  If indeed it means anything at all. 

What right does she have to judge anyway?  She wears her mask, her disguise too.  Everyone does.  She’s sure she’s even seen the cat, eyes Mona Lisa-style following her around the room, and she wonders what creature it really is inside its cat-suit.

She locks her car doors using the central locking, thinking as she drives away, is it her dad or her who's disappearing into the darkness?

*