Ramsey Campbell - 1976 - The Doll Who Ate His Mother (14 page)

 
          
Chris
scanned the plastic menu above the metal counter. “The fish and chips aren’t
bad,” Clare said.

 
          
“You
mean the large deep-fried fillet of codling and fried potatoes,” he said loudly
enough to make heads peer over the edges of booths. Rob had used to trap her in
this kind of public spotlight. “Don’t, Chris,” she said, nudging him. In fact
her embarrassment was rather delicious; a few people were pointing out her
necklace, her dress.

 
          
“Anyway,
that stuff’s not for me,” he said. “I’ll have a salad. I’m into health foods,
strictly vegetarian.”

 
          
A
woman moped over their glasses of milk, sniffing. Clare tried to push past
Chris to the cash desk, but he blocked her way gently. “Come on, I’ll pay,” he
said almost impatiently. “I want to give you something. You gave me something,
right?” He was loosening the drawstrings of a little leather purse. She hadn’t
realized he’d been so pleased to see her. Maybe he had been more upset by
Edmund’s attitude than he’d admitted, and therefore more grateful to her.

 
          
They
sat in a booth of heavy, dark brown wood and red-and-orange deck-chair canvas.
“Listen, I wanted to pay,” he said as she frowned a little at her tray.
“Really, you came down just to tell me?”

 
          
“Well,
I felt you ought to know,” she said around a chip. “After the way Edmund
treated you. You offered to help, after all. Do you still want to?”

 
          
“Yeah,
I’d like to.”

 
          
“I’d
understand if you didn’t. But we might be helping the police as well as
Edmund.”

 
          
“Right.
You think he’d let me?”

 
          
“I
don’t know.” Now that she had to think about it, she thought not. “If I can
make him, I will,” she said.

 
          
Below
the window, shoppers stumped grumpily up a paralyzed escalator toward the
market balcony. Across the road, a marquee said, “Come to
Me
,
all you that
labour
and are burdened, and I will give
you rest.” Clare remembered the building as a cinema, offering Girls in the Sun
and Women by Night, which she’d taken a while to recognize as a double feature.

 
          
When
Chris stopped spluttering with laughter at that, he said, “Do you like
teaching?”

 
          
“Yes,
I do.
More than anything else that I do.”

 
          
“Yeah.
That’s really the way to be, right?”

 
          
“Yes,
it is. You like your job too, don’t you? You like kids.”

 
          
“Right.
You saw that. I like playing with them.”
When he saw her expression sour he said, “Huh, what?”

 
          
“I
was just thinking of that teacher. He was so horrible. You couldn’t imagine him
playing with kids. He really hated them.” Her brow pinched at a memory. “I got
one more thing out of him. I was trying to find out where Kelly’s grandmother
lives, his guardian—oh yes, Christopher Kelly is the name of the boy we think
we’re after. Well, I couldn’t work round to that. But there was a friend of
hers who collected him from school sometimes. The teacher told me she works in
a launderette.”

 
          
“Yeah?
Fantastic! Let’s go and talk to her!”

 
          
“I
haven’t thought what to say yet.”

 
          
He’d
stuffed the whole of a lettuce leaf into his mouth and was chewing vigorously.
“Don’t worry,” he said, his mouth sprouting and retrieving green. “I’ll get the
address out of her, if that’s what you want. You watch me.”

 
          
He
might be more convincing than Clare. But just now all she wanted was to eat her
meal leisurely. “All right,” she said, “but not today. You promised to play
with those kids.”

 
          
“Yeah, right.
I can do both. It won’t take long. I just feel
right for it now. I mightn’t tomorrow,” he said, casting his cutlery loudly on
his plate. “I mean, don’t hurry. I can wait.” He shook his hands impatiently in
what she took to be an attempt to calm her. “We’ll go and see her when you’ve
finished. Then you’ll be able to tell Edmund I helped, right?”

 
          
She
could feel his frustration, almost like a threat of violence. She ate slowly,
determined to do so; she felt him urging her faster, faster. She laid her knife
and fork beside a few chips. “Come on, then,” she said, “I’ve had as much as I
want,” unable to bear more.

 
          
Ringo
was parked behind Church Street, by the Bluecoat Chambers. Birds in trees
shouted above the cobbled courtyard; a traffic warden had trapped a motorist
and was lecturing him ponderously before issuing a ticket, confidently
dictatorial in her uniform. Clare resented the woman, and resented the way
Chris was making her hurry to keep up with him.

 
          
When
he saw Ringo he said, “That’s a sweet little car.”

 
          
“That’s
about the word for it,” she said.
“A
Noddy
car.”

 
          
Her
tone made him glance at her. Although he was a head taller, she didn’t feel he
was looking down. “Don’t you like your car?” he said.

 
          
“I
don’t like me.”

 
          
She
fastened her seat belt, started the engine, and swung rapidly away through the
side streets, up a hill of warehouses and nightclubs. “What don’t you like?” he
said.

 
          
“Oh,
I don’t know. Dwarfs are all right in Walt Disney.” She didn’t bother to make
it sound like a joke.

 
          
“Who’s
a dwarf? You’re small, but you’re no dwarf.”

 
          
“Small, and out of proportion.”

 
          
“What’s
this out-of-proportion shit? You don’t look deformed to me.”

 
          
“Well,
I feel it.”

 
          
“Fu-
uck
!
Listen, last year we had
a girl in TTG. The kids wouldn’t go home when she was there; we had to throw
them out. She’d play with them all day; they loved her. And then she’d help us
in the evening. We’d work out parts for her to play because she asked for them.
It got so people came just to see her.
Right?
She was
a spastic.
Couldn’t even hold a cup without spilling it.
She’s gone to London now, doing a one-girl show in an arts theatre. She could
do all that, and you’re kidding yourself you’ve got problems? She hadn’t even
got a pretty face like you.”

 
          
She
frowned at the road ahead. “You’re just saying that to have your way with me,”
she said.

 
          
“Yeah.
I wouldn’t mind, either.”

 
          
She
felt as if she’d lit up red as the lights ahead on Canning Street. Yet the
feeling in her stomach wasn’t embarrassment, wasn’t fear.
Apprehension,
anticipation?
She should be anticipating the road. She frowned ahead.

 
          
They
passed the flats of Canning Street, the blackened columns and iron balconies;
vague patches of music tossed on the car’s wind. She swung widely right at the
lights, through more lights at Upper Parliament, and past a cinema which now
offered HALF A MILE OF FURNITURE. “Hey, it’s good to be with someone who can
drive,” Chris said. “The guy who drives our van, they should never have let him
see Bullitt.”

 
          
William
Huskisson
shone green in the sunlight, except where
the birds had given him leprosy. “For a while I thought I wouldn’t be able to
drive,” she said.

 
          
“Passing
your test, you mean?”

 
          
“No,
I mean after my brother was killed.”

 
          
“Oh,
right. I can imagine.”

 
          
She
didn’t want him to stop her talking. “I felt responsible,” she said.

 
          
“Yeah?”

 
          
He
sounded indifferent, but she went on: “I was driving with faulty brakes. I knew
they were faulty before I had the accident.”

 
          
“Well,
it’s good you can still drive.”

 
          
He
still hadn’t said what she wanted to hear. “I’m not so sure now it was my
fault,” she said. “Now I know that the man who caused the accident was insane.”

 
          
“Yeah,
you shouldn’t blame yourself.” She relaxed gratefully, and he said, “I live on
the other side there, on Princes Road. It’s weird, right? You don’t know how
close I might be to the guy who’s doing these things.”

 
          
“Yes,
you should be careful,” she said anxiously.
“Especially at
night.”

 
          
Children
were playing ball against the church; Christ held up his arms for a catch.
“This is where it happened, the accident,” Clare said. “I have to drive along
here to school. That was one reason why I thought I couldn’t drive.”

 
          
“Where
do you teach?”

 
          
“
Durning
Road.”

 
          
“Where, the other side of Lodge Lane?
You don’t have to come
along here.”

 
          
“You
do now. They’ve blocked off all the shortcuts.”

 
          
“No,
you could go down Upper
Parly
.”

 
          
She
gaped at him. “You’re right,” she said. That was a more direct route than this.
“Why couldn’t I see that?” she said, bewildered.

 
          
“Maybe
your head wouldn’t let you. I mean, things can screw you up half your life if
you look at them the wrong way. You feel better now, right?”

 
          
By
God, she did. She swung Ringo into Lodge Lane, hooting at a man laden with a
typewriter, a Richard Strauss opera, and an armful of bottles of hock. She felt
ready for anything. “Let’s go and grill this woman,” she said.

 
          
She
manoeuvred
the car along the narrow swarming street.
Cars squeezed past parked cars, vans hung open outside shops, buses muttered
impatiently. Litter flapped across the road, apples rolled from stalls to be
kicked by children, a dog darted through the traffic, a cat watched
superciliously from a hill of onions. Clare braked as children were chased out
of the library by a red-faced man in uniform. On the next block was the
launderette.

 
          
They
parked in an alley; two men sat in a doorway, sucking bottles wrapped in
newspaper. As Chris reached the launderette a woman in a pink-checked overall,
her hair like a rusty poodle’s, glared through the window at him. “Someone
doesn’t like you,” Clare said.

 
          
“Right.
Bet she thinks I’m gay.”

 
          
“She
doesn’t like me either.” The woman glared at her over a row of infants, like
reluctant ornaments on the window ledge. “It doesn’t look worth trying, does
it?”

 
          
“Hey,
anything’s worth trying. If she thinks I’m gay then that’s what I’ll be,” he
said, smoothing his hair, limp-wristed.

 
          
“Oh,
Chris,” she said, snorting. But he’d gone in; she could only follow.

 
          
The
launderette felt overcast; the heat was heavy with the smells of soap and hot
cloth. A shirt reared up almost shapelessly at a porthole, flapping empty arms;
vortices of clothes pressed against glass. A young man filled his plastic sack
from a dryer, feeling a girl’s underwear furtively for damp, like a fetishist
hastily fingering the contents of a chest of drawers. A child went out dragging
a sack, an early Christmas gnome. “Leave the door, will you,” the
overalled
woman shouted as the child slammed it.