New Writing

I never played with dolls except to execute them. I had heard grown-ups talk of hangings in low, secret voices – in those days the death penalty was still very much a fact of life.

It was during my last week at infant school, just before the summer holidays, when I arrived home one lunchtime to find the wireless on at full volume, reporting an execution.

They were all listening to it: Hamish lounging on the sofa, my mother through in the kitchen where she was frying some mince, Audrey at the table behind her, picking up ladders in one of her precious, fully-fashioned silk stockings.

As soon as my mother caught sight of me she called for Hamish to switch it off, please. ‘Now, Hamish!’
My brother finally unslumped himself and did as he was told – in the middle of a rather gruesome description of a hangman’s duties.

'Why do people get hanged?' I asked.

Hamish jostled past me into the kitchen, swiped a Passing Cloud from my mother's pack and lit up. 'Because they've murdered folk, slit their throats, cut them up, strangled them.' He waved his cigarette about as he mimed the deeds, down to the phantom knife and axe, to scare me.

'But why hang them?’ I persisted. ‘Is it to drain off the blood?' When Mr McDougall, our neighbour, killed rabbits, he always strung them up on the washing line – skinned and beheaded.

Audrey giggled, 'No, silly, of course not. There's no blood.' Pursing her red mouth (so red I could easily picture her as a vampire sucking all those murderers' blood), she sewed up a tiny loop, carefully scissored off the thread and slid the stocking egg along to the next ladder.

'Then why not shoot them with a gun?'

'Shush. Don't talk about shooting, Lizzie.' My mother looked at me over her shoulder, her face like a mask all of a sudden, stiff and unfamiliar. The wooden spoon in her hand dripped bits of mince and onion slivers.

Hamish didn't take any notice. 'Good question, wee one. Myself I'd opt to be shot.' He grinned and blew a smoke ring.

'Shush, Hamish. Don’t talk about shooting, I said.' Sweat was beading my mother's upper lip. She clawed at a pan and it clattered over the side of the cooker, spilling boiled tatties.

Audrey sprang to her feet, knocked the cigarette from Hamish's fingers and shouted at him to shut up. Then she led my mother to a chair.

Many years later my mother told me that Grandad had shot himself. He’d gone into the woods one morning, saying he intended to fell some trees, and didn't return. Dervish, his Border collie, tracked him down. But by the time Granny and my mother got there, he was already dead. 'It was so dark and still,' my mother said. 'Nothing moved. No bird sang. The trees were enormous. They reached into the sky and tore it apart.'

I never shot my dolls, for the simple reason that I didn't have a gun. Instead they got amputated. Limb by limb I studied their inner workings; I shattered Parian porcelain, drained sawdust, destroyed elastics, wires, rod-and-lead-ball mechanisms. Afterwards I stuffed the various body parts into my sister’s discarded stockings and laid them to rest in the old rabbit holes under the hedge at the bottom of our garden, the graves marked by broken slates.

One particularly sickly specimen, with huge, stupid eyes that lolled about like a drunk's and eyelashes long enough to wipe its nose, I ceremoniously hanged, minus its arms, inside the McDougalls’ tall holly tree. I had just given the bootlace noose a last tug to test its soundness and was ready to jump down and crawl back through the hedge when a voice yelled:

'Hey, what're you doing up there?'

I twisted round in alarm.

'Only ch-checking on a b-bird's nesssssss–' The word flew off into the air as I lost my balance and crashed to the ground. Life had started in earnest.

I tossed my hair, straightened my frock and the freshly ripped three-quarter hose, then glanced about me. No sign of Mrs McDougall. The garden was empty. It had to be someone in the street, on the other side of the wooden fence. Someone small. I grimaced to myself and climbed over.

And there she was, about my age and size, perhaps slightly shorter, her face half-buried in the fur of two tiny puppies.

'But it's August,' she stated, continuing our conversation as if nothing had happened. 'No baby birds around.' She kept nuzzling the puppies. One of them was speckled white and bluey grey, like Stilton cheese. The other was the sleekest, wettest black.

'Please, can I hold the black one?’

Flaring her nostrils as if to sniff me, the girl looked me up and down. After what seemed at least five minutes, she smiled a gap-toothed smile. 'If you tell me what you were really doing up that tree.'

'You'll have to cross your heart and hope to die first.'

'Cross my heart and hope to die.' She clapped a hand to her chest, quickly, so the puppies couldn't squirm out of her grasp.

I paused for several seconds, then announced, 'I hanged my doll. I hate dolls. Dogs are much more fun, eh?' And I inched closer, reaching out to stroke the black puppy.

The girl took a step back. 'Is this where you bide?'

'N-no. I stay across the hedge. My dad's the plumber and slater.'

She glanced from me to the holly tree.

I added hastily, 'It's Mr and Mrs McDougall's garden. He aye strings up his deid rabbits on the clothesline . . .'

The girl pulled a face, then abruptly waggled the black puppy at me. 'Here. You can keep it if you like.' And she placed the little creature in my arms. 'I'm Marlene.'

'Lizzie,' I replied, absently. The puppy had begun to lick my throat and round to my ears and I could feel the play of its muscles under the slippery coat. Its eyes were as shinily black as liquorice.

Until I met Marlene, I was a solitary child. I hadn't made any real friends at the local fee-paying school, where my parents had sent me from when I was four and still wet my knickers. Born on an April Sunday in the middle of our kitchen, at the very moment the roast was ready to be carved, I'd slipped out just like another hot chicken, as my mother was fond of saying, proud of herself, and me. From my parents bedroom upstairs I bawled all through that interrupted Sunday lunch, providing a soundtrack – it was the year of The Jazz Singer, after all.

I was the youngest of three by seven years, and my mother indulged me from the start. 'Come here, my pet,' she would call from under the pend of the slater's shop, her voice carrying across our big yard, past parked vans and cars to the plumber's shop with the garages at the far end. Obediently, I'd stop my games and trot up to her. 'Good girl,' she'd praise, sticking a custard cream into my mouth or, even tastier, a piece of raw meat. Fresh lamb and beef I adored to the point of salivation (one clop of the cleaver and I'd be in position at the kitchen table, my small upturned face barely level with it).

I loved rummaging among the old taps my father kept in a brass-bound seaman's chest. Rusty or verdigrised, they did nicely as one-armed pirates. Leaning them together, hot and cold in matching pairs, I crowned them with downy thistles, dandelion clocks and overblown roses, then blasted their heads off in a storm of wild puffs. Other times they became water pistols I aimed at the cabbages, the grotty window of the yard WC, our cats, the workmen. Pete, the young apprentice with five sisters of his own, would laugh and feign a swipe; the older one simply ignored me. But the journeymen boxed my ears if I didn't duck or run fast enough, and Red Ray, the fiery-haired foreman, swore he'd dunk me in the Tweed.

Apart from the taps, there were heaps of cut-offs from copper pipes, not really good for anything or anyone. Except for me. I planted them in a jagged circle in the earth of the yard – my magic circle – and played at organ pipes, striking the metal lengths into a ringing frenzy as I sang at the top of my voice:

Mary had a little lamb
You've heard this tale before,
But did you know she passed her plate
And had a little more?
Mary had a little lamb,
Her father shot it dead,
And now it goes to school with her
Between two chunks of bread.

People said I was a 'rum 'un'. They asked, 'Why don't you play with a nice wee baby doll instead, like a nice wee lassie?'

'Because I'm not a nice wee lassie.' And I'd bash the pipes extra hard.

They'd frown down at me, shake their heads and walk off. But the scarecrow wifies with their baskets, bat-wing hats and quivering wattles would press closer to peer at me from red, sunken eye sockets. 'A naughty thing to say, Lizzie. You don't mean that.' And they'd wag a gouty finger before hobbling off in a flap of skirts that almost swept the yard.

'I hate dolls! Hate dolls! Hate dolls!' I'd cry after them, whirling inside my circle, rapping the pipes like so many knuckles.

Then, one evening after the workmen had left and my father had gone to the pub with Red Ray, a woman in a mouldy greatcoat and a faded beret stepped from the shadows of the pend – and into my magic circle. Swiftly she grabbed my arm and pulled me towards her. Fastened to her beret was a gold chain from which hung two milk front-teeth, each set in a tiny gold frame. They dangled hypnotically. I could smell the camphor in her clothes and something else, something faintly sweet, decayed.

For a long time the strange woman stared down into my eyes and I forgot to scream. Forgot to struggle. Her ancient-looking face was webbed with wrinkles, but her eyes seemed to dance. Misty blue at first, they turned grey, almost silver, then the palest shade of pearl green. She had what I have come to call seawater eyes. Never speaking a word, she lifted my right hand, palm up, studied it, nodded to herself, and then vanished into the thickening dusk.

'Tinker Jeanie, damn her!’ my mother exploded when I told her about the stranger. ‘She has no business snooping around our yard. I'll kill her if she's put the jinx on you. Stinking tinks!' She clutched me to her: 'Lizzie, pet, she didnae touch you, did she?'

I mumbled a quick 'No' and wiggled out of her arms.

My mother had a thing about travelling folk, especially gypsies. Tramps she fed and occasionally let bunk down in the slater's shop, but she refused point blank to buy Chivers jam, saying it was 'the tinks' who picked the fruit in the Perthshire fields and made it 'rot on the spot'. I myself rather fancied those wagons with the giant wheels, fairytale shutters and dainty henhouse ladders; fancied the shaggy ponies, the sooty, bulbous pots over the fires and, most of all, the songs that floated in the air like promises.

It was shortly after my encounter with Tinker Jeanie that I fell from the holly tree and met Marlene. My mother was measuring out flour into her bread-making bowl when I got home. She flared up the instant she saw the rips in my three-quarter hose and, with a jerk of her chin at the puppy snuffling at her feet, demanded, 'Where did you get that shilpit wee thing?'

All I knew was the girl's name and that she had wheaten hair, canny blue eyes and was generous to a fault.

'Marlene!' My mother thumped the kitchen table so hard the bowl tipped over in a white flurry. 'That must be Mrs Gray's youngest – a wee horse face, they say. Changed her name as if that could undo the shame. Illegitimate she is.'

I didn't understand the half of it and tried to catch Liquorice, who had just peed under the table, to escape with her into the yard. The puppy wagged her tail at me, then fled into the sitting room, squatted next to the closed office door and produced a lurid yellow offering. It was a Friday afternoon and I could hear my father talking inside, sorting out the wage packets with Miss Hunter, the secretary. By the time I’d cleaned up the mess, my mother had started to fondle Liquorice, murmuring 'pretty girl', 'my sweetie', 'my pet'.

In future it would be Liquorice, not me, that got enticed across the yard with a biscuit or a tasty cube of fresh lamb. Meanwhile, I had to be taken to Doctor Jolly for the after-effects of eating raw meat, referred to as 'noodles' by my mother.

My pet days were over.