You shared a room with Jim. That night you waited and waited, hands cupped around your privates, waiting for him to fall asleep. The smell of the dolly was rising through the pillow. A warm-milk smell. A baking smell. You thought of a girl trailing her fingers through the waters of a lake. A little girl. No taller than a chickie. The thing in your hand gave a kick.
You did not trust Jim to be asleep. You shifted in bed, turning to face the wall, moving the pillow so the scent flooded you. You stroked yourself. You thought of its mouth. Its sharp teeth. You had only seen pictures. The complex entrances between its legs. Its enormous phallus. You did not know what to imagine, and you did not know what to do with what you imagined. Your own modest cock was hard in your hand and you were seized with fear: what if it wouldn’t go down? You wanted to look at it, to reassure yourself. You wondered if doing this turned you into a chickie. It felt as if it might. You tried to remember the pictures you had seen and the feeling in your groin overtook you and something hot spilled into the palm of your hand. This had never happened before; you wondered what was wrong with you.
You lay still. Jim was silent. It was not a silence you trusted. Only when he started to snore did you ease yourself from the bed. You didn’t know what was in your hand. You thought it might be blood. You were afraid of getting blood on the sheets so you cupped it in your hand and cupped your groin with the other hand and hobbled to the door. The floorboard squeaked. You closed your eyes. Jim did not stir. You wondered how you were going to get the door open without smearing blood on the doorknob. You wiped your hand dry over your belly, opened the door and tiptoed onto the landing. You went downstairs and fetched your coat and went through the kitchen to the back door and into the yard. In the privy there was a nub of candle and a box of matches. You lit the candle and held it near yourself. There was nothing to see. Whatever it was that had come out of you, it was not blood. The fear went away, leaving you hollow inside. There was water in the jug. You soaped and towelled yourself. You tried to pee but couldn’t. You went back to bed.
In the morning, you lay under the blankets until Jim had dressed and left the room. You fished out the dolly from under your pillow. It was clean and tightly woven, but in the course of the night its smell had changed. There was a sharp note like cat pee running through it, and something damp-smelling: moss and musty washing.
You took it into the kitchen and poured cold water into the sink and shook the dolly about in the water to clean it. It came apart immediately. There were things living inside it. Insects. They fled up your hands. They crawled about in the water. You slapped and splashed, balled the mess of straw in your hands and took it through the back door into the yard. You screwed up the dolly and dropped it into the bin.
For twenty minutes the train sits without moving. Then, with a great gush of steam, the mechanism gathers itself and with a painful, squealing slowness, the locomotive tugs at its matchwood burden, nursing you over so many meshing rails, into the narrowing mouth of the valley and out again on a broad embankment, east and bending slowly south, past sodden pastures and the silver smears that recent floods have made of rivers, past so many flocks of indeterminate black birds, and mill towns, and the backs of terraces.
The dolly in your hands is a new thing. Now: how can that be?
It must be a replacement.
From where, though? They none of them last more than a few months.
Let’s say you bought this one in London from a shop east of Charing Cross Road.
You have no memory of this.
And then (I’m good at this) you do.
2
You come up out of the Underground into Aldersgate Street, at the junction with Long Lane. There are banks and clothing shops. Office workers on lunchtime errands jostle you towards the road. The traffic on the dual carriageway is heavy and unaccommodating.
Everything here is motion, business and the constant shuffle of people, information and goods. It is hard to imagine that anyone could live around here. Were you to lift your eyes, you would see, rising above the faceless brick wall impending over the opposite pavement, the accommodation towers of the Barbican Estate. But the pavement is too busy, the road too dangerous, so people do not look up. The street keeps their attention. Up this close, the Barbican becomes a kind of secret, a region made invisible by strategy, known but disregarded. Your private kingdom.
When the lights change, you cross the road and follow Beech Street to where it becomes an underpass, and up a white-painted concrete spiral stair to raised brick-paved walkways. Though the estate follows a rough grid plan, routes between its multiple levels, its towers and terraces and gardens, are confusing for the visitor, so routes to the main towers and the arts centre have been marked out on the ground with durable coloured tape. You follow a yellow line to a view over the ponds. The flat you shared with Fel is directly above you, hidden by a concrete canopy. You are summoning the energy to turn and enter the tower through a door controlled by a keypad. Inside there are stairs and a single elevator. You lived on the eleventh floor and often took the stairs, a late convert to exercise, working off the weight your unathletic college years had piled on. Today you have been awake too long, you have been sitting on the train too long, you are tired and unhappy and you just want to be done; you call for the lift.
The elevator is clean and cold. A notice behind clear plastic mounted on a mirrored wall reminds tenants of the rules governing sublets. Beside it are an advertisement for a dance performance and advance warning of the annual residents’ AGM. The elevator is painfully slow.
On the eleventh floor there are two flats. Outside your neighbour’s door there’s still that thin red welcome mat which was always tripping you up when you passed it on your way to the stairwell. The door sports a non-regulation brass-effect knocker that belongs on a house. Not that you expected changes. You haven’t been away long. Anyway, most of the residents are old; they’re settled here for the duration.
The door to your flat is secured with an Ingersoll and two mortise locks. You did not bother with the mortises when you lived here, so it takes a second to remember which way around the keys go. Inside there is a burglar alarm, disarmed by typing 1-2-3-4 on a keypad near the door. The hall smells exactly the way it used to smell. You had expected to walk into an empty shell. But no: this still feels like home.
The lounge is an airy room, though the ceiling is low, with generous windows all down the longest side. Nothing appears to have been removed since you were last here. The shelves are stacked with books, and there is Fel’s piano against the wall beside the kitchen door; you’re surprised she hasn’t taken that. She must have a better instrument now. A real one. A grand. What kind of life does she live now? Money will not be an issue inside the Bund. What friends does she have? No one you know has heard from her since the pair of you split up, nearly a year ago. This is one of those times when losing a lover has been like losing a world.
Weary of your ruminations, you go to sprawl on the couch, but first you have to empty your pockets. The dolly. The frame. What on earth made you bring these things along? The dolly goes back in your pocket. It’s a wonder that the glass wafer in Jim’s photo frame hasn’t snapped. You set it up on the table beside the sofa and sit there idly tapping it. You move the photo frame around the table, pointing it to face the hall, the kitchen, the long window. As though you are showing him your home. As though the photo were a screen, and your brother really were looking out of it. Tap tap tap.