The Doll

I

It was offensive, how healthy Aoife was. She had broad shoulders and strong, well-shaped legs. She wore short skirts with thin-strapped sandals and when she strode across the street in those dumb little shoes, he couldn’t believe they didn’t end up crushed to pieces under her sexy pink feet.

She had been hurt badly in a previous relationship. The other guy used her and had then made her feel like the using was something she’d specifically requested. She had been smart enough to see through it, so she’d gotten out of it. But she was still heartbroken, Dar could tell. She was still heartbroken in a way he could only ever dream of making her feel.

They had only been together for a few weeks but already he knew she was slipping away. He was too weird for her, too intense. He was funny; on a good night out he could keep a whole group of them entertained with his impressions for hours, and she had much admired his dark eyes and curly hair in the early moments of their relationship.

But there was all of that other stuff underneath, and she could smell it. He was astounded. What was this instinct that even someone as straightforward, as untroubled as her could access? Maybe there was something else going on. Maybe he wasn’t a materialist atheist after all. But though all of that could be intellectually kind of thrilling, especially after smoking when everything seemed abstract and possible, in the sad reality that was his life, it just meant he was about to get his heart crushed again.

So he was getting into ventriloquism as a way to handle it all.

They moved in the kind of circles that made this just about acceptable. They were all back home just after college, all waiting for their lives to properly start, all mostly living with their parents. Dar bought a shiny-faced dummy online, called him Stuart. They didn’t know anyone called Stuart, and it was instantly hilarious.

Dar started bringing Stuart to the pub. Aoife seemed thrown by this, but when she saw how everyone else loved and accepted Stuart, she laughed along too.

Dar had no intention of working on his technique. That would have been crazy. It would have taken up far too much time and for what? So instead he just sat Stuart beside him at the pub and treated him as if he were a real person. Everyone was fine with it.

Soon Stuart found his way into Dar’s impersonations. Dar didn’t have an official act, but he would end up performing most Friday nights out in the smoking area in between roll-up cigarettes and pints of six-per-cent beer. Stuart would sit alongside him making vicious comments about the person Dar was impersonating, or, after a while, his actual impersonation. That then evolved into Stuart making vicious comments about Dar himself. And so it soon became that Dar would carry around a doll whose only function was to under cut everything he said with sarcasm, vitriol or just plain aggression. For example:

Dar: I’m going to the bar, anyone need a drink? Stuart: You’re a cunt.

Everyone loved it.

Stuart’s voice grew richer and more distinctive. He adopted an old-fashioned British accent with a nasal twang. It was nasty, authoritative, hilarious.

It was coming up to Halloween and Aoife was going to the party at the pub they all went to as a slutty nurse. Dar was disappointed by this. He’d hoped that she had more imagination. But she did look unbelievable in her costume.

On the evening of the party, they got ready together in his bedroom at his parents’ house. They drank vodka and Coke, and Dar played Led Zeppelin on an old CD player that had belonged to one of his brothers, hoping that she would like it.

He painted zombie make-up on her face to make her costume scarier and less embarrassing to him. He was good at doing make-up, he was good at anything that involved creating weird or freaky things.

He used an eyeliner pencil to draw stitches across her mouth. He noticed how full and pink her bottom lip was. He imagined her biting his finger and wished suddenly that he could stop what he was doing and run his fingers tenderly across her lips. He got aroused thinking about this and had to get up and walk away. He picked up Stuart and brought him over to her.

Stuart’s face was shiny and cream. His eyes were blue; his hair was black.

‘Stuart thinks you are too sexy,’ he said. ‘He says we need more blood.’ And then he pretended Stuart was a vampire and he thrust his cold hard face into the hot crevice of her neck. She seemed startled but then she laughed.

He knew that Aoife didn’t like Stuart. He had expected her to be annoyed by him, he anticipated that she would be a little fearful of him. He felt the feelings she was having, and he became colder to her, he began to nurture a contempt for her. He imagined her feelings around Stuart to be rooted in revulsion towards him for the person that he was, and towards herself for having liked him in the first place.

But she didn’t seem to feel like that. Instead she seemed upset. She said, I don’t like the things you say about yourself with that doll. I don’t get the joke.

Women have a shit sense of humour. He’d always tried hard not to think that. He knew he wasn’t supposed to think that. But it was so true.

They’d never had sex. He hadn’t had much experience. When he was in fifth year, he went to Dublin a few times to meet up with a girl he’d become friends with online. She was glum and funny, like him. They had done it once. It had been kind of awful. He couldn’t think about it without wincing. It was confusing; she seemed like she wanted to do it, even though he, the first time, had been scared. And so they had.

Afterwards, she couldn’t meet his eye. And so he withdrew because he was terrified he’d done something wrong. He became icy with her, and she

became sullen with him. It had all ended with him getting on the bus to go home one evening after a long terrible day walking around the city, and she flicked her cigarette in his direction and didn’t even say goodbye.

And then with Aoife, they just didn’t get around to it. They were both living at home with their parents. Their relationship had started slowly, drunken snogs on nights out. They had done some sexual things together but he had always stopped it and she seemed embarrassed and they quickly got dressed.

So it was barely a relationship. They didn’t have sex. He didn’t really like her. But still, he said to Stuart after the break-up, but still I feel like shit. You are shit, said Stuart.

He laughed. Stuart always made him feel so much better.

His mother did not like Stuart either. She didn’t know the way Stuart treated him, but she suspected it. At first, she thought Stuart represented a new hobby, and she was very supportive of that. She loved his impressions, he had honed his skills doing impressions of her, they used to make her weep with laughter. So when she first met Stuart, she’d smiled and said, are you trying out for the circus? But as time went on, she became wary of him.

His dad was surprised but he saw the joke and understood that it operated within the dense, insult-heavy culture of Dar’s friends.

‘Clumsy fuck,’ Stuart said one day, as Dar fumbled over a fork at dinner. Dar creased into laughter but his mother was annoyed. The next day, she saw Dar leaving the house with Stuart peering out of his backpack.

‘Where are going with that thing?’ she said. ‘I’m not a thing,’ Stuart said.

In town that day, Dar spent a long time in the secondhand gaming store, looking at games and refurbished phones. He needed a new phone but he didn’t have the cash. Just take one, he heard Stuart say. Don’t be a pussy.

Dar walked quickly out of the store.

He just needed to keep it together for a little while longer. He’d read that once you turned twenty-five, your brain is finally fully developed and you stop feeling so mental all the time. His older brothers testified to that. You’ll be okay, they’d said to him, the few times they’d gotten stoned enough to have a real conversation. They’d said it again when they went to visit him on the ward the year before. They found it hard to see him in his own context, they kept talking about things they’d been through at his age. But neither of them had ended up on a psych ward.

‘Just three more years,’ he said to Stuart. ‘And then we’ll be grand.’

‘Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that,’ Stuart said. ‘Just keep telling yourself that, you stupid cunt.’ They ran into James then, he was walking down the

high street, strapping and intent. James was the de-facto leader of their little gang. Not that they had a leader. Not that they were a gang. But he totally was.

‘Stuart,’ James said, happily. ‘Let’s go for a pint.’

They all walked down the street together. It was 4 p.m. on a late-November afternoon. It was getting dark and the sky was purple and hanging low over them like a shroud. Dar felt very close to darkness and decay. He felt like he’d felt the last time things had gotten very bad.

In the pub, James was talking but Dar couldn’t focus on what he was saying. All he could think about was Aoife, all of a sudden. Why had they broken up? Why had he hurt her feelings by telling her that her sexy nurse uniform was basic and that she was stupid and that he was bored and didn’t she think it was fucked-up they weren’t even shagging. He pictured her strong legs striding across the road. He’d walked beside those legs. Those legs were going places, they were going good decent places, like a job at the hospital and a house near the river. Those legs could have wrapped themselves around his neck if he’d just played his cards right.

‘Yeah, right,’ Stuart said. ‘Dream on. She was never going to stick with you. She was a dumb bitch anyway, wasn’t she?’

‘What’s that, Stuart?’ said James.

‘I was just talking about Aoife,’ said Stuart. ‘What a stupid bitch. Stupid camogie bitch.’ James laughed nervously. He didn’t approve of sexist comments any more, not since Blindboy had gone woke. ‘Ah, now,’ he said.

Dar himself then said – at least he thought he said – fucking cunting bitch face slut she was so she was, right Stu my boy my ghrá gheal buachaillín beag im phóca ná habair ar eagla na heagla ná habair focail le aon duine an dtuigeann tú an méid sinn and he kept just talking in Irish like that. He couldn’t stop.

James was a good man. He’d been a mental health advocate at their school, and he was ripped like a soldier who dreamed of being a model. James probably weighed twice as much as Dar did, including Stuart. James was unafraid of manly emotions; he listened to a lot of very good podcasts.

James took Dar by his hand and led him out of the pub onto the street. It was a beautiful night, cold and hard and polished. They crossed the town together, it took very little time. On the bridge, the castle behind them, moonlight skeletal on the water. The cold hard air had helped and holding James’s hand had too.

‘You are so homosexual,’ said Stuart.

Dar felt like he was retreating deep inside his skull and when he started to feel like that he needed to touch and feel real objects and people. He very often dreamed of drowning.

James threw Stuart into the river. Dar admired James very much. James was unafraid to take action; he was one of the people who made the world what it had to be. Dar looked into the water, he thought Stuart would float on the surface but he couldn’t see him. He leaned over the edge of the bridge. He knew that James had done the right thing in getting rid of Stuart. But he wished he hadn’t.

James dragged him back from the ledge, swearing at him, telling him not to be so stupid. They walked up the town towards the square. Dar’s mother was there, on the corner, waiting for them.

She put her arms around him. She didn’t ask what had happened.

II

When she was a young girl, Joan had loved dolls. She had been very upset when she finally realized they were not, despite all the propagandizing of childhood, ever going to come alive. She felt angry at everyone for letting her believe they would. As a mother, she never really figured out how to reconcile the complicated philosophical parenting question this memory represented. Is it better to let children know the truth? About everything? Should we tell them? When? And how?

She’d never decided. It had all just unfolded, all of the years. Her three sons were grown up now. And they were okay, apart from Dar. It was very hard to witness his self-loathing because on the one hand it was comic and self-indulgent but on the other it was infuriating. How dare he hate himself when she loved him so much?

But she kept that to herself. She managed her rage and sadness and presented herself as blankly and benignly as she could for him. Delivering her child to a psych ward was not the kind of fate she expected to escape. Motherhood had ways of making you pay, she knew that, everyone she knew knew that. From her friends she got grim understanding and company on walks around the ring road in the summer dusk.

Dar had to go back to the hospital after the thing with the doll. She felt helpless, as if she herself were some inert puppet, but what option did they have. The doll really frightened her. He represented a corruption of the things she loved most about her son, the things that made him most him – his creativity, his playfulness, the particular, cherished oddness of him that had been there since he first came to her as a black-eyed, gurgling baby.

Stuart took this precious Dar-ness and poisoned it. She was grateful to James for drowning the bastard.

Dar came home again, sedated, humiliated. The months passed. He did not get any worse but he did not get much better either. He didn’t try to get a job. He didn’t talk about the next step. He was sullen and quiet, terse and quiet, or totally comatose and quiet. He went to bed at god knows what time and got up at noon.

In the mornings, she drank tea and looked out the back window at the lawn and the brick wall and the shrubs now starting to bud a little. She had so much peace inside of her. Could she give some to him, somehow?

One day, James and his new girlfriend Aoife came up to the house. Aoife and Dar had been together for a few months but now she was with James, and this is why, Joan suspected, James had not been to the house since Dar had come home from hospital.

Joan felt very fondly towards them all. They were earnest, and they were all trying very hard. She knew that young people were supposed to be cynical but she had never found that to be true. She wished Dar were more cynical. There would have been a bit of safety in that at least.

She brought them sandwiches in the back garden. She felt energy pulsate from James’s limbs – hot, red, male energy – and she wished he could touch Dar and imbue him with it. Or at least get him to go to the gym with him some time. Aoife looked at the ground when Joan looked at her.

Joan wanted to say, it’s grand. It’s not your fault. I admire you for coming here. I know you liked him, and I know why too. He is so lovely. How can we make him see that?

III

Aoife woke up in the big double bed alone. She felt well rested and pleased. She was going to see her mother later for coffee at the garden centre but she had no other weekend plans. Aoife liked time alone. She had never had much of it until she moved in with James, and it was part of the reason she was so content now. They were renting a house on the west side of town, a short drive from her parents’ place. Their house was an eighties built family home with floral carpets and brown linoleum in the kitchen. There was a big tree in the garden. It was the kind of house you could imagine a sitcom family living in, the kind of sitcom they didn’t really make any more.

She decided that she’d go for a run. Their housing estate backed onto some fields that ran alongside the river. It was March and the trees were beginning to bud, though the wind was still sharp and biting. As she ran, Aoife wondered if they should get a dog. She could see herself and James with a dog, they could walk down town with it and get takeaway coffees together while one of them waited outside and people they knew would stop and pet it and ask them how they were. She could see it all so clearly.

The wind blew in her face, making her eyes water. It was cold but she soon warmed up and she stopped to take off her tracksuit top. She liked the feeling of her blood pumping around her body, she loved to become indifferent to the cold, it made her feel powerful and free. The movement of taking off her top knocked one of her wireless earbuds out of her ear. It fell on the ground and rolled towards the edge of the riverbank.

She dropped to catch it and that’s when she saw Stuart.

He was caught in some low branches in the water on the other side of the river; his slick face pointed up towards the muddy sky. At first she thought it was a plastic bag. But then she saw it was him. It had been two years since she’d seen him, but she felt sure it was him.

Aoife had always been intimidated by the arty faction of James’s friends. They made no secret of their contempt for her; their eyes slid over her face whenever she spoke, making her feel tongue-tied and stupid. They often made scathing comments about people who did the kinds of things she did: study hard, save for a deposit, not hate or even think very much about the government. Initially, therefore, being with Dar had felt like a triumph. She was not some empty-headed idiot, she was special enough for the smartest, weirdest one of them all. She had felt so proud, walking into the pub, holding his hand. And she had been moved by the gentle way he spoke to her, the interest he took in the things that interested her, the way he sometimes looked at her as if he could not quite understand how all of her parts functioned.

But that doll hated her, she could tell. And she understood, more than any of the rest of them, she understood that Stuart was not some secret true part of Dar, but the man Dar wished he could be. And that pissed her off. Why couldn’t Dar just be happy with who he was? That’s why she’d had to end it. She couldn’t bear to see him struggle to become this other thing – struggling to be something you were not was grotesquely embarrassing enough but to struggle to be like Stuart was just pathetic.

(That was what she had told herself. Deep down, she felt like maybe Stuart was right. Maybe she was pathetic and shallow and stupid and small. It was impossible to know for sure. Maybe she was with James just because he never made her question herself. Maybe he was just comfort. But who was she to look for anything other than comfort anyway?)

She thought she’d get in the water to get Stuart. She felt an urge to grab him, to look at him, to face him. And she’d been intending to get back into outdoor swimming for a while now. She used to swim here all the time, they all had as children though she hadn’t for many years now. Her body was surging with the heft of her blood, the spring day was not so cold.

She took off her trainers, socks and T-shirt and then, after a moment’s hesitation, her running leggings. She stood up and stretched, feeling gleeful and strong in her sports bra and knickers. She put her phone and her earphones in her left trainer. The grass was wet and cool on her toes. She squinted again at Stuart. She could see the weird flatness of his belly, the part where you were supposed to put your hand.

She stepped carefully down the sloping mud path onto a small rocky shore. It was a popular paddling spot for children; she recalled sinking her toes in the oozy mud long ago. She hoped no one would see her until she had gotten in the water, but people didn’t come down here very often at this time of year.

The water was cold, but she was warm from her run so she could take it. She waded in quickly and waited for her body to go numb, splashing about until it did. She dipped her head under the water and felt a deep, buoyant thrill. She came up to the surface and scanned the far side of the river, looking for Stuart. The river was much deeper than she remembered.

She dived under again, thinking why had she ever stopped doing this. She loved swimming, she loved running, she loved all of this. She had always been a sporty girl, she needed to remember that, she needed this physical exertion to keep her happy. Why had she left it so long to get back in the water? It was only as the current swept underneath her that she remembered she had never swum in March. No one ever swam here in March.

At first, she floated reasonably with the current.

She realized that though the water was in control, she could stay afloat. It was not a problem, she just had to not panic. She would be dragged downriver for a while until this current dissipated and she would have to scramble up the side of the bank and then walk back upriver in her underwear and bare feet, it would be really embarrassing. Or someone would come by and throw her one of the red-and yellow lifebuoys that were situated at regular intervals along the riverbank. That would also be embarrassing and they would ask her what had she been thinking and she would not know what to say.

But the current did not dissipate. And she was quickly becoming very, very cold.

Soon, she was at a part of the river she didn’t recognize, far from town, and the churning determination of the water showed no let-up. She was tired and then she was underneath the water and it was like being a child again, how small and helpless she felt. After a few moments of thrashing panic, she felt her insides go thick with terror. She was utterly unused to this powerlessness, she could not believe this was happening. It was as if the water had become sentient and decided to suffocate her just to show her it could.

She kept trying to come to the surface but the relentless indifference of the current would not have it. The panic was paralysing and then annihilating. She saw herself as she had been mere minutes before, idiotic and delighted in her underwear, wading into the water, begging to be taken by whatever it was that had her now. She had a feeling of having affronted something and she was very sorry.

The current was working so hard to keep her down. She was feeling tired now, more tired than afraid. She did not want to die, she wanted more than anything to stay but this nature, this water, this fate she was now churning in regarded her desires with the most devastatingly unperturbable disinterest. She felt sad, a deep sadness and a feeling of betrayal. She had loved the earth during her time on it, but it felt nothing for her.

In the distance she heard a dog, and in her exhausted mind she saw the dog she had imagined having with James. A small white terrier, with a tartan coat, a dear, smiling chap who would lick her ankles and bound up on the sofa and run in delighted circles to the sound of her voice. It was a beautiful sound, a heavenly sound, and she rose towards it, she tried to reach it, she reached her hand up to it. Moments later, she felt an elbow around her neck and the rough feeling of another human’s skin was the most certain and most wonderful thing she had ever felt. She became suddenly aware of her weight as a body strained to pull her out of the churn and she felt a new fear, but a wide-awake one, not the deadly, somnambulant one of moments before. She came to the surface and gasped at the air before slipping under again, but she was moving away from the tug of the water, she felt its gravitational power shift in response to this determined new presence beside her.

He got her to the side of the riverbank where there was a slippery hollow overhung with the exposed roots of a stumpy tree. He clung on to those roots with one arm, and to her with his other. He was strong enough to haul her to the side but not to drag her up the bank. She couldn’t speak, she was spluttering, she wasn’t fully awake. He said, don’t worry, don’t fight, I have you. You’re all right now, girl, you’re all right.

A young voice cut through the wind and she looked up to see a boy of about nine peering down at them. A dog panted at his side – a dark brown collie, an angel with a leathery tongue. The boy held a mobile phone aloft and nodded at his father, tears rolling down his white-as-marble cheeks and she realized she had almost drowned herself and this boy’s father both. She sobbed with joy and fear.

Word spread that Aoife had gone in the river. That was a euphemism everyone was familiar with. That was a euphemism for a situation involving drink, a young man, and a different kind of intent. And despite the difference in the niceties of her situation and that of the usual young man, this intent got transferred onto her.

So she wasn’t about to start talking about a doll. They thought her crazy enough already. She told James that she had simply decided to go for a swim, but he didn’t quite believe her, he didn’t understand. He was confused and hurt, and then he got angry about it, and then he moved out. He never said anything about the rumours; she felt sorry for him, but she couldn’t figure out a way to talk about what had happened without causing more confusion.

She had a feeling that Stuart had intended for all of this to happen. And if he had, he may have had a point. She was surprised at how little she missed James, she was surprised at how suddenly free she felt without him. She walked around the empty house, catching sight of herself in mirrors, and she smiled at herself, and sometimes laughed.

But she also had terrible dreams about Stuart. They always started the same way. She would be trying to get home to her parents’ house because something unspecified and terrible was happening there, and only she could stop it. But she was stuck with Stuart in a bedroom and they were having sex. She was enjoying it (which was terrible, even in the moment of the dream, the enjoyment was terrible) but she also felt like someone was about to walk in and that she just had to get past her lust so she could think straight about the emergency that was happening at home. But the roar of everything was too much and she always woke up feeling exhausted and ashamed.

Her best friend Laura was friends with friends of Dar. She wanted to ask Laura to ask him if he had heard what had happened to her. When he had been hospitalized that time after Stuart, she had meant to send him a message and she had written and deleted one over and over, but no matter what way she phrased it, it came out seeming self aggrandizing. The very act of sending a message meant that she was flattering herself into thinking he would care about hearing from her. At that time, she was sure he didn’t. He had said some horrible things to her when they had broken up, they had been ringing in her ears at the time. But now she couldn’t remember any of them.

She was driving across town one day when she found herself on the road to his housing estate and she indicated right and drove in. It was a damp day in July, almost four months since she’d gone in the river. She parked against the kerb outside his house and got out. A group of kids were playing on the small green opposite. She hadn’t been up here since that time with James, soon after Dar came out of hospital. It had been so awkward, Dar kept looking at the sky as if it might tell him what to do now.

Joan looked out of the upstairs window to see who had parked outside. She was surprised to see Aoife. She noticed that her blonde hair was freshly highlighted and that her car was squeaky clean. She watched her watching the children, and eventually the young woman walked up the driveway to the front door.

Dar was at work but Joan invited Aoife in for a cup of tea anyway and was surprised when she said yes. They sat in the kitchen and Joan told Aoife about how things were going for Dar: he was saving money, he was volunteering at the Arts Festival, he was helping to programme some fringe events. Aoife looked pleased to hear all of this.

Joan then asked her how she was and Aoife said, me and James broke up. After the river. Joan nodded. She wasn’t sure what to say. She watched Aoife nibble on a biscuit and then put it down on her plate. There was an awkward silence.

‘Remember Stuart?’ Aoife said.

Joan flushed. She felt as if Aoife had pointed at a mess in the corner or said that the skirting boards needed to be dusted.

‘I do,’ Joan said. ‘You and Dar were together around then, weren’t you? Before you took up with James.’

The implication – Joan hoped – was clear. You dumped my son just when things were getting hard for him. You left him for that handsome hunk who has now left you. So now you know how it feels.

But Aoife didn’t seem to notice that Joan was annoyed by the mention of Stuart. She got up and leaned on the sink, and looked out at the back garden for a minute. She then turned around and said to Joan, I saw Stuart in the river that day. I went in to get him, and that’s how I ended up getting into trouble. That’s how I almost drowned. It was all because of Stuart.

When Dar came home that evening, he noticed his mother was in an odd mood. She looked at him gently, with a curious lightness. She usually regarded him with a concern he had to work hard not to find irritating. She didn’t ask him any questions about his day.

Later, his father came home. The three of them were re-watching The West Wing together and they put an episode on after dinner. Dar had initially refused to join in because of his disapproval of American foreign policy, but he didn’t like being in his room on his own all evening. Halfway through the episode, his phone binged. It was a message from Aoife.

Two days later, they walked down by the river together. She pointed out to him where she had seen Stuart the day she had almost drowned.

‘I can’t really remember what I was thinking,’ she said. She sounded amused. ‘I think I just wanted to see him up close. To make sure it was him.’

Dar hated when anyone mentioned Stuart, so no one ever did any more. But hearing Aoife talk about him felt okay. Her belief in him made Stuart more real but less powerful. Less nightmarish, less shameful, just some weird thing that had happened to him. That had happened to them.

He looked shyly at the side of her face, he noticed how determined and relaxed she seemed. They walked on a bit further until they came to a clearing. It was around seven o’clock on a July evening and the light was soft and golden in the branches. He used to swim here as a child, they all had.

Aoife had suggested they go swimming together, to celebrate them both being alive. She peeled off her leggings and sweatshirt and ran at the water at some speed. Her body was big and strong and young. He felt embarrassed about how scrawny he was, so he ran in after her, as fast as he could.