SUSIE'S DOLL - an episodic story (UPDATED 02/04/08)
Hello all! Right then. What follows is the first part of an episodic story I've been sort-of working on for about three years. There are various drafts of various bits of the story, but finally I'd deem this bit pretty much finished. From now, I'm going to try to update as regularly as possible in a linear fashion (well, as linear as this story gets!) Make what you will of it. I'm not really going to discuss the subtext or pragmatics of it for now. But I'd bloomin' love if you could take whatever you want from it, and for it to be more than 'just a storybook'.
It's about a little girl and her doll. It shouldn't be triggering. It might be a little in places. This part shouldn't be unless you're particularly sensitive about knives.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy.
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Susie's Doll - 0
Susie picked up the doll and stared into its deep, fiery eyes. She held it there, not breathing, beads of sweat seeping from her forehead and navigating their routes down her soft face. The doll stared back, still, emotionless, a mirror of herself. Susie held the doll’s gaze and waited, waited with a passionate intent; and she focused. She focused all her energy, all her soul, all her life into the eyes of the doll. Her knuckles whitened as she gripped the stuffed torso with all her strength as her features contorted to form a painstaking grimace. Focus, Susie, focus. Focus.
A flash of white. Susie rocked backwards, momentarily startled by the sudden intensity. It was never usually that fast; on occasion, the first flashes had taken hours, not mere minutes. She couldn’t let this distract her. Regaining her composure, and forcing herself back into the routine, Susie concentrated, shaking, on the sparkling glass eyes. Focus.
Another flash; she expected it this time, and took it without so much as a jolt. The flashes hurt - a great, thumping pain in Susie's head and chest, spreading slowly through her limbs and dissipating as out of her extremities as pins and needles - but she was long accustomed to the agony. The blinding white light faded this time, into a new scene: a blur at first, then a colour, orange, followed by the faint shape of a crowd: faceless beings hustling together. The smells came next: a heavy, exotic musk; warm sweat and arid sand masked by the aroma of incense and of cooking meat. Focus. Susie began to make out the sandstone walls, lined with stalls and cut into by tunnels. The orange desert air hung low among the crowds of hurried men and women fighting their way through the medina. For a moment, or maybe a few, silence: only the faint sounds of Susie's own heavy breathing and beating heart were audible. Then,
"'Ello, bonjour, guten tag! You English, yes? French? You French?"
"You no have twenty dinar? Okay, okay, fifteen. Fifteen dinar is good! Come on, you must have fifteen dinar! You rich! Look at that watch, it gold! Okay, twelve."
A large woman - probably German, she suspected – smacked into the side of Susie, knocking her sideways and towards a small Tunisian man dressed in off-white robes and tatty, brown sandals. A grin emerged through his patchy moustache and beard, the tiny droplets of sweat diverted around his mouth by his enthusiasm. "Ello, little girl! You want to buy hubble-bubble?"
Susie composed herself and began walking, faster than usual, through the horrendous crowd. She began to feel agitated: perhaps she was on to something this time, perhaps exploring a place and time of significance. The atmosphere exuded something, a subtle but distinctly noticeable sensation that something was not quite as it should be. It was too warm, too crowded, too... familiar. She'd been here before, she new she had, but the reasons escaped her, tormented her.
Susie broke into a run. She darted through the mass of shoes and legs and torsos, sticking near the walls to remain inconspicuous. Her size helped - four feet, eight inches, and of slight build - as she twisted and turned through the elaborate human maze. Finally, a parting in the crowd ahead: she sprinted, making for the clear area. At last, seclusion, a chance to breath and regain her bearings. A chance to think things through. Almost there. Focus.
"And as you see, these rugs here of highest quality. Hand-woven, only forty din- Ello, little girl. Something is wrong?"
Dead end. Sh*t. Focus.
"Why you run, huh? Something is the matter?"
Turning on the spot, she tripped and fell towards a middle-aged English man, drenched in odorous sweat, football jersey tucked into revealing shorts, beer gut overhanging. He held out his soggy arms and broke her fall, laughing. "Eh-he-he, easy up, love."
Focus.
She barged past him, beginning to cry. She was lost in a place she knew, a place she'd been before, a place something important had happened; but a place lost in time, lost in lives past. She ran.
She ran back through the crowds, past the stalls and the naive holidaymakers, up the steps to the walls of the medina and back down to the lower levels once again. She ran through shops and alleyways, smashing valuable pottery and stepping on pristine artwork, climbing now towards the higher reaches of the bazaar. She let her subconscious guide her, still gripping the doll tightly in her hand as a sharp pain engulfed her left side.
F*ck. F*ck. Focus!
Swinging round in shock, Susie saw the man, wearing a baseball cap and a large jacket. The sun beamed down and reflected a glint of light off a silver blade enclosed in his right hand, his face in shadow from the hat's peak. Focus! She whimpered, switching her gaze to the wound on her abdomen - a long, gaping wound, a few inches deep. She grasped the doll and stared once more. Focus, Susie. Focus. F*cking focus!
The sounds of the market became distant echoes, and Susie stared into the life of the glass eyes. A flash. Another flash.
"Only five dinar! You have five dinar, yes?"
And she was gone.
Last edited by Lewis The Second : 03-04-2008 at 12:47 AM.
Reason: Updates.
wow, its really good so far,
keep posting, i'd love to read more.
x
"That is why, for Christ's sake,
I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships,
in persecutions, in difficulties.
For when I am weak, then I am strong"
(2 Corinthians 12:13)
Updates! Next part just about done, I think. Seems okay. Hope you like it. First part, clearly, is above, for those who've not read it and fancy following this.
Not started Chapter 2 yet so dunno when that'll be. Have some work to be getting on with this week too, but hopefully I'll have something boshed up by next weekend.
Thanks once again for reading, comments and discussion welcome and - indeed - appreciated.
Lewis x
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1
The tiles were dirty again. Susie observed this from time to time, becoming uncomfortably aware of the dull flooring, devoid of her figure below. It was disconcerting, somehow, the lack of a reflection. The normality, the tiny streak of the ordinary left in her life, was that little bit easier to locate with the aid of self-portrait. That’s what she needed, Susie thought, a stronger sense of self.
If asked how long she’d been there, Susie wouldn’t have been able to give an answer with any certainty. The line between minutes and hours seemed to blur a little more with each one that ticked by. She’d been there long enough to forget the intricacies of her arrival and a lot of her life before it; but then, her memory seemed unnervingly short anyway these days. Either way, it was certainly not mere minutes or hours since she first awoke here. It had to be weeks, months, or even years.
The more Susie tried to recall her life before, the hazier the puzzle became. There wasn’t a crystalline memory of anywhere but the room she found herself in now; the corridor on the other side of the heavy, scratched green door; the canteen down the hall emitting a curious odour-cocktail of gravy and disinfectant. Even of outdoors, all she knew was the view from her third-story window, and the yard on the other side of the building where she was allowed in the company of the workers, always within sight and never respecting of privacy. Despite having little memory of it, Susie missed the outside world. Her new world was a shattered mosaic.
Confusion abound, then, but Susie had learnt to deal with it, and even to make sense of small portions. Such progress she found comforting, and learning the intricacies of her environment was fast becoming her favourite pastime. She had established early on, for example, that the square, red button to the left of her bed summoned a servant of some kind, usually a young woman dressed in the same white as that of her sheets. Lifting her legs back onto the bed, she rolled across its surface and pressed this button, illuminating it in the centre. She pressed again, once, twice, and a third repeat for good luck. No real reason; just a habit formed out of impatience. Moments later, the door swung open, and a middle-aged, bespectacled man peeked his head around the door.
This was not to Susie’s taste. The young women at the establishment were, on the whole, pleasant and helpful and at least partially on a level with Susie herself. But the men were a different matter. Distant and unapproachable, the males patrolled the corridors and the yard dashing from one locale to another without a moment to spare out of kindness. They spoke in a weird, jargonistic tongue, and shared private jokes that felt spiteful and conspiracist to Susie. Moreover, the appearance of a gentleman (Susie had never understood this term. Why not gentlewomen as well? In any case, all the men Susie had come across were considerably less gentle than women) unsettled her mainly for its peculiarity: of all the times she had utilised the button’s service, not once had a man materialised in the doorway.
“Yes, dear?” the man called, half-twisted around the doorframe. His manner was curt and irritable, as if this whole business was simply a waste of his valuable time and effort. At least, she thought, the man could have had the courtesy to step into her quarters. Susie glared.
“Yes?” he asked again, this time setting foot inside the room and ambling towards the bed, but leaving the door ajar on its hinges. Susie bit her tongue. No point in complaining if this was the best she was going to get.
“I want to see myself,” she commanded, fixing her eyes on those of the ageing man. His forehead was covered in creases, sweat running in channels above his eyebrows and sitting in droplets below his receding hair. His breath stank of stale god-knew-what, the stench enveloping Susie’s surroundings in a veil of invisible smog. He was shaven, but his chin was patchy, with thick stubble beginning to emerge in one place, a smooth beige surface in the next. Thick frames sat above his nose, hanging slightly too low so that the lenses magnified only the bottom half of his dark, deep-set eyes.
The man looked perplexed as he neared the bedside and crouched to Susie’s height. “I’ll bring you a mirror, sweetheart,” said the man, touching her shoulder before standing up to leave. Susie stopped him.
“Not a mirror.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not a mirror. I want to see myself in the floor.”
The man – Nurse Graham, his nametag seemed to read – looked “Um, why do you want to see yourself in the floor, sweetheart?”
This term did not please Susie, particularly a second time. She was anything but a sweetheart. Though she had hardly questioned her current situation, she knew she had been far too hardened to be called anything of the sort. She was an intelligent girl and, even at her fairly low year-count, Susie knew when she was being patronised. She let Nurse Graham know. “I just do,” she said cuttingly.
Susie enjoyed the upper hand. As the perspiration continued to form irregularly on Nurse Graham’s forehead, and as his voice wavered, becoming more and more unsure as he spoke, Susie became more comfortable in his presence. This man wasn’t a threat. He wasn’t intelligent enough.
“The floor is dirty, Nurse Graham,” she stated, pondering for a second mid-sentence to debate whether or not to award the man the dignity of using his name. Nurse Graham reluctantly returned to his crouched position and spoke softly.
“Well the floor is what people walk on, dear. People leave muddy footprints and such. It’s just the way it goes.” Oh, wasn’t he the clever one, Susie thought. Nobel Prize for Nurse Graham for his paper on ‘What people walk on’. Nurse Graham thought for a second, then, still confused, repeated, “Why do you want to see yourself in the floor?”
Susie glared. Nurse Graham remembered, and smiled.
“You just do, right? I’ll have someone give it a clean for you.”
He stood up and patted Susie on the shoulder once again. She looked down at his hand with contempt. He removed it, suddenly and with a jolt, and left the room, swinging the door and letting it shut of its own accord behind him.
Susie sat back in bed. She examined the wall opposite. The paper was tatty and old, white fading to a pale ochre over time, grey-pink flowers with thin olive stems repeating in lines across and down the surface. It reminded her of her grandmother’s living room, years ago when Susie had been very small. There – that was a memory. They filtered through occasionally. Standing in grandma’s living room, pushing the rocking chair gently backwards and forwards as her mother and her elderly relative drank tea and talked about Mrs Midgely from number 43 and her net curtains that you could see through at night, you know, especially when she had the main light on, or even just the telly sometimes. Susie had been bored at the time, but now she found the memory comforting; or, at least, less tiresome than her current situation. Her grandmother had talked too much for Susie’s liking, the way old people do, but now she could have done with the company. No worries. She had always been independent. This didn’t need to change now.
After her grandmother died (she was old but hadn’t died specifically of old age; she had fallen on the steep staircase leading down from the landing to the front room, cracking her head on the frame of the open door below. The next-door neighbour had heard the noise, and rushed round to find the poor dear slumped on the carpet. The woman had been traumatised by the event and had ended up in therapy, Susie’s mum later told her, though Susie didn’t really know what this meant), Susie’s mother became unwell. Not the sort of unwell where you have a temperature and feel sick; the sort of unwell where you feel unhappy and cry a lot. So eventually, Susie and her family had moved away from their town (its name escaped Susie) and to London. London was busy and full of people in a hurry, and it took some getting used to for Susie and her dad, but her mum had seemed happier. London kept her busy, her dad had said one day, kept her mind off the accident. That’s what everyone had referred to grandma’s death as at the time. ‘The accident.’ Now, people still used the term, but Susie knew they were talking about something else. Susie’s mum got a new job in London, working in a bank, and liked how she could ‘leave her work at work,’ which sounded a bit silly to Susie, but nobody else seemed to question it, so neither did she.
See, these sort of memories, these general timeframes and major events, weren’t a problem for Susie until much later. Her early years – until she was six, maybe seven perhaps; it was difficult to tell when she couldn’t remember her current age – weren’t a problem unless she tried to recall specific scenes. A smile crept upon her face as she remembered her grandmother’s wallpaper. She was starting to break down a barrier, Susie felt.
The door of the room swung open once more, and Nurse Graham poked his sweaty little head back into the room. Of course, he had no time to enter further again, particularly after his little errand. His urgency and reluctance to stay for longer than was necessary reminded her of a rabbit in a film she had once watched – another memory flash: she was doing well today – and she began to find it humorous as well as irritating. “There’ll be someone along this evening to wipe the floor, sweetheart,” sweetheart again, “see you later.” The door swung shut again, slamming this time behind the impatient, patronising man. This wouldn’t do, Susie thought. She was going to have to find a way of summoning just the women instead of the men.
She lay back to ponder the predicament, to find a way of excluding this strange, sweaty man with loose glasses, but she must have been tired because, without meaning to, she fell quickly into a deep sleep.
Oh gosh this really is something... And like Sian said, you're a really talented writer; it's quite admirable =)
I'm really enjoying this story and look forward to the next part.
The only time you will find real light is when you're searching in the dark..
Bloomin' 'eck, I've reached that point where I have ideas for further on in the story but I'm not entirely sure where to take the next few chapters. Might just write and see what happens. Will try have 2 up by the end of the week.
