The Fictional Man (30 page)

I
T WAS
M
ICHAEL
Rourke who opened the door, and the fall of his face as he beheld me confirmed that I had come to the feast as a spectre, as unbidden and unwelcome as Banquo’s ghost. I had suspected as much, and now a dark part of me, my inner imp, was filled with a perverse, gleeful joy at the knowledge, and in greeting I lifted up the wooden figure I’d carved the night before for his inspection.

“Look, Mike, look!” The smile felt savage on my face, like the anarchist readying the bomb. “Why, I’ve brought a friend for the party!”

“Why, so you have!” Mike made the best attempt he had in him to be jovial. But his ruddy cheeks had turned deathly pale at the sight of my friend the doll, and I cannot now find it in myself to blame him.

For in those small, dark hours in the dead of the night, as my hand had worked the blade and carved the wood, it had been guided by that inner imp, that savage anarchist, that mean and ugly quarter of my spirit which I had brought back with me from what my wife called ‘my time away’. That time which had driven out the joy from my life, and drove her out in turn. My ugly souvenir of darker times.

I tell myself now that I tried from my heart to instil my little friend with joy, and hope, and happiness, if only from a need to be loved and accepted by the Sutherlands and their hangers-on. But perhaps in that dark night I was more honest. Or perhaps the knife knew me better than I did myself, and had whittled accordingly.

My friend the doll was a horror.

To begin with he had been made overly tall and thin, his legs so skinny that I had to hold him gingerly by the waist, lest I should squeeze too hard and snap them off. His wooden arms, meanwhile, hung limp at his sides as if dislocated, broken by some terrible wound. In my worst folly, I’d attempted to carve him a little jacket, so he would at least be smartly dressed for the occasion – but the knife had had its way, and the macabre slashes I’d left on his torso suggested nothing so much as a suit of rags hanging from a condemned man.

All such indignities my friend the doll could have borne with equanimity. Yes, even a smile! For I had meant him to be a cheery fellow, despite his many hardships. But the knife had shifted at the last, and the slash of his mouth was sour and cruel, his eyes hollow, blank dots, and it was this hateful expression more than anything which had turned Michael Rourke so pale.

I saw his expression, and the inner imp inside me flexed again – and so I spoke for the first time as the doll.

How to describe it? How to describe that awful voice? It was my voice, that I admit freely. I am not such a fool as to believe that any animating spirit but my own possessed that hunk of mis-carved wood. It was my voice, but warped and black and twisted, in the way I’d heard the voices of my friends in their hospice-beds warp and crack as they begged, from faces without jaws, bodies without limbs, begged for the nurse, for their mothers, for death.

To speak for my friend, I drew my lips back and back, revealing my yellow teeth in a fearful grimace like Death’s own, my head tilting to the side as though I were asleep or dead myself. And then I spoke through my teeth, from low in my throat, and the result was a keening whine, a banshee sort of voice, a voice from an unmarked grave on a muddy field.

“HELLO MISTER ROUR-R-RKE,” my friend the doll said in his awful cracking croak, as I stood like a living corpse, waggling him two and fro in my grip. Mike Rourke had left the porcelain teddy bear that he’d bought that afternoon, for a full eight dollars, on one of the Sutherlands’ end-tables, so all he could do in response was stammer and nod, backing away from the door and from my friend as we made our grand entrance.

“HELLO, EVERYONE. HELLO, HELLO.” That awful voice! It had the same effect on the assembled company as it did on Mike Rourke, who stood ashen-faced in the doorway of the living-room. Tom Fuller dropped his whiskey and it went on the new carpet, and Roger Sutherland seized the opportunity to escape, running for a moist towel and some soda-water rather than staying a moment longer in that place. Marlene’s teacup rattled in its saucer like a bone, and poor Jeannie Rourke looked as if she might faint dead away. I may have dreamt it, but I will even swear I saw Margaret Sutherland’s eyes flash with rage for the briefest moment, and the vicious imp inside me counted that moment as well worth the price of admission.

But then she was on her feet, smiling prettily, her eyes as full of good humour as ever, holding the toy soldier that had once been my possession in her hand.

“Goodness me!” she boomed, in her deep soldier-voice, the red-carved wood waggling in her grip as if it was trying to escape. “I’m a redcoat, on my way from war! Will you march with me, little clothes-peg-boy?”

Part of me recoiled at her insolent naming of my friend. Names, I have been told, are magic, and to name a thing is to bind it. Perhaps that was Margaret Sutherland’s power, that she could name us all as her friends, create roles for us, slot us into her pretty little fictions of smoking-rooms and drawing-rooms and tea- and dinner- and cocktail-parties where everything was such, such fun.

But I had a trick worth any two of hers. The peg-boy spoke again.

“YOU ARE NOT FROM THE WAR-R-R,” the peg-boy said, for though the voice echoed from my own throat, and the spittle flew from my stretched lips, I would leave you in no doubt that the words were his, and his alone.

“Ho ho!” laughed the soldier, a hint of desperation creeping into Margaret Sutherland’s voice. “Why, of course I am! I’m a soldier, on my way from war! Who’ll march with me?”

“YOU HAVE ALL YOUR LIMBS,” the peg-boy said, and Jeannie made a high-pitched little gasping sound and covered her mouth with her hand. “YOU HAVE BOTH YOUR EYES. YOUR FACE IS NOT A RAGGED HOLE.” Tom Fuller was white as a ghost, and made no move to pick up his empty glass. “WHO DID YOU KILL.”

“What?” Margaret said in a faint voice, before recovering herself. There was the lightest trace of sweat upon her brow, but she still smiled brightly – a wide, mirthless smile, as if we were still playing the game. “Why – the Japs, of course!” Roger, returning with the cloth and soda, nodded vigorously at that; he had always been a man of deep and abiding patriotism. But Tom Fuller winced, as if troubled by an old wound, and in that moment I felt some pity for him. Tom had been at Okinawa. It was real to him.

To me, as well.

But the peg-boy did not care for what was real, and what was only doll-play. He had come to the doll-party, and now he would have his say.

“HOW MANY.” The croaking voice was flat and dead, bubbling up from a tomb world under a cold sun. My throat was raw, but I did not mind the pain. I did not truly feel that it was mine.

“Oh – hundreds!” Margaret sang out, gaily, losing the soldier voice by degrees. Tom opened his mouth to speak, but could not quite bring himself to do it. Instead, he stared at the bright red varnish on the wooden soldier, on the pretty wooden drum he held.

“DID THEY SCREAM.”

“Like little piglets!” Margaret’s face was flushed now, joyous as a boy’s on Christmas morning. In her eyes, she was winning our strange game, matching me point for point, seeing me off the field. She did not notice Jeannie, weeping silently, or Tom, standing like a statue, or Mike Rourke, who’d turned and walked out of the house, fists bunched.

“WAS IT FUN.”

“It was such fun! Such, such fun!” Margaret shouted, in her own childish little-girl voice, waving the wooden soldier to and fro, until Jeannie got up and followed her husband down the driveway at a run, tears streaming down her face.

There was a long moment of silence, during which Marlene put down her tea and picked up her coat. “It’s been a delightful game,” she said crisply, not looking at Margaret or her husband, “but we really must go.” Her husband must have been in full agreement, for he left with her without another word.

And then I walked away myself, with my wooden peg-boy in my grip, and left Margaret Sutherland with her husband, and her toy soldier, and the game she still believed she’d won.

I
SHOULD HAVE
slept like a baby that night.

If nothing else, I had broken the Sutherlands’ power over me. Perhaps in time the others would forget the hundreds she’d sang of killing, or the glee with which she’d described their end, but I knew it would not be for some long time to come.

For a moment, my fellow party-guests had seen a real soldier in her hands, and the red on his tunic had not been varnish, and what he held in his hands had not been a drum. And in her face, they had seen something worse than any expression my inner imp could have carved into a piece of wood; they had seen the callous indifference of one who cares for fun, but not what fun has cost, who squanders time bought for her by blood, who would see the world outside her clique burn to ash without batting an eyelid. As long as one could still have nice plays on the radio, and a really good Martini, with fresh olive – well, what would be the difference?

And her clique was, at the root, a clique of one.

I should have been in bed, but instead I stayed up late into that night, drinking whiskey and savouring my anarchist’s triumph. And yet, with every glass, I could still see the peg-boy out of the corner of my eye, standing on the bookshelf where the soldier had been, leaning against the books, as his feet were too thin to stand up on. Unable to resist the urge any longer, I turned in his direction and raised my glass. “To our triumph, peg-boy.”

He stared at me in silence, with his empty eyes. I felt a sudden wave of irritation pass through me. There was something insolent about that sneer of his, some judgement to it that I felt I didn’t deserve. “Don’t look at me like that,” I muttered, fixing him with my own gaze, my own sneer. “You’re uppity – that’s your problem. Think you’re better than everyone.”

I sipped my whiskey, leaning back in my chair. He continued to look at me, the grimace on his face seeming to intensify. “You’re cynical,” I told him, “unpleasantly so. You were fun enough at the Sutherlands’, but now...” I shot him another look, finishing the drink. He stared back, as full of hate – yes, hate, hate and contempt – as ever. And all of it aimed at me! Me, of all people! Me, who had created him from a knife and wood!

“Damn you!” I shouted at him, rising from my chair and grabbing him my the waist, resisting the urge burning inside me to snap those damnable little legs from his body. “Why me? Why turn that look on me?”

“BECAUSE YOU MADE ME,” came the reply, from my own burning throat. On another occasion, I might have been disturbed at the ease with which I answered my own question, but I was full of whiskey and bile then, and I gave it no mind.

“Well, show some gratitude,” I hissed, eyes narrow as slits. “So what if I did make you? You should be happy to be alive.” Immediately the voice returned to me, echoing in my own ears – but no less horrific for all that.

“YOU MADE ME TO DIE.”

“Nonsense,” I said, taking a step back at that. “Why, you’re only wood. You can’t die – surely?”

“WHEN YOU STOP MAKING ME SPEAK,” the peg-boy said, through my mouth, “I WILL DIE.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head, but something in the words struck an awful chord inside me. “That’s nonsense. Nonsense!” I turned from him, trying to escape his dreadful gaze by pouring myself another whiskey.

“WHEN YOU STOP MAKING ME SPEAK,” he said, in his awful voice, the voice that tore at my throat and my ears and whatever parts of my soul were left to me, “I WILL DIE.”

“There will be periods of silence, I grant you,” I said, as if trying to strike some strange deal with that gaze, with that voice. “But I will carry on speaking for you, on and off. You will live as long as I!” Dear God, what devil’s bargain was I making? I remembered my wife, promising to love me for all time, and once again I felt pity for her, and hatred for myself. How my beloved must have suffered, promised anything in the hope the man she loved would come back to her at last! How her heart must have torn in her chest when she realised that man was dead, forever dead, and all that was left of him was I.

“YOU ARE LYING,” the peg-boy croaked.

“No!” I lied.

“EVEN SO,” the peg-boy said, his logic remorseless, “WHEN YOU DIE, I WILL DIE. YOU MADE ME TO DIE.”

“Others might speak for you –”

“THEY WILL NOT. I WILL DIE.” The voice was inexorable. I tried desperately to keep from speaking, but the voice would not be silent; it tore itself from my throat like pus from an open wound.

Tears stung my eyes, and I made one final plea, one desperate lunge to escape the consequences of my crime. “What – what of your soul?” The words felt futile, bitter as ash in my mouth.

“I HAVE NO SOUL,” the wooden doll croaked. It was too much. With a cry of horror, I hurled my glass at the peg-boy, knocking it from the bookshelf and sending it tumbling to the floor. The glass smashed; the doll did too, one of the thin legs snapping out from underneath it as it struck the hard wood of the floor.

I felt a wave of nausea pass through me at the sight of the cruelly maimed body, and then felt my own lungs expel air, my lips pull back in that death’s-head leer, my throat shriek with pain as the grotesque, croaking voice burst from me once again – in a scream.

“YOU HUR-R-RT ME,” it shrieked, over and over, seeming almost to move before my eyes, to tremble and shake in agony at its missing limb. “YOU HUR-R-RT ME. YOU HUR-R-RT ME.”

I could stand it no longer. Desperately, I looked around for something – anything! – to rid me of this awful creature, this monster that I had created. The fireplace beckoned – I would burn him, consume him in flame, end that awful voice forever! No, first the axe I kept in the cellar, for chopping firewood! I would rend him in pieces, burn those pieces in the grate and I would hear his voice no more!

“YOU HUR-R-RT ME,” he screamed, with my voice, as I rushed for the cellar stairs, almost tripping at the top one and breaking my neck; and the thought rushed unbidden through me that that would have solved everything, silenced the voice that still shrieked through my lungs and in my ears, as loud and piteous as ever. Then I had the axe in my hand, and I was racing back up the cellar stairs to finish the peg-boy once and for all.