Read by Miranda Harrison (19 minutes into podcast, here)
Shana opens the window that overlooks Clapton Way, the one with mould at the seal that never disappears, and decisively throws the doll’s head into the street. Moments before she’d snapped it clean from the body. She looks at her baby in the corner of the kitchen and living area who is still screaming. Still eight months. Still difficult. The smell of weed from the corridor laps at the door and she breathes in, half hoping for a high that won’t come.
‘Never trust a man to pull out’ her friend had advised her at the time, and Shana thinks now how it would be enough just to say never trust a man, full stop.
*
Outside, Ali, unaware of people like Shana watching from their windows, walks down the street from Rectory Road Overground, quietly contemplating if she is in a transition phase or a crisis. She plays with a wedding ring she should have removed when the final order, the last step of the divorce, was granted two weeks ago. She notices the bags on the pavements first, thinks how they will invite the rats, then wishes again that the election was coming sooner. Britain is breaking. The doll’s head catches her eye next: the ripped plastic and stunned eyes give the impression that being bereft of body is an unexpected violation. She bends, strokes the hair the same texture of the cheese strings her housemate stuffs his shared shelf with, and picks it up.
As she does, her fingers let go of the blue bag she is carrying that holds six eggs from the off-licence that transfers money on request to Pakistan and keeps halal chicken in the deep freezer at the back next to the chocolate Cornettos. The end of the cones are bent from the budget packs of peas that press down on them. Ali thinks about how she’ll add this head to her box that she keeps under her bed, a small-sized secret, smaller at least than the others she keeps from her housemates. She drops in the things she finds on her walks home – recently, a queen of spades separated from a pack, a single trainer with the laces removed and a map of Copenhagen’s metro, tea stained at the edges – to remind her of the lives others are living out there. She grips the head with the same force as her ex used to grip her throat, and walks on.
*
Shana watches Ali disappear down the street. She notices the blue bag left behind. Her baby’s cries fill the room. She thinks about how it was her cries that filled this room instead once, not so long ago, when Casey would come intermittently and make promises to her. He’d arrive and lay a black helmet, chipped at the front, on the table she’d bought from Age UK on Hackney Road, a place filled with a musty mishmash of cups and chairs and other things that people had decided they no longer wanted, voluntarily or involuntarily.
‘Check this track’, he’d say as he put his phone in a glass, a makeshift speaker to better hear. He’d circle his arms around her, his invitation to come closer, and they’d go through motions that led to movements.
In the afterwards they’d stay half-dressed on her sofa and Shana would hope it was good for him, never dwelling on the fact it was never good for her. She’d grind weed to sprinkle thickly on the tobacco in the spliff she’d roll for them, a ritual she started to buy a little more time together. They’d lie lazily as smoke blew into the room, letting the spaces in between the seconds slow, and Shana would tentatively rest her head on his chest.
He’d whisper ‘You know you’re the only girl I fuck raw right?’ and Shana translated, wrongly, this meant he liked her the most. That her risk would bring a reward. She looks now at her daughter, at the only remains of Casey she has that she isn’t sure she wants, and places the doll’s body on the stack of adoption leaflets she printed at Dalston Library. She’s already submitted the application.
*
Ali goes to Dalston Library too, more regularly now that she’s in a new house where the only place she can be alone is in her small single room that overlooks Rendlesham Road. The sound of sirens often swells in the space. She arrives there now, doll’s head in hand, ignoring the kitchen that has a sofa in so that the house could be advertised falsely as having a living room to increase the rent, and goes to sit on her bed. Ali wonders where the head came from, where the body is, what made it bend and then break. She remembers how that happened with her ex-wife too, how they went from collecting coffee cups for their cupboard along Columbia Road to her hiding emergency bags of clothes to grab when the hits became too hard.
The way it started was almost playful. A slap of a spatula across her wrist the first time she seasoned a stew wrong. Her ex-wife had laughed and Ali tried to laugh with her. The slap still stung. The next time had been across her face; she’d been home ten minutes later than planned. And then the times after that blurred together until Ali would try to count in meetings when her attention drifted where there was a spare place on her body for another bruise.
She used to research whether this was normal at the library when she could, although opening hours from the council cuts made it more difficult to go. She was afraid to look at home, that her search history would be discovered. All the advice she found seemed aimed at straight couples. Ali thinks now of all the times she could have been like this head, realising she’s left the eggs somewhere on her walk home. She sighs. She pulls out her box, drops the head in. Her phone rings out.
*
Three streets over where time is the same but lives are different, Shana has turned back to the room and sits on the sofa where she watches her daughter’s hands gripping the remains of the doll’s body. Shana can’t interpret her gurgles. ‘Why did you go ahead’, she’s often asked, and she isn’t sure, can’t explain how sometimes decisions are made from not really making decisions at all. She thinks of the boldness of her body back then and how he’d commit to nothing more than the moment.
‘I’ll tell you many things but I won’t tell a lie’ he’d quip, and Shana knows this is true: he’d never made a promise to her. Perhaps this is why he never replied; there is no truth for him to tell.
The grey of the sky is starting to fade into a November black. Shana decides to organise baby clothes into piles; Hackney Baby Bank had originally donated them to her. She’ll give them all back, the onesies that have holes in the feet and buttons that are impossible to do in the night and came streaked with milk stains across the front. Shana opens the note section on her phone, wonders what she can leave for her daughter. She can’t give her anything physical, but maybe an explanation is enough. What to say?
She taps out: ‘I loved your dad and I loved you, and he loved neither of us’, then deletes it. Is familiarity the same as love? She opens the one photo she has of them together from the only time he’d stayed over, accidentally, after he’d fallen asleep during the UFC. His fingers had loosely rested in one of her palms and she’d found it hard to hold the phone as she’d tried to balance the almost burnt-down spliff. All she’d ever really wanted was for him to stay a little longer.
*
Ali answers the call, puts it onto loudspeaker so she can sort through her box of lost items as her friend talks.
‘It’s finally happened’, her friend says, ‘the adoption has come through!’
Ali wants to be happy for her, wants to say the right things like ‘congratulations’ and ‘wow you’re going to be a mum’ and ‘isn’t this exciting’ but all she can do is silently cry as she keeps sifting through the things people have left behind, not knowing if they’ll ever notice them being gone. She’s realised she’s silent and her friend is waiting and she doesn’t want to make it about her divorce, again, and so she chokes out ‘I’m so speechless’ and this feels honest enough for the dishonesty that inevitably grows between friends.
’I never thought we’d get here’, her friend whispers, and Ali agrees, wonders that often too.
*
Six days later, Shana snaps her daughter into a pushchair that she’ll leave behind at the adoption office and walks out of the flat that she will return to alone. She’ll call the housing association later to remind them of the leak they still haven’t fixed. The walk is short. She was unexpectedly restless this morning, folding and re-folding tiny clothes to rearrange in a backpack she’d found abandoned on a bench in Millfields Park. The ending is always harder than the beginning; there is no more possibility left. She notices how the eggs in the blue bag have cracked open and oozed through to the pavement; white and yellow membranes gloop into the gully and are preserved in semi-frozen streaks. She steps to the side to not track the pushchair wheels through it.
As Shana turns to walk along Rendlesham Road, Ali drops her keys into her bag as she closes the door that needs a pull to thud shut. She’ll regret not placing them in the zipped compartment later when she’ll have to dig amongst old receipts and a scarf soaked with the scent of tester perfumes and her book with folded down pages to find them again, fingers frozen. Ali has promised she’ll meet her friend at the adoption centre, to squeeze her hand before she goes in and starts single parenthood and a life that will take her in a direction that is different to Ali.
As she steps on the pavement she pauses to let a woman with a pushchair pass. Ali notices how the baby inside holds a doll without a head, and Shana notices something about the woman’s coat, a familiarity that is not familiar at all. They walk on opposite sides of the pavement as Ali thinks fleetingly about the head in her bedroom, if it belongs to the doll. As the cold closes in around them, Ali thinks for longer on answers never found out, on the things that tie strangers together.
(c) Kathryn Sharpe, 2024
Miranda Harrison: Actor and voiceover artist. Theatre highlights include Viv, Norfolk (Arcola); Florrie, Skin (Park Theatre); Vagina Monologues (Bread & Roses); Nurse, Romeo & Juliet (Leicester Sq). TV includes 3 pilot episodes of UTU (BBC World TV). Voiceover: Plague Songs (a political satire on Covid) & work for Bletchley Park & BBC Children in Need. She runs Page to Stage London: rehearsed readings of new writing, with an industry panel giving feedback. Spotlight: 6296-7864-5315
Kathryn Sharpe lives in East London & enjoys exploring the psychology of people & places through short stories.
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