Doll by Nicky Singer Page A

then.”
    And she’s right beside him now, and when he doesn’t open his hand, she touches him. Or maybeshe touches the doll’s hair, and just glances her fingertip against his. He feels it in his spine, like electricity.
    His hand opens.
    “Oh,” she breathes. “Is that gross or what!” She pokes at the doll with fascinated disgust. “I’m beginning to think our friend might need some professional help. I mean that is revolting. I can’t believe her mother made it.”
    “Her mother?” queries Jan.
    “Yes, that’s what Tilly’s mother does, when she’s not drunk. Makes dolls and sells them at markets. But they’re normally big dolls, you know, rag ones. For kids. But this one – she must have been in the middle of some seriously random nightmare to have made this.” Her cat eyes shine. “How did you get it?”
    “When she came to the table,” Jan falters. “She had it in her apron pocket. It … fell. I picked it up.”
    “Tilly’ll be mad without it,” Mercy says. “She’s obsessional like that. Do you want me to take it? Give it back to her at school tomorrow?”
    And he doesn’t. All of a sudden he doesn’t even want Mercy to touch the doll. The doll is something between him and the girl at the bridge. But Mercy is right. He shouldn’t have taken it. Tilly, mad with the doll, will be madder without it.
    “Mercy!” shouts Mrs Van Day.
    “Jan!” shouts Mrs Spark.
    “OK,” Jan says. “OK.” And he gives Mercy the doll.
    She pushes the doll so deep inside her skirt pocket it disappears. He cannot see the bulge of it against her svelte body.
    She turns to leave.
    I have done wrong, he thinks.

7
    I’m sitting at my mother’s sewing machine, my feet on the treadle. I’ve lit some incense, nag champa from Bangalore. It took me a while to find the incense holder, the simple wooden stand Inti gave her. I discovered it eventually, clean and in a drawer. Grandma’s work. My mother always lit incense when she worked. And sang. “ Pluie d’amour , my soul dances in your eyes. Pluie d’amour .” I turn the hand wheel of the machine and begin paddling with my feet. It’s as I remember it, that rhythmic, comforting clunk, the background noise of my childhood. Pluie d’amour , my soul dances in your eyes.
    “What is it?” my father asked once. “That tune?”
    “Big’s theme,” my mother replied and laughed.
    Big.
    That was my mother’s market name. All the traders had nicknames, not that I understood that at first. For years I thought the dun, wiry man who sold honey and mead and beeswax candles really was called Wasp. Just as I believed that Sir Henry, the second-hand clothes man (a public-school boy who bought his wares by the hundredweight, threw most of them away and still made the best profit –    so he said – in the market) was a genuine member of the nobility.
    Clunk, clunk-de-clunk. This machine is spooling memories as it once spooled thread. Inti. Was that a nickname? I don’t think so. It was probably just strange enough for the other traders not to have to invent something new for him. Inti with his gappy teeth and Latin grin. Inti who looked out for me when my mother was busy with a customer, when she was loading or unloading. Inti who made the time pass by telling me stories about the fire inside a Mexican opal, or showing me how to blow a run of notes on the panpipes, or pointing out the flies in his new delivery of amber.
    “This one,” he’d say, cradling a large honey-coloured drop with an eternally dancing fly inside, “this I give to your mother.” He charged her half whathe wrote on the tickets for his stall. “But hey,” he would shrug, “not everyone wears amber the way Big does.”
    Big.
    Does it all come down to this? Big. Was Big a nickname or just a description? I don’t know. Maybe it was simply a truth. For Big was Big in the same way that earth is earth or sky is sky. A big woman with a big laugh. Someone you remembered. Someone to be