The Doll with a China Head by Vicki Feaver
I hear the noise of a car outside and then the door opens and I see Mummy standing there holding a baby wrapped in a white shawl. I run up to her and throw my arms round her legs. I hold her as tight as I can so that she can’t get away.
‘Let go of me!’ she says.
She has been away for days and days. Grandma told me she would come back but I didn’t believe her. I thought she would never come back - like Rags, the dog, who was here one day, licking my chin with her tongue, letting me ride on her back, and then I never saw her again.
Mummy gives the baby to Grandma to hold while she takes off her coat. Then she sits down in an armchair and Grandma hands the baby back to her.
‘Come and look at your baby sister,’ Mummy says to me.
I go up to Mummy’s chair and I want her to throw the baby onto the floor and take me on her lap and hug me. She leans over and gives me a peck on the cheek. I feel as if I’m burning inside. My eyes fill with tears. My bottom lip hangs down in the way she says is so ugly.
‘Isn’t she lovely?’ she says gazing down at the baby.
I don’t think she’s lovely. I think she has a funny red screwed up face. I wish my mother would take her back.
The baby is howling now: a scratchy sound like cats make at night.
‘Poor little thing, she’s hungry,’ Mummy says.
‘Ssh, ssh, darling,’ she murmurs, unfastening the top buttons on her blouse and lifting out her swollen breast.
The baby is still howling; but suddenly she fastens her mouth round my mother’s nipple and all I can hear is a faint snuffling and sucking sound.
‘Come and sit on my knee,’ Grandma says to me.
‘I want to sit on Mummy’s knee,’ I say.
‘Not now,’ Mummy says.
Grandma goes up to her whispers something in her ear.
‘You’re not jealous, are you? Mummy says.
I shake my head.
‘Of course she’s not jealous. You love your little sister, don’t you?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Good girl,’ she says. And for a moment I am good: the little girl with a curl right in the middle of her forehead who when she was good was very very good.
‘If you are very good,’ Mummy says, ‘you can have my precious doll to hold.’
Mummy gets Grandma to fetch the doll from the wardrobe in her bedroom. I have never been allowed to hold her on my own before - the doll with a slippery pink dress and china head that her brother Jack gave her who was in the War and that makes her cry when she holds it so that the pink silk has dark splotches on it.
Grandma wraps the doll in the baby’s spare shawl and lays her on my knee, showing me how to put one hand underneath her and one hand to support her head, just like my mother is holding my sister.
‘You will hold her carefully, won’t you? Mummy says. ‘You know how precious she is?’ ‘Aren’t you a lucky, girl, ‘Grandma says. ‘You’ve got a baby of your own now.’
I hold my baby tightly, gazing down at her face. It is a much prettier than my sister’s face; surrounded by dark curly hair and with blue eyes and a little delicate nose and rosebud mouth.
My sister is crying again and Mummy is holding her against her shoulder and patting her back.
‘She’s got wind,’ she says.
I am happy now. I nurse my baby and in my head sing the song Grandma sings to me when she rocks me on her knee:
Rock-a bye, baby
In the treetop
When the wind blows
The cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks
The cradle will fall
Down will come bay
Cradle and all.
My baby has wind, too. I pick her up and hold her against my shoulder and pat her back, just like Mummy. The shawl slips down and I try and pull it up and my baby falls out of my hands and onto the floor. My mother shrieks and I know something terrible has happened. But for a moment I do nothing. I just sit there very still and frozen. Then I look down and see that my baby’s head has broken into pieces: some quite big - her nose and one eye are one piece; and the top of head with the hair has broken in two - but her mouth and the rest of her nose and her cheeks are broken into tiny pieces.
‘I should never have given it to her,’ Mummy sobs. ‘You stupid girl. Why did you let her drop?
Then I start to cry. I am only two and half but I know that my mother will never forgive me; that from now on she will blame me for every bad thing that happens to her; for every accident that happens to my sister; even for Jack’s broken head that she never saw to grieve over but that is lying now in pieces on the floor in front of her.
