Ramsey Campbell - 1976 - The Doll Who Ate His Mother Read Free Page B

stone overhead and close around her, musty-smelling, a
crowd squeezed in so tight she could hardly lift her arm to drink her Coke,
dense smoke hanging low beneath the ceiling: beyond the crowd she could just
see four figures on a stage, making loud blurred sounds. “There was a boy there
I knew from school,” she said. “He only touched me, only just below my
shoulder, here, but Rob gave him such a push he nearly got trampled. I must
have been about thirteen then.”
                 Dorothy
was shaking her head, wide-eyed, smiling, engrossed .
To Clare, she looked a little like a teacher pretending to be interested. You
should be interested, Clare thought. It’s a side of Rob you never knew.
                 “Oh
yes, and there was one other boy,” she said.
                 “This
was a few years later: I thought he was nice, at the time. We used to go for
walks, and he’d tell me all his plans, all his dreams. Then one day I heard Rob
had nearly broken his arm with a piece of railing because of what he’d been
saying about me. All the time he’d been laughing at me with
his friends. Rob never told me what about.” But she’d heard from someone
else. Little Stumpy, he’d been calling her. Little Noddy . Little Stumpy-legs.
                 “Poor
Clare,” Dorothy said. “You must have been really unlucky with boys.”
                 “Unlucky?
I don’t think so. I’d say they were about average.” She gazed ahead; the light
on the Mersey trembled against her eyes. “The funny thing was, he kept on, Rob
did, even after we had our own places,” she said. “If I ever had a boyfriend I
had to bring him up here for inspection, or Rob would be at me until I did. We
had a row once. I’d told him I was inviting my latest to my flat, for dinner.
I’m not making this up. We were just sitting down to dinner when Rob arrived,
and he stayed until this bloke had gone. God, did we have a fight then. But the
bloke wasn’t any great loss, when I think about it—a bit snobby and
know-it-all.”
                 “It’s
incredible you didn’t lose your temper with Bob more often.”
                 “Oh,
he didn’t bother me really.” Sometimes she’d been grateful to him, when he’d
arrived just in time to interrupt a planned seduction—or at least what she was
sure had been threatening to be one. Not that she couldn’t
have defended herself if it had ever come to the point. “I haven’t much
time for going out with blokes,” she said. “Too much to do at
school. When I’ve been teaching I just like to go home and flop. But I
don’t mind that. It satisfies me.”
                 Dorothy
was nodding, smiling warmly. “No doubt I sound as if I’m deluding myself,”
Clare said coldly.
                 “Of
course you don’t. I was just thinking, perhaps Bob was jealous. Maybe that was
why he kept getting in your way, because he needed you.”
                 Her
voice faltered. She was coming up out of memories now, toward what had happened
to Rob. “I suppose so,” Clare said hurriedly, searching for a change of
subject. She felt uncomfortable. She always did here, trying to pretend she
didn’t know everything about Dorothy, everything she’d said to Rob. All her
mind would offer was that Rob had certainly seemed to need her since he’d
married Dorothy.
                 “Obviously
I don’t mean he needed you, you know, sexually,” Dorothy said. “You used to
look after him, didn’t you, as well as the other way round. Maybe he still
needed that.”
                 And why not sexually? Clare demanded. Why is it so obvious?
Just because Dorothy was prettier! She remembered Rob at the age of eleven,
saying, “Look what I can do!” and brandishing his erection. It had been empty,
though, and she’d failed to see the point of all his red-faced manipulation. So
she’d been the first, in