The Daydreamer Read Free

which Kate was always trying to open.

    Over there were Kate’s painting and drawing table, her tele-scope, microscope and magnetism sets which were as much fun as the pictures on their lids promised, and everywhere else in her half of the room were the dolls. They sat along the window ledge with their legs dangling idly, they balanced on her chest of drawers and flopped over its mirror, they sat in a toy pram, jammed like tube-train commuters. The ones in favour crept nearer her bed. They were all colours, from shiny boot-polish black to deathly white, though most were a glowing pink. Some were naked. Others wore only one item, a sock, a T-shirt, or a bonnet. A few were dressed to the nines in ball gowns with sashes, lace-trimmed frocks, and long skirts trailing ribbons. They were all quite different, but they all had one thing in common: they all had the same wide, mad, unblinking angry stare. They were meant to be babies, but their eyes gave them away. Babies never looked at anyone like that. When he walked past the dolls, Peter felt watched, and when he was out of the room, he suspected they were talking about him, all sixty of them.
    Still, they never did Peter any harm, and there was only one that he really disliked. The Bad Doll. Even Kate did not like it. She was scared of it, so scared she did not dare throw it out in case it came back in the middle of the night and took its revenge. You would know the Bad Doll at a glance. It was a pink that no human had ever been. Long ago, its left leg and right arm had been wrenched from their sockets, and from the top of its pitted skull grew one thick hank of black hair. Its makers had wanted to give it a sweet little smile, but some- thing must have gone wrong with the mould because the Bad Doll always curled its lips in scorn, and frowned, as if trying to remember the nastiest thing in the world.
    Of all the dolls, only the Bad Doll was neither boy nor girl. The Bad Doll was simply ‘it’. It was naked, and sat as far as possible from Kate’s bed, on a bookcase from where it looked down on the others. Kate sometimes took it in her hands and tried to soothe it with her murmurs, but it was never long before she shuddered and quickly put it back.

    The invisible line worked well when they remembered about it. They had to ask permission to cross to the other’s half. Kate was not to pry into Peter’s secret trunk, and Peter was not to touch Kate’s microscope without asking. It worked well enough until one wet Sunday afternoon they had a row, one of their worst, about where exactly this line was. Peter was sure it was further away from his bed. This time, Kate did not need to turn purple or pretend to die, or scream. She clocked Peter on the nose with the Bad Doll. She held it by its one fat pink leg and swung it at his face. So it was Peter who went running down stairs crying. His nose was not actually hurting, but it was bleeding, and he wanted to make the most of it. As he hurried down, he smeared blood over his face with the back of his hand, and when he came into the kitchen, he dropped to the floor in front of his mother and wailed and moaned and writhed. Sure enough, Kate got into trouble, big trouble.
    This was the fight that led their parents to decide that it was time Peter and Kate had separate rooms. Not long after Peter’s tenth birthday, his father cleared out what was called the ‘box room’, even though it contained no boxes, only old picture frames and broken armchairs. Peter helped his mother decorate the room. They hung curtains and squeezed in a huge iron bed with brass knobs on.
    Kate was so happy she helped Peter carry his stuff across the landing. No more fights. And she would no longer have to listen to the disgusting gurgling, piping noise her brother made in his sleep. And Peter could not stop singing. Now he had a place where he could go and, well, just be . That night he chose to go to bed half an hour early in order to enjoy his own place,