At the beginning we made eggs. Standing at the kitchen counter, me trying to stop the poaching process from completely collapsing, him to my side handling the toast and the butter.
It was something me and Derek used to do together.
Then I’d limp into the sitting room and we’d have breakfast and watch television together. Well, I’d have breakfast. I don’t think he eats. He, or it, or whatever he is.
But he’d hold my hand when we were watching television.
He even helped correct my spelling on the posts. Gave me advice on using dictation, cleaning it up after with spellcheck.
We’d lie in bed together too, at night. Not sex, I was too broken for that, I was a lot of breaks now. But I’d lay on his chest, feeling it go up and down rhythmically – they’d got the breathing right anyway – rubbing my fingers along the hair that ran down the centre of his torso.
One day he tried to leave for work, but after he put on his jacket he just stood at the door, confused. Like a broken toy.
Or a doll, really. Which is what he is. I know that. From the moment I opened the box and saw him lying there and he opened his eyes I knew that he wasn’t… real. Not really real. Not really Derek. Not really the man I’d gone so mad for that I’d condemned myself to shattering every bone in my body to feed some… well, Rita had called them “psychic vampires”. I don’t know if that’s quite right.
I knew it wasn’t Derek from the get-go. But I also had to balance that with the fact that I was going to die, in agony, and if that was going to happen then having a facsimile of the man I loved with me might be the best I could get.
Maybe that was Angela’s point – some solace while we bit the dust. Even though I knew that wasn’t true either. My bones were breaking faster now. My obsessional thoughts accelerated by actually having the object of my affection right there in the house with me.
Nóirín wanted to burn him. But she knew I wouldn’t let her do that.
We all called each other at the beginning – Susan first, of course. That weeping phone call in the middle of the night to say that her six-year-old son who’d been dead for three years had turned up in a package on her doorstep. Then Rita and Imran; for them it had been… themselves. A younger version of Rita, a younger version of Imran – from back in their twenties, when they were sunburnt and pudgier and more beautiful and happy than they ever would be again.
For Holly it was the baby, of course. A beautiful, bouncing baby boy.
We let each other know what had arrived and then… we sort of stopped speaking to each other. We knew what the others were doing – indulging in their new arrival, whatever that meant – and were too ashamed to talk about it.
It was a tiny thing that shook me out of it. I was lying in bed talking to Derek – he talked too, a little stilted, but a good approximation of what he was like – when I decided to apologise to him, for what I’d done to him when he’d dumped me.
“I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you.”
“I pushed you through a pane of glass.”
“I forgive you.”
“I… I hurt you, I physically hurt you because you dumped me.”
“I forgive you.”
And then I knew I had to get up and leave him. I’d been so obsessed with Derek that I’d hurt him, like I’d hurt every other guy I’d ever been obsessed with, but this doll was happy to sit here and absolve me of my sins. And for some reason that rankled me. I’d made peace with dying but I hadn’t made peace with dying dishonestly, apparently.
I got dressed and left.
Limping my way into an Uber and then over to Rita and Imran’s. I figured they’d be the easiest.
The house was a warzone. They’d sent the kids away the week before, to stay with one of Rita’s cousins, told them that Imran was sick and they just needed some time to nurse him back to health. And now the place was… a party.
There was coke on the table, music blasting out of the speakers (late 90s, rave), old takeaway boxes gathering flies. Rita had answered the door – not Rita, really, the doll Rita, the younger one, who wasn’t as put together and wasn’t as lean and wasn’t as precise.
In the kitchen I found the real Rita, rigid, stony, doing tequila shots out of the belly-button of the Imran doll. The real Imran lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling. Covered in burns, smiling.
They were having the time of their lives, and it was killing them.
Rita offered me a line of coke – I told her that I thought we should leave. Gather together. Find Angela again. She told me to fuck off and went back to the tequila. I asked Imran. He said that he understood where I was coming from but didn’t seem to care anymore (his shoulder was leaving burn marks in the couch as he spoke to me).
Then our phones all went off at the same time. A message on the group. It was Holly.
“I think I’m going into labour.”
So we left.
I’d thought about going by Susan’s on the way, but labour’s labour. And we needn’t have bothered. When we arrived at Holly’s little block of flats in Camberwell, Susan was outside, waiting. Her son was with her.
“I couldn’t leave him at home.”
She was running her hands through his hair, over and over and over again. She wouldn’t stop touching him. I saw one of her fingernails come loose and fall to the ground. It was one of the few she had left, her eyes sunken, half her teeth gone, skin yellowed and veiny.
Rita rang the bell with all the energy of someone who’s been doing coke all morning.
A voice came over the intercom. But it wasn’t Holly… it was Angela.
“Come up.”
Holly’s place was on the fourth floor. When the elevator opened, some of them were already standing there – Yeoman with his long flowing robes, Constant in a sharp suit, Riona in her athleisure… and Ezra. He was wearing the same denim dungarees he was wearing the first time we met.
They were also holding weapons. Basic stuff. A crowbar. A baseball bat. A cane.
A simple message: don’t even try.
They nodded to the door of Holly’s flat, and we headed inside. The place had the smell of fresh paint. In the kitchen on the left I could see a bottle steriliser on the counter, freshly bought. A pile of ‘MY BABY’ photo frames. The constituent parts of a cot she hadn’t had time to put together.
A scream from Holly drew us down the corridor, into the living room, where we found them. Maddy first, in the corner, holding a knife, the blade pointed inwards. She looked at us, tapping the knife, and I remembered what happened to the couples in Liverpool when she turned that knife on herself. The ways she could hurt us.
Angela and Leila were at the couch, tending to Holly – Angela between her knees, Leila holding Holly close, comforting her. And Holly herself…
“Jesus,” said Susan.
Holly was barely there. Skin and bones, so emaciated she seemed to be all shadows, cast by her jawbone, her eye sockets, her protruding clavicles. Except the belly. It was enormous, like she was a few weeks overdue.
And she was holding the doll in her arms. It was a baby, maybe two months old, smiling at her. She was smiling back.
“Holly – you don’t have to do this.”
Angela looked up at us.
“I think at this this stage there’s only one option – just my professional medical opinion.”
Holly smiled up at us.
“I’m having my baby….”
Leila held her tightly, forehead to forehead, their hair strung together by sweat. Holding one of Holly’s hands. And, so subtly you’d barely notice… licking her lips.
Angela went back to what she was doing – examining Holly – but kept talking to us.
“Apologies for the dolls – just one of those things Ezra whipped up moons ago. Tends to accelerate the process, when we need it.”
She glanced at me, all my broken bones.
“Seems to be working. But I know that they can be rather distracting, and I didn’t want Holly to be on her own for this.”
Holly perked up.
“How am I doing?”
“Absolutely wonderfully, darling.”
Back to us…
“It was good of you to come. It can’t have been easy to tear yourself away.”
She looked at Susan, her son poking his head out from behind her.
“No childcare?”
And suddenly Susan was rushing over— Maddy standing up—
“Don’t you fucking dare—”
But she didn’t go for Angela, she went for Leila – grabbing the girl, tossing her off the couch, and replacing her. Taking Holly’s hand, holding her close.
“It’s okay. I’ve done this before. It’s all going to be okay.”
It was hard to tell if Holly believed this, or just wanted to, or couldn’t really tell that what was happening was even wrong… she was so thin, it was a wonder she was conscious.
Angela just kept working.
“Any questions? While we wait?”
Rita took a seat.
“Who—scratch that, what are you?”
“Well… I don’t really know. I’m serious. You don’t know all the ins and outs of being what you are, of being human, just because you’re human – you know because doctors and scientists and schoolbooks told you. We were human, by the way. I mean, we still are. Same organs, same overall physiological… architecture. Just… sustenance is a bit different. Though I still love a fry-up.
“I was born about… my memory’s a little dodgy on this but it was around the 1720s. Nigeria. Well, not Nigeria, you know, but the amalgam of kingdoms and fiefdoms that were where Nigeria is now. And before you start going on about the “darkest magicks of ye olde Africa”, this thing didn’t come from us. It came from a missionary.
“Father Beresford. His name I remember. Arrived in our village with the promises – you know, the promises that missionaries have. We’d encountered a few before. Pestering, Christian folk. Annoying as all fuck. But he was different. He wasn’t offering us God. He offered us our heart’s desire… or that’s what he said. You’ve probably realised by now that what you get offered in these kind of retreats and what you actually get… there’s quite the gap.
“The whole village was affected. A woman grew tall… so tall she started to tear, her skin stretched past breaking point. A man became his shadow. I… I had acid in my veins. Always been like that. Acerbic, caustic… toxic, I suppose.
“Everyone died but me. I survived. And Beresford took me with him, back to Europe. I was strong, for a long time, didn’t notice I wasn’t ageing, because those things take a few years to notice. But I did realise the… hunger. That couldn’t be quenched with food or water – or alcohol, or drugs, or sex, for that matter. Beresford had died in the meantime – we can die, by the way – and I didn’t know what I was. I don’t think he liked me very much. But then I figured it out.
“I was a maid for a rich family – the… Ros’s, yes, that was it. The youngest daughter, maybe twelve or thirteen, she wouldn’t eat – couldn’t eat, really, from her perspective. You’d call it bulimia now – I’d found her in the kitchen. But to me it was like a beacon, an absolute clear-eyed obsession. I grew close to her, connected to her, bound to her… and began to feed.
“It worked. I was suddenly re-energised. And the girl… well, I don’t know what causes these things but I do think God has a sense of humour. All the bulimia… she just kept vomiting. And vomiting. And vomiting. Long after her stomach emptied she’d vomit things up – not just food, but coins, pieces of metal, buttons, once a bedroom key that had been lost months before. More and more and more until eventually the family abandoned her in the cellar. I presume she died down there –but I was already gone.
“I picked up the others along the way – Maddy in the 1850s, Yeoman about a hundred years ago… and Leila, most recently. The 90s. Others like me. It can be a lonely life, without company. Without people to love.”
Angela stopped. Looked up at Holly.
“It’s time, dear. Can you…?”
Angela reached out for the doll in Holly’s arms. Holly seemed hesitant.
“It’s needed. It’s necessary.”
Holly held the baby out for Angela to take – her arms were like sticks, shaking under the weight of a two-month old. Or a facsimile of one.
Angela took the baby, held it between Holly’s legs, and Holly started to moan. The final push.
What came out of her looked like black bile. Strange, thick. Angela acted quickly, rubbed some on the doll’s head, its chest. And stood up, handing the baby back to Holly.
“There.”
Holly looked confused.
“This is real. This is what came out of you. You’re a mother, Holly.”
Angela looked at us – as if daring us to intervene. To break Holly’s heart. Holly was probably going to be dead in the next day or so.
We kept quiet.
I thought of a story my Dad had told me once. He’d grown up on a farm, and if a lamb’s mother had died you’d wait until another ewe gave birth, smear the lamb in the afterbirth, and convince the ewe that it was hers.
Angela went back on her knees – I saw she had a bucket off to the side, she pulled it into place, started collecting the bile.
Holly whispered…
“What’s that?”
“Just the afterbirth, dear. Completely normal.”
But the way Maddy and Leila were looking at it, now both licking their lips, I could tell it wasn’t afterbirth, or bile. I suspected it was a concentrated version of whatever they’d been feeding from us.
Eventually, whatever was spilling out of Holly stopped.
Angela stood up.
“Congratulations.”
Holly was beaming. Her smile was like a ravine across her face, matched by her gaping, sunken eyes.
Angela picked up the bucket. Leila stood up, Maddy too – still holding that knife close to herself, if we tried anything.
I looked at Angela.
“Do you feel… guilty?”
She paused. Looked in the bucket. At Holly.
“Spectacularly. But I have mouths to feed too. Actually, on that… before I forget…”
She reached into her jacket, pulled out an envelope. Handed it to me.
“What’s this?”
“Instructions.”
She looked at Rita, Imran, Susan…
“Weren’t you wondering how I survived? All those hundreds of years ago? By becoming. You can become too – well, one of you, it’s kind of… single use. It’s not an easy life, but…”
She looked at Holly.
“…it’s a life.”
Then she left, Leila and Maddy behind her.
Leaving us with the knowledge that if we wanted, one of us could become like them. Could survive.
We didn’t talk about it. Just joined Holly on the couch. Holding her.
She smiled at her baby. The baby smiled back.
And, cradling each other, they both died.