Poppet

Poppets

THE JAMS ARE all potted and now need time to cool. Penny lies on the sofa, a blanket pulled up around her. She’s weary – she didn’t sleep well and when she woke this morning she was in no doubt. The quilt next to her was warm. She felt it all over, trying to understand how this quirk of temperature had happened. The shutters weren’t open for the sun to come in and she hadn’t been lying on it – the blankets were still tucked around her. There was no explaining it. It was just as if Suki had been there.

She sighs and lifts her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. Her breasts chafe at the underside of the blankets – a sudden, crackling reminder of what it was to be sexual. Sensuality has been Penny’s undoing. Over the years she’s eaten too much and drunk too much and loved too much, in all the wrong places. You get told as youngsters that a type of emotional incontinence, a stray hedonistic streak, will lead to no good. You never believe it – until, lo and behold, it leads to no good.

Fifteen years ago Penny was married. Not happily, but respectably and without rancour. Not much sex, but equally no fighting and no poison. Then her hormones sabotaged everything. She met the Handels at a village party and soon she and her husband became friends with the attractive couple from Upton Farm. Graham in particular was good-looking – tall with a touch of danger about him that pricked Penny’s senses wide awake. Graham, for his part, took one look at the pretty cook who had moved into the Old Mill and knew exactly where his life was going to take him. Penny didn’t stand a chance.

The affair evolved slowly, almost under the noses of their respective spouses. Louise Handel travelled away on business a lot and that allowed Graham and Penny to spend more time together. She grew to know a lot about the Handels and their lives. More than she wanted to know. She found they had a son who didn’t attend the local school but was taken out of the county to a ‘special’ school. Isaac definitely had needs. Introspective and unable to look anyone in the eye, on occasions when Penny encountered him with his parents she tried to get through to him but failed.

Sometimes when Louise was away Graham would send Isaac outside to play while he and Penny locked themselves in the spare bedroom on the top floor. Penny worried about Isaac outside – his silence was disturbing – maybe he suspected what was happening. Maybe he would tell his mother. After sex, she would look out of the window under the eaves and watch Isaac playing – always solitary and a bit too intense for a thirteen-year-old who should be out kicking a football with his friends. Usually he would be squatting, completely absorbed in some private task. Making something.

One day, during school hours, Penny happened to be passing Isaac’s bedroom on her way to get a glass of water. Ordinarily she’d have walked straight past – she’d made a pact with herself never to pry into the life of Graham’s family. Today, however, Graham was showering, Louise was away on business and Isaac’s door stood open. It was too tempting. On his bed was a small tin. Curious, she crept inside, sat on his bed and opened the tin. Inside she found a collection of odd little dolls made from scraps of leather and pieces of stick. One wore a crudely made track suit, fashioned from scraps of fabric Penny recognized as belonging to Louise. The other doll was male. It wore trousers of brown cord – similar to a pair Graham had in his wardrobe.

Penny chose not to mention the dolls to Graham. She wasn’t sure why – was it because they were so disturbing? Or was it because they felt like a subtle key to her lover’s private world? Over the following weeks she increased the times she went into Isaac’s room and from what she found and the snippets of information she got in conversation from Graham, began to piece together what was happening to the boy. She decided that anyone or anything who had upset or angered Isaac would have a doll made in their likeness. These strange mini-representations of people and creatures populated the adolescent’s world. A neighbour’s notoriously bad-tempered cat – who had once scratched Isaac – was depicted with a toilet roll as the body, real hair stapled to it, eyes glued on clownishly. Its paws, Penny noticed, were bound, and the hair seemed to be real cat hair. She stole a few strands and the next day secretly compared it to the cat. The hairs appeared to match.

Graham told Penny that at Isaac’s school there was a little girl who had a habit of stealing. She must have been driven by the thrill, because the purloined objects followed no logical pattern – sweets and toys and money and clothing and pencils and pieces of paper and socks. She stole the pencil shavings from someone’s sharpener, just to prove she could. The day Isaac’s football disappeared from his show-and-tell shelf was the day he came home and made an effigy of the little girl in a torn blue gingham that exactly matched the girls’ uniforms at Isaac’s school. It had long black hair made of wool and one hand tied behind its back. The stealing hand, forever disabled.

Penny went to the local library and browsed several books on voodoo. The books explained that a voodoo fetish, or ‘poppet’, must contain an object close to the person represented – ideally something taken from the body: fingernail clippings or hair. Excretions too – urine, faeces, semen, mucus, sweat, blood – could be collected and used. Even clothing. A shaman or medicine man would then chant spells which had the power to transfer physical acts committed on the doll to the person or thing it represented.

‘Mrs Handel has these books out on loan all the time,’ said the librarian with a sniff. ‘Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? You know – the way the boy’s turned out.’

Louise was doing an OU history course, and when Penny dug a little deeper she discovered Louise had indeed chosen voodoo and the slave trade for one of her papers. It was clear to Penny that Isaac had somehow seen the books, or been influenced by Louise’s interest, but when she questioned Graham about the books he made light of her unease. This marked the beginning of her loss of faith in her lover. Slowly, over the next few months, she began to suspect he wasn’t serious about her. She even began to wonder if she wasn’t the only lover Graham had known during his marriage, and whether Louise’s ‘business’ trips were actually getaways to visit her own boyfriends. Penny’s anxiety and guilt about her husband – her quiet, unargumentative, unadventurous, unsexy husband – exploded.

That month Penny and her husband were invited to the Handels’ Halloween party. Graham insisted it would seem odd if they didn’t attend. Penny can still remember it in vivid detail – she spent most of the night in the kitchen wearing her gypsy blouse and patchwork skirt, clutching her handmade witch hat in one hand, bemused by all the strange women dressed in green wigs and suspender belts who smoked and laughed and swallowed champagne in gulps and outlined their mouths in red gloss.

To her husband’s bewilderment, Penny went home crying. Her error had been exposed in the clearest light. Graham was a different person from the one she’d believed she was in love with. She made up her mind she would end the affair with Graham – whatever the cost.

Now, sitting on the sofa in the mill, her attention goes to the windows. They open out on to the bottom of the valley. On the other side of the stream the forests slope up and up – ending where the mists at the top crowd around Upton Farm. Maybe it was her punishment, the world teaching her a lesson, but she never did get the chance to tell Graham it was over.

Ironically, the day she chose to do it – All Souls’ Day – happened to be the day Isaac Handel had decided to end his parents’ lives.