The Doll's House

Rocking her back and forth, I watch Emma’s eyelids, with their long lashes, open and close. Each time I rock her, she looks up at me again. I stare into the crack running down the side of her face, remembering that old argument with Mum and Dad, how scared I felt, and once again, I feel like that child, the one who found escape with her dolls and her doll’s house.

I’d thought about cancelling my next appointment with Gerard, but regardless of how stupid Dominic and everyone else may think I’m being, I want to find answers. A part of me needs to know more. I brush my hand across Emma’s cold, cracked porcelain face, hoping she might unlock something. She stares back at me, giving nothing away.

I think about the happy little girl, the one held by my mother, the one I saw the first time I regressed. I don’t know where she’s gone. Can life change you so much, as if the first person never existed?

Emma is still staring at me, her eyelashes looking longer and more curled. I realise I’m still holding her like a baby, and it’s then something else comes back. I see my mother. Her back is towards me, but I know she’s been crying. She, too, holds a doll. She thinks she’s alone, but she isn’t, because I’m in the room. When she turns and looks at me, it isn’t love I see in her eyes. It’s hatred.



I have no idea how long I’ve been sleeping, but when I wake, I’m still holding Emma. I put my doll on the bed, resting her head on the pillows. I walk across the corridor to the room Martin and I used to share as husband and wife. Looking around it, I’m hurt when I realise Martin has removed all the photographs of the two of us. I instantly wonder where he has put them. I start opening drawers in search of some proof that I once existed here. I feel like I’m in a maze, neither the past nor the present making any sense, but something is telling me to be afraid.

Outside, the October weather takes a turn, and the sound of hailstones feels like tiny hammers thumping away at my thoughts. With my back to the door, I decide, like some madwoman, that I need to toss the room. I won’t be like that little girl and simply disappear.

I’m so engrossed in what I’m doing that I care little for the mess I’m creating, pulling clothes out of our wardrobe, flinging them onto the floor and emptying drawers. I find Martin’s briefcase at the top of the wardrobe, but it’s locked. I wonder why he didn’t take it to work today. He could be home at any minute. I grab the stainless steel letter opener from the top of his desk in the corner, finally prising it open. It’s practically empty, except for a couple of work letters in the leather flaps, so I unzip the centre pouch. I no longer hear the hailstones, losing all concept of time and anything else other than my desperate effort to find a small piece of me. When I pull the old photograph from the centre of Martin’s briefcase, I feel as if my mind has finally cracked, that I’m like my doll Emma. It’s only then that I hear him and know he is standing behind me.





Mervin Road


It was six o’clock by the time Kate arrived back at the apartment. O’Connor would be screaming for her report.

‘Where have you been, Mum?’

‘Work, honey, but I’m home now.’

Was she imagining it, or did she recognise the same sense of loss in Charlie’s eyes that she’d seen earlier in her own?

When the phone rang, thankfully it was Declan. She’d hoped he would ring, not because she wanted to speak to him but because she knew Charlie needed to. Kate had avoided talking about him to Charlie, which had inadvertently told him something was wrong. Handing the phone to Charlie felt strange. Now it was as if every action, or inaction, needed to be viewed differently. Something to which before she wouldn’t have given a second thought had become strained, different, questioned, front and back, inside and out.

She felt like an intruder in the room, hearing only one side of the conversation. At the same time, she was unsure if she wanted to know what Declan was saying. At the start of the conversation Charlie appeared guarded, and again she wondered if he was aware that something was wrong. She didn’t need a degree in psychology to know children picked up the slightest change in mood or atmosphere, especially when that change went to the core of their emotional security.

Kate gave Charlie a reassuring look before turning away to look out of the living-room window. If he was feeling uncomfortable, the best thing to do was to give him space with his dad. It looked bitterly cold outside, with a dark, damp chill, as another shower of hailstones belted against the glass. Almost without thinking, she turned to her son. He looked so serious that she wanted to rush over and grab him, hold him so tight that no words were needed for him to understand the almost primal love she felt for him – a tiny tot stuck in the middle of it all.