I was without an idea in my head last night, rang Sarah in a panic, and she had the brilliant idea of reading song titles from a CD to me in the hope they would spark something. Fortunately it was a CD by They Might Be Giants, thus providing plenty of weirdness. I recommend the method. Kudos to anyone who can guess which TMBG title set this story off...
Dummy (990 words)
The shop has yellow cellophane in the windows to cut the bleaching sun; Ralph hasn’t seen that stuff for years, not since the ‘ladies’ boutique’ in his parents’ village, with its two headless mannequins in powder-blue twinset and pussycat-bow, cream rayon blouse. He puts his hands against the glass and peers, but the only thing in the window is an old-fashioned ceramic doll’s head with a chipped mouth and its wig slipping; the window is closed off from the shop by louvers which are probably cream, but in the cellophane’s glow they are the colour of processed cheese.
In Ralph’s childhood, a new window display in that ladies’ boutique was an event for excited gossip. He’s made a career poking fun at that life. He even had a sniff at a television slot, but he didn’t get it. His agent says his material is becoming dated, and Ralph, resentfully, agrees; his village-green, women’s-institute references, a sophisticate’s jabs at the rural doom he’s escaped, are no longer enough. Ventriloquism, presumed dead, is undergoing a revival; and if he wants to ride the wave, he needs a surfboard. He wants to ride it all the way to a studio and his own series, where he can sneer at his younger, softer, kid-friendly rivals. Idiots, the lot of them.
So he’s looking for a new dummy. Blue-haired Winifred with her jam-making and unintentional double-entendres, cardiganned Clive with his slow-voiced, garden-shed pronouncements on human behaviour, are the past. So is the man who made them; an old-school craftsman, who lived alone with his children of wood and cloth, and reviled humanity with a piercing cynicism that supplied Ralph with reams of material. Sometimes, in the chill small hours when sleep is stubborn, Ralph thinks of him dead in his chair, surrounded by random limbs and stray eyes.
Ralph could order a new dummy via the internet, but he wants to find a personality that works for him, and he can’t do that at a distance. It’s taken him months to find this place, and he’s beginning to think he should have ordered online after all. He pushes his way in.
The door has a bell over it. Its chime falls flatly into the yellow gloom.
The shop is tiny, and incredibly crowded. The walls are lined with shelves, and another set runs down the middle of the room. The shelves are populated. The dummies swing their legs like schoolchildren on chairs too high for them. Unmoved by the weight of their silent stares, Ralph walks along the row. Looking back at him are queens and clowns; slaves, burglars, tarts, tramps. It’s a hell of a collection, but all these are too obvious. He wants something more subtle. “Hello?” he says.
He thinks he hears a faint shuffling from somewhere in the back, where, presumably, there is a counter, a proprietor, maybe even, if he’s very lucky, equipment modern enough to handle his debit card; but no proprietor appears.
Ralph ventures further into the shop, past bishops and witches and lions. No. There’s something, to his mind, faintly perverse about animal dummies. Further in – the shop is bigger than he thought - it gets better. There’s a city type in a bowler – but still too old-fashioned, he hasn’t seen a bowler in years. A plump middle-aged woman, with a small hairy brown dog under her arm; he considers her for a moment, but though she doesn’t resemble his Winifred she’s of the same type. He needs to get away from that.
Further back. And here he starts to get excited. These look like people. A man with limp grey hair and a Big Issue. A plump, weary policewoman who looks as though she’s spent her day dealing with drunks and domestics. “Well,” he says. “Let’s have a look at you.”
There’s no resonance, as though silence has thickened the air somehow; his voice tumbles flat among the dummies.
He reaches up – the shelf is a little high for safety, he thinks as the policewoman tumbles into his hands. The weight makes him stagger; she’s almost as heavy as a two year old child. The dummy next to her, a teenager with unpleasantly realistic acne, tilts forward, and before he can free a hand to stop it, hits the floor with a thud. Heart racing, Ralph props the policewoman against the shelf and checks the fallen girl. The teenager looks undamaged, but her heavily-made-up eyes stare accusingly.
No proprietor rushes out to see who’s interfering with his goods. “Hello?” Ralph says again, ready to prepare his defence, but there is no response.
He lifts up the teenager dummy to put her back on the shelf. She’s even heavier than the policewoman, it’s ridiculous, no-one could work with something that heavy. He grunts as he tries to haul her back to the shelf, but he can’t reach.
He feels silly. He got the policewoman down, he should be able to get the teenager back up.
But the shelf is too high. He can’t even reach it with the tips of his fingers.
“Uh?” he says.
He looks down at the policewoman. Her head is tilted back, and her weary eyes look past him.
Rudely, he grabs her, but she’s impossible to lift. Her jointed limbs flop. Ralph looks up at the shelf that’s now high above his head. He whimpers, and turns for the door; but his legs betray him, going loose and strange at the knees. Sprawled on the dusty carpet, he reaches down with numbing fingers, and pulls up his trouser leg.
Somehow, he knew that the limb beneath would be plastic.
Ralph tries to crawl towards the door, but his arms won’t work. He feels a strange, dark, emptying sensation; the small of his back is collapsing inwards, making a hollow. Levers and hinges form and lock into place. He hears something shuffling towards him. I wonder if I’ll get on television, he thinks.
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