Hearts and Bones by Niamh Mulvey

Author:Niamh Mulvey [Mulvey, Niamh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2022-05-13T17:00:00+00:00

The Doll

I

IT WAS OFFENSIVE, how healthy Aoife was. She had broad shoulders and strong, well-shaped legs. She wore short skirts with thin-strapped sandals and when she strode across the street in those dumb little shoes, he couldn’t believe they didn’t end up crushed to pieces under her sexy pink feet.

She had been hurt badly in a previous relationship. The other guy used her and had then made her feel like the using was something she’d specifically requested. She had been smart enough to see through it, so she’d gotten out of it. But she was still heartbroken, Dar could tell. She was still heartbroken in a way he could only ever dream of making her feel.

They had only been together for a few weeks but already he knew she was slipping away. He was too weird for her, too intense. He was funny; on a good night out he could keep a whole group of them entertained with his impressions for hours, and she had much admired his dark eyes and curly hair in the early moments of their relationship.

But there was all of that other stuff underneath, and she could smell it. He was astounded. What was this instinct that even someone as straightforward, as untroubled as her could access? Maybe there was something else going on. Maybe he wasn’t a materialist atheist after all. But though all of that could be intellectually kind of thrilling, especially after smoking when everything seemed abstract and possible, in the sad reality that was his life, it just meant he was about to get his heart crushed again.

So he was getting into ventriloquism as a way to handle it all.

They moved in the kind of circles that made this just about acceptable. They were all back home just after college, all waiting for their lives to properly start, all mostly living with their parents. Dar bought a shiny-faced dummy online, called him Stuart. They didn’t know anyone called Stuart, and it was instantly hilarious.

Dar started bringing Stuart to the pub. Aoife seemed thrown by this, but when she saw how everyone else loved and accepted Stuart, she laughed along too.

Dar had no intention of working on his technique. That would have been crazy. It would have taken up far too much time and for what? So instead he just sat Stuart beside him at the pub and treated him as if he were a real person. Everyone was fine with it.

Soon Stuart found his way into Dar’s impersonations. Dar didn’t have an official act, but he would end up performing most Friday nights out in the smoking area in between roll-up cigarettes and pints of six-per-cent beer. Stuart would sit alongside him making vicious comments about the person Dar was impersonating, or, after a while, his actual impersonation. That then evolved into Stuart making vicious comments about Dar himself. And so it soon became that Dar would carry around a doll whose only function was to undercut everything he said with sarcasm, vitriol or just plain aggression.

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