The worry dolls

"You worry too much my chick", Thirza said. Rather she lectured me, in her lazy smoker's rasp. It's the kind of voice that sets your teeth on edge, like the shiver of nylon beneath calloused fingers. "Worry is a wasted emotion, didn't you know? It changes nothing. Just gives you wrinkles."

Thirza could talk about wrinkles. She suffers from excema, and her own complexion is like some ancient fresco, fretworked with eggshell cracks. This, and the platinum curls give her the look of a battered cherub, as if she's been gold leafed and crackle-glazed by some trendy designer. Sometimes I fancy that if you scraped away at it, another face might lie beneath the flakes of dead skin. The real Thirza revealed beneath the layers, not clean-scrubbed and innocent, but somehow.....terrible.

"What you do is write them down, your worries, every niggling little one of them. When you see them in black and white, you'll realize how bloody stupid they are."

To demonstrate, she scrunched up my shopping list and set it alight with the tip of her joint.

"There you go. A little ceremony. Worries up in smoke, pouf!"

I didn't know Thirza all that well then. I remember being fascinated by her hands; the scratches, the yellow paint stains on the knuckles, and those narrow dirt engrained fingernails, as if she'd been clawing her way out of a coffin. Athough she'd probably been earthing up leeks or something, in what she likes to call 'The Fishburn Estate Physic Garden.'

I tried it anyway, that night when Thirza had left. My list went something like this:

"Worries": (Though not in order of merit.) l) Money, 2) Finding a job to fit in with school holidays (other than dinner lady or toilet cleaner,) 3) The Washing Machine flooding, 4) Getting to sleep at night, 5) Barney catching Super chemical resistant Headlice, 6) Child Molesters, 7) Paying the TV Licence, 8) The large mole just above my navel, 9) My mother going senile, l0) Barney growing up without his dad/Barney growing up with a step-dad/Barney not growing up at all. And so on, which brought me back to Child Molesters.

Pretty mundane stuff. It seems shaming to me now that I didn't include things like Global Warming and World Famine, but this, after all, was just the top ten. After that my worries began to get silly. Like this one for instance.... 11) Thirza, is she a friend or an enemy?

Friends. There's nothing like a birthday for showing up the lack of them, especially what they call a 'Big One'. I might have woken up that morning to balloons, banners bobbing from the front gate, '"Beth Carter is 30 Today"!'

The three cards on the dresser shelf told a sadder tale. There was the kitten in a basket from my gran, and my mother's, typically obscure...Magritte's 'Man in a bowler hat'. Barney had drawn me a picture of an army tank with 'happy birfday mum', scrawled on the side. Thirza didn't bother with a card at all.

Thirza, my best friend. My only friend. Thirza bearing a cake shaped like a fish in honour of my birth sign, glistening with green icing scales; Thirza leading the children in a tuneless greeting...

'Happy birthday to you...'

Barney, Pheobe and Fi sang the 'tomatoes and stew' version. They think they're so clever when they do that. They don't know, bless them, that we were singing it before them and our mothers before that. But still the little ceremony brought a lump to my throat.

"Well open your present then", Thirza pushed a tiny package across to me. She was wrapped like a parcel herself, in wisps of muslin artfully arranged. "Not" in honour of my birthday particularly. She just likes to dress up. The occasion hardly matters. I've seen her often, wafting around Asda with her shopping trolley, trailing drifts of curtain lace, like the Lady of Shallott.

"You're not going to sit staring at it like a dumbo?"

Impatient, she was breaking off the icing scales, crunching them between her teeth.

"Oh....a little pouch. It's......."

"Well look inside, you ninny".

I snapped open the popper, and there were five matchstick sized dolls, tucked up in their bed of green velvet.

Barney hanging over my shoulder sounded worried, "You don't play with dolls mum....do you?"

"It's an old custom from Peru" Thirza said, "You just choose a different doll to confide in every night, then tuck it under the pillow...and worries all gone, right?."

"They're beautiful Thirza." I was touched. Each little figure was distinguished by a vivid plait of embroidery wool. The outfits were exiquisite, made from scraps of velvet and silk and tartan cotton. My eyes began smarting again. How could I have imagined that Thirza meant me anything but well?

"Poor things" I murmured, "They'll have more worries than they can cope with, they'll have anxiety neurosis by the time I'm finished with them."

Thirza was already slicing the cake into squashy segments,

"Better them, than you my chick", Thirza said.

Thirza and I have a few things in common; that is we are both single mothers, we both live on the Fishburn estate in pimply grey rendered houses. Other than that, I can never quite remember how we got to be friends in the first place.

Thirza must have approached me first. I have this vague memory of her in the school playground where we waited for the kids, Thirza huddled shivering in one of her crazy outfits like a skinny girl in her mother's party frock.

She asked me if I wanted any Lavender plants.

"I've taken masses of cuttings" she said, "You're about the only one with a front garden round here that doesn't look like a breaker's yard." Then she laughed herself into a paroxym of coughing.

I didn't tell her then that the neat garden was all Jake's doing. Jake had had ideas about buying our council house. That was before he met up with his 'soulmate' of course, a divorcee from Golder's Hill called Natalie. Soulmates, it seemed could easily be found in the yellow pages; not under 'Lonely Hearts' but 'Plumbers'. It was just after New Year when it happened. Natalie had returned from Christmas in the Canaries to find her pipes frozen. You had to feel sorry for Natalie, Jake said later, describing the Niagra Falls cascading from her loft; she hadn't a soul in the world.

"Soulmate?" When I confided this sorry tale to my new friend, Thirza responded by hawking up phlegm into a grubby handkerchief; "Hah. You mean she took a fancy to his bum cleavage. Anyway, he's done you a favour my chick. Can't you understand girl? You're free now. Free!"

She didn't say what I was 'free' for exactly.

Shaking the Worry Dolls from their pouch that night, I was struck by their prim little faces, and their scent, Thirza's own smell, of old knitting wools, and incense. It was as if Thirza herself was huddled there on my bed, inviting me to tell her all.

"I suppose I should give you names then," I told them. I decided to christen them Darlene, Ethel, Sharon, Mildred and Dottie; silly names, to de-mistify them I suppose.

That night I told Darlene about my money troubles. Like how I'd spent my mother's birthday cheque on a new jacket for Barney, instead of paying off the telephone bill. Darlene had such a knowing look, I almost expected to find a fistful of notes under my pillow when I woke. But there was only Darlene, looking a bit smug it seemed to me.

"I'm not surprised she didn't help you, if you called her Darlene".

Inside Thirza's house was like some theatrical props department; everywhere there were murals, masks and buckets of Papier Maiche fermenting in corners; the brightly splodged paintings of Pheobe and Fi, papered the walls. The scent of incense was overlaid with fish today, as Thirza wrestled with an enormous trout. The cleaver swished down on its head. Her long fingers raked out a sphagetti junction of innards.

It was strange to me; Thirza had that pale evangelical look of the classic vegan, yet I knew her to be an intrepid meat-eater. She liked to cook. She had a cavalier way with flesh and fowl.

"You should think carefully before you name anything," Thirza lectured me. "Names carry a potency with them."

Her hands were sticky with blood and slime as she shook a cigarette from the pack

"What are yours called then?" I asked her.

"Mine?" She cocked her head at me, the light catching the blonde fuzz on her upper lip, "Oh I don't have any." She gazed intently at me, "What have I got to worry about?"

Later that night, I shook the dolls from their pouch, arranged them on my pillow. Funny how the yellow haired one reminded me of Thirza.

"Okay Sharon, this is just between the two of us, right?"

I told Sharon about Liam Flaherty.

"The thing is Sharon, should I get involved? Or will I get hurt, like before?"

Sharon looked as if she'd heard it all before. I almost expected her to speak in Thirza's wearily amused voice..."Haven't you learnt anything my chick? Men are a waste of space. You can't trust them."

Liam Flaherty had come to fix our telly. The set was rented from "Mr. Ram's TV Rentals", just off Bounds Green road. The picture had never been right, and after a week of my complaints, Mr. Ram finally sent along a wiry young man wearing a 'Simpsons' T Shirt with a picture of Homer on it, going 'Doh!' and a mop of rag-rug hair.

"We'll soon have it right for ye", Liam had that throwaway Ulster growl which is both shy and gruff at the same time. Probably it was the accent which made me warm to him straight away.

As a TV Repair man though, Liam was not much cop. After much twiddling of knobs and scratching of the rug, the picture was worse than ever.

"You could get snow-blindness watching that thing" I pointed out.

Liam agreed that it was desperate. "It'd make you go cross-eyed right enough." He twiddled some more and looked so unhappy that I made him a cup of tea.

"You're not from round these parts?"

Liam said no, he came from Holywood. When I raised my eyebrows he laughed and said, not that Hollywood, "It's a wee town just outside of Belfast, overlooking the lough."

A few days later, Liam turned up with a new telly for us that he said was from a cousin of his, and going spare.

"Wait till you see the picture on this one!" He adjusted the ariel, then he and Barney sat down together to watch The Simpsons.

"What about the wee fella's father?" Liam asked me when Barney was in bed.

When I told him about the soulmate, he shook his head and said that Jake 'must need his head looking at.'Then he said that he was free on Sunday, and how would Barney and me like to go out to Epping Forest or something for the day?

Somehow I couldn't bring myself to tell Thirza. We often spent our Sundays together, taking the bus to Regents Park, or trundling round the museums.

"I'm going to see my mother" I told her.

"What's got into you? Guilty Conscience?" Thirza crouched in her boiler suit, planting the crimson frills of Lollo Rossa among her wallflowers. I couldn't see her expression, I only knew from her voice how aggrieved she was.

"Oh well you know.." I stammered, "I feel I ought to...for Barney's sake. She is his grandmother."

Thirza scoffed something about 'family!' and how she didn't believe in duty visits. She straightened, staring at me until I was pink-tinged as the lettuces, "You let people take advantage of you Beth, that's your trouble."

Ethel was much more understanding when I told her:

"You see Ethel....Liam seems really nice, genuine; but they all start off like that don't they."

Ethel didn't blink. She had a long russet plait and a cute tartan outfit, material left over from Thirza's sofa cushions.

"I mean, supposing he's some sort of pervert, they're very clever those people. And anyway, he hates working for Mr. Ram, he told me. He's probably going back to Northern Ireland soon. Ethel" I sighed, "There doesn't seem to be much future in it does there?"

Ethel wasn't much use. Whatever advice she might have given she kept it to herself. We went anyway, Barney and me, in Liam's old Ford Estate, to Epping Forest that Sunday, and the following weekend a boat trip to Hampton Court, and the weekend after that to Hampstead Heath...

Liam told Barney how he had once seen a beached whale in Belfast loch. He brought potato bread and cooked us an Ulster Fry for our tea. He said he would take us both to Holywood soon and we could eat champ and watch the oyster catchers and the seals from Helen's Bay.

I never meant it to happen, not so soon after Jake. But it was only a matter of time before he discovered the velvet pouch beneath my pillow.

"Would you look at this? Does the wee girl still take her dollies to bed with her then?"

The dolls tumbled like spillikins, all with their vivid plaits and little pursed faces. I felt ashamed that they should see me naked like this with Liam's arm draped across my breasts.

"They have them in Peru" I told him, "They're kind of like a charm."

Liam said didn't I have quite enough charms anyway? The dolls lay helpless as they fell in the rucks and valleys and hillocks of the quilt.

Afterwards, when Liam had gone, it took me ages to recover them all. Mildred had wedged herself somehow between the bedpost and the mattress. She lay in my palm, brown hair all unravelling, I recognized her blue dress from one of Pheobe's little skirts.

"How stupid can anyone get" I said to Mildred. "I've done it now haven't I. We didn't even use anything. Supposing I'm pregnant again, supposing Liam never comes back? How can I bring up another child in this place with no money? Oh Mildred, tell me that?"

It would soon be Easter. Thirza was showing the girls how to blow eggs from their shells. First she made a pin hole, then planted her cracked lips in a kiss and blew. A viscous fluid swirled into a saucer, mysterious as ectoplasm. It made me want to heave.

"Get out your paints then chickadees" Thirza set the children to work in her little back porch where her potting up was done. Then she poured me a mug of camomile tea.

"We won't waste the eggs" Thirza said, "I'll get them to make pancakes after."

I yawned. "Thirza you're amazing, don't you ever run out of energy? Don't you ever feel like flopping down in front of the telly and doing nothing?"

"Drink up your tea my chick" was all Thirza said, "You're looking run down. What's up? You know you can tell me. Spit it out eh?"

"Oh you know" I said..."Life."

Watching her spoon flecks of blood from the yolks, I almost threw up and gave the game away. I couldn't look Thirza in the eye. She knew anyway. I'm certain, she knew. She just wanted to hear the news that I was pregnant from my own lips.

It's a joke really, the other day I found my list of top ten worries, and they seemed so pathetic. There I was going on about Head Lice and some mole on my stomach, and now I have to worry about cots and pushchairs and where the new baby's going to sleep. As for Liam Flaherty, I've given up worrying about him.

"I'll send for yous both," he said when he left for Northern Ireland, "Soon as I find some work you know?" And that was the last I heard from him.

Somehow, I've got it fixed in my mind, that it's all the fault of the Worry Dolls. I've a feeling they've brought me this bad luck, brought Liam Flaherty to my house for a joke, as some kind of test, as if they'd been programmed by Thirza.

One afternoon when Barney's at school, I take them out to the garden. I make a little fire over by the compost heap, and then I burn them one by one, Sharon, Mildred, Darlene, Ethel, and Dottie. There's a soft drizzle in the air, and they sizzle reluctantly, their bodies distorting into little maggotty shapes. Their pigtails shrivel and fizz.

"Burn you stinky little creeps!" I tell them.

I crouch, feeding the little fire with bits of twig and cardboard, my belly rests on my thighs. They make me feel guilty, such a hissing and spitting I imagine that they're crying out to their creator, to Thirza...'see how she treats us mother!'

She must have made them from some special stuff, flame resistant; their demise is so slow, agonizing as they writhe and twist, distort. The smoke seems full of chemicals, so foul it makes me choke.

But, by the time I hear the sirens, there's nothing left but a blackened shred of tartan. I go out to the gate, and see the fire engines. They seem to be parked outside Thirza's house.

Thirza is knitting a little jumpsuit in a soft heathery shade of blue. She knows it will be a boy, my baby, she's done the pendulum test over my belly.

"Another boy my chick, the pendulum never lies; oh well it can't be helped."

The children are knitting too, Pheobe and Fi dimunitive and industrious like the shoemaker's elves, and even my Barney bless him, dropping stitches, tongue poking out. They're making squares for a cot blanket, just like Thirza taught them. Now that the telly is gone, the place is a hive of activity.

I don't know how long Thirza will be here. Her own house burnt to a cinder. One of those muslin curtains caught in a candle flame, and woosh.. up it went in a matter of seconds. What choice did I have? She has no family, no friends, there is nowhere else for her to go.

At night we sit either side of the gas fire like an old married couple. "Don't look so worried my chick," Thirza grins at me fondly, "You're a right old worry-bag you are. Who needs men anyway? Waste of space. We can manage all right, can't we. I'm here now, to look after you. No worries...eh?"