they have “unhappy endings”—although all but two of them do—but because they attempt to count the cost of “happiness” with the kind of scrupulous accuracy that people with no talent for moral arithmetic call “cynicism.” They also make more use of variant of the diegetic narrative mode than is currently fashionable, even in the commercialized and commodified fringes of neo-Gothic fiction. Most readers do not like stories of that sort, and editors desirous of appealing to large audiences invariably take the view that there is no point in writing or publishing them, but I make no apology for them. I am glad that there are perverse readers in the world as well as perverse writers, and even a few perverse publishers—a fact for which there is no earthly reason to thank God—but I hope that I would be sufficiently stubborn in my perversity to keep writing stories like these even if there were no perverse readers and publishers to lend them heroic endorsement.
ROSE, CROWNED WITH THORNS
Barbara was the first on my list, because she was the source of my distress. It wasn’t all her fault, of course—how could it be?—but she had been the prime mover in every phase of the unfolding tragedy.
I didn’t have to visit her at home in order to pick up stray hairs from her bathroom; I’d always been a collector and I’d had plenty of reason, over the years, to think that I might one day have need of a little dead Barbie: hair, skin cells, even a little dried blood. I had bits of almost everyone I knew stored in my secret cabinet, along with the tallow, the pins and the needles, and all the other paraphernalia. Going to see her was a different thing; a matter of pride and balance as well as tactics. We’d been rivals and opposites so long that it wouldn’t have been right to do what I intended to do without an actual confrontation, even if it had been possible. I needed to stand face to face with her and look her in the eye, as if I were a sinister reflection lurking in the depths of a darkened mirror, staring out at my bright and gaudy doppelganger in the world of artifice.
She lived, as a Barbie would, in a red-brick house with freshly painted woodwork, on a tidy new ‘model village’ estate south of Marlow, nice and handy for the M4 and the M40. The garage door was aluminum, but it was painted the same shade of burgundy as the window frames. The front door had frosted glass panels and three locks; the burglar alarm was ostentatiously positioned above it and to the left. The door chime sounded like tubular bells.
I watched the expressions flit across her face when she opened the door and saw me there. Surprise, confusion, suspicion and anxiety all showed, briefly, before the professional smile took over and her face reverted to its plastic Barbie mask.
‘R...Rose!’ she said, swallowing her first impulse and calming the exclamation so that it implied pleasure rather than alarm. ‘Why didn’t you call?’
Nowadays, everyone says Why didn’t you call? if you turn up unexpectedly. It’s impolite, these days, to do anything without warning, although that doesn’t stop people doing things in secret.
When I moved forward she stepped reflexively aside to let me in. Inside, the carpets were royal blue and the wallpaper was cream, patterned in silver. Because I hadn’t answered her question she said, ‘You were lucky to catch me in.’ Luck had nothing to do with it; I knew that she was in, and alone—but she was right to be surprised; if I’d turned up at random the chance of finding her in that precious combination of circumstances would have been slim. Whenever her so-called job wasn’t keeping her busy, adultery was.
I went into the sitting room and sat down on a leather-clad armchair. She didn’t know what to do, but she stayed on her feet. ‘Would you like a drink?’ she said, still cruising on automatic. ‘How’s John?’
‘No thanks,’ I replied. ‘You probably know better than I do.’
It took her a moment or two to figure out that the two remarks were unrelated to one another because I’d answered both her questions, in strict chronological order. That was when she sat down, in the armchair that was twin to mine. Rumor has it that people’s faces are supposed to go pale when they find out that they’ve been rumbled by their lovers’ spouses, but Barbie’s didn’t. Plastic never loses its hue, and mischief knows no shame.
‘How long have you known?’ she asked, matter-of-factly.
I nearly said Since it began, but it wouldn’t have been true. Witch or not, I’d had to pick up the usual clues, and my first reaction had been exactly the same as anyone else’s: denial. There was a sense in which I’d known long before it began that Barbara could never be satisfied with what she originally wanted, of course; Barbie had always wanted everything, because she was the kind of person who could. When she’d given John to me—or, as she presumably saw it, had given me to him—she’d always intended to take him back as and when the whim struck her, to fit him in when she found a gap in her life, a window in her schedule. Even so, I’d been taken by surprise when the inevitable finally became manifest.
‘Long enough,’ I said, for want of any better answer.
‘Long enough for what?’ she came back, her poise recovered and her delicate sneer back on line—but I’d rehearsed and she hadn’t; for once I was quick enough to join in.
‘Long enough to decide what to do,’ I told her.
She’d known me long enough not to really see me, even when she looked at me long and hard, but the way her gaze travelled from my boots to my eyes, taking in the whole Stygian ensemble, suggested that she might be making a new appraisal. She probably contemplated making the suggestion that I was certainly dressed for a funeral, but she’d used it too many times before—and what was worse, had heard other people use it. When you always dress entirely in black, it’s the kind of comment everyone stumbles over as they search for something apposite to say; for once, though, it would almost have been appropriate.
‘And what have you decided to do?’ she asked, in a carefully neutral tone. ‘Name me as co-respondent in your divorce petition?’
‘I won’t need a divorce,’ I told her. ‘Nor will you.’
For a moment, she must have toyed with the notion that I was being civilized; I’m sure there was nothing in my tone to suggest otherwise—but she had known me too long. She knew that the last thing I could be accused of was any kind of orthodoxy.
‘Howard wouldn’t divorce me,’ she said, uneasily aware of the probable irrelevance of the remark. ‘We tolerate one another’s little adventures. I’m surprised, in a way, that you and he....’ She trailed off, too nervous to be thoroughly vicious.
‘I think you managed to put him off, when we were all nineteen,’ I said, blandly.
‘Are you sure you don’t want a drink?’ she said, abruptly getting to her feet again. ‘If this is going to be intense, I think I need one.’
‘I’m not staying long,’ I assured her. ‘I just came round to tell you what I’m going to do, so that if it works, you’ll know that it was me. I wouldn’t like you to think that it was just some kind of virus.’
She really did want the drink, but she didn’t want to go over to the cabinet with that kind of tease unresolved.
‘Are you planning to kill us all?’ she said, sharply. ‘Or is it just me? What are you going to do—make a doll that looks like me and stick pins in it?’
‘I don’t have to make a doll that looks like you,’ I told her. ‘For your effigy, I can just buy one off the shelf. I’ll have to mould a photograph to its face, of course, and bind the other identifiers to it with sealing wax, but you’re
