Independent Image

The doll was an independent image.

The dollmaker left the room. His name was George, though he rather fancied himself as an Italian. Wasn’t it an Italian who invented Pinocchio the Wooden Boy? Or manufactured him? Who invented the Italian puppet-maker himself? Probably some writer, with the help of Walt Disney, or vice versa.

George was proud of the doll he’d made.

He assumed – rather playfully – that whenever he left the room, she came to life and, like Andy Pandy’s Looby Loo, danced across the floor to the jolting tunes of invisible rhymes. George would have to get her a Teddy-Bear with whom to waltz the afternoons away. Only fair.

The doll was made from lots of cast-offs and from older dolls that his daughters had thrown away before they left home with their sweethearts. He felt – this time – he had truly made the optimum doll. Nothing is perfect - and therefore, logically, perfection itself is imperfect, he thought.

If she came to life, that was as near to perfection his ambition could reach. Giorgio chuckled to himself both at the change of name with which he’d just miraculously found himself Christened and the idea that had simultaneously struck him about perfection.

He’d look through the keyhole and maybe he’d catch a glimpse of the doll mid-dance. He still rather regretted her lack of a partner, but, even in these early days, independent images needed to reach fruition as conscious beings before having their independence prematurely removed.

He sensed this doll – an optimum version of some ideal doll to which the doll herself aspired – would already be pining after a sweetheart of her own.

But first the dance. He must witness her dance – or at least some vestige of movement that could be interpreted as dance.

He needed the jaw-key. He shook his head. His own words were coming out all skewed and warped. Not the jaw-key. But door-key. That was it. George, not Giorgio. That was equally it.

The key-hole to the doll’s room was blocked with the door-key and it was on the doll’s side of the door, not George’s side of the door. He’d need to slide his hand round the frame of the door – after edging it ajar sufficiently for this feat to be accomplished – and take the door-key from the key-hole. Then he would be able to cool his eye at the key-hole, having repositioned the door fully in its frame, and watch the surreptitious dancing by his own creation.

There was silence. Precocious darkness had dropped its curtain upon the scene. Then gasping, scrabbling noises like many mice running across the floorboards, creaking, coughing - then, the sound of lock tumblers falling …

And dawn seeped into the blackness slowly, piecemeal, imperceptibly … until, by abrupt contrast, Giorgio could be seen slumped to the ground, between the door’s edge and the door’s frame, a bodysack of earlier memories and ideals.

The doll was sitting in her chair – a smirk upon her fair chops – a book splayed in her lap, apparently a volume treating the life of Cyrano de Bergerac … but it is hard to tell from this distance. She holds a key in her mouth like a cigarette in a cigarette holder, puffing her china cheeks in and out with each turn of a riffling page. There is a glint in her eye, an icy spark … as she carelessly turns to view George’s crumpen form in the door wedge.

An independent image. A strewn tableau of a life become a silly whoette. A frozen dance now become a jagged shadow on the floor: an irregular loop of existence escaped from a choreography of cast-offs. His name had become Teddy, not George. One bare of fur.