#lostcat

SEASON 1: EPISODE 2: THE WORRY DOLLS

Episode released 1st July 2014

http://thelostcat.libsyn.com/episode-2-the-worry-dolls

My lover bought me worry dolls. They dance for me every night, and cry when they think I am not looking.

THE LOST CAT PODCAST BY A P CLARKE, EPISODE 2, THE WORRY DOLLS

My lover bought me worry dolls as they could see the situation with my cat was getting me down a bit.

What worry dolls are are little stick figures about an inch high with bright clothes made of coloured string wrapped around their bodies. Their heads and hands are just the top of the sticks.

How worry dolls work is, last thing at night, you tell them your worries and then put them beneath your pillow. They will take away the worry from your sleeping head for the whole of the night, giving you comforting dreams, and a fresh start in the morning.

So, after the wine, I took them from their box, laid them out in a row on my hand and whispered my worries to them.

“I am worried about money. I am worried that my lover does not love me. I am worried about my cat, which is lost.”

Then I laid them out in a row on my bed, put the pillow over them, and lay my head down to sleep.

They did not work as I expected at all.

Late that night, long after the clocks stopped working, I was awoken by movement beneath my pillow. So I sat up in bed, staring down through the gloom and the wine at the pillow, and saw it pulse like a sea cucumber.

I lifted the pillow and found the worry dolls all in a row, moving as if to music, up and down and side to side. They would partner up and spin about each other like perfectly weighted moons before moving on to the next. They formed a circle and, each rotating slowly around their middles, they moved around the circle they formed on my sheet. Once to the left, and once right.

They formed back into a line, and began again.

I watched them do this three times. They began to slow and I worried they were tiring. I leant in close with my ear right over them, and I could hear the tiny pulls of the string slipping on itself, I could hear little creaks of the straining wood, and I could hear the miniscule clicks and knocks where the binds were loosening.

So I put my lips as close to them as I could, I said “thank you.” And I gathered them and put them back in their box. They made no sound I heard then and, happy they were resting, I fell soundly asleep until late the next morning.

I could not tell you of what I dreamt, but I felt better than I had in a week. I am not sure I trust those who can recount their dreams with any detail.

So that morning, in the light of the day,  I looked very closely at all the little worry dolls in my hand. And I could see that the string was frayed and mended, knotted and re-knotted. I could see that the sticks were splintered in places and mended by new loops of string.

These were not new worry dolls. I was not their first owner, and mine were not the first worries they had dealt with.

Who’s worries had they been tasked to ease before mine? What had made them feel like they had to work so hard? What was the size of those worries?

I dug up fresh string – blue and yellow and green – and put it in their box.

I looked closely at them as I did, looking for some clue and I found, in amongst the knots of string, tiny slivers of a shining thread, almost filament thin. They shone as if flecked with metals - silver, gold, something purple.

That night they had wrapped the fresh string around themselves to strengthen their bonds, the shining threads almost completely hidden. The worry dolls looked strong, and refreshed. So I lifted them from their box, and whispered my worries to them once more.

“I worry about the future. I worry that I do not love my lover. I worry about my cat, which is lost.”

Then I put them beneath my pillow and went to sleep.

I remembered a dream, or some of it. What I dreamt was I was sitting at the table in my garden during the summer because it was warm. My cat was sitting on the table, and he was ignoring me.

Was that a good dream?

And when I looked closely at the worry dolls the next morning, I could already see a discolouration in the string, and the faintest smell of burning, as if from friction.

I left them in their box that night. I could not face the idea of one of them breaking. And deep into the night I could hear them weeping, and it warped their sticks.

So on the fourth night I put them beneath my pillow once again, whispering my worries as I did.

“I worry about anti-biotic resistant strains of virus. I worry that it is worry that gets in the way of love. I worry about my cat, which is lost.”

And I noticed they had woven some of my cat’s hairs into their clothes.

I had to find out where the worry dolls were from, and showed them to my house-mates.

“I recognise those threads,” said one. “There’s only one person round here has material like that. It hangs as curtains in her front window.”

“That’s amazing,” I said.

“I hear she hangs them as a warning.”

“A warning?”

“Well i’ve heard… She’s a witch.”

“You’re using that word.”

“Well it’s what I’ve heard.”

“Where does she live?”

“You shouldn’t go.”

“Where?”

“124 Cherry Lane.”

And I went, taking the box of worry dolls with me.

At the end of the high street, down a cul de sac,  I found 124 Cherry Lane. It was the entrance to a large Edwardian house, but nothing else. Not the house, just the entrance, Around it was just air.

You could see the next road over, behind it. The walls of the surrounding houses towered over it. Curtains of a strange material, flecked with shining threads of silver, gold and something purple, hung behind the one tiny window.

I knocked three times. And before I finished the third knock, the door opened. And an old lady stood before me.

“A young man,” she said. She said it like she was telling me who I was. I straightened up.

She looked me up and down, and looked at the bandages around my right foot and said “I do not keep cats in the house.”

She spoke like someone who had spent so long getting what she wanted that she mostly chose not to these days.

“You have something for me,” she told me.

“I think these are yours,” I said and I brought out the box of worry dolls, and showed them to her.

When she saw them she cried.

“Come in,” she said.

Her hair was silver and gold and bunned-up loosely at the back of her head by two thick chopsticks painted in black with flowers. She wore endless shawls and a dress of that same material, flecked through with shining thread. She looked like an almost impossibly ancient lady, doubled over, and with skin like parchment.

I went in.

The house was tiny.  Inside there was a narrow hall I could barely fit through leading to nothing but a spiral staircase leading down.

A dozen umbrellas formed a bouquet by the door that I got tangled in. A huge dark mirror, blackened almost to the centre with silver’d cracks dominated one wall.

“It makes the place look bigger,” she said. When I looked into it I saw three of me, standing in front of a huge fireplace with a dog sleeping on one side.

“There’s not much left of what there was. But I do not need so much these days. Please, follow me.”

And she disappeared down the spiral stairway. I followed. It spiralled down twice, three times, getting ever narrower as it did. Down and down it went. I counted one hundred steps until I was almost in darkness and then I stopped counting, as this is what a child does. When I stopped counting the stairs ended.

“Finally,” she said.

The stairway opened out to a forest.

With grass on the floor and huge mushrooms everywhere, the room was bounded by huge trees I could not see through. I followed their branches up and saw the sky like a tiny window between their leaves. The surrounding houses looked down like quizzical battlements peering in.

In the middle of the room were two comfy chairs, a lamp,  a loom, and a coffee table.

I opened my mouth to begin speaking, and she held up a bony finger and I stopped.

“First things first,” she said. “You have come to me and, in return, I offer you a glass of wine.”

Now it would have been rude to refuse. So I sat in one of the infinitely deep chairs in the forest of her living room and she brought out a bottle of deep red liquid with no label from a knot in one of the trees and poured it all into two huge, thick-glassed goblets. And together we drank a glass of wine…

<music plays: The Song Of Madelline, written by A P Clarke, performed by A P Clarke and W Walker-Allen>

There once was a girl who was made out of snow

and she would leave puddles wherever she would go

and when she was happy she started to cry

and of course loved a boy who cheated and lied

When he left for nothing, she was hard as a stone

so these things go

and the drunken priest watched her stand at the end of the pier

heard her singing a song and then just disappear

Well a storm came from the sea and settled over the town

and it ripped up the roofs and made a terrible sound

and the bell of the church blew around for a day

and then fell on the priest and then tolled him away

the wood ripped and thundered and swirled through the air

all through the year

and the rain turned to snow and then buried them deep

then the snow turned to rain and they drowned in their sleep

and it rained rocks and dogs and a frozen red wine

and the town learnt to sing the song of Madelline

well they drank until morning, and then wrapped themselves warm

they called on her name and then headed in to the storm

they hauled up the nets that they laid in the street

for the thousands of fish that lay dead at their feet

and the boy he came home, grew rich and grew old

so these things go

but the rocks and the wood and the snow and the wine

and the town all sing on to the song of Madelline.

It was good wine, too.

“May I look at them?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said, and handed them to her.

She breathed in deeply as she held the box.

She said “these were once mine.”

She sat up then, impossibly straight in her chair, and fixed me a calm gaze and for all the world she looked as glamorous as any movie star. She spoke like someone who really, really did not care whether I found her attractive.

And she told me the story of the worry dolls.

“I have been young,” she said “And used it well. I had my loves and wove spells to make those loves perfect. I took them, and I left them, as I desired. Perhaps some would call me selfish, and I am sure that they are right. I have had, in my time, everything I could want in a life.

“But I am not cruel. Every love I left I wove a new spell for, to ensure their lives had what they wanted too. I loved them, and did not want them sad.

“This is what I gave them, and this is what they took: a life lived by spells is bound by spells, and if I did not keep the weaves fresh, the spells would come undone, and leave my loves with tatters where their lives once were.

“So I made these worry dolls, and I worried on my loves, to keep the spells fresh and tended. A lifetime of spells and a lifetime of worry.

“And now I am old, and I have had to sell much of what I own – to get rid of what I no longer want, and to keep that which I still need. Much was sold in large boxes, as lots. The dolls had been placed in one by an uncaring carer and I lost them. Without the dolls, I could not worry about all those I had loved, and I have been in despair ever since.”

I said “I do not really believe in magic.”

“It is as real as it is.”

“That isn’t much of an answer.”

“It wasn’t much of a question, young man.”

“Why do the worry dolls cry?”

“They were made that way. They were made to ease the worry of the heads that sleep on the pillows above them. If they do not dance, they can not let whatever is in them out.”

She leant forwards, “do not feel too sad, young man. If you want to think of it that way: we are made a particular way too.”

“Is this poetry?”

“This is how I live my life.”

She spoke like someone who did not feel it necessary to explain herself to me. Considering yourself the centre of the universe is an arrogance of youth, but it is a comfort of age.

“I want to return the worry dolls to you.”

“You understand that they are yours.”

“If they are mine I can give them to who I please.”

“That is indeed your right.”

“Then I give them to you freely.”

“Then it is my right to only accept them if I give you something in return.”

“You don’t have to.”

“It is my right, young man.”

“Then I accept,” I said.

“Tell me. Tell me what you are worried about,”  she told me.

And, for some reason, I felt a need to tell her. As she eased back into her infinite chair, and opened the box of worry dolls, I said “I worry about my cat, which is lost… and about my lover.”

She was looking closely at the worry dolls, laid out upon her hand. She had noticed the hair of my cat wrapped around them.

“I think the dolls will help you with your cat. Your lover,” she said, “is your business.”  

As she gently brushed at the string of the dolls, I could see them moving beneath her finger, leaping up to meet her.

“But let me tell you this: whatever made you think love was happiness?”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Worry is love too,” she finished with a wry look back at me.

And I found myself smiling.

She placed her hand flat upon the other and put the worry dolls back in their box.

And then The old woman was suddenly leant in close to me, right over me in my impossibly deep chair. And she kissed me on the lips.

She said, “the worry dolls will be safe with me, and I see your wine is done. And thus, so are we. I have one last thing to ask of you, which shall put me in your debt forever more.”

“Ask it.”

“Do not come back again.”

“But I’d like to check in on you.”

“Do this for me, young man. Never come back.”

“I promise.”

And her face broke out in a wet-eyed grin and she looked just like a baby.

“Excellent.”

She took the empty wine glass, showed me to the stairs and beckoned me up.

“Take an umbrella, ” she said.

The next thing I remember I was on the high street with an umbrella in my hand and it had just started to rain. So I put the umbrella up and walked home.

Over the next few days a strawberry shaped mark in my skin has appeared on the side of my mouth. It is slightly hollow, as if some of my flesh is gone. It is not sore. My lover says it is nice, and kisses me there.

That night I worried about my lost cat, and that was fine. It was lost, after all.

And I haven’t gone to see her again. And I won’t.

I hope the worry dolls are happy.

THIS HAS BEEN EPISODE 2 OF THE LOST CAT PODCAST, WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY A P CLARKE. COPYRIGHT 2014.

THANK YOU FOR LISTENING

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