china doll.

inside a cocoon of four hidden bandage walls, amongst gauze bedclothes, empty pockets, sellotaped windows, dust, old fashioned films, oriental love stories, smiths records, dead insects, stubbed out cigarettes, playing cards and photographs, china doll was writing her story.

a boy she knew suggested it, and she locked herself away until it was done. she smashed her phone and tore up badly spelt love letters. for the first week she missed his kisses so much she didn’t want to move into the sunlight, her hands shook and her eyes were two cherries set into her face. she wrote all night and pancake-tossed her body in bed in the day, ears ringing after she took out her max-volume headphones. she barely ate, just smoked, and lost half of her weight, but she’d been thinner.

china doll was not born a pancake girl with cherry eyes. in a hospital room of delicate shell babies she was an alien with string veins and bones shining through her skin and electric shock of bright white hair. with her limbs splayed like a starfish in her crib, nobody saw the fragility of this strange newborn, just her puce tainted tracing paper body and cotted hair, an ugly little monster baby with window skin.

she grew up beautiful, but not in a sunshine, high-cheeked way. if she was a doll, she was the one with only one glass eyeball in the back of a second hand shop; sometimes she felt like somebody had forgotten to finish her, to sandpaper her edges, paint her fabulous and take her chipped nail polish off. dangerous whisper girl, a tissue that could explode like a bomb.

every morning she would wake up with plug socket-coloured curls that would tangle into kitten balls around her face and shoulderblades during the day. her eyes sometimes made her wonder about how a tinned peach old woman could inspire a novel. she was as little as a child and very, very thin, like an icicle sculpture that could snap in tear stained arms. her lips were a dior painted broken-heart kiss too large for her face.

but for most of the life in her memory there was a broken heart inside her too, underneath the angel wings stretched tightly across the gaps between her ribs. somebody had ignored the writing on her chest (screaming black letters: FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE) and let her go, sent her smashing against the ground. for a long time all that existed of the girl was a hollow shadow, and all that was left of her heart were sharp pieces of shattered china on a dirty bathroom floor.