The Doll's House

Officially, O’Connor’s dark shadows and baggy eyes would be put down to the previous months of operating nights. They say working outside the daily routine of other fellow mortals alienates you from reality. That wasn’t so with O’Connor. To him, doing the ghost shift had brought him far too close to reality: his own.

Harcourt Street station was the hub of the Dublin police force, but to O’Connor it felt like a bigger version of the suburban Rathfarnham station where he had worked for the previous six years. In other ways, Harcourt Street was a whole different ballgame. It got you closer to the stench of the city, the bigger players and the lowlife who performed their menial tasks. Most of the bums were barely out of nappies, destined for two things: crime and a very short life.

Unofficially, a couple of people close to O’Connor had taken him aside, told him to go easy on the sauce and the late nights. Most had put his recent heavy drinking down as par for the course. You had to let the job seep out of your skin somehow, and booze was legal.

He cursed to hell when he pulled the empty box of painkillers from the bottom drawer of his desk. If he didn’t get rid of his thumping headache, he’d be no use to anyone. Grabbing his heavy woollen coat off the stand, he barely grunted to his colleague, Mark Lynch, as he marched out of the door, heading to the corner shop for paracetamol and juice.

Outside, he felt a little less pressured. If he got the head on him sorted, he’d be fine. No one would be any the wiser, except himself, of course. He waited until he was outside the newsagent’s to pop three tablets into his mouth, swallowing them with a full carton of orange juice. The morning painkillers hadn’t worked, and it would take another while before these had a chance to do their bit. It was nearly twelve hours since he’d emptied the last of the whiskey bottle, but this time the painkillers should take effect. Once they had, he’d be grand, at least until the end of the shift when the same demons that had fucked up his head in the first place would pay another night call.





Ocean House, the Quays


Kate smiled as Imogen sat down in front of her. Over the previous few months Kate had learned to let Imogen initiate the proceedings. The teenager had tried to starve herself to death. At least, that was the way everyone viewed it, including her own family.

Severe cases of anorexia nervosa were not uncommon, and since Kate had begun working at Ocean House, it was a condition she had become all too familiar with. In Imogen’s case, Kate was convinced that the girl’s severe and progressive self-harming was connected to some earlier trauma.

Imogen was a cutter too, a condition she had managed to conceal for a long time. That was the thing about cutters: they became expert at hiding the very thing their subconscious mind was doing its best to get noticed. She was an observant girl. Kate had figured that out during their early sessions: her noticing the slightest change Kate made either to herself or the environment.

The previous week Imogen had been completely withdrawn, closed down. But, as with other patients, the intricacies of her mind were complex. At any moment everything could change.

At seventeen, Imogen looked tiny in her pale pink hoody and faded jeans, the heavy sweat top giving her eighty-six-pound body extra bulk – an improvement of ten pounds on her weight after her discharge from hospital. A few months earlier, her heart had nearly stopped, no longer able to pump blood efficiently: her body had turned to her internal organs for its protein needs.

‘You seem in good spirits today, Imogen.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes, you do.’ Kate smiled again.

Instead of improving Imogen’s form, Kate’s compliment did the opposite, as if she’d been caught out in being happy. Kate let the moment pass, keeping her eyes firmly locked on the girl. Imogen’s eyes had made an irrevocable first impression on her. They held a story: one which Kate believed was her job to unravel.