Doctor Knife

By Marni Scofidio

What happens when home, the place where they have to take you in, no longer exists? Leonora has come to England for love, but when her relationship fails and her father won't let her return home, she finds herself having to take a position as mother's help to the creepy Dr Nye and her husband.

This horror novella (a short novel) is based on the author's experience as a multi racial slave in London. Exaggerated, of course; but not all of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: For Attention Press
• Release date: Jun 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215386439

Marni Scofidio

Now resident in Wales, Marni was born in San Francisco, California, and raised in Buffalo, New York. She is a modern supernaturalist whose fiction and nonfiction has been published in the UK, Canada, Australia, and the United States. Her first novel, Knucklebones, was published by PS Publishing, the UK's premier genre publisher, home to Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, and Joe Hill. She is married and Wicked Stepmother to one stepson. Her staffy x Gruff has a poet alter ego named Vanilla G.

Book preview

‘Seems to me—’ said Scraps—

‘Seems? Why you're all seams, my girl!’ said the Horner Chief, laughing heartily at his latest joke.

Scraps turned around and found a row of girls seated in radium chairs ranged along one wall of the room. There were nineteen of them, by actual count. All were neatly dressed in spotless white robes and had brown skin and three-coloured hair.

These,’ said the Chief, ‘are my sweet daughters. My dears, I introduce you to Miss Scraps Patchwork, a lady who is travelling in foreign parts to increase her store of wisdom.’

The nineteen girls all arose and made a polite courtesy, after which they resumed their seats and rearranged their robes properly.

‘Why do they sit so still, and all in a row?’ asked Scraps.

‘Because it is ladylike and proper,’ replied the Chief.

― L. Frank Baum,  The Patchwork Girl of Oz

Sometime in November, 1991

There has to be something wrong with me to be in this predicament in the first place.

I have to write down exactly where I am. In case. In case somebody does find this. I can only write during the day, when there's natural light.

Moving is difficult. It gets harder and harder to move without falling apart.

They've been at this for years. But I'm not going without a fight. She may have gotten away with it this time, but someday she's going to pick on the wrong girl.

Whoever finds this, if anyone does, you're probably wondering, why didn't I just go straight to the police?

Because I can't. I'm not supposed to even be here.

They've got me on that. I can't do anything about it.

Except to say that I was here. I was here, in this city. I lived, and had a name, and worked hard, to the best of my ability, and fell in love with the last person I ever expected.

I was here.

Part One:  Where Dreams Go to Die

1

The closest thing to something positive Hugo ever said to me during the short time we were together was, People who buy stone cladding for their houses should be subject to six months’ psychological evaluation first.

The rest of the time he loved to tell me what was wrong with me. Can’t do housework. You’re so fucking undomesticated, he’d say. Too passionate. Do we have to have sex every night? Quite foreign, you are, he’d say. Every time I tried to cook he said there were too many ingredients, how do you expect me to afford that on child benefit and income support? And him with a university education.

Then I started becoming friends with his son Allister whom he had custody of (alcoholic birth mother); instead of fighting with Ali for Hugo’s affections, Ali and I started to become friends. And that was the end of the relationship with Hugo. What there was of it.

The first time I left Hugo he came to see me where I was staying and took me out for a coffee, something he’d never done while we were living together. He sat across from me in the caff, fists on the grease-filmed tablecloth, and cried.

After the second time I left him I called him because I was frightened and lonely. The abuse he shouted from the other end of the line made me drop the pay-phone. Well, what was I expecting? Come all the way across the world to Tottenham, north London, in the frosty month of October, because of a personal ad in the Los Angeles edition of Loot. Wanted my head examining, I did.  

The second time I left, I had no money but one friend I knew from the bakery on Lordship Lane said I could stay with her and her journalist husband and five-year-old son George, if I didn’t mind cooking and cleaning for them. Nick and Fee LaRocca were kind to me. After I fell out with Fee I wondered how it had happened – I thought I’d been on my best behaviour; but Nick told me later about Fee’s diagnosis, manic depression, and how my presence had aggravated it.

Fee used to hear music in her head and go mad at the sound of airplanes over the house. She said she could hear Nick’s breathing in another room, and mine, and the mice chattering to each other behind the skirting boards. She didn’t like any of us watching television. Once during Coronation Street she ran into the kitchen and zipped back into the living room and started throwing table knives at me. They weren’t sharp but they were plated and heavy and it hurt where they caught me – she was an excellent shot.

I ran upstairs into Fee’s old sewing-room where I’d been sleeping and Nick came up after me and put his arms around me and said over and over again, ‘I don’t know what to do any more, I don’t know what to do.’

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Now please. It won’t help much if she comes upstairs and finds you here.’ Though I knew he didn’t mean anything sexual by it.

It’s a shame when you can’t even comfort a person in this world.

2

Before I moved out of her house, I tried to help Fee. England is a great place, much better than where I come from, for phone numbers to help with all sorts of problems. Only thing is, there often isn’t any answer at the other end of the line.

I was with her, giving my support, when Fee called MIND one morning. She said it made her paranoid on top of depressed because every voice she reached either disconnected her or gave her a new number to ring. I tried to make her laugh telling her about the Christmas Eve in Los Angeles when I called Suicide Prevention and they put me on hold. She burst into tears instead.

Fee took me round to the local McDonald’s. She said I could get a job there, no questions asked, and then a bed-sit in, waving her arm in a grand gesture, any one of these old Victorians. There we were, her paranoid, me thinking of finding a bottle of pills. A thimble of laughs.

We returned to the house. When she started shouting at George for sketching on the kitchen table without a mat under the paper, I took him up to my room where we drew cartoons for a while. After several minutes, the screams that travelled up through the thin floor stopped.

It was hard answering ads then, terrified as I was of all sorts of things: deportation, bad choices, becoming homeless. Because I believed that Hugo and I would marry, I’d cut all my ties back home. My father was happy I’d gone and hadn’t contacted me since my departure. My heart beat bloody in my mouth as, inside one of a row of phone boxes near Fee and Nick’s, I dug in my bag for the phone card I'd purchased to call and tell him I’d left Tottenham and was in trouble.

A man climbed into the phone box next to me; when he unzipped his pants and started to pee inside the booth, I couldn’t hear the rest of what my father was saying. Not that it mattered. After I’d explained my situation, he said, ‘You can’t come back now, I’ve rented out your room.’

I walked around the block two or three times, which took quite a while as London blocks are not rectangular or always part of a grid, and you can come out at a different destination than you meant to. Not wanting to go back to the house right away, I looked in at a small newsagents in the shopping parade kitty-corner to Nick and Fee’s. A card on the door read PAPER BOY REQUIRED.

Squaring my shoulders, I went inside, walked up to the counter and said I’d come about the position, if a woman could apply. The woman at the counter looked over her glasses at me. She didn’t need to say anything, it was all in her look: a woman just shy of thirty, asking about a paper round, a child’s job! I fled.

Over the next few days I looked at lots of other ads, having had a little think about the whole adventure. Whether it was better to accept defeat; go back home, throw myself on my father’s mercy, beg for the return fare and a roof over my head when I got there. That, or keep trying to get myself sorted here in England, a place where, for reasons I couldn't explain, I felt at home. A writer I’d read but whose name I couldn’t remember put it perfectly: dans ma peau: in my skin.

There are many things I like about England. People are less strident, they look into your eyes when they’re talking to you; there is a sense here, lacking in my country, that ambition is futile.

Yes, I like England. Not London. London’s a shithole. The best thing you can say about London is that most people here don’t have guns, like in Lost Angeles or Washington DC, Murder Capital of America. London is a gloomy, dark city, with lots of little alleys and quirks and hiding places; you get the feeling ages of history happened here, much of it nothing to be proud about.

Maybe I believe that because I never saw most of the good bits, like St Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey, Big Ben or Changing the Guards. I have seen Tower Bridge but I’ll come to that later.

I think the best thing about London is that you can get away from it, to the