the only good doll

is a drunk doll on drugs
thief
mess
junkie
menace
charmer
artist
this is why she matters
the good doll hasn't slept for a week. she's snorting cocaine through rolled-up pages of french poetry. she thinks her shadow is a ghost. it's just another day in the life.
DUSK IS FALLING over the southen and the hazy neon lights of the penny arcades lend the esplande an out-of-season melancholy. the doll's motorcar, her on-again off-again home is parked, besieged by snakes. inside, it's like a 50s boudoir: scarlet leatherette seats trimmed with white piping, velvet curtains, a bottle of champagne on ice. in the wake of the furor following the secret spying of the doll doing drugs, drugs and more drugs; there's an edgy, paranoid atmosphere. earlier, she, her lion and her moon, the one with the bones, ordered people off and it's unclear whether anyone is welcome or not.
events unfold like a surreal film. she appears from the end of an alley, dressed in all black and stares wildly: 'goodness gracious, stone me, o look at this moon tonight it is ripe my mates, ripe indeed.' she is hallucinating. she hasn't slept for four days and nights. she eventually calms herself and acts prison-movie cool, rigid with uncertainty. the silence is horrible.
she is due to speak more words than you can shake a stick at, but the star doll is clearly off the pretty little head of hers. to boot, her 'baby' is as well and has no care in the world for anyone but himself. 'chiz, chiz,' is all the doll says. her lion is just drunk enough.
for the last few months, over the summer, the doll was one of the most talked about sweethearts in the city, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with her writings. sweeping from the elite hills of primrose to skid row and all the way to down and out alley and back again before she'd give up, that doll would. thus, she is the 'sucrerie gâtée.' then she found a breeze who knew a thing or two about 'parps off the glass trombone' if you can dig what i'm saying. she's been arrested, caught red-handed and most recently, having finished an "exposé" on taking cocaine at an underground session in west _____________town, has been most cruely become the shorthand for 'drug-addled deadbeat'. (which, she spat, were merely 'snakes hissing.')
the doll has been demonised to the extent that people outside the hep would are surprised to learn that that 'blonde junkie dame' was a prodigy, even taken under the wing of french council to recite her poetry.
in earlier times, she talked animatedly of arcadia ('the clearing in the brambles we're trying to reach') and albion (her thougful, semi-mythical city). she came across as an intelligent and original thinker and her inspirations - rimbaud, oscar wilde, james joyce, william blake, kerouac, withnail and i - an impeccable jumble of high and low. here, too, was a talented writer, able to juxtapose rich cultural detail and almost-too-painful confessional. de nos jours de toute façon.
however, over the past few months, attitudes to kat steadily shifted. admirers have wearied of the relentless struggles, while old mates profess to missing the outgoing dreamy cupcake who'd turn up on people's doorsteps with freshly cut flowers. those days seem long gone.
she stokes up her own myth well enough. as if on cue, she picks up a battered copy of poet under saturn, marcel coulon's 1932 biography of dissolute french poet paul verlaine, tears out the frontispiece and uses it to snuffle a fat line of coke while one of the shadows in the back speaks, '...she's like the living dead spending all those pounds daily. she's like a zombie. she's self-centered and cruel-tongued. she's docile, sleeping all the time - because she's so loaded. she's paranoid, skint and difficult. and it's all his fault. she would say, 'i'm hurt' and he would say, 'no, you're not, i'm hurt more'. there really does seem to be no peace for the wicked, doesn't there?
ripping out a sheet of aluminum foil, the doll said quietly, 'i wish i were smarter. this hard shit's for the birds. you can't get comfortable and you sweat and you're boiling hot. you pour with sweat. and your nose dribbles and then all of a sudden, you get the colds. and the sweat turns to fucking ice on you. and you put a jumper on and then you're boiling hot again. and then you get cold again. like you just can't win. and you lie down and that's not comfortable. so you sit up and that's not comfortable. it just drives you insane...'
and before you know it, you're spun.