Dennie’s mummy and daddy enjoy watching her play with Sabrina, having tea parties and conversations, but they never suspect that Sabrina might be actually talking because Dennie is the only one who can hear her. And Sabrina always tells Dennie the truth.
Most of the things she tells Dennie are helpful, like where Mummy’s spectacles are when she loses them, or what the weather is going to be like before a family trip to the park, or that Daddy’s car is just about to appear around the corner at the bottom of the road. Dennie quickly learns not to tell her parents everything that Sabrina says because Dennie sometimes forgets and does things like telling her mother who is on the phone while it is still ringing and they give her some very odd looks that she doesn’t like.
Sometimes she and Sabrina go for walks in the night. Sabrina shows her magical things like fairy rings of toadstools in the moonlight and a woodland clearing where baby badgers play. When her parents find out about this they do not like it at all. Her daddy starts sleeping with the house keys under his pillow and her mummy takes her to see the doctor, who says not to worry, it’s just a phase that she’ll grow out of.
As she gets older, some of the things that Sabrina tells her are confusing, like the feelings behind the words that her mummy and daddy say to each other, or the reason why the lady from next door had to leave suddenly in the night with just a single suitcase. One time Sabrina even saves her life and that of her brother and parents, as they are driving to see her Uncle Robert in Norwich. They are going smoothly and steadily along the road when all of a sudden Sabrina starts shouting We have to stop! over and over, and her voice is so loud that it starts to come out of Dennie’s mouth too – Wehavetostop!Wehavetostop!Wehavetostop!Wehave tostop! – so her Daddy pulls over to the side and while her mummy is fussing and her brother is teasing, they all notice the big cloud of oily black smoke from in the road up ahead. It later turns out that there has been a six-car pile-up with multiple fatalities, which would have killed them too if her Daddy hadn’t listened to her.
But as she gets older, Sabrina begins to fray. The print on her clothing fades and becomes threadbare, the buttons on the back of her blouse keep falling off, and her cotton stuffing starts to show. This is especially distressing when it happens to Sabrina’s face. Mummy does the best job she can with big strips of Elastoplast, but eventually they have to take Sabrina to a dressmaker who stitches a completely new face on her, reproducing her eyes and smile exactly. Dennie can tell that Mummy is worried that she won’t think it’s the same, but by now Dennie is old enough to understand that Sabrina’s voice comes from somewhere inside her, not her face.
It will be years yet before Dennie recognises that Sabrina’s voice is actually her own voice, and that it isn’t coming from the doll at all but from inside herself. The day she realises this is the day that Sabrina stops talking to her. Then all too soon Sabrina will be spending more and more time on her bedroom shelf while she discovers the toys of adulthood, and then Dennie will have her own children and that voice will fade as it finds expression in her love for her family, and she will forget that Sabrina ever spoke to her, and in the end she will forget even Sabrina herself.
Which was why it was with such mingled homesickness and dread that Dennie saw her old rag doll clutched in Sarah Neary’s arms as she stood in the corner of the bedroom. It was 3:07, just like last time, which couldn’t have been a coincidence. She closed her eyes, counted to ten, and opened them, but the apparition was still there. The house around her seethed with echoes, like restless birds’ wings.
‘Having a moment,’ she said to herself. ‘You’re just having a moment, that’s all.’ It would pass, but she had to make sure that she was in the here and now. Trying to ignore Sarah, she got out of bed and went downstairs to the kitchen, where Viggo greeted her with a worried lick. ‘It’s all right, I’m just having a moment, boy, that’s all.’ She drank a glass of water, and switched the television on to a rolling news channel. It was the same litany of wars and scandals, but at least they were up-to-date wars and scandals rather than the regurgitated fragments of her unstable memory. She hadn’t thought about Sabrina in years, and couldn’t even remember whether she still had her. It was possible that she’d gone during one of the clear-outs when the children had left home. One would have thought that a toy so precious couldn’t just slip out of the world unnoticed. The water was helping to clear her head, and she thought maybe the moment had passed. ‘No,’ she told a hopeful Viggo. ‘It’s not breakfast time and I’m not letting you upstairs with your stinky dog farts.’ She patted him, put a few dry biscuits in his bowl anyway because she was a soft touch and he knew it, and Sarah was standing by the back door.
Dennie shrieked and dropped the box, scattering dog biscuits all over the floor.
‘What do you want from me?’ she whispered.
Neither Sarah nor Sabrina replied.
‘I did everything you asked. You can’t do this to me. It’s not fair!’
Then somehow Sarah was outside the back door and walking away, carrying Sabrina so that the doll’s face appeared over her shoulder, looking back at Dennie as she receded into the shadows of the
