Toxine
She lay amid the lumber of my grandmother’s attic: a dead princess, used, discarded, forgotten, in the ruin of her dark tower. Her name was Toxine. After school, I often retreated to her shadows, to contemplate her broken beauty and comb her long, long hair. I had discovered her shortly before my thirteenth birthday, during a year in which my parents seemed for ever abroad. Business, they said. Her incorruptible porcelain flesh consoled me.
For generations my family had dealt in antiques, and the attic had proved a graveyard for the unsaleable. But why had no one bought Toxine? Perhaps she would have been too expensive to repair; perhaps she wasn’t the fashion. Beyond the trapdoor, she had awaited an admirer, a lone thing of loveliness in a world of Victorian junk.
She had awaited me.
I attended a large comprehensive in Notting Hill. Staring at my book, flushed and intent, I’d discern, not a line of algebra or a spelling exercise, but a confusion of limbs lit by a shaft of light from the eaves. Dressed for her first ball, her blood-red gown was emblematic of her martyrdom. The lips too, and fingernails long as a mandarin’s, were incarnadined, so her body seemed one sensuous wound. But her eyes were not those of a victim. They were murderous. Green, and made of a luminous enamel, they glowed catlike in the gloom. She smelled of cat, her perfume the musty, electric scent of damp streets and brief couplings. A choker, half-obscured by inky locks, proclaimed her name. It would appear in my school books, on my desktop, on playground walls; and I would taste it upon my tongue as I ran home each evening to the sanctuary of the attic, to the hours between supper and bed. Toxine, Toxine, Toxine.
My father (though premature senility later effected a sea change) subscribed to a William Morris-type socialism, and insisted that the son of an antiquarian should be educated at a state school, alongside fellow artisans. School was an ant-hill, a midden. I remember Daz, so called because of his dandruff: a fat blubberball of a boy, my chimera and persecutor. I was consumed with plotting his demise. A poisoned wine gum? A sniper-shot from my customized Webley? Or an assassination squad funded by the huge reserves of my piggy bank? But I was a shy, bookwormy child whose resources were purely mental; it was my shyness, interpreted as supercilious conceit, which made me so unpopular. I was called ‘Lord Snooty’ and boys with goblin faces would jeer and poke, while their doxies applauded, giggling. A few gum-chewing little whores kept my nascent sex dreams company (Trace and Trish, was it? Or Trash and Treeze?), but they were insufficiently doll-like, too grossly human, to inhabit those dreams for long. I was alone; my comfort, Toxine. She had sentenced my heart to a lifetime’s infatuation. In my classroom reveries I would arrive at school with her on my arm, to the wonder and envy of all; and she would tell everyone how I had awoken her, just like the Sleeping Beauty, how clever I was, how we would live happily ever after. But school, with its wretched abundance of reality, prevailed, while Toxine and all that was marvellous lay dead. Toxine, I knew, must live.
Each night, after combing her hair, I rehearsed her resurrection. I laid her out; bathed her; lit candles at her head and feet. One, two, three, four candles. Then, with necromantic tools gleaned from a Meccano set, I would sit cross-legged by her side and ponder the necessary surgery. Lifting her dress above the waist revealed a panel in her abdomen, which, when removed, left her disembowelled, her pretty, clockwork innards submitted for my appraisal. She was horribly complex, a glittering bellyful of cogs, springs and wheels that granted me no favours.
Before this unknown country I at first did no more than clean off rust and oil the atrophied vitals. My astonished science master, subject to after-hours interrogations, proved an inadequate guide; I learned more from my Saturday afternoons in the public library, reading everything indexed under ‘clockwork’ and ‘dolls’. I was soon confident my beloved would respond to more earnest overtures. But my exploratory sessions, conducted with screwdriver and knife, which would begin with such a rush of delight as I plunged my hands into her metal womb, ended, invariably, with her stomach ruptured and exploding like an overwound watch. Such delicacy! In the candlelit garret, reassembling those precious elements of life, my hands would again explore her dark interior.
Ours was to be a hopeless courtship.
On my morning walk from Chepstow Villas to school I would look back at my grandmother waving goodbye and at the roof of the big, patrician house where my fairy princess was entombed. Soon, soon, I’d murmur. So besotted was I, so eager to see her walk, I forgot my loneliness, the bullyboys, the adolescent sluts, forgot even Mum and Dad (across the Atlantic, I had overheard, devouring each other); I was obsessed, with knowing her mysteries, of uncovering the secret life of machines. But I also forgot precocity has its limits. The mechanism that had once animated Toxine was beyond the understanding of a thirteen-year-old; and my attempts to revive her who was more cat than girl, more machine than cat, more beautiful than all, continued to be shamed, each attempt accompanied by that explosion of belly parts, the familiar haemorrhaging of porcelain and steel.
Academically, I prospered. I swotted with the fervour of a novice who has glimpsed the life to come; but salvation lay behind a veil of unknowing, perpetually out of reach. I plundered alarm clocks, carriage clocks, cuckoo clocks, to transplant the components I had wrecked; I smuggled her ratchets into metalwork lessons, to be rebored and soldered. Tox, Tox, why didn’t you rise from your bier? Why did you stare at me, glass-eyed and dumb? Despairing, I would wander through school after last bell, through deserted classrooms, playgrounds and corridors, the fading light of that distant autumn conjuring phantoms from the dark: the goblin faces of my enemies leering from behind bike sheds; of fillettes fatales, spiteful and vain; and Daz, above all Daz, his face smirking into my own, babbling, ‘Little dolly daydreams is dead, dead, dead, little dolly daydreams is dead.’
