Toxine
I took up my dark, secret task with fluency, for the loved one guided my hand. My output—clowns, acrobats, singing birds, and other exotica—was modelled on eighteenth-century examples: homages, mostly, to Vaucanson. I produced so many, my room itself began to resemble a tableau mécanique. Though little more than crudely engineered bagatelles made of tin and cardboard, my juvenilia, in three years, acquired a sophistication that impressed the entry board at Brunel. ‘Shh!’ I’d hear as I lay in bed. ‘It’s me, Toxine. I’m waiting. Make me walk and talk. I can’t stand it any more. Make me kiss you. Make me!’
But it was not until my grandmother died and we were installed in her grand mansion that, with the benefit of a larger workshop, an inheritance and my father’s increasing pliancy (he had begun his descent into mental squalor), I could attempt my androids, TX1 through 7. I limited myself to constructing their motors, hydraulics and servomechanisms; the bodywork, which I designed, was contracted out, at fearless expense, to Royal Doulton and Wedgewood. I disdained electronics; though forced to concede the advantages of a few circuits and switches, I imitated, whenever possible, the technology of the age of steam. To that age the species Toxine owed her origin, her inventor a steam-driven man. What a titan he had been, that disciple of Fabergé: he had translated the idiom of his eighteenth-century counterparts into that of the modern world; he had industrialized clockwork. I was jealous. He had been as familiar with the principles of advanced metallurgy as with the entrails of a clock. I wanted to understand him; to become him.
At college, I read of the great Victorian engineers and wondered how their skills might complement those of antique horologists; I studied bridges, tunnels, canals, the art of the cantilever and girder, asking how such examples might apply, say, to Vaucanson’s flautist or the chess-player of Kempelen; I read the mechanistic philosophers and the works of Samuel Smiles. My first creation, a thing of cams and cranked shafts, died at birth, her body too frail to withstand the violence of her own organs. I called her Tristesse. My second android was strengthened by wire mesh, which ran like an unseen arterial grid beneath her porcelain epidermis. She was a silly, skittish thing, and I called her Taratata. Tressaillement, my third, was a confection of masterful clockwork and sweetly sculpted lines. Her gears were exquisite. She was outshone, however, by Topaze; and Topaze, in turn, by the three sisters who were the culmination of my art: the Mesdemoiselles Tonique, Toison and Trésor. On these robots I lavished gowns of crimson silk, carmine lipstick and verdant mascara. Their beauty was bittersweet. To none could I give the name Toxine. Accomplished as they were, spoilt and flirtatious, ready to prink, prank and pout at the turn of a key, the Toxine Experimentals palled before the beauty of their original. I remembered Toxine through a child’s eyes, as a vision of first love. Craftsmanship alone could not recapture her; nor could those who aped her embody the uniqueness of her charm. My dolls, though technically sound, displaying complex locomotive functions despite the brittleness of their flesh, were spiritless replicas. I took a hammer to them. Poor things, by the time I sat my finals I had reduced you all to smashed crockery. It was not enough to possess the outward form: I desired the soul: that ghost in the machine, that quintessence of clockwork, that elusive twist of pitifulness and crime. How to distil? How to quantify?
I wandered through the late-night streets as I had once wandered through school after last bell: in despair. Traversing Oxford Street, I would follow girls overwrought with make-up swanking home from discos and pubs, seeking among them, in some mechanical gesture, some artifice of fashion or speech (O women are most beautiful when like machines), the answers to my hopelessness. But neither they nor the shop-window dummies, whose street this was, and to whom I turned with longing, offered counsel. Returning to my bedroom, while the house was still, I would review the ranks of little porcelain friends I had amassed over the years: antique and distant cousins of Toxine. Hidden beneath the bed was my Barbie collection. Sindy, too, was well represented. I owned dozens of these mannequins, each one altered to resemble Mademoiselle T. I would dye the nylon hair black, dress them in red, stain the suntanned flesh white and, with a dash of fluorescent paint, award them green pussycat eyes. But these china and plastic confidantes were as powerless as the street girls who understudied for machines to tell me where lurked the soul of my love. In my studio, spreadeagled upon a workbench, a slaughtered doll offered herself for repair. I could not move. I had begun to admit that I was to be left with only memories: images of a boy shivering in a cold, damp attic, embracing the automaton he would have died for.
Ten years passed, and memories decay. Toxine no longer spoke to me. I had failed as a child to restore her, as a man to rebuild her. My promise was unfulfilled. Burnt out, my affective life void, I spent the days in my derelict workshop surrounded by the remains of would-be brides and empty bottles of whisky. After graduating I had studied industrial design at the Royal College of Art. It seemed inevitable that, with my knowledge of the mechanical aspects of the human form, I should excel in the design of prosthetics. My patents bought me respite from this world, a retreat from the banality of the herd. But drink, drawn curtains and the roughshod years could not wholly bring respite from Mademoiselle. A month might pass by when her presence was all but exorcized; then her face would again taunt, and I would nervously fondle a cog, a wheel, some scrap of silk rent from a red ball gown, begging her, Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, while she would even then grow indistinct, claimed by the forbidden zone of the past. After such a visitation the craving would begin. My blood hollered for a machine. Any machine. And I would flee the house to the showrooms of Dixons and Currys, to ponder computers, microwaves, TVs and cameras, to gaze upon stereos and VCRs, admiring their lovely man-made surfaces—modern-day correspondence of china and bisque—while surreptitious fingers delved into intricate silicon innards. Unsatisfied, frustrated, I would loiter in bookshops furtively thumbing the pages of car-repair manuals, the manifestos of Marinetti, or science-fiction novels with covers boasting chrome-plated robo-women with bellies of electrical flex. Later, I might find myself in the suburbs outside an industrial estate, where a workforce (if I was lucky, a workforce of young females) would be arriving for their shift, punctual as the jacks of an old town clock. And life for me would have remained like this if I had not met with an epiphany, an apparition that was to salvage the past, recall me to my responsibilities, to my life’s work, and bring my pilgrimage to an end.
