Toxine
‘Tina?’ he whispered.
‘An automaton. Late nineteenth century. Studio of Fabergé. I must have left her wound up.’ He moved closer, studying the features.
‘It looks—it looks like Tina.’ He touched her face. ‘A china doll, just like Tina.’
‘Take your hands off her—you’ll break her!’ How dare he be so intimate, this bull in a china shop, this gorer of maidenheads; did he wish to hurt her more? I would not allow it. ‘I helped her, don’t you understand? She was unhappy, when she came here. I helped her. And then she left. How dare you reproach me, you of all people?’ I wanted to tell him everything: what I knew of his crimes, the whereabouts of his daughter, her fabulous fate. I sparred with temptation, dancing into a corner, ready to take a dive. ‘How dare you come here causing trouble like this—why don’t you leave me alone!’ I was ignored. Entranced by the doll’s verisimilitude to his daughter, he studied her face as if for signs of life.
‘She’s so like Tina. I don’t understand.’
‘She’s not for sale,’ I said.
‘You said everything was for sale, everything except her.’ He lifted his hand as if to catch a fly; but it was my ear that fell victim, caught between the sticky membrane of forefinger and thumb. He twisted. ‘What’s going on? I want the truth.’ He twisted again, as if unloosening a recalcitrant bottle top, forcing me to my knees. ‘I want the truth,’ he repeated. With contempt, I regarded the dandruff on his shoulders, the bullyboy eyes, the superfluity of his flesh. I wriggled with pain and disgust. ‘Why does that thing look like my daughter?’
For too long the god of this world, the fat blood-god of Man, had intimidated me. I would placate him no more.
‘So why don’t you go to the police? We’ll both go. I can tell them what a comfort Tink was to you after your wife died. We used to have such long talks, Tink and I. She had such an interesting childhood.’ He screamed a thin, girlish scream, and threw me backwards so that I fell upon Mademoiselle. Covering her body with my own, I stared up into a face livid as a Halloween pumpkin, defiant. Then he spat. Spat into my eyes.
‘O you bloody, bloody . . . You will talk to me.’ He rolled into the street, his words dawdling behind, flying about the room, knocking over furniture, peeing on the carpet; then they too, with an insolent wiggle of their hindquarters, left. Wiping away the saliva, I got up to watch him stride down the Portobello Road.
Daz, my childhood tormentor, had returned.
The honeymoon was over. We would have to leave. When it was dark I drove Toxine the short distance to my house. I planned to flee London, to rent an isolated cottage in Cornwall or Wales, and to live there until Daz had relinquished his search. The following morning I thumbed the property pages of the daily press, telling myself that all was not lost, that Toxine and I, like refugees bound for a new world, would escape the jaws of the beast. Evening came, and I noticed a silhouette in the boarding house opposite. Turning off all the lights, I watched him as, spotlit by a naked hundred-watt bulb, he swigged a hip flask or raised binoculars to his eyes: my chimera, the Dazman. My escape plans had been presumptuous; we would be followed. I threw every bolt, locked every door. We were under siege.
So that I might be alert during the night when I most feared attack, our habits became nocturnal. The daylight brought little rest. I slept fitfully, awakened by a telephone with no one at the other end. Poisonous letters arrived. I ran a fever. My anxieties, however, were mostly for Toxine. I could survive on soup and biscuits—all that the larder held—but Tox required that protein-rich drug compound only to be bought from all-night chemists and the lowlife that frequented them. Without it she would revert to her fallen self.
At night, the house was our playground: a labyrinth of corridors and interconnecting rooms, a baroque palace of cornices and arabesques, mazes, towers and dungeons. Attempting to regain our former happiness, we engaged in desperate games of hide-and-seek. As my cache of opiates was reduced, Toxine participated in these games with alarming vigour, negotiating the stairs with ease and wandering through our vast intestinal nursery with embers of intelligence in her eyes. When these signs of an all-too-human sensibility became acute I would carry her to my studio, tie her overactive limbs to the sole workbench that remained, and gently sing her to sleep. I sang of voyages, of Cythera, Avalon, and El Dorado, of that city to which we would escape, where even now they prepared our welcome. To have her restored to me after so many years, and then to be condemned to watch over her as she degenerated, dying into the human world: this was bitter.
When she was at rest I’d peep through the curtains, and there, not a hundred feet away, was my enemy: a sniper who, night after night, patiently reconnoitred his kill. When he moved, he eclipsed the garishly lit window as thoroughly as he eclipsed my life. However ignorant he might have been of the motive, he would know I would some time have to leave the house; and when Tox began talking in her sleep, abandoning her mantra of ‘Tik-tok, tik-tok’, to speak of things she should not, could not know of, I imagined he smiled, for I was then compelled to risk his intrusion to go shopping for my loved one’s favourite cocktail.
