Toxine
I disguised myself with greatcoat, hat and balaclava, and, leaving the car outside as a decoy, exited while the window from which Daz spied on us was momentarily devoid of his shadow. My expedition was successful, and I returned not only with supplies for Toxine but with a resolve (bolstered, no doubt, by my quality-control snufflings of high-grade H) to vacate London as soon as it was light. I at first thought that in the panic of my departure I had forgotten to close the door. I saw then the splintered wood surrounding the lock, and a cold wind blew through me as though I were a moth-eaten shroud.
The house seemed hostile, alien, unwelcoming as an out-of-season hotel. The floor dipped; I pitched towards the stairs. Gripping the balustrade, I gazed up into the black heart of a helix: a stairwell winding to its vanishing point three flights above. Giddy, I turned away. Up there, at the summit, Soapsuds the Terrible had come to steal my toy. I wanted to scamper up those stairs three at a time, but my feet dragged as in glue. A hidden fairground organ played the theme music from Carousel; the darkness poked and jeered. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I called softly. ‘Why are you persecuting me over all these years?’ The stairs creaked like arthritic vertebrae; they seemed to talk.
‘Wait until I tell your father, young man; and what will your mother say.’ She had betrayed me, the old crone, they had all betrayed me. Only Toxine had been constant. ‘You think so?’ said the stairs. ‘That little hussy? Oh, why have you wasted your life on her? Why, why, why?’ I reached the first landing and stopped. A grandfather clock confronted me. It chimed; the door opened. Inside, a homunculus sat astride a hypnotic pendulum, swinging to and fro.
‘What are you doing?’ it said.
‘Go back to your pap and your ravings. I don’t need you any more.’
‘And what’s an old man to do without love? His only boy a rude mechanical, his wife gone off with some Yank car salesman. I should never have sent you to that school. A working-class hero, that’s me. And what have I got for it? A snob of a son who goes weak at the knees over some tarty machine.’ He raised a finger. ‘He’s up there, y’know. She’s partial to fat men . . .’
I slammed the clock-door shut and continued my ascent. At the second landing the fairground music stopped. Some way down an adjoining corridor, light escaped from beneath a door. Outside stood a pair of riding-boots, smudged with lipstick. Pressing myself against the wall, I shuffled crabwise, my nostrils stinging with the sharp scent of cat.
‘Mother?’ I called, rapping on the door.
‘Enter,’ she said, ‘my little bellboy.’ She was as I remembered her, beautiful as the Queen of the Night. She presided over a pink boudoir. An open fire blazed in the hearth. ‘It’s so good to see you. But then, I simply had to. We really must talk. The young lady people have been telling me about—Toxanne, isn’t it?—I wanted to know, well . . . But what must you think of me? I haven’t introduced you to your stepsisters. Tracy, Trisha, ‘Tasha, Tereza, say hello to your big brother.’ Lazing upon a rug before the fire, four adolescent grisettes tossed their heads and laughed, their peppermint eyes flickering. Flickering, snickering eyes.
‘Why does he wear such funny clothes?’
‘Like little Lord Fauntleroy.’
‘Better go home, boy blue, Mr Daz is coming to eat you up!’
‘O Baby Buntin’, don’t cwy!’
Mother hushed them with a stare. ‘Now about this young lady. I feel it’s only right to tell you I’ve heard stories about her . . .’
My stepsisters giggled and began to sing, very quietly, very nastily: ‘We know what they’re doing, we know what they’re doing.’ They crawled towards me on all fours, mewling like spoilt, pampered kittens. I leaped into the corridor, turned the key in the ward, and ran. Behind me, they scratched at the woodwork. ‘Miaow! Let us out,’ they cried. ‘We’re burning!’ False cats; untrue tabbies. Slink! There was only one genus of sphinxlike demi-feline, and that was Toxine. Again I assaulted the house’s crooked backbone, the final landing a flight above. I halted. Someone had cleared their throat.
‘Still playing with dolls?’ It was a boy’s voice, coarse and dull. I looked up; a gang of goblin-faced youths leaned over the balustrade, slack-jawed, malevolent. ‘Dead,’ said the boy. ‘Your poxy queen is dead.’
‘Dead,’ they chorused, ‘dead, dead, dead. Little dolly daydreams is dead.’ Hands over my ears, I rushed the gradient, shouts, jeers, giggles and screams swelling into a crescendo that would not resolve.
‘She is alive!’ My words bounced off a wall of white noise. ‘I brought her to life. I raised her . . .’ The air had grown rarefied. I could not find a footing. Abruptly, the voices ceased. I uncovered my ears, opened my eyes, and discovered I stood at the summit. I was alone. Ghosts, ghosts; this night I would put them all to rest. My workshop was opposite. I grasped the doorknob and listened, but heard only the tympanum of my heart. The hinges whinged; I squinted into the shadows. Before me in dim outline was a ransacked parlour of machinery and dismembered dolls; then, my pupils dilating, a horrible tableau vivant made itself known: Daz, pink and porcine, supporting a half-conscious Toxine—free now of her inhibiting bonds—and slapping her, like one trying to sober up a drunk. I switched on the lights. For an instant he seemed to fade, like a phantom surprised by day; then his corporeality returned, the insistent, heavy ink of his contours thick with a reality I could no longer bear.
