Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things

by Richard Calder

  ‘Titania’s going shopping. Can I go too?’ Father reached for his spectacles and blinked at me.

  ‘Mrs Krepelkova is worried about you and Titania.’ I swallowed and dug my hands deep into my pockets. He chuckled hoarsely. ‘She thinks I am too liberal.’ Silence. The invalid tray was burdened with buttered muffins; the curtains swayed gently in the summer breeze. ‘Peter, what do you want to be when you grow up?’

  ‘An engineer, like you. A famous engineer.’

  ‘No. You mustn’t say that. Not any more. The days of the toymakers are over. Mrs Krepelkova: she’s the spirit of these times.’ At the periphery of my hearing a Mayday sounded. The grown world was hijacking my life.

  ‘But Titania’s not Lilim,’ I said. My father seemed quietly shocked.

  ‘What stories has Mrs Krepelkova been telling you? Stories of witches and succubi and golems? I swear that woman’s brain is full of nonsense. The nonsense of cheap newspapers and cheaper politicians! There are no Lilim, Peter. You’re an intelligent boy: you mustn’t believe all you hear.’ He wheezed like a punctured concertina. ‘Mrs Krepelkova is a good woman. At heart. But we must be careful. Next time you come home from the country bring someone with you. I know you like Titania, but you must make other friends too. For her sake.’

  ‘When I was little we had lots of dolls. It never seemed to matter then.’

  ‘Life was different then,’ said my father. Unbidden, the memories came: our home filled with the rich patrons of my father’s skills; the marvellous automata that waited on our table; my mother, laughing at some after-dinner joke, her cheek even then hectic with the mutant tubercle bacillus that was to savage the Europe of that belle

  époque. ‘The invisible worm,’ he sighed, taking off his glasses, his head sinking into linen and down. ‘It is best to think of happier times: like the day I was discovered by the Comite Colbert . . His eyelids fluttered, straining at wakefulness. ‘I had just graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology. They liked my English hauteur, the dandyism I had adopted ever since reading the nineties’ writers as a boy. France then was the de luxe marketplace of the world. It’s like yesterday...’ His eyelids closed; his voice became a whisper. ‘In Paris I freelanced for Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Dior and Chanel. Later I worked for Boucheron and Schiaparelli. By the time I had met your mother and moved back to London I was the finest quantum engineer in Europe. Automata! They were the most coveted of luxury goods. And Europe monopolized the luxury market with its L’Art de Vivre. But quantum electronics has many problems...’ His eyes snapped open. ‘The chief of which is... ?’ He pulled himself upright. ‘Really, Peter, I’ve told you enough times!’

  ‘Quantum indeterminacy,’ I said, rote fashion. ‘The imprecise behaviour of sub-atomic particles.’

  ‘Tachyons, leptons, hadrons, gluons, quarks—Mavericks! Hooligans! They were my ruin.’

  ‘The crash,’ I said. ‘I thought it was the crash that ruined you.’

  ‘Our troubles came after Black Monday. The crash was just the beginning. To compete with the Pacific Rim we delved deep, deep into the structure of matter to make more wonderful, more extraordinary toys.’ He passed his hand across his face. ‘The invisible worm! It was right that we fell. Ours was an esthétique du mal. We shaped life to satisfy our vanities; life has called us to book. When you engineer at the quantum level, Peter, at the level of essence, style blurs into soul. And God will not be shaped...’

  There was a knock at the door. Nursie entered, in her hands a steaming bowl of camphor. ‘Time for your inhalant, sir.’ She set the bowl down. ‘Tsk! Has that girl not taken away your breakfast things yet?’ And she picked at the bedspread, holding up to the light a wispy thread of lace. ‘Pink lace, pink ribbons, pink stockings. A pink girl. Pink! Pink! Pink to her praline heart!’ She went to remove the muffins and teapot, but Father brushed away her hands.

  ‘That will be all, Mrs Krepelkova, thank you.’ Hurt, she turned to leave.

  ‘Do you want me to wind your automatons, sir?’

  ‘Peter will do it, Nursie. Later. Thank you.’ She smiled, shyly, her disappointment tempered by having been addressed by her sobriquet. As she left, she mussed my hair.

  I drew away; she had defamed Titania.

  ‘She says they eat men,’ I said, after Nursie had gone, wanting her discredited; banished. ‘That they’re poison. That they kill children and put their own in their place.’ Father laughed, but not altogether dismissively; he was too aware of what underlay those penny-dreadful tales used to explain the ascendancy of the dolls.

  ‘Reality,’ he said. ‘They say it is hard to bear. You mustn’t be too hard on her. She’s frightened.’

  ‘And frightened people,’ I said, completing the cliche, ‘say foolish things.’

  He sighed, ignoring my sarcasm. ‘But why shouldn’t she be frightened? We have all been seduced, and the world sickens, gravid with our half-mechanical heirs. No more talk of nanoengineering, Peter. Everyone blames us now, the toymakers. I wouldn’t have them blame you too.’ He leaned over the bed to where Nursie had placed her aromatic offering and breathed deep.

  ‘Titania will be leaving soon. Can I go with her? Please?’

  ‘When I made her I was at the height of my powers. She was my best.’ Red-eyed and perspiring, he reviewed his automata. ‘Wind them for me, Peter.’ My hands dipped into wet, freshly lubricated motors, tightening their sprung lives. ‘Titania’s a good girl. She would never harm you. Never.’

  ‘Then I can go?’

  The automata were waking: a monkey costumed like an eighteenth-century fop took a pinch of snuff; a conjuror sawed at a naked girl; the Steiner doll fell to the floor and wriggled and squirmed and squealed; someone—something—played the Marseillaise; and birds broke into song. Soon, that cast of feckless playthings was rioting about my father’s bed like a mob before palace gates.

  ‘Their day has come,’ said Father. ‘Yes, you can go. This time.’

  The Bentley shouldered its way through the backstreets of Mayfair. Titania drove. Peeking over the wheel, and with immortal abandon, she swung the car into Bond Street. At thirteen (Titania had always been thirteen) her motor-neuron skills often seemed no more accomplished than those of a child; and though in that ghost town vehicular manslaughter was an unlikely prospect, I checked the rear-view mirror for cadavers and the unlikelier police. The street was empty (during the day the streets were always empty), the receding images of boarded-up windows—Cartier and Tiffany, Ebel and Rolex—a glittering slipstream of demise. Now those showrooms displayed only the spray-canned symbol of the Human Front, and graffiti that shouted, ‘England for the organic,’ ‘Proud to be human’ and ‘Hospitalization now!’

  At Fortnum’s we bought some corned beef and cabbage (the store was run by an old Ukrainian couple, condemned, like my father, to remain in town), and then set off on the classified leg of our tour, our antique motorcar thundering down Shaftesbury Avenue, Holbom, Cheap-side, deep into the City. At St Paul’s we noticed a few technicians lowering themselves into manholes to massage the trapped nerve of some pampered AI. They noticed us, too; or rather, they noticed Titania, for they suddenly began gesticulating, scurrying into the depths.

  ‘What are they frightened of?’ I said. ‘Dolls only come out at night.’ Titania, gay as a bird, laughed without irony.

  On reaching Whitechapel we pulled into Brick Lane, parking beneath a Cyrillic logo reading LADA. The logo belonged to a warehouse, which—like the derelict ‘Borsch ’n’ Vodka’ fast-food outlets nearby—was a legacy from the years when a Bengali enclave had been ceded to Soviet and East European migrant workers. Lured by hard currency to buttress the West’s declining birth-rate - the fashion then being to consort with the artificial -‘Slav’ had, for a time, replaced ‘Paki’ as the taunt of England’s bigots. Until, that is, men learned to say ‘Lilim’.

  We entered the warehouse by a side door. Light filtered through the corrugated roof, falling aslant over exhausts, engi
ne parts and a samovar. In one corner, where rust had eaten away the trap once used for deliveries to the Seven Stars, the light tripped, fell and was engulfed. We descended the staircase, Titania’s cat’s-eyes burning green as, sure-footed, she led me into the cellar’s swarthy midst. Though blind, I knew a multitude of candles, like stalagmites in an enchanted grotto, rose from the surrounding debris. I heard the sweep of Titania’s hand; the candles burst alight, scattering our shadows; and the familiar beer barrels and wine racks, the pool table and slot machines, were revealed to us like the treasures of an Egyptian tomb.

  The old pub sign, which we had repainted, hung from a wall. A woman dressed in scarlet, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of seven stars, gazed down upon us, green-eyed and beautiful.

  ‘Our flag,’ I said, saluting her.

  ‘Our planet,’ said Titania. ‘I always feel safe here. At least, I feel safe with you.’ She brushed a cobweb from Our Lady’s feet. ‘What did your father say to you this morning?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, and picked up a can of paint, eager to change the subject. ‘Let’s get started. This is going to be our world.’ But Titania sat down upon a legless pinball machine, despondent.

  ‘This is just a holiday, Peter. This can never be my world. To them, I’ll always be the Thing from Outer Space.’ She drew a long red fingernail across the wall, setting my teeth on edge, and incising into the plaster the outline of a heart. ‘They’re right. I’m a dead girl. You really shouldn’t be seeing me...’A trace of coyness had infiltrated her musical-box tones. On one side of the heart she drew a T, on the other, a P; then, momentarily wrinkling her nose, scored the heart with a Cupid’s arrow. The ensuing smile, dislocated from the rest of her imperturbable face, twisted at my entrails. ‘But you’re my only friend. What would I do without you? A dead girl needs a friend.’

  Only recently, after I had returned from the north, had I realized how pretty she was. So delicate, so pale. Our little chambermaid, for years a mere playmate, had had me tossing sleepless in my bed through all the long hot nights of that summer.

  ‘I like...’ I said, my mouth and throat suddenly dry. ‘I like dead girls.’ Her smile rippled across her face like irrepressible laughter at a funeral. ‘Don’t worry about Father. He says the Lilim don’t exist.’

  ‘No,’ she said, giggling joylessly. ‘We dolls believe in nothing. Have nothing. Do nothing. We don’t exist. I wish—’ As if hearing a barked command, her face assumed its customary autism. ‘Light,’ she said curtly, ‘more light.’ The candles blazed, their light turning green, so we seemed in an undersea cave, immersed beneath a canopy of seaweed. ‘A doll needs something to believe in. Just the same as people like Mrs Krepelkova. We need... an explanation.’ A tear dribbled down her glassy cheek. I had not known a dead girl could cry. ‘People say that I am Lilim. Why shouldn’t I be Lilim? Why not? They seem to want it so much.’

  I knelt before her, burying my head in her lap. ‘Don’t talk like that. Don’t take any notice of people like Mrs Krepelkova.’ Her hand, white and inhumanly cool, touched my brow, razorblade nails pricking my flesh.

  ‘I would never hurt you. You do know that, don’t you, Peter?’ She stroked my hair. ‘Do you remember, years ago, when your father decanted me and brought me home? How beautiful your mother was. I so liked her. If only life could be like that again.’

  ‘We’ll make it so. We will. Believe me. We’ll find some way.’ I held her hands and looked up into that tear-stained face and the inhuman taint of her perfection. I felt the coolness of her thighs beneath the thin cotton frock, the articulation of her ball-jointed knees.

  ‘I shouldn’t mind,’ I whispered, ‘if you were Lilim.’ The candles guttered in a sudden draught, and the room darkened. ‘We could—you could—’ A spume of saliva hung from her lovely plump lips. ‘Make the dolls come back—like before—a world of dolls...’ The draught became a wind. Her lips parted and she grew saucer-eyed. Spittle dripped onto her chin. The wind blew through me, a divine mistral, turning me to stone. Still kneeling, I clutched white-knuckled at her skirts, petrified by her cold beauty. Her hair, black and opulent, lashed about her face, now like a malefic cherub’s; and her eyes shone like green ice. The wind howled, and the ice was in me.

  ‘No!’ she shouted, ‘I won’t, I won’t!’ The wind died, sighing with exasperation. Her tongue, darting lizard-like across her lips, licked away a lather of white froth.

  I moaned.

  ‘Don’t ask me again. Don’t tempt me!’ She was clutching at her stomach. ‘I feel it there. In my clockwork. The poison.’ She pulled from her pocket a large brass key. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Like this. This is better. I can take you back. Back to how things used to be.’ The key was about six inches long with a butterfly handle and a tip of uncut emerald. Again, the wind gusted, threatening storm and stress.

  ‘That’s Father’s key.’

  ‘He doesn’t use it any more. He’s too ill. He doesn’t miss it.’

  ‘I’m not supposed to touch it.’

  Titania placed the key in my hand.

  ‘Don’t be frightened,’ she said, and hoisted her frock above her waist, displaying her white belly. The umbilicus, dimpling the satin hemisphere, dark and deep, exerted its allure. Titania closed her eyes, waiting. ‘Please, Peter,’ she said, ‘make the poison go away.’

  I inserted the key.

  ‘Careful.’ She flinched. Fumbling, I pressed the key home and felt it engage. She drew her breath in sharply. I began to turn. ‘Slowly,’ she said, ‘slowly.’ Deep within her, a hiss and spit: mathematical monsters stirred. In abandonment, she leaned back across the pinball machine, her midnight tresses trailing in the dust. The key tightened; my fingers hurt. I hesitated, fearful something might break. ‘A little more,’ she said, ‘just a little more.’ Using both hands I forced the key a final one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. She screamed in an impossible soprano. The pinball machine lit up; bottles smashed against the walls; the candles exploded like magnesium flares.

  The wind that had been waiting impatiently off-stage hurricanoed through the cellar. It whirled about me, a private storm, ignoring all else. I joined its dance. Lifted off my feet, and clinging to the key like an anchored kite, I spun in its centrifuge. The cellar was a blur of streaked candle flame; below, her belly, a white expanse, a salt-seared tundra, drew me to its mine shaft of night. The umbilicus had grown huge, a black hole sucking me into another universe. I fell into its velvet maw.

  Through a dark tunnel dimly lit with blood-red alphanumerics I tumbled in free fall. The tunnel stretched to an infinite perspective; and as I fell a jungle rhythm shuddered through its walls. I was buffeted by waves of turbulence; but I felt no terror; my heart raced benignly with the frisson of a rollercoaster ride. Blood mixed with crystal, crystal with vermeil, amber, glazing into a salmon pink. The tunnel had become a pink glassy membrane. The jungle pulse receded; the membrane ruptured. I smelt grass; felt sunlight on my face; heard the chatter of voices. I opened my eyes.

  I was in Grosvenor Square, playing with Mama. About us, the Beautiful People—movie stars, couturiers, artists - scowled at the encircling paparazzi. I was eating an ice cream; father was talking with friends. Our automata, Treacle, Tinsel and the newly-created Titania, danced quadrilles with some of our guests. Doll boys, in the shapes of Harlequin and Pierrot, Gilles, Scapino, Cassan-dre and Mezzotinto, poured wine and served cakes. Half awake, half asleep, I rested on Mama’s breast and watched the dancers weave elaborate, stately patterns to the courtly music of some gamme d’amour. It was one of father’s ‘Watteau afternoons’: a midsummer day’s mime of pleasure, a pastoral from a Meissen porcelain granted a little time and space.

  Titania danced by. Was I in love, even then, albeit unknowingly? She was Columbine the soubrette, dressed in the sweet satins and rocaille folds of the infant eighteenth century. She waves to me with her painted fan. There is a clinking of glasses, a buzzing of bees. Time lies sleepi
ng.

  ‘My work now’ (my father’s voice drifts by) ‘is to unveil the spiritual physiognomy of matter.’ And the conversation turns to nanorobots, the latest molecular machines. ‘Reduced to the size of a molecule, a component will become delinquent; but I am learning to exploit quantum effects, to manipulate Chaos. [A flash bulb ignites.] Indeed, I have now developed assemblers that can manipulate not just atoms, but sub-atomic particles. These automata you see today, commissioned by the House of Cartier, have been brought forth from a microphysical realm where mind and matter, dream and reality, co-exist. They are-quite marvellous toys.’ And he extends his arms towards Titania and her clan. ‘Gentlemen, I give you L’Eve Future.’

  Above the applause, a clap of thunder. It begins to rain.

  I do not remember this.

  It is raining milk.

  And Treacle, Tinsel and Titania—fashion accessories we did not credit with life—bedraggled hair pearly with raindrops, dresses wet and sticky, are standing with their mouths agape like newly-hatched chicks; standing like totems of ecstasy.

  Titania?