‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I get it.’
‘Good lad.’
If I’d known then what I understand now—that the Volvo we were sitting in was bought on hire purchase from a dealership in Chesham two years after I was born and was still registered under my mother’s name—I would never have been pacified by his story of hard work and reward. As it was, I took his lies to heart.
He pulled into the first garage that advertised a decent price for diesel. The needle on the fuel gauge had reached empty in the middle of his fable, and we must’ve passed five other petrol stations before he settled on the one we ended up in: a ramshackle establishment you used to see a lot of in those days, which looked as though a motley co-op of retired locals ran it for a hobby. The forecourt was a dust-track and the pump handles were corroded. All of the carnations they left out for sale stood parched in margarine tubs.
While he filled up the tank and went in to pay, I waited in the car with the atlas open on my knees, tracing the bright-yellow route he’d charted for us. Map reading is a skill that other boys my age picked up at Scouts, but I happened to learn it in the context of my father’s underhandedness. I tallied the grids, converted all the inches, got the answer I was searching for: it was 190 miles to Leeds, give or take. But I noticed something else, too. The route he had plotted was not the most direct. It took us on a snaking course of A-roads.
He ambled across the forecourt, studying the receipt. ‘Not as cheap as I thought,’ he said, getting in beside me. ‘They haven’t changed their sign for weeks, the lazy gits.’ He stuffed the receipt into his pocket. ‘Want a mint?’
A pack of Fox’s glaciers was held under my nose. ‘No, thanks.’
‘I got us a Drifter each for later.’ He leaned across me, flipped open the glovebox, tossed his haul of confectionery inside.
‘How come we aren’t going on the motorway?’ I asked.
He slid a mint around in his teeth, turned on the engine. ‘Roadworks,’ he said. ‘Once you hit Leicester, there’s a wall of traffic. Best to skirt around it.’
‘Oh.’ I took him at his word. It seemed to me that fathers were supposed to have an intuition for such matters, just as mothers were supposed to have a native sense for flower arrangement. There was such nonchalance to his dishonesties, such a measure of conviction, that they left me feeling impudent for raising questions. ‘Anyway, it’s about the same in miles. I counted.’
‘Does that mean you approve?’ He rolled us away from the garage, back onto the road. ‘Because a navigator and his captain have to stand together. I’m not having any insubordination.’
I stayed quiet.
‘Know that word? Insubordinate?’
‘No.’
He bit down on his mint, chewed it for a moment. ‘Well, it’s what happens when people get ideas above their station, start thinking they know better than you do. When a boat sinks in the middle of the ocean, it’s normally because of that.’ And he turned to me, eyes wide. ‘But we’re not going to sink, are we?’
I pressed my finger hard against the atlas, held it there. ‘No way.’
There wasn’t much that bound us, so I cleaved to any small thing that we held in common. Reading, for example. He said his favourite novel was The Comedians, but the books he renewed most at the library were historical doorstops like Torquemada and The Name of the Rose, which would take him months to slog through; I loaned mostly science fiction or boys’ adventure novels where smart-talking youths rode motorbikes and hunted bounty.
We often watched old films together on TV, turgid Westerns with orchestral soundtracks (he liked to lie back on the sofa with a can of beer and give a running commentary: ‘Whoever cast Bogart in this role needs hanging too, Sheriff’). On certain Saturdays when my mother had to work, he’d take me to whatever matinee was showing at the multiplex—we’d see films that were too grown-up for me, like Brewster’s Millions and Eight Men Out. Afterwards, he’d say, ‘Well, it wasn’t art, but I’m not asking for my money back, are you?’ He twice took me to play snooker at a gloomy club in Amersham, and I recall that he was impressed by my knack for potting balls, although he grew impatient with the minutes I spent measuring the angle of each shot—a third outing was not proposed.
We went to the golf centre a great deal, of course, and in between encounters with Nadine, he did show me how to grip a club correctly and the right way to plant my feet. There was also the fact that his favourite chocolate bar was a Drifter and so was mine: he had the sweetest tooth of anyone I knew. We enjoyed spaghetti Bolognese and cold toast with raspberry jam, we hated cauliflower and raw tomato. He kept a blonde Fender Telecaster locked in a black case inside his wardrobe and would bring it out every so often just to hold it in his arms, strumming it inexpertly with one thumb—it was the aesthetic of the instrument he admired most, not its potential sound, and I felt the same. What else? Our hair colour—tar black, identical—and I’m sad to say that I inherited my features from his end of the gene pool, which makes it difficult to stand before the shaving mirror these days, or sit in the barber’s chair, or hold my head up as I walk into a lift.
The rest of our likenesses were so insubstantial they don’t bear repeating. I’m not sure we ever saw the world with the same eyes. And yet, when I was twelve, I’d broadcast his achievements to anyone who’d listen. If babysitters asked me, ‘What about your dad? Does he come over much?’ my chest would swell with pride. I wouldn’t think about the shortage of our time together, the places he no longer took me, the films we didn’t watch, the meals we never ate at the same table. Because I knew that he was doing something more important with his life than taking care of me. ‘He’s away a lot. He works on a TV show,’ I would say. ‘Oh yeah,’ they’d answer, ‘which one?’ And I’d watch their faces soften as I spoke its name—The Artifex—as if the words explained his absence and absolved it.
I’ve never had the mettle to review the scratchy VHS recordings of the programme I once made as a boy, though I’ve held on to them—for the same reason, I suppose, that people keep the urn after the ashes have been scattered. If I were to watch those episodes again, I would lose the final memory of their goodness, and I can’t stand to close the gap between the poor expectant kid who made the tapes and the man who now possesses them. Had it not been for my father, it’s unlikely I would ever have tuned in to The Artifex at all, and yet when I first saw the show it gave me a sensation that few stories ever have—a voluminous excitement slow-flooding my body, a recognition that I’d seen these characters and scenes before, that I was born with the show in me like some fossil waiting in a rock.
You’ll have your own fixations, I am sure, and you’ll recognise how difficult it is to move beyond them, even when they end or you outgrow them. The Artifex was mine, and I evangelised about it—at school, to my Sunday maths tutor, to my mother’s friends, to any set of ears that entered my vicinity—believing that I had a more profound connection to the show than anyone, a deeper insight into its material, because my father was involved in its making. I will admit that it gave me a feeling of specialness. It was rare that I could make it through a day without re-watching it. This is still a problem I am working on, for different reasons.
It was much easier to avoid the show before the internet, of course, which only gets more complicated to navigate. Technology keeps generating new ways to disseminate the episodes. The web is a scrapyard of pixelated clips on YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Vuze, to name only a few—they appear whenever I’m compelled to type The Artifex into a search bar, which is much too often, and I have to summon the reserve not to click play. Many of the VHS originals remain in circulation, despite all my hard work to intercept them on eBay, Craigslist, Gumtree, and the other two-bit platforms people use to flog unwanted wares around the globe—I have at least a hundred copies boxed inside my storage locker because I can’t quite bring myself to make a bonfire out of them. Facebook, Twitter, and Wordpress are the hardest to evade: nostalgia pages and devotional accoun
ts are always rising up like cupboard ants and I’m forced to let them carry on existing. There’s a stubborn mastermind out there who keeps restoring all the links I cull from Wikipedia pages, such as this one:
The Artifex Appears
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the television adaptation, see The Artifex (TV Series)
The Artifex Appears is a science fiction/fantasy novel by children’s author Agnes Mosur. Believed to have been written in the early part of her career (c. 1954), it remained unpublished until after Mosur’s death from pancreatic cancer in 1986. The full typewritten manuscript was discovered with a hoard of uncompleted works at Mosur’s home in Primrose Hill by editor Clarence Denholm. It was first published by Asphodel Press within the posthumous collection In Otherland: New, Unseen and Unfinished Stories, but was repackaged as a single edition in October 1993 to tie in with a successful adaptation of the story for children’s television starring Maxine Laidlaw and Mike Egan.
Plot summary
It is 1955. When young Albert Bloor races his two sisters in the woodland on their father’s estate, he falls behind and has a fit of asthma, passing out. He is found among the leaves and saved by a mysterious, disfigured woman named Cryck, who heals him with natural remedies. She insists that she is from a distant planet called Aoxi, and claims to be invisible to everyone but Albert.
In Cryck’s eyes, the Earth is an abandoned prison world and the landscape of Britain is littered with underground compartments that once housed Aoxin criminals. Cryck calls herself an artifex: ‘an artist, a craftsman, but also a thinker. I invent things, mostly.’ She is stuck on Earth after an engineering malfunction projected her through time and space, and has conceived a scheme to get home, for which she enlists Albert’s help. Each day, he visits her in the woods until she agrees to let him join her mission to Aoxi.
They work together, salvaging materials from what Cryck says are old Aoxin compartments buried in the countryside. From these, she constructs a power-generating device (‘conducer’) that is meant to fuel her journey back across the galaxies – but how much of what Cryck describes to Albert Bloor is really possible? Whose version of reality is better to accept?
Television series
Main article: The Artifex (TV Series)
Upon the book’s release in 1987, ITV Children’s Drama bought the adaptation rights for British television in a co-production with New Original. Screenwriter Joel Kasper (Pantheon Nine) was enlisted to write the first series of six episodes. ‘I was asked to retain the darker aspects of the source material and ramp up the spookiness,’ said Kasper in an interview with Radio Times. ‘It’s an old-fashioned story but I think most kids today will get a kick out of it – they don’t like things sugar-coated.’ Filming began in January 1993 on a sound stage at Yorkshire Television studios in Leeds; exteriors were recorded at various locations in Lancashire, London and South Wales. The programme debuted on Wednesday 13 October 1993 at 5:00pm
—which is the date and time my father made me write down on a piece of paper and stick to our refrigerator door, in case my mother and I forgot to watch. The first five minutes of that episode were all it took.
It opens on a quiet shot of misty autumn woodland. A title card goes up: Devon, 1955. An overlapping sound of frantic footsteps on soft ground, a leafy rustle. Cut to the mud-spattered legs of children bounding through the trees. Close up on the face of the smallest child, a boy trailing far behind the pack. He is a wheezing curlytop in shorts and jacket. One of his shoes is missing. He calls out to the others, begging them to stop and wait, but they keep running. ‘Last one there’s a rotten egg!’ they shout back, or something similar. They get further and further away. The boy has no choice but to stumble on. His panting worsens and his face flushes red. It’s an asthma attack. A bad one. He falls onto the mulch, clutching his chest. The other children are too distant to notice. An eerie piano theme begins. The camera cranes upwards, showing the helpless boy left on the forest floor, until the screen whites out. A moment passes. The whiteness gradually dissolves into the quavering tips of pine trees. A woman’s voice says: ‘Drink up, little one. You’ll be all right.’ We see a pale hand lifting the boy’s head up, a cup being pushed to his lips. As he gulps, a greenish liquid spills down his chin. ‘Breathe now, breathe,’ she tells him. ‘A bit of ranyan tea, that’s all you needed.’ The boy’s lungs fill with air again. He opens his eyes and sees his rescuer.
She does not seem human. Her eyes have strange pale irises. Her hair is ragged and wiry. She has a toothless mouth and scars across her brow. Her skin is pockmarked, stippled with blisters. The boy is startled by the oddness of her, but he’s too weak to get up. ‘Who . . . ?’ he manages to say.
She seems surprised. ‘You can see me?’
He starts to wheeze.
‘No, no, no, don’t be afraid, boy. Give those lungs a rest. Can you hear me, too?’
He nods at her, still fearful.
‘I had a feeling you were different.’ She has a strange accent: European with an American tinge. As she gets up, we see how tall she is: at least seven feet. She’s dressed in a beige boiler suit, as a prisoner might wear, and she’s barefoot. ‘My name is Cryck,’ she says. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Albert,’ he murmurs.
‘Well, I think I’d better take you to my camp until you get your strength back. Then we’ll find your friends and get you home. What do you say?’
The boy is exhausted. His eyes close again, dreamily.
‘That’ll be the ranyan kicking in,’ she says. ‘You’ll feel better in an hour or two, I promise.’ She bends and scoops him from the ground with ease. He lies cradled in her arms. ‘It’s just a mile to my compartment. Hold on tight. It’s going to be bumpy.’ She carries him into the mist between the trees.
The piano theme gets louder. Credits roll. Funny, how the order of the cast has stayed with me all this time: Mike Egan, Joy Greaves, Kimberly Pope, Malik Asan, Eve Quilter, Gavin Wynn-Norton—and Maxine Laidlaw as Cryck. Based on the book by Agnes Mosur. Produced by Declan Palmer, Carole Reeves, Bruce Haswell. Directed by Alfred O’Leary. The title goes up, dead centre of the screen, where it glimmers like moonlight on water: THE ARTIFEX.
‘The only thing worth eating at this dump is pancakes,’ my father said. ‘But order what you want.’ We had made it as far as Lincolnshire unscathed. The town of Colsterworth, according to the map. He leaned back against the vinyl of the booth and drew out his tin of Wintermans, slotting one between his lips and mumbling, ‘See an ashtray anywhere?’ He beckoned the waitress over. ‘You know there’s a reason they put these places on the sides of A-roads, don’t you? Same reason they put bookies next to pubs. Temptation for the desperate.’ The flame of his cheap plastic lighter was minuscule, but he always seemed to make it work. ‘The Little Chef,’ he said, heaving the smoke out of his nose. ‘I mean, what does that say to you? Inferior cooking, that’s what. Tiny portions. One day I’ll take you to a proper diner in America. You’d never find a place called little anything over there. They’d call it Jumbo’s, or Fat Dan’s.’
I sat with the laminated menu, deciding between breakfast or dessert. The restaurant was almost empty. There was just a pane of glass between us and the car park, where the Volvo rested in the tepid sunshine. A cheerful bossa nova played on the house system, but it couldn’t mute the din of tyres on the dual carriageway, which seemed no further from us than the kitchen.
The waitress arrived with a notepad. ‘You ready to order?’
‘First things first,’ my father said, ‘I need an ashtray.’
‘It should be on the table.’
‘Should be,’ he said. ‘Isn’t.’
‘Okay, I’ll bring you one.’ She fished inside her apron for a biro. ‘What’re you having?’
‘He’s still choosing, but I’ll have raisin pancakes and a coffee. And can you tell me something?’ He rubbed the sleep out of his eye and she waited while he scrutinised the goo upon his fing
er. ‘Does your payphone work?’
‘Last I checked,’ she said.
‘Does it take tens or twenties—you know, minimum?’
‘Tens, I think.’
‘Terrific.’ He reached and took the menu from my hands. ‘So, what’s it to be then, Danno?’
‘I can’t decide.’
My father glanced up at the waitress. ‘He’ll have pancakes with syrup and vanilla ice cream. And a Coke. No, scrap the Coke—get him a glass of milk. And I’ll have a bit of ice cream for my pancakes, too. Why not?’
She scribbled it down and left.
‘I wanted scrambled eggs and beans,’ I said. ‘Or sausage and fried eggs.’
‘Hard luck. If a man wants eggs, he shouldn’t mess about.’ He canted his head to get a view into the foyer—a cold entrance-way with a magazine stand and a podium that housed the cash register. ‘Why don’t you go and use the loo? It’s a miracle you’ve held it in this long. Are you still sleeping with a bin bag underneath the sheet?’
‘That was years ago, Dad.’
‘Really? Not what I heard.’
I turned away from him.
‘You’d better go before we leave. I’m not having any mishaps in the car.’
A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better Page 3
