Sometimes when people hear my name for the first time they give me strange looks or nod their heads knowingly and say ‘Mmm hmm’ or even ‘Oh yes’. It was my father who chose that name for me. I didn’t know it was anything out of the ordinary until I was nine, the year he died. I came home from school one day with a black eye and he asked me what happened. We were in our basement where the bulb over the work-bench in its green metal shade picked up the glitters and gleams of tools and a jumble of glass vessels and tubing. He was an inventor, and the place smelled of oil, metal, wood, rubber, Jack Daniel’s (a bottle and glass are beside me as I write this; it has a wood-smoky smell and taste; it seems to me as I drink that the flavour is peculiarly American — long rifles; coonskin caps; ‘D. Boon killed a bar on this tree in the year 1760’) and something sharply chemical. I see him by the light of the green-shaded bulb, his face half in shadow; average height, average build; blue jeans, navy sweatshirt, sneakers. Brown hair, round face, glasses; he always looked surprised. He had a quiet and thoughtful way of speaking when he’d been drinking. ‘What happened?’ he said.
‘George Kubat said you and Mom were aliens.’
‘Who won?’
‘I did. What’s an alien?’
Dad heaved a big sigh. ‘Roswell,’ he said, ‘back in 1947 there was something that happened at Roswell, New Mexico. People said they saw things — flying saucers. Then something crashed near there and they reported finding debris and the bodies of alien beings.’
‘But what are alien beings, Dad?’
‘Beings from outer space, from another planet. The government hushed everything up and said that nothing happened but a lot of people still think something did happen and it’s been covered up.’
‘And that’s why you named me Roswell?’
‘Well, I gave you that name because …’ He seemed to have lost the rest of what he was going to say.
‘Because what, Dad?’
‘What, son?’ He was leaning his folded arms on the work-bench and his eyes were closed. Sometimes he dozed off standing there like that.
‘You were going to tell me why you gave me my name.’
‘Yes. Because … Because you never know.’
‘Never know what?’
‘All kinds of things. Mysteries, life is full of them, whether it’s UFOs or the Bermuda Triangle or whatever. And the government is always saying there’s nothing out there.’ He swept his arm to take in the whole basement workshop and knocked over the Jack Daniel’s which was stoppered and didn’t spill. ‘Saying this is all there is.’
‘You mean …?’
‘I mean this whole thing we call reality that you wake up in every morning and go to sleep in every night. Not just the government, ordinary people too.’
‘Ordinary people what?’ It was hard to follow him sometimes.
‘Only seeing what’s in front of them or behind them. Just because the past is what it was doesn’t mean the future can’t be something else.’
I waited for him to go on but he didn’t. I said, ‘Is that why you named me Roswell?’
He went quiet and I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he looked at me as if we were resuming a completely different conversation. ‘It won’t always be like this,’ he said. He tapped a flask with some blue liquid in it and smiled at me. ‘“From this moment on,”’ he sang quietly, ‘“no more blue songs, only whoop-dee-doo songs, from this moment on …”’ Then he did fall asleep standing at his work-bench.
He was not a big success as an inventor; he often started out with something that led to something else that went nowhere. There was a self-winding hourglass. Why? I don’t know but I remember what it looked like: the hourglass was supported by an arm that held the waist of it. When the sand ran into the bottom part the weight of it released a spring that flipped the hourglass over and wound itself up to do it again. After a while it ran down because of what Dad called ‘the energy deficit’. ‘If I could just lick that,’ he said, ‘I’d have perpetual motion.’
Mom came down to the basement looking for something just then. ‘Perpetual bullshit,’ she said.
My father owned the house but we never had much and I don’t know what we’d have done if my mother hadn’t always worked, mostly as a waitress. I had a newspaper route until I was old enough to work in the supermarket after school and on Saturdays. This was back in the sixties and Mom was a handsome woman then, fair-haired and taller than Dad, with blue eyes that seemed used to miles and miles of distance. Her maiden name had been Lindstrom and she looked like one of those pioneers who’d settled the Midwest, trailing a rope behind their covered wagons to help them steer a straight course through the tall grass of the prairies. Men liked to be waited on by her and tipped her well.
As soon as she got home from work she’d take her shoes off and put on a pair of fleece-lined slippers. Sometimes if she wasn’t too tired she’d read to me, more often than not from her Bible which was bound in black leather with HOLY BIBLE stamped in gold on the cover and spine. It had what I thought of as a Presbyterian smell; if I closed my eyes I saw men in black with large hard hands and stiff collars. There was a blue ribbon bookmark and the type was good and black, the columns of text very strong, like verbal pillars to support the roof of faith. Sometimes the numbers of the verses seemed like eyes that watched me. I still have that Bible. On the flyleaf is written, in a firm and faithful hand:
Presented to our daughter Rachael
on her seventh birthday, March 21st, 1930
by Christian and Ursula Lindstrom
Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain:
but a woman that feareth the Lord,
she shall be praised.
Proverbs, 31.30
Mom skipped around between the Old and New Testaments when she read to me; she’d use a verse as a point of departure for a one- or two-minute sermon. I recall Matthew 5.13 — she was very intense when she did that one:
Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?
She always paused there. ‘You hear that, Sonny? Remember that, and don’t you lose your savour.’
‘What’s my savour, Mom?’
‘Just remember the words — you’ll understand them when you’re older.’
Now and then for a special treat she’d read to me from Grimm’s Fairy Tales; her favourites were ‘The Goose-Girl’ and ‘Clever Elsie’, both women who were hard done by. She read those not in her Bible voice but in a younger and more intimate way. When she did the part where Clever Elsie got turned away from her own house it gave me goose pimples.
Dad read to me sometimes too; he liked Andersen: his favourite was ‘The Tinder-Box’ in which the soldier ended up rich and married the princess. I could never understand how that soldier was able to lift the dog with eyes as big as the Round Tower in Copenhagen — that dog would have had to be at least as big as a house. ‘I’ve given that a lot of thought,’ said Dad. ‘The soldier was down inside the hollow tree when he saw that dog, and because it was a magic place everything around the dog got bigger, the inside of the tree and the soldier too; that’s how come he could lift it — he sort of grew into the job.’ Dad’s name was Daniel. If anyone asked him, ‘As in the lion’s den?’ he answered, ‘No, as in Jack.’
But I was talking about Mom. She hummed or sang when she was cooking and doing housework. Some were hymns and some were standards and there was one, a tune that she made up for Psalm 137 that she used to sing almost under her breath; sometimes she just hummed it: ‘“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion …”’ I don’t recall that she ever got all the way through it. We were not a religious family but Mom sometimes turned to the Bible in the same way that Dad turned to Jack Daniel’s.
‘What’s Zion?’ I asked her. Dad was down in his workshop and we were alone.
She was ironing at the time, and she paused and blew out a little breath. ‘Sonny,’ she said — she always called me that when she was about to impart maternal wisdom. ‘Sonny, Zion is where it was a whole lot better than it is now and you never get back there.’
‘What are we supposed to do then?’ I asked her.
She tilted her head to one side and looked at me across a few thousand miles of prairie. ‘“The ants are a people not strong,’” she said, ‘“yet they prepare their meat in the summer.” Proverbs, that is; I forget the chapter and verse.’
‘What does that mean, Mom?’
‘It means that winter is always coming, and don’t you forget it,’ and she went back to the ironing.
Dad patented several things: in his notebook there were sketches and notes for a new kind of safety razor, magnetic buttonholes, and a self-cleaning comb. Mom told me that the razor had actually been made and sold but hadn’t brought in much and was quickly superseded by a better one. Dad never got to develop all the ideas in the notebook. One rainy night in November after I was in bed but still awake I heard him go out and start the car. When everything was all right Dad was careless about the noise he made shutting the front door, but this time he left the house without a sound so I knew that he and Mom must have had an argument. Later I woke up when the police came to the door. They told Mom that Dad was dead: he’d wrapped his car around a tree while driving under the influence. He was forty-two years old.
Next morning I took his notebook off the work-bench, and when Mom asked me if I’d seen it I said no. I could read most of the words but I couldn’t understand very much and there were numbers and symbols I couldn’t make head or tail of. I hid the notebook in a cigar box in my sock drawer for when I got older.
Right after Dad’s death my mother was on the phone a lot. A big man in a dark-blue suit came to the house, his aftershave was like a kick in the head; his eyes looked as if they’d been shot in with a rivet gun; you could tell from his smile that he enjoyed his work. He looked around at the furniture and the carpet and the wallpaper. He had a briefcase and he took some papers out of it, then Mom sent me out of the room while she talked to him. I listened at the door but they were too quiet for me to hear anything; I looked through the keyhole and saw Mom signing the papers.
After he left she just stood there looking out of the window. I asked her if that man was going to take away the furniture and she said no. Then I asked if he was the undertaker and she said no, there wasn’t going to be a funeral. She told me that some people left their brains to science and Dad was doing that with his whole body. ‘His brain too?’ I said. I was thinking of all the ideas he had in his head, like perpetual motion; I was thinking of the words he hadn’t said.
‘Well, yes,’ she answered, ‘they’re taking all of him.’
‘What are they going to do with him?’ I wanted to know. I wondered what kind of experiments they had in mind. I could see him high up on a platform in a thunderstorm where lightning would strike him.
‘They’ll do whatever scientists do,’ she said, ‘and he’s bringing home more money this way than he did when he was alive, so be proud of your father. He finally achieved perpetual motion.’
‘Is he in Heaven now?’
‘I don’t know where he is but it’s just you and me from now on. He’ll be missed at the liquor store but they’ll have to stagger on without him.’
‘I’ll miss him too, won’t you?’
‘Oh yes, but, like they say, there is a Balm in Gilead.’
‘Where’s Gilead?’
‘I’ll let you know when I find it.’
The first I heard of what was really happening was that afternoon. I was out on our front walk killing ants with a hammer and Herbie Johnson came by. ‘Are they going to let you watch when they crash-test your dad?’ he asked me.
‘What are you talking about?’ I said.
‘Don’t you know? They’re going to strap him into the driver’s seat of a car and crash the car into a wall — they must figure he’s got the experience for the job.’
‘Don’t come around here with that crazy kind of talk,’ I said. ‘I’ll crash you into a wall.’
‘My father works at Novatek,’ said Herbie, ‘and he’s the one who told your mother they pay good money for dead bodies and they use them for dummies to test how safe a car is.’
That’s when I punched him in the face and he went home. And then I was left with Dad in my head singing ‘From This Moment On’ and smiling at me. Years later I bought a Frank Sinatra tape with that song on it but I always fast-forwarded past it. Psalm 137, though, that my mother used to sing to her own tune — I’ve got that on a CD with Boney M: ‘Rivers of Babylon’. ‘By the reevers of Bobby-lahn …’ they sing, and they don’t sound as if they’re sitting down by the water — they’re on a long dusty road and they’re moving right along, going somewhere. I’ve got recordings of Psalm 137 by the choirs of King’s College and Trinity College, Cambridge, Westminster Abbey, and Wells Cathedral, and they all sound like choirs in a church.
It was the summer of the last year of his life when Dad took me out to Cranbrook to see the Orpheus fountain by Carl Milles. We drove out there one afternoon, just the two of us. The heat waves were shimmering over Woodward Avenue and the smell of the upholstery in the car almost made me sick; when we got on to Lone Pine it was cooler because of the trees. We parked the car, walked through gates and an archway, went past a sculpture that I don’t remember, then down some steps, along a promenade, up some steps and through some columns, and there it was: eight naked bronze figures, male and female, all in a circle around the spray that was coming up in the centre. The figures were realistic but smoother and simpler than real people and very athletic-looking. Some of them had their arms uplifted and some didn’t; all of them seemed to be listening for something, listening so hard that their bodies stretched out and their arms and legs grew longer. All of them had one foot touching some foliage but that was only a support for the bronze; the figures were suspended in mid-air, suspended by their listening. One of the men was holding a bird in his right hand and with his left he motioned it to be quiet. The girl to his right had turned her face away and raised her hands, almost touching either side of her head as if she was saying, ‘No, it’s too much!’ The listening seemed to go all the way up above the green of the trees to the blue sky and white clouds over us. There were mallard ducklings swimming in the fountain. The bronze looked cool; the water sparkled in the sun and a breeze was blowing the spray towards us. There was a smell of fresh-cut grass and flowers, purple ones that I didn’t know the name of and yellow daisies. I heard birds in the trees. ‘Remember,’ said their voices, ‘remember the listening of the bronze people.’
‘What are they listening for?’ I said to Dad.
‘The music of Orpheus. He made such wonderful music that he almost brought his wife back from the dead.’
‘Are these people dead?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Where’s Orpheus?’
‘He’s not here.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is one of the women his wife?’
‘I don’t think so. All that’s here is his music and these people listening.’
I listened hard but all I heard was the whisper of the spray and the splashing of the water falling back into the fountain basin. ‘I don’t hear any music,’ I said.
‘The music is in the silence,’ said Dad.
But I thought it must be very faint and far away from those eight in the fountain; they seemed to be trying hard to hear it, yearning for it to come to them. One of the men seemed to be saying, ‘Louder!’ with his arms up, both fists almost clenched as if he was trying to pull the music out of the air.
‘I don’t think they can hear it either,’ I said to Dad. There was a sadness welling up in me that was almost choking me. ‘They’re trying but they can’t hear it. Can you?’
‘No.’
‘But you said the music was in the silence.’
‘It is but it’s not music you can hear. You keep trying but you can’t hear it. Maybe that’s all there is.’
‘All there is to what, Dad?’
‘All there is to what I can tell you.’ He rubbed the top of my head and gave me a hug. We had our cooler with us and we went and sat down on the lawn to eat our ham-and-cheese sandwiches and drink our drinks. Dad had his regular beer, Stroh’s; I had a soft drink called Vernor’s. I can almost remember the taste of it: sweet and gingery and the first swallow made you sneeze. While we ate and drank we watched the fountain people and the ducklings and the other visitors. That was the only time I ever saw the Orpheus fountain. Even after I was old enough to drive there myself I didn’t; I was afraid I might not feel what I felt that time with Dad. It was something that I saved inside me.
After Dad died and then got smashed up again as a crash-test dummy I didn’t do very well in school and I didn’t feel much like talking to anybody. Mr Falco, the art teacher, gave me some clay and modelling tools. ‘Maybe your fingers feel like talking,’ he said. I tried to make a figure like the ones in the fountain but it wouldn’t stand up; the legs gave way and the arms fell off. Mr Falco showed me how to make an armature, and then I did a figure of a man reaching for the music he couldn’t hear. It wasn’t very good but Mr Falco said it wasn’t bad for a first time with clay.
I used to hang around the art room a lot, and as I got older the figures got better. When I was twelve I brought one home and showed it to Mom. ‘What’s that supposed to be,’ she said, ‘a basketball player?’
‘He’s reaching for music he can’t hear,’ I said.
‘Aren’t we all?’ said Mom. ‘I hope they’re teaching you something useful at school; reaching for music you can’t hear is not going to pay a lot of bills when you’re older.’
Actually the figure wasn’t all that good; none of them were and after a while I stopped making them. I didn’t do any drawing or painting and I didn’t hang around the art room any more. I was good at maths and algebra and when I got to high school I did well in chemistry. I kept reading Dad’s notebook and I was understanding more of it all the time. There wasn’t much else happening. I read a lot; I had a girlfriend for a while, her name was Pearl; she ditched me for a quarterback on the high-school team. I still had my part-time job at the supermarket. Mom was always talking about saving for the future but there wasn’t a whole lot to save back then.
Finally the chemistry and the notebook began to pay off: in the high-school lab I produced a lump of malleable plastic but you couldn’t do anything with it that you couldn’t do with Silly Putty. In the notebook Dad had been trying out product names: Memoplast and Mnemoplast appeared several times so I knew I was looking for a plastic with a memory. I took over the basement workshop/lab and put in many hours there but it was slow going.
After graduating high school I got a job at Spectrum Displays in Eight Mile Road and worked my way up to making papier-mâché figures on chicken-wire armatures. Soaking strips of newspaper in flour-and-water paste and building up the forms on the chicken-wire was a restful and contemplative thing to do. The mixed-up bits of headlines gave me strange stories to think about: THREE DEAD IN STOLEN BASES AS INDIANS LOSE SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE. All human life was there in interesting variations, slowly assuming male and female form for Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other seasonal occasions. Sometimes they lifted their arms, sometimes not.
By the time I was in my twenties Mom had retired. She had two offers of marriage from men who seemed all right in their way but she didn’t accept either of them. ‘“Vanity of vanities,”’ she said to me. ‘There’s a time for gathering husbands and there’s a time for having less bother.’ She was heavily into Ecclesiastes around then and there was a new bottle of Jack Daniel’s under the kitchen sink. Her faith in Jesus was no longer what it had been; she used to sing her own version of ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’: ‘Thou art short but I am tall, Jesus, why are you so small?/ If you’ve got no help for me,/ Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.’
‘You never used to be a drinker,’ I said to her.
‘Your father’s name was Daniels, as in Jacks,’ she said. ‘Daniel, as in Jack. Or whatever. He died for my sins.’
‘Who?’
‘Your dad. I always put him down, never encouraged. Night he treed in the drove, drove in a tree, I told him …’ She trailed off into silence but she was still awake.
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Told him he was a failure and I was sorry I married him. Crying when he left the house.’
‘You or him?’
‘Him. Not a good wife. He died for my sins. Jesus, why are you so small? Don’t be like him, Sonny?’
‘Like Jesus?’
‘Like Dad. Be something, do something. My fault.’
I hugged her and said, ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ but I knew I wasn’t very convincing. With my arms around her I was remembering the Orpheus fountain at Cranbrook, the whisper of the spray and the droplets on the cool bronze.
I stayed on at Spectrum and I kept working on my basement chemistry. My mother needed more and more looking after as the years went by. When she was sixty-eight she had a stroke that paralysed her left side. At the hospital they did CT and MRI scans; they did EKGs and EEGs. Mom was looking very small. ‘She’s doing all right,’ the neurologist told me. ‘The brain does a surprising amount of self-repair. I think we’ll see improvement in her speech and left-side mobility.’
‘Ihha I, orihha ah I?’ said Mom.
‘Say again?’ I said.
She said again and there was something familiar in the rhythm but she had to repeat it several times before I thought I recognised the Clever Elsie quote: ‘Is it I, or is it not I?’ was what Elsie said after she fell asleep in a field and woke up with a fowler’s net and bells hung on her by her husband Hans. She was frightened and uncertain whether she was Clever Elsie or not. She went to her house but the door wouldn’t open, so she knocked at the window and said to Hans, ‘Is Elsie within?’‘Yes,’ said Hans, ‘she is within.’‘Ah, heavens!’ said Elsie. ‘Then it is not I.’ She tried other doors but when they heard the jingling of her bells no one would open for her. Then Elsie ran out of the village and was never seen again.
‘Is that it?’ I asked Mom. ‘Are you saying, “Is it I or is it not I?’”
She nodded vigorously and died.
She’d left instructions for her funeral; she’d asked for the simplest ceremony and that’s what she got. She hadn’t wanted anybody there except me so there were just the two of us and the minister. It was a grey November day, the deciduous trees black and bare after the first heavy rain of winter and the pines holding the chill and the wet. Among the surrounding tombstones were three angels, one of them turned towards us, two away. Crows in the pines looked on and quoted Ecclesiastes but the minister stuck to his text and insisted on the resurrection and the life. When he finished I read Psalm 137. The minister frowned when I got to the part about dashing the little ones against the stones but the crows called for an encore. The coffin was lowered into the grave and I threw a clod on top of it which just sounded like a lump of dirt hitting a wooden box. Shouting amongst themselves, the crows flapped away into the greyness and the minister and I departed while the gravediggers finished their work.
I hadn’t cried during the burial service; I felt as estranged from my mother’s death as I had from her life. When I went home I sat on our front steps and looked at the grass growing up through the cracks in the walk where I’d hammered the ants when my father died.
‘You never know,’ I said to the winter chill in the air. There was a row of new houses where there used to be trees; a man was working on his car in front of one of them. As I looked, the sky and the houses and the cars and the man all went flat, like wallpaper. It came to me, not for the first time, that I was a stranger in the country where I was born. I had friends whom I drank with and friends who invited me to dinner but sometimes it all seemed like TV with the sound turned off. I’d been reading Dickens and Trollope and a lot of British ghost stories. As I sat there under the grey wallpaper sky there came to mind the M. R. James story, ‘Casting the Runes’, and the slide show put on for the local children by Mr Karswell, in which
… this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn to pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw at first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly …
There were other stories with London fogs, and newsboys running past the window shouting, ‘Dreadful murder in the Marylebone Road!’ while the landlord and his wife toasted a bit of cheese over a gas ring. Although I was well aware that the Victorian London of the stories was no longer to be found, England seemed a cosy place to me and I began to live there in my mind.
There was still work to be done in the basement but I was getting closer until finally, too late for my mother to see my success, I achieved Mnemoplast. I had a plastic that could be pushed, pulled, squeezed and crumpled but would return to the shape it had been cast in. As I worked in the basement I’d been trying to come up with a commercial application. I wondered what Dad would have done with it; I saw him dead and strapped into a car that crashed into a wall and then the idea came to me.
I patented Mnemoplast, then it took me a little over a year to get my design worked out and production set up but eventually I had my commercial application: Crash Test. It was produced and marketed by Merlin, Inc. for sixty-four-ninety-nine in the US and thirty-nine pounds ninety-nine pence here. It came in a glossy colourfully printed box and when you took it out of the box it felt good in the hand, not cheap. The battery-powered car was nicely detailed but of no recognisable make. When it hit whatever it was aimed at it crumpled and bits of it flew off as well as bits of the driver but it uncrumpled quickly and the loose bits of car and driver were easy to fit back on.
Crash Test appeared in US shops in October 1987, and though sixty-four-ninety-nine was a hefty price it quickly became the Christmas present that parents who couldn’t afford it bought for their kids. The same thing happened when it came out here in November. The distributors had calculated correctly that a strong start in the US would cause a buying frenzy here at the later date. When stocks ran out in less than a month on both sides of the Atlantic there were auctions in which Crash Test changed hands at outrageous prices.
It isn’t always easy to say why people do the things they do. I sold the house, moved to London, and bought a house in Fulham. I feel like a stranger here too but I am a stranger so it’s all right. I married a woman I met here and maybe I’ll say more about that later.
When I went to the V & A to look for the chair-cover bats I was a widower. By then I’d been living in London for eight years. Crash Test had been superseded by computer games and was barely ticking over in the US and UK although it was a little more lively on the Continent. I hadn’t come up with any other commercial ideas or ideas of any other kind; I’d been drawing and painting a little: early on I’d found a life class and I made some OK sketches; I went water-colouring along the Thames; I did some oils also, a few nothing-special street scenes.
There came a time, however, when I had to put artistic development aside and give some serious thought to bringing in money. I’d reached a point where I really had to make something happen before too long when, early in 1999, Merlin forwarded a letter to me from Paris:
Dear Creator of Crash Test,
In the window of a shop I have seen Crash Test and immediately it draws me to itself. I see it demonstrated, see the dummy at the wheel knowing nothing, expecting nothing. The car starts up, not controlled by the dummy but by a hand above him, all-powerful. At speed it hurtles forward into a wall, CRASH! The car is smashed, the doors fly off, the windows also, the dummy’s head, his arms, his legs! Alas! he is destroyed. But no, the all-powerful hand reassembles him, makes the car again like new, and once again Mr Dummy, who from experience has learned nothing, hurtles to his dismemberment.
I purchase the toy, I take it home where it comes out of its box as we come all new into the world. Now I am the all-powerful hand of Mr Dummy’s destiny. CRASH! we go, and CRASH! again. ‘Bravo!’ I cry with vigour and enthusiasm. I applaud, I approve with delight your most profoundly metaphorical demonstration of the human condition. What are we all but dummies doomed to crash head-on into the death that speeds towards us? And for what are we being tested? Who can offer to this mystery an answer that will bear examination? No one! Yes, you have hit the eye of the bull with this so deep perception of la comédie humaine.
Please be so kind as to respond to this letter. I wish to commission privately works from you and I make to you the assurance that you will be well recompensed for the exercise of your most interesting talent.
With admiration and intense good wishes,
Adelbert Delarue
M. Delarue’s address was in the Avenue Montaigne which made me think that he probably wasn’t short of a franc or two. Eager to develop this promising connection, I wrote back and said that I’d be interested to hear what he had in mind. Within a week I had his reply with a cheque drawn on Coutts for five thousand pounds. His letter explained that this was a down payment for the work and that five thousand more would be coming my way on delivery.
He went on to describe what he wanted: a crash-dummy couple, ‘man and woman anatomically complete, with functional parts and receptive orifices’, engaged in sexual intercourse. The figures were to be thirty centimetres tall. They were not to be one composite unit but two independent dummies capable of assuming all positions possible for humans. They were to be ‘electrically activated’ and there was to be sound — he didn’t specify what kind.
My first impulse was just to return M. Delarue’s cheque but then I began to have second thoughts. In Crash Test I was showing a dummy being dismembered; how was that better than showing two dummies having a bit of fun? I could find no moral high ground so the question was simply how much the traffic would bear. I sent back the cheque and wrote that I couldn’t do what he wanted for less than twenty thousand pounds, half of it payable up front. By return of post I got a cheque for ten thousand pounds and the go-ahead. Twenty thousand pounds for a bonking toy! Obviously he was some kind of a nutter but the cheque was good. I’d half expected him to back off when I upped the price but now if I kept the money this thing was going to be for real. I decided to keep the money, and from that moment on I had a patron. I was to let M. Delarue know when the figures were ready and he would send a courier to take delivery and pay me the other ten thousand pounds.
The dummy in my Crash-Test set was a coarse and primitive thing compared to what Adelbert Delarue wanted. Thirty centimetres seems a lot of room until you think of batteries and a motor of some kind, and these would have to be articulated bodies that might be doing the whole Kama Sutra for all I knew. And of course they’d be radio-controlled and I didn’t want them to look like model cars with antennas sticking up out of them.
Then there was the matter of the ‘functional parts’. My first thought was that the male member might as well be in a state of permanent arousal but then I imagined the figure in solitary repose on a desk or table flaunting its priapism so I decided to accept the challenge: zoom lenses got longer or shorter at the touch of a button and the booms of model cranes went up and down so presumably the thing could be managed somehow. As for the ‘receptive orifices’, they’d need a soft lining to prevent the dummies from sounding like an abacus. The audio tape could be in the base, worked by the remote radio control.
What was I going to make my figures out of? The Crash-Test dummies had been plastic mass-produced from my clay model, pretty much like Action Man although better articulated. But for twenty thousand quid M. Delarue was entitled to something a little more upmarket so I decided on wood; it was going to take a lot of time but I wanted my porno-dummies to be work I could be proud of. More or less. I could already imagine carving them and sanding them smooth. Before going to wood, however, I thought it best to do some trial-and-error on a clay model. At Green & Stone in Chelsea where I sometimes bought art supplies I was told that I’d find everything I needed at Tiranti’s in Warren Street.
The day was grey but not yet showing its hand with any precipitation. I thought it might be a favourable greyness, it felt as if it was with me and not against me. Fulham Broadway station, excited by the attentions of workmen and machines, hummed in anticipation of the new self that would emerge from its chrysalis of scaffolding, hoardings, fluorescent tubing, and noise. Mid-morning, this was, and the platform not too crowded. The rails winced, a headlight appeared far back in the tunnel, gathered a Tower Hill train to itself in its onward rush, became large and loud, stopped, and slid its doors open. I boarded it, went to Embankment, and changed to the Northern Line.
When I came out at Warren Street there were red Jurassic earthmovers nodding and feeding behind the hoardings on the other side of Tottenham Court Road, their heads rising into view and dropping out of it again as two motionless cranes watched from a distance. I looked down Warren Street into a foursquare perspective of nothing in particular. ‘What?’ I said. Warren Street shrugged, and it began to rain, gently but perhaps with intent.
Undistracted by pubs, shops, cafés, and a health-food centre with free-standing sandwich boards that offered to restore the world’s love life with Viagra, I proceeded to the modest blue shopfront of Est. 1895 ALEC TIRANTI LIMITED, TOOLS, MATERIALS & EQUIPMENT FOR MODELLING, CARVING, SCULPTURE. BOOKSELLERS Inside, exotic labels whispered siren music of haematite, jade oil and iron paste along with gilt cream, antiquing fluid, cupra, black patinating wax, gold leaf and rust remover. Elementary and advanced glues urged me to stick my world together; coloured waxes evoked the ghost of Benvenuto Cellini; unrolled canvas rolls of sharp and slender shapers hinted at undreamt-of subtleties of form; short and tall modelling stands in wood and metal beckoned tripodally; calipers in many sizes promised to transfer any measurement faithfully; and rows of carving mallets in beech and hardwood silently insisted on the verb, ‘to thump’.
Ignoring everything but my immediate needs, I quickly acquired twenty-five kilos of terracotta clay, a nylon clay cutter, a tabletop modelling stand, two sliding armature supports, some armature wire, and a set of modelling tools. For the next stage, the woodcarving, I bought a book on how to do it, a variety of chisels, gouges, rifflers, fluters and veiners, beechwood handles as necessary, an oilstone, slipstones, honing oil, a buff hide leather strop, strop dressing, a small beechwood mallet, and a Scopas Chops, which was not a machine for decapitating sculptors but a kind of bench vice. Finally, with my Visa card breathing hard and myself in a state of wild surmise, I stepped out into the rain, found a taxi after a while, loaded my gear aboard, and went home.
I put the woodcarving equipment aside for the present and prepared for clay-modelling. New tools and materials have exciting smells; they smell as if good things are going to happen. ‘Here goes,’ I said. ‘This is the first moment of the rest of my life.’ I poured myself a large Jack Daniel’s, said, ‘Here’s looking at you,’ to whatever might be looking back, drank most of it, put the modelling stand on the work-bench, made the armature, cut off some clay, and started work on the female figure.
Although the traditional design of crash-dummies offers little scope for individuality I felt that liberties might be taken here and there; with the clay I could decide how far off straight I wanted to go, work out the articulation, and estimate my wood requirements. Both male and female faces would be blank and eyeless but the bodies could certainly help the body language along. The clay felt primeval under my hands; it smelled earthy and made me think of God and Adam. I watched my hands and was impressed by their confidence and skill. When I’d done both figures I must admit that I was pleased; the female was somewhat more voluptuous than the usual crash-dummy and the male was similarly robust; I was looking forward to seeing them in action.
I went to Moss & Co in Hammersmith for the wood. It was raining again that day; the greyness and the wet made the whole thing more private and I liked that. Moss & Co itself is rather private; it’s in Dimes Place, a tiny alley you could easily miss, off King Street. Most of the north side of King Street between the Broadway and Dimes Place is taken up by Kings Mall Shopping Centre. Everything is nothing, it said brightly as I passed. Everybody is nobody. I averted my eyes and hurried on to Dimes Place.
I love specialist suppliers of all kinds — places that have exactly what you need and know all there is to know about it. Moss & Co have been around for a hundred and fifteen years, and not only are all the people somebody but all the woods are somebody as well. When you turn into Dimes Place you’re in a long narrowness lined with sheds where long baulks of timber lean, each in their proper place with a sign on the shed saying what they are: iroko or jelutong or ebony, whatever. All the woods have their smells, sometimes very faint, like the ghost-breath of the trees they came from. When you look at all those straight and squared-off timbers you might not think of trees at first but in the sheds the forests gather round you, tall and shadowy, whispering wood. In the long narrow alley the paving stones glistened in the rain; the sounds of King Street were small and distant.
In the shed where the limewood was I put my hand on one of the timbers and closed my eyes. For a moment it seemed to me that I stood in an avenue of linden trees roofed in by dark leaves and branches that met over a dim perspective of shadowy trunks. There came to me the Schubert song, ‘Der Lindenbaum’, and with my hand on that wood I thought of Tilman Riemenschneider, the great fifteenth-century sculptor who worked mostly in lime. In the photographs in my books you can see his chisel marks on the faces of Christ and Mary and the saints.
I opened my eyes and I was back in Dimes Place and the whisper of the rain with my hand still on the wood. If I used lime I was connecting myself to that man who was, you might say, the Johann Sebastian Bach of woodcarving. Probably in his whole life he never got the equivalent of twenty thousand pounds for a single commission.
Stuart Duncan, one of the company directors of these ghostly forests, was in the office. I was half afraid that he’d ask me if I was qualified to use lime but when I told him what I wanted he said, ‘You can probably find what you need right out here.’ We went to the little room outside the office where there were remnants of various lengths and thicknesses. I found eight pieces that would give me more than I needed, all neat and smooth and blond.
On the way home on the Piccadilly Line I could see my chisels and gouges and hear the slithery rasp as I sharpened them on the oilstone. I felt wide-awake and excited. Odd, I thought, that I had never done any woodcarving. Why hadn’t I? The hand, the eye, and the mind respond differently to different tools and materials. Once home, I put the wood on my work-bench and there it waited, whispering to itself.
Before I began the actual carving I needed to know how the figures were going to be made to work so I browsed the small ads in Model World and found Dieter Scharf, I CAN MAKE IT WORK — SPECIAL APPLICATIONS TO ORDER. He was local, too. I got some sketches and notes down on paper then I rang him up and went to see him the next day.
Scharf lived off the North End Road in Eustace Road, which today seemed somewhat sullen and withdrawn; the houses were looking at me the way the regulars look at you when you wander into the wrong pub. The sky was overcast, as it often is when I’m trying to find something. When I rang the bell the door was answered by a stern middle-aged woman in a flowered apron. She looked like a housekeeper in a horror film. ‘He’s in the basement,’ she said. The house was dark and cool, the furniture was dark and brown; the curtains were drawn, the kitchen was silent.
Dieter Scharf’s workshop was dark and cosy; it smelled of electrical wiring, oiled metal, and cheap cigars. A light bulb in a green metal shade looked down on various little engines and skeletal articulations that littered his work-bench; some looked as if they were arrested in mid-crawl or mid-hop, others were not that far advanced. Tools hung in their painted outlines on the wall. From this moment on, I thought: What? You never know.
Scharf didn’t look like an indoor type; he was a short sturdy man with a brown weathered face, sudden blue eyes, and big strong hands. He might have been a charcoal-burner in a haunted forest, and although his basement was in SW6 it felt far away and elsewhere. He watched me as I took in his workshop. There was a sampler on the wall in a carved rustic frame; the stitches were in faded orange, pink, and mauve:
EGAL WIE MAN SICH DREHT,
DER ARSCH BLEIBT IMMER HINTEN.
‘What does that say?’ I asked him.
‘“Whichever way you turn, your arse stays always behind.” My grandmother gave me that.’
‘Words to live by,’ I said.
On a little box on the wall there was a small wooden figure of a horseman in medieval dress. About a foot to the right of the horseman was another little box with nothing on top of it. Between the two boxes and connected to them by wires was a pushbutton. ‘This is Eustace Road,’ said Scharf.
‘St Eustace?’ I said, pointing to the wooden horseman.
‘Right.’
‘But where’s the stag?’
‘Push the button.’
When I did that, St Eustace sprang from his horse and fell to his knees; the lid of the other box slid aside as a stag reared up, a tiny Jesus popped out of its head with his arms outspread between the antlers, and Bing Crosby sang ‘White Christmas’.
‘The music’s a nice touch,’ I said.
‘Goes pretty good, I think,’ said Scharf. ‘There never was a St Eustace.’
‘Just as well for him and his family; in the story they ended up being roasted alive in a brazen bull.’
‘This will teach us not to talk to strange stags. Have you an interesting problem for me?’
‘I think so.’ I showed him my sketches and explained my requirements.
Scharf laid the sketches on his work-bench and perused them, humming ‘Der Lindenbaum the while.
‘How come you’re humming that?’ I said.
‘It’s one of those songs that’s often in my head, it’s a goodbye song — he’s saying goodbye to his youth, his dreams, his hopes. The rustling of the branches speaks to him, offering rest; but for him there is no rest as off he goes on his winter journey. No rest for any of us, not?’
‘I guess not.’
He drummed on the sketches with his charcoal-burner’s fingers. ‘Someone has commissioned you to make this?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll do anything for money, yes?’
‘I’ll do a lot of things for money.’
‘I also. Have you met this person who commissions you to do this?’
‘No.’
‘What, a letter comes out of nowhere?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then a cheque?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wonderful.’ He spread out the sketches and lit one of his foul cigars. ‘You want both figures to be active, yes?’
‘In any position and independent of a base?’
‘Yes.’
‘So for this we need radio control. There must be an aerial on each one and I think you don’t want the sort that sticks up as on a model car.’
‘No.’
‘We can do internal ones if the distances are short. Probably these are for indoor use, not?’
‘I doubt very much he’d be taking them outdoors.’
‘So internal is OK then. You want the whole articulated torso to be motorised or only the pelvis?’
‘Pelvis only — the articulation will allow the rest of the torso to move with it.’
‘Arms? Legs?’
‘They’ll stay in the position they’re put in except as the pelvis moves them.’
‘Your sketch indicates that his pimmel elevates and extends — a commanding member, this one.’
‘Well, you know, this whole thing is what it is.’
‘I can make it work. You want the batteries in the thighs?’
‘That’s what I’m hoping. Will that be a problem?’
‘No, we can do this. Let me make my calculations, and if you phone me tomorrow I can tell you how much this will cost.’
We said our goodbyes; I made my way through the cigar smoke and walked home thinking about Adelbert Delarue. Twenty thousand pounds for a bonking toy! What kind of man would pay that kind of money for such a thing? Obviously someone who had money to throw around, and he’d turned up at a time when I needed money. This whole thing began to feel like something fated. Not for the first time I tried to visualise M. Delarue: sometimes I saw him alone and scholarly in a booklined study; sometimes in action with a partner while watching my crash-test dummies. Occasionally St Eustace and company got into the picture; Eustace leapt off his horse, the stag reared up; Jesus popped out of its head and watched while the dummies did their thing and M. Delarue and partner (frequently a stern housekeeper) did theirs.
When I got home I worked out how to get the necessary parts out of my blocks of lime, then I made drawings, transferred them to the wood, clamped the first block in the Scopas Chops, picked up chisel and mallet, and got started on the male torso. The mallet blows and the bite of the chisel sounded good to me; as the shavings fell away from my blade I felt hooked-up, connected, and it occurred to me that this might be how artists felt. In six weeks my figures were ready for Dieter Scharf. The drilling and carving for the motor, battery, and wiring spaces had been ticklish but although I’d bought enough wood to allow for errors and wastage I hadn’t made any errors and I’d wasted nothing.
Dieter Scharf charged me twenty-five hundred pounds for radio controls and aerials, motors and installation. I painted the quartered yellow-and-black discs on the dummies and varnished them. The smooth hardness of the lime and the polished surfaces heightened the anatomical hyperbole so that even side by side in repose the figures had a beguiling lewdness. When the male dummy zoomed into readiness and the female received him they did what they were designed to do; their blind and expressionless faces radiated a mystic calm while their lower parts worked tirelessly. The primary receptive orifice, lined with foam rubber, maintained a discreet silence as the pelvises kept up a quiet clacking that was as cosy as the tick of a kitchen clock. I put a Walkman mechanism and two little speakers in the base, the top of which was upholstered like the back seat of a car. The audio was car-crash sound effects, and I looped the tape so that the noise was continuous. When I had the whole thing put together with the dummies bonking and the sound crashing I showed it to Dieter and he said, ‘There we have it — dummy sex on a road to nowhere.’
I faxed M. Delarue and he replied that I was to send the radio controls, described as being for models, via DHL. The base was to go the same way, described as a customised Walkman. The figures would be collected by his personal courier the next afternoon. At about three o’clock that day a very large man with a shaven head appeared at my door. He had a big smile, several gold teeth, and an unbroken nose; my guess was that the other man’s nose was normally the one to get broken. He was about seven feet tall and carried a Louis Vuitton holdall. His suit was expensive but his wrists and hands came out of the sleeves in a grappling sort of way. ‘I am Jean-Louis, arrived by Eurostar,’ he said. ‘Me, I am ready to roll.’ His taxi stood waiting.
‘Do you watch a lot of American TV?’ I said. ‘Hill Street Blues repeats?’
‘You got it. I come from M. Delarue. Here is ID, also message.’ He pulled out a wallet and showed me a driver’s licence which identified him as Jean-Louis Galantière.
‘Nice name,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘It goes.’
The note from M. Delarue confirmed that my visitor was who he said he was and would give me a cheque for twenty thousand pounds as soon as he received the figures from me. Ten thousand of this was a down payment on a new commission: a crash-dummy mastiff for which he was again offering twenty thousand pounds. The mastiff was to have the usual fully functional parts and was to be made to the same scale as the male and female dummies.
‘OK?’ said Jean-Louis, looking at his watch. ‘We are burning daylight, pardner.’
‘You like John Wayne?’
‘In my book he is Number One. With him no one takes liberties. You give me merchandise, I give you money, I am out of here, yes?’ He opened the Louis Vuitton and let loose a powerful aroma of dirty socks. ‘My cover,’ he explained. ‘The douanier looks not too close.’
‘Are you sure you’ll get through Customs all right?’
‘No problem. I am as one invisible.’
‘You’re a whole lot of invisible,’ I said.
‘Rest you tranquil — it goes.’
I removed the batteries from the figures and put them in a small bag which I gave Jean-Louis with the written operating instructions. ‘What an équipement,’ he said when he saw the male figure.
‘Life is short but Art is long,’ I replied.
He wrapped each figure separately in dirty socks, put them into hidden side compartments in the Louis Vuitton and closed it. He gave me the cheque and we shook hands. ‘Au revoir,’ he said.
‘Au revoir. Would you like something before you go? One for the road?’
‘Have you perhaps the Jack Daniel’s? A small one only.’
I fetched the bottle and two glasses, and poured us both large ones, confident that M. Delarue could afford the taxi’s waiting time. ‘Santé,’ said Jean-Louis as we clinked glasses.
‘Here’s looking at you,’ I returned. ‘Are you just a courier or do you do other work for M. Delarue?’
‘I am his chauffeur.’
‘What sort of a man is M. Delarue?’
‘Rich,’ he answered, then made a gesture of zipping his lips, after which he raised an admonitory index finger.
‘Right, no more questions about him. What did you do before you became his chauffeur?’
‘Time.’
‘Ah.’ I was going to ask him what he did the time for but thought better of it, so we drank companionably but without conversation from then on until he left, and thus ended the first transaction with my new patron.
The next morning a fax arrived in which M. Delarue said that he was delighted, his satisfaction was greater than expected; the action of the figures together with the sound produced an experience without parallel. He was lost in admiration and looked forward with eager anticipation to the mastiff.
It’s astonishing, really, how quickly the strange becomes the usual. Whoever and whatever M. Delarue was, he was willing and able to pay handsomely for his playthings and I now settled into the role of providing him with the wooden objects of his desire. As I began my mastiff research I wondered what the end of all this would be. In the meantime, craftsmanship and the moral obligation to do the job right took over. As well as something else which I’ve already touched on: these wooden erotica excited me; not only erotically but — dare I use the word? — artistically. Working with wood felt good; it put new heart into me. I was beginning to feel like an artist, beginning to wonder what I might carve when I finished with M. Delarue’s commissions.
I looked at mastiffs in books, I talked to mastiff breeders on the telephone, I went to Watford to photograph a dog called Longmoor’s Dark Dandy and paid his owner fifty pounds. Remarking my interest in the animal’s private parts, he smiled knowingly and asked for twenty-five pounds more, which I paid with a cryptic smile. Although he obviously had theories, I very much doubted that he could imagine what my research was for.
On my return I bought more wood, made my clay model, just a little hyperbolised, went to the lime, thoroughly enjoyed the carving, and ended up with a crash-dummy mastiff that could confidently collide with the best society.
As before, Dieter Scharf supplied the pelvic motor. ‘It didn’t take us long to get down on all fours, did it,’ he said.
Although no sound had been requested I looped a tape of Maria Callas singing ‘E strano! E strano!’ and the aria that follows in Act One of La Traviata, ‘Ah, forse e lui che l’anima …’, ‘Ah, perhaps he is the one …’ The finishing touch on my crash-dummy creatures was always the yellow-and-black-quartered discs; these came to have an almost mystical quality for me, particularly when they were in motion.
Jean-Louis and I did the business as before, and Bonzo was received as enthusiastically as the first figures had been. ‘The animal is all that one could wish,’ wrote M. Delarue, ‘and the music — what a touch!’ The cheque Jean-Louis had given me brought the total up to fifty-five thousand pounds, fifteen thousand of which was a down payment on the next commission. ‘It is my hope,’ he wrote, ‘that your earnings from these commissions will gain for you a little non-commercial time in which to follow your art wherever it leads.’
My art! Although I was beginning to feel like an artist I hadn’t been thinking of what I did as art but perhaps a rethink was in order. This was a time when unmade beds and used condoms were fetching high prices, and certainly my crash-dummies were no less — maybe even more — art than those.
M. Delarue’s next request was for a crash-dummy gorilla with the usual specs. Feeling that he might have underpaid me on the first two commissions, he was offering thirty thousand pounds, confident that my work, as always, would exceed expectations. That would bring the total up to seventy thousand pounds for my art. Maybe with a capital A: my Art. A crash-dummy gorilla, OK. Having done the others, I found no reason to draw the line at this one. But what did he want from me besides his crash-dummy bonking menagerie? What was he expecting me to do with this time that his money was buying for me?
Never mind, I said to myself, just make a good gorilla. I decided not to visit the Regent’s Park Zoo. When I last went there, some years ago, there was a female gorilla licking her urine off the floor. Was that her way, I wondered, of saying, ‘Is it I or is it not I?’ I had National Geographics, I had a video of David Attenborough whispering his narration while chewing vegetation and hanging out with a silverback and his troupe; and I had my own idea of gorilla-in-itself, a creature likely to be the dominant member in any relationship. I rigorously maintained my standards and eventually achieved a wooden gorilla with whom a wooden woman might crash any party of the appropriate scale with complete assurance.
I thought of my gorilla woodenly dreaming of African mountains while doing what I’d been paid to make him do. I gave Jean-Louis a tape to take with him for the gorilla-and-partner soundtrack: : Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. I couldn’t find a recording by Marie-Claire Alain on that wonderful organ in Flensborg, Sweden that sounds as if it was made from the salt-encrusted timbers of Noah’s Ark so I went with Albert Schweitzer at the Parish Church in Gunsbach, Alsace. On reflection I was pleased with that choice; I thought Schweitzer and the gorilla would get on well together.