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In spite of my feelings about this country (and my suspicion that I’m not bearing this burden alone), my job had given me a new perspective. I find it surprisingly gratifying, helping to demonstrate to people that they can build a more comfortable future for themselves and their families. As if it might be possible to fight against that rot after all. Comic characters are just stylised representations of my feeble attempt to escape from the less rewarding aspects of working; a release from the daily slog. I have only had the weekends to devote to my collection, and even then, until recently, there were domestic duties and visiting Laura’s family to distract me from cataloguing my best finds and searching garage sales and church hall book fairs for rare and exceptional issues. ‘Sid Snake’ and ‘Shiner’ from Whizzer & Chips were hardly of this world, but then neither, it soon became apparent, was what I’d found in Other Worlds. Laura obviously felt our life together had become too predictable. She was working at a photographic agency and had become quite the ambitious female executive; complete with attaché case, mobile phone and personal digital assistant. Once a week we’d sit and exchange important appointments in our respective calendars. She wasted no opportunity reminding me that other men bought flowers for the woman they loved. Flowers were so unimaginative. The Nano Doll seemed just the thing to lighten things up. * It was already getting dark when I arrived home. From beneath the overlapping cardboard leaves of the box came the doll. I lifted her out and yet it was as though she levitated from it; as if her fixed expression of surprise was actually wonderment at her surroundings and not merely the positive image of the toy-makers’ mould. Holding her in my hands she was even smaller than I had expected her to be: no more than fifteen centimetres tall and as seemingly fragile as a cognac balloon. I was expecting to find at least a folded sheet of badly translated instructions in the bottom of the carton but there was nothing. I couldn’t even find a battery compartment, let alone any reference to what size of batteries she might take. There was no on/off switch, no visible openings of any kind, apart from that narrow slit between her lips. Frustrated and embarrassed that I had just sunk good credit into what seemed to be nothing more than an incongruous ornament, I left the doll on the bookshelf and went to pour myself an exceptionally large, cask-strength whisky; wondering just who the dummy was as I passed the glass ritually over the water jug. “I’ve got a surprise for you,” I shouted, as Laura slammed the door shut behind her by leaning on it with her full weight. “Fuck. What a day!” she said, dropping her briefcase and kicking off her shoes. She stroked out the creases in her short, pastel-pink skirt and threw off her jacket, revealing a pearlescent blouse that was almost translucent. A black wired bra was clearly visible over her curves. I poured her a glass of Chateau la Tour St Bonnet and retrieved the Nano Doll from the shelf, as ever desperately trying not to become distracted by the luscious plumpness of Laura’s breasts. She was calling the voice-mail on her mobile by the time I had gathered my elation into a tight knot in my belly. “Look,” I said holding the doll towards her. Instead, she looked at me as though I’d just announced that her mother provided oral services for the residents of the underworld. Her portrayal of contempt could not have been more convincing if she’d discovered me in bed with a nineteen-year-old. “What is it?” she asked. “Well, er, it’s a Nano Doll...thing,” I stuttered. “A doll. You bought me a doll? Just what goes on in that head of yours? Is that the best you could do?”A front of cold air charged with derision hit me head-on as she turned on her heels. “You hungry?” I countered. “We could order a curry.” I don’t think she was hungry. I think she had actually been waiting for an excuse to leave me. And now the waiting was over. It was as though she had been prepared for this moment for months: the suitcases seemed to have been lying open waiting for her clothes, which all fell into her hands as smoothly as if they were being borne by conveyor belt. I can’t even remember her ordering the cab; the driver materialised at the door and the next thing she was handing me her keys and waggling her irascible buttocks in the direction of the stairs. I’m probably putting too fine a point on it, but it felt as though the Nano Doll was the trigger of the gun that put our relationship out of its misery. *
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