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Saturday was bitterly cold. I collected Laura at the underground station and she slipped her icy hand into my jacket pocket so we were forced to walk back to my place practically arm-in-arm. The flat was tidy and warm and I’d arranged the table lamps for a little laid-back, mood lighting action. Laura smelt wonderful. She was wearing the Crabtree & Evelyn perfume I had bought her for her last birthday. She took off her long, black velvet coat and threw it onto the bed, the way she’d always done. She was dressed in a short skirt over black tights, together with an embroidered jacket; beneath which something lacy was visible. I was busy in the kitchen, so I let her choose the music. She put on Number 154: David Sylvian and Holger Czukay’s ‘Flux & Mutability’, which I thought was a strange selection. But the living room windows were stippled with a bloom of condensation that obscured the bare branches on the common and the dimmed lights and gentle chords simulated the cosy completeness of a happy home. I was cooking us one of my favourite recipes: a rich and spicy west African peanut soup with chives and sweet potatoes. Peanut butter makes it thick and savoury; root ginger and dried chillies add bite and chopped carrots give the soup a delicious sweetness. It seemed just the thing for a cold winter evening and its fragrances had soon softened the evening’s frigid edges. I’d come back into the living room to ask Laura if she had anything against garlic bread. I found her kneeling next to the coffee table, one ear up against the Locum, Yellow Rose’s head. Frankly, in all the excitement, I’d forgotten all about the doll and the disruption it has caused the last time they had confronted each other. Laura was grinning all over her beautiful face because the Locum was talking to her. I just heard the doll say, “Wozy cheeks,” in her silly, squeaky voice before Laura let out a squeal of delighted laughter. Momentarily relieved, I apologised needlessly then did my best to laugh off the incident. Laura was obviously still under the impression that this was a regular speaking toy with a modest selection of built-in phrases. “Usually she’s more talkative,” I said, trying to be cool and enigmatic, returning to the kitchen to smother a nascent whiff of trepidation. When I came back with a fresh bottle of St-Emilion, Laura and the Locum, Yellow Rose had struck up quite a conversation. Well, it was more of a monologue really, and the Locum was doing all the talking. For a while, I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Laura was still kneeling next to the coffee table, face illuminated by the biggest smile I have ever seen, eyes glistening with surprise, her hand to her breast and her breathing unnaturally heavy. And then I heard the Locum say in that ridiculous, mechanical New Jersey accent of hers, “Beah bwottom.” I laughed loudly and somewhat hysterically in my irrational embarrassment. It had never said more to me than that one innocent sentence — that one about the butterflies — and yet here it was, this ridiculous toy, threatening to sabotage the reunion like some gruesome plastic vibrator lurking between the first night sheets. “It’s just a toy,” I muttered, “don’t take any notice of it.” I picked up the Locum, checking the ashtray for burning incense, my face imploring the complacent Buddha to help me out of a corner. “Oh, put it down, honey. Turn it on again, that was fascinating.” I returned the Locum to the table with rather more vigour than was strictly necessary. She made that little alarm clock noise again and took a few swanky steps towards Laura. Then she turned and looked up at me with those big, oval eyes. Laura laughed shrilly and gasped with her hand to her mouth. She was enthralled; utterly captivated. With a jerk of the head, the Locum, Yellow Rose vomited a scroll of paper onto the carpet. For a moment it lay there like a coiled tapeworm. Then Laura grinned at me and grabbed the nearest end. I read what she had to say over Laura’s shoulder. “She 1ntz the bondzzuvlerv. She 1ntz 2 b spankd. She laikes teh hy tend & deaply pleshrubel sens uv x poshure an normus attenshun b in payd 2 her botum. Sumtaimz she 1ntz 2 b stredcht akros yor lap, sumtaimz she 1nts 2 bend ovr a chare or the bedd, or ly flatt owt onit, or b horsd ovr the piloes, the dreser or a stule.” Laura found it all hysterically amusing and I assumed she was laughing at me — as if everything the Locum had said was somehow my fault. I felt myself getting redder and redder, beads of sweat forming at my hairline. The temperature in the room seemed to rise ten degrees just from the glow that my face was radiating. Laura shook her arms and clapped her hands, “More, more!” she said, looking up at me. “How do you get it to do more?” she said, her eyes eager and childlike. “I can’t get it to do anything. It’s just a stupid toy. I didn’t even put batteries in the thing!” I shouted, defending myself against I-didn’t-know-what. More than anything I was furious at my embarrassment. “Well there’s no need to raise your voice, is there,” said Laura, assuming her assertive Sharon Stone persona. The Locum’s mechanism gave a brief whirring and a buzz before she sat down on the table-top, dangling her legs over the edge. When she saw us both looking at her garter belt — me with an expression of foreboding doom — she coyly re-adjusted the slit in her dress. Then, with a lugubrious flutter of her mechanised eyelashes, in the closest thing this tin-plate Betty Boop could get to a conspiratorial whisper, she began to address me in perfect, unaccented English: “Sometimes she would like a rod, sometimes your hand, your belt, sometimes a whip, a cane, a cat-o’-nine-tails, a bull’s pizzle, a switch, a ruler, a slipper, a leather strap, a hairbrush. She fantasises about being reduced to a craven object of desire by your firm male hand...” At this point, I adjourned briefly to the kitchen and returned with the ladle I’d been using to stir the soup. A chunk of carrot fell onto the Locum’s head as, raising it in the air, I brought it down as hard as I could and bashed the toy to pieces. Tiny cogs and flywheels rolled or flew into the corners of the room. Shattered tin, circuit boards and capacitors bounced and clattered about, then lay curled and broken on the table-top. Minute screws and mysterious midget components ricocheted off the walls and the stereo system. There was one last, extended buzzing — like the death throes of an expiring watch movement — and the Locum, Yellow Rose fell still. Laura rose from the floor with tears of shock streaming down her face. As her eyes turned to me from the wreckage they were filled with rage. From a throat thick with tears she managed to say: “That’s just what you’ll never understand: it’s not about violence, it’s about love!” She fetched her coat from the bedroom and left me staring at the fragments of the Locum, desperately trying to summon the scent of yellow rose incense. Laura’s words hurt. It didn’t dawn on me for a while that she was upset not — as I selfishly supposed — because she had presumed these to be my own sexual fantasies. Rather, the Locum had been trying to reveal something about Laura, something I would never have guessed in a thousand years. Not only had I been so disrespectful as to dismiss it, I’d annihilated her fantasies. They fascinated her; she was not in the least compromised by them as I had been. In the wreckage of the Locum, Yellow Rose, I felt the definition of what I had, until that moment, considered to be reality, shift radically; as though someone was pinning the flimsy pattern of my life onto a quite different batch of material. And as I looked down at the fatigued carbon fibre and the twisted titanium, a tiny spring uncoiled itself with a metallic hiss and one of the Locum’s knees jerked, the gartered leg extending itself towards me in one final reflex action. There wasn’t even any need for me to kick myself; the Locum, Yellow Rose was doing it for me. * As night settles on the houses, like falling cobwebs, unnoticed at first — so gentle is its descent — I sense the tremulous whirr of Time and a howl of regret resonates within me, as if the tape is being pulled violently past the heads of the machine that records its passing. I founder in my memories of Laura. The soup I made earlier smells scorched and has stuck to the bottom of the saucepan. My head rises from the miniature cogs, the stretched springs, silicon chips and capacitors lying all over the coffee table and my gaze returns to the small statue of the Buddha on the bookshelf, dozing contentedly. Perhaps I’m imagining this, too, but his grin seems even broader and more self-satisfied than usual. —0O0—
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