by Adam Roberts
‘So,’ I said, trying to swing my arms in an insouciant manner and thereby express my eminent suitability for a session of experimental interbreeding, should she wish to test the possibility. ‘So how did you manage to survive for thirty-two years inside this helmet? What did you eat?’
‘I ate pap. There is a supply - it can be accessed by climbing up the mouthpiece tube. There is water there too.’
‘Enough for thirty-two years?’
‘Yes indeed. The portions, you see, are considerably magnified. The food is coarse and without flavour, but it contains enough nutrient to maintain life.’
‘It doesn’t sound very pleasant.’
‘It is not. But it is preferable to the alternative.’
‘What’s the alternative? Some sort of food even worse-tasting? You know, like, like,’ I couldn’t for a moment recall the phrase I wanted, and then it came to me: ‘—like airline food, ha-ha?’
‘When I said preferable to the alternative,’ she replied in her flat, slightly puzzled tones, ‘I meant that the alternative would be death by starvation.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
There was a silence.
‘Still,’ I said. ‘I’m terribly impressed that you managed to get up into the mouthpiece at all. Terribly impressed.’
‘I unthreaded my trousers,’ she explained, in her level voice, ‘and wound the twine into a rope, and this I used to get up to the opening of the mouthpiece. Of course this has had the consequence of leaving my legs bare, and of forcing me to walk around in nothing but my knickers for three decades. But, once again, I preferred that to the alternative.’
I too preferred her walking around in only her knickers to the alternative. That sentence holds, actually, for pretty much any alternative you might care to name. My being crowned King of Norway, for instance. A lifetime’s supply of chocolate headwear. A new cure for Chronic Bat Syndrome. Whatever alternative you can think of, I can assert that I would prefer watching Lexanco walking around in nothing but her knickers to it. In fact - and I’ve given this matter some considerable thought - the only alternative I can be sure I would prefer to watching Lexanco walking around in nothing but her knickers, would be the alternative in which I watched Lexanco walking around in nothing not even her knickers. But that wasn’t on the cards. At least not immediately.
I decided, as tactfully as I could, not to try and put into words the thoughts expressed in that last paragraph, even though they all passed rapidly through my mind at that juncture. Instead I limited myself to saying: ‘quite’.
‘It has been a lonely time,’ she said.
‘I can imagine,’ I said. ‘And how did you come to be marooned here inside this helmet in the first place?’ I asked.
‘It is a long story,’ she said. ‘I was an assistant-stroke-companion to The Dentist.’
‘To who?’
‘To whom?’
‘I asked you that.’
‘I am not asking, but correcting. You said to who?, when the correct formulation must be to whom?’
But of course she had absorbed the passion for correct grammar and syntax from the Time Gentleman she had been accompanying. ‘Whom,’ I tried, ‘is The Dentist?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘in this case the correct formulation is who is The Dentist?’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s a poor thing for a prose tailor to confess, but I have to admit that I’ve never been very good on the difference between who and whom.’
Her eyes widened in shock, and I felt a sudden sickness in my stomach - for the fear had come abruptly upon me that I had alienated this beautiful creature. I’m ashamed to say that I panicked a little. More than a little. Alright, I panicked abjectly. ‘Not,’ I hurriedly added, ‘but that I wouldn’t be eager to learn the difference, from a teacher as expert and, um, alluring as yourself. You could certainly teach me the difference between who and whom - or between the two states of any nips you like. Nouns, I mean nouns. Nouns, not, ha! Ha-ha! Ha! Stupid of me. Embarrassing! I mean that sort of slip of the thong - of the tongue, the tongue, the tongue tongue. That kind of slip. Tongue. Slippery tongue!’ I tried to calm myself. I was speaking much too rapidly. And a little loudly too. Some part of my consciousness was trying to blot out the fact that I had, only minutes after meeting her, yelled ‘slippery tongue!’ directly into the face of the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I am, I concede happily, no expert on the business of chatting-up beautiful women; but I’m prepared to bet any amount of money that walking up to a woman you barely know and shouting ‘slippery tongue!’ in her face is not likely to persuade her to go home with you and crack open the bottle of baby oil. If I became fully aware of what I had just done I might well literally expire with embarrassment. I had to push on, not to lose my momentum, to try and salvage the situation. I took a deep breath, and decided not to say anything else.
She looked coolly at me for a moment. Then she said: ‘Sir Tailor: if you can free me from this monstrous helmet, which has been my prison for so many years, I promise to teach you anything you ask.’
‘Anything?’
‘Anything.’
‘Just to clarify, so as I understand. Anything?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Well, that’s a very generous offer that y—anything?’
‘It has been so long!’ she cried in despair, balling up her fists and tapping at her own temples, a gesture I assumed was made to indicate her frustration. ‘Trapped, alone, in darkness, eating pap! I waited - I waited - thinking, as you first said, that somebody would be sure to lift the helmet up and release me. Somebody! But did they? Did they? No! For a day and a night I sat in the middle of the chamber here, sitting cross-legged, until thirst and hunger forced me to explore the mouthpiece.’
‘Ah, yes,’ I said, seizing on this as a topic of conversation that would steer me free from the morass of embarrassment into which I had, against my better judgment, been striving to bury it. ‘You were explaining how you got up there. You said you unpicked the threads of your silver trousers, and wove them together again as a rope. What then?’
‘I used the buckles from my stylish patent-pretending-leather shoes as a grapple.’
‘Your patent what?’ I asked.
‘Mock leather,’ she said.
I was so pathetically eager to please her, so desperate to impress her with my openness, that I took her at her word without a second thought. I should have had that second thought, so as to prevent myself from making a fool of myself; but my brain was galloping on heat. ‘Leather!’ I said, in a scornful voice. ‘It’s rubbish, isn’t it? All tough and - and leathery .’ This didn’t seem to me to be mockery enough, so I added in whiny voice, flapping my hands about for comic effect: ‘oo I’m leather, look at me aren’t I versatile,’ before resuming in my normal voice, ‘well no you’re not actually, you’re just skin, not even living skin, just dead skin, and that’s the same thing that gets sucked up in my vacuum cleaner when I do the hoovering. Leather? Don’t make me laugh.’
I stopped.
‘I meant,’ said Lexanco, ‘not that you should mock leather, but that they are mock leather. The shoes.’
I thought about this.
‘I see,’ I said. Then I said. ‘Yes, that makes more sense. I feel a little foolish.’
‘So,’ she said, neutrally.
I looked down at her bare feet. ‘So, where are they now? Your shoes?’
‘In my den.’
‘You have a den, then?’
‘Inside the mouthpiece. I use the shoes as all purpose utensils. Cups, scoops, containers, gloves. They have worn surprisingly well, really. I clambered up inside there and felt my way along the tunnel. There is a toggle just on the inside. It’s designed, I suppose, to be operated by a tongue; it releases gushes of water, or pellets of food. The first time I tried it I was almost flushed from the tube! But at least I could satisfy my thirst from the residue clinging to the inside of the container. Then I ate some food. I crawle
d further into the mouthpiece to explore. It was dark, and the rubber was relatively soft underneath my knees and hands - much more so than the hard floor of the main chamber. I was exhausted, and fell asleep. The next thing I knew I was being thrown about, bounced from rubber wall to rubber wall.’
‘The helmet had been picked up?’
She nodded, grimly. I grinned noddingly. This was an inappropriate reaction to her expression of gloominess, of course, but I seemed to have lost control of my face. Some part of me was still trying to ingratiate myself with her. ‘Somebody - I know not whom - had picked up the helmet. And because I was inside the mouthpiece, rather than just standing on the floor, I was picked up too. The helmet was plunged into some dark space - perhaps the very cupboard from which you plucked it, so many years later.’
‘I don’t understand - how could your companion abandon you? You said you were with a dentist?’
‘Not a. The. The Dentist - a Time Gentleman of great distinction.’
‘What a coincidence! I too am the assistant-stroke-companion of a Time Gentleman! Mine is called The Doctor. And one thing of which I am sure is that he will not abandon me here, inside this helmet. How did your Dentist come to leave you here?’
‘I do not know,’ she said, sorrowfully. ‘For many years I fretted and worried over this very question. Perhaps he merely forgot about me, for he was a trifle absent-minded. Perhaps some tragedy befell him and he was unable to rescue me. But as I lived on in the darkness, year after year, counting the passage of time by my periods of sleep, marked as notches in the soft material of the rubber wall of my den—well, to be truthful, darker suspicions began to crowd in upon my brain.’
‘Darker suspicions?’
‘That the Dentist had abandoned me deliberately, maliciously. That he, whom I had taken to be a force for Good in the cosmos, was actually a figure of evil.’
‘But he was a Time Gentleman!’ I objected. ‘A guardian of virtue and honesty and order in the cosmos!’
‘But how much do you really know of the Time Gentlemen? ’ she pressed. ‘How much did I know? The Dentist arrived in this craft on my home world of Tapov, circling the star Thpops, and met me. Within a few hours I was whirled away, carried off in his marvellous machine to visit a succession of exotic and exciting worlds. He told me he was one of the good guys. I believed him. But should I have done?’
I was nonplussed by this, or I would have been if I had known precisely what nonplussed meant. Something to do with mathematics, I’ve always assumed.
‘But tell me,’ she asked, urgently, ‘tell me of the world outside the helmet. Did you meet the Dentist?’
‘No Dentist,’ I said. ‘Only the Doctor.’
‘He is your Time Gentleman then? Please tell me!’
‘That’s right. I’m his assistant-stroke-companion.’
‘Did your Doctor ever talk of The Dentist?’
‘No.’
‘Then perhaps,’ she wailed, ‘perhaps my Dentist is truly dead! Oh, my poor Dentist, perhaps I have maligned you! Perhaps you tried to help me - perhaps you lost your life in the very struggle to release me from this prison!’
‘Wait a minute. Dentist? Come to think, he did mention a dentist,’ I said. ‘I’ve just remembered.’
‘He did?’
‘If we’re talking about the same person,’ I said. ‘He talked not of The Dentist, but of That Tooth-Hurting Wino Git. It comes back to me now . . . the Doctor once told me that he originally bought the TARDY off WhoBay, the hypernet sales site, from a Time Gentleman who happened to be in reduced circumstances. I’m trying to remember his exact words - some old codger who had sold everything else, even his own teeth, in the search for money to feed his drink-habit, and had finally sunk so low that he had to hock his own TARDY.’
‘Ah,’ said Lexanco.
For a while we both stood in silence.
‘Well,’ she said, in a small voice. ‘It only goes to show. You should not trust some person who shows up on your home world and carries you off without so much as a by your leave.’ She pondered some more. ‘He was always a little tipsy, you know. Blundered about a fair bit. Double vision. Do you know, he once told me he had multiple hearts? I thought this was merely a physiological fact of Time Gentleman anatomy, until I realised that he’d been looking at an internal scan of his own body with alcohol induced double-vision. He also told me he had two livers, four lungs and an invisible friend called Claudius.’
‘He let you down.’
‘He did. I assumed he would rescue me, and I was proved wrong.’
This made me think, uncomfortably, of the frequent evidence of unreliability that the Dr had demonstrated since I had known him. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you are right. Perhaps we should do more than just wait around for the Doctor - for my Doctor, I mean - to lift the helmet up. Perhaps we’d better get ourselves out of this mess ourselves. Under our own steam. Rather than just depending, passively, upon the actions of others.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But how?’
And at that very moment, inspiration struck. ‘I’ve got it!’ I cried.
‘What?’
‘Look at the floor!’
She did so, and presented me with a view of the top of her head. It may seem silly to you, but the sight of that top of the head moved me almost as much as the sight of the rest of her body. Her hair was purple, the strands straight and parallel arcs, and the top of her cranium was marked with the tender and exquisite line of her parting. If you cannot conceive of a hair-parting as being tender, or exquisite, then you have never truly been in love. Perhaps it is the blend of vulnerability and intimacy that that slender sight of her scalp granted me, I don’t know. Parting, a poet of Love once wrote, is a sweet sorrow - what a foolish and ignorant thing to say! In this case it was a sweet joy . It took actual effort on my part not to leap forward and kiss the top of her head.
She looked up at me again. ‘Why did you instruct me to look at the floor?’
‘Don’t you notice,’ I said, my heart pounding, ‘anything odd about it? You may have been padding around this space in your knickers for over three decades, but that was in the dark. Your helmet was inside a cupboard in the central console of the TARDY control room.’
‘True.’
‘Now it is resting on the floor of the TARDY itself. In the outside world it occupies a space no larger than a dinner-plate; but inside it takes up acres of space. Acres and hectares! Hectacres, probably.’
‘And?’
‘So the floor beneath us is the TARDY floor, except that it is magnified by a factor of - well, I can’t calculate the factor. Certainly it’s a lot. The floor I remember from the TARDY is perfectly flat and white. But when we look down the floor is bobbly.’
‘Bobbly,’ she said.
‘Blobbly. As if paved with miniature cobbles. Trillions of them - I’m guessing those are the actual molecules of whatever substance the floor of the TARDY is composed. Being inside this helmet is like being inside a gigantic microscope.’
‘I don’t see how this helps us,’ Lexanco said. Her brow was deliciously furrowed with noncomprehension. I wanted to kiss her forehead. In fact, to save time, I might as well admit that I wanted to kiss pretty much the whole of her, regardless of how long this process might take, and excepting only her big toes. I’ve always had something of a phobia about big toes. The rest of a woman’s toes I’m fine with; they’re even sweet, in a certain way of looking at things, all lined up in a row on the foot like that. But there’s something a bit revolting about the big toe - knobbled and protuberant with that toenail like a chip of faded bakelite. Urgh! But I’m getting distracted.
‘Don’t you see?’ I urged her. ‘Every tiny imperfection or indentation in the floor will be enormously magnified inside the helmet. If we work our way around the rim of the helmet I feel sure we will find a gap eventually - something that might be only the tiniest of dint or scrape in the surface of the TARDY floor, but which will inside here be a trenc
h large enough for us to climb out of.’
‘You should not end your sentences with prepositions,’ she observed.
‘But apart from that, what do you think?’
‘An excellent plan,’ she said.
‘There’s no time to lose!’ I cried, enormously excited. ‘Let us start here and work our way clockwise around the rim. This helmet cannot be resting perfectly flat upon the floor - no floor is absolutely and perfectly flat, not on a molecular level! As soon as we find a gap we can escape.’
‘It is a very good idea,’ she said.
I did not add what I was truly thinking - that then, in the outside world, when her gratitude to me as her saviour temporarily overwhelmed her quite natural physical revulsion, I would be able to seize the chance for a cuddle. Perhaps two cuddles. Perhaps - and why not? - a whole series of cuddles. And what, I found myself wondering excitedly, is the collective noun for cuddles? A huddle of cuddles, perhaps? A gaggle of cuddles? Or, if the principle of naming collective nouns applies across the board (I mean that principle which chooses a word primarily by its randomness with respect to the thing being grouped: an unkindness of ravens, a metaphysics of chairs, an obliqueness of proctologists, that sort of thing), then perhaps a bacon-slicer of cuddles, or a venn-diagram of cuddles. Although, come to think of it, that last one isn’t so random.
Anyway: the point is that I anticipated some form of affectionate reward for helping the beautiful woman - the girl of my dreams - to escape. My fantasising knew no bounds. Except, of course, the bounds of decency such as was consonant with the tenets of teatime family entertainment.
We set off at once, Lexanco leading the way and me following, keeping the wall of the helmet on our left. For the first ten minutes or so there was nothing: the base of the helmet sealed perfectly against the white, stippled surface of the floor. I began to wonder about the soundness of my reasoning: perhaps, I thought to myself, the TARDY floor was constructed from some space-age advanced material that kept itself perfectly flat. This thought was a distinct worry to me.