by David Miller
All was well for a time after that, until the toymaker noticed that his wife often looked at him with reproach, and sometimes wept for no reason. It made him uneasy to look at her, and so he made her a new pair of blown-glass eyes that were bright and approving, and never shed tears, or seemed to express anything but contentment. He was very proud of his handiwork, and for a time, he was content.
But soon he noticed his wife’s hands; hands that were often clumsy and slow, and so he made mechanical hands for her, and fixed them into place. His wife’s new hands were as white as milk, and as clever as any automaton’s, and so he made a pair of feet, and then a pair of perfect breasts, so that little by little, over time, he had replaced every flawed and worn-out part with clockwork and gleaming porcelain.
“At last, she is perfect,” he told himself, looking at his beautiful wife. But still, there was something missing. Still, she wasn’t quite as he’d hoped. And so the toymaker opened her up to see what part of her inner workings he might have neglected to tune or correct. He found everything in place – except for one thing he had overlooked. One small, insignificant thing, so deeply embedded in the intricacies of clockwork and circuitry that he hadn’t noticed it. It was her heart – it was broken.
“I wonder how that could have happened?” he said, reaching for his watchmaker’s tools, fully intending to make his wife a new heart to replace the broken one.
But then he looked at her, lying so still and beautiful and pale upon the workbench; quiet and lovely in every way; every part shiny and gleaming.
“Why, you don’t need a heart at all, do you, my darling?” he told her.
And so he took the broken heart and threw it onto the rubbish heap. And then he turned back to his wife and kissed her lovely silverfish mouth, looked into her shining blown-glass eyes and said:
“At last. You’re perfect.”
MARCHING SONGS
Keith Ridgway
Keith Ridgway (b.1965) is the author of The Long Falling, which won both the 2001 Prix Femina Etranger and Premier Roman Etranger, The Parts, Horses, Animals, and Hawthorne & Child, as well as a collection of stories, Standard Time.
I am ill. I have been ill for some time. Years now. It has become years.
I believe, though I cannot prove, that my illness is due directly to the perverted Catholicism and megalomania of Mr Tony Blair, former Prime Minister, whom I met once, whose hand I physically shook (at which point he assaulted me), and who, if you should mention my name to him, will tell you that he met me, or that he did not meet me, or that he cannot recall. Because he has all the answers.
My illness is debilitating. It disbars me from work. It prevents any social interaction. It has been, my illness, both misrecognized and dismissed. Misdiagnosed. And dismissed. As malingering; as a problem of my own creation, of my own invention, as if it was my child or my garden or a song I was singing, or something I have idly, on a quiet afternoon say, made up, invented, as a story to tell mental health professionals because I have nothing better to do. It generates anger, pity, bloody-minded stinking compassion, notes between doctors, phone calls and files, avoidance, the disappearance of friends, and all that sort of Englishness. I sit in my chair.
Compassion is a weapon wielded against me. Amongst others.
I’m not blaming you, specifically. I don’t blame people, specifically.
However, Islington council, my landlords, my sister (against her entire knowledge), and the NHS are all trying to kill me. Trying to enable circumstances (to arise) in which my death becomes inevitable. They are involved in an unconscious, unarticulated conspiracy to kill me in other words. It’s not a plot. It’s nothing so straightforward as a plot. No one can be blamed in any individual way. It is an inevitable, bureaucratic conspiracy, so devolved and deniable as to be invisible; so peculiarly set out in rules and procedures and protocols and directives and guidelines as to allow plausible public denial of responsibility on the part of any of the participants at any stage of the process.
Initiated by Mr Blair. Of which I have no proof. A small wart. On my thumb. It sings to me in the mornings in warm weather. My doctor shrugs at it, and no ointment works.
No blame. You understand me. When they write the report, my report, the report into my case, they will find some systemic failures, some culture of this or that, some procedures for tightening, some lessons to be learned. No heads will roll. Dead children. You understand me.
I like where I live. I live on my own.
It’s not necessary to be paranoid or to harbour any delusions in order to feel that I have been abandoned by the mental health services. Because I have. They want me to fail, mentally. I have innumerable documents if that sort of thing interests you. Tracing a clear trajectory of discouragement, in which a subtle strategy is discernible. No single thing. Cumulative. Terribly slow, terribly patient. The gentle whisper of the letters and the reports and the assessments. Die, they say. You may as well.
My GP, one example, has prescribed to me, for the pain, enough Tramadol to kill me several times over. Go on. Another example, the mental health doctor who first assessed me in Archway had an office on what appeared to be the 12th floor, with a large window, and she sat me within easy reach of the window and also left me alone for several minutes in the room with the window on the 12th floor, which had a view of all of the east or south or west of London from Archway. All that sky, like the city is upside down. So that if you stepped out there you would rise. Several minutes. Perhaps seven or eight. Go on.
I do not have any trouble with my neighbours and I have never had any complications with either the police or the security services, nor have I ever stood for elected office or campaigned for any political party nor have I ever agitated or demonstrated against the authorities in any way, not even on a march – and I never even went on the anti-war march – so there can be no reason for what is happening to me that is public or which may have been expected to arise as a result of my previous actions. I can only assume that the council and my landlords and the NHS have an occult agenda to which they secretly adhere, created for them by the Tony Blair government, to encourage into complete despair any person who does not hold a stake in the national project involving bank accounts for babies, education for profit, and pretending to fight wars – when in fact all that is happening in Afghanistan, and all that happened in Iraq, is that British soldiers are invested in American projects so that the Tony Blair Agenda can feel that it is a stakeholder in the future, which it cannot imagine as being anything other than American, and this is our national embarrassment.
I am not a stakeholder. I hold no stake. I pay my taxes. My taxes buy weapons and arm soldiers. My taxes send the soldiers to Afghanistan and formerly Iraq to be terrified and traumatized, and to inflict terror and trauma upon others, including the killing and maiming of others, and I do not support Our Boys, it is a volunteer army and I believe that every one of those volunteers is misguided and that their innate, childish, boyish attraction to aggression and adventure and camaraderie is being perverted by malign and morally vacant politicians who are not even clever enough to be operating to anyone’s advantage, not even their own, who are merely drunk on narrative and who see themselves as part of something bigger, such as the delusion of History, and who are impressive only in the scope and depth and profundity of their stupidity.
He’s quite charming, actually, Mr Blair, when you meet him. You can see how he manages to draw people to him. He looks you in the eye. He listens. His smile is warm and he is the right height – neither too tall nor too short. The average height of successful politicians is five feet eleven.
My landlords make noise at a very early hour meaning that I cannot sleep. They also send in the middle of the night an overweight middle-aged or elderly man who tries the steel doors. He rattles them. The landlords, let me explain, have their offices below my flat. I never speak to the head man. He never speaks to me. But I see him, dapper and small, coming and going, and I see how they de
fer to him and I notice, I have noticed, how he watches me sometimes with half a smile. He has an odd name – Mishazzo. An unlikely name. As if he is a landlord by mistake. His people are very polite, even friendly. But they are, as soon as I am inside my flat, extremely devious in their methods, always doing things that are small enough in themselves but which taken together amount to a campaign of psychological torture, including slamming doors. I think they have fed rats into the cavities. Certainly the cat that used to patrol the yard has disappeared. There are noises in the walls, in the roof, the ceiling. My ceiling is the roof. I hear scratches. Scurries. I hear clicks. I once found a cockroach in my bathroom. I ran downstairs and into the landlord’s office but they were not of any use at all to me … in me … in my horror. Mr Mishazzo was there. His people glanced at him and he smiled. As if he is a landlord because he finds it amusing. Mr Price came by later with a trap. I wanted nothing to do with a trap. I have devices now. Electronic discouragers. Since I have installed them there have been no further creatures inside apart from mosquitoes, bluebottles, wasps, flies, tiny centipedes, moths, a spider.
I have some sort of infection in my forehead.
Let me level with you. Level best and utmost. Let me be as honest as I can be. I know that something has gone wrong. I know that the fault is visible. You can discern it in everything I say to you. In most of what I say to you. In how I say it. I know this. I am cracked like ice. I know this. But listen. Listen to me. This is important. Beneath the fault there is solid ground. Beneath the ice. Under all the cracks. Under all the cracks there is something that is not broken.
I am on the Internet.
You can watch the suicide bombers on there.
I go down to the square a couple of times a week.
Giggling now.
On the Internet, you can watch people dying, all over the place. This is new, isn’t it? This is a new thing in the world. On a slow day, when nothing happens, I wait for the news, hoping that there will be something happening there. And sometimes there is. And I like the idea of something happening. I like the idea of it. People don’t take anything seriously unless something is happening. My illness makes more sense when something is happening. Against the background of light entertainment and the weather it looks inappropriate. It sticks out. Against the background of body parts and the constant slaughter it looks wise and cautious and who could blame me? I imagine that if there were lots of things happening to me all the time I would like the idea of nothing happening. Sometimes the news is nothing. So much happens and they tell us nothing. I look out of the window.
When I met Tony Blair we talked briefly about motor racing. About Formula One. I don’t know why. There had been a Grand Prix that day. It came up somehow. Someone else mentioned it. I said oh. I said I used to watch Formula One as a boy. Not any more? the Prime Minister asked me.
No.
Not any more. Nothing happens now. In Formula One.
Through my window I can’t see very much of what I suppose is the world. Some offices. A roof. A sky crossed by planes. I often hear helicopters but I don’t see them. There is always something happening. If I press my cheek against the glass and twist my shoulder to the left I can see the elderly or overweight man rattling the steel door. No helicopters. Just the street and the orange lights, wet sometimes. The wet orange street. Shining in the dark and the rattling door.
When nothing is happening we want something to happen, and when something is happening we want it to stop.
There is always something happening on the Internet.
I sit at my kitchen table. I make a cup of tea.
The Zapruder film. Hillsborough. Bloody Sunday. The shooting of Oswald. The audio of Bobby Kennedy’s murder. The calls from the towers. The planes going in. The jumpers. The suicide of Pennsylvania State Treasurer Budd Dwyer on live television. He stuck a gun in his mouth and blew the back of his head off. The camera zooms in on his dead face, the blood pouring out of him like the water out of my overfilled kettle. I don’t know what to do about it.
The Madrid bombs. Running up those stairs. The Enschede explosion. Laughter then fear then the world just goes dark and sideways.
Tamil suicide bombers flinging parts of their bodies into the crowd like pop stars.
Iraqi IEDs. Hostage murders. Car bombs by the Green Zone.
Hundreds of dead people. Around craters in Baghdad, Tikrit and Ramadi. British armaments. American armaments. You can see the markings and the peeled-back steel.
There are photographs of aftermaths. Blood and stumps and crushed torsos. All the devil’s little mandibles. Misery hats. Pockets of tissue. Cups of tea. There are interviews with people in shock. They cannot begin to believe what they have seen until they tell someone else what they have seen. They shout at the camera, they use their hands, they say things over and over. They’re actually talking to themselves, and we are watching.
I am talking to myself and you are watching.
In my kitchen I can look at the wall if I want to.
When he shook hands I felt a sort of scratch. A nick. A prick. Something or other. I didn’t react. I didn’t look at my hand. I was meeting the Prime Minister. But it hurt. Something had. He had. I don’t know.
Some device.
***
There are endless car crashes on the Internet. There are head-on collisions, turnovers, side swipes, flying pedestrians. All sorts, really. But it is usually unclear whether there have been fatalities.
I stare at the little wart on my thumb. It’s white. Tiny and a perfect circle.
When I go down to the square I take a coffee with me, in my hand. I get it from the coffee shop around the corner. I glance at the machine gun policemen. I walk through the square, as if I have business on the other side. They keep an eye on me. I nod sometimes at a policeman. A policeman sometimes nods back. I haven’t spotted the cameras. I expect they will knock on my door sometime. That they will come and have a chat.
I’ll examine their cards. Their IDs. I’ll look at their faces and their photos. They won’t mind me writing down the numbers. I’ll do it at the kitchen table, so that they follow me into the flat. Let them have a good look around. They’ll stand over me. Looking. Two of them. They’ll smell of the street and of cars and of camaraderie in the locker room and the gym and of encounters with trouble.
– You think I don’t live well?
– What? No. We’re here about Connaught Square.
– About what?
– Connaught Square.
– What the hell is a connocked square?
I’ll have them baffled in minutes. I’ll speak slightly louder than is necessary. I’ll walk them backwards through a prayer. Policemen are standard procedures. There is nothing to them that cannot be confused.
– You took your time getting here.
– What?
– I called you hours ago.
– We’re not responding to a call.
– So you know about the windows?
– What about the windows?
– They are haunted.
– Haunted?
– They contain reflections at night other than my own.
– Ghosts?
– What are you going to do about it?
And so on.
I go and sit in the park. There is a view over the City, and to the left, Canary Wharf. The park is full of people looking in the same direction.
Part of managing my illness is to keep. Is to try to keep. Is to try to manage to keep a certain amount of regularity in my operations, my whereabouts. A structure. When the pains allow. When the singing isn’t outrageous. I used to work in radio. Everything had a schedule. I try to get up every morning and I do. I get up at eight o’clock and I listen for a little while to the Today programme. I never worked on that. I try to have a shower. Sometimes I am in too much pain to shower. Sometimes I just get dressed and think about having a bath later. I never have a bath.
I go to Sparrow’s for my breakfast
. I have Breakfast #5, except I have black pudding instead of beans, and I have tea and toast. I try to take my time. It costs four pounds. I can’t afford to do this every day, so sometimes I stay in bed. The waitress calls the toast bread when she brings it. Not every morning, but most. There is a man there, sometimes, two times in four maybe. A small man in a thoughtless suit, short haired, crooked somehow. I look at him trying to work out what it is. I think maybe he’s had a harelip corrected. Maybe it’s just a broken nose. Some facial thing from childhood like a ghost. He has scrambled eggs. Every time I see him he has scrambled eggs in front of him. A hill of yellow rubble, as if he’s been sick. He has a notebook that he writes in sometimes. Maybe he’s a writer or a journalist. I’m trying to work out if he’s some sort of writer or journalist. Sometimes he reads a newspaper, a tabloid usually, but he doesn’t read the same newspaper every time, which is more evidence that he might be a journalist, I think. He is half ugly half handsome. He looks at his watch. Sometimes he talks on his phone, turning the pages of the newspaper, or writing lazily in his notebook, making humming noises, yes, go on, yes, OK. He’s the only regular I notice. I don’t think he notices me. Who would look at me?
I look at him. Sometimes I think he’s crying, which makes me laugh. Sometimes I think that night is day and I look out of the window and everything is wrong until I realize it’s night and this is what the night is like.
The man who rattles the steel door and shutters. That’s always in the middle of the night. I lift the corner of my curtain and peek at him. He is big. He wears a grey jacket. In the dark it’s grey. He just rattles the door, the shutters. He does it and he stands there for a moment staring at the steel. And then he goes away. I don’t know what it’s about. Perhaps he has a grievance.