Trish had poured herself some coffee from the pot Andrew always kept standing ready. He said it was his only vice. He couldn’t drink any when he was wrapped up and he tried not to look envious as she took a first sip.
She looked at him fondly. This was their quiet half-hour while he stewed and glinted in his pharaoh’s shroud.
To me a Cyberman is a friendly thing. Not like they used to be when we were kids, when they went shooting people on Doctor Who, smacking people on the head and that. Coming out of tombs.
‘A Cyberman is a perfect man. His suit is silver and gold, he bristles with light, that curious liquid light that proper jewellery takes on. My Cyberman looks bloody expensive. I am proud to be seen with him.
‘He’s been custom-built and to the highest standards. Everything they say on adverts about posh cars they could say about him. They could film him running easily, easily, easily, beside a burning field of corn at sunset, playing an Eric Clapton song over the top.
‘He has a square jaw, like an old-fashioned hero. His eyes are narrow dark slits. He is suspicious because he is world-wise and because of this he is inured to the world. Sex with him is the safest in the world. He is laminated; his whole body is sheathed.
‘Nothing can put my Cyberman off his stroke. Programmed to please, he will let nothing get in the way of his pleasing me. He knows what I expect from my man.
‘But he is not a robot, forged to my will. Part of him—a good part—is fleshly still. His electronic body he wears as a shell, an exoskeleton. The underside is sensitive and sheltered. Like a lobster. If I crushed him from behind in a hug, his pliable insides would squirm and ooze through. I love the contrast between the bits of him that are tender and those that are indestructible. Only I know which are which. I see the chinks in his armour. He shows them to me, almost proudly. I can appreciate the way he’s had to cobble himself together.’
She smiled at Andy.
‘That’s what I mean by my Cyberman.’
‘Oh.’ He smiled unsurely. ‘Help me out of all this shit, would you?’
ANEMONES, MY LABRADOR,
HIS PUPPY
We all lived, working on our separate, idle little projects, in a slate-grey town that had a history rank with witch burnings and a one-way system of irate traffic as futilely intricate as the patterns inside your ear.
It rained all the time and especially during that last third of the year when they held there, in our nascent Cultural Studies Department, a ten-week course of papers on witches. Papers were given by a variety of visitors in a duskily lit common room which always looked to me like an airport lounge, although I’ve never flown. An hour of turgid historicism at teatime, Wednesdays; letting somebody’s god-awful academic prose wash heedlessly over you, an hour of questions, drinks, then a meal in town, in the same, cramped, crimson room hung with horse brasses and a single, long table, reserved for a set who disturbed other diners with raucous, entirely theoretical talk of sadomasochism, incest, female circumcision.
Julian was beginning his MA on father/son incest in Renaissance drama. He sat at one end of the table, his first night at one of these dos, in a home-made linen shirt, cuffs trailing heartbreakingly in his silver platter of garlic mushrooms. The regulation glossy dark hair flopped over this face arrogant with its own half-apprehension of its beauty; lips quite pink and curling now, with a clumsy wit, as he tried to winkle something noticeable into the conversation between his supervisor, Stephen, and the visiting academic, Ivy.
When Julian laughed it was to draw attention to the Post-vocalic ‘r’ completing each ‘ha’; he was making a feature of a rather cultured dippiness. He was all flannels and affected stammer, groping towards the correct critic’s name, a distracted hand through hair stylishly awry with three days’ grease.
‘Yes, my shirt was made for me by my wife,’ he told me when I’d said he had oil up the cuffs but that it was a nice shirt anyway. He added, ‘She makes all of our clothes; mine and my son’s.’
I was making a point of smoking particularly heavily at the meal’s end, and working through the last cafetiere, defying the puritanical looks I was getting; the modern critic does not abuse his own body. And I pictured Julian and a whole family togged up in clothes too large for them; the thin and young family, cultured and enunciating properly. Dressing up as grown-ups.
Ivy was the American visiting professor; researching the length and breadth of Britain on instruments of torture used to quieten women. Asked her area of expertise, she would square up her padded shoulders, toss an immaculate Golden Girl perm and declare ‘Scolds.’ She talked and talked that evening and took a group of us for coffee to the house she had borrowed for a month by the castle.
It was the oldest house I had ever been in, I think, and oddly proportioned; I felt it creak about me as she showed us to a darling little sitting room, and proceeded to slosh coffee onto a milky-coloured carpet. Stephen leaped up to stamp out the stain with J-cloths; all a-sweat now (whereas, minutes earlier, he had been replete with a good meal’s strain and an evening of intellectual chitchat). The old house by the castle belonged to a dear friend of his; he was the agent of its rental and blame for the carpet was something he could see reverting straight to him as the patch widened, darkened, and Ivy flapped about, helpless, pissed, and Julian and I sank deep into a plum sofa and chatted, making up a friendship from bits of shared bibliographies and very coy eye contacts.
All this while, past midnight, fog came up over, around the squat castle from the marshes. Ivy
