A rickety metal gantry leads through the room and through into the lower reaches of the railway, and then abruptly to an ancient goods lift which comes up near the riverbank: a highway for smugglers, ancient and modern.
The whole journey takes less than half an hour. You could barely do it faster in a car with an open road.
The dog’s name is Bastion, and it is without shame or mercy. Any dog worth the name will sniff your crotch on arrival, but Bastion has buried his carbuncled nose in the angle of Joe’s trousers and shows no inclination to retreat. Joe shifts slightly, and the dog rewards him with a warning mutter, deep in the chest: I have my mouth in close proximity to your genitals, oh thou man who talks to my mistress over coffee. Do not irk or trifle with me! I possess but one tooth, oh, yes, for the rest were buried long ago in the flesh of sinners. Behold my jaws, upper and lower in righteous, symmetrical poverty. Move not, man of clocks, and heed my mistress, for she cherishes me, even in my foul old age.
It’s a tiny animal, the shrunken remains of a pug, and as if poor dentition is not enough, it has absolutely no natural eyeballs. Both have been replaced with substitutes made in pale pink glass which appear to refract and reflect the interior view of Bastion’s empty sockets. This ghastly decision lends considerable sincerity to the growling, and Joe elects to allow the animal to continue drooling on his groin.
Bastion’s owner is called Edie Banister, and she is very small, and very wiry, and apparently goes back slightly further than the British Museum. She has a tight cap of silver hair through which, in places, the freckled skin of her scalp is visible. Her face—proud eyes and strong mouth suggesting powerful good looks in her day—is so pale that Joe imagines he can actually see the bone through her cheeks, and the wrinkles on her arms are folded around one another like melted plastic, all scrunched up in unpredictable directions. Edie Banister is old.
And yet she is profoundly alive. Over the past few months, she has found reason to call upon the services of Spork & Co. on several occasions. Joe has come to know her a little, and in this respect she reminds him of his grandfather, Danieclass="underline" she is almost vibrating with rich, distilled energy, as if the process of living all those decades has made a reduction of her spirit which is thick and slow in her chest, but sweeter and stronger for it.
Bastion wears his age less well. He is uglier than anything Joe has seen outside a deep-sea aquarium. He seems an unlikely companion for a woman like Edie Banister, but the world, Daniel once observed, is a great honeycombed thing composed of separated mysteries.
Joe has cause to know this for the truth. When a child, he inhabited a variety of secret places, courtesy of his bad dad, and though he has very firmly left those places behind, with their daring characters and picturesque names—the Old Campaigners, the Sinkhole, Kings Forget—he has discovered that every aspect of life is a strange gravitational system of people-planets, all orbiting unlikely suns such as golf clubs, theatres, and basket-weaving classes, falling prey to black holes like infidelity and penury. Or just fading away into space, alone.
And now they come to him in their droves. Dotty, aged, and absent-minded, they file through his doors clutching little pieces of broken memory: music boxes, clocks, fob watches and mechanical toys they once played with or inherited from their mothers, uncles and spouses, now gone to dust and ash.
Edie Banister offers him some more coffee. Joe declines. They smile at one another, nervously. They’re flirting; the elephant in the room—apart from Bastion’s unremarked grip on Joe’s nether parts—is a laburnum-wood box about the size of a portable record player, inlaid with paler wood around the edges. It is the reason for this latest visit to Edie Banister’s home, the reason he has locked up early and come out to Hendon, with its endless rows of almost-pretty, boring houses decorated in little-old-lady chic. Coquettish, she has drawn him here repeatedly and disappointed him, with bits of spavined gramophone and an unlikely steampunkish Teasmade. They have played out a species of seduction, in which she has offered her secrets day by day and he has responded with quick, strong hands and elegant solutions to the intractable problems of broken machinery. All the while, he has known she was testing him for something, weighing him up. Somewhere in this tiny set of rooms there is something much more interesting, something which sweet, ancient Edie clearly believes is going to knock his socks off, but which she is not quite ready to reveal.
He trusts devoutly that what she has in mind is clockwork rather than flesh.
She wets her lips, not with her tongue, but by turning them briefly inward and rubbing them together. Edie Banister comes from a time when ladies were not really supposed to admit to having tongues at all; mouths and saliva and the oral cavity proposed the possibility of other damp, fleshy places which were absolutely not to be thought of, most particularly by anybody who had one.
Joe reaches down to the box. Touches the wood. Lifts it, weighs the burden in his hands. He can feel… moment. A thing of importance. This sweet, dotty old bird has something stupendous, and she knows it. She’s been leading up to showing it to him. He wonders if today’s the day.
He opens the box. A Golgotha of armatures and sprockets. In his mind, he assembles them quickly: that’s the spine, yes, the main spring goes here, that’s part of the housing and so is that… dearie me. Much of this is just so much dross, extra gears and the like. Very untidy. But all together, the useful parts… Oh! Yes, good: early twentieth century by the style and materials, but quite refined in its making. An artisan piece, a one-off, and they always get more, especially if you can link them to a known craftsman. All the same, it’s not… well. Not what he was expecting, though he has no idea what that was.
Joe laughs, but quietly, so as not to waken the canine volcano burbling between his thighs.
“This is very fine. You realise it could be worth quite a bit of money?”
“Oh, dear,” Edie Banister says. “Do I need to insure it?”
“Well, perhaps. These automata can go for a few thousand on a good day.” He nods decisively. On a bad day, they can sit like a dead fish on the auctioneer’s pallet, but never mind that for now.
“Can you fix it?” Edie Banister says, and Joe brushes aside his disappointment and tells her that of course, yes, he can.
“Now?” she asks, and yes, again, because he has his kit, never leaves home without it. Soft-arm clamp to hold the housing. Another as a third hand. Tensioners. There’s no damage, actually, it looks as if someone took it apart on purpose. Quite carefully. Snickersnack, as it were, the thing is assembled, except… hmph. There’s a bit missing—ain’t it always so? It would crosslink the legs… hah! With a piece like that, this would have a veritable walking motion, almost human. Very impressive, very much ahead of its time. He’s seen a robot on the television which works the same way, and is considered a brilliant advance. This could almost be a prototype. No doubt somewhere the ghost of a dead artisan is fuming.