‘Is that it?’ I asked Mom. ‘Are you saying, “Is it I or is it not I?’”
She nodded vigorously and died.
She’d left instructions for her funeral; she’d asked for the simplest ceremony and that’s what she got. She hadn’t wanted anybody there except me so there were just the two of us and the minister. It was a grey November day, the deciduous trees black and bare after the first heavy rain of winter and the pines holding the chill and the wet. Among the surrounding tombstones were three angels, one of them turned towards us, two away. Crows in the pines looked on and quoted Ecclesiastes but the minister stuck to his text and insisted on the resurrection and the life. When he finished I read Psalm 137. The minister frowned when I got to the part about dashing the little ones against the stones but the crows called for an encore. The coffin was lowered into the grave and I threw a clod on top of it which just sounded like a lump of dirt hitting a wooden box. Shouting amongst themselves, the crows flapped away into the greyness and the minister and I departed while the gravediggers finished their work.
I hadn’t cried during the burial service; I felt as estranged from my mother’s death as I had from her life. When I went home I sat on our front steps and looked at the grass growing up through the cracks in the walk where I’d hammered the ants when my father died.
‘You never know,’ I said to the winter chill in the air. There was a row of new houses where there used to be trees; a man was working on his car in front of one of them. As I looked, the sky and the houses and the cars and the man all went flat, like wallpaper. It came to me, not for the first time, that I was a stranger in the country where I was born. I had friends whom I drank with and friends who invited me to dinner but sometimes it all seemed like TV with the sound turned off. I’d been reading Dickens and Trollope and a lot of British ghost stories. As I sat there under the grey wallpaper sky there came to mind the M. R. James story, ‘Casting the Runes’, and the slide show put on for the local children by Mr Karswell, in which
… this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn to pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw at first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly …
There were other stories with London fogs, and newsboys running past the window shouting, ‘Dreadful murder in the Marylebone Road!’ while the landlord and his wife toasted a bit of cheese over a gas ring. Although I was well aware that the Victorian London of the stories was no longer to be found, England seemed a cosy place to me and I began to live there in my mind.
There was still work to be done in the basement but I was getting closer until finally, too late for my mother to see my success, I achieved Mnemoplast. I had a plastic that could be pushed, pulled, squeezed and crumpled but would return to the shape it had been cast in. As I worked in the basement I’d been trying to come up with a commercial application. I wondered what Dad would have done with it; I saw him dead and strapped into a car that crashed into a wall and then the idea came to me.
I patented Mnemoplast, then it took me a little over a year to get my design worked out and production set up but eventually I had my commercial application: Crash Test. It was produced and marketed by Merlin, Inc. for sixty-four-ninety-nine in the US and thirty-nine pounds ninety-nine pence here. It came in a glossy colourfully printed box and when you took it out of the box it felt good in the hand, not cheap. The battery-powered car was nicely detailed but of no recognisable make. When it hit whatever it was aimed at it crumpled and bits of it flew off as well as bits of the driver but it uncrumpled quickly and the loose bits of car and driver were easy to fit back on.
Crash Test appeared in US shops in October 1987, and though sixty-four-ninety-nine was a hefty price it quickly became the Christmas present that parents who couldn’t afford it bought for their kids. The same thing happened when it came out here in November. The distributors had calculated correctly that a strong start in the US would cause a buying frenzy here at the later date. When stocks ran out in less than a month on both sides of the Atlantic there were auctions in which Crash Test changed hands at outrageous prices.
It isn’t always easy to say why people do the things they do. I sold the house, moved to London, and bought a house in Fulham. I feel like a stranger here too but I am a stranger so it’s all right. I married a woman I met here and maybe I’ll say more about that later.
When I went to the V & A to look for the chair-cover bats I was a widower. By then I’d been living in London for eight years. Crash Test had been superseded by computer games and was barely ticking over in the US and UK although it was a little more lively on the Continent. I hadn’t come up with any other commercial ideas or ideas of any other kind; I’d been drawing and painting a little: early on I’d found a life class and I made some OK sketches; I went water-colouring along the Thames; I did some oils also, a few nothing-special street scenes.
There came a time, however, when I had to put artistic development aside and give some serious thought to bringing in money. I’d reached a point where I really had to make something happen before too long when, early in 1999, Merlin forwarded a letter to me from Paris:
Dear Creator of Crash Test,
In the window of a shop I have seen Crash Test and immediately it draws me to itself. I see it demonstrated, see the dummy at the wheel knowing nothing, expecting nothing. The car starts up, not controlled by the dummy but by a hand above him, all-powerful. At speed it hurtles forward into a wall, CRASH! The car is smashed, the doors fly off, the windows also, the dummy’s head, his arms, his legs! Alas! he is destroyed. But no, the all-powerful hand reassembles him, makes the car again like new, and once again Mr Dummy, who from experience has learned nothing, hurtles to his dismemberment.
I purchase the toy, I take it home where it comes out of its box as we come all new into the world. Now I am the all-powerful hand of Mr Dummy’s destiny. CRASH! we go, and CRASH! again. ‘Bravo!’ I cry with vigour and enthusiasm. I applaud, I approve with delight your most profoundly metaphorical demonstration of the human condition. What are we all but dummies doomed to crash head-on into the death that speeds towards us? And for what are we being tested? Who can offer to this mystery an answer that will bear examination? No one! Yes, you have hit the eye of the bull with this so deep perception of la comédie humaine.
Please be so kind as to respond to this letter. I wish to commission privately works from you and I make to you the assurance that you will be well recompensed for the exercise of your most interesting talent.
With admiration and intense good wishes,
Adelbert Delarue
M. Delarue’s address was in the Avenue Montaigne which made me think that he probably wasn’t short of a franc or two. Eager to develop this promising connection, I wrote back and said that I’d be interested to hear what he had in mind. Within a week I had his reply with a cheque drawn on Coutts for five thousand pounds. His letter explained that this was a down payment for the work and that five thousand more would be coming my way on delivery.
He went on to describe what he wanted: a crash-dummy couple, ‘man and woman anatomically complete, with functional parts and receptive orifices’, engaged in sexual intercourse. The figures were to be thirty centimetres tall. They were not to be one composite unit but two independent dummies capable of assuming all positions possible for humans. They were to be ‘electrically activated’ and there was to be sound — he didn’t specify what kind.