The Transfiguration of Mister Punch (11 page)

Stanley imagined he might even be able to make her tap-dance, so perfect were the controls.

Three feverish days had passed. Stanley was exhausted. He left Lilith upon a holding beam to prevent her strings becoming tangled as he attended to the neglected house and its interminable chores.

The following morning, after an unusually long sleep, he carefully twisted her strings, wrapping them in tissue paper and tying them with twine, to avoid tangles, and then folded her limbs in bubble wrap and more tissue, before making a suitable package for her to be sent through the post to the address provided by The Pütershein Authority. This whole process filled him with sadness, even though he had begun the day buoyed with the thrill of having made her.

He thought of Dorothy and her coffin again.

Over the next week things got slowly back to normal. He caught up with some bookings that were left on the answerphone, whilst he had been immersed in the intensity of making Lilith. He caught up too with Sean Nevill, who had been invited out to Eastern Europe to tour his ‘Dark Designs’ show, the puppets for which Stanley had made.

It was about a week later that the postman rang the bell with a small, and rather battered package. The full postage hadn’t been paid and so he had to pay an extra three pounds, but he’d recognised the writing on the front and was intrigued.

It was from The Pütershein Authority. The letter inside read,

Dear Stanley,

We’re delighted that you have made such efforts for us in such a short time. Truly, this is an incredible feat.

The quality of materials you have used and the care you have taken to follow our plans is to be commended. Please find herein the agreed payment, in cash, for your work.

However, you will also find, as no doubt you have already discovered, the puppet itself. We have decided, following some initial rehearsals, that she is rather too complex for our performance, and we require some further changes to her stringing, the joint constructions etc., all of which you will find detailed in the enclosed documents.

Obviously we will be happy to compensate you for this further work, at a similar rate to that offered previously.

Yours sincerely,

The Pütershein Authority

The letter was not written on expensive paper this time. It was typed, with a fading ribbon, on cheap white copy paper.

Inside the package, wrapped in an old rag, was a thousand pounds in well-used twenty pound notes (a quite incredible amount) and a forlorn looking puppet. He lifted the crumpled Lilith from the flimsy box. She hung limply in his hand, like a dead pet rescued from the roadside. Her strings were badly tangled and her arms and hands seemed, however he held her, to fall across her face, suggesting an expression of pain, or anguish—or no, was it a sort of shame?

It was certainly not unusual for a puppet, even an important character puppet, to serve a single purpose, or even a limited series of functions. They were always made in a manner that addressed the needs of their role within the show. But to reduce this puppet,
his Lilith
, to such a thing, seemed outrageous, even insulting. Why commission such a flawless piece and then have it vandalised—for such it would be—by such degeneration of her capabilities?

How ridiculous, Stanley thought.

As attached as he was to the puppet—and he had become so with many of his creations over the years—it was still just a puppet: wood, wire, and string, and only that! This was just another job. The customer wasn’t satisfied and he’d have to rework it. It was as simple as that. After all, they weren’t even quibbling about paying more. It was their design and he’d have to make the changes until they were satisfied. He’d set to work on it straight away, after all there couldn’t be that much they wanted doing.

Beneath the puppet there was a crumpled piece of tracing paper, upon which had been written the modifications they wanted.

Firstly he was to remove the legs.

Remove the legs! The whole balance of the puppet would be ruined. Her whole upper frame relied on the weight of the lower limbs to give it structure—that was the whole point of the first design which, and especially now that he saw her again, was ingenious.

Secondly, a crude weight was to be attached to the pelvis—they suggested a heavy coin—so that she should drag along the ground, with the right hand to be pinned to her forehead to suggest mourning or woe. The left arm was to be made rigid by the use of metal pins and then fixed at the shoulder. The only remaining moving feature of the strings should therefore be the roll of the head and the slope of the shoulders, all other strings were now redundant; the control jig to be suitably reworked and limited to this effect.

Stanley was amazed. How could they want to do such a thing?

So infuriated was he that he wrote back to them this time to query the proposed changes.

The letter he received from them, by return, was not what he was expecting.

Dear Stanley,

I suggest you don’t contact us here again in this manner. Either you can do the required modifications to her, or you can’t. You let us know which it is by sending her back to us with, or without, the repairs. If it’s the latter then we’ll have to find someone capable of making what we consider to be perfectly reasonable and—for God’s sake—rather simple changes.

We expect the puppet returned, as per current specifications, as soon as you can complete it. I wouldn’t have reckoned you’re inundated with work are you, eh?

An old puppeteer whose travelling days are over and done with. I’d have thought you’d be glad of the money!

Yours impatiently,

The PA

It was days before Stanley mustered the courage for the first part of the modifications, which had taken on the import of major surgery in his mind. He snipped the legs off with some scissors.

A day or so later he managed the minor modification and rethreading of the left torso cord that drew her body into a leaning pose.

As more days went by, some in pained inertia, others completing elements of the alterations, he seemed to drift into an odd reality, where his dreams (day or night ceased to have any real meaning) played with the graceful movements of the once magnificent Lilith.

What he refused to do was pin her left arm and shoulder. This he also left attached to the jig, so that she was still able to offer a little expression in her abject movement across the floor. It was the least he could do, to give some agency to her sorrowful crawl.

He packaged her up and sent her on her way.

Returning from the post office he sat at the kitchen table and felt he had committed some terrible crime. He shook with fear and guilt. He paced the house. He walked the garden, desperately attempting to put from his mind the significance of what he had done, all for money. He had betrayed his trade. But worse, he had betrayed the soul of Lilith.

Again, the absurdity of his thoughts struck him and he resolved to put his mind to some much needed housework.

In the dusty and forgotten lounge his answering machine was flashing at him. He recalled how many times he had heard it ring over the last few weeks until it had finally fallen silent a few days ago. The tape was full of show bookings, most of them over two months old, and many past the proposed date. Could it really have been this long that he had been working on these alterations to Lilith?

Interspersed between the messages about shows there were others, from friends and relatives, enquiring as to his welfare and also from fellow puppeteers keen to have repairs made, or arrange to meet up and discuss new projects. The following morning he’d have to attend to all those messages; he couldn’t face it now.

He was awoken by the postman, at nearly midday. Another package had arrived, with a set of small denomination stamps half covering its surface. Attached to it, with a single strip of tape was a used envelope with the previous address scribbled out savagely in red biro and his own alongside it in bold capitals. Inside the envelope was a folded out packet of B&H cigarettes written on the back of which was,

Look here, Stan, you useless idiot! This really is the last time. We warned you—or, we thought we’d warned you—in the last letter. Do you know how busy we are here? Do you have any idea of what effort and sacrifice it takes to run a network of this kind?

What are you trying to do to her? This isn’t bloody rocket science. You had detailed instructions. You did not follow them, that’s clear enough. Why are you trying to give this thing false life—you’re not fucking Geppetto, you know! Just make the puppet! Follow our simplified alterations. Let us do the rest. Your bumbling ‘improvements’ are surplus to requirements!

The alterations were far from ‘detailed’ though. They read simply, in scrawled and angry marker pen, ‘ERASE FEATURES. ERASE FORM. ERADICATE INDIVIDUALITY.’

He had no will left to resist. He followed their instructions. With gouge, chisel, saw and rasp he set to work upon the remains of the once wonderful Lilith.

The authorities—that is to say, the ‘proper’ authorities—assumed that Stanley Headingley had suffered a stroke at his workbench.

His bleeding hands, lacerated with a hundred tiny cuts from the blood-stained tools that were strewn across the bench, and studded with shards of wooden splinters, were evidence though of a mind that had sunk into the depths of madness. He must have spent hours working on the puppet on the table, one of the police officers in attendance said, observantly. And such intense effort had been the cause of his attack, answered one of the paramedics, with a professional air.

The case was solved to their satisfaction.

They both looked at the puppet. There was little left but a blood-stained stick, wrapped in dirty rags. Had it not been so grotesque it might have belonged in a nursery school art class. The head had been fashioned from a block of wood that had been whittled down to a ball no bigger than a walnut, its surface cracked and fractured from random chisel blows, with great chunks of shavings hanging from it. The face, if such it could be called, had been crudely drawn in with felt-tip marker pens, the eyes lop-sided, the mouth a gash of bright, vulgar red. The ridiculous nose was moulded from a lump of blu-tac, the monstrous hair a crumpled brillo-pad. They looked pityingly back over at Stanley, whose arms hung uselessly at the side of the wheelchair they had lifted him into.

“It’s a shame, I bet he was quite good at making them once,” one said.

“Yes, it’s very sad, very,
very
sad,” the other replied.

Stanley looked up at them, almost insentient, almost divine.

I believe we deserve something uplifting and light from the cellar for this next one. A Perrier Jouet will be just heavenly. I do adore the lightness of that drink, wouldn’t you agree—rather than the bombast of your Bollingers and Moëts? In champagne saucers, of course, so that we might sup swiftly, and often, before the joyous bubbles depart.

Ah, what delightful effervescence; the fleeting exuberance of a moment!

Still, before we become caught in the wicked web of hedonistic pleasures what can we find that will enthral you?

Yes, this should do the trick... Why, yes, it is indeed one of the famous Devrill puppets. You certainly know your stuff, of that there can be no doubt. She is from his early set, used in his shows from 1922 to 1936. And this one is that playful minx, Pretty Polly. She’s a naughty little plaything isn’t she? I’m sure all the men would enjoy a close dance with our Polly now wouldn’t they, eh? He dropped her from the show sadly, in the late thirties, as I’m sure you’re aware. That makes her doubly rare!... Why, of course, the full set of puppets is here. Each is carefully stored, catalogued and available for view.

I selected our little Polly because she moves us on so perfectly from our last tale to the next. She’s such a simple design you see, and yet has so many possibilities. You can see she is of straightforward construction—a basic rod, and two free-hanging arms that the cheeky rascal, Mr Punch, is able to grasp when dancing with her. Just a twirl of the wrist—as you can see—sets her dervishing with abandon though. And then a quick flick upwards sees her lovely blue skirt sail up, revealing those tempting knickerbockers.

And so, in honour of her, this brief detour is saucily called
,

And our little teaser goes
,

PUNCH. When the heart of a man is oppressed with cares,

The clouds are dispelled when a woman appears...

That Roseanna Robertson should have had an affair at all was shocking enough; that it should be with that poet and ne’er-do-well Simon Symington was too much. It really was just too much,
indeed
! It was the talk of Wickhampton and had no doubt already reached the ears of the gossips in Baseford and Newbly; by noon it would be on the eager, blathering lips of the social set throughout the whole of Nasleshire and would spread on from there, like a plague, to other counties. Within a month, or perhaps six, it would have reached the ears of his few friends in London. There it would die a death within a day, but Rupert Robertson was not to know that, was he, poor chap. For now, in the depths of his misery, calamities of all proportions were seething through his head, along with the image of his wife and her lover making the devil with two backs within his own marriage bed.