The Locum, Yellow Rose

by Chris Bell

A tiny distorted face bearing an almost comical expression of incredulity is staring up at me from my coffee table between strewn fragments of ruptured metal, carbon fibre, fiddly screws and mangled plastic.

The pieces of a thing, once broken, cannot be put back together again. You might manage to reassemble all the bits - if you can find them - and stick them back together. You might even do it so well that no one would notice that the thing had ever been broken. But no matter how good you are with your hands, you can never repair a moment by gluing the spaces between the pieces. A moment is irreparable; you cannot mend Time.

A couple of months ago, a chain of events began to unravel for which I have no explanation. The strange thing is, as vivid as the experience was as I was living it, looking back on it now, I cannot accept that any of it really happened. And yet, the evidence that it did is all over my coffee table, begging not to be ignored.

On the face of it, my job is a humdrum one. I work as a consultant for an insurance company, training self-employed agents to run their businesses more efficiently. It’s a new position and I’m just getting used to things like Excel computer spreadsheets and Microsoft Word for Windows, and putting a positive outlook on life after years of handwritten forms, open-plan offices, flickering strip lights, the overcooked delights of the company canteen and the rare ‘perk’ of a rainy afternoon spent trudging from door to slammed door.

In my spare time, I write short stories. Science fiction mostly. As hobbies go, it’s a fairly harmless way of spending one’s time.

I was on my way to a client out west one day, when I discovered a new shop on the Terrace. Other Worlds was sandwiched between liquidated butchers’ shops and foggy launderettes. The silver lettering stuck to its large display window said:

SCIENCE FICTION
MAGS
FANZINES
FANTASTIC POSTERS
GAMES

Always on the look-out for potential markets for my stories, I decided it might be worth browsing.

From inside, the shop was rather disappointing. The broad and optimistic window with its vainglorious silver lettering was just a front for a converted shoe shop full of Star Trek comics, amateurish horror magazines and a dusty cabinet bristling with dungeons and dragons junk.

I was about to leave when, in a corner by the door, a lonely, dented box on an otherwise bare shelf caught my eye. I began to study the brightly coloured packaging without really knowing why I was doing it. It was some kind of toy, that much was apparent; sealed in the customary cardboard box with transparent plastic window.

Up close, it looked like a three-dimensional model of Betty Boop. She was wearing a shiny black dress with a slit up one side, exaggerated because her left leg was placed coquettishly in front of the other to reveal a frilly garter. Her disproportionately large oval eyes dominated a peculiarly flat face with swollen brows, and her head was crowned with a glossy excuse for hair: a solid black mass of stylised plastic curls. With my eyes I scaled those shapely but obviously unreal legs, back to her face. Her expression was one of sensual surprise, her lips slightly parted. There was a gap between them that seemed to reach back into the darkness of her workings. She was an obvious and perhaps even insulting caricature of a woman, yet I found her intriguingly charming.

Most of the text on the box was in Japanese characters but, on the strip of cardboard above the transparent plastic, the economically bold script read: NANO DOLL. Made in Japan, it continued underneath. Miniaturised. Batteries not supplied. © Bonsai Nanomechanics, Japan. SPECIAL EXCITING TOY. ALL MOVING PARTS. BIGGEST SINCE DIGITAL. NO VALVES! BEST SO FAR. FULL DETAIL.

No valves? Best so far? Well, they had me convinced. I was sold on her.

Thirty-five pounds seemed a bit steep for a toy, but the plastic with which I paid for it seemed appropriately artificial and I consoled myself with a mental reminder of all the commission I was now earning.

It occurred to me that the Nano Doll might be a suitably light-hearted surprise for my girlfriend, Laura. An unusual gift might be just the thing to cheer her up, I thought. We hadn’t really been on speaking terms recently and our sex life, it seemed, had moved out and gone to live in a retirement home in Bournemouth.

I travelled home from Other Worlds carrying the Nano Doll so that she faced me in the box. The other faces on the underground were as sullen and predatory as always; clouded by doubt and mistrust. They belonged to people who looked like disguised war criminals. In silence, we clattered through the tunnels, seemingly wanting to say something to our neighbours and yet unable to make the first move; like couples after a tiff, each too proud to say ‘I love you.’

Hurtling along on that underground train in the afternoon rush hour, my whole life reduced itself to a senseless carousel ride. The train became progressively jammed with sweaty commuters whose hobby seemed to be mutating into circus freaks. Their faces warped into grotesque caricatures; their bodies stretched and bulged to make room for swollen glands, bulging eyes, acne scars and dartboard cheeks. Nasal hair and waxy ears magnified themselves a hundredfold. The man next to me smelled as though he had been eating his own excrement. The clatter of the tunnel surged through the open windows and pummelled my ears. The eyes of the other passengers bored into me. I groaned under my breath. Tension throbbed in me. The world was thundering along like an out-of-control juggernaut. Entropy loomed with open jaws. I wrinkled my brows and tightly shut my eyes. When I opened them again, the faces had become a grotesque collage of failure; dull, thick and drawn. There was a seeping stench, a discharge of hopelessness.

We have failed, it seems. There really is no hope for us; for peace, beauty, for a life spent in anything resembling harmony. All for nothing. Thousands of years of regression. The train rattled on and on towards doom as my backside cramped itself on the seat.

When I looked down at the doll’s face she was still looking comically surprised.

Yesterday, on the Edgware Road, I saw an elderly man with an impressive beak of a nose. He was wearing a threadbare brown suit and a crumpled raincoat. Around his neck hung a pair of binoculars. He was walking with a pronounced stoop, gleefully rubbing his hands together and grinning like a maniac. A shock of grey hair stood straight up on his head and, every now and then, he would stop in his tracks to let out a convulsive, blood-curdling laugh; like a hyena on Ecstasy, rousing passers by from their reveries and terrifying little children.

I am convinced that the heart of England is diseased. Cardiac arrest is lurking around the next corner. The angina will get to me too, eventually - if it hasn’t done so already. And the real irony is that we are not even capable of communicating our true feelings to our neighbours, let alone of changing ourselves enough to make a difference. I, as much as anyone, am incapable of change. I sense the parasite of intransigence gnawing at my innards. If even a sizeable minority of people feel the same way, then we are surely hurtling towards destruction.

It has just occurred to me that it is this anticipation of impending chaos that causes the Edgware Road madman to rub his hands together and laugh hysterically. Perhaps he plans to observe Armageddon from a safe distance, through the lenses of his binoculars.

In spite of the feelings I have for this country (and my suspicion that I am not bearing this burden alone), my job has given me a new perspective. I find it surprisingly gratifying, helping people to identify their weaknesses, demonstrating to them that they can build a more comfortable future for themselves and their families. As if it might be possible to fight against that rot, after all.

Science fiction is only my feeble attempt at escape from the less rewarding aspects of the work; a release from the repetition, the day-to-day slog. I have really only had the weekends to devote to my writing, and even then there were - until recently - the usual duties like visiting the family and the remnants of a social life with Laura to distract me from my desk.

I’ve begun sending my stories to small press magazines. I now have five or six that seem worth submitting and that don’t make me cringe or blush when I re-read them. There’s no money in it and I haven’t even had anything accepted yet, but it gives me something to look forward to when the postman comes each morning, instead of only bank statements and junk mail.

It seemed a harmless hobby until I stumbled upon Other Worlds.

Although I was feeling happier and more motivated than I had done in years, Laura obviously felt that our life together had become too predictable. We’d been a couple, off and on, for nearly ten years and recently she had been dissatisfied with me, my job, my clothes, my salary, my car. In fact, nothing of mine seemed good enough for her any more. She was working at a photographic agency and had become quite the ambitious female executive; complete with attaché case, mobile phone and Filofax. Once a week we’d sit and exchange the important appointments in our respective calendars.

She wasted no opportunity to remind me that other men bought flowers for the woman they loved. I was not going to be bullied into it by hints. Besides, flowers seemed so unimaginative. The Nano Doll seemed just the thing to lighten things up.

How wrong a man can be.

It was already getting dark when I arrived home.

From beneath the overlapping cardboard leaves of the box came the doll. I lifted her out and yet, it was rather as though she levitated from it; as if her fixed expression of surprise was actually wonderment at her present surroundings and not merely the positive image of the toymakers’ mould.

When I had her in my hands, she was even smaller than I had expected her to be: no more than fifteen centimetres tall and as seemingly fragile as a cognac balloon. I was expecting to find at least a folded sheet of badly-translated instructions in the bottom of the carton but there was nothing. I couldn’t even find a battery compartment, let alone any reference to what size batteries she might take. There was no on/off switch, no visible openings of any kind apart from that narrow slit between her lips.

Frustrated, and rather embarrassed that I had just sunk good credit into what seemed to be nothing more than an incongruous ornament, I left the doll on the bookshelf and went to pour myself an exceptionally large, cask-strength whisky; wondering just who was the dummy as I passed the glass ritually over the water jug.

‘I’ve got a surprise for you,’ I shouted, as Laura slammed the door shut behind her by leaning on it with her full weight.

‘Fuck. What a day!’ she said, dropping her briefcase and kicking off her shoes. She stroked out the creases in her short, pastel-pink shirt and threw off her jacket, revealing a pearlescent blouse that was almost translucent; a black wired bra was clearly visible over her curves.

I poured her a glass of Chateau la Tour St Bonet 1976 and took down the Nano Doll from the shelf, as ever trying desperately not to become distracted by the luscious plumpness of Laura’s breasts.

She was calling her voice-mail on her mobile by the time I had gathered my elation into a tight knot in my belly.

‘Look,’ I said holding the doll towards her. Instead, she looked at me as though I had just announced that her mother provided extra-curricular oral services for the residents of the underworld. Her portrayal of contempt could not have been more convincing if she had discovered me in bed with a nineteen-year-old from the EDP pool.

‘What is it?’ she asked, barely able to conceal her apathy.

‘Well, er, it’s a Nano Doll . . . thing,’ I stuttered.

‘A doll. You bought me a doll? Just what goes on in that head of yours, mmm? Is that the best you could do?’ A front of cold air charged with derision hit me head-on as she turned on her heels.

‘You hungry?’ I countered. ‘We could order a curry.’

I don’t think she was hungry.

I think she had actually been waiting for an excuse to leave me. And now the waiting was over. It was as though she had been prepared for this moment for months: the suitcases seemed to have been lying open waiting for her clothes, which all fell into her hands as smoothly as if they were being borne by conveyor belt. I can’t even remember her ordering the cab; the driver seemed to materialise at the door and the next thing she was handing me her keys, demonstratively waggling her irascible buttocks in the direction of the stairs.

I’m probably putting too fine a point on it, but it felt as though the Nano Doll was the trigger of the gun that put our relationship out of its misery.

When Laura had left, I lit two sticks of incense, anchoring them in a lump of Plasticine stuck to the middle of the ashtray on the bookshelf.

And in telling you that, I have reached the part which, as a rational human being, I find almost painful to relate; because I can’t honestly swear that it really happened. Overwork, poor diet, a momentary lapse of reason - I know that they are all poor excuses for what you’re going to have to swallow next, so I am left with the broken pieces of reality. And, as the song goes, breaking up is hard to do.

What I remember is coming back from the kitchen with a mug of steaming coffee held to my lips to find that the living room was full of ticker tape. It looked as though someone had unravelled several rolls of percussion caps from one of those toy guns that kids used to drive you mad with, in the days before Nintendo and techno music. And it all seemed to have spewed, in one long roll, from the mouth of the doll that was now standing on the coffee table. I froze, my lips pursed above my drink, the mug tipped at a dangerously acute angle, not really believing what I was seeing.

The first thing to hit me, ridiculously enough, was a sensation of relief that at least Laura wouldn’t be arriving home from work any minute, eager to put her feet up and relax. I’m sure she would have been just thrilled to find the living room resembling Times Square after the safe return of an Apollo mission.

The end of the roll that was suspended between the pouting lips of the Nano Doll hung motionlessly; it seemed that she had, at least momentarily, stopped spewing paper. I picked up the free end, causing the coils to rustle like party streamers. On one side of the paper was a string of words. They seemed nonsensical (although the total lack of punctuation didn’t help) and were printed in a faded matrix of dots. I had to retrace my way to the doll’s lips to find out what she had said first. I tore the paper against her lower lip and the jagged edge retracted into her mouth. Feeding the message between my fingers I tried to follow the printed words:

‘ai yam teh loakum yeloe roas i nose no merci haf noe foas i is wort i am and am wort i be that is teh long and thr short of me y i am hear knobudy nose taht givz the gong and seals 2 me mai faes is breit for orl to c past 12 at nait to one to free 4 wen nain is ten and 12 be free be braif and neel not nex to me un knowl to dem un tole to me no dokta haf a rjemadi on top o dat fahr ovr me sitz godd in hevnly leck triss it ee my own lee feer if u mus no cums hurtlin down goas to an froa godd sendz us luv he nose not y an if u luk it goas on buy 4 such is laif in this hier hoal no taim to waist no time 2 crai on top o dat eyes goan 2 dai thr godd eye luvs 4 saek en me . . .’

The automatic writing prattled on like this at length, interrupted by neither full stop nor comma and driven by a rhyme scheme that might politely be described as random but which did not seem especially Japanese in origin. A dyslexic telegraph for an unknown recipient. I picked up the doll, frantically searching for the surface I must previously have overlooked - a cover concealing some switch or dial - but I found neither secret compartment nor cunningly disguised control.

Being a true Virgo, I had not yet thrown away the packaging; but there was no reference made on it to the toy’s printout feature. The words had come out anyway, in one long line.

Staggered, I stood in the half-light, cursing the Japanese and their miracles of miniaturisation.

In defeat, I placed the doll on the nearest flat surface, which was the bookshelf beside me; next to a ceramic Buddha that Laura had given me one Christmas. It’s a tiny statue with pale, pinkish skin, a bulbous belly and gold-painted prayer beads hanging from his left hand. He sits, contentedly in his pale blue robes with eyes closed and his chin resting on his chest.

The Buddha and the Japanese equivalent of Betty Boop: how ridiculous they looked, next to one another on my bookshelf!

This seemed like the kind of moment in which to take up smoking cigarettes. Or perhaps intravenous heroin.

Only music could save me now.

The first CD in the rack was Sheila Chandra’s Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices. Number 423 in my archive. I don’t know what would have happened if it had been Number 897, The Story Of The Clash or Lenny Kravitz’s Circus; Number 685. The fact of the matter is, as Sheila Chandra commenced her Indian scat on Speaking In Tongues, I was distracted from the flickering of the green numbers on the front of the CD player by the strangest of sounds coming from the direction of the bookshelf.

‘Gzzz . . .’ it went, like the bell of a tiny alarm clock going off.

I turned around, in time to see the doll come to life. She moved to the hectic tabla rhythm of Sheila’s voice with an exaggerated flick of her hips, a delicate oriental grace and a provocative tilting of the head that was agonisingly realistic. She took a few steps to the right then flung an arm around the Buddha and lovingly stroked the top of his head.

And as the doll was stroking the Buddha’s bald, ceramic head it seemed, very briefly, as though he had opened his eyes and was looking at me. His opened eyes were tiny, black and beady, but quite different from the thin curved slits that were otherwise almost obscured by the folds of fat on his cheeks.

And then the Nano Doll straightened up, retraced her steps and the Buddha’s eyes suddenly closed again. Apart from the streamer of gibberish on the floor, it was impossible to tell whether any of it had ever really happened.

I sat staring at the doll for what seemed like hours, expecting her to move again. The CD ended, the darkness beyond the window became opaque, the silence reproduced itself until there was no more space left for it and I couldn’t bear the pressure in the room any longer.

I succumbed to the sudden and uncontrollable urge to tidy up; my star sign getting the better of me again. I had crumpled all the paper up and was jamming it into the kitchen bin with the heel of my shoe when the bell rang.

I opened the door. On the other side of it was Laura.

She had seen the error of her ways. All was forgiven. She’d had a bad day at the office and, what with all the stress, had simply over-reacted. But she’d come back to apologise and now we’d kiss and make up and have wild sex together all over the furniture, as you do after you’ve squabbled.

‘I forgot the condoms,’ she said, ransacking the bathroom cabinet. ‘Don’t forget to take Bonfire of the Vanities back to the video shop,’ she added before stomping back out of my life.

Ouch.

I lit two more incense sticks and put on Paul Weller’s Stanley Road, Number 570, very loud. Then, in the lull following a stomach-numbing pang of anger and regret, I ran to the kitchen bin and retrieved the crumpled mass of paper that the Nano Doll had spewed up. In my haste to recover it, I tore it into shreds.

Piecing the fragments back together, I could still make out between the creases: ‘ai yam teh loakum yeloe roas.’

Back in the living room, I deeply inhaled the first bloom of incense, before attempting to read aloud the words. In order to pronounce them I was forced to correct them and thus came close to understanding: ‘I am the loakum yellow rose.’

Fumbling about on the bookshelf, I located my battered copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

There was no entry for ‘loakum’; the closest to it was:

loc´um ten´êns (- z; also colloq. loc´um), n. Deputy acting esp. for clergymen or doctor. Hence loc´um ten´enCY n. [med. L, (one) holding place TENANT, (foll.)]

That definition didn’t seem to help me. My eyes rose to the Buddha, who was drowsing amid the thick, cloying mists of incense. The fragrance was sweet, reminding me of fresh flowers . . . The incense!

On the bottom shelf was the cardboard carton containing the incense sticks. I picked it up and read the label:

Himalaya incense. 20 incense sticks. Rose Jaune. Rosa Amarillo. Rosa. Yellow Rose.

And the Buddha sat on the shelf with eyes closed, chest supporting his chin and wearing a self-satisfied grin.

The Locum Yellow Rose would move around in my flat at will, but she wouldn’t print out her words unless I first lighted the incense. She liked music, too, although preferably nothing too modern. Thelonious Monk was a particular favourite.

Daily I encouraged the words to spill from her mouth and as I read them spewing forth on the apparently endless ticker tape, an intense warmth began to glow around my heart.

She seemed to be regurgitating fragments from my books, my CDs and - most uncannily of all - my consciousness:

‘ingerlish garding yor roases r re3d so y r mai pepl orl hange in ther hedz 1nce ai satt yppon the hille 2 wodjch thr wurld gou bai thr chursh belz saundjd midnite az ai roas 2 sae gudbai the sunn lite filturz sofly thru the pajl an watry skai 2 cadj the mirurd sammon az it roas to taek thr flai shain on silvur sunne . . .’

Whether it was the rhythm of her words, the jumbled diction and shredded syntax or just the misplacing of the words themselves; they generated some profound magic in me.

From the quicksands of my memory, the past swelled up and burst, spraying me with fragmented images and traces of sensations; fledgling emotions thrown from their nest and left to fend for themselves.

It was a Utopia I have lived in my heart: the first light of an English summer’s day. The tinkling of a china tea service on a summer lawn. The smell of freshly mown grass. The hissing of car tyres on country lanes while you’re dozing in the sun. Lying in a field, looking up at the sky. Train rides to backwater stations in carriages with compartments and corridors. Black-and-white British films on rainy Sunday afternoons. The theme music from All Our Yesterdays and Coronation Street. It was an idea of England in the pre-graffiti years, before vandalism and football hooligans. A dream, in primary colours, of how this country should have been after the war. Hats and suits and pencil skirts; docile materialism, peace and tradition. The benevolent Empire. An England that never was. Sunshine; floral-patterned dresses; cigarettes that would make you look suave, not kill you.

Dixon of Dock Green, not NYPD Blue. BBC Radio 4, not Sky and MTV. The Goon Show, not Beavis and Butthead. Afternoon pub lock-ins, not draught real ale in cans. Brighton Pavilion and the Natural History Museum, not Planet Hollywood and the Internet. Thick cut marmalade and the Sunday papers, not pop tarts and Mondo 2000.

‘Tell me more, Locum, tell me more,’ I said, day after day, combing the endless ticker-tape. The words came out in one long line and it was impossible to predict what she was going to say next.

‘thr roadz L so hajv ther wystful reste wenn thr wethrcox persh stil end ruste end the taun iz a kandulit rume the strijts L so dreme ther dreme this valie wud is pledjd 2 thr sett shajp uv thingz & risunablly hedjd hier pojsd in kwietewd karm elemjntls brude frum this grenewud onlj the lorns r soft thur tre stemms grajv & auld sloe branshes swaij alof the evning ajr cumz coald thr sunnsete scaturs goald smal grasiz tos & bend smal pathwajs aidli tendd 2wards uz feerfal endd yeeld 2 the lorrel bransh this twailajt paily faedz a hart widj shud jentli bete . . . ‘

The effort it took to study the words and grasp hold of some timeworn idea, to advance beyond the gobbledegook, was the challenge. It was a challenge made worthwhile by the upturn in my demeanour that followed every painstaking discovery: the source of a quotation, the original rhythms obscured by a dense flood of oblique, misspelt cut-ups.

This warmth sprouted like a seed in my heart and grew. And as the ripples made by a pebble thrown into a pond spread outward, the waves of make-believe reached my face and caused tears of joy to rise behind my eyes.

Along with the scent of yellow roses, the incense blew on zephyrs like smoky fingers that carried the mildewed fragrance of old books; the smell of summer orchards, the distant sound of bee hives and the percussive clatter of red double-decker buses idling at Piccadilly Circus. I experienced in its pervasive fumes the brute force of a phantom Cup Final choir and saw the spectral smiles on the faces of Notting Hill Carnival policemen.

I wasn’t just wallowing in nostalgia; with every word the Locum issued, nostalgia was consuming me.

It was like cracking a secret code; deciphering hieroglyphics.

For a brief time I was almost happy.

During the day I worked, in the evenings I burnt incense and received the Locum’s messages, accompanied by a soundtrack of old jazz.

I began arriving late for work in the mornings, exhausted from the previous evening’s exertions with the Locum. I rode the tube trains like a zombie, painfully aware of all the wrong things. There were dead pigeons everywhere; I found one outside the flat, writhing with an industriousness of maggots. There were benignly grinning ‘Smileys’ sprayed all over the road signs and anything else that was even vaguely circular. To me, their moronic faces came to represent the lobotomised fools strap-hanging in the rush hour trains; too numb to feel or see what was being done to them in the name of ‘progress’.

The newspaper headlines became increasingly aggressive and meaningless. FUCK! demanded The Sun. GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY, enjoined The Times. There was no reprieve from the shock tactics of the advertising agencies. The messages screaming from their posters on the billboards grew so brutal that I wondered how long it would be before these campaigns were superseded by gangs of youths in Benetton sweatshirts, clubbing old ladies senseless with the dismembered limbs of dead Aids patients.

During a debate on ‘mad cow disease’ in the Commons, the Prime Minister spat on the Leader of the Opposition, who denounced his assailant in a shrill and hysterical voice as a ‘cretinous cunt.’ I wondered what all the fuss was about. It was much too late to be talking about preventive measures; evidently we were quite mad already.

A man was found dead on a seat on the northbound platform of my local underground station. I don’t think anyone would have noticed if a commuter hadn’t reported to the transport police that he’d seen the chap slumped in exactly the same position the previous morning.

The other day there was a slate at the ticket barrier with the poignant message: Due to a body under a train at Earls Court there will be delays to all destinations. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused. What an obituary! To be dismissed even in death as an ‘inconvenience’, as if your demise was merely some humdrum public nuisance. What kind of world is this?

With hunched shoulders, I scurried home between decomposing pigeons and barricaded the door. Throwing off my coat and kicking off my shoes, I hit the power switch on the stereo system before I had even thought of switching on the light.

When I did so, it illuminated the Locum standing on the living room window ledge, apparently gazing out at the blighted trees on the common.

I wasn’t even aware that she had registered my presence but suddenly she turned to me and spoke, in a squeaky, mechanical Betty Boop voice: ‘Deh wah no kuhwuhd butterfwies any mawh, ownwee cabbagewhites.’

Those were the first words she spoke to me.

In my stunned silence, staring at those artificial lips that had, even while she had been talking, remained motionlessly parted, I felt the twinge of a recollection from my childhood. As if the doll had pulled it, still damp and writhing from the recesses of my mind. And although it had nothing to do with butterflies or cabbagewhites, I knew exactly what she meant.

It’s one of my very first memories. I’m at Holyhead railway station. It’s about 1962. The last days of the steam engine are expiring with a sooty hiss. A train is about to depart. Great shrouds of steam are pistoning out from between the wheels and the funnel’s emissions are obscuring the road bridge overhead. Between the hissing and soot and cinders, the clanking of the cranes on the quayside, are my Mum in her best dress and stilettos, my Dad tall, pressed and shaved in his suit with turn-ups, and me in my blue quilted romper suit. A man drops a cigarette butt, smouldering, onto the puddled platform, and (here reality gobsmacks me - it’s real and now and actually happening!) I toddle over and stamp on it until it’s dead. The loose, snagged threads on the left leg of my blue quilted romper suit seem grotesquely magnified as I tread on the butt with the sole of my white sandal and I can hear the grittiness of the ash being ground into the platform.

Tell me that it’s not a genuine memory, tell me there’s no way I could possibly remember that. You still can’t take it away from me.

It’s a memory of a Britain that doesn’t exist any more. Perhaps it never really existed in the first place; at least not in the bright primary colours of this mental Technicolour film clip; but it’s a Britain I’ve always harked back to and yearned for.

As time went by, the Locum’s ability to shift my consciousness up a gear, to throw me into a reverie, became as precision engineered as the nanomechanical flick of her hips as she crossed the bookshelf on one of her rhythmic missions to stroke the head of the Buddha. Her words were always accompanied by the fragrance of yellow rose incense. I don’t know whether that was a prerequisite, but it enchanted me as much as those huge oval eyes of hers with the fluttering lashes.

The messages she printed had become reflections of my feelings and dreams. Of lazy summer days in a long forgotten England. Memories of floating dust motes in cottage kitchens fragrant with pastry and home-made jam, in thatched-roofed villages with fire-engine-red pillar boxes, smiling postmen, the clink of milk bottles and satisfied, rosy faces.

I felt the inexplicable longing to drag my Topper and Beezer annuals down from the attic; to gloat over the mildewed remnants of my Beano and Dandy collection. I spent my lunch breaks at work in a trance, trying to remember Bill and Ben, and Blue Peter before Peter Purves. I scoured back street video shops looking for recordings of those Jack Hargreaves programmes in which he interviewed country craftsmen who were inevitably the last of their line.

I caught myself wondering if I would ever be able to afford a Saville Row suit; started wearing Czech & Speake’s 88 aftershave and a lick of Brylcreem in my hair. Those smells reminded me of old-time barber shops and long dead uncles.

I stocked the larder with bottles of vintage port that almost bankrupted me. The unidentifiable objects mouldering in the fridge were successively replaced by jars of pickled onions, Cheddar cheese and Stilton. I bought Marmite and lemon curd, cream crackers and gentleman’s relish, steak and kidney pies and Worcestershire sauce.

And the Locum’s words lulled me, well nourished, into visions of Arcadia.

‘thul orlwajs b 1 wai uv getin cloas 2 yor ansesturz folo thr auld rode & az u wark think uv them & the auld ingerland yore ownly seein wat ther aijs sore u fordd the sajm rivrs the sajm burdz r sjnging & wenn u lai flatt un yor bak & restt wajtch the clawds sajling az ai oftjn du u cann here the thrummjng uv thr hoovs uv thr horsjs the saunde uv the whealz un the rode & the mewsic uv the jnstrumintz they carie . . . ‘

This language was an incantation and what it had conjured was the naive vision of a life and land that never was, but which existed nonetheless; somewhere in my soul.

Laura sent me a postcard. It was a photograph of a stack of written-off cars in a wrecker’s yard. On the back it said, ‘If there’s any mail, please forward it to me. L.’ There was an address in Belsize Park.

It was with some trepidation that I decided to write and invite her over to dinner. In a way, I was exorcising ghosts. Then, after posting my letter, I became gripped by anxiety; obsessed by the notion that Laura’s very femininity had a menacing aspect of which I had previously been oblivious. Her curvaceousness; the symmetry of her face; the sensuousness of her eyes; each assumed a threatening quality. In my mind the prospect of an entire evening with her grew quite daunting and yet I was too cowardly to cancel it.

I continued to be attracted to Laura; indeed, in some baffling way, my desire for her body intensified. Although it was a compulsion, I began to find this manifestation of her in my mind as an incorrigible seductress rather ridiculous. My intentions, after all, were honourable. I only wanted to show her that there were no hard feelings, that I was man enough to call the past the past and make a fresh start as she had done.

Laura called me and left a brief message on the machine. ‘Thanks. I’d love to. Saturday at 7:30 is fine. I’ll bring some vino. See you then.’ Her voice was soft and reassuring. I felt good about my decision, dismissed my misgivings as dithering.

At about this time, the potency of the Locum’s images began to fade. The words continued to tumble out, but my memories, or the mirror-images of my subconscious - whatever they were - became steadily more jaded; as insipid as the malaise that has befallen this Land.

When the last pack of incense sticks was empty, I didn’t bother to replace them. I had begun to find their intense flowery scent stifling and had the impression that they were causing my chesty cough. I also couldn’t bear to hear any more of those tinny big band jazz recordings by Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway that the Locum seemed to enjoy.

It all seemed quite natural at the time. Too much of a good thing, and all that. Perhaps by now the Locum had exercised all my unquiet spirits, I thought.

And so I let her be.

Saturday was bitterly cold. I collected Laura at the underground station and she slipped her icy hand into my jacket pocket so that we were forced to walk back to my place practically arm-in-arm. The flat was tidy and warm and I’d arranged the table lamps for a little laid-back, mood-lighting action.

Laura smelt wonderful. She was wearing the Crabtree & Evelyn perfume I had bought her for her last birthday. She took off her long black velvet coat and threw it onto the bed, the way she had always done. She was dressed in a short skirt over black tights and an embroidered waistcoat. Beneath it, the arms of a lacy white body stocking were visible.

I was busy in the kitchen, so I let her choose the music. She put on Number 154: David Sylvian and Holger Czukay’s Flux & Mutability, which I thought was a strange selection. But the living room windows were stippled with a bloom of condensation that obscured the bare branches on the common and the dimmed lights and gentle chords simulated the cosy completeness of a happy home.

I was cooking us one of my favourite recipes: a rich and spicy west African peanut soup with chives and sweet potatoes. Peanut butter makes it thick and savoury; root ginger and dried chillies add bite and chopped carrots give the soup a delicious sweetness. It seemed just the thing for a cold winter evening and its fragrances soon softened the evening’s frigid edges.

I had come back into the living room to ask Laura if she had anything against garlic bread. I found her kneeling next to the coffee table, one ear up against the Locum Yellow Rose’s head. Frankly, in all the excitement, I had forgotten all about the doll and the disruption it had caused the last time they confronted each other.

Laura was grinning all over her beautiful face because the Locum was talking to her. I just heard the doll say, ‘Wozy cheeks,’ in her silly, squeaky voice before Laura let out a squeal of delighted laughter.

Momentarily relieved, I apologised needlessly then did my best to laugh off the incident. Laura was obviously still under the impression that this was a regular speaking toy with a modest selection of built-in phrases. ‘Usually she’s more talkative’, I said, trying to be cool and enigmatic, returning to the kitchen to smother a nascent whiff of trepidation.

When I came back with a fresh bottle of St Emilion 1979, Laura and the Locum Yellow Rose had struck up quite a conversation. Well, it was more of a monologue really, and the Locum was doing all the talking. For a while, I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

Laura was still kneeling next to the coffee table, face illuminated by the biggest smile I have ever seen, eyes glistening with surprise, her hand to her breast and her breathing unnaturally heavy. And then I heard the Locum say in that ridiculous, mechanical New Jersey accent of hers, ‘Beah bwottom.’

I laughed loudly and somewhat hysterically in my irrational embarrassment. It had never said more to me than that one innocent sentence - that one about the butterflies - and yet here it was, this ridiculous toy, threatening to sabotage the reunion like some gruesome plastic vibrator lurking between the first night sheets. ‘It’s just a toy,’ I muttered, ‘don’t take any notice of it.’ I picked up the Locum, checking the ashtray for burning incense, my face imploring the complacent Buddha to help me out of a corner.

‘Oh, put it down, honey. Turn it on again, that was fascinating.’

I returned the Locum to the table with rather more vigour than was strictly necessary. She made that little alarm clock noise again and took a few swanky steps towards Laura. Then she turned and looked up at me with those big, oval eyes. Laura laughed shrilly and gasped with her hand to her mouth. She was enthralled; utterly captivated.

With a jerk of the head, the Locum Yellow Rose vomited a scroll of paper onto the carpet. For a moment it lay there like a coiled tapeworm. Then Laura grinned at me and grabbed the nearest end. I read what she had to say over Laura’s shoulder. ‘She 1ntz the bondzzuvlerv. She 1ntz 2 b spankd. She laikes teh hytend & deaply pleshrubel sens uv x poshure an normus attenshun b in payd 2 her botum. Sumtaimz she 1ntz 2 b stredcht akros yor lap, sumtaimz she 1nts 2 bend ovr a chare or the bedd, or ly flatt owt onit, or b horsd ovr the piloes, the dreser or a stule.’

Laura found it all hysterically amusing and I assumed she was laughing at me - as if everything the Locum had said was somehow my fault. I felt myself getting redder and redder, beads of sweat forming at my hairline. The temperature in the room seemed to rise ten degrees just from the glow that my face was radiating.

Laura shook her arms and clapped her hands, ‘More, more!’ she said, looking up at me. ‘How do you get it to do more?’ she said, her eyes eager and childlike.

‘I can’t get it to do anything. It’s just a stupid toy. I didn’t even put batteries in the thing!’ I shouted, defending myself against I-didn’t-know-what. More than anything, I was furious at my embarrassment.

‘Well there’s no need to raise your voice, is there.’ said Laura, assuming her assertive Sharon Stone persona.

The Locum’s mechanism gave a brief whirring and a buzz before she sat on the tabletop, dangling her legs over the edge. When she saw us both looking at her garter belt - me with an expression of foreboding doom - she coyly readjusted the slit in her dress.

Then, with a lugubrious flutter of her mechanised eyelashes, in the closest thing this tin-plate Betty Boop could get to a conspiratorial whisper, she began to address me in perfect, unaccented English: ‘Sometimes she would like a rod, sometimes your hand, your belt, sometimes a whip, a cane, a cat-o’-nine-tails, a bull’s pizzle, a switch, a ruler, a slipper, a leather strap, a hairbrush. She fantasises about being reduced to a craven object of desire by your firm male hand . . . ’

At this point, I adjourned briefly to the kitchen and returned with the ladle I’d been using to stir the soup. A chunk of carrot fell onto the Locum’s head as, raising it in the air, I brought it down as hard as I could and bashed the toy to pieces.

Tiny cogs and flywheels rolled or flew into the corners of the room. Shattered tin, circuit boards and capacitors bounced and clattered about, then lay curled and broken on the tabletop. Minute screws and mysterious midget components ricocheted off the walls and the stereo system.

There was one last, extended buzzing - like the death throes of an expiring watch movement - and the Locum Yellow Rose fell still.

Laura rose from the floor with tears of shock streaming down her face. As her eyes turned to me from the wreckage they were filled with rage. From a throat thick with tears she managed to say: ‘That’s just what you’ll never understand. You’re so dull. It’s not about violence, it’s about love.’

She fetched her coat from the bedroom and left me staring at the fragments of the Locum, desperately trying to summon the scent of yellow rose incense.

Laura’s words hurt. It didn’t dawn on me for a while that she was upset not - as I selfishly supposed - because she had presumed these to be my own sexual fantasies. Rather, the Locum had been trying to reveal something about Laura, something I would never have guessed in a thousand years, and not only was I so disrespectful as to dismiss it, I had annihilated her fantasies. I think the shame I felt at the belatedness of this realisation was worse than if she had caught me masturbating. They had been her fantasies and she was fascinated by them; not in the least compromised, as I had been.

In the wreckage of the Locum Yellow Rose, I felt the definition of what I had, until that moment, considered to be reality, shift radically; as though someone was pinning the flimsy pattern of my life onto a quite different batch of material. And as I looked down at the fatigued carbon fibre and the twisted titanium, a tiny spring uncoiled itself with a metallic hiss and one of the Locum’s knees jerked, the gartered leg extending itself towards me in one final reflex action.

There wasn’t even any need for me to kick myself; the Locum Yellow Rose was doing it for me.

As night settles like falling cobwebs on the houses, unnoticed at first - so gentle is its descent - I sense the tremulous whirr of Time and a howl of regret resonates within me, as if the tape is being pulled violently past the heads of the machine that records its passing.

I founder in my memories of Laura.

The soup I made earlier smells scorched and has stuck to the bottom of the saucepan. My head rises from the miniature cogs, the stretched springs, silicon chips and capacitors lying all over the coffee table and my gaze returns to the small statue of the Buddha on the bookshelf, dozing contentedly.

Perhaps I’m imagining this, too, but his grin seems even broader and more self-satisfied than usual.

Chris Bell is the author of The Bumper Book of Lies, a collection of twenty stories including The Locum.