Sleep was a stranger to David. Our gentle friend, that warmth of embrace and
soft comfort at the end of a long day, had always seemed to be at one remove from his
soul. He tried in vain to count sheep, failing miserably each night to imagine any flock
big enough, and through that imagination to will his limbs to slumber. David lay at
night amid the intermittent tics and spasms of sagging brickwork and leeching pipes.
Minutes might turn into decades of waiting, during which time he focussed on liver
spots on the painted ceiling above his dishevelled bed. He always returned to the same
theme, and in so doing he inevitably banished all hope of that slow decline into the
unconscious world of the dream king. And so, wiping the grit from the corners of his
eyes, he would rise, usually around two in the morning, make a pot of tea, and sit in
front of the television flicking between the educational and the banal.
On occasions David tried alternative tacks, pouring himself liberal measures of
cheap brandy in an effort to knock himself out, and but for the persistent worry that
his liver would explode, he might have considered alcoholism as a cure for insomnia.
Fridays were his favourite tipple days, as he generally did not work on a Saturday and
then had time to recover before Monday. Even here, though, when sweet oblivion
coursed through his veins and he collapsed on the sofa, he couldn’t ever say that he
slept. Rather he entered a twisted world where the great theme of his life was made
real, and the tempting began all over again. In some ways, these weekly diversions
seemed more real to David, more full of the visceral sharpness of existence, than did
the mundane world of rag trade cutting on Eastcastle Street in London’s West End.
David’s inability to enter the altered state of mind that brings mental recharge
and balance was caused directly by his chosen trade. David worked the cutting
benches for those ‘B’ list designers who stitch their way through one financial crisis
after another at the back of Oxford Street. He spent his days surrounded by fittings, by
models, and by the spike-tongued hopefuls trampling their way towards the catwalk,
and all of them, the girls, the boys, the madames, the couturiers, only ever saw him as
a pair of sharp blades.
David, however, saw beyond the chalk line and the pattern book. David saw
girls and women. He watched them move and twist within their fabric shrouds, and
surrounded by skin and bone and muscle and the imposing beauty of the fashionista,
he wept internally. Summer was the worst time of all with acres of breast exposed to
draw his gaze down into the realm of the lascivious. David was one of life’s luckless
men. He smiled and made a threat of it. He laughed and drew fingernails across a
blackboard. He held a woman’s hand for just a moment too long. He tried too hard.
He was barely thirty years old, skilled and adept at his trade, but he was
already balding, noticeably overweight, had crooked teeth and one eye that stared
manically out of its socket. He knew instinctively that he was never noticed for who
he might be, but only ever for what he could do. Those paragons of perfection who
employed him would not see the man because his flesh offended them.
At night, David thought about one thing; his ideal woman. In spending his
sleepless nights imagining perfection, and then in the morning looking at his own
reflection in the bathroom mirror, he committed himself to a cycle of despair that he
was convinced would only ever end when he put out the lights…permanently. It
wasn’t as though David wanted too much of the world. He recognised in the sea of
fake perfection that ebbed and flowed around his salt bleached rock, that beyond the
make-over shores, where bleary eyed beauties awoke in their raw state, there might be
a little nook or tight cranny where he could find happiness. All he wanted was a
cuddle, was warmth other than his own in bed on a cold night, and in the throes of
such thinking, when the alcohol finally bit, his dreams took him into strange
encounters with girls made of glass and wax, girls who beckoned to him and then
shattered at his touch. He dreamed of feminine peacocks, creatures of fan and feather
and piercing shrillness. He dreamed of the hunting tigress with cubs mewling in the
undergrowth and he knew the bite of her rancid fangs. David also dreamed of a man,
who sat at the edge of the disillusionarium that his drunken world inevitably became,
a man who never spoke, who never moved, but watched and waited, and waited and
watched, a man dressed in the threads of deep, black time, threads woven into a
riverboat gambler’s brocaded frock and embroidered waistcoat.
It was on one such Friday amid the high heat and low cut bosom of June that
David forsook the usual Fundador and splashed out on two bottles of Grouse. He
never drank Scotch. It made him unduly maudlin, but, he decided while wandering
disconsolately down the drinks aisle at his local Tesco Metro, that it had been a
fucking maudlin day, and the cause of his melancholy was the new girl on reception.
During a quick introduction by the owner of the salon, David had let his gaze
linger too long on the new girl’s breasts and rather than the usual snort of disgust he’d
received a round, heavy slap in the face. The sound of her palm on his cheek filled the
air with thunder, rattling across the downstairs showroom, and he had fled in horror to
the workshop on the first floor. No matter how large the stone he overturned, he found
no place to hide, and blushing crimson the day long he’d chalked and cut and made
one ham-fisted, embarrassed mistake after another, until She Who Must Be Obeyed
had waved her finely manicured hand at him and told him to go home. The fact that
she added words like creepy and weird and skin-crawling to the usual terms of abuse
that he periodically suffered was, he felt, a little gratuitous. He had never actually
touched a girl’s breast, nor would he dare to do so, but sometimes he just couldn’t
help where he looked, afflicted as he was with the blow of the birthing ugly-stick.
“It isn’t weird or creepy”, he told himself repeatedly as he stared at the rack
full of spirits in Tesco. “I just lose track of where I am looking sometimes. For God’s
sake!”
David caught sight of another shopper looking at him as if he were the nutter
on the bus, so he picked up the two bottles of scotch, bowed his head, and walked
quickly to the check-out counter.
Slumped on the sofa, with the world drifting into an amber haze fuelled by an
empty bottle of the blend, David closed his eyes and fell asleep immediately. All he
wanted on this night of all nights was the blackness of absolute torpor, but even in his
befuddled state he still staggered into the kingdom of impossible dreams. David stood
on a beach watching the waves crash in, swaying in drunken rhythm with the surf.
In the distance he saw his alter ego, Mister Darcy on a white charger,
galloping along the shore line with whipping hair and muscular abandon. Unlike his
previous dream incarnations, however, there was no immediate object of the chase, no
impossibly fragile maiden to save. Instead, his imagined avatar turned the horse to
face a rocky spur at one end of the beach, and there he saw the man in black. Again,
breaking with all tradition, the usually passive and silent man stood, climbed down
from the rocks and started to walk towards the Darcy figure, who dismounted with a
jump and a flourish. The two figures met in the curl of receding water at the shore
line. They stared at each other for a moment before Darcy spoke.
“Are you the Devil?” he asked. “Have you come to make a pact? Is this my
Faustian temptation?”
The man in black looked down at the wet sand and shook his head. “Nothing
to do with me, mate, all that Devil nonsense”.
He looked up and pointed back along the beach to where the true-to-life form
of the dreaming David stood watching them. “There’s no magic can make him any
less ugly than he is.”
“We know,” replied Darcy, “but we’ll do anything for just one chance. Souls
aren’t much use when you’re as disappointed and as lonely as we are.”
“That’s true enough,” said the man in black as he kicked at a pebble embedded
in the soft, wet sand. “But it won’t change anything. When he wakes up he’ll be just
as unattractive as he was yesterday. More so, given how much he’s put away tonight.
Anyway, I’m not in the soul business. I’m just a gambling man.”
Darcy moved in a little closer and looked hard and long at his companion on
the beach. “So what are you doing here? Why are you always in our dreams?”
The gambling man shrugged his shoulders. “Waiting for the moment when
you get off the horse and ask that very question. I feel sorry for you, for him.”
“But according to you there’s nothing that will change our life?” asked Darcy,
looking confused.
In the dream David and Darcy started to merge together, so that, as the man in
black watched and smiled sweetly under the towering blue sky, the impeccable and
imposing rider of the white steed twisted and decayed back to his sad and depressive
core component part.
The man in black waited for the metamorphosis to complete before speaking
again. “I didn’t say that. I said you’d still be ugly in the morning. I never said
anything about not being able to change your life.”
With that the man in black took David’s hands in his and turned them over as
if inspecting for warts and calluses. “Hands of a craftsman, mate. I don’t think you
have any idea just how skilled you are. Think about it. Tomorrow, when you wake up
I’ll give you this – no hangover, nothing but the fresh breeze of a summer morning,
and you’ll feel great. Think about what you can really do with these hands.” He
paused. “And with what’s in your heart.”
The man in black smiled and let David’s hands fall to his sides. “As I said, I’m
not looking for a soul. Not looking for anything of yours. You live your life, mate. If
there’s anything to collect it’ll be done long after you’ve stopped shuffling through
this mortal soil.”
With that he turned on his heel and walked back towards the rocks. David felt
tears stinging his eyes as they welled up and then fell upon his ruddy cheeks, and as
his vision blurred so did the image of the walking man. David wiped away the tears
with the back of his hands, but when he finally saw clearly again, there was no
gambler, no Darcy and no white charger on the beach. There were no fantastic images
of women, no wheeling gulls, nor was there the reassuring sound of surf. Slowly a
dusky darkness fell, and for the first time in years David slept truly, like an innocent
child.
Despite the evidence around him, the empty bottle of scotch, an overturned
tumbler, the crick in his neck and the taste of deep sleep in his mouth, David had
never felt quite so bright and alive of a morning. It was still early, the clock hands
reading just seven o’clock, and already the summer sun streamed in through windows
against which no curtains were drawn. He stretched out on the sofa, yawned,
considered his options and realised that he was hungry, as if he had been walking in
coastal air all night.
He remembered nothing of the dream, but he felt a tingle in his fingers, as
though they were trying speak to him. David made himself a cup of tea, sipping the
hot drink slowly, and all the while he basked in the warming sunlight that flooded his
meagre little flat. He had an idea, but first he must shower and then, rather than hunt
for a dry crust in the bread bin, he would walk down to the coffee bar on the corner of
the street and eat Danish pastries. For some reason it seemed to him that this was a
good day be alive. To Hell with the bloody women and their bloody dresses, he
thought.
The rest of the weekend saw David working to liberate himself from the
squalid mediocrity that had coloured so much of his life to date. He cleared the flat of
rubbish. He swept and dusted and hoovered. The bathroom gleamed as never before
and the whole place bloomed like a summer flower bed bursting through mulch. He
washed clothes, bagged up old items for the charity shop, and without quite knowing
why he put aside the best cuts of collected redundant cloth for some future use.
During Sunday afternoon he started to move the furniture around so that he
could create a working space, and there he placed the tools of his trade, his scissors,
his needles, his threads, his bodkins, together with his one pride and joy, an antique
hand-cranked Singer sewing machine. Finally, come Sunday evening, when all was
set and clean and fair, he took himself off to the bathroom and scrubbed himself with
a vim and vigour that suggested in no uncertain terms that David wanted to scour
away the stain of disappointment that had soiled his life so far.
Although the previous working week had ended in personal embarrassment for
David, the one saving grace in all this was his skill and his craft. He might have been
ridiculed the previous Friday, but he had not been sacked. As he walked up the stairs
at Oxford Circus station and headed along towards Eastcastle Street, he felt serene
and relaxed.
He bought flowers from a stand by the old Post Office. The morning girls, all
bright and rouged and clad in their summer skimpies, simply didn’t interest him. He
entered the building where he worked, handed the flowers to the receptionist and
apologised for his previous indiscretion. He skipped up the stairs in the full
knowledge that mouths hung open behind his back, and when the Madame appeared
to ask what was going on he simply smiled at her and told her that he had thought
long and hard about life and that he was now a changed man. David couldn’t quite tell
what they believed and what they disbelieved, but then he didn’t care. A plan was
forming, a scheme of divine proportion, that would take away the edge of his physical
and emotional hunger forever.
The plan was nothing more than a vague shape in the early moments of
Monday morning, but by degrees, as he worked through the day, smiling and
whistling to himself, the bones of the thing began to form. He surveyed the fabrics in
the workshop and saw in lycra and toile and cotton the shapes of limbs. In taffetas and
satins and wools he saw skin tones and contours. The mannequins upon which hung
Madame’s latest creations gave form to the coagulation of shape and sinew, and in his
hands he held the means, held the tools that might bring life to the ideas floating
dimly in his head. By the end of that first working day after the disaster and the
dream, he was resolved to act. He would borrow a mannequin and, at the end of each
day working the cloth, he would take home off-cuts. David would fill his evenings
with the sound of the Singer.
Over the next few weeks there appeared in David’s flat a succession of
patchwork skins, each one crafted on the old singer and fitted over the mannequin like
a Lycra glove. Colours and shades entwined, with gold and silver threads catching the
light, but none of the textures and the patterns, made up from off-cuts as they were,
could ever quite conform to David’s aesthetic. Her skin had to be perfect before he
would consider the next steps.
Days merged into nights and back into the rising light of late summer and then
early autumn. David worked all day at his trade, a changed man, happy and discrete
and gentle. At night, with his latest captures from the cutting room floor, he became a
fevered creature, bending over his old sewing machine for hours in an effort to sew
the smallest and the finest seams. David never drank now, but the hours and the days
spent spinning the sewing machine wheel in both directions inevitably took its toll on
the man.
Towards the end of September, just as the Devil spat on the bramble bushes in
the courtyard behind David’s flat and the Hawthorn in the local park hung heavy with
blackening sloes, David began to realise that something had to give. His search for
perfection was driving him towards the madness of insomnia again, and he had either
to finish his dream project or abandon happiness for all time. On the last Friday of the
month, as he yawned over his scissors and counted the minutes down until lunch
time’s sweetly fresh air, the Madame entered the cutting room. Across her arm she
held a bolt of the finest golden Escorial, which she laid gently on David’s table.
“For that singer, you know, hot little arse but slight nasal whine on the high
notes…touring at Christmas and wants this ready for dress rehearsals next month.”
she said, smoothing out a crease in the material. “I’ll send the drawings up later.
Usual stuff, patterns and cuts, and I know you’ll do your best. Beautiful isn’t it?”
David simply stared at the sheer brilliance and the tight but elastic weave of
the Escorial. It was, indeed, beautiful. He nodded his agreement as Madame turned
and headed back down to the lower floor. The Escorial was perfect.
True to her word Madame sent up the relevant drawings, a design for a light
and skimpy halter neck dress, cut low at the front and back. It was all so depressing,
he thought. Here he was, staring at the most stunning bolt of cloth just when he
needed it, but judging by the drawings he would have to be profligate with the
material. While the line was simple, there were so many flourishes and twists and
hints to be cut for the associated dancers that there would nothing serviceable left of
the Escorial, nothing worth taking home for his darling girl. It would be a tragedy,
but, as he turned the design round in his hand, desperately trying to find economies
within the pattern, David decided that it was time to sink or swim. He had to finish his
dream girl, and only the golden Escorial could possibly do. The entire bolt of cloth
would be required, but from it he could cut a perfect skin, and then he could really
begin to make his dreams come true.
David spent his entire lunch break walking the diesel fumed streets that ran
around the John Lewis store at Oxford Circus in a vain attempt to clear his mind. This
would be the last straw as far as Madame was concerned. David tried to talk himself
back towards a land of common sense, but he was, he knew, already too far gone with
his new enterprise. Eventually a grimly determined David returned to his cutting
room, gathered up the golden skin, stuffed it under his arm, and, taking one last look
around his place of work for so many years, he boldly marched out of the building and
took the first train home.
Never in any folk or fairy tale did a man work as hard and with such
concentration as David did that Friday night. No elves, no pixies, no faeries, not a
single creature, not even Tom Tit Tom, could have sewn and measured and cut with
such care and deliberation. David could feel a fever brewing up in his blood, but it
was, he knew, a fever of the heart. This skin would become flesh and blood in his
hands. He was a chalice filled to the brim with love, and he alone possessed the skill
to make that love real. By Saturday morning the skin atop the mannequin was
complete and without blemish. He ran his hands over the perfect material, sensing the
warp of the fibres as though they were pores, and David shivered with delight. The
skin fitted every contour perfectly, revealing a proportioned ideal of womankind, full
of breast and slim of waist. He could not rest yet, however. As perfect as the skin
might be it was still many hours and days away from being his darling girl.
Where before David might have sought out alcoholic remedies for his
nocturnal restlessness now he revelled in the fever of work. The only time that he left
the flat was to buy threads and cottons. He spent nearly twenty-four hours
embroidering just one eyebrow. She would take time and effort and skill to complete,
all of which David devoted to her making without care or thought for his own state.
He embroidered full lips of ruby red, eyes of a deep, longing brown, toes that were
flawless, fingers that were slender and golden, and ears that were faultless and
delicate. He spent days bent over an embroidery hoop, barely remembering to drink
the meanest cup of water or to eat even the most frugal morsel. Every ounce of
David’s energy, every luminescent molecule of his soul, fed this unbridled passion.
He was determined, come Hell or high-water, that he would create the perfect woman,
the ultimate partner in life.
It took almost three weeks of the most painstaking work to complete the
embroidery, to carefully add elements to the skin that would enhance her beauty, and
finally to make the prefect little black dress for her to wear. By the end of his labours,
David was blindly in love with his fabulously fake creation, seeing in her weave and
in every stitch the embodiment of everything that he could never be close to in the
flesh of real life.
He spoke with her about love and truth and timeless bliss, imagining her voice
as a soft and sultry summer night’s whisper. He sat at her feet, gazing up into her
embroidered mannequin eyes, and wept quiet tears for such beauty. In his heart he
also wept because he knew that there was no such thing as a fairy god mother, no
matter how much he wished it, no matter how loudly he wailed and pleaded. He
suddenly remembered the words of the gambling man in his dream, a dream that
seemed to exist in another lifetime. There was no soul. There would be no miracle. He
would never meet his own Jiminy Cricket, nor would his darling girl ever come to
life. For weeks David had denied this one simple fact while lost in the fever of
creation, but now that this simulacrum of love stood rigid above him, he had to admit
the truth, and with that admission the last of his strength began to drip away.
But there was yet one decision that David had to make. He understood that if
he were to die for love, he would leave the girl standing as cold as stone in his flat,
and that would never do. He had to find a way for them to be together, if not in this
mortal world, then together in spirit, as one being within the eternal flame. Slowly
David rose to his feet and, with the world swimming in black spots, he reached out
and leaned on his work chair. Gradually the close horizons of his little working world
steadied and he managed to focus. Where would they go, he asked himself? Where
could they go? David was so tired and so run down and so exhausted of life that he
really couldn’t think clearly. Every spin of the cog wheels in his brain drained him of
precious energy, so he took a decision. They would trust to Lady Luck.
Although rigid, the mannequin body was light. Without putting on shoes or
coat, David picked up his darling girl, manoeuvred her down the stairs to the street
door, and stepped out into a foreign world. When last he’d been out it was autumn and
blustery but still warm. The world around him now was white and thick and diamond
clear. Snow had come to blanket the world outside, marking the end of living time for
another year with the coming of the sterile freeze.
David felt the cold for just a moment as the snow underfoot melted into his
socks and the cold air scratched at his throat. The only question in David’s mind was
where should they go. A church? A bar? None of the obvious places for seeking
happy oblivion seemed appropri