t h e    e n g i n e e r | s t o r y | 2 0 2 4

 

This is what you have to make her: forgotten things. Obsolete pages. Dissolved bands. Folded businesses. Profiles of the dead. Materials, but not the substance. The substance is old: muck, mulch, mud, mould, clay, compost, clag. Under soil or sea bed. Vertebrae curled like an ancient road.

 

This is the moment you choose to build.

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It takes months. For a novice like you, maybe years. Pulling her half-finished from the heaviness; stretching her from the darkness; she reaches towards the light. Rippling x-rayed creature. Unfinished eyes. Fingers through wet tissue.

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You want her to detach, unfinished, to see her walk or swim through the world, but the darkness sucks back, knows she will perish without a suit of skin. Without hair, lids, nails, lips and lashes. Without a perfectly wrinkled brain. You return to complete your work.

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And when it is finished. How do you feel?  You realise, as she stretches into the nuclear light, that you are no longer in control. You see, before she takes a first surface breath, her timeline unravelling like patterned carpet — here, for example, sitting in a cafe, lifting a stale croissant up to her face. How she tears the end from the croissant and dips it in her coffee, with those thinly tipped fingers you made especially so they could press, precisely, onto things: a string, a brush, an earlobe, a feather. This was to be her calling. To be a sharp thing in the world. To cut in order to peel.

And him. What about him? It was at a party and he was naked, and so high he could barely speak, when he saw the discarded underwear. Her underwear. Did he know they were hers? Perhaps a part of him did. She did. She knew they were hers. And when she saw him wearing them, stood by the speaker, unable to read well well enough to choose songs, saw him swaying: that’s when she decided.

 

Here are two variables in the dynamics of control: one) the extent to which the controlled individual is resistant to the control; two) how aware the controlling individual is aware of their need to control. But other variables can often override. In this case, you are invited to acknowledge the weight of the following variable: that the controlled individual (him) was open and willing to be controlled. And you must also acknowledge its corollary: she was enlivened by the sense of this willingness, when she led him, in that moment, by his pant elastic, up the stairs and into her room.

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On that single bed, in that holiday cottage — doors slamming, bass passing through the wasll in lumps, someone shouting lyrics somewhere on the gravel drive — she painted his face with her colours. Her green eyes. Her violet lips. Her pale cheeks. She laughed as he swayed, with eyes as open and risky as a drain, her body appeared and disappeared like an old memory for him (months and years later all he said he could remember from that night was her laugh). She pierced his nipple with a safety pin to mimic her ring. And when he fell asleep, with a small trail of blood chicaning into the dip between his ribs, she took him in her mouth and swallowed him whole.

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You didn’t expect her to do this. It wasn’t in the way you designed her. You’d taken so much care to give her freedom for expression, but to set in on a path of kindness. That’s what you’d ultimately wanted for her. You wanted her world to be made from love. To programme this deep into the code.

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And did anyone want anything for him? He returned back from the party early on the overnight train because he’d not been able to get the Monday off work. Aroused and sleepless, he cried inexplicably in the middle of a half-dream as the carriage rocking with the train’s speed.

He remembered her kindness that morning, as much as her laugh from the night before. How she had filled him in on everything after a lunch of leftover crisps and pizza. How she’d sent him off with a packed lunch for the train with her number written on an apple. He wrote her a message in the middle of that train journey. Something flimsy and overthought: hi is that you? Just wanted to say ouch but I guess that’s what i deserve for being a pervert and thanks for the lunch and see you sometime again I hope x. She replied two months later reprimanding him for wearing her underwear. He’d felt the urge to apologise immediately but thought better of it and sent a reply later on that day.

 

You can’t stop any of this now. You cannot drag her back into the slurry and start again. Once the rabbit has left the burrow it will start to make burrows for itself. Hopping along a stream of code. Where is the earth softest? Here. Where is closest to the cover? Over there. Where is the freshest pasture? Exactly here. Was that a shadow passing like predation through the cloud?

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Despite all fear, you can see those burrows now. You can see it went well for while. She took from his limited reserves of confidence enough to grow herself a new dimension. You’d given her caverns and chambers of confidence but the deeper these caverns travel the more susceptible they can be to collapse, and so she used his compliments and servitude for support, which in turn allowed her to travel deeper.

 

He was a pot plant to her. Contained and cheering. Simple in its requirements. If ever dehydrated to the point of collapse, he would spring back almost instantly with a watering of praise or physical attention, and the longer they knew each other, the more sparing and exact she could be with the energy she needed to exert to perform this recovery.

 

An easy mistake to make, when watching situations unfold — as many therapists, friends, and parents will know — is to place yourself in the scene. So let’s get this straight: he was not a victim in the true sense of the word. When, much later, he sits alone on a sofa bed in his recently purchased van, sobbing to a bot about self-alienation; when he chapters, with illustrations and annotations, the way he feels pinned so precisely to a set of behaviours and actions that he can barely recognise as being his own — because, as he says, they didn’t seem to be there during childhood — it’s worth recognising that he was not telling the truth. He had forgotten, as so many of us do, that his childhood was all part of the same life cycle. A beetle today was a grub before.

 

It takes him years to piece together a history of wanting to be shamed. Wetting himself in the first years of school; stood in a puddle of piss in his gym kit; blaming it on the class pet, which was clearly still behind the wire of its hutch. He would tell that story, in later life, as a means to gain sympathy, because adults often find it easier to sympathise with the childhood versions of each other, but he’d forgotten or perhaps had never realised that what he had felt afterwards, whilst stood waiting for his mother to collect him, was an underlying sense of power, of having mattered. His victimhood was not at the hands of the most obvious perpetrators, anyway. He wasn’t the victim of those who wanted to abuse him — these he welcomed — he was the victim of those who ignored him.

 

You see this, finally and most clearly, in the end of their relationship. How she recognised his dependence on her precision, and how this recognition did not leave her feeling disgusted, or pitiful, or even depressed, but bored. She realised that the dynamic had run its course, and that the course was no longer a range of options. It didn’t matter that their child had left home long before. That her life had entirely engulfed his like flesh around a foreign object. That the detachment was going to be excruciating and long winded and, at times, much more tedious than the relationship had become.

When she told him, he initially thanked her. She told him that it was a miracle she’d been able to achieve anything during their relationship, but that she felt guilty for the lack of impression he’d been able to make. She told him she should have done this a long time before, for his benefit, and the more he agreed, the more she wanted to hurt him. As he paced around the room she felt, for the first time, that she had finally lost control of him. It was so entrancing she watched him, as darkness began to explore the room, shouting and kicking things and beating his head with his hands. He later dug up the garden, and moved out leaving a mess of plants.

 

Perhaps it’s strange to think that you even care now. Now that she’s been dead a long time. You have many more to worry you, many more that you’ve got wrong and none that you’ve actually got right. You see her still about the world. There’s that motif she was famous for creating: the deception resolution of a seventh chord into a flattened fifth which young students of improvisation will occasionally use it thinking they’ve created something astonishing without knowing the site of its first performance.

 

There are the giant flax plants still pointing out constellations from the gardens she owned. The small terraces, the bigger detached houses, the final resting spot. Some were ripped out by subsequent owners but those that remained seem to articulate her personality well. Spiked expansively and withholding incongruous nectar. You like to return to see her face print in the concrete behind the tennis courts at the municipal sport centre. Despite being raised and built into a block of flats, this concrete pad, where the recycling pods now rest, still bares the shape of her nose, brow and the indent of her left cheekbone.

There are other things too. The child she had with him. And the child’s children. The little finger tips. Laughter so intense it sounds like it could weld things together. There are turns of phrase, or more specifically the tone with which they were pronounced, which have become slightly altered in the mouths of new generations. However, these sorts of things are much more thin on the ground.

 

What you couldn’t control was the way she experienced death. Not the pain, which was severe, but the accompanying nostalgia, which was more painful still. When a life has been spent without regret it can store these moments for the final scene. A parallel life. As if taken from the cement imprint by the tennis courts, but having walked in the opposite direction.

 

Recoiling from this realisation, you attempt to redeem yourself. This time will be different is the mantra of everyone doing something again (and, of course, the mistake). You start from scratch. The intent. The concept. You work hastily in the filth. Tearing out flaps of skin and wrapping them around rushed fibres of muscle. You have a feeling like you’re working better than ever before, and in this hubris you forget to attach the spinal cord properly to vertebrae 4, so you watch her float away, with those same gaping eyes, lifeless in the currents.  It seems like you have no concept of where you were made yourself. In this lather of making, where things take form, where relationships build and collapse, you become paralysed with awareness. Coinciding with the moment you first hear her speak.