The Chemistry of Tears Read Free Page A

dustcoat and wrapped myself inside it.
    When I came back, there was Eric, and the tea chests. I was suddenly certain it was some awful tribe of clockwork monkeys blowing smoke. Sir Kenneth Claringbold had a horrendous collection of automata, clockwork Chinamen and singing girlies of all sorts. In fact my first assignment at the Swinburne had been his gift to the museum: a monkey.
    That particular monkey had had a certain elegance, except for the way it drew back its lips to smile, but for a person raised on the austere rational elegance of clockwork it was creepy beyond belief. I got headaches and asthma. Finally, in order to complete the restoration, I had to cover its head with a paper bag.
    Later there was a smoking Chinaman who was not quite so horrid,but there was always, in any circumstance, something extremely disturbing about these counterfeits of life and I sniffed around my new studio more and more irritated that this was what Eric had chosen to console me with—eight tea chests were much more than you needed to contain a clock.
    “Aren’t you going to see what it is?”
    I imagined that I detected some secret in Eric’s mouth, a movement below the fringe of moustache.
    “Are there textiles involved?” I demanded.
    “Why don’t you look at your presents?”
    He was talking to Catherine Gehrig who he had known so very well, for years and years. He had seen me in very stressful (dangerous, in museum terms) circumstances and I had never given him cause to see me as anything other than calm and rational. He liked that I never seemed to raise a sweat. Eric, by contrast, loved big emotions, grotesque effects, Sing-songs, the Opera. Whenever he found fault with me it was for being too cautious.
    So dear Eric had no idea that the present beneficiary of his kindness had become a whirring, mad machine, like that sculpture by Jean Tinguely built to destroy itself.
    He wanted me to inspect his gift to me. He did not know it would blow me wide apart.
    “Eric, please. I can’t.”
    Then, I saw the blood rising from his collar. He was cross with me. How could he be?
    And then in the stinging focus of his gaze I understood that he had pulled a lot of strings, had pissed off a lot of people in order to get the backstreet girl set up where her emotions would not show. He was looking after me for Matthew, but for the museum as well.
    “Eric, I’m sorry. Truly I am.”
    “Yes, I’m afraid you have to go through Security if you want to smoke. You are still smoking?”
    “Just tell me it’s not a monkey,” I said.
    Tears were welling in my eyes. I thought, you dear moron, please just go.
    “Oh Lord,” he said. “This is all awful.”
    “You’ve been very sweet,” I said. “You really have.” For a second his whole face crumbled but then, thank God, he pulled himself together.
    The door closed and he was gone.
    IN THE MIDDLE OF the night I lost Matthew’s hat and got in a mad panic, stripping the bed, knocking over the reading light until I found what I had lost. I took a pill and had a scotch. I ate some toast. I switched on the computer and the museum email was functioning again.
    “I kiss your toes.”
    An insane fear of my employers prevented me replying. I filed: “unread.”
    I wrapped myself up in his shirt and took his hat and went to bed and snuffled it. I love you. Where are you?
    Then it was the morning, and he was dead. The server was down again. Matthew was completely gone forever. His poor body was lying somewhere in this stinking heat. No, in a refrigerator with a label on his toe. Or perhaps he was already trapped inside a coffin. The funeral was at three o’clock.
    I had sick leave and sleeping tablets but I would go mad alone—no church, no family, no one to tell the truth, nothing but the Swinburne which I had stupidly made my life. By noon I was back inside the claustrophobic underground. Three trains later, I surfaced at Olympia with unwashed hair. There was a yellow misty haze.
    My