that what you want, Danny?” you ask. “Toast and marmalade?”
“Well blister my buffers,” Danny says. He seems almost startled that you’ve been able to follow his circuitous thought processes.
Startled, and also pleased.
* * *
—
After Sian’s collected Danny to take him to school, you get out your phone. You don’t know exactly when you made the decision to call Lisa, but having made it, it feels right.
You find her name in CONTACTS and press CALL. So simple. You imagine your sister picking up her own phone, staring at the caller ID. There’ll be a few moments of shock, you imagine. But after all, she’s seen you on TV now. At some point, she’ll answer.
But she doesn’t. After a few rings, the call goes to voicemail. You can’t bring yourself to leave a message. Your first contact with her after so long shouldn’t be a recording.
A few minutes later, you try again. This time it cuts out after one ring. You imagine her holding the phone, waiting for your name to appear, her finger jabbing down at the button to cut you off. To get ABBIE off her screen as quickly as possible.
Sighing, you send a text. Lisa, it’s me. It’s REALLY me, whatever you may have read or heard. I’m going to call again. Pick up this time, will you?
Delivered, the phone tells you. Then: Read. Three dots appear, meaning she’s typing. But no reply comes. She must have deleted her answer before sending it.
Encouraged, you try dialing again. And this time it’s answered. She doesn’t say anything, but you can hear her breathing.
“Leese, we need to meet,” you say into the silence. “I know you think this is weird—I do, too. But it’s not like I had any say in the matter.”
“Jesus,” she whispers disbelievingly. “Jesus. It sounds—it sounds—” She starts to cry.
“Why don’t I come to Spikes?” you say, naming the coffee bar where you used to meet up sometimes, halfway between your houses. “Say at eleven?”
She doesn’t reply, just sniffs back tears.
“Look, I’m going to be there anyway,” you say, after a while. “Please come. I need to see you.”
FOURTEEN
It has to be said, we couldn’t spot any signs of Abbie’s alleged drug use at work, no matter how closely we looked. What we saw instead was someone immersing herself in a new creative project. There was a full-sized 3-D printer in the workshop, a very expensive piece of machinery for making prototypes. At Abbie’s request, Darren showed her how it could be used to make perfect replicas of almost anything.
She ordered in a load of Newplast, a soft modeling putty favored by stop-frame animators. Then, for a whole week, she took over the printer booth. We didn’t know what she was doing in there, but she started arriving late and working through the night. Tim was cool with that, we gathered.
As with the punching bags, she made no fanfare about this new artwork when it was finished. We simply came into work one day and found Sol, who usually got in earliest, in a state of high excitement.
“You have got to come and see what she’s done this time,” he told us.
He led us to one of the meeting rooms. And there it was—a life-sized, 3-D replica of Abbie, fashioned out of flesh-colored putty. Apart from the briefest of thongs, she was nude. She stood with her hands on her hips, her torso turned slightly sideways, as if looking at herself in a mirror.
“Holy fuck,” someone breathed, and indeed it was a remarkable sight. Nobody wanted to look uncool by commenting on it directly, but Abbie really did have an awesome body. It was more than that, though. It might only have been a 3-D printout, but you really got a sense of what kind of person she was: vibrant, optimistic, even somewhat innocent.
It was only after we’d been staring for several minutes that someone spotted the printed card fixed to the nearby wall.
DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!)
3-D printed modeling putty and wireframe
Interactive installation
Dimensions variable
“How is it interactive?” someone else wondered. “It doesn’t do anything, does it?”
“And why dimensions variable?” asked one of the girls.
“Maybe,” Kenneth suggested, “we’re meant to—you know—play with it?”
There was silence while we digested this. Someone bent down and gave the sculpture’s foot a tentative squeeze, just above the toes. “It’s soft, all right,” he reported.
“Hey, don’t ruin it!” Marie Necker protested.
“But I think that’s the whole idea. I think we’re supposed to—refashion it.”