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the money this thing was going to be for real. I decided to keep the money, and from that moment on I had a patron. I was to let M. Delarue know when the figures were ready and he would send a courier to take delivery and pay me the other ten thousand pounds.
    The dummy in my Crash-Test set was a coarse and primitive thing compared to what Adelbert Delarue wanted. Thirty centimetres seems a lot of room until you think of batteries and a motor of some kind, and these would have to be articulated bodies that might be doing the whole
Kama Sutra
for all I knew. And of course they’d be radio-controlled and I didn’t want them to look like model cars with antennas sticking up out of them.
    Then there was the matter of the ‘functional parts’. My first thought was that the male member might as well be in a state of permanent arousal but then I imagined the figure in solitary repose on a desk or table flaunting its priapism so I decided to accept the challenge: zoom lenses got longer or shorter at the touch of a button and the booms of model cranes went up and down so presumably the thing could be managed somehow. As for the ‘receptive orifices’, they’d need a soft lining to prevent the dummies from sounding like an abacus. The audio tape could be in the base, worked by the remote radio control.
    What was I going to make my figures out of? The Crash-Test dummies had been plastic mass-produced from my clay model, pretty much like Action Man although betterarticulated. But for twenty thousand quid M. Delarue was entitled to something a little more upmarket so I decided on wood; it was going to take a lot of time but I wanted my porno-dummies to be work I could be proud of. More or less. I could already imagine carving them and sanding them smooth. Before going to wood, however, I thought it best to do some trial-and-error on a clay model. At Green & Stone in Chelsea where I sometimes bought art supplies I was told that I’d find everything I needed at Tiranti’s in Warren Street.
    The day was grey but not yet showing its hand with any precipitation. I thought it might be a favourable greyness, it felt as if it was with me and not against me. Fulham Broadway station, excited by the attentions of workmen and machines, hummed in anticipation of the new self that would emerge from its chrysalis of scaffolding, hoardings, fluorescent tubing, and noise. Mid-morning, this was, and the platform not too crowded. The rails winced, a headlight appeared far back in the tunnel, gathered a Tower Hill train to itself in its onward rush, became large and loud, stopped, and slid its doors open. I boarded it, went to Embankment, and changed to the Northern Line.
    When I came out at Warren Street there were red Jurassic earthmovers nodding and feeding behind the hoardings on the other side of Tottenham Court Road, their heads rising into view and dropping out of it again as two motionless cranes watched from a distance. I looked down Warren Street into a foursquare perspective of nothing in particular. ‘What?’ I said. Warren Street shrugged, and it began to rain, gently but perhaps with intent.
    Undistracted by pubs, shops, cafés, and a health-food centre with free-standing sandwich boards that offered torestore the world’s love life with Viagra, I proceeded to the modest blue shopfront of Est. 1895 ALEC TIRANTI LIMITED, TOOLS, MATERIALS & EQUIPMENT FOR MODELLING, CARVING, SCULPTURE. BOOKSELLERS Inside, exotic labels whispered siren music of haematite, jade oil and iron paste along with gilt cream, antiquing fluid, cupra, black patinating wax, gold leaf and rust remover. Elementary and advanced glues urged me to stick my world together; coloured waxes evoked the ghost of Benvenuto Cellini; unrolled canvas rolls of sharp and slender shapers hinted at undreamt-of subtleties of form; short and tall modelling stands in wood and metal beckoned tripodally; calipers in many sizes promised to transfer any measurement faithfully; and rows of