The L.B. phenomenon had seen off the 1990s and showed no sign of running out of steam in the new millennium. Malik Solanka was forced to admit a terrible truth. He hated Little Brain.
Meanwhile, nothing to which he turned his hand was bearing much fruit. He continued to approach the newly successful British claymation companies with characters and storylines but was told, kindly and unkindly, that his concepts weren’t of the moment. In a young person’s business, he had become something much worse than merely older: he was old-fashioned. At a meeting to discuss his proposal for a feature-length claymation life of Niccolo Machiavelli, he did his best to speak the new language of commercialism. The film would, of course, use anthropomorphic animals to represent human originals. “This really has everything,” he awkwardly enthused. “The golden age of Florence! The Medicis in their splendor-cool clay aristocats! Simonetta Vespussy, the most beautiful cat in the world, being immortalized by that young hound Barkicelli. The Birth of Feline Venus! The Rite of Pussy Spring! Meanwhile Amerigo Vespussy, that old sea lion, her uncle, sails off to discover America! Savona-Roland the Rat Monk ignites the Bonfire of the Vanities! And at the heart of it all, a mouse. Not just any old Mickey, though: this is the mouse who invented realpolitik, the brilliant mouse playwright, the distinguished public rodent, the republican mouse who survived being tortured by the cruel cat prince and dreamed in exile of a day of glorious return…” He was interrupted unceremoniously by an executive from the money people, a plump boy who could not have been more than twenty-three years old. “Florence is great,” he said. “No question. I love that. And Niccolb, what did you call him?, Mousiavelli sounds… possible. But what you have here—this treatment—let me put it like this. It just doesn’t deserve Florence. Maybe, yeah?, it’s not a good time right now for the Renaissance in plasticine.”
He could go back to writing books, he thought, but soon found that his heart wasn’t in it. The inexorability of happenstance, the way events have of deflecting you from your course, had corrupted him and left him good for nothing. His old life had left him forever and the new world he’d created had slipped through his fingers too. He was James Mason, a falling star, drinking hard, drowning in defeats, and that damn doll was flying high in the Judy Garland role. With Pinocchio, Geppetto’s troubles ended when the blasted puppet became a real, live boy; with Little Brain, as with Galatea, that’s when they began. Professor Solanka in drunken wrath issued anathemas against his ungrateful Frankendoll: Out of my sight let her go! Begone, unnatural child. Lo, I know you not. You shall not bear my name. Never send to ask for me, nor never seek my blessing. And call me father no more.
Out she went from his home in all her versions—the sketches, maquettes, tableaux, the infinite proliferation of her in all her myriad versions, paper, cloth, wood, plastic, animation cell, videotape, film; and with her, inevitably, went a once-precious version of himself. He hadn’t been able to bear to perform the act of expulsion personally. Eleanor agreed to take on the task. Eleanor, who could see the crisis mounting the red cracks in the eyes of the man she loved, the alcohol, the rudderless wandering—said in her gentle, efficient way, “Just go out for the day and leave it to me.” Her own career in publishing was on hold, Asmaan being all the career she needed for the moment, but she had been a high flier and was greatly in demand. This, too, she concealed from him, though he wasn’t a fool, and knew what it meant when Morgen Franz and others rang to speak to her and stayed on the phone, coaxing, for thirty minutes at a time. She was wanted, he understood that, everyone was wanted except him, but at least he could have this paltry revenge; he could not want something too, even if it was only that two-faced creature, that traitress, that, that, doll.
So he left home on the agreed day, stamping over Hampstead Heath at high speed—they lived in a capacious, double—fronted house on Willow Road and had always both rejoiced in having the Heath, North London’s treasure, its lung, just outside their door—and in his absence Eleanor had everything properly packed and taken away to a long-term storage facility. He’d have preferred the whole caboodle to end up at the Highbury garbage dump, but on this, too, he compromised. Eleanor had insisted. She had strong archival instincts and, needing her to take charge of the project, he waved a hand at her strictures as if at a mosquito, and didn’t argue. He walked for hours, allowing the Heath’s cool music to soothe his savage breast, the quiet heart-rhythms of its slow paths and trees, and, later in the day, the sweet strings of a summer con cert in the grounds of the Iveagh Bequest. When he got back, Little Brain was gone. Or, almost gone. For, unknown to Eleanor, one doll had been locked away in a cupboard in Solanka’s study. And there she remained.
The house felt emptied when he returned, voided, the way a house feels after the death of a child. Solanka felt as if he had suddenly aged by twenty or thirty years; as if, divorced from the best work of his youthful enthusiasms, he at last stood face-to-face with ruthless Time. Waterford-Wajda had spoken of such a feeling at Addenbrooke’s years ago. “Life becomes very, I don’t know, finite. You realize you don’t have anything, you belong nowhere, you’re just using things for a while. The inanimate world laughs at you: you’ll be going soon, but it will be staying on. Not very profound, Solly, it’s Pooh Bear philosophy, I know, but it rips you to pieces all the same.” This wasn’t just the death of a child, Solanka was thinking: more like a killing. Kronos devouring his daughter. He was the murderer of his fictional offspring: not flesh of his flesh but dream of his dream. There was, however, a living child still awake, overexcited by the day’s events: the arrival of the moving van, the packers, the steady come and go of boxes. “I was helping, Daddy,” eager Asmaan greeted his father. “I helped send Little Brain away.” He was bad at compound consonants, saying b for br Little B’ain. That’s about right, Solanka thought. She became the bane of my life. “Yes,” he answered absently. “Well done.” But Asmaan had more on his mind. “Why did she have to go away, Daddy? Mummy said you wanted her to go away.” Oh, Mummy said, did she. Thanks, Mummy. He glared at Eleanor, who shrugged. “Really, I didn’t know what to tell him. This one’s for you.”
On children’s television, in comic books, and in audio versions of her legendary memoirs, Little Brain’s protean persona had reached out and captured the hearts of children even younger than Asmaan Solanka. Three was not too young to fall in love with this most universally appealing of contemporary icons. “L.B.” could be driven out of the house on Willow Road, but could she be expelled from the imagination of her creator’s child? “I want her back,” Asmaan said emphatically. Back was bat. “I want Little Brain.” The pastoral symphony of Hampstead Heath gave way to the jangling discords of family life. Solanka felt the clouds gathering around him once again. “It was just time for her to go,” he said, and picked up Asmaan, who wriggled hard against him, responding unconsciously, as children do, to his father’s bad mood. “No! Put me down! Put me down!” He was exhausted and cranky and so was Solanka. “I want to watch a video,” he demanded. Viduwo. “I want to watch a Little Brain viduwo.” Malik Solanka, unbalanced by the impact of the absence of the Little Brain archive, of her exile to some DollElba, some Black Sea town, such as Ovid’s barren Tomis, for unwanted, used-up toys, had been plunged quite unexpectedly into a condition resembling deep mourning and received his son’s end-of-day petulance as an unacceptable provocation. “It’s too late. Behave yourself,” he snapped, and Asmaan, in return, crouched down on the front-room rug and produced his latest trick: a burst of impressively convincing crocodile tears. Solanka, no less childishly than his son, and without the excuse of being three years old, rounded on Eleanor. “I suppose this is your way of punishing me,” he said. “If you didn’t want to get rid of the stuff, why not just say so. Why use him. I should have known I’d come back to trouble. To some manipulative crap like this.”