A SORT OF LEGACY

A SORT OF LEGACY.

His name was Henry Mayleon, but four days into the honeymoon - on one
of the cheapest and most flea-ridden of the Greek islands - she had
started calling him The Pig.
It hadn't been a successful marriage. Henry did not like women: they
terrified him. His mother had been a large-boned back-alley tyrant
swathed in a floral pinny. Fuelled by draught Mackeson, any domestic
utensil, from yard broom to rolling-pin, had been transformed into
offensive weapon, or rather instrument of correction, for beating the
twin devils of lust and idleness from her husband and six sons. Henry
was the youngest: born on The Change. Briefly suckled by a tight-lipped
Medusa in rollers, he learned early to duck and weave, to grab and run,
and, his limbs permanently stippled with bruises, to regard with
suspicion any act of tenderness whilst all around him all hell was let
loose as Mam's hormones orchestrated their swan song. Forty years
later, he still flinched at any sudden movement.
Her death startled him. Never before had she lost a fight to the
finish. He hadn't loved her, rarely visited, and yet he found himself
curiously bereft of her dubious feminine influence. By then he had
risen above his humble beginnings and was a well-respected teacher in
one of the lesser public schools, the last resort of the old-fahioned
disciplinarian. He liked to think of himself as a sculptor of boys'
lives. The hunt for a wife was precipitated by a full-blown scandal
involving the art master and a pair of pretty, blond catamites. By
innuendo all batchelor masters were implicated. This offended him since
a fair proportion of his salary was spent on indulging his particular
heterosexual requirements. On reflection, Henry, who knew he was in
line for deputy headship, realised that a speedy marriage was
imperative. History, however, must not be permitted to repeat itself.
He would be master of his household, just as he was master of his
boys.
The solution was to select a child bride, preferably plain and poor,
thus grateful, and mould her to his requirements. Galatea was
seventeen, penniless, and bone idle. She was decorative, bearing an
uncanny resemblance to Botticelli's Venus, but thought herself ugly,
being totally disatisfied with her appearance. Her sole ambition was
marriage to a man able to finance her extensive (and undisclosed)
programme of cosmetic surgery. A personal introduction consultancy
brought them together. She had lied about her age. So had he. At their
first meeting Henry found her vacuous act perfectly convincing. Galatea
mistook his aloof detachment for full-blooded masculine arrogance and
was impressed. She observed the quality of his suit, the year and model
of his car, the quiet assurance with which he proffered the gilded
credit card in restaurants, and set off in excited pursuit, not
realising that it was she who was being drawn into a spider's web of
disenchantment from which she might never fully extricate
herself.
Self-disgust had kept Galatea sexually inexperienced and Henry demanded
nothing beyond chaste kisses before the low key registry office
wedding. She put this down to old-fashioned gallantry and lost herself
in seduction fantasies. Her eyes were finally opened to his meaness
when they arrived at the honeymoon suite - two seedy rooms with
partially functional bathroom above a noisy taverna - and to his sexual
proclivities when he produced a leather strap from his baggage and
instructed her in its use. Her vociferous refusal alarmed him. He felt
himself shrinking, a child again, out of control, before the shrill
notes and repetitive quality of the ensuing diatribe. For three days
they slept in separate rooms. On the fourth morning Galatea called a
truce and appeared to concede defeat. Walking through the parched olive
grove behind the village they reached some sort of compromise. By
hiding her repugnance, Glatea would be recast in her own image. Paying
for it meant that The Pig had his masochistic needs met. A united front
of respectability had to be presented to the world. THe pattern for the
next twenty years was set. Learning to loathe each other was the easy
part.
In his sixties, Henry developed heart problems. He died quite suddenly
in the early hours of 2010. The duty doctor, who arrived wearing the
bird mask and robes of a plague physician, closed his eyes to certain
marks on the corpse's back and shoulders, signed the death certificate
without demur, and hurried back to his party. Galatea stood, naked and
wafer thin, at the bedroom window and raised her glass to a new dawn.
Immediately after the funeral she removed almost every trace of her
husband from the house. The thought of another man taking his place
repelled her. She took delivery of Eros twelve weeks later.
Both Henry and Galatea had been self-made, but Eros was her creation:
every reaction of the android had been programmed according to her
wishes, as had every aspect of his appearance. He was, in fact, an
outrageously expensive sex toy.The saleswoman who guided her through
the extensive paperwork had worked as both a nurse and a whore and was
incapable of embarrassment. Incredibly detailed questionaires probed
into all her real or imagined sexual preferences. Diagrams plotted her
erogenous zones in order of sensitivity. And when that was exhausted,
they turned to him. Did she prefer an adolescent smoothness or
something more rugged? Heigh? Weight? Shape? Colouring? She closed her
eyes and stroked plastoskin samples. Her fingers raked through untold
quantities of both head and body hair. The house vibrated with a
thousand voice types. Capsules of male perspiration were snapped open,
saturating the air with a musky scent which lingered for days.
Holograms of bodies, sometimes limbless, or headless, posed, flexed,
gyrated, in thin air. Faces peered from the monitor, turning slowly,
allowing her to examine them from every angle. Galatea chose carefully,
determined that Eros would be different from Henry in every way.
Right at the end, when it seemed that no cell had been left unturned,
the saleswoman offered her a bonus: a wild card, an X factor, some
random addition to the programme which would come as a complete
surprise to her and make their interaction more realistic. Galatea
agreed.
Visually, Eros was everything Galatea had hoped for. And his voice,
made exotic by the slightest of French accents, sent shivers down her
spine. Although she had been assured that it made no difference, a sort
of shyness made her deactivate him before conducting a full
examination. He smelled good. He felt better. Emboldened, she set him
for affectionate response, but was oddly disappointed by his lack of
warmth.
On their first night together, Galatea was prepared for some
awkwardness, but not for a computer crash. Eros froze in the middle of
the bedroom floor. His knees buckled. His mouth went slack. His eyes
were wide and mad. They seemed to be fixed on the battle scars left by
years of cosmetic surgury. Humiliated, she snapped on her robe. Eros
slowly recovered but the magic was gone. Galatea seethed. Was this what
she'd spent five million Eurines on? Damn it all, it might be a machine
but it was programmed to feel pain. Reaching into the darkest depths of
what had been Henry's wardrobe. she drew out the worn leather
strap.